Even the End Has a Smell…

By Ben Andoni

Writers usually keep a saying at hand when asked about the state of the world and the nightmarish paradoxes surrounding us. Writer Daniel Kehlmann (translated into Albanian by A. Kove) once cited a saying by Dürrenmatt (translated by the late A. Klosi) — that a story does not end until it finds its worst variant — in an interview with the late Greek journalist Anteos Hrisostomidhis. It suddenly came to mind when, at a panel of the SINTRAK festival (first edition, curated and conceived by translator and author Milena Selimi), I asked the well-known Bulgarian writer and philosopher Todor P. Todorov a few days ago about the times we are living in and how he perceived this era ontologically. A pause followed, then, carefully turning toward the audience of the “Puppet Theatre,” he said something chilling: “You have to reach the bottom in order to change,” repeating what I had heard and read before. He fell silent to let the impression sink in. And then, eyes on them, he added a rhetorical question: “But what is the bottom, really?” He gave the answer himself after a few seconds that felt like hours. “I was talking about a topic in Russia. I repeated this idea and tried to elaborate on it, believing I was within the idea expressing how I conceived the bottom philosophically. At the end of the event, an old woman approached me and said: Son, do you know what the bottom is? What bottom were you really talking about? Have you experienced war? The blackness of hunger? Extreme survival? Of course not,” the old woman went on, “because had you lived through them you would understand that the misery, the death, and the bottom you perceive philosophically eventually turn into matter. You feel it right in front of you, and it has a stench you can never name, because it is horrifying. I hope you never experience this smell, because you will be terrified… you will all be terrified.”

We are making this long introduction for a moment Albania is going through, one that no longer finds comparison with any other event in the years of its existence, full of dark days. In the first quarter of the 21st century, no one has an answer as to why democratic Albania is so disappointing. There are no explanations. Not even a single justification to explain the evil, the refusal to take responsibility, the gargantuan greed, the avarice, the way institutions are exploited by people whose meritocracy is in doubt, and so on. The dilemma grows because this crisis Albania is going through exceeds our sensory capacities and our thinking abilities — apart from the irony toward moral categories that are no longer taken into account. And not simply because of the latest scandalous case of SHISH chief Vlora Hyseni and the arrested businessman Agasi (if the leaked investigations are true); not because of this parliament, ever lower in intellectual and moral capacity; the empty propaganda and artificiality; or the vanity; the state corruption and the luxury that is today part of a cynicism displayed on screens and hurled harshly and coldly in our faces. And not because we are ignorant and do not understand, but because our very Being has now turned chaotic and looks like the tale of something absurd that we experience as “normal.” If we believe Heidegger (this is in the literature), the problem is ontological: today’s Being has withdrawn, has weakened. Today’s Albanian crisis does not come from a lack of knowledge; it is the clash of two ways of confronting being that cannot find themselves in each other. The first is the one destined to trust the institution, which disappoints it, and the second is tied to what it believes should really be. If you carefully follow the reasoning that some of the people inspiring the Flamingo Revolution make in forums, you understand that the Albanian being has an extraordinary desire for change and deserves it. It suddenly feels as if we have returned to the distant 1930s, when Albanian intellectuals believed in change through young people and the ideas they had to convey.

Today’s crisis, the endless cases of corruption (the incinerators, 5D, the reconstruction funds, AKSH, and so many others), the wiretaps (the author thinks it excessive that they be made selective and given to the public in this form), the often useless work of the administration show that it has exceeded our capacities. Many colleagues, who claim to have access to many sources (this too is one of the oddities of our democracy), are convinced that even bigger scandals will follow. This chills you. When knowledge fails to orient itself, it is a sign that it is not your knowledge failing — it is your Being showing itself as weak. Today we are weaker even though we perceive and react. Democracy is stronger than us — we protest and demand, though things change very little. Tirana and Pristina protest, but things remain there and look even gloomier. What we called “democracy” for 36 years in Tirana confirms two ideas. The first, what we are often told, that Democracy is procedure: elections are held, parties function (!), EU reports seem respected and genuinely evidence the country’s development. And the second, democracy as meaning: the concept that those procedures would make us part of the West, would protect us from the cynicism of the history we are living. In fact, we have the paradox: in Albania, 97% of Albanians consider corruption a very serious problem in the country (IRI); the abuse of political power is seen as the main factor of this state by 80% of Albanians (IDM); 59% of citizens declare they are dissatisfied with the way democracy develops and functions in Albania (IRI).

Weak democracy, then, is what we are living now. Institutions exist, but we do not understand their efficiency. Are they ours? Are they captured? Why is there no sense of change?

All of this is more dangerous than a bitter end, because an end can be replaced. But our democracy seems to be reaching a kind of end, when people stop feeling that they own it even symbolically. Today’s state, where Rama is everything, no longer needs to stop people from speaking — and in fact does not (the protest is proving it) — but it has made Albanians feel that speaking changes nothing. Criminals make the law and time is showing they are untouchable; the strong get construction permits, not rarely outside the rules; your diploma is useless; MPs are often successful businessmen… and Albania is being abandoned. Ceaselessly.

Philosophically, this is the end of ontological ownership, the Bulgarian professor would have explained that day at the “Puppet Theatre,” once the first Albanian parliament. Perhaps we have not yet felt this end, but its smell is so strong, and it seems the changes happening everywhere in Europe and the whirlwinds of war news coming ever more often are bringing it. The old Russian woman knew this lesson from life, but her lessons “are no longer of use to anyone.” We are destroying the beautiful democratic dream ourselves. Unfortunately not only we Albanians, but everywhere. The smell of the end, the one that stinks, apparently waits to reveal itself to us sooner rather than later… Only, it will be late. (Homo Albanicus)