Koloreto Cukali's funeral procession of roosters

Alfred Lela

Koloreto Cukali, during those boring meetings in any hotel in Tirana where books are promoted, seminars are held, or bombastic conferences are held with big solutions for Albania, he could hand out some business cards. As a filmmaker, NGO man, radio show host, columnist, etc. Not that anyone has come out yet with a business card that reads Poet, but I think that Cukali would not be presented anywhere, anywhere, as such.

The inauguration of the book at QKLL (National Book and Reading Center) was so discreet, almost like a Masonic session. In a quite strange and perhaps poetic way, it is located on the back of a shepherd.    

This urban mise-en-scène made the inauguration of Cukal's book seem like an illegal, revolutionary act. The author also shares this impression, saying that the poem should be distributed as a tract.

This does not mean that Koloreto Cukali is shy of his status as a poet. Still, without saying it, he is disturbed by the disregard in the public sphere of one of the oldest and noblest genres of civilizations: poetry.

The emergence of this concern is perhaps the very reason that prompts him to write. In a code, language, or genre that seems almost forgotten. Perhaps this is his way of rebelling, trying to keep alive, against the current, the light industry of the verse, in spite of the increasingly heavy industry of the image, of its shrill and endless repetition.

At the same time, poetry can also be how Koloreto Cukali confesses about those 'sins' he commits against poetry, participation, for one reason or another, in pop culture, in mass communication.

More or less, as he says in one of the lines, The windows of the buses have turned into TV screens,/ where those who have been denied/ the time they deserve on the national screens appear.

In this sense, Cukali's poetry is committed, not in the sense that the leftists of the mid-20th century gave to commitment, but quite differently, a spiritual commitment. Not to define social classes and orders, but the spiritual and where it takes humanity (or spiritually).

This grimace seems to be the verse. The year '92 seems far away;/we bathed less often, /but wore less smell, /we could see each other in the eyes and on the street.

The intimacies that unfold in Cukali's poems are transformed into sociality because poetry, for him, is an act against the system. It is also a system of acts that configure a spiritual and social state and, thus, together, that space that we know as a community.

This community, in Cukali's verses, faces an exorcism that is as much of the author as of his poetic subjects. This is how our girlfriends smell of smoke/ like coming from pubs/ or from wood stoves. Their young noses lead them helplessly to the slaughterhouse.

When he talks about 'slaughterhouses,' the author has in mind the aesthetic clinics of Tirana, but especially the oppressive showcases into which social networks, screens, and the whole wanna-be industry that flourishes in Albania have turned.

This atmosphere, this oppression, which is also found in a Hatibian verse by Cukal, unfolds like this: We are oppressed by the palaces/ that drive the streets like drunken cars.

Koloreto Cukali, instead of a business card, can easily distribute his book and say without shame: I am a poet. The fact that he is silent, as a poet, not as an engaged man of the public sphere is related to the fact that, as a craftsman, he lives for the spiritual, as a professional he has to live.

In verses like these: There are many dying things,/ natural green,/ dumplings,/ and men named Gege. But not you./ You breathe asbestos/ and squeeze into buses/ protecting the cell phone; a man is revealed who rediscovers the past, the old, the traditional, not only as a time dimension but more as a contradiction, as a contrast, as a survival, yes you wanted. In this sense, Cukali is conservative, and rightly so. Any repetition presented as new is sure to get up his nose.

In the finale, Koloreto Cukali's poetry can be said to be a subversive act, not to bring something new (this is an illusion—there has been nothing new since the Tower of Babel) but to keep it known.

This makes him a genuine poet, and his book Marshi funebr i gëlave de detit is a sure business card for future anthologies of Albanian poetry.