Albania is not ready to follow Ismail Kadare. She is trapped by his escape. And here we are not talking about those emergencies that find the house a mess and you can't wait for friends. It is more than that. Albania has been caressed by the fate that had it alive and a part of it for 88 years, one of the colossus of world literature, and was familiar with this fate, as with a common thing.
He was lucky for the Albanians who wanted to keep their brains alive from the conformism of socialist realism and even more lucky for the Albanian society that cultivated the tastes of Western art and the standards of a universal culture. Above all, he brought luck to the Albanian language, being its modern father, making it a language capable of writing great literature.
Given that the language for Albanians is the backbone around which our national identity is conceived, with three religions, with Geg and Toska and with a difficult geography, Ismail Kadareja remains for this reason and an embryo of our pro-Western national identity.
When I say that Albania is not ready for his departure, I mean that we were familiar with the idea that the man who gave value to Albania more than any other Albanian, had it as a duty appointed by God and we had a duty to judge him for his earthly life.
The defenders of freedom could not bear the fact that he had spoken to the neighborhood saleswoman or that he had tricked "comrade Enver" while escaping punishment. Now that they will no longer see him in the neighborhood, and that they will only have his literature in front of them, they probably feel liberated, since they don't have to deal with books but with people.
Now that we will no longer have him among us, we will understand that his absence will leave behind a precipice, on the edge of which stands the fragile Albanian literature, which without Ismail Kadare is like a rolling stone. He is the ambush and the only hope that our national culture will never be completely eroded. His works are a dam against any evil that may threaten us in its future.
Therefore, Albania is not ready to follow it today. She is unprepared, unable and hopeless to fill the void he leaves. When we say we're not ready to pass him on, I mean we're not ready to be the same without him alive. And we will all understand this very soon.
Ismail Kadareja is the last one to uphold a system of values for the Albanian nation, a system on which neither the mud of freedom nor the blood of dictatorship could climb. He had upon his back the weight of the Cross to bear us sometimes with difficulty from the West.
This was his mission and the "dictatorship" of the man who showed the world that a small language like Albanian can produce great literature and a country like Albania can produce worthy citizens of the world. And no one can overthrow his kingdom. Albania will be remembered in the world, among other things, because Ismail Kadareja was born and lived in that country./TemA