Where Does Light Come From?
by Arian Leka
My father was not a sorcerer, but he could see things that the rest of us could not see. He spent his humble life as a seaman sailing the Mediterranean coasts. What especially caught his eye on these voyages was not the people of the coasts or the mountainous landscapes, which, to his surprise, had made the emptiness even more profound, nor was it the endless waters or the skies that seemed, for the most part, to be slumbering in the dark. Being a seaman in communist Albania meant that you were given the opportunity — one that was quite limited — of seeing things that others would never see. What mattered to us was not what the sailors exported to those shores; what was important was what they brought home. But what did my father get home from those journeys? Silence. Mostly.
When I asked him to tell me one of the most amazing things he had seen, he said it had been the lights. “The lights of the harbors where we could never go ashore, and the lights of the ships that we passed and hailed ceremoniously from a distance, exchanging volleys of signal lights as if we were at war.” Over time, my father’s silence became more profound, but I continued to see the Mediterranean lights through his eyes. I was not angry at his silence. Though we were not living during the Spanish Inquisition, my father might well have been burned alive had he spoken of the dim lights of those foreign cities. I had realized that Light has the nature of waves — I had learned that in school — so the distance between us and our maritime neighbours could turn into light years. We were separated from the rest of the world by the waves of the sea and the waves of light.
My grandmother was a woman with a rare heart. She had the gift of seeing and foreseeing what most of us could not even imagine. She was neither a witch nor a sorceress but had memorized the Holy Books, and from it, she drew wisdom. In her day, Albania was atheistic, and to speak of God —though not the Devil — was blasphemy. So in order to protect herself, she found shelter in a world of euphemism. She would use words related to light as an oblique way of expressing her faith, without perhaps knowing that the monotheistic religions had first come to light in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean.
My mother was not a saint, but she could sense the amazement in my mind. It was she who first introduced me to the halls of the theatre and the cinema. She opened a world of miracles before me, igniting in my eyes a spark that was to turn into light. And it was that light that I remember seeing when I entered the theatre world.
Where did that light come from? Was it from the children’s theatre in the town where I was born? From that building which, in February 1967, was transformed from a Catholic church into a marionette theatre? The atheist revolution could have turned it into a warehouse or a shop, but we ended up with a marionette theatre and a cinema instead of a church. The frescoes on the walls were plastered over, but the large sanctuary lamps remained, dedicated to their mission of spreading light.
Where did the light come from, and how did it find its way to us? Did it not come to us over the sea, something my late father would not even whisper? Did it descend from heaven, as my grandmother had always believed? Or did the light come from the arts, as my mother professed?
There were many questions for a child like me, who remembered the neighborhood near the marionette theatre and the two faces of reality in that era. Like every coastal region in the Mediterranean, the town in which I was born had its own unhurried pace, lit and warmed as it was by the light of the sun.
Few would have guessed that the cinema would suddenly embrace its monotony and languid siestas. The backstreets of that fortunate neighborhood were the only ones in the city to project their destitute lives onto the silver screen. This happened when the area near the Marionette Theatre in Durres was chosen to serve as the all-purpose movie set for New Albania Cinema Studios, which was to shoot some of the first Albanian movie scenes in those backstreets.
I knew that World War II had ended long ago, so I was quite confounded to see guerrilla units still carrying out attacks and assassinations against the Nazi fascists. Walking through those backstreets, I sometimes encountered actors resting after filming a scene. Peering over a wall, I would see incredible things: A wounded partisan drinking water from the very flask from which a German, armed to the teeth, had just drunk! Hadn’t they been fighting only moments ago, trying to kill one another? The climax came when, after their drink of water, the sworn enemies lit one another’s cigarettes as friends do. Were they no longer enemies? Or did the movie resurrect them, just as God resurrects good people? And this double reality of enemy and friend appeared in the sun's light in front of everyone! For understandable reasons, scenes like this confused my still childish mind. But the situation worsened when, after what I had seen in the backstreets, I returned to the cinema's darkness. We were back to where we started, and the actors who had been smoking cigarettes and drinking water together were once again enemies on the screen.
Which of the distorted realities should the child choose in moments such as these? I began to suspect the man who was beaming dazzling light from the cinema projector. Was he perhaps the one turning our friends into enemies? I was even more confused when movies produced by the Communists were projected onto the same screen where, not long ago, fascist documentaries had been projected. Ironically, the name of the film studio that had produced the earlier films had to do with light. It was Mussolini’s Istituto Luce, the Institute of Light! The projector shed light on both those who had lost the war and those who had won. What was certain was that this movie machine had been made in one of the coastal cities across the sea that my father might have seen but did not mention, as if they never existed. How did this strange light get to that minor and convoluted Mediterranean town? My father believed that light came from the sea. My religious grandmother believed that the source of light was spiritual and was born of something sacred that had lingered inside the church, even though the church had been forced to become a marionette theatre. My mother, who cherished art, believed that light came only from the cinema, the theatre, and nowhere else.
In the twilight of those halls, I understood that applause is generally a sign of appreciation, and that whistling is a sign of disapproval. This helped me discern the differences between myself and people who did not believe the same things I did and guided me in my modest attempts at becoming a writer.
Thanks to those experiences, some illusions, especially those related to punishment and justice, thrived within me. The cinema and the church theatre of my childhood, those dark rows where I sat surrounded by actors and marionettes, were to be the places where I was to create my own chaotic utopia. Images of the socialist Albania where I grew up, a state that represented itself as the place where evil was punished, and good was always rewarded, blurred my eyes for some time.
But how did that light get there? It should not have ended like it did. Everything came tumbling down upon us when the communist system fell into its death trap. At once, people began to flee, trampling over one another, as if suddenly someone trapped in the darkness of the cinema and trying to tear free of it began to shout, “Fire! Fire!” Everybody rushed to abandon it before it collapsed and trapped everyone inside. The exodus began. Instead of staying put to extinguish the fire, people were leaving the country like those who fled a cinema engulfed in flames. Gathered around the projector, like moths drawn to the light, people were brought back to reality.
The same question is of importance today: Where does light come from? Television screens bathe us in the cliché of Mediterranean light. Those hypnotic murmurings: Close your eyes! Come to the Mediterranean! You will find friendly people, sunlight, seafood, white sand, and the blue waters of the undulating Mediterranean. Above all, you will see the light, buoyant and warm, of this fairytale sea. But this is not a mirage, and you’re not in a theatre or a cinema. The people on screen are not marionettes. What is happening is not stage drama. These are stories played by real actors in the shimmering light of the Mediterranean. The lights emanating from your screens are not the warm, silent lights of the ships my father had greeted with signals from a distance.
Do you see the faint lights of boats carrying refugees on your television screens? Do you see them pushing helplessly through the darkness of the Mediterranean? These people have honored us. From all the world's seas, they have chosen to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean, choosing the most challenging route, the most impossible destination. The refugees are drowning in the depths of the Mare Nostrum only to have the fate of being counted among the missing of our sea and not being among those lost in an ordinary sea.
The Mediterranean, famed as a sea of light and friendship, has been transformed into a kind of concentration camp for hopeless men, women, and children. Their lives are not counted. They would never have believed that one day, they would come to drown in this darkness of misunderstanding. Thus, the light falling on the surface of this sea is more like the moonlight falling on a tombstone. Did we transform this beautiful sea of cooperation, culture, and relationships into an azure tomb of mistrust? Did we do this by harnessing the nature of the light wave?
Along with the people loaded into small boats, arriving from little-known cities in the Mediterranean, civilization is also drowning in its condescending and cynical sigh. And here we are. We feel at a loss when it comes to wind direction and light source — “God forfend!” as my grandmother often said — we are losing our minds, caught up in our weakened consciousness. The questions remain: How did the light come to us? Where does it come from? And, most importantly: Why?
Translated from Albanian by Peter Constantine
When I asked him to tell me one of the most amazing things he had seen, he said it had been the lights. “The lights of the harbors where we could never go ashore, and the lights of the ships that we passed and hailed ceremoniously from a distance, exchanging volleys of signal lights as if we were at war.” Over time, my father’s silence became more profound, but I continued to see the Mediterranean lights through his eyes. I was not angry at his silence. Though we were not living during the Spanish Inquisition, my father might well have been burned alive had he spoken of the dim lights of those foreign cities. I had realized that Light has the nature of waves — I had learned that in school — so the distance between us and our maritime neighbours could turn into light years. We were separated from the rest of the world by the waves of the sea and the waves of light.
My grandmother was a woman with a rare heart. She had the gift of seeing and foreseeing what most of us could not even imagine. She was neither a witch nor a sorceress but had memorized the Holy Books, and from it, she drew wisdom. In her day, Albania was atheistic, and to speak of God —though not the Devil — was blasphemy. So in order to protect herself, she found shelter in a world of euphemism. She would use words related to light as an oblique way of expressing her faith, without perhaps knowing that the monotheistic religions had first come to light in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean.
My mother was not a saint, but she could sense the amazement in my mind. It was she who first introduced me to the halls of the theatre and the cinema. She opened a world of miracles before me, igniting in my eyes a spark that was to turn into light. And it was that light that I remember seeing when I entered the theatre world.
Where did that light come from? Was it from the children’s theatre in the town where I was born? From that building which, in February 1967, was transformed from a Catholic church into a marionette theatre? The atheist revolution could have turned it into a warehouse or a shop, but we ended up with a marionette theatre and a cinema instead of a church. The frescoes on the walls were plastered over, but the large sanctuary lamps remained, dedicated to their mission of spreading light.
Where did the light come from, and how did it find its way to us? Did it not come to us over the sea, something my late father would not even whisper? Did it descend from heaven, as my grandmother had always believed? Or did the light come from the arts, as my mother professed?
There were many questions for a child like me, who remembered the neighborhood near the marionette theatre and the two faces of reality in that era. Like every coastal region in the Mediterranean, the town in which I was born had its own unhurried pace, lit and warmed as it was by the light of the sun.
Few would have guessed that the cinema would suddenly embrace its monotony and languid siestas. The backstreets of that fortunate neighborhood were the only ones in the city to project their destitute lives onto the silver screen. This happened when the area near the Marionette Theatre in Durres was chosen to serve as the all-purpose movie set for New Albania Cinema Studios, which was to shoot some of the first Albanian movie scenes in those backstreets.
I knew that World War II had ended long ago, so I was quite confounded to see guerrilla units still carrying out attacks and assassinations against the Nazi fascists. Walking through those backstreets, I sometimes encountered actors resting after filming a scene. Peering over a wall, I would see incredible things: A wounded partisan drinking water from the very flask from which a German, armed to the teeth, had just drunk! Hadn’t they been fighting only moments ago, trying to kill one another? The climax came when, after their drink of water, the sworn enemies lit one another’s cigarettes as friends do. Were they no longer enemies? Or did the movie resurrect them, just as God resurrects good people? And this double reality of enemy and friend appeared in the sun's light in front of everyone! For understandable reasons, scenes like this confused my still childish mind. But the situation worsened when, after what I had seen in the backstreets, I returned to the cinema's darkness. We were back to where we started, and the actors who had been smoking cigarettes and drinking water together were once again enemies on the screen.
Which of the distorted realities should the child choose in moments such as these? I began to suspect the man who was beaming dazzling light from the cinema projector. Was he perhaps the one turning our friends into enemies? I was even more confused when movies produced by the Communists were projected onto the same screen where, not long ago, fascist documentaries had been projected. Ironically, the name of the film studio that had produced the earlier films had to do with light. It was Mussolini’s Istituto Luce, the Institute of Light! The projector shed light on both those who had lost the war and those who had won. What was certain was that this movie machine had been made in one of the coastal cities across the sea that my father might have seen but did not mention, as if they never existed. How did this strange light get to that minor and convoluted Mediterranean town? My father believed that light came from the sea. My religious grandmother believed that the source of light was spiritual and was born of something sacred that had lingered inside the church, even though the church had been forced to become a marionette theatre. My mother, who cherished art, believed that light came only from the cinema, the theatre, and nowhere else.
In the twilight of those halls, I understood that applause is generally a sign of appreciation, and that whistling is a sign of disapproval. This helped me discern the differences between myself and people who did not believe the same things I did and guided me in my modest attempts at becoming a writer.
Thanks to those experiences, some illusions, especially those related to punishment and justice, thrived within me. The cinema and the church theatre of my childhood, those dark rows where I sat surrounded by actors and marionettes, were to be the places where I was to create my own chaotic utopia. Images of the socialist Albania where I grew up, a state that represented itself as the place where evil was punished, and good was always rewarded, blurred my eyes for some time.
But how did that light get there? It should not have ended like it did. Everything came tumbling down upon us when the communist system fell into its death trap. At once, people began to flee, trampling over one another, as if suddenly someone trapped in the darkness of the cinema and trying to tear free of it began to shout, “Fire! Fire!” Everybody rushed to abandon it before it collapsed and trapped everyone inside. The exodus began. Instead of staying put to extinguish the fire, people were leaving the country like those who fled a cinema engulfed in flames. Gathered around the projector, like moths drawn to the light, people were brought back to reality.
The same question is of importance today: Where does light come from? Television screens bathe us in the cliché of Mediterranean light. Those hypnotic murmurings: Close your eyes! Come to the Mediterranean! You will find friendly people, sunlight, seafood, white sand, and the blue waters of the undulating Mediterranean. Above all, you will see the light, buoyant and warm, of this fairytale sea. But this is not a mirage, and you’re not in a theatre or a cinema. The people on screen are not marionettes. What is happening is not stage drama. These are stories played by real actors in the shimmering light of the Mediterranean. The lights emanating from your screens are not the warm, silent lights of the ships my father had greeted with signals from a distance.
Do you see the faint lights of boats carrying refugees on your television screens? Do you see them pushing helplessly through the darkness of the Mediterranean? These people have honored us. From all the world's seas, they have chosen to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean, choosing the most challenging route, the most impossible destination. The refugees are drowning in the depths of the Mare Nostrum only to have the fate of being counted among the missing of our sea and not being among those lost in an ordinary sea.
The Mediterranean, famed as a sea of light and friendship, has been transformed into a kind of concentration camp for hopeless men, women, and children. Their lives are not counted. They would never have believed that one day, they would come to drown in this darkness of misunderstanding. Thus, the light falling on the surface of this sea is more like the moonlight falling on a tombstone. Did we transform this beautiful sea of cooperation, culture, and relationships into an azure tomb of mistrust? Did we do this by harnessing the nature of the light wave?
Along with the people loaded into small boats, arriving from little-known cities in the Mediterranean, civilization is also drowning in its condescending and cynical sigh. And here we are. We feel at a loss when it comes to wind direction and light source — “God forfend!” as my grandmother often said — we are losing our minds, caught up in our weakened consciousness. The questions remain: How did the light come to us? Where does it come from? And, most importantly: Why?
Translated from Albanian by Peter Constantine
Born in the port city of Durrës, Arian Leka belongs to the avant-garde writers who emerged after Albania’s borders opened. His books in poetry, prose, essays, and literary studies have been honored six times with National Awards from the Ministry of Culture and Writers Association and three more International Literary Awards, among them “Opera Omnia Tudor Arghezi - 2022”, “The Poetry Scepter” (Skopje, 2018), “The Poet of the Cultural Capital of Romania,” (2019). The critic emphasizes that his vital texts devoted to “the country and the homeland” are nodes that connect the present with the history of the past in communism and transform Albania’s maritime themes and symbols into the primary metaphorical approach of his literary work, making unmistakable the voice of this author, who uses a language unique aesthetic. Through fact-fiction techniques, Arian Leka conveys fragile details between his personal history and the history of Albania, especially in his books Born in the Province, In Search of the Lost Shirt, and Mute Map for the Drowned. Arian Leka’s short story Brothers of the Blade became part of The Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press, USA); in 2014, his fictional prose, The Shirt, was part of the European anthology Das Hemd (Leykam, Austria); in 2017 his story Paper Cell was included in the Glückliche Wirkungen Anthology (Ullstein Buchverlag, Berlin); in 2018, the narrative Paranoia became part of the A Good European – Anthology (Goethe Institute) and in 2020, his essay Where Does Light Come From, was part of the Circle-Surface-Sun: from somewhere in the Mediterranean (Schlebrugg E.Editor, Vienna). Different books and other texts of Arian Leka in poetry, prose, and essays have been translated and published into German, French, English, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bosnian, Polish, Finish, Croatian, and Chinese. Arian Leka has a PhD in Literary Studies. In 2020, he published “Socialist Realism in Albania,” and in 2022, “Consensus and Polemics” (Albanian Academy of Sciences Editions). Arian Leka is the Head of the Department of Albanian Encyclopedia, a researcher at the Albanian Academy, and a lecturer at Tirana’s University of Arts. He founded the Writers in Residence Programme “POETEKA-Tirana in Between” and editor in chief of “POETEKA” literary magazine.
