Two tragedies and a catharsis

Two tragedies and a catharsis

The novel “I confess it to the tomb stone” of Agron Tufa is a work that intertwines the witness with fiction, the epic with lyric, the love with hate and the individual anamnesis with the collective one, in order to be articulated as an aesthetic denounce that doesn’t aim to lynch, but to cause a national catharsis. The narration is divided in two parts: “The confession of Lirika Mertiri” and the “Confession of Rita O.”. In both parts Lirika is present, but while in the first time we get to know her tragedy, in the second part, she, as a journalist, unfolds the tragedy of an Albanian singer. The stories of two parts deal with two raped women in two times: under the communist dictatorship and under the pluralist democracy. In both cases, their writings give way to the rapes. Lirika, a young teenager, writes poems and needs an assessment from her teacher, which, profiting for her being naïve, rapes her in his office. Even the story of Rita O. comes as a sobbing confession in front of a raped person. While in the first part the story of a violated woman was confessed to a dead person in an accident, in the second part the story of the raped singer is told to the raped journalist. Thus, both parts go along as confessions of two twin raped souls. Same as Lirika, Rita O. suffers from her writings, since she has a diary where she writes all her utmost secrets of mind and heart. This diary is taken by an operative of Sigurimi, who longed to possess the singer.

This novel by Agron TUFA, being a lyric novel on tragic fates, promotes a new literary discourse and is seen as a call for national catharsis. If we agree on an outstanding thought that the people is a huge individual, than the violence of a category of people should be considered as violence to our national body. This point of view would make this novel more shocking and maybe this literary shock could wake us up from the national lethargy and we probably can realize that Todorov was right when he said that literature could transform from within each of us.

Ag Apolloni, writer, literary critic, scholar

The novel in Macedonian will be published in 2020 by Blesok.

2020-08-14T22:03:35+00:00 August 5th, 2020|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok Editions, Blesok no. 130 - 132|0 Comments