– Deirdre Egan –
Recently a friend of mine gave me a copy of The Wedding to read; she felt that my interest in the women’s liberation movement would make this novel which centres on women’s struggles in Albania seem relevant to me. I must begin by confessing that I know very little of the history or cultural life of Albania, but I found the description of the people and their cause of such high interest that I have since read the History of the Party of Labour of Albania to deepen my knowledge of this great socialist country.
The central event of the story is a wedding which is taking place between a mountain girl and a young mechanic she met while engaged in the socialist construction of a new town in a rural and isolated area of Albania. The conflict in the novel is between the new life and the old, revolution and counter-revolution. The forces of the old and dying culture are represented by the Canon and the father of the bride who is still loyal to the precepts of this code of behaviour which prior to liberation subjected women to great hardship. The forces of the new society are personified by the Party of Labour and the communist youths and workers who are struggling hard to build a new town and to break down the inequality of women by enlisting their full and equal participation in the building of the new society. These two forces come together in a tense and potentially murderous way in the novel as the visit of the father to the wedding feast is described and speculated about from various points of view.
A revolution brings about a complete and double rupture in a society. The political life as well as culture undergo total transformation, and The Wedding chronicles the way this transformation has made itself felt in the lives of a few people in modern-day socialist Albania.
In Albania there had once been a tradition of early betrothals of girls to men. Once they were betrothed, it seems according to the events of the story, they would be taken from school and their lives would be limited to the household and their own mountain village. The only day they would leave the village would be the day that their bridegroom, often a man much older, came to take them to his home. If they reneged there would be much bloodshed and hostilities had wiped out whole families. Fierce blood feuds went on for generations and decimated towns. In one very moving section the bride contrasts her life under socialism to what had awaited her under feudalism. First the day of her betrothal comes:
“‘Katrina!’ father called me to him. ‘Come here! You are now betrothed. Beginning with tomorrow you will no longer go to school!’
“I burst into tears. Father became angry. He snatched my reader out of my hand and flung it into the fire. Its leaves curled and rustled as they began to burn. The pictures of cities and towns, the trains, plains, highways and the blue sea were all turned to ashes.” (p. 199.)
Then Katrina goes on to describe the go-between who profits by the arrangement of marriages and would like to disrupt her present wedding. She remembers and reviles him as she sits at her own wedding feast as a member of a proud socialist society:
“He follows me everywhere. He is trying to make me return, to deprive me of all that I have gained these recent months. He wants to deprive me of the beautiful highways, cities, the sea, the trains and my companion. In compensation for all these he wants to give me a half-lit nook and the solitude of subjugation to a forty year-old man I have never seen. He wants to deprive me of my bobbed hair, clean underwear, wall bulletins, books and songs, and in their place to give me a black kettle, a lash rope to haul firewood, filth and beatings.” (p. 200.)
She sees all this not as a simple personal problem but as a political position. She goes on to denounce this remnant of feudalism: “He wants to snatch away socialism from me. But this will never come about” (p. 200). From this we see the solidarity of the working people of Albania and the warmth of their feeling for each other and for the Party. Katrina is certain that she will succeed in her struggle against the forces of reaction with the help and the encouragement of the Party and her worker-comrades.
Katrina’s father is a figure of the past, a man who has suffered a great deal but is not brave enough to relinquish the old ways. In a description of the reactions of the parents when they visit their daughters who have left home we can feel much of the love which they have and their pride as well as their misgivings. It is plain by the tone that the author takes this as a contradiction among the people; when the parents see the concrete results of many of the struggles their children are carrying on they too will be won over wholeheartedly to the task of socialist construction. Katrina remembers the mixed feelings of the elderly parents when they came to see the new life that their daughters were taking up in defiance of the old ways and the reactionary Canon which had for so many centuries held all of them in thrall:
“Then a delegation composed of elderly people came from the village to see how things were getting on. They alighted from the bus and walked through the camp in a dignified manner. They visited and looked at everything. They peered into our sleeping quarters, visited the club, looked at the flash-posters on the bulletin board (they read them all for they had been told that it was here that we mountain girls wrote love letters to city boys). Then they visited our dining rooms, the kitchen, the broadcasting station, the shower baths (they asked a lot of questions about the shower baths, though goodness knows why. They even asked to be shown the soap we washed with and passed the cakes of soap gingerly from hand to hand as if they were dynamite). Finally, they saw us, too, coming straight from the railroad track singing. They shook their heads in wonder and yet were greatly pleased and fascinated. We looked so smart in our overalls.” (p. 76.)
But these changes Katrina counts as minor when compared with the impact of Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech which she heard on the afternoon of February 6. This speech, it would seem from the context of the comments of the story, gave the final blow to the ancient Canon which had enslaved Albanian women for generations. It releases the initiative of all the girls involved and they resolve to follow the lead of the Party and break their underage betrothals. Katrina describes the militancy of the class struggle:
“That night not a girl in our dormitory caught a wink of sleep. How could we? Almost all of us had been betrothed when we were young children just as Comrade Enver said. Horrible intermediaries, roaming night and day from one village to another, from one district to another like spiders, had fastened us with undetachable ropes. Hundreds of rifles stood guard over these bonds. Some of us had been bought for cash, some had been exchanged for cows, sheep, horses, sacks of corn and even for shepherd’s dogs… Before us lay the terrible Canon. To leave the fold we had to trample it. It lay prostrate at the threshold threatening us. Hundreds of rifles waved us back, threatened us if we dared to step out!…
“‘Girls!’ shouted Liza who was the first to get up. ‘Don’t worry, we have our Party. It will not leave us in the lurch.’” (pp. 77-78.)
I am quoting in such detail from this book because I find these pages inspiring. They show the relationship of the individual to the Party under socialism and the way that struggle for equality must continue at every level under the leadership of the Party.
A question may be raised: Why was not the Canon abolished before the revolution as a means of mobilizing women, did they not want “freedom now”? A Party writer and intellectual in the story illustrates graphically the primacy of revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary condition to women’s full emancipation:
“Betrothals from motives of interest, the pledged word and going back on it, insults, old feuds, threats to the clan, all these things went to creating those black contours which hovered like winter clouds over our weddings. And it often happened that in the midst of gaiety rifles were seized and havoc was wrought. The Albanian wedding could not be conceived otherwise. Gaiety and alarms were bound together like Siamese twins. It was only the revolution that pulled them apart.” (p. 102.)
Revolution brings about a radical rupture in both the politics and the culture, but the culture cannot be changed until the economic base is transformed:
“The revolution shook up everything, weddings included. But the old world keeps writhing still. It palpitates here and there but in old customs it is stronger than anywhere else.” (p. 102.)
The emancipation of women in Albania is integrated with the struggle to build the new society, and it is crucial for the success of the revolution that it be constantly renewed and continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat until all remnants of inequality are abolished. Women’s emancipation depends on their participation in revolution and the success of the revolution. The two are dialectically linked but revolution is primary. The women in the novel are shown as directly responsible for carrying on the struggle under the most favourable conditions which the Party has provided. I find this encouraging and in sharp contrast to bourgeois feminists in the United States who ask me, “Will the Party guarantee women’s liberation?” Women’s liberation is not a guarantee or a warranty that one can get now and cash in on demand. The point is that a Communist Party leads the struggle for women’s emancipation by seizing state power and involving women in this struggle. By so doing the women prepare the conditions to free themselves. This is true of Katrina; with a nation of women like her under the leadership of the Party of Labour, Albanian women are daring to fight and achieving their equality.
(Literature & Ideology, No. 15, 1973)
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