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Like a Prisoner
The book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devise increasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters in different stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners’ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.
Fatos Lubonja is Albania’s most distinguished opposition intellectual. He served 17 years in prison during communism, and since his release has been a fierce critic of the erosion of democracy.
Fatos Lubonja is Albania’s most distinguished opposition intellectual. He served 17 years in prison during communism, and since his release has been a fierce critic of the erosion of democracy.
- GenresAlbanian Literature
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 18, 2023
At this point in the journey I think that I have written [these stories] in order to accept them as my own, and to see these clothes, and these ordeals that I at first so determinedly refused, as belonging now to me, a part of my ‘true’ self, and realising that this wide open space where we will walk with body and soul at ease, with a meaning to life and death in our hearts, can only be found by taking stock of the shackles we have left behind.
Në këtë pikë të rrugëtimit mendoj se të gjitha këto histori i kam shkruar për t’i pranuar si të miat, si pjesë të vetes sime “të vërtetë” ato rroba dhe ato vuajtje që i kam refuzuar me aq ngulm në krye të herës; për të kuptuar se çeltira ku na duket se do të gjejmë veten tonë të vërtetë duke ecur, për kënaqësinë e trupit dhe shpirtit, me një kuptim jete dhe vdekjeje në zemër, nuk arrihet dot veçse duke bërë inventarin e prangave që lemë prapa.
Like a Prisoner (2022) is John Hodgson's translation, from Albanian, of Fatos Lubonja's Jetë Burgu (2021).
Lubonja himself spent 17 years as a political prisoner in Albania from 1974, to his release in 1991, as described in his profile at Words Without Borders:
He has described the circumstances of his second trial in the non-fictional memoir Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag (the English translation also by Hodgson).
Like a Prisoner is a collection of stories of prison life by a first person narrator who is imprisoned , from 1974-1991, initially in Spaç but at different times in other prisons and camps including the dreaded Burrel prison. I'm not entirely clear if this is to be read as fiction or non-fiction, and suspect it may be a hybrid with the stories based on real characters, but some names or details changed for both anonymity and the flowing of the story.
And characters are at the heart of the collection, each centred around one of the men (and they are all men) the narrator encounters during the 17 year period, each a political prisoner of sorts but ranging from senior officials who fell out of favour to 'common criminals' who simply attempted to flee the country. There are 11 stories in all, bookened with a prologue and epilogue:
Prologue: The Caged Wolf -the narrator's first impressions of the Spaç labour camp in early 1975, when the mass of pacing prisoners reminded him of caged wolves in a zoo.
I could never shake off that feeling prompted by my first sight of them, when the place had looked like a madhouse, and the sense that I had plunged into a whirlpool of people, united by the neurosis of the caged wolf, and into an existence that was a negation of everything I had lived for.
Eqerem - a prisoner alleged to have attempted to escape Albania purely to visit a brothel overseas and who is obsessed, to the point of madness, by a woman he recalls from his pre-prison days.
Ferit the Cow - an inveterate and compulsive thief, and teller of fantastical stories.
Kujtim - perhaps the most complex of the characters, a writer of poetry but also a brutal murderer of a fellow prisoner, a person that the narrator is immediately warned not to speak to, which only intrigues him more (the story also highlights the homophobia that reigns in the camps)
If in the earlier poems he strongly resisted fate, and was at war against it in a struggle he believed he could win, in the Burrel poems he saw his adversities as a destiny dictated by the gods. Instead of a struggle, there was a sense of surrender, reconciliation, and a search for spiritual peace. He evidently saw himself as similar to Sophocles’ heroes, who after rebelling and striving to oppose the will of the gods, surrender to it.
In the period before Burrel, two forces had pulled his life in opposite directions: love of knowledge and poetry, and love for ‘reckless heroes’. He described these two ideals as if they coexisted in a battle against each other, as if the strand of his life was held in tension between them. Now it was as if the cord was broken and the two passions, weary of their struggle, had made peace. He didn’t hope for any wisdom beyond what he learned in prison and he couldn’t escape the misfortunes that his passion for ‘reckless heroes’ had caused him.
...
‘The greatest wisdom lies in loving only those things that happen to us, that are woven into the fabric of our lives,’ he said, quoting the Stoics whom he had read in Burrel.
Zef Mala - set in the 'kaush', prison slang for the holding area in Tirana where prisoners mingle while they await transfer to other camps:
I had been fond of the word kaush since childhood. It reminded me of primary school, where peddlers used to come to us in the yard during the long break to sell us those paper cones called kaushë filled brimful with the sweet black hackberries that grew in the gardens of Tirana. We not only enjoyed eating the hackberries, but they brought us together because the berries of one kaush would be shared out among several of us. Then we used the hackberry stones as ‘bullets’ in our war games. We would load them into the barrels of our ‘pistols’, which were pieces of reed that we always kept in our pockets, and blow these ‘bullets’ at each other.
These memories of childhood meant that I never entirely got used to the meaning of the word kaush in prison slang.
There the narrator meets Zef Mala, a famous and elderly political prisoner of long-standing, a senior Communist leader sentenced by the dictator for "maintaining an opportunistic, social-democratic attitude to the revolution."
Zef tells the narrator his own story and also explains the etymology of various prison slang, although he rejects the 'slang' term as these words describring the prison system are, he explains, now part of the Albanian language.
Çuçi - the beloved cat of a prisoner, Çavo.
John Smith - one of the more quirky stories, a prisoner convinced he is Australian, rather than a 'filthy Albanian': the entire meaning of his life wasinvested in his not being Albanian. He firmly maintained that Albanian nationality and citizenship had been forcibly thrust upon him, although he was in fact Australian, and he found himself here because of a disgraceful trick.
The Don - a nickname based on Quixote, as The Don is convinced he is a genius. He is also convinced as each 28-29th November national holiday comes around that a sweeping amnesty will be announced, and for the 2-3 months before that he would dress differently, carry himself and behave differently, and eat differently. This period, he said, was a preparation for freedom: we should forget the vices and foul language that we had learned in prison, and relearn the manners of life in freedom.
Edip - a senior military figure, now in prison accused of being part of a putsch. He is known for his calm and courteous manner, which different groups in prison interpret in different ways, notably Pëllumb, leader of the anti-communist faction, and Spiro "son of an old communist whom the dictator had eliminated at the start of his time in power" and obsessed with the rise and fall of different factions:
Spiro liked to quote a passage of Shakespeare, when the unfortunate King Lear says to his daughter ‘Come, let’s away to prison… and talk of court news’. Spiro said that prisoners have their antennae tuned to the court. They yearn to be free, and they know that if the day of their release ever comes, it will happen because of events at court. He kept in with every serviceman who arrived in the camp, asking questions intended to ferret out what was happening there.
Ahlem - set on the day of the dictator‘s funeral and centred on a character more and more devoted to the regime that crippled him after a near-suicidal escape attempt. This after one of the fabled amnesties has come to naught:
Just then, when we were all sunk into a deep despair mixed with hatred, a strong, deep voice came from the back of the crowd.
‘Long live the party and the teachings of its immortal leader!’
It was Ahlem. Nobody had the spirit to laugh at him, or even to grab his crutch and break it over his head. At that moment, his survival mechanism had made him stronger than any of us.
An earlier version of the story can be found at Words Without Borders
Frano and Josif - Frano is a Catholic Priest and Josif the only avowed Protestant in the camp, and the two debate the theological meaning of the fate of another prisoner, Vangjush, with the narrator who is a firm atheist, and against the backdrop of the cruel creed which rules the country:
Vangjush too was a man abandoned to the cruel hands of his brethren, without hope of salvation. The question was, why did these brethren behave so cruelly? ‘Because they are the Devil’s,’ Josif told me. ‘Because they don’t believe in God, who is love,’ Frano told me. ‘Because they don’t fear punishment in the next world,’ both of them told me. But according to the Works of the dictator, which we read every day, the answer was that these cruelties were perpetrated for the sake of good. They purged the world of swindlers who preached a heavenly paradise in order to justify hell on earth. The Works claimed that happiness must be built on Earth and to achieve this the world must be cleansed of people like Frano and Josif who believed in the world to come, and also of people like Vangjush and me, who didn’t believe in this promised happiness. Therefore, they didn’t consider this lack of mercy towards us a form of cruelty, but a virtue. At least that is how they justified themselves, because it was hard to imagine that the dictator genuinely believed in the paradise that he himself promised. When he preached ruthlessness, it was as if he were trying to convince himself, and his own people, that they should have no doubts in what they were doing. And this need to quell doubts through cruelty stemmed from a fear that they were losing faith in the sole justification for their cruelty, and also from the fear that the countless dead would persuade the living to hold them to account one day for what had been horrible crimes, pure and simple.
Nuri - one of the first fellow prisoners the narrator meets, while awaiting being sent to prison, and someone he re-encounters over the years.
Epilogue - Discarded Souls - which provides a postscript to the novel including updating what the author heard later became of Nuri and Kujtim. He also explains the rationale for the collection:
When I try to understand why I chose to tell the stories of Nuri, Kujtim, and the others in this book, out of the thousands of human lives I encountered in prison, I have no single or clear answer. I met these men and others when I joined that repellent whirlpool of prisoners, each of whom, like ‘the caged wolf’, was trying to escape being sucked in by that centripetal force. We were striving to break free into some kind of wide open space, where we would walk with body and soul at
ease, with a meaning to life and death in our hearts.
At the start of this written journey through my memories of these lives, I thought that I had chosen them because they best illustrate the ambivalent feeling of the acceptance and refusal of a life spent thrown into this cauldron created by devils intentionally to destroy souls ... But it becomes more difficult to think this way as I write about people like Kujtim, those who never managed to make any kind of life for themselves outside prison. Their wounds and the balm for these wounds, adaptation and resistance, became one and the same thing, their inner self.
The reality behind what, in purely literary terms, are relatively straightforward stories makes this a powerful work.
Në këtë pikë të rrugëtimit mendoj se të gjitha këto histori i kam shkruar për t’i pranuar si të miat, si pjesë të vetes sime “të vërtetë” ato rroba dhe ato vuajtje që i kam refuzuar me aq ngulm në krye të herës; për të kuptuar se çeltira ku na duket se do të gjejmë veten tonë të vërtetë duke ecur, për kënaqësinë e trupit dhe shpirtit, me një kuptim jete dhe vdekjeje në zemër, nuk arrihet dot veçse duke bërë inventarin e prangave që lemë prapa.
Like a Prisoner (2022) is John Hodgson's translation, from Albanian, of Fatos Lubonja's Jetë Burgu (2021).
Lubonja himself spent 17 years as a political prisoner in Albania from 1974, to his release in 1991, as described in his profile at Words Without Borders:
At twenty-three, Lubonja was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for "agitation and propaganda" after police found his diaries, which contained criticisms of Hoxha, in his uncle's attic. He began serving his sentence in the copper mine of Spaç. In 1979, while still incarcerated, Lubonja faced a second accusation, this time of having created a "counterrevolutionary organization" alongside nine other prisoners, and was sentenced to a further twenty-five years.
He has described the circumstances of his second trial in the non-fictional memoir Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag (the English translation also by Hodgson).
Like a Prisoner is a collection of stories of prison life by a first person narrator who is imprisoned , from 1974-1991, initially in Spaç but at different times in other prisons and camps including the dreaded Burrel prison. I'm not entirely clear if this is to be read as fiction or non-fiction, and suspect it may be a hybrid with the stories based on real characters, but some names or details changed for both anonymity and the flowing of the story.
And characters are at the heart of the collection, each centred around one of the men (and they are all men) the narrator encounters during the 17 year period, each a political prisoner of sorts but ranging from senior officials who fell out of favour to 'common criminals' who simply attempted to flee the country. There are 11 stories in all, bookened with a prologue and epilogue:
Prologue: The Caged Wolf -the narrator's first impressions of the Spaç labour camp in early 1975, when the mass of pacing prisoners reminded him of caged wolves in a zoo.
I could never shake off that feeling prompted by my first sight of them, when the place had looked like a madhouse, and the sense that I had plunged into a whirlpool of people, united by the neurosis of the caged wolf, and into an existence that was a negation of everything I had lived for.
Eqerem - a prisoner alleged to have attempted to escape Albania purely to visit a brothel overseas and who is obsessed, to the point of madness, by a woman he recalls from his pre-prison days.
Ferit the Cow - an inveterate and compulsive thief, and teller of fantastical stories.
Kujtim - perhaps the most complex of the characters, a writer of poetry but also a brutal murderer of a fellow prisoner, a person that the narrator is immediately warned not to speak to, which only intrigues him more (the story also highlights the homophobia that reigns in the camps)
If in the earlier poems he strongly resisted fate, and was at war against it in a struggle he believed he could win, in the Burrel poems he saw his adversities as a destiny dictated by the gods. Instead of a struggle, there was a sense of surrender, reconciliation, and a search for spiritual peace. He evidently saw himself as similar to Sophocles’ heroes, who after rebelling and striving to oppose the will of the gods, surrender to it.
In the period before Burrel, two forces had pulled his life in opposite directions: love of knowledge and poetry, and love for ‘reckless heroes’. He described these two ideals as if they coexisted in a battle against each other, as if the strand of his life was held in tension between them. Now it was as if the cord was broken and the two passions, weary of their struggle, had made peace. He didn’t hope for any wisdom beyond what he learned in prison and he couldn’t escape the misfortunes that his passion for ‘reckless heroes’ had caused him.
...
‘The greatest wisdom lies in loving only those things that happen to us, that are woven into the fabric of our lives,’ he said, quoting the Stoics whom he had read in Burrel.
Zef Mala - set in the 'kaush', prison slang for the holding area in Tirana where prisoners mingle while they await transfer to other camps:
I had been fond of the word kaush since childhood. It reminded me of primary school, where peddlers used to come to us in the yard during the long break to sell us those paper cones called kaushë filled brimful with the sweet black hackberries that grew in the gardens of Tirana. We not only enjoyed eating the hackberries, but they brought us together because the berries of one kaush would be shared out among several of us. Then we used the hackberry stones as ‘bullets’ in our war games. We would load them into the barrels of our ‘pistols’, which were pieces of reed that we always kept in our pockets, and blow these ‘bullets’ at each other.
These memories of childhood meant that I never entirely got used to the meaning of the word kaush in prison slang.
There the narrator meets Zef Mala, a famous and elderly political prisoner of long-standing, a senior Communist leader sentenced by the dictator for "maintaining an opportunistic, social-democratic attitude to the revolution."
Zef tells the narrator his own story and also explains the etymology of various prison slang, although he rejects the 'slang' term as these words describring the prison system are, he explains, now part of the Albanian language.
Çuçi - the beloved cat of a prisoner, Çavo.
John Smith - one of the more quirky stories, a prisoner convinced he is Australian, rather than a 'filthy Albanian': the entire meaning of his life wasinvested in his not being Albanian. He firmly maintained that Albanian nationality and citizenship had been forcibly thrust upon him, although he was in fact Australian, and he found himself here because of a disgraceful trick.
The Don - a nickname based on Quixote, as The Don is convinced he is a genius. He is also convinced as each 28-29th November national holiday comes around that a sweeping amnesty will be announced, and for the 2-3 months before that he would dress differently, carry himself and behave differently, and eat differently. This period, he said, was a preparation for freedom: we should forget the vices and foul language that we had learned in prison, and relearn the manners of life in freedom.
Edip - a senior military figure, now in prison accused of being part of a putsch. He is known for his calm and courteous manner, which different groups in prison interpret in different ways, notably Pëllumb, leader of the anti-communist faction, and Spiro "son of an old communist whom the dictator had eliminated at the start of his time in power" and obsessed with the rise and fall of different factions:
Spiro liked to quote a passage of Shakespeare, when the unfortunate King Lear says to his daughter ‘Come, let’s away to prison… and talk of court news’. Spiro said that prisoners have their antennae tuned to the court. They yearn to be free, and they know that if the day of their release ever comes, it will happen because of events at court. He kept in with every serviceman who arrived in the camp, asking questions intended to ferret out what was happening there.
Ahlem - set on the day of the dictator‘s funeral and centred on a character more and more devoted to the regime that crippled him after a near-suicidal escape attempt. This after one of the fabled amnesties has come to naught:
Just then, when we were all sunk into a deep despair mixed with hatred, a strong, deep voice came from the back of the crowd.
‘Long live the party and the teachings of its immortal leader!’
It was Ahlem. Nobody had the spirit to laugh at him, or even to grab his crutch and break it over his head. At that moment, his survival mechanism had made him stronger than any of us.
An earlier version of the story can be found at Words Without Borders
Frano and Josif - Frano is a Catholic Priest and Josif the only avowed Protestant in the camp, and the two debate the theological meaning of the fate of another prisoner, Vangjush, with the narrator who is a firm atheist, and against the backdrop of the cruel creed which rules the country:
Vangjush too was a man abandoned to the cruel hands of his brethren, without hope of salvation. The question was, why did these brethren behave so cruelly? ‘Because they are the Devil’s,’ Josif told me. ‘Because they don’t believe in God, who is love,’ Frano told me. ‘Because they don’t fear punishment in the next world,’ both of them told me. But according to the Works of the dictator, which we read every day, the answer was that these cruelties were perpetrated for the sake of good. They purged the world of swindlers who preached a heavenly paradise in order to justify hell on earth. The Works claimed that happiness must be built on Earth and to achieve this the world must be cleansed of people like Frano and Josif who believed in the world to come, and also of people like Vangjush and me, who didn’t believe in this promised happiness. Therefore, they didn’t consider this lack of mercy towards us a form of cruelty, but a virtue. At least that is how they justified themselves, because it was hard to imagine that the dictator genuinely believed in the paradise that he himself promised. When he preached ruthlessness, it was as if he were trying to convince himself, and his own people, that they should have no doubts in what they were doing. And this need to quell doubts through cruelty stemmed from a fear that they were losing faith in the sole justification for their cruelty, and also from the fear that the countless dead would persuade the living to hold them to account one day for what had been horrible crimes, pure and simple.
Nuri - one of the first fellow prisoners the narrator meets, while awaiting being sent to prison, and someone he re-encounters over the years.
Epilogue - Discarded Souls - which provides a postscript to the novel including updating what the author heard later became of Nuri and Kujtim. He also explains the rationale for the collection:
When I try to understand why I chose to tell the stories of Nuri, Kujtim, and the others in this book, out of the thousands of human lives I encountered in prison, I have no single or clear answer. I met these men and others when I joined that repellent whirlpool of prisoners, each of whom, like ‘the caged wolf’, was trying to escape being sucked in by that centripetal force. We were striving to break free into some kind of wide open space, where we would walk with body and soul at
ease, with a meaning to life and death in our hearts.
At the start of this written journey through my memories of these lives, I thought that I had chosen them because they best illustrate the ambivalent feeling of the acceptance and refusal of a life spent thrown into this cauldron created by devils intentionally to destroy souls ... But it becomes more difficult to think this way as I write about people like Kujtim, those who never managed to make any kind of life for themselves outside prison. Their wounds and the balm for these wounds, adaptation and resistance, became one and the same thing, their inner self.
The reality behind what, in purely literary terms, are relatively straightforward stories makes this a powerful work.
August 8, 2024
A very important book to never forget the cruelties and crimes of Albanian communist dictatorship. The book is uncomfortable and awful, just how it is supposed to be. It shows how important remembrance is to build a healthy democracy and society.
www.kujto.al
www.kujto.al
November 27, 2025
LEXOJENI! Nuk di ç'të them më tepër, këtu.. këtu është krejt Shqipëria, në këto rrëfime të vërteta gjen pak nga të gjithë shqiptarët në zgrip të mbijetesës me të këqijat, smirën, ligësitë, intrigat e vogla dhe tradhëtitë e pafalshme, karakteret e brishta që shkërmoqen në të parën pengesë, por edhe me dashamirësinë, humanizmin, trimërinë e guximin e çartur përballë të pamundurës, urtësinë e moçme trashëgim i së kaluarës, autoironinë therëse e prakticitetin për t'u përshtatur ndaj sfidave të reja.
Kur lexova tek tregimi i Donit fjalinë që Koçi i thotë Lubonjës: "-Sikur të kisha lindur ndonjë fëmijë, s'do më vinte keq ta kaloja tërë jetën në burg, por një fëmijë e doja." për një çast ndala së lexuari, se nuk mundesha më sinqerisht. Megjithatë, thashë me vete, kaq është, ky është kulmi, nuk besoj të trishtohem prapë, por ja që erdhi ai tregimi i Nuriut me Çokun, dhe unë e kam të vështirë të qaj me libra se asnjëherë nuk i marr aq seriozisht, por si duket kaq e bukur qenka shkrimtaria e Lubonjës, nejse, LEXOJENI!
Kur lexova tek tregimi i Donit fjalinë që Koçi i thotë Lubonjës: "-Sikur të kisha lindur ndonjë fëmijë, s'do më vinte keq ta kaloja tërë jetën në burg, por një fëmijë e doja." për një çast ndala së lexuari, se nuk mundesha më sinqerisht. Megjithatë, thashë me vete, kaq është, ky është kulmi, nuk besoj të trishtohem prapë, por ja që erdhi ai tregimi i Nuriut me Çokun, dhe unë e kam të vështirë të qaj me libra se asnjëherë nuk i marr aq seriozisht, por si duket kaq e bukur qenka shkrimtaria e Lubonjës, nejse, LEXOJENI!
October 29, 2022
A very human story of those who were imprisoned in the dictatorship. I knew very little about Albanian history and this book helped me seek out more information about the history of this region. The stories themselves were very simply presented but they were very vivid in bringing up the emotions and environment that the people lived in - a lot was left unsaid but your imagination knew how to connect the dots and that's for me a sign of a good book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews