Drinking green tea in a café in Pristina, while respecting social distancing, Kosovo writer Shkumbin Gashi tells BIRN that he considers writing a kind of “spiritual therapy … yoga of the mind, a type of meditation”.

His second book, Nënë më fol për ëndërrimtarët, Mother Tell me About the Dreamers, published in 2019, had just won the prestigious Rexhai Surroi literature prize from the local media organisation Koha a few days earlier.

“The prize was a reality check that tells me I’m doing something good, but I must not stop here. It is an incentive to move on,” the 29 year old told BIRN explaining that new writers are too often intimidated by the success of their idols and end up comparing themselves.

“People are familiar with great writers and find it easier to buy a book that has already made a name for itself,” he notes. This can lead to unintentional “replication”, he adds, due to others not having “the courage to bring something new and take risks”.

Book that ‘exhausted all my emotions’

Kosovo writer, Shkumbin Gashi’s book, Mother tell me about the dreamers, in a library in the capital Pristina. Photo: BIRN

“I don’t try to write something just to prove to myself and to others, and keep adding value to it until I reach 70 and then say: “I’ll publish it now. Experimentation for me is the transition from one genre to another, or from one character to another,” he says.

Nënë më fol për ëndërrimtarët  is the story of four emigrants who retell their life experiences while trying to adopt to life in Olten, which is where Gashi lives in Switzerland, while reflecting on the tragedies of their past.

“I wrote the three first chapters in the third person, but at the part where I was writing dialogue it came to me that it would be much more honest and difficult to write in the first person, as this speaks more to the reader,” he recalls.

“I believe identification with the character in this novel is its main asset… it allowed me to exhaust all my feelings and emotions.”

From real-life language class to fictional character

Gashi’s inspiration is the British-American writer and director Christopher Nolan, which can also be seen in the unfinished endings he left in the book, drawn from real-life characters in his own German-language class in Olten.

“We were in class and an ordinary military plane flew over the school and a woman from Syria immediately flew under the desk,” he recalls.

“Because of my studies in psychology, I wondered why that was her spontaneous reaction. My answer was that she probably suffered from an undiagnosed, post-traumatic stress disorder,” he reflects.

That woman inspired Gashi to temporarily set aside his idea of writing a sci-fi book and focus on something more realistic, having thought: “Maybe this is a story worth writing, which will resonate more with readers than a science fiction novel.”

The mysterious woman in class became a character in his book, Rima, a single mother-of-two, whose husband drowned in an attempt to escape Syria and find a better life elsewhere.

Similarly, Ibrahim, from Eritrea, who Gashi considers the unintentional main character because his story interconnects with all the others, was inspired by another person in Gashi’s class “whose behaviour resembled self-loathing or shyness”.

There are two more characters in Gashi’s book. Agroni is an Albanian from Kosovo whose rancour against Kosovo’s current political situation mirrors Gashi’s own feelings, and Kamila, a woman from Uruguay, has escaped her husband’s abuse and is the mother in the title, and dreams of being a writer.

Agron is the character that may confuse the Kosovo readers most because Gashi has combined different problems in Kosovo society here.

Agron used to be a fighter for the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in the war against Serbia in the 1990s but has now emigrated as a consequence of a blood feud, after his father killed a neighbour.

“In all Balkan societies, the problems seem to me more dimensional than in other societies,” Gashi says.

“Agron’s story has more than one aspect because the first assumption is that most Kosovo Albanians emigrate due to poverty – but there are other reasons that remain unexplored – open wounds that no one sees,” Gashi says. He explains that he has met many Albanians who emigrated due to blood feuds.

Agron’s story does not end in the book but is left for the reader to decide – leaving an option for Gashi to go back and develop all the characters in a few years’ time.

He is unsure whether he will. “Writing about a second Ibrahim, for example, I would be afraid to repeat myself at the moment. It will take me three or four years to go back to it again. The epilogue leaves room for the story to continue – but how and when I am not sure,” he says.

Delving into the ‘cultural soup’ of emigrant life

A migrant receiving an infusion in an infirmary at a migrant reception center of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) during a working visit of Swiss Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga of the Department of Justice and Police (not pictured), in Agadez, Niger, October 5, 2017. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANTHONY ANEX

Gashi studied psychology in the University of Pristina and was hoping to do a PhD program abroad.

But he only decided to move to Switzerland four years ago, when he met his ethnic Albanian wife.

Her parents had emigrated to Switzerland in the 1980s when she was only two. His studies and direct connections with migrants there helped Gashi have a better understanding and create realistic characters.

“Psychology was one of the best decisions I made in my life and it has helped me write the book,” Gashi tells BIRN.

He befriended many Albanians when he moved to Switzerland, which assisted in better portraying homesick characters trying to adapt and not betray their culture. Rima, for example, constantly struggles to keep her older daughter, aged seven, in touch with Syrian culture and traditions.

“Subconsciously, I may have been influenced by my wife but mainly by other Albanians I met in a shisha bar in Zurich,” he says.

“In the bar there were ethnic Albanians, Turks, Arabs, and even some from Switzerland – but it was difficult to notice real ethnic identities … a cultural soup… neither Swiss nor totally Albanian,” he comments.

Gashi says many emigrants feel outsiders in their homeland, and in the country they live their lives, remaining caught in a “war between the present and the old part of the identity”.

One aspect of the book that Gashi says many people have asked him about is the realistic narration of the lives of the two women characters, who are both single mothers but for different reasons.

Kamila has had to leave her son because her father-in-law, whose example her ex-husband had followed, had become abusive, and had kept his nephew, after his son, Ruben, Kamila’s husband, was imprisoned. While trying to start a career in writing, Kamila constantly seeks to get her son back.

Gashi says the first Kosovar victim of sexual violence during the war who decided to speak up, Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman, helped him better understand mother-child connections.

“When I saw Vasfije recounting her war trauma, I did not immediately see the maternal instinct because she spoke of a completely different life. When I researched it more, I noticed that the maternal instinct was a kind of shield but also a kind of burden to her,” he says.

Similarly, in interviews with domestically abused women, Gashi saw one aspect that was “impossible to ignore”, which connected most of them, was the mother-child connection.

Rima, who suffers from PtSD, is also in the midst of a choice – to go to rehab and have her daughters taken by social care, or quit her job and stay with a daughter with an untreated mental disorder.

“Life is a war between two decisions … and each has a lot of impact on the life of the individual and one always remains wondering what would happen if the other decision was made,” Gashi says. “Unpredictability also makes the story resembles real life,” he adds.

Living in Switzerland makes all the difference

Gashi believes that moving to Switzerland helped him learn and improve in the process of publishing and advertising his book.

“After writing the first novel, I realized the hardest part was advertising it, as I did not study marketing,” he says.

Gashi believes the big difference between a writer living in Kosovo and Switzerland lies in awareness and those opportunities.

“I did not know how to advertise my first novel which was published four or five years ago, but in Switzerland I had the opportunity to publish a novel after making a contract with a publishing house, which then dealt with the advertising,” he explains.

Youngsters in Kosovo too often “feel alone and lost in the face of the system” because they do not have equal opportunities and are not assisted, he concludes.