Gazmend Kapllani

LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION

 Gazmend Kapllani

Gazmend Kapllani was born in Albania in 1967. In January 1991, he

crossed the Greek border along with a convoy of people. In order to
survive once he got to Greece, he worked in construction, restaurant
kitchens and kiosks. Simultaneously he attended the School of Philoso-
phy at the University of Athens. He completed his doctorate thesis at
the Panteion University on “The image of Albanians in the Greek Media
and the Image of Greeks in the Albanian Media”. For the past five years
he has been working as a journalist for the Greek daily TA NEA and Ath-
ens Voice.

A SHORT BORDER HANDBOOK

• Rights sold to the UK (Portobello Books), Poland and Denmark

International reviews
GUARDIAN
‘Sketched with a light hand and a heavy
heart … Kapllani is at his best on the devas-
tating effects of tyranny and its aftermath,
where Albanians tear the statues down “like
orphaned children robbing the corpse of a
false and terrifying father”. But he is univer-
sally relevant when he talks about the sub-
tleties of the immigrant’s life… One of the
pleasures of this is the author’s honesty, but
one of its shocks is that it exposes a strug-
gle for dignity in a wealthy, multicultural EU.
We think of walls and borders as something
either in the past or in the Middle East. Kapl-
lani brings borders closer to home and ruf-
fles our notions of 21st-century Europe and
the price some pay to live in it.’

INDEPENDENT
‘Kapllani treats the absurdities of national-
ism in the Balkans – and everywhere – with
mischief, wit and insight.’

2 LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION

INDIPENDENT
A Short Border Handbook combines the wittily mischievous eye for absurdity of
George Mikes’s How to be an Alien with the philosophical insight of Milan Kundera
… With the best migrant literature, this book tells a collective story through a per-
sonal one.’

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

“This funny, ironic and intelligent description of immigrant life gives voice to a social
group that did not have one, and mediates on the broader tragicomedy of exile”

FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Kapllani’s stories offer a poignant and humane glimpse into the complex life of a
migrant.’

THE TIMES
‘An Albanian passport is no guarantee that the holder will be received with enthu-
siasm at border crossings. As a migrant he can expect to be given a hard time.
In 1991 Kapllani walked to Greece, where he endured fear and loathing from the
Greeks while working long hours at low-grade jobs for survival-level wages. Though
his is a success story - Kapllani is now an eminent journalist and broadcaster in
Greece - he identifies his chronic condition as “border syn-
drome”, a latent state that can become active at any time,
so that he is acutely aware of his difference and remembers
which side of the border he was born on.’

IRISH TIMES
‘It is a telling reminder of how the borders that many of us are
lucky enough to regard as bureaucratic inconvenience often
form unimpeachable barriers and of how the way they are
policed can be ruthless and absurd.’

SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

‘There will always be parts of the world that fall prey to ty-
rants, and there will always be people fleeing from them,
seeking to escape their hell. I can see this handbook being
of inestimable value to them, a guide to coping with bitter
disappointment.’

BOOKSELLER
‘Thought-provoking and blackly comic stuff on what it means
to be an immigrant.’

ATHENS NEWS
‘His is the universal story about those with little opportunity
but with plenty of guts - immigrants, who, abandoning their
meagre existences in their native country … his perspective
articulates the fraught Albanian immigrant experience, as
well as the ever-present humour of this master storyteller.’

LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION 3

 Gazmend Kapllani

I
found myself once more in front of the na-
ked body of a blonde with huge breasts.
I was in front of a sex cinema. I went in.
The first sex cinema of my life. No wait, the
second. The first one was quite eventful, in my
small town in Albania. It was in December of
1990, the day of the grand anti-establishment
protest, when we clashed against the Special
Forces with sticks and stones and drove them
out of town. That night, the town belonged to
us. We were free. Then a part of the male crowd
went towards the only cinema in the town. I
was amongst them. I didn’t know exactly what
was going to happen. When the cinema was
packed, the word “Sex!”, “Sex!”, “Sex!” start-
ed spreading among the crowd, like a signal
between soldiers, a signal of war, or a signal
between prisoners. The huge cinema was so
full of people that they were packed tightly
against each other, like they used to be on the
bus to the beach at summertime. There were
only men there, men of all ages. As if they had
shaken off the taboos of decades from their
shoulders. When the lights went out, there was
absolute silence. A beam of light went on over
our heads, coming from the projection room,
and hit the cinema screen. A couple appeared
on it. She was half-naked, with red hair, eat-
ing a banana. He was caressing her vagina. A
first wave of noise swept through the cinema.
Then there was silence again. She started tak-
ing off her bra. He put her nipples in his mouth.
Then they said something in French. A second
wave of noise was heard. The crowd demand-
ed a translation. There were no subtitles. A
young man with a megaphone, a student of
French probably, did an on the spot transla-
tion. “I’m so horny, I want to penetrate you”,
he said with a weird voice that sounded so

4 LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION

alien. It was the first time a phrase like that
was heard through a megaphone. Usually,
only the shouts of the Party’s secretaries, of
the police officers or of the military instruc-
tors were heard. Maybe that’s why, when the
translator completed the sentence, a loud
laugh boomed in the cinema. The translator’s
voice again: “Oh, I like your cock so much,
it’s so big”. This time the translator changed
his voice to mimic that of a woman. Nobody
laughed. Then he started sighing. She put
his penis in her mouth. There was complete
silence. That’s exactly when the two bodies
disappeared from the screen. A scream of
surprise and displeasure accompanied their
disappearance.
There was chaos and unintelligible
screams. Then, from the speaker that the
porn phrases had been heard, someone
said that the Special Forces had returned to
attack us. Faces turned angry. Voices were
heard and the sound of breaking wood. The
crowd broke the seats to arm themselves
with wooden weapons. They were the only
weapons that they had against the Special
Forces. Within ten minutes, the cinema inte-
rior had turned into a pile of rubble. People
were running. Some to return to their homes.
Others to clash with the police. “Sons of
whores”, was the phrase that was heard over
and over again from everybody’s lips, while
they were running, pushing themselves, or-
ganizing themselves. Finally proved to be
just a rumor. The first public porn movie pro-
jection in the history of our city was stopped
because of a rumor. The Special Forces did
in fact return, but close to dawn. When the
mob had broken up and people were asleep.
They broke into many houses, arresting and
torturing people for days and days.
The second porn movie I saw was again
in French. There were of course, subtitles. A
hairy man sighs as he moves up and down
on the body of a woman. Only their sighs are
heard. Their faces are not visible - only their
bodies from the waist down.
LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION
Suddenly, the description of Taxtsis for
the sex cinemas pops to mind. The hairy
man climaxes and screams. Suddenly, I
hear a sleepy voice from behind me: “Mos
bertit, mor shkerdhat, te flem pak!”*. I turn
my head. Two young men are asleep in the
seats. One of them looks a lot like the “sex
kid”. He looked a lot like Marenglen, whom I
met in the stadium where we refugees were
piled up, in Filiates; like Marenglen, whose
name was a mix of Marx, Engel, and Lenin;
Marenglen, who we used to call “sex kid”
because he liked porn movies so much. So
much so, that in order to secretly watch them
on Italian television he would put Valium in
his parents’ dinner, so that they wouldn’t
wake up at night. I left with the truck and left
him there, in the stadium, along with the oth-
er refugees. I want to call out to him, but it’s
dark and I can’t make out his face clearly.
He falls asleep and I give up the effort. If he
is the sex kid, maybe he doesn’t want to be
seen in this state, I think to myself.
I see other young men coming in. Even
the plastic bags in their hands look tired. It’s
the cheapest hotel they can find in Athens.
Right up till dawn, when the cinema closes,
then they go out to Omonoia Square and wait
for their employers. Here, in the sex cinema,
there are other kinds of “employers” that are
willing to pay for pleasure. Sex cinemas are
turned into something like a meeting place
for male prostitutes.
I get up to leave, haunted by Greek and
Albanian words and the sighs of a bald man
moving up and down on the same body of
the blonde woman. That, more or less, was
the way my first experience of Athens at
night ended.
*”Stop shouting, you fucker, we’re trying to
get some sleep”
5
Gazmend Kapllani

LIVANI PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION

Solonos 98, 106 80 ATHENS – GREECE
tel.: +30 (210) 3661200 – fax: +30 (210) 3617791
http://www.livanis.gr/ • e-mail: rights@livanis.gr