Essays on the Awareness of Loss in Contemporary Albanian Literature: Voices That Come from the Abyss

Essays on the Awareness of Loss in Contemporary Albanian Literature: Voices that Come From the Abyss is the first scholarly monograph on the concept of loss in Albanian poetry and life writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It represents the first academic contribution to an international audience dedicated to three women writers that personified loss in communist Albania: Musine Kokalari, the first Albanian woman writer and political dissident; Bedi Pipa, the first woman known to have authored a diary in Albanian literature; and Drita Çomo, author of a diary and poetry written in secret in political exile under communism. Their works bring forth the necessity to re-visit the history of Albanian literature and promote interdisciplinary and comparative studies beyond Albanian literature. Shatro studies the exceptional capacity of poetry to carry loss to the point of articulating the unsaid, thus giving a voice to silence. She argues that through diary, memoir, epistolary and poetry, all five authors provide different views of loss and its challenging ethical implications in relation to death, memory, and freedom.

Bavjola Gami Shatro is associate professor of literature at Aleksandër Moisiu University in Albania and is President of South East European Studies Association (SEESA), USA.