The astute chronicler of Kosovo

In memory of Esad Mekuli on the 32nd anniversary of his passing - with some details from an interview given to Zagreb's START magazine in 1979.

Enver Robelli

I.
August 6 marks 32 years since the death of Esad Mekuli, the intellectual, poet, academic and tireless cultural and enlightenment worker of Kosovo. He was born on January 15, 1916 in Plav, Montenegro. Esad Mekuli lived for 77 years. He was and remains the most prominent voice of Kosovo's social poetry in the 20th century. Spiritual pioneer of the people. A zealous creator. A guide for many young writers. Anyone who has grown up and matured and learned to read more than a primer in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, can hardly not know Esad Mekuli. Or Sat Nokshiqi. Or Sat Hoxha. As the director of the famous literary magazine "Jeta e re", he opened the gates of the literary world for many enthusiastic writers of Kosovo. He was an anti-fascist, so he was imprisoned in 1940. He was the first teacher of many of those men and women of Kosovo who would later become important personalities of cultural life, both religious and political. He sang the painful song of his people. He denounced the oppression of Albanians in the Yugoslav kingdom. He cursed the state oppression of his people. He fought against denationalization and opposed Turkization, which often ended with the displacement of families to the fields of Anatolia.
One of his poems is entitled "Longing for the Unreachable".

II.
Esad Mekuli graduated from high school in Peja in 1936. He studied veterinary medicine in Belgrade, where he graduated in early 1947. He specialized in parasitology in Zagreb in 1947 and 1948. He received his doctorate at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Belgrade with the thesis “Contribution to the recognition of piroplasmosis of domestic animals in Kosovo and the Dukagjini Plain”. As a student, he joined the progressive movement. He was one of the editors of the “Beogradski student” newspaper. He participated in student actions and anti-fascist demonstrations. He worked as a military veterinarian in Peja, where he was captured by the occupation. In 1942, due to his work in the national liberation movement, he was imprisoned. Later, he joined the partisan detachments and for a time worked as a doctor and editor of the illegal newspaper “Lirija – Sloboda”.
After the war, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Albanian-language newspaper Rilindja, and from 1947 to 1960 he was head of the parasitology department of the Veterinary Institute in Prishtina. From 1949, he was editor-in-chief of the first literary magazine “Jeta e re”, which he edited for almost a quarter of a century, and later also editor-in-chief of the scientific-professional agricultural magazine “Glasnik” (The Messenger). He was editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine “Biotehnika” and editor-in-chief of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia in Albanian.

III.
He published eleven scientific-professional works in Yugoslav and foreign journals, then two books and two brochures on veterinary medicine and about fifty scientific articles in notebooks and magazines in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian.
He began to engage in literary work in his early youth, collaborating with youth magazines. He published five collections of poems in Albanian, six in Serbo-Croatian and one each in Macedonian and Turkish, and more than eighty books of translations. He was the first president of the Kosovo Association of Sciences and Arts and the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts.
For his work in the field of translations, he was awarded the December Prize of the Kosovo AS and the Renaissance Prize; he was also awarded the Diploma of Honor of the League of Translators' Associations of Yugoslavia for his merits in affirming inter-republican cooperation. In 1971 he received the AVNOJ Prize for literature and the 13th of July Prize of Montenegro (1974).

IV.
In May 1979, Esad Mekuli gave a lengthy interview to the Zagreb magazine START, from which we will quote extensively here. Mekuli is described as Kosovo’s most prominent public activist. “Injustice, suffering, misery – they became my obsession. In my youth, I loved to draw and I remember drawing the most miserable huts, Roma poverty, going to the saddest neighborhoods. I believed that things would change if they started to be described and represented,” he explains in the interview.
About his first steps in creativity, he says: "In fact, when I was a child in elementary school, in Plav where I was born, we didn't have books. For me, it was an event when, after the feast of Saint Sava, which was the school holiday, and I recited on that occasion, an officer gave me the newspaper 'Jadranska Strazha'. It was an illustrated magazine with many pictures.
Later, in the gymnasium in Peja, there were about 150 to 200 books, which I read very quickly. And so, in reality, when I had a great desire to read and time for it, I didn't have the opportunity. That's why at first I didn't have many examples to follow, except for the folk poetry that I heard from my uncle and the folk tales that my mother told me.
The first writer who influenced me was JJ Zmaj. Under the influence of his poetry, I wrote youthful verses, paying more attention to rhyme than to content."
When asked which of his first poems he considers important at the beginning of his literary career, Mekuli answers: “It is the poem ‘Life’, written as a reaction to the death of my beloved sister – an association for life that appears like a meteor in the universe and then fades away. In fact, everything was permeated by the consequences of the horror that had occurred from 1915 to the end of World War I, when Muslims experienced violent mass conversions of religion, accompanied by the shooting of hundreds of people.
Plava is a small town, but it has four cemeteries. I have not seen and do not know of any place so small that has more cemeteries than my birthplace.
In fact, there was the border between Turkey and Montenegro, and there were always clashes and conflicts. If we also remember the blood feud, one can imagine how many victims have fallen in several hundred years.”

V.
How Esad Mekuli began his path of knowledge: “My father was a hoxha, a very advanced and cultured man. In our environment at that time, he was probably the most cultured man. He had completed his theological studies in Istanbul and knew all the most important eastern languages – Persian, Arabic, Turkish – then Italian, Bulgarian and Serbian, in addition to his native language, Albanian.
My mother was very religious, uneducated and stubborn, and she tied me tightly to herself, as the only son among five sisters, so that at first I was under her influence.
My father wanted to be fair in love, so sometimes, for fear of becoming too soft with me, he showed even greater severity than towards the girls. There was a great difference in education between my mother and father. But my mother, although simple, was a good housewife and citizen and hard worker.
For his time, my father had a revolutionary concept of education: perhaps as one of the first Albanian Muslims, he sent all his daughters to state school. Because of my deep emotional connection with my mother, there was a risk that she would draw me towards religion. When I was little, he took me to learn Arabic from a colleague of my father, with the aim of becoming a hoxha.
But that man was very advanced, almost communist. I continued learning Arabic even when I enrolled in the Prizren gymnasium. There, however, in the mosque they tried to instill in me the belief that this world is temporary, that suffering prevails here, but that in the eternal other world all injustices would be corrected and that we too would live well and with dignity there.
I accepted that consolation, because reality was unacceptable to me.
Then new knowledge from biology and physics began to come. As I learned, I gained more and more knowledge, which was contrary to that that the religious leaders taught. Slowly, I began to know more than some incompetent religious teachers, who were primitive and ignorant.
Thus, very early on I became an atheist.
The decision to continue secular education came naturally, and my father supported him in every way."

VI.
When did Esad Mekuli finally decide to pursue education? This is his answer: “After finishing junior high school, when I transferred to the gymnasium in Peja. Many students who, because of their progressive views, had been expelled from schools in Montenegro and Serbia had come to that gymnasium, and they exerted a strong and profound influence on the rest of us with their political orientation.
In Peja, I lived with my older sister, whose son, Xhemal Kada, a fighter for Spain and a national hero, was two or three years older than me and went to the same gymnasium. I was connected to him by a sincere friendship, and I am indebted to him for my change of heart.
Xhemal Kada was later expelled from the gymnasium, fled to Albania, and from there went to study in Italy, at the military academy. In Italy, he became a member of the Communist Party and, when he finished the technical course and became an engineer, the civil war broke out in Spain.
He joined the International Brigades and was martyred. in 1938.
After his departure, we corresponded regularly. In Spain, before he fell, he had been wounded once and, while recovering in Paris, he tried to describe to me in as much detail as possible the developments of the civil war.
It was clear that for us, too, the only salvation in the face of the injustices that had brought about such a situation - where so many of my compatriots suffered in poverty, humiliated, deprived of all rights, even of the use of their native language, was only war.
The decision was made that something had to be done so that our people too could become equal among equals. The consequence of this was clashes with the police, imprisonments, mistreatment.

VII.
Esad Mekuli says that prison did not discourage him. "Instead of demoralizing me, it gave me more strength and drive. Resistance arises within a person. I experienced it especially hard when they came to check my parents' house.
They were elderly, and I was the only boy, and all this in a politically backward environment, where the provincial mentality prevailed that nothing should be changed, that both good and suffering are determined by God, and that is how it should remain.
In such an environment, it was scandalous that the son of such a respected personality would commit 'excesses' against the regime. When we, 60 students - mainly from Kosovo, among whom, in addition to Albanians, there were also Montenegrins and Serbs - signed a resolution against Stojadinović's secret agreement with Turkey for the relocation of about 400,000 'Turks' from the southern regions of Yugoslavia, the police were very brutal.
They overturned and scattered the entire house, and when I saw how my mother - a woman with "Old beliefs - this was probably the hardest thing for me: I experienced it extremely badly.
The prisons I went through later (in Plav, Glavnjača in Belgrade) only strengthened my faith in life. I knew that we were on the right path and that people were getting closer and closer to freedom."

VIII.
On literary creativity in Kosovo: “Before the (Second World) War, two or three writers appeared. They were: Hivzi Sylejmani, a prose writer, who, as a student of the great madrasah in Skopje, published two or three short stories; then Mark Krasniqi, who, as a seminarian in Prizren, was perhaps among the first to start writing poetry in the mother tongue, which was allowed in the seminary, since it had a certain autonomy.
The rest of us did not have this opportunity. Mikel Marku from Peja was involved in translations. He was the first to translate some poems from the collection 'Poems of Ali Binaku' by Radovan Zogović. Of course, those translations have been lost, but it is interesting as a fact that someone was trying to translate poems from Yugoslav literature that spoke about us.
And if we take into account that even in 1949, when the magazine 'Jeta e re' began to be published, we had almost no writers - if this situation, when, "We had almost nothing, compared to the fact that today we have almost 100 members of the Writers' Association (among them some who have been affirmed on Yugoslav levels as poets and prose writers), then we still cannot fully appreciate these great achievements."

IX.
A message at the end of the interview: “The solution lies in the humanization of man. This is also the fundamental meaning of art. Art is what humanizes man in the most sustainable way - it awakens in him the love for beauty, for honesty, for life.
Science also essentially aims at the same goal, although it is often misused.
We must fight to remove boundaries and differences between people.
And, what is most important: we must believe in life as something sustainable, as something that will exist as long as the universe exists.
Life itself is a struggle, but a dialectical struggle, which is very long.
As conscious beings, we must understand that the life of each individual is too short to be able to fully encompass the meaning of this process.”

X.
The interview with Esad Mekul for the magazine “Start” was conducted by Mirjana Buljan. She was of partial Albanian origin (from her mother, while her father was Croatian). Some biographical information about Mirjana Buljan, according to the Croatian biographical lecture: prose writer and playwright, translator (born in Niš on February 10, 1931). She completed primary school in Niš (1938–41) and Zagreb (1941), high school in Zagreb (1942–50). At the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, she studied English and Yugoslav studies (1950–54). She was a journalist in the editorial office of the newspaper “Borba” in Zagreb (1956/57), a translator in Northern Ireland (1960/61), a translator and librarian in the Federal Republic of Germany (1964–67), and then a professional writer. She is a member of the Croatian Writers' Association and the Croatian Literary Translators' Association. She is 94 years old.
She writes novels and short stories, mainly with themes related to the modern urban environment and the fate of Albanian women. Since 1949 she has published works in various magazines. She has translated from English and German (L. Carroll, J. Jones, A. Strindberg, B. Brecht, J. Joyce, G. Büchner, U. Plenzdorf and others). Her prose has been translated into several languages. (A2 Televizion)