GAZMEND KAPLLANI
GAZMEND KAPLLANI is an Albanian-born polyglot author, journalist, and scholar. He lived in Athens, Greece for over 20 years (1991–2012), studying philosophy and psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and receiving his Ph.D. in political science and history from Panteion University. He was one of the most outspoken journalists in the Greek press regarding migrants and minorities.
He is the author of two collections of poetry in Albanian and four published novels (written in Greek and Albanian). His literary work centers on borders, totalitarianism, migration, identity, and how Balkan history has shaped private and public narratives and memories. His books are taught in prestigious universities in Europe, the United States, and Canada and have been the subject of many scholarly essays.
Kapllani’s first best-selling novel, A Short Border Handbook (2006), has been translated and published into 10 languages so far. It has been adapted for the stage by Bornholm Theater in Denmark and The National Theater of the Deaf in Greece. It won the International Literary Prize of the City of Cassino in Italy in 2017. His three other novels, My Name is Europe, The Last Page, and Wrongland, have been published so far in French, Italian, Albanian, Greek, and English; The Last Page was short-listed for the French Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE 2016 and awarded the literary prize of the Salon du Livre des Balkans in Paris, France. Wrongland was adapted for the stage by the Greek theater director Pantelis Flatsousis and performed in Athens, Greece, in 2022.
Since 2012 Kapllani has been living in the United States, where he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and writer-in-residence at Brown University and Wellesley College. He taught creative writing and (Southeastern) European history at Emerson College in Boston, MA (2013–2018). Gazmend Kapllani and his wife Sonia currently live in Chicago, IL, where he directs the Hidai “Eddie” Bregu Endowment in Albanian Studies at DePaul University and the DePaul Albanian and Southeastern European Studies Program.
Photo by Stephanie Mitchell
From The Harvard Gazette, Corydon Ireland | Harvard Staff Writer
“I learned foreign languages in order to catch images of this world beyond the border,” said Kapllani, who is now a novelist and the Rita E. Hauser Fellow at Radcliffe. “I grew up in a small country with a totally shut border,” Kapllani said. “You could not even approach the border, and you were in serious danger if you even talked about borders.” By age 11, “that terror I began feeling on my skin,” he said. “You understood the people who ruled your country are violent; they are paranoid. The whole country was like a prison.” As a teenager, Kapllani was required to complete two weeks of military training a year, during which young Albanians were told to prepare for hordes of invaders. “You look around,” said Kapllani, remembering those days. “You don’t see any enemies. They’re imaginary enemies.”
From Südosteuropa Mitteilungen | 02 – 03 | 2021
Gazmend Kapllani
The Albanian Border Experience
Interview with Belfjore Qose and Christian Voß
Belfjore Qose: In A Short Border Handbook, you write: “Tyrants are merciless beasts, especially because they leave behind distorted societies worn down by oppression and above all suffering from an orphan complex.” The narrative of the secluded immigrant is strong in your books and comes out in all kinds of situations. How exactly would you describe the consequences of isolation and dictatorship in terms of human relations? Is this the reason behind the parallel storylines in A Short Border Handbook?
Gazmend Kapllani: It’s not easy to describe in a few lines the consequences of isolation and dictatorship especially when we are talking about 45-year long isolation and reign of terror in Albania. I would emphasize that one of the most devastating consequences of the dictatorship’s aftermath is the inability to handle freedom. I remember how one of the characters in Svetlana Alexievich’s books says: “No one taught us how to be free.” Learning to think and act as a free human subject takes time, and when you come from a place of terror like Albania under Enver Hoxha it’s really a painful process. As for the structure of my books, I believe it’s due mainly to the fact that in my stories I focus on two apparently different experiences: that of living under a totalitarian regime and that of crossing borders as a migrant and refugee.
Belfjore Qose: The title does not deceive us in A Short Border Handbook, as we see borders everywhere, in all kinds of meaning and contexts. Escaping, leaving becomes an aim in itself (breaking the taboo) and only after achieving it, the protagonists begin to rationalize the fact that they know nothing of the world beyond the borders. Dystopias cannot survive without borders; they depend on the information the citizens have on the outside world. How do borders affect the way we perceive the world and what is known to us?
Gazmend Kapllani: I feel that I’m really a carrier of “border syndrome” exactly the way I describe in my first novel. That kind of peculiar anxiety and sensitivity to borders. I grew up in communist Albania during the Cold War. The communist regimes had an unprecedented obsession with closed borders and walls, which has never been explored in depth. After leaving Albania, I spent all my life as a migrant. Today when we say the word “borders”, almost mechanically we connect it to refugees and migrants. Furthermore, coming from Europe, a continent which was divided for half a century with an impermeable border, it’s easy to understand why borders play a central role in my writing.
Belfjore Qose: Humor and irony accompany your storytelling, the frequent time shifts send us to other times and the tragicomic becomes a characteristic of your prose. Do you use humor to make reality bearable, to adapt the narrative to your readership, which, when not informed about the context, might find the narrator unable to distinguish reality from imagination or paranoia, or is it simply a literary device used for aesthetic purposes?
Gazmend Kapllani: For those who have lived under disasters and political dystopias humor constitutes a survival strategy. Otherwise, they would have lost their minds or simply committed suicide. I feel that I’m one of those survivors, therefore for me humor before becoming a literary device has been a survival strategy. Albanians have an extraordinary, playful but also tragically absurdist sense of humor and I believe that all these were an invaluable cultural gift that I have received since my childhood from my relatives and parents. In my writing, humor is like a boat whose cargo is tragic. If I had not been able to use humor as a literary device, I’m afraid I would have never been able to write novels and share with the readers the things I write about.