The Rhetoric of Subjectivity and Memory in Women’s Life Writing in Albanian Literature: Bedi Pipa's Intimate Diary, A Comparative Approach

• In Event: Margins and Parentheses: On Translation, Gender, and Digression in Albanian, Russian, and Ukrainian Literature

Abstract

This paper focuses on the first diary authored by a woman in Albanian literature: Bedi Pipa. The diary was written during WWII, just before Pipa passed away of cancer at 24 years old. Due to her family being labeled enemies of the people by the communist regime, her diary remained entirely unknown until the collapse of communism.
Her diary demolishes the dichotomy established by the regime in Albanian literature regarding the status of Albanian women during WWII. This dichotomy sees Albanian women either as lacking emancipation, and education or as engaged in WWII as communists. Thus, it served the communist propaganda to control historical memory by claiming that in order to be an antifascist one had to be a communist. Bedi Pipa’s diary is a fundamental work that challenges this manipulation of history.
Her diary focused on what is a major challenge to dictatorships, and to catastrophic times of violence such as WWII and what would later be the archenemy of the communist ideology: subjectivity and its inextricable connection to memory. Through close reading, the biographic approach to Pipa's diary, as well as a comparative approach to the diary of her contemporary Etty Hillesum, this paper explores the role of subjectivity and memory in diaries written in times of extreme violence and how Pipa's diary contributes to a comparative study in the Eastern Blok and beyond.
While her diary is positioned outside of the Albanian literary canon, it is proof of how memory was the most damaged entity during communism.

Author

• Bavjola Gami Shatro, U of Mississippi