Thursday, April 10, 2025
Bavjola Gami Shatro Publishes “(Re)Discovering the Poetry of the (Un)Known: Silence and Loss in the Poetry of Eqrem Basha”
Bavjola Gami Shatro published “(Re)Discovering the Poetry of the (Un)Known: Silence and Loss in the Poetry of Eqrem Basha” in Balkanistica 38 (2025).
This article is an elaborated version of the paper Silence and Loss in Eqrem Basha’s Poetry presented in the 23rd Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore, hosted by the University of Mississippi, in May 2-4, 2024, in Oxford. While the presentation was the first to address Basha’s poetry and generally Albanian poetry in the Republic of Kosova, it was finalized with the publication of this article, which is the first scholarly work published in a an academic journal in the U.S. on the poetry of Eqrem Basha, one of the key representatives of contemporary Albanian literature in the Republic of Kosova.
This 32-page article is a contribution that aims to draw the attention of specialists to this literature and its place among Southeast European literatures. The article provides a thorough elaboration on the concept of silence and its relation to loss in the volumes of selected poems Menyja ballkanike (Balkan Menu) and Doktrina e të menduarit vetëm (The Doctrine of Thinking Alone) by Eqrem Basha.
By means of close reading, the hermeneutic method, the cultural approach, and the comparatistics, the article analyzes his poems and places Basha’s poetry in the context of Albanian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while providing references to authors from world literature of the twentieth century pointing at similarities between Basha’s poetry and that of several important writers of the absurd, existentialism. symbolism, surrealism etc., aiming to encourage a comparative approach of his poetry.
The goal of this paper is to explore the way silence is configured in the poetry of Eqrem Basha in relation to the human condition, to the understanding of the individual and collective fate, to the concept of hope and the future. This is achieved through an in-depth analysis of the fascinating stylistic devices that make Basha’s work a unique phenomenon in Albanian literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Such elements are the tone, the black humor, phantasmagoria, the grotesque, irony, metaphor, figures of syntax, the prosodic elements and the structure of the poems.
This article sheds light on how the poet envisions the modern man marked by loss, as a result of confusion, indifference, loneliness and of the evil that has been established as a solid structure in society. In Basha’s poetry silence is pivotal to the very vocalization of the most traumatic human experiences, to man’s deepest and most disturbing (un)known fears that exhaust the human capacities to suffer and endure pain. Nevertheless, the individual in his poetry exists in this context providing a sigh of the non-life in a not-world, thus configuring the epitome of the antihero in contemporary Albanian poetry.
Identifying the faces of silence in Basha’s poetry allows for a deeper understanding of loss as a crucial experience of the modern man, which appears in various levels and impacts him in multiple dimensions. The article analyzes how the relation between silence and loss is achieved and to what effect; how it helps us to have a more profound understanding of the state of man and of our constant challenges which often present themselves in different forms but remain of the same nature in their core and serve as a reminder of our own responsibilities and choices as human beings.