blog of revelations II

My grandfather-in-law (baba) married three times and in between he went to Chicago where he was part of a secret society. This society published an underground journal of news. It may have supported itself in traditional mountain brotherhood ways. Baba travelled and worked all over North America. He sent home money. When he came home he lived on the family mountain top but he travelled down from there often selling secret and magical antique charms and ancient painted Icons to both Moslems and two varieties of Christians throughout the nation. The charms and paintings came from within three steamer trunks he brought back from Chicago.

Baba himself was a Bektashi. His lodge, and perhaps his own great grandfather, had hosted Byron when he was in the valley below Limon, my grandfather's village. Bektashis are a large mystical order of active poets celebrating the redemption, melancholy and life of creation. They attempt to get through the veils of cant. Byron discussed their outlook with them when he was in the area and there is a folk memory of this and a few contemporary poems. Some of these are referred to in a manuscript I have from my father-in-law which is by several generations of family poets stanrting in the 16th century.

Did I say Baba had at least seven known children? The Greeks tried to steal some of them in a Balkan war to be used on their farms and for worse and in so doing wiped out most of Baba's small village. No one will say if any of their children were taken or their wives raped.

Fifty years later, just as the Communist regime collapsed, as an Aid official I investigated this area of my Grandfather's birth and death as well as a few other mountaintops and also some pestilant marshes. I was checking for certain individuals in the emptying prison camps that had been constructed for dissidents and their families and also in the attached so-called 'orphanages' which had actually been filled with bastard sick and starving kids and which still had quite a few naked down's syndrome children chained to the walls, and also other people that had been said to have been impossible in an authentic socialist state.

I kept updating my Red Cross list of the missing which kept growing day by day. 400, 500, 600. 'The Greeks are at it again' explained the orphanage administrators fat with baklava bought with the money they had got from recent sales in the newly free and uncontrolled labour market.

Did I say Baba was Albanian? Yes he was. From his many sons and daughters known about, two are buried on the hill of the martyrs, they were gunmen against Nazis, one is a retired general and one other, the youngest known ,who is still living was the one who married a pre-revolutionary princess. Her father had saved the revolutionary leader from death in his youth as the party was forming but that is another story. One only recently considered true although it was known for thirty years.

The youngest known son of Baba did become a ranking party official, a professor of applied ideology who in the famous 'affair if the cows' contributed to the cleansing of the party of an enemy clique and is one of the reason's Hohxa's ninety something year old wife who now lives in a state beyond memory in a small bungalow is not in prison. It is easy to visit her if you have the right credentials. The youngest son and the dictator's wife (the guide's closest true comrade) notoriously enthusiasticly supported the declaration of atheism as the state religion at a private party. The dictator was said to be in China at the time.

All grandfather's sons were classified by the party apparatus as peasants from the mountain and therefore to be trusted in party posts and in the final analysis in their ideology as long as they didn't dis the leadership whether that leadership, apparently alive, was dead or not.

But, if you have been following the narrative so far, you would see that they were actually Americans, children of a suspected gangster, perhaps one who had his name anglicized to 'Clinton' at Ellis island. They could be siblings to Greeks or perhaps Canadians.

They are Moslims now, true believers (but some belong to a secret order).
Me, a grandson-in- law, restored a church of sacred mediaeval icons. A blessed event in national history. Which is how I may be remembered.

All of the above is true and I can prove it. I got the evidence on my last trip.

So we get to the discussion on identity. This is of course a process. Identity is an activity. It engages and disengages. What it cannot be confused with is image. That can hold identity. Or it cannot when it is not authentic.

Because

Tradition is the thing least old. Authenticity is the thing least true. Nation is the thing least ethnic, territorial or ideological. Origins are definitely where we didn't come from. Memory is definitely what didn't happen.

Did your grandfather piss in the snow?

What did he write there?

is there a parochial art? should there be?

Why did a black panther supporter try to shoot a Vancouver communist? Or were either of them that?

Who is my favourite American?

And

What is all this dreaming?

Ask Baba:

Bektashi Fable # 1 :

According to the traditional Muslim belief, when one fell sick, one called upon the prayers and the good wishes of those considered god-fearing and pious. In a melancholic state, a man whose son was very sick called on a Bektashi Baba from the mountains; he asked the Baba to come to recite prayers in order that his boy be cured.The Baba, grand-dad, who cannot get out of this duty, accepted the plea and soon arrived at the door of the townsman. Standing near the child, he opened his hands towards the sky and prayed, 'My God, make it so that this boy dies immediately.'

The horrified father grabbed the Baba, beat him and threw him out of the house. Many days later the man came across the Baba on the street and continued his abuse of him, saying, 'Do you remember when you came to recite prayers for my son and, contrary to what I asked of you, you asked God to take his life? Well God did not listen to you and, El-Hamdulillah, my son is cured!'

The Bektashi laughed and responded, 'It is for that reason that I cursed the lad. I have been on bad terms with God lately and He has been giving me the opposite of what I ask for!

Bektashi Fable # 2:

After collective prayer in the lodge and reading of poetry, a Bektashi was praying by himself in the Mosque and demanding more money from God so that he could buy a bottle of raki. A traditional religious man next to him was also praying by himself, demanding more personal faith from God.

The imam noticed this situation and yelled at the Bektashi: 'Look! Do you see what others ask from God, and what you ask for? Alcohol! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'

Baba replied, 'Everyone asks for the thing he doesn't have.'