Illustration by Bilge Emir, commissioned by Blerta Haziraj. The illustration shows partisan women cutting telephone cables, a main tool of communication used by fascists and the Axis powers to send secret messages.

Documentary exploring the challenges of accessing archival material and reconstructs FAG's socialist feminist contributions post-World War II through secondary sources and private collections. Filmed by Blerta Haziraj, edited by Alban Nuhiu and Blerta Haziraj.

Moments from the public presentation which took the form of a screening of the documentary and an exhibition of curated excerpts from "Buletini" and "Agimi." The presentation took place at the bunker near the fountain at Ulpiana, in Prishtina, on November 23, 2022.

Photography: Majlinda Hoxha.

The following interview was conducted and edited for the HS Edition VI Catalogue (2022).

Blerta Haziraj
Chasing the invisible: “Your eyes and hands must be seen everywhere”

Interview by Lura Limani

Translated by Ron Krasniqi

Blerta Haziraj is a researcher, member of the collective, and one of the founders of the alternative space and independent publishing house PykëPresje, with extensive experience in different artistic projects. When speaking about her most recent research project and artistic presentation, “Your eyes and hands must be seen everywhere” (2022), she hesitates to define the result of her experimental, almost year-long work, which she considers only the beginning of a broader and more long-term project.

One of the reasons for this hesitation is the fact that the original project had encountered unexpected obstacles which led to changing the goal and final medium of the project which had started as research into the archive of the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF) in Kosovo, with the aim to produce an annotated publication of the WAF. As a result of her inability to find the original archival material in the Kosovo Archives, the final work, or ‘presentation’ as Haziraj modestly calls it, now includes a short 15-minute documentary, an original poster inspired by the research created by the Berlin artist Bilge Emir, and a collection of archival materials from the daily Rilindja, as well as the magazines Agimi and Buletini, which were also exhibited together with the two artworks.

The short experimental film, which is the central product of this research, begins with the sounds of the keyboard and footsteps in the hallway: on the screen, through subtitles, we follow the researcher-narrator’s story as she runs into administrative red tape with which almost every researcher in Kosovo is faced at the Kosovo Archives. We’ve all heard the magical phrase “Come back next week” in such institutions. In fact, the first time we spoke with Haziraj about this project she was still researching, and as two “long-suffering” researchers we had started to commiserate with each other about the lack of cooperation from the institutions that are in charge of the Kosovo public archives.

Although the film starts like a procedural drama, we see very quickly that the author has in fact managed to find several copies of the first publications written by anti-fascist women in Kosovo in journals dedicated to their counterparts. These publications, which Haziraj calls literary activism, give us invaluable access to post-WWII history, giving insights into the construction of spaces dedicated to women, and socialist state-building – with all of its nuances and problems. Inspired by the section featuring letters from peasant women readers written to the editors of Buletini and Agimi, Haziraj has decided that in the film, words written by the WAF’s activists should be read by women of the rural areas of Kosovo today. This temporal and geographic transposition brings to the fore many questions related to women’s emancipation in Kosovo since the end of WWII up to this day.

What follows is an edited dialogue with Haziraj, based on a very open and sincere conversation conducted in the Centre for Narrative Practice in Prishtina.

***

LL: As you have told me, you were introduced to the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF) indirectly while working on other research.

BH: Yes. During 2021 I was working on some research, which was also archival, about the portrayal of women characters in Albanian drama. During the research, which often also takes place outside of the library premises, a booklet with the title Ato (Them) caught my eye, a collection of poems published in 1981 in the textile factory ‘Integj’, in Gjilan. The book was published as part of the literary group ‘Punëtoria’ (Workshop) by Albanian and Serb women workers of this factory and it includes different poems with themes on the fatherland, love, and motherhood. Later, I also found a similar publication with the title Qielli Ynë (Our Sky) published in four languages in 1985 by the women of the literary group Trepça.

I was coming across various writings about subjects that I never knew about before. The same also happened with the history of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Kosovo, a women’s movement that existed during and after the Second World War – more precisely the two WAF journals, Buletini and Agimi. In this way, I started reading about the WAF and trying to find these journals. I started reading about this movement and what happened and how the Women’s Antifascist Front was documented and interpreted at a regional level. And my expectation was that I would manage to find these materials in the Kosovo Archives. The main idea was to open the archives and start a discussion that would also include scholars and experts of this field. When I started to work on the project, I also started working intensively in the Archive. You go one day: “No”, go another day “no”, or “no, come back today, come tomorrow” … and this was very tiring and often disappointing. That is why this part is shown in the beginning of the film, where this endless back-and-forth and discussions with the employees in the Archive seem to reflect the situation of this story. “On Tuesday don’t come because it’s a day off, next Monday you’ll have it here”. Anyway, Buletini and Agimi were nowhere to be found, not even in the catalogues and registers, and the Women’s Antifascist Front didn’t appear anywhere either. Now of course, you could consider that the WAF was disbanded in 1953-1954 – but there were still collections on the League of Women’s Associations and on the Conference on the Social Activity of Women. I therefore kept wondering why the WAF wasn’t included.

LL: So there were documents on women’s activism after the WAF but not on the WAF itself?

BH: Yes. The fact that I had no access to these materials piqued my curiosity and imagination about an important part of the political organization of women in Kosovo. I started thinking about what I was researching and how to interpret it, and how to work with the archives and materials that were inaccessible. Above all, I kept wondering about the archives of the feminist socialist movements, which in our context were an extension of the communist party. Beyond this, in my artistic approach, the path opened up for me to use this archival reality as a tool to reflect and to be considered as a metaphor.

Because of the numerous delays, I put the archive to one side for a bit, I let the archive rest – even though I went from time to time, I started collecting primarily secondary materials. Naturally I turned to the National Library and I researched texts by authors such as Ali Hadri, Ferit Lipa, Drita Bakija Gunga, Sulltane Ukaj, Sabile Keçmezi – but not the original issues of Buletini and Agimi.

During this time, the researcher Tevfik Rada was also involved with me in the project, and he had found a ‘catalogue’ – in the form of four A4 sheets attached – in which a list of the ‘Press’ that was kept in the Kosovo Archive was recorded. Here too, Buletini and Agimi are listed. But despite this, the archivers would repeat after every meeting that the journals and magazines are in a room that is being reorganised. I don’t know how many times I have heard this sentence accompanied by the two-minute search of the storage room under the pretext that “down there it is cold and stuffy.” Around that same time I was also meeting with and writing to researchers who had knowledge about this period. I had contacted Erëmirë Krasniqi (who had sent me 12 copies of Buletini and 2 copies of Agimi) which she had obtained from the archive a few years ago, when the archive was more organised. I remember my reaction when I received the email from Eli, I couldn’t believe it! After many attempts, based on the open approach that I had maintained throughout the research process and thanks to the understanding from the team at Heritage Space, I decided to change the course of the project. Accepting the fact that I was not going to find these back-issues encouraged in me a different horizon of possibility, that of uncovering this reality in the archive by placing it in opposition to the current rural reality of women in Kosovo. This has also been the reason why through the film the entire process of the research is shown as tool to think about the state of the archive and how feminist historiography is preserved; in this case, the beginnings of a broad movement that promised the coming of a woman that seemed to start off as a wing of the party and was torn off from the party during the 50s.

LL: In total, through Eli you found 12 issues of Buletini and 2 of Agimi. What information did you find on the WAF in these issues and in secondary sources?

BH: Buletini is without a doubt a product and practice of certain historical circumstances, the origin of which is part of a broader antifascist women’s movement from the pre-war period which had gained momentum in all Yugoslavia. As the journalistic body of the WAF, Buletini was published for the first time in 1946 in Prizren. Published in the Albanian language, the magazine followed the line of press that was published by the women of the WAF in Yugoslavia, in the magazines Žena u Borbi (Woman at War), Žena danas (Woman today), Glas žena (Women’s Voice), and was infused with the same socialist goal: the social, cultural, and economic emancipation of women. The magazine had an informative tone whose focus was on the various activities of the WAF that were taking place in the cities and villages of the country; these included the cultural emancipation of women through educational courses for reading and writing, the ‘attackers’ competitions, various discussions between women, interviews with women teachers who worked in cooperatives, reports from sewing and knitting courses and often also lifestyle advice and recipes. The issues of Buletini and later also Agimi contain constant talk about illiteracy courses and recorded the number of women who were part of the campaign for removing the headscarf, a massive campaign that gained ground in the entire region at the time. When you read the issues of these magazines you also encounter special sections for women and youth.

LL: The initial idea was to produce an annotated book, but this changed.

BH: Yes, the idea was to annotate all the issues of Buletini and Agimi, to compile a bibliography of books and writings that I had discovered, to translate some of the important textual materials, as well as eventually to conduct an interview with Sulltane Ukaj, a researcher and expert on the educational, cultural, and socio-political circumstances of the period we are talking about. However, even though I have not yet managed to finalise the book, which needs a little more time, this is an ongoing process. From the research I have collected useful materials such as the first two abetare (the Albanian name for the ABC-book) which were used in the illiteracy campaigns, published in 1946 and 1947, ABC Book for Children and ABC Book for Grown-ups. Also, publications that portray the day-to-day life of women, summaries of regional congresses of the WAF, books that write about revolutionary lives and partisan activity, monographies and biographies as well those that follow the development of the National Liberation War – I have compiled all of these to collect as much as possible of the scattered information on the WAF.

However, also taking into account the period of the project’s development, as far as I managed to understand this history, especially in relation to other countries, women’s activism and involvement was more developed. In Kosovo, due to political and social circumstances the position of women was worse off, and this was the reason why the campaigns that had more impact were those of removing the veil and the massive reading and writing courses, i.e. a school in itself.

LL: Perhaps also because women in Kosovo were actually numerically less involved in the National Liberation Movement.

BH: Yes, that is also a factor. But here, the reason we use archival materials to interpret some spaces, some gaps when the material itself does not provide an answer, is by making some comparisons. I usually, apart from written materials and experimenting with language, words, last names, and complete sentences, give a lot of focus also to photographs and old publications that I find along the way.

For example in the film, alongside the journals Buletini, Agimi, the newspaper Rilindja, and references from Drita Bakija Gunga, I also use a photograph taken from Ali Hadri’s book on which I build the entire narrative tension around the archive. It is a photograph titled “Women of Gjakova in a meeting immediately after liberation.” Such materials encourage me to think much more than certain other materials because through them I manage to create visual connections to what I have read about. Could these women have been antifascists? How many were gathered in the square, some have headscarves, some have veils while some have none at all! And I notice these contrasts, which is not possible sometimes in text. But at the same time, the more you look at this photograph you confirm that there are gaps and questions in this story to which you will perhaps never find the answer to. Photographs are interesting also because after I started to get to know the materials I began to recognise some of the women, for example, activists such as Sabrije Vokshi, Safete Nimani, Ganimete Terbeshi and Meme Vokshi.

LL: The poster, made in collaboration with Bilge Emir, is an illustration of a story that I myself had not heard before.

BH: Sulltane Ukaj, in her article “The Development and Massification of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Kosovo,” published in the journal Kosova in the year 1977, mentions numerous actions and activities in which women have been participants. Among them, one that left an impression on me was the action of cutting down telephone poles in which women such as Gjylsha Pula, Shirine Brovina, Halime Zherka and Nazmije Brovina also took part.

Now, this is a story that made an impression on me and one I wanted to visualise and highlight. I did not read it solely as a historical fact but more as an act of rebellion and an action carried out This as an event seemed very beautiful to me to bring to life.

LL: What seems interesting to me about this is that from our own research as well (with Mrika Limani Myrtaj published in Feminisms by Alter Habitus), is that there exists a type of mythicisation of the role of women, even though at the same time women partisans are reduced to assistants, almost housewives, such as washers, couriers, etc… This story really highlights and presents a break of the main narrative.

BH: When I compared the materials outside of Kosovo, there is a lot of research about the myth of the woman teacher, partisan, mother. The teacher and mother are used in these magazines especially in reinforcing the narrative of ‘helping the people’s power’ in the accomplishment of the different tasks of state-building. The woman partisan, on the other hand, is used less, except in issue 20 of Buletini where a drawing of a partisan woman is found on the cover. And here and there, there are stories about Ganimete Tërbeshi, or Jovanka Radivojevic-Kica. This is because we have only 4 fallen women partisans registered. Meanwhile, I would say that the focus is stronger on the housewives and mothers. Even the physiognomy of Buletini and Agimi – seen from today’s perspective – contains special sections on housework, maintenance, knitting and sewing, washing dishes, breastfeeding and childrearing, while showing very little on the public engagement of women.

Perhaps the reason for this also lies with the gaps that I was mentioning. Not all the editions of Buletini are there, nor of Agimi. In the archive the WAF is not registered and there are no documents or notes of meetings, which if they were in the archive we would be able to rewrite or think about. In this way, the archive itself and the challenges when working with archival sources become part of the artistic creation.

LL: In the film, fragments of Buletini and Agimi are read by rural women in Kosovo. There is a moment with one of the characters in the film, who can barely read the text, which as a viewer makes you feel uncomfortable. Because they are reading something written 70 years ago, and which was meant to be written precisely for women in the village, and with the idea that we have eradicated illiteracy.

BH: While in fact we didn’t.

LL: The transposition in time creates discomfort.

BH: Well the reason I chose to make the film in the field was to see the situation from up close and to meet the women of the villages, but also to tell the story of the WAF. Another element that fascinated me during the reading of the magazines is the broad village-city correspondence where interviews and conversations with women from rural areas of Kosovo are included. Such reports covered the participation of women in different sectors, their discussions, visits and attempts for their cultural emancipation through various campaigns.

And so, for around two weeks, together with my sister and mother we did a marathon through the villages of Dukagjin, Klinë, Istog, Drenicë, and the surroundings of Runik and Llaushë, with a camera I had taken from DokuFest. The way I chose to meet women was sometimes deliberate, and sometimes random, in the sense of the approach and what I could do in that context. And so from the car, I would see a woman and I would greet her and they would invite us into their garden, where I would tell them the history of the WAF. I had a lot of printed materials with me: the magazines Buletini and Agimi, the Abetare, and some photographs. Regardless of whether they allowed me to record them, I would tell them the story. And it’s interesting that the reaction was somehow similar to the writings of Buletini. My story was followed by some remark of surprise, or they would start to tell their own stories which were often not even related to the subject. A need to be heard and to speak…

The majority did not know how to read, or they couldn’t read or understand the language of that time which I don’t know if I should describe as Gheg, because sometimes it is in standard Albanian. Some of them were kind enough to allow me to record them. From one to the other – you cannot believe how much they spoke. This feeling that this history hasn’t been overcome became very actualised for me. I couldn’t make this story relevant for them, when I saw that nothing had changed for them in the sense that they are isolated and there are no spaces which they can frequent or activities which they can get involved in. When they read the texts, they would express their own wish that “they would like it a little, to have fun with friends, to gather like back in the day,” and this is how you notice that in the village there is a need to have such spaces.

And as the history of the WAF is isolated in the archives, so are women in the villages today. They stay at home during the entire day, that is why for me it was important for me to be confronted with the women in the village.

LL: At the end of the film we see recordings of a Serb woman from the village at a graveyard who tells a story of a partisan named Miruna Kovacevic, who dies after she shoots herself with a firearm following a failed action to break her brother out of prison. Tell me a little about this.

BH: Agimi was published in both Serbo-Croatian and Albanian language, and for me it was necessary and reasonable to also include Serbian women – I wanted to see their reactions when I told them this story and when they read fragments from Agimi.

I went to the village Banjë, which is along the road to Istog, a little further from Runik. Of course I needed an interpreter, and I took my elementary school teacher, Xhevat Uka, who helped me a lot in carrying out the interviews. I found them sitting at an old café, and we started the discussion with them. It turned out that they knew my teacher and they spoke a lot about memories in common. After they read Agimi, which they had never heard about before, Valentina Sapic insisted on having a copy of it. During the conversation, one of them started telling the story of a partisan woman, who I had of course never heard about. Miruna Kovacevic. In the final part of the film, she takes us to her grave and tells us her story. This part too, unintentionally, reveals again the gaps, and it is like a culmination of what is being revealed during the film. This story is not only forgotten but it was not even preserved properly, therefore you find its traces not necessarily only in the archives but also in fields where you least expect it.