THE GHOST RIDER by ISMAIL KADARE

The first poesy taught to children in creches had to be the one that follows:

O dear friends, I have three mothers;one at home,one at school and the other is my mother,the party.

It would be hard to find any Albanian at least 25 years old who was not taught this poesy in the first days of creche

-FALMA FSHAZI on Albania under Enver Hoxha

         Without referring to Falma Fshazi,I do not think I can begin this review of  The Ghost Rider ,a novel by Ismail Kadare.It is her doctoral thesis that helped me understand Albania better.

        We have indeed other sources to read about Albania.A brief history of Albania as we read in Wikipedia can teach us only a few basic facts about the country.I also referred to a few other encyclopedias.I re-read my own review (published in a periodical a couple of years ago) of Ismail Kadare's novel 'The File on H'`But nothing can excel the direct experience of a native of  Albania. Especially when a writer like Ismail Kadare tries to debunk the myth that the Balkans may have about themselves,a study like the aforesaid thesis can help us a lot.

        To read The Ghost Rider,it is necessary to have an idea of the history of Albania.  A poem about Albania written by Lord Byron in the 19th century is as follows:

Land of Albania! Where Iskander rose,

Theme of the young,and beacon of the wise,

And he his name-sake,whose oft-baffled foes

Shrunk from his deeds of chivalrous emprize:

Land of Albania!let me bend mine eyes

On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!

The cross descends, thy minaret arise,

And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,

Through many a cypress-grove within each city's ken

(XXXVII,CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE)

        Note the last four lines and you get what he meant.After nearly 200 years,Falma Fshazi writes about the Hoxha regime:

The ban of religion,the intervention in the family until deciding who would marry whom,the hard ideological indoctrination of education and the pressure was made to the citizens to accept a priori and apply the requirements of being 'the new individual as the individual of the party' profoundly damaged the spiritual,social and cultural individual integrity of every Albanian

Falma Fshazi

        I think this is where I can give you the brief summary of The Ghost Rider. The promotional description on the back cover itself is enough to give an idea of it.

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door.The woman opens it to find her daughter,Doruntine,standing there alone in the darkness.She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin.But unbeknownst to her,Konstandin has been dead for years.What follows is a chain of events that plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust.

        Although the blurb tells the reader clearly that the novel is set in medieval Albania,a peruser cannot refrain from linking it to the impetus behind the work.What made Kadare choose such an ancient tale for his novel?

       It is not just because 'The Ballad of  Constantine and Doruntine' is known wherever Albanian is spoken.As in his early novels,he does not want to be the representative of his 'small nation'.The narrator is not eager to use 'we','our people' ,'our land' etc in this novel either.

          Who is the ghost rider?

         The novel answers this question.It was written in the late seventies.It was first published in 1980.In 1975,Kadare was rusticated to the provincial city of Berat following the controversy over his poem 'Red Pashas'.Those who learn the history of Albania know who Pasha (Ali Pasha)was.In a country where 'red' connotes communism the title infuriated the Pashas of the society.

        Ms Fshazi writes that every single piece of individual life was made collective by the party.In her words,it robbed the citizen of all personal properties.

       The belief that was widely propagated in Albania could be written as follows:

The enemy within :Clergy

The enemy outside:capitalism

'Others are plotting against Albania.'

    At the same time,like the communists elsewhere,Indians also believed that Albania was heading towards the dream of communism.

        K.Venu,the leader of one of the Naxalite parties in India then analysed the Albanian communism in his book titled 'Philosophical Problems of Revolution'(I am probably one of the few who still have a copy of the book in English).He had,however,opined that Albanian communism was being mechanical.At least a few naxalites like him had started thinking that the great China itself  was on its way to capitalist restoration.It was not a premonition or sense of foreboding.

        In his introduction to The Ghost Rider,Prof.David Bellos says that it relates the legend of Doruntine to the emergence of the famous(or infamous?)Albanian besa,the foundation stone of Kanun.In his view,the novel broaches the question of surviving oppression or a kind of cultural hegemony.A brief and relevant history of Albania is given in the introduction to equip the reader for its proper perusal.

       Stres,the precursor of today's police detective is the person who tries to unravel the mystery.

     The rumour of Konstandin’s resurrection worries the church authorities. Resurrection is  the monopoly of only one name.Attributing it to a common man is blasphemous. It cannot be allowed. The archbishop himself summons Stres to know about the progress of his investigation.Stres tells him that all except a minority believe in Konstandin’s resurrection.

                                “Then you must see to it that this minority becomes the majority.”The Archbishop says. He orders Stres to find the young man who brought the young woman back. He continues:

        “And if you do not find him, you will have to create him.”

Before long ,an itinerant seller of icons is arrested.

       “I am an honest man. I was arrested while lying on the roadside in agony. It’s inhuman!”wails the man.

        “Put him to torture” Stres orders relentlessly and exits quickly so as not to hear the prisoner’s cries. Yet he hears some indistinct whs and ehs sounds.

       “God be praised, he has confessed!”The messenger says,

       “Scarcely had he seen the instruments of torture when he broke down.”

    Contented archbishop,later,in his speech suggests what unimaginable catastrophes could result if such heresies were permitted to spread freely. He also notes the efforts by the Church of Rome to exploit the heresy, using it against the Holy Byzantine Church, as well as the measures taken by the latter to unmask the imposture. Schisms within the medieval churches are beautifully brought to our notice here.

       Stres also gets opportunity to give his own account of the events. During his speech, he asks the gathering:

            “In these new conditions of the worsening of the general atmosphere in the world, in this time of crime and hateful treachery that could be called unbelief, who should the Albanian be? Shall he espouse the evil or change his features to suit the masks of the age?”

ENVER HOXHA

         These are the questions of  Kadare himself and our mind suddenly leaps from the generic Middle Ages to the contemporary Albania. Albanians’ besa,Kanun,family feuds, bloodshed violence, sudden shifts in climatic conditions that reflect the Kanun-bound tradition ( I remember some descriptions and situations in Kadare’s The File on H .) etc indeed regurgitate.

This is what Kadare said about his childhood:

My father was against the Communist regime; my mother and her family were for it. They did not quarrel about it, but they teased each other with irony and sarcasm. At school I belonged neither with the children from poor backgrounds who were pro-Communist, nor with those of rich families who were terrified of the regime. But I knew both sides. That made me independent, free from childhood complexes.  

       Only certain aspects of communism are good,in his view.'The practice of it in Albania was terrible' 

      In an interview Kadare makes his idea of 'Negative creation' clear.To him,Negative creation for a writer is what he doesn’t write. One needs a great talent to know what one shouldn’t write, and in a writer’s consciousness nonwritten works are more numerous than the ones he/she has written.

       The world that Kadare's words create, however, makes reading a unique experience.It successfully debunks the Albanian myth and mirrors the Balkan dilemma to a great extent as well.The Ghost Rider,therefore, travels beyond the Balkan peninsula and reaches the mind of all those who are aware of our world society.