A Statement from the Playwright
I wrote the drama, The Basement, in 1999, immediately after my return from Albania, where my family and I, along separate routes, had been forcibly driven from Kosovo. We were reunited after a long journey, by train and by foot, across various state borders, meeting many other families along the way that had had every kind of luck – and not just the good kind. Only then was I able to come to grips with what had actually happened. Although it might seem to be something so elementary, for a very long time I couldn’t fully grasp or accept the real force behind the events that had compelled me and a hundred thousand other Albanians from Kosovo to become sudden refugees, the disappeared, or the dead. I also tried to think more as a member of a group than an individual, since the war was directed toward everyone with a common ethnicity, nationality. If ethnicity, nationality, etc., are just social constructs, it’s war that regards you as, and reduces you to, an element of such a construction, whatever your analysis or sense of yourself might be. Yet, there is a story beyond the terrors of the war that holds a great deal of meaning that has deepened my understanding.
After my family and I finally returned home, luckily unharmed, and I wrote the play, it felt like I had found a way to confront those issues, and even though the mystery remained, it didn’t torture me anymore. I know that the process of writing was also a way of searching for the meaning of the events that culminated in 1998-99.
In 2009, ten years after I first wrote The Basement, I reviewed the text during rehearsals at the National Theater of Kosovo. There we were, after ten years of freedom and one year of independence, without a murderous regime to deal with. Now we had only ourselves to deal with and the everyday choices that we made. Anyway, to my mind, The Basement is just a family drama that has given me some clarity about the war. It’s just the story of particular people in particular circumstances who have limited choices given their situation, but countless choices with respect to each other and themselves.
—Ilir Gjocaj