NTH POSITION (2006)
by Kevin Higgins
The Condemned Apple is quite simply the most
disturbing collection of poetry I've ever read. Visar Zhiti was born on 2
December 1952 in the port of Durres on the Adriatic coast. Between 1970 and
1973 his first published poems appeared in literary periodicals. By 1973 Visar
was preparing his first collection of poems, Rhapsody of the life of roses.
Pretty standard stuff so far. If he'd lived in Ireland or Britain, Visar might
have gone on to be nominated for a Forward Prize or some such, or been invited
to showcase his first collection at The Ledbury Festival or Cúirt. Or he might
have been ignored, and if this happened he would, no doubt, have complained
about it to his friends. Such is the poet's life. At least as we have come to
know it.
But Visar Zhiti didn't live in Brighton or Galway; he lived
in a country under the absolute rule of the fanatical Stalinist, Enver Hoxha,
who made Nicolae Ceausescu look like a benign liberal. Hoxha was a crank of
gargantuan proportions. After first falling out with the Soviet Union, when
Khrushchev admitted that Stalin had actually made a mistake or two, Hoxha then
proceeded to fall out with the Chinese when, after Mao's death, they called a
halt to the so called 'Cultural Revolution' and put the Gang of Four -
including Mao's wife Jiang Qing - on trial. He condemned the Soviet Union, the
People's Republic of China (and all their satellites from Cuba to North Korea)
as "bourgeois revisionists". By the mid-1970s Albania had broken off
diplomatic and economic contact with the rest of the communist world, it was
now officially "the only socialist country in the world". It was also
probably the second worst place in the world to live. In terms of grim
Stalinist brutality, only Pol Pot outstrips the Albanian regime.
It was hardly the ideal circumstances in which to be
publishing a first collection of poems. Zhiti had just submitted the manuscript
of his first collection to the Naim Frasheri publishing company, when the
Purge of the Liberals' happened at the Plenary Session of the Communist Party
in Tirana. That the 'Liberals' in question only existed in Enver Hoxha's
imagination was neither here nor there; they had to be purged anyway. And Zhiti
suffered as a result. His work was interpreted as "blackening socialist
reality". In 1979 two members of the League of Writers and Artists - their
names are abbreviated here to R.V. and P.K - prepared an "expert
opinion" on the poetic works of Visar Zhiti, at the request of the
Ministry of the Interior. The two lackeys dutifully handed over their 12-page
"expert opinion" to the authorities on 24 October 1979. Two weeks
later Visar Zhiti was arrested. He was finally released on 28 January 1987,
having done the rounds of the Albanian gulags, including the hellish copper
mines at Spac.
This "expert opinion" is republished in full at
the back of the book. It makes chilling reading, in particular because its
vehement denunciation of the "obscure language" and
"hermetic" nature of some of Zhiti's poems reminds me of things I've
actually heard socialist friends - some of them now former friends - say about
the works of poets such as Medbh McGuckian and John Ashbery. Much left-wing
literary criticism, particularly as it appears in the small press, is still
laced with Stalinist attitudes. These days there are few overt Stalinists left,
but there are certainly those on the literary left who talk Trotsky – "no
party line when it comes to art", and all that - but act Stalin when
dealing with poetry which doesn't appear to serve the cause. Bad and all as
things are, those of us who live in the Western world are at least still
basically free to write whatever we want. Our poems may languish mostly ignored
- that's a different issue - but at least Medbh McGuckian is not in danger of
being denounced by the Ministry for the Interio
