A Conversation with Ani Gjika about “An Unruled Body” – Chicago Review of Books

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Ani Gjika’s An Unruled Body follows the author from the turbulent final years of Albanian communism through an era of transition and on to a somewhat fated path to Boston—as a matter of fact, it is her “grandmother’s faith that gets [her] family to the U.S.” In this memoir, the passage from girlhood to womanhood is magnified, merging with the entrance into a new language and the experiences that flow from it. The book lays bare the intersection of politics and the body—crystallized in the Albanian iteration of the Balkan immurement myth—and the hardened silences that break open through introspection, a kind of close reading and listening to the messages and cues of the body. Gjika’s first book of prose follows the publication of her debut poetry collection, Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013) and her translation of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions and Bloodaxe Books, 2018), among others. I spoke with Gjika about the origins of her book, the arc of the genre of Albanian women’s memoirs, and the ways that the body speaks and anchors us in the world.

Suzana Vuljevic

What was the impetus for writing this book? How did it emerge?

Ani Gjika

It wasn’t really one specific thing that pushed me to write it, but an accumulation of experiences that had been roiling for a while and began to bubble up to the surface: having lived the life of an immigrant, poet, translator, educator, having come of age in a country at a time of transition, then being removed from that and thrown into a new culture and language… Most of all, I had never come across characters like myself and Ishan, or my parents, or grandmother Meropi, or the country of Albania as a character, in any book I had read and I wanted to write their stories.

Suzana Vuljevic

Within the pantheon of Albanian literature, women’s voices are conspicuously absent, silenced, and erased, yet your book could be considered part of a slowly emerging genre of women’s memoirs about life under communism and transition, immigration, and more, which has come after Lea Ypi’s Free, published in 2021. What was it like to carve out a new genre with no clear guideposts? Or, alternatively, to enter into the genre of women’s memoir more broadly?

Ani Gjika

I have to mention here the criticism editor at Asymptote, Barbara Halla, who has so thoroughly and succinctly analyzed this phenomenon of the erasure of Albanian women’s voices from the Albanian literary canon in her essay, “Barren Landscape: Who’s Afraid of Albanian Women?” published at Asymptote on February 20, 2019. It’s the long patriarchal tradition of men bestowing laurels on men in that culture, sometimes women writers themselves internalize misogyny by not naming and not giving attribution for the work and ideas of fellow women writers, and an Albanian educational system that dismisses women writers from the curriculum, that continues to add to that erasure and silencing. But, in truth, writers like Musine Kokalari in the 1940s and Elvira Dones since the 1990s, to name just two, have done a lot through their early short story collections to give someone writing today the tools for how to write a memoir. That’s because, while they wrote fiction, their work is beautifully rooted in history and a journalistic tradition which memoirs that do well today tend to incorporate well. Additionally, there’s a long tradition of Albanian women telling stories in song since antiquity. Albanian funerals, for example, are famous for this: the ones weeping are typically women narrating the life of the dead and world-building in a similar fashion to Homer’s The Odyssey. So I would say that the genre of memoir, as written by Albanian women, may not exactly be described as slowly emerging, but it’s been a feature of Albanian literature all along and anyone writing memoir today needs to take notice.

In terms of my experience writing prose, it felt liberating to do so, both because I wrote the first rough draft in three days in the summer of 2015—something of a myth I like to mention every chance I get because it startled me in a good way, I couldn’t not write this book,—and because it confirmed for me that I’m not just one thing, just a poet or just a translator, but a writer who’s informed by all the tools she uses. I have been publishing poems in English about being an immigrant and about my life in communist and post-communist Albania since 2001 and my first book of poems, Bread on Running Waters which was published in 2013, centers around these themes. An Unruled Body picks up and expands upon them and, writing it, I felt that the memoir genre gave me space to examine more complex issues at length and in depth whereas poetry felt limiting in that regard. Memoirs are very difficult to write well and from personal experience and what I’ve observed of other memoirists I admire, it takes a long time to shape them. Memoir is not a genre that begins with any one particular voice and we may still see people publishing years from now a book they may have begun working on since the early 2000s. I’m glad you mention Lea Ypi’s memoir because that is the only memoir written by an Albanian that has enjoyed wide exposure and rightfully so, but there are diverse Albanian women writing in Albanian as well as in other languages throughout the diaspora and we’ll be lucky to hear their stories when they are published.

Suzana Vuljevic

At one point, you write “Being a girl or a woman, you learn to equate strength with simply feeling comfortable in your own skin” and elsewhere, “I wrote this book so that the words from the pages of that time in my life would finally assemble, and I would speak. And I would see myself. Because language is a presence, and to speak means to be seen .” In many ways, the book unobtrusively and quietly urges the reader to do just that, to take up space, to gain an attunement to self, to language, to systems oppressive to women…

Ani Gjika

Thank you. Yes, I hope it is doing just that, urging the reader to pay more attention to language among other things. I have already observed readers describe Ani and Ishan’s marriage as a failure or as dysfunctional, which is the language used when we see others through a deficit perspective rather than attributing the failure to prevalent systems that oppress both women and men. I hope the book exposes, too, how fear can turn not just people but also entire countries into strangers to themselves. I hope the readers see themselves in the book, hence the cover art—which pays homage to the Albanian legend of Rozafa mentioned in the book—but also to Sheela-Na-Gig, a symbol, to me, of a woman who doesn’t need anyone’s language, much less the government’s, to dictate how she lives in her own body. There is no home more sacred out there for anyone other than our own bodies and this book I hope acts as a reminder of that, of the sovereignty of our bodies.

Suzana Vuljevic

The language is so arresting, beautiful, and poetic. It often feels like we’re observing the world through the mind’s eye of a child, there’s a newness and strangeness to it—there are asides, fragments, poetry embedded in the text. Were there other writers who served as inspiration or exemplars for you in the writing of this book? Writers you gravitated to as a reader and who informed your approach? In other words, whom would you say this book is in conversation with?

Ani Gjika

Thank you for saying that! I love movies and have loved them since I was a child. I think when I write, I become a camera. I begin with an image and then I find what I need to say. I would say the stars I followed were two in particular—Lidia Yuknavitch and Katherine Angel. They both tune in to the senses and write from the body rather than the mind when evoking various experiences. Also, both my editor, Jennifer Alise Drew, and I loved how Maggie Nelson plays with text in the margins in her book The Argonauts and I envisioned having the poetry fragments scattered in the margins, next to passages they speak to and sometimes breaking the prose in such a way that the poetry is sort of looking at us from a window on the page.