To return to Albania with green eyes

Alfred Lela

The title is metaphorical. I have not put on lenses (green!!!) to improve myself, remaining head-to-toe this summer, outside the Paris of Tirana fashions, full of follicle implants and vulva regurgitation. I have taken non-stop vacations, stretching not to beaches but to spaces, and I have met several villages and cities in America, from Bar Harbor in Maine to Niagara Falls in New York. During these two unforgettable weeks, green has remained in my eyes, and temptation is found, perhaps, only in Lorca's lines Verde que te quiero Verde (green, how much I love you, green). To top off this ode to green, my 4-year-old granddaughter, Abigail, had replaced the weekday calendar with colors: Thursday was green. A child in Boston can mark a day of the week with green, can one in Tirana?

Isn't this just another attempt to find Rama and power an exposed rib to poke at? It's a monologue done out loud. It's the inner call against the crap and the blather, which appear to us as light and progress. We may not be able to change anything, but at least we don't let our projections of light and dark change us.

When you go down to Rinas, the green that covered your eyes in America is struck by the brown and gray. The road from the airport to Tirana resembles a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, the crown of a bunch of trees or bushes is only the image of the world before it turned into a desert. Iron, concrete and glass, a murderous combination of brutal architecture with the architectonic carelessness of the Albanian, build where and how you can, we have given the jizhat , inshallah they will not destroy it , we will fix it with the state . The latter lies at our feet. On the roadside are those turtle backs, which only Edi Rama's imagination can spawn. Unnecessary, yes, but also dangerous. This is a sign of how aesthetic hooks have become a state standard. Tall palm trees, withered wings like their sisters in Baghdad after the American attack of July '90, symbolize defeat. Everything was lost when the prime minister left his area and saw the homeland as an experimental garden, when three Kim Yong Unrs appeared together in every ceremony, from satellites to buildings.

Tirana itself is a Balkan Gotham City. Because the beautification efforts have not been strategic but sporadic, it is not the laryshia, but the laramania of an unfinished work by Jackson Polloc that comes before the eyes. The roads have to endure the dust of an African city which makes the heat seem more like it. You have garbage in every corner. The bicycle lanes, with their battered plastic dividers and dust-stained pastels, resemble a bullfight where rabid dogs have encountered each other. Trees are not absent in some parts of the city, but they are reduced by dust, narrow sidewalks (there is one on Pashko Vasa Street, so you have to walk barefoot), the stupor of old buildings and the arrogance of new ones.

As for the parks, they live only as a publicity stunt for the orbital forest. In our country, which is mainly mountainous, even Puka, which was once covered by forests, no longer exists. Paradoxically, the Puk businessmen who made their money by cutting and selling the Puka forests in Tirana, now build roads and towers, from the capital to the Llogara tunnel.

I don't know what place Dante would leave for them in his hell, I would imagine a brown pit surrounded by dried logs, on whose branches hang concrete stalactites. An eternal view of death.

I want to ask: Why is Tirana not a city for people, like Boston, or why Dhërmiu is no longer a tourist village, like Bar Harbor on the border with Kandana?

I remember Kadarjesa, light paste!, when he said that Albanians hate greenery. Then the conversation with him continued in the imagination that, perhaps, having so much contact with the Turks, who in turn had an affinity with the Arabs, peoples who came from the deserts, in their eyes, the soldiers of an empire that came from the bare, anti-greening sprouted.

It may be anthropologically so, but politics emerge over cultures with the right will. Be that as it may, above this filth, the enemies of green talk to us every day precisely about green. With an incomparable boast, with Mephistophelian self-confidence. Nature refutes them whenever our writings fail. The wind that blew yesterday, unfolding bags, rags and garbage, these flags of greed and bad governance, under the dome of the sky of Albania, showed everyone, even the patronazis of stupidity, that a gust of wind and rain is enough to expose it the homeland of propaganda.

Let their feathers shine and their breasts beat, but the heap on which they stand is not a pedestal, but dung.