Elvira Dones

99/2020. This is a good novel. It presents complex themes so straightforwardly that their complexity slides under conscious awareness so it feels like reading a simple story in plain language. An impressive achievement.

The first aspect of Sworn Virgin that really struck me in the contemporary part of the novel, set in the US in 2001, is that although the story has a culturally specific framing with a sworn virgin protagonist it's also a common human story of a young person (usually female) who feels obliged to look after her older relatives (usually parents) at the cost of her own development and who only gets her chance at adult life long after the age we would usually allow a story to be a bildungsroman or coming of age plot. This isn't about a second chance at life, it's a first chance. Being a teenager in middle age is doubly difficult, doing so as an exile in another culture in a second/third language is triply troublesome.

The second, when the novel flashes back to Albania in 1986 is how much the characters don't say or even think to themselves. This isn't authorial understatement. The text makes it explicit that most of the characters lived in times and places where casual conversation, and even internal perspective, were tightly controlled by both traditional culture and an authoritarian society: in this case Gheg misogyny and Albanian communism, although I dare say realising you're socially unacceptable because of gendered unconventionality or an unallowable tendency to self-education are common human experiences. And it's only fantasy utopias where all forms of loving human relationship are acceptable. So, if you're a woman don't speak to any adult man you're not related to, if you're a Gheg don't have friends unless the head of your family permits it, if you're a Christian be wary of Muslims and vice versa, if you're human don't think or speak in any way the local authoritarians won't allow, or you will be punished: murdered, attacked, exiled, imprisoned, shunned. Don't say it. Don't even think it. This is authorial realism. The niece character in 2001, Jonida, has grown up in the US and if she thinks something then she expresses it freely, and encourages her aunt to express herself. The protagonist's African-Caribbean-American friend also encourages her to express herself more freely.

"In silence there was hope; in conversations there often wasn't. Sound played for the enemy side."

The denouement is set up early in the novel and is inevitable in a book called Sworn Virgin but sex isn't presented as some sort of miraculous cure for trauma. It's an ending of one phase of life and a beginning of another, as all new relationships are to some extent.… (mer)

Rea sta festeggiando il suo compleanno. È giovane, piacente, brucia di vita. È leggermente alterata, perché il suo ragazzo, un brillante giovane giornalista, non ha voluto fare l'amore. Chissà come, chissà perché. La sua fida amica Nita, più grande di lei e già professoressa all'università, libera, indipendente, fa di tutto perché quel giorno assomigli ad una festa. Perché purtroppo tutto rema contro. Fuori ci sono esplosioni. Ma non sono fuochi d'artificio per Nita. Anzi. È il 24 marzo 1999. Siamo a Pristina, capoluogo del Kosovo, provincia serba a maggioranza albanese. I kosovari vorrebbero staccarsi dalla Serbia, come già prima han fatto, versando sangue, Croazia e Bosnia. Siamo in guerra. Proprio quel giorno infatti aerei della Nato hanno cominciato a bombardare la zona per indurre Milosevic, presidente ultranazionalista della Serbia, a fermare la pulizia etnica e abbandonare la regione e lasciarla libera di autodeterminarsi. Nita ospita alcuni suoi parenti a casa. Le notizie si susseguono, si accavallano e sono drammatiche. Si viene a sapere che i serbi finalmente allentano la morsa sulla città per consentire agli odiati albanesi di andarsene. Le famiglie alloggiate da Nita partono quasi subito, ci sono donne e bambini e speranze cui aggrapparsi. Che la fortuna sia con loro. Rimarrà con le ragazze solo Hana, che non sta bene e spera ardentemente che i suoi due figli, andati presso conoscenti prima dello scoppio dei bombardamenti, prima o poi si facciano vivi. Perché fuori si respira morte, odio, come solo la guerra sa fare. La città spettrale e deserta, ostile verso I kosovari, accusati di essere traditori. I collegamenti telefonici bloccati solo ai non serbi, paramilitari minacciosi che si aggirano, notizie ferali e grondanti sangue che vanno a far visita ai pochi spauriti albanesi che ancora son rimasti. C'è poco spazio per la fantasia e per sentimenti liberi, puliti. Si può solo cercare di sopravvivere…… (mer)

The Kanun, the code of customary law that has regulated rural life in northern Albania for centuries, includes an unusual provision that makes it possible - in very specific circumstances - for someone born female to adopt male gender by formal declaration. In most cases they do this when a family would otherwise be left without a male head. The declaration includes an oath of perpetual virginity. The people who do this (burrneshas, or sworn virgins) dress and act as men, and are treated in all respects (except sex and marriage) as though they are men.

I didn't know about burrneshas, but I see that it's become a "colourful cultural phenomenon" with a slew of magazine articles and documentary films made about the handful of people who still live this way over the last few years. Looking back, I see there's even a passing mention in John Boswell's encyclopaedic The marriage of likeness, which I read twenty years ago. Dones has also made a documentary film on the subject.

The novel follows the life of Hana/Mark, a young woman who has to give up her studies in Tirana, around the end of the communist era, to look after her uncle and aunt in a remote village in the mountains when they become ill. She adopts male gender when her uncle's death leaves her without a male protector, and lives in this way for some fourteen years - driving a truck, carrying a rifle, drinking raki, etc. - until a cousin persuades her to join the rest of the family in Washington, DC, where she finds herself faced with the tricky process of adapting to life in a new country at the same time as trying to piece together a female identity again.

Perhaps inevitably, this is a book that often feels rather didactic - it's hard to stop ourselves seeing Hana/Mark as an anthropological case-study, even though Dones works hard to make her an individual character. Other characters, such as the beloved-but-old-fashioned uncle, the various not-quite-boyfriends, the motherly cousin and her American-teen daughter, all feel rather sketched-in in consequence. And it was disappointing that the story jumped straight from Hana's decision to become a man to the plane to Washington, without telling us much about the process of adopting another gender and maintaining it. Obviously there are good reasons why Dones might not feel competent to put herself into the character's head once she has taken her decision, but from the reader's point of view that's really the part we're most curious about...

Still, an interesting little book that manages to dig into a relatively obscure corner of Balkan culture without coming across as either patronising or voyeuristic. And probably a writer to follow up further.… (mer)