A PLAY OF INNER PAIN AND SHAKSPERIAN
MONOLOGUES
The well-known poet and writer Xhemil Bytyçi, with his new
play “Traces of a Silent Soul” dedicated to the profound crisis
of the Kosovar people, has further enriched his literary
creativity. He has been dramaturgically treating the main topic
of long-standing issues up to the present day about the plight
and atrocities against the downtrodden Albanian people in
Kosovo, where they fought for centuries to gain the freedom
and independence of their land. The play is full of shocking
episodes, overwhelmed by violence and genocide against this
people and their country separated from the mother land of
Albania. Although this topic is of local reference, it definitely
arouses global attention, as it is not based on fiction, but
rather on a very bitter reality. I began writing of this preface
by filtering and challenging the many difficulties of the
Kosovar people with the hope that it will shed some light on
this new play by the author and creator of Albanian literature,
Prof. Dr. Xhemil Bytyçi. The author has been publishing one
after another his books of new poems, writings and plays. He
remains consistent and focused on dramatizing real events of
his captive people. He composes and meticulously sculpts
positive characters carrying divine virtues in bravery and
glory.
Rape is a most hideous thing that happened to Albanian
women during the war in Kosovo by Serbian military and
paramilitary forces. This inhuman filth darkens Drita’s life
breaking her harder than her husband’s heart. The course of
rape happens to her while protecting her children in very
grave circumstances of war by the two Serbian policemen,
where the childish peace of the little ones lived, that is where
the forces armed to their teeth intervene. In front of the
children, their mother is tortured, while in the bedroom she is
also raped. Drita remembers this ingesting it into herself with
deep pessimism. She tries to protect her children in distress at
gunpoint. In the end, she finds the strength to survive the most
critical stage during the war and is then deported to Albania
by Serbian forces.
Drita deeply experiences the Serbian indignities in analogy
with the desire for a free and beautiful “paradise” life in
Kosovo, while the “others”, let them not be, are the negative
characters, a crowd of killers like rabid beasts acting with
barbarism and bloody horrors like bloodsuckers never satiated
with Albanian blood, with the final goal of expelling the
Kosovars from Dardania, their ancient ancestral land. The
drama of the exodus of the innocent comes and is
overwhelmed by the Serbian forces, and this terrible exodus is
described in detail in the play, namely the literary tragedy
“Traces of a Silent Soul”. The play is divided into six acts in a
series of ready-made scenes completed with detailed
sequences, with slightly muted color and dim lighting,
episodes in the shadows and in the dark accompanied by
soundtracks of voices of legendary braves followed by
mourning, children’s cries, people’s screams and the sound of
choirs coming from far away. Here we also have piles of ideas
and pains conveyed by voices of confessions about a new
revival in Kosovo, better complementing the literary work and
raising the artistic level of the play. The play, namely the
tragedy, is dramatically summarized around itself through
strong conflicts, providing opportunities to the directors
enriching and reconstructing the dialogues with even more
fantasy and artistic novelty. All are written to be red and
waiting to be performed on theater stages on settings of
interior and exterior decor constructions. The play “Traces of
a Silent Soul” aims to artistically interpret the drama of
innocent people, as well as the daily life in occupied Kosovo
until the end of the 20th century and in the first years of the
21st century. The episodes are experienced with pain, sadness,
rape and nightmares, ghoulish mass murders and other
inhuman murkiness. Here we also have acts of strong and
unyielding people, men and women fighting with
determination and bravery. The brave Albanians of the KLA
survive there protecting their lands like the precious rocks of
Mitrovica. The fiction play, written with love and alertness,
continuously dramatizes the suffering and murders of the
innocent crushed generation after generation by the bloody
hooves of the schizophrenic Serbian paramilitaries of
Belgrade. Policemen in black and heavily armed to the teeth
characterize the barbaric paramilitary police. The events are
characterized by murder, rape, burning of houses and
depressing evictions. The execution of a child nailed by the
hands to a tree trunk by the infamous Serbian forces,
resembling the crucified Christ, is excruciatingly painful. This
is a psychologically burdensome description, which is deeply
and forever burdened in the heart of Drita Gashi, the main
character of the play, who lived in harmony and happiness
with Agim Gashi and their three children before things
changed. In her community, she is noted for her participation
in mass activities in defense of human rights in Kosovo and
throughout Europe, protecting young abused women. In the
play, she is ignored by two Serbian paramilitaries who tie her
up, torture and disgrace her. They have the sadistic pleasure of
beating and bleeding her badly, and while unconscious she is
raped by the paramilitary Dragan, the cruelest one. In tragic
moments we see Drita overloaded while in the soundtrack her
inner voice is heard. Her monologue and inner pain resemble
a Shakespearean soliloquy, as poignant interpretations of
extraordinary spiritual pains and whimsical deaths depicted in
an outstanding ways by the playwright Bytyçi. There are no
more terrifying pains than those of a spiritually and physically
crushed mother, who kills the newborn baby in order to
resolve her drama. Morally trodden, she destroys the newborn
Liridon, gathering the strength to throw her offspring in a
garbage can. Her soliloquy is rather elevated through screams
and dialogues in a situation of insanity, a very grave event. In
difficult spiritual situations, she protects him, but at the same
time she hates him, as the living being was emanated and born
from an impregnation with a loathed Serbian criminal. Dragan
was nurtured ending up to living with criminal gangs of
Belgrade, who alienated and appropriated the Albanian
territory of Kosovo as of 1912. Drita Gashi’s actions and
soliloquy continue with vicissitudes and uncontrolled
situations. The play carries and follows texts loaded with
symbols of pain experienced by other compatriots in Kosovo.
Through the high court conclusions, clarifying the
circumstances under which the rape occurred, she does not
seek to defend herself for her actions, but is rather calling for
a most severe punishment. On the contrary, in the judicial trial
by both sides her solid character is clear. On the other hand,
she cannot accept self-defense as reasonable, but the court
justifies her self-defense plea by facts in the judicial trial from
both sides, as the judicial trial drags on until the additional
facts and circumstances are gathered for a trial.
However, at the last moment Drita ends her own life by
hanging herself in the dark and narrow premises of the prison
cell. In the continuation of the play, as if it were real, as
created by the author Xhemil Bytyçi, Drita Gashi is typical for
the women raped in Kosovo by the Serbian military and
paramilitary forces that carry heavy disorders in their own
separate world to be tried and severely punished, but again
without a way out of themselves. The negative character of
the murderous paramilitary, abuser and a most depraved
ruthless Dragan, a murderous Serb who unjustly lived in
Kosovo, is the most negative person as we see and hear him
act in several episodes culminating in hatred in the play with a
profound and psychologically strong sense. Through his evil
ideas, the counter-actions of Serbian paramilitary and criminal
forces, which represent the ideology of Belgrade’s leadership,
are composed in a literary form in the play. The focus is on
the mass murders to make the people captive until Albanians
are all expelled through mass exodus from Kosovo with the
aim of turning Kosovo into a Serbian land. People’s lives
become unbearable, though it is as much difficult for the
Serbs of the Belgrade regime to carry out these unending
dreams as conquerors.
From crossing the border, the arrival of Kosovars in Albania,
such as the Gashi family to Hasan Dani’s family in Tirana,
which welcomes them with fraternal hospitality, is summed
up at a time as the diagram of the dramatization of events
takes a somewhat calmer extension, with the necessary
landings and movements of breath. But now the strongest and
most unexpected blow occurs to Drita with her aggravated
spiritual condition as finding herself pregnant with the most
hated enemy as a representative of all her compatriots, while
Hasan Dani is a small literary figure, but very benevolent in
the play. He behaves well and is not only generous, but also
persistent in finding both women’s husbands, Agim and
Fatmir, KLA soldiers, who from the beginning were engaged
in the fight for the liberation of Kosovo. Drita’s drama
continues and grows without breaking away giving and taking
more painful spiritual proportions. In the most intricate
situations, Drita’s drama moves to Gjakova to be arranged and
resolved, and when no way out was found, she decides to
hang herself, becoming a murderer and the most courageous
symbol among young women and women raped by Belgrade’s
Serbian paramilitary oppressors. The pride of the Serbian elite
through the promoted “general”, who becomes negligible as
much as Dragan hates himself, as he is not respected even by
his Serbian leadership that engaged them into these dirty wars.
He chats with himself in harsh terms without finding a
solution, as finally this criminal too, out of guilt, kills himself
with a gun as the only way to end his most disgusting
cruelties. The literary drama cannot end without the
representative of the centuries-old enemy also being punished.
Dragan is afraid and wishes to be excused following the
NATO bombings in Serbia. He is no longer “brave”, because
no one cares about him. After the murders and rapes in
Kosovo, he was praised and awarded to the rank of a general
that served him nothing. And seeing himself cast aside,
manipulated by the regime and despised, without any solution
of social status, he becomes so ridiculous that he decides to
kill himself and does so, a tragic end for him and others like
him, but quite significant in the play.
Apparently, in the international arena, the Serbian criminal
state had planned this new ethnic cleansing in time being
probably approved by the Western secret services. The
Balkans is a pit full of absurd desires and jealousies and
avenging desires following a torturous and humiliating path
broken and subjugated with tragic reverberations. Although
the truth is that the quality of the designation “Land of
Eagles” is attached to Albania, the playwright clearly breaks
down the stupidity of the Serbs in Kosovo, surpassing the
Nazis in the Balkan Peninsula. Their aggression has
something inexplicable, endemic. They rape women, kill
children, massacre young men in their extremely insane desire
for the extermination of Albanians and ethnic cleansing of
Kosovo. The Serbs are psychologically involved in ruling
with an unbridled cynicism and ferocity in an unmatched
cannibalistic bestiality. They slaughter people in front of their
families, mutilate children, rape adult women and girls, rip
open their bellies when pregnant; men are killed next to
mothers and fathers and Albanian houses are set on fire. The
death commanded by the Serbian criminals is not equivalent
to the fierce defenses of the hearts of the Albanian people of
Kosovo, because they have not killed anyone and only want to
live in their homes. High morale should prevail over Serbian
bestialities practiced. There is no force or treaty that prevents
the fighters of the KLA to defend their homeland. Xhemil
Bytyçi’s plays are close to William Shakespeare’s great
tragedies, which end with wars and foreign invasions. The
regime of Serbian criminals led by Milosevic was a pestilence
and the author of the play “Traces of a Silent Soul” boldly
reveals them so that the small Albanian people in Kosovo do
not continue their miserable and humiliating journey, but
recover once again from the plague of unspeakable Serbian
crimes. This tragedy must be red carefully and then a play
written by a surgeon, who has accumulated horror scenes for
years, must be played on the stage.
The new artistic play written by playwright X. Bytyçi is
undoubtedly his creative aura. Xhemil Bytyçi’s exercise of his
profession in life and his living experience have served him in
a detailed sculpting of the characters and his overall artistic
plays. They contain the most injuring episodes and the most
serious wounds in Kosovo that need to be healed. These are
episodes that have strengthened and spiritually kneaded with
more psychology and dramatization the life of literary
characters in Gjakova and around Kosova, where events
commence and develop deeper than in the world. Through
numerous and continuous works, Dr. Xhemil Bytyçi is
mitigating himself quite well, becoming one of the most
beloved figures among his colleagues in his country. Capable
and passionate with dedication in several professions,
especially in medicine, he remains to be well positioned in
useful literary creativity.
The life tides and struggles within Drita, an educated woman,
are among the most severe. The court puts her on trial, but it
is impossible to punish her. It is the cruelty, the psychological
and physical tortures that she experienced by the Serbian
paramilitaries that put Drita in a spell. All this makes the
situation more difficult and complicated for the jury and
justifies that the population has been covered with the blood
of the innocent. All this makes the situation more difficult and
complicated for the jury with justification that the population
has been washed in the blood of the innocent.
Drita erases every kind of ideal from her heart, killing even
her own baby and depriving herself of her own body. These
plays written by the hand of a surgeon are very harrowing,
terrifying at once, so having them published is welcome. The
issue would be more welcome if a director decides to put
them on a theater stage with the audience more directly
involved.
Astrit Tota
Painter and Stage Designer
New York, August 2015