Psychic Irredentism

Jet-lagged, I wake before sunrise in a hotel outside Rila Monastery, in the mountains south of Sofia. I slip out of my room and take a seat at the empty outdoor restaurant facing a tree-covered hill. A standalone brick fireplace is crackling, to my surprise, with half-charred wood.  

Rila is a center of Bulgarian culture and monastic tradition that is plastered with demons who will fuck you up in hell. It is a place of contemplation. In the firelight I replay images from the day before. Black-and-white-striped arches. Haloed icons. Byzantine frescoes ennobled by the crisp pine air. For lunch, bone-in fried fish caught from the mountain stream. For dessert, the traditional Mekitsa pastry heaped with powdered sugar and raspberry jam. 

The sound of footfalls brings me to the present—a worker arriving carting a wheelbarrow of split logs. He offers me a cigarette. I usually don’t smoke, but I take it. He could be from anywhere. We try English then settle on broken Spanish. He picked it up working in Madrid, he explains, I think. 

I want to thank him for greeting me while I sat alone in an unfamiliar place. But I go quiet, embarrassed to travel at will when he travels to carry loads in the dark. Dawn breaks. He tosses his cigarette in the fire and returns to work.

*

The summer of 2016 has been a tough one. Medication didn’t help. But travel is its own kind of medicine. 

They say travel gives you perspective. 

They say travel is a great way to try new foods and meet new people. 

They say encountering the other startles the other within you, flushing it like a wild boar onto the rolling hills of Thrace. 

*

Overnight passenger van: Now I’m in Albania. 

The walking tour departs from the heart of Tirana, Skanderbeg Square, named for a fifteenth-century feudal lord who, having once repelled the Ottomans, is now perched permanently astride his muscular bronze warhorse.

First stop, National Historical Museum (curated memory). 

A socialist realist mural featuring Partisans lunging at Nazis (nice). 

Albanian postage stamps commemorating 9/11 (thanks?). 

A whole pavilion dedicated to Mother Teresa (she’s Albanian?). 

Teresa’s name was unknown in Albania—the world’s first officially atheist state—until the Skopje-born ethnic Albanian became a retroactive national hero in the 1990s. Today the International Airport Nënë Tereza is the country’s gateway to the world.

*

Revision is the norm. Tell that to unreconstructed Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who scorned his allies for their political deviations. Hoxha preferred ideological purity, paranoid isolation, a landscape pockmarked by 170,000 concrete bunkers built in case of imperialist (or Soviet or Yugoslav) invasion.

*

I’m not saying Albania represents the foreign as such. That would be absurd, orientalist. It’s a real place with real people who brush past me in the plaza and smell my own strangeness. 

I’m saying that Albania is foreign to me right now, because this is where I am, carrying the foreign in tow. 

*

Knowing all this history, our tour guide, a dark-haired Albanian man in his twenties, is bullish on capitalism. And yet capitalism nearly destroyed Albania faster than central planning ever did. From 1992 to 1997, half the country’s wealth was disgorged by pyramid schemes, culminating in deadly riots, the looting of national armories, and the collapse of state function.

But markets grew familiar and people grew less credulous. Not long before my arrival, KFC became the first American restaurant chain to open a location in the country, here in Tirana, a welcome sign of investment. 

The last stop on the tour: a statue of Lenin stashed behind a public building, missing an arm at the elbow, no longer able to exhort the crowds—an antiquity to bleach in the sun.

*

In the seaside city of Saranda, I come upon a newly erected bust of Hillary Clinton on a public street. Back home, Clinton has just defeated a bushy-haired democratic socialist to clinch her party’s presidential nomination, dashing the only real moment of political hope I can remember. Now she accosts me on holiday, bronzed and triumphal, poised to crush her joke of a populist opponent in November.

I take the strange photo op: a lanky American leaning on a pedestal propping up his next president in a transitional democracy tucked beneath the former Yugoslavia in a US election year. 

Click. 

Officials claim they haven’t put up the statue in anticipation of Clinton winning the US election, only in appreciation of her support for Albanians. It probably helps that her husband led the NATO bombing of Serbia to defend Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Maybe it’s enough that she bothered to visit Albania when she was secretary of state in 2012. 

George W. Bush became the first US president to visit Albania in 2007. They named a street after him in Tirana.

Recognition makes you real.

*

My nephew in Wisconsin will come up to you and recite facts he’s recently learned, usually about history. Sometimes he quizzes you so he can give you the answers. It’s a way of consolidating knowledge, seeking attention, and shoring up a sense of self.

This is what I’m doing to you now. 

If I’m the teacher, that makes you the student (juvenile, inchoate, wide-eyed). 

Poor child. What do you know of Albania’s layered, inscrutable history? What do you know of the shepherds of the Accursed Mountains, who hang the spiral horns of autochthonous goats above their thresholds to ward off the evil eye?

This way, I’m not a divorced tourist squinting at a laminated café menu, picking around the chicken hearts on his plate. I’m a professor of Balkan studies—a use for grad school after all.

*

I do know some things about how nothing fits together. Slovenes share a religion (Catholicism) with Croats but not a language. Croats share a language (Serbo-Croatian) with Serbs, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins but not a religion. Serbs share a religion (Orthodox Christianity) with Macedonians and Montenegrins, but whether Montenegrins are just Serbs—or whether the Macedonian language is just a dialect of Bulgarian—is a loaded political question. Bosniaks share a religion (Islam) with most Albanians but not a language. Albanians aren’t Slavs, but many live in the former Yugoslav territories of Kosovo (whose independence Serbia doesn’t recognize) and North Macedonia (the “North” added in 2018 because Greece is loath to cede the legacy of Alexander the Great).

Dislocation breeds irredentism—a longing for lost territories. Everyone is out of joint, exploding their borders in imagination to become whole.

 *

Surely some territories should be returned. These territories aren’t just geographic. You can lose a phase of life, a fantasied career, the benign suzerainty of a lover. 

The losses go all the way back. Exiled from the borderless motherland, we’re strayed in history and can only collect ourselves there. 

*

I used to be a baby but now I’m in Albania.

*

I could be anywhere: pacing a basement resale shop in Plovdiv, fingering lockets of Stalin; folding a paperback of Laura Palmer’s diary in Cyrillic script at the open-air bazaar in Sofia; counting skulls and femurs in the ossuaries of Meteora. 

As a psychic irredentist, my task is always the same: overcome the alienation of self from world. It’s an endless task and, in truth, a compulsion. 

The sense of the foreign is an inner sense, born of experience. If the infant knows no boundaries—only an oceanic unity—then the arrival of a separate world is a wound. Each new encounter with otherness presses on this wound. 

You can respond to the irritation by lashing out at the other, whose otherness is a projection of your inner dislocation; or you can wave your hand through the projection, see it flicker, and allow yourself to mourn.

*

Berat, south-central Albania. The daybreak call to prayer petitions the river valley, the windows of whitewashed Ottoman houses glinting on the hillside. 

I climb the hill to Berat Castle, the ancient walled city where locals sell trinkets, woolen aprons, and rose petal preserves. 

I sit alone by a limestone wall. My coffee is strong; I take it in sips. 

Cicadas thrum from the olive trees.

A shepherd mix pads over to my table. I let him lick the honey-salt from my fingertips—a residue of baklava. His sun-bleached tail sweeps the cobbles.  

He is a matted ward of the ruins, a transient living off bids for attention. But I see him as what I am not: timeless and wise, a true Albanian breed, a minor sovereign of the citadel. Yawning, he curls up to my ankle in the shade of the table.