I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2024.
Peaks of Shala - Rose Wilder Lane (Albania)
The author was “baby Rose” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years, a fictionalized autobiography that recounted her only surviving child’s infancy and hard times on a prairie homestead. Lane (1886 – 1968) worked as a journalist in San Francisco in the years before WWI and wrote serialized biographies of Henry Ford and Jack London for popular magazines like Sunset. During WWI she went to London to write about women who were active in humanitarian work. She travelled extensively in Syria, Georgia, Turkey, and Egypt. She got this book out of a trip with English Red Cross activists in 1921.
Knowing nothing about Albania except “bandits,” she meets the north of the country with wide-eyed American candor and enthusiasm. A major attraction of the travelogue is her description of scenery that captures the beauty of the mountains of Albania.
The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed…. [I]t was low in the sky—it seemed on a level with us—when we made the last interminable hundred yards up into the Chafa Bishkasit [the Road of the Mountaineers]. We were in the sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us, Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor.
She always brings a keen ear to quoting at length old songs and a keen eye to describing clothes, linen, and crafts like weaving and embroidery. She tells about rituals of etiquette, table manners, mountain hospitality, courtesy, personal and tribal honor. She reports, but mercifully not at length, about the Albanian practice which has always interested foreigners, feuding a.k.a. revenge killing as capital punishment. She also identifies national characteristics as stubborn, indifferent to danger, fatalistic, patient, tenacious of their own language and customs, all of which aided their integrity and survival against invading Romans, then the Turks, then the Austrians and Italians and always the Serbs.
Sure, the reader has to endure at times. Lane has excessive fascination with superstitions and stories of wood and pond spirits. The rapture over the “animal beauty” of the local men and women may weary the reader.
Then for the first time I really looked at Lulash. He had been until then simply a marvelously beautiful animal; a man such as men must have been before cities and machines and office desks brought dull skins and eyes, joy rides, padded shoulders, and crippling collars. Now I perceived that he was also a real person.
Note also the reference to our lost Eden, when men were men and wore loose clothes. But there’s more:
I felt a regret, purely romantic, perhaps, at the inevitable disappearance of this last surviving remnant of the Aryan primitive communism in which our own fore-fathers lived, and at the replacing of Lulash by men like our politicians. I am a conservative, even a reactionary; I should like to keep the Albanian mountains what they are.
Let’s let “Aryan” go since nowadays the obsolete concept is beneath notice, but we can wish that in Paradise anthropologist Edith Durham lets Lane know “primitive communism” is a myth too since many traditional peoples had notions of private ownership of land, houses, trees, ponds and even beaver stands and eagles’ nests. It’s a source of needless misery to feel nostalgic for the life of primitive simplicity; human life has always been full of conflict and complication because conflict and complication are normal and natural consequences of our sociality and our linguistic ability to impose our persuasive arguments on the world. Lane, an advocate of rugged pioneer individualism like a reactionary would be, may also be missing the interdependence implied in:
Padre Marjan spoke of the unimportance of past glories and shames, of the new dawn of liberty for Albania which brought responsibilities and duties, and of the importance of eternal things, of goodness, strength, and courage, given by God to man for man to use. For, said he, the knife in its scabbard cuts no leaves to feed the flocks, and the goodness of man when not used for those around him becomes a rusty knife, which is of value to no one.
The phrase “used for those around him” implies working in and for a community, seeking excellence not only for one’s self and family.
Lane was a journalist and our default assumption when dealing with reporters is that they will make things up to make a good point, fictionalizing to make points that are true. And that is okay as long as we readers are sophisticated enough not to take literally everything we read. Lane was not an anthropologist like Edith Durham.
But I will grant Lane writes with journalistic simplicity and she is sincere in her admiration of and advocacy for an historically impoverished, exploited, brutalized people. She laughs at her impatient self as she deals with pre-modern attitudes toward time (“slowly, slowly, little by little”) and getting the hell started, for the luvva Mike, it's been hours waiting. Some scenes are very amusing, like dealing with local indifference to discomfort, hunger and fatigue and getting across to mountain men that though maps are flat, the earth is round.
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