What you will read here are the introduction and conclusion to my uncle’s life as he has told them himself. I have decided to exclude his entire story and only include the beginning and end of our conversation because both were told intentionally. My uncle wanted to begin and end his life story with these two stories.
Before you read the beginning and ending of my uncle’s life, I’d like to bring awareness to a few facts. My uncle is from Albania, a land and a people that, from the years 1944-1991, suffered a communist regime (one of the worst in Eastern Europe) and a harsh, harsh dictator. Although born in the last years of the regime, at the precipice of its collapse, the aftermath was just as difficult as the actual regime. The end of the regime did not end the crises people faced, only changed them. My uncle is an ordinary man in an ordinary world–that is, ordinary in the sense that it’s full of suffering, pain, and exhaustion.
My entire conversation with my uncle was done in Albanian. I have had to translate everything into English. I grappled with the question, do I translate and make readers forget it is translated or do I translate with the intent of reminding readers with every sentence that what they’re reading is originally in a language foreign to them? In the end, I chose the latter.
At the end of this partial biography, my uncle will apologize to me for possibly having given me the wrong stories to tell. Before I even reach the end, I will apologize for any mistakes I may have made in translation that are now engraved as this story and any facts that I have chosen to leave out for the sake of condensing it.
Finally, the short story that will be told here will not impact anyone more than it has impacted me. I listened to it, I transcribed it, I translated it. But, despite that, dear reader, appreciate it. Appreciate it in the sense that it is a life you will never live except through the words you will read here.
Now, to begin:
***
“Where do we begin?” My uncle asked me.
“Daja,” I began, addressing him with the Albanian word for uncle, “tell me about your childhood. Tell me about the things that make up the first years of your life.”
“Hmm,” he thought for a few moments, “can I tell you another story?”
“Of course, Daja,” I replied. “Tell me the story you want to tell.”
“I’m going to tell you about the first time I came into contact with the Quran.”
“It was a dreary winter day, a December day, and at the time I was in the 8th grade. We used to go to school in groups, with scrappy cloth bookbags on our backs. I, as I always have, had a passion for working with and understanding the mechanics of cars. That day, on our way to school, there was a truck whose wheels had popped out of place. I became curious so I stopped and helped the truck drivers get their wheels back into place. When we were done, the truck driver brought out a book, a Quran, from his truck. Unfortunately though, he didn’t give it to me, he gave it to a friend of mine. I became curious as to why he didn’t give it to me so I turned to my friend to strike a deal with him. I asked him to sell it to me. In the end, my friend named his price and I took it for myself. From that entire winter all the way to summer, I read the entire Quran, front to back. This was the first connection I made with the Quran. Afterwards, I began to read it for a second time. When I read it for the second time though, I would get shocked. I wondered how I hadn’t seen certain parts during my first read. My second read in fact felt like another first read. And the same thing occurred during my third read and during my fourth. After some time, I began, in the privacy and secrecy of my mind and heart, to believe in the things written in that book.”
Here I asked my uncle a question. He answered it then exhaled an overwhelmed breath. “There are so many stories, I don’t know how to tell them in a manner that connects them all.”
He continued, “After some time passed, I left the book alone. I believed in the things written but I never did anything with it. Life continued normally. Years later–keep in mind that during that time, Islam was an anomaly–after Lida [his older sister and my mother] began attending university, she came home one day and said to me, I’m going to be a Muslim.
We’re already Muslim, I told her.
No, no, I’m going to be a practicing Muslim, she said to me, not just a Muslim by name.
“So I pursued the exact path she took and became a Muslim alongside her. Some time later, she came home wearing a Hijab. It was fine if we believed but to make an outward expression of it was unacceptable. During that time when she first made the statement with the Hijab, the atmosphere in our home was very heavy. This lasted five, six months, until our mother refused to tolerate it anymore. She burned all of Lida’s hijabs and books and kicked her out of the house. So I, to support her all I could as a young boy, gave her all the money in my pocket and my older sister and only sibling left for Tirana.”
***
“Maybe what we’ve discussed don’t have anything to do with history. Maybe I needed to have told you other things than what I did. History can’t be told like this, all at once–a person needs to be asked throughout their life about their history. Despite that, I hope you have understood something from what I’ve told you. Maybe, even, the most beautiful part or the darkest part of my history hasn’t yet been told.” In this way, my uncle began his end.
“You know, Daja,” I said to him, “you have the qualities of a writer.” He laughed at this as if it was the strangest thing in the world.
“No, I don’t know that,” he replied. “Maybe I need to have a diary to write something about the story of my life.”
“Yes, Daja, I think you should.”
“My heart,” he continued, addressing me, “I’d like to end with something related to your grandfather.”
“Tell me, Daja.”
“Your grandfather has had a beautiful but also difficult life–a strange life. He’s always had a dependency upon alcohol. He still has it today–a dependency he cannot separate himself from. But, he has something else that makes me, as a father as well, love him more than I love my mother. In rules, your mother is supposed to be loved more, but my heart loves my father more than my mother. He’s loving and he’s well-mannered when he’s away from the alcohol, but when he’s under the influence of the alcohol he’s an adversity. When he’s under the influence of alcohol, not only does he not love himself, but neither do I. But after he’s out of the influence, he really becomes the most loving person. I don’t know–I really don’t know whether he will reach a day that he will turn inwards and respect himself and distance himself from the obsession he has.”
