Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Musine Kokolari (February 10, 1917 Adana, Turkey - August 14, 1983) of Gjirokastėr, Albania was probably the most interesting figure among the minor prose writers of Albania's pre-communist period, both as an individual and as an author. Kokolari was the first female writer of Albania, and the only one up until the 1960s. Born on February 10, 1917 in Adana in southern Turkey of a patriotic and politically active family of Gjirokastrian origin, Kokolari returned to Albania with her family in 1920. She was early to acquire a taste for books and learning since her brother Vejsim operated a bookstore in Tiranė in the mid-thirties. In January of 1938, she left for Rome to study literature at the university there and graduated in 1941 with a study on Naim Frashėri. Her stay in the eternal city gave her an ephemeral glimpse into a fascinating world of intellectual creativy and her sole aim in life upon her return to Albania was to become a writer. In 1943, she declared to a friend, "I want to write, to write, only to write literature, and to have nothing to do with politics." She had, at the age of twenty-four, indeed already published an initial 80-page collection of ten youthful prose tales in her native Gjirokastrian dialect: Siē me thotė nėnua plakė (As my old mother tells me), Tiranė 1941 This historic collection, strongly inspired by Tosk folklore and by the day-by-day struggles of women of Gjirokastėr, is thought to be the first work of literature ever written and published by a woman in Albania. Kokolari called the book, "the mirror of a world gone by, the path of transition from girlhood with its melodies and the first years of marriage to the world of the grown woman, once again bound by the heavy chains of slavery to patriarchal fanaticism." Three years later, despite the vicissitudes of the civil war, Kokolari now twenty-seven, was able to publish a longer collection of short stories and sketches entitled ...sa u-tunt jeta (...how life swayed), Tiranė 1944, a total of 348-pages which established her -- ever so briefly -- as a writer of substance. A third volume of her folksy tales was entitled Rreth vatrės, (Around the hearth), Tiranė 1944. As the Second World War came to an end, Kokolari herself opened a bookstore and was invited to become a member of the Writers' Union, created on October 7, 1945 under the chairmanship of Sejfulla Malėshova (1901-1971). All the time she was haunted by the execution without trial of her two brothers, Mumtaz and Vejsim, on November 12, 1944 by the communists and candidly demanded justice and retribution. Having herself been closely associated in 1944 with the fledgling Albanian Social-Democratic party and its press organ Zėri i lirisė (The voice of freedom), she was arrested on January 17, 1946 in an age of terror concomitant with the arrest of Malėshova, and on July 2, 1946 was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the military court of Tiranė as a saboteur and enemy of the people. The next eighteen years of her life she spent in the infamous concentration camp of Burrel in the Mati region, isolated and under constant surveillance, persecuted and provoked by boorish and uneducated prison officials. A broken woman, she was released around 1964 and given a job as a streetsweeper in the provincial town of Rrėshen. Musine Kokolari, once a gifted young teller of tales, was persecuted to the end of her days. Terminally ill with cancer, she was even refused a hospital bed before her death on August 14, 1983. See also List of Albanians References This article contains information from Frosina.org and it is used with permission. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.