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Hoxha’s governance, or else who were deemed
to have been simply too free in their artistic and
intellectual endeavors, were quickly denounced
for encouraging “bourgeois revisionism” and
“decadent trends” (Jacques 495). Various
members of the Union of Albanian Writers and
Artists were removed from their posts, and many
such reformers were then relocated to various
sites outside the capital, where they were forced
to work on farms and in factories, dig ditches,
build railway lines, and thus reground themselves
in the fundamentals of socialist realism.
Zeqo was no exception; having published in
literary magazines a few cycles of poems from
the as-yet-unpublished collection Meduza, he
became an object of Hoxha’s crackdown. At the
Fourth Plenary Session, his work was labeled
“hermetic, with modernist influence, dangerous,
[and] foreign,” and he was removed from his
post at Drita, after which he was relocated to
the Albanian countryside, forbidden to enter
Tirana for an extended period of time, and
“mercifully” (as Zeqo puts it) obliged to work
as a schoolteacher. Ismail Kadare was the only
writer who defended him; most others were
either party-liners or else also suffering from
similar — or worse — retribution.
One poem in particular was singled out as
embodying the worst kind of anti-Albanianism,
though such a strong reaction to this particular
poem might seem strange to today’s American
reader. Titled “Spjegimi i fjalës vetmi” (“An
Explication of the Word Loneliness”), it
describes through a series of metaphors the
despair of solitude, a common poetic theme,
which though perhaps too personal to fall
generally within the prescribed subject matter
of socialist realism, would not seem to garner
such specific and pointed attack. In the poem,
Zeqo claims, “Loneliness is a clock / without
numbers or hands, frozen in dead time,” and
further explains that “[w]ithout people, / you’re
without everything — / even time and space
abandon you. // And you turn gray like Crusoe, /
not just on a distant island, / but here, too, closed
inside yourself” (63). In fact, despite what seems
to be personal subject matter, the poem was
interpreted as a critique of Albania’s extreme
political isolation in the wake of its withdrawal
for the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Thus,
the withering away of the individual that Zeqo
describes in the poem was viewed as a metaphor
for an Albanian cultural withering caused directly
by Albania’s political and economic seclusion,
one of Hoxha’s central policies, which explains
why it was criticized so harshly.
In fact, it is just this sort of subtle duplicity
that makes many of Zeqo’s poems so effective
on both personal and political levels. Throughout
Meduza, the isolated individual that recurs
can often be read as representing the plight
of Albania under Hoxha. For instance, in the
brief poem “Këtë mbrëmje” (“Tonight”), when
the speaker addresses a lost love on a lonely
night — “Tonight I’m sitting / quietly alone. /
Only a memory / of you remains” (61) — we
can also read the lost love as Zeqo’s — or
Albania’s — loss of contact with the intellectual
and poetic world outside Albania. In such a
reading, the closing quatrain strikingly and
surreally emphasizes the profound importance of
whatever brief moments of contact Zeqo — or
Albania — has had with outside thought and thus
takes on an added poignancy beyond that of a
simple lost love: “I balance / on that memory, /
the cosmos hanging / on the moon’s coathook”
(61). Similarly, in the brief poem “Mbas ndarjes”
(“After the Separation”), Zeqo simply offers
metaphorical descriptions of the effects of the
“separation” — perhaps a breakup, but also
Albania’s separation from the Soviet Union: “[E]
ach word / became a broken Aphrodite, / a train
run off its tracks. // Now the images flash — /
pulling out the rain’s hair” (153).
In another poem, “Efemera” (“Ephemera”),
Zeqo offers varied layers of reading. On all
levels, the poem reads like a curse, and at the
outset it seems addressed to an ex-lover in the
Translation Review 35