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Political nostalgia of old Tirana

2023-05-10 09:35:53Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA FATOS TARIFA
Political nostalgia of old Tirana
Fatos Tariff

I read a desperate tyrant these days. He said that he had recently returned to Tirana after many years in emigration and was disappointed and very depressed that in Tirana he found not the city he had left many years ago, but a completely different city, with which he said he does not identify I can't anymore.

I don't know how old the author of those words is, so I can't even say which Tirana he's talking about: the Tirana of the 1960s, the Tirana of the 1980s or the post-communist Tirana of the 1990s. I don't know, that is, with which Tirana this person was previously identified, nor with which features of the urban identity of our capital.

If his despair is simply a political projection of the great transformation that has taken place in Tirana, I understand that. A large part of the people, whose political sympathies are not for the Socialist Party and for the socialist mayors of the capital, Edi Ramë and Erion Veliaj, the only ones who have transformed Tirana in these last three decades, criticize the changes made simply politically, although they do not necessarily dislike them.

If the person's nostalgia and that of other "nostalgics" like him is related to the Tirana of the 1990s, when Tirana went to hell, at a time when the whole country, under the rule of Sali Berisha, lost its morale and went into a collective madness, when Tirana it was massacred from an urbanistic point of view, it was kioskized, it was dirty, it smelled, so if the person in question has nostalgia for that Tirana, I don't know what to say.

If, as an immigrant, he lived and worked in a Western European country, in the USA or in Canada, it would have been reasonable that the Tirana he found when he returned would have made him feel good, since he found in his hometown a a more European city, or more western than the one he left, found a piece of Europe in a country that for half a century had been far away from Europe, although geographically and historically part of it.

Imagine for a moment if my grandson Heru, born in Tirana in 2018 and who is not yet 5 years old, had found Tirana as this city was in 1979, when his father and my son were born, or how Tirana in the mid-1950s, when I was born.

Would my son and grandson want to live in that Tirana today, in the third decade of the 21st century?! Hundreds of thousands of young Albanians born in Tirana, or in Albania after the 1980s, would like to live in that Tirana today, i.e. the generation of Albanian millennials, or Albanians of generation Z (born between 1995-2012) or those of the Alpha generation, i.e. the children born in the last ten years?!

Who gives us, the older generations, the right to keep Tirana and other cities of the country unchanged, as they were when we were young? Such a claim is morally wrong and practically impossible. Times change. With them we also change, our demands and needs change as well as the possibilities and ways to fulfill them.

Our children and their children will live in a Tirana of tomorrow, in the Tirana that is being made and that will be made, not in the Tirana of yesterday, not in the Tirana of my childhood and youth and of my generation, or in Tirana that many of those political opponents of the SP, who today are raging cursing the towers, bicycle lanes, traffic and the great transformation that has been carried out in the capital, had not visited it once before becoming its residents.

None of this has anything to do with human nostalgia. Such nostalgics are nothing but political nostalgics, people who long and want to return to the time of Baba - Baba Qamili or Baba Saliu.

Nostalgia is a feature of our human condition. As human beings we need to maintain some narrative continuity with our past. Getting away from the past as much as possible, we need to return to it, if only as a state of mind. This, perhaps, also happens because we are always in "a nostalgic search" for a continuous reintegration into a new social totality, such as today's Albania.

But, as Marcel Proust pointed out, nostalgia for things past is not necessarily the memory of things as they were. I have a lot of nostalgia for the Tirana of my childhood and youth, for the neighborhood where I lived and my neighborhood friends, for elementary school and for the good times with my classmates at the Petro Nini Luarasi high school in the early 1970s. Although deprived of many freedoms and material goods, we lived and enjoyed life in our own way and, perhaps, more – although quite differently – than the children and youth of today.

Like my whole generation, I have nostalgia for that small urban cosmos where I grew up, for the Tirana of the big boulevard, for Broadway and the Barricade Street, for Tirana without traffic, without this dense population that it has today and saw so many policemen on its streets, for Tirana with only one maternity hospital and only six gymnasiums, whose location everyone knew, for Tirana where you could not get lost and where you could easily find any address, for Tirana without noise and without crime.

This Tirana is no longer and could not be after many decades of changes and in a society that is no longer a socialist dictatorship, but a democratic republic.

We must not forget, also, that even today will be the nostalgia of the future for today's past. Like Hannah Arendt, being against the destructive undoing of the past, I am against its nostalgic preservation.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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