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Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in a world that sometimes seems to be tearing itself apart, it may be the small word that meets our current challenges.

Learning a language, therefore, is not only learning the alphabet, the letter sounds and the shapes, the meaning, the grammar rules, and the structure or arrangement of words, but it is also learning the behavior of the society and its cultural customs.

– Kadri Krasniqi

Can a word be the glue that holds a cultural community together? Can two simple syllables extend tendrils throughout a diverse state and connect at levels from empire all the way down to the everyday? And if so, would it then be possible to uproot that word and plant it into another language?

The Albanian word besa goes back to the medieval period, and its origins as a social concept may go back much further. It has played a central role in some of Albania’s most significant literature and mythic narratives. It has even been a part of world-historical events that have played out on Albanian soil. All in all, it is a concept that touches the lives of many daily.

Besa—literally “to keep the promise”—means, in the words of scholar Kadri Krasniqi, “taking care of those in need, protecting them, and being hospitable to every single human being you have given your promise.” The word is interwoven into the very meaning of Albanian community, as seen through scholar Besmir Shishko, who writes that “besa contains mores toward obligations to the family and a friend, the demand to have internal commitment, loyalty, and solidarity when conducting oneself with others.”

Sources tend to agree that besa came about in part because of the frequent incursions of invaders into Albania’s territory throughout history—when anyone could be turned into a refugee at a moment’s notice, community norms toward hospitality, protection, and solidarity would make a lot of sense. As a legal doctrine, besa goes back perhaps to the fourteenth century, when the Statutes of Scutari, a legal code for the region (which was then known as Scutari), documented the concept of an oath as a part of the social order. Since that time, besa has been passed down for generations as part of Albania’s Kanun, a set of common laws that has governed the lands since the fifteenth century. Beyond the legal sphere, some see the very idea of besa as possibly originating in the Christian Bible, while others, such as leading Albanian author Ismail Kadare, consider it as predating Christianity. With the opening of Albanian society and overall modernization throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept has begun to lose much of the cultural currency it once had.

A notable act of besa that reappears again and again in the literature surrounding the word occurred when the Albanian population protected thousands of Jewish individuals during the Holocaust, taking them into their very own homes and treating them like family. This act is perhaps even more remarkable when one learns that, at the time, Albania was the only nation in Europe where the majority of the population was Muslim. This diverse country considered it its besa to protect Jews by granting them false identity papers and hiding them within their homes. It is a point of cultural pride that, according to many accounts, the refusal to aid and abet the Nazis was so thorough that not a single Jewish person was turned over to Nazis by Albanians during World War II, despite intense pressure by the occupying forces to give up lists of Jewish people. 

Decades later, during the wars of separation that occurred as the former Yugoslavia splintered into individual nations after the fall of communism, Albanians again showed care and hospitality to those caught up in horrific, genocidal acts. Writer Hamza Karčić recalled his experience of besa as he fled Slobodan Milošević’s siege of Sarajevo as a ten-year-old boy:

In my case, long before I had ever heard of the concept of besa, my family and I experienced it. Other Bosniak families who came to Macedonia with us, as well as many who poured into the town in the following weeks, were similarly given besa by other Albanian families…

Albanians’ besa to Bosniaks was not a top-down decision. It was a grassroots, people-to-people, humane response to an ongoing genocide. Nor was it the only time Albanians had acted this way in the twentieth century. It is a testament to the power of an informal code of conduct and a reminder that acts of immense faith and hope do take place.

Beyond wars, the concept has also figured significantly into Albanian history via politics. In one major example, the concept was integral to Albania becoming an independent nation from the Ottoman Empire; as Bedri Muhadri explained in an article in Kosovo Online, “by forming the League of Prizren in 1878, besa was given to fight for the independence of Albania against Ottoman rule.” Muhadri also explained that besa has factored as a way for politicians to build consensus among the population for major policy proposals. “When the unity of the Albanian masses was sought to achieve their legal and political rights, they gave their word and thus, through faith, created lasting trust and cohesion.” 

One of the earliest instances of the concept of besa in Albanian literature is found in the age-old ballad “Constantin’s Besa,” which tells the story of Constantin, the youngest of twelve brothers to only-daughter Doruntine. Constantin promises his mother to bring back Doruntine after she is married far from home, and even dying in a war does not prevent Constantin from keeping his besa to his mother. Constantin does, in fact, bring her back home, and in the climactic finale, both women realize Constantin has risen from the dead on his sister’s behalf.

This ballad, which is often sung at Albanian weddings, has been the subject of much literature, notably Kadare’s novel Kush e solli Doruntinën? (literally, “Who brought Doruntine back?”, although translated into English by Jon Rothschild as The Ghost Rider). Kadare adds his own flourish to the legend by placing it in the context of a medieval police procedural and adding the character of the detective Stres, who must solve the mystery of how the dead Constantin could bring back his sister. In Kadare’s hands, the story turns into a meditation on the birth of legend, the origins of Albania’s version of Christianity, and the source of its Kanun laws.

More recently, the legend of Constantin and Doruntine was transformed into a bilingual children’s book, Doruntina’s Besa, released on International Women’s Day in 2021 by the United Nations. Notably, the book aspires to feminist goals by giving the legend’s besa to Doruntine (who is the hero of this book) instead of Constantin. In the words of the book’s press release, “This publication aims to teach children, youngsters and adults alike, that boys and girls bring the same happiness into families’ lives and that no one should have the right to decide for women’s and girls’ marriage.” It is an example of how the concept continues to have cultural currency, centuries after it was first codified into existence.

Scholars Craig T. Palmer and Amber L. have argue that literary texts have played an essential role in transmitting besa through the centuries. They believe that literature has been a significant part of ensuring that the concept has retained cultural value:

The behaviors prescribed in the Kanun were not simply transmitted from parents to offspring as simple instructions of how to behave. Instead, the tradition was made more interesting, and thus more influential, through being transmitted in stories, songs, and plays, and these accompanying behaviors often emphasized the importance of keeping one’s besa to sacrifice for others as prescribed by the Kanun. Whitaker (1968) explained how “traditional Albanian epic songs (këngë trimnijë)… reveal the Canon of Lekë Dukagnini in operation,” and Mustafa, Young, Galaty and Lee (2013) observed that the pledge of besa to follow the social behavior required by the Kanun is “informed by cultural narratives so immense and unique to the people of the valley that entire books have been written about them.”

If Palmer and Palmer’s argument is true, then the translation of literature that centers besa in foreign languages may play a substantial role in spreading this concept worldwide. But translation of besa is quite challenging, not least because it is so fluid and shifting a notion. In the words of writer and translator Tom Phillips, “It is a quality, an obligation, a gift, but it can also mean truce, haven, protection, peace. It is none of these alone, and all of them at once, existing where they overlap or, like mortar in a wall, in the gaps between them. . . . Nor is besa a necessarily fixed concept: its definition is open to negotiation on, as it were, a case-by-case basis.”

In a world that is often critiqued for being overly transactional, based more on economic relationships than relationships based in human mores of community and connection, and also a world that at times seems to be tearing itself apart, besa would seem to have much to offer. Perhaps the very things that lead Phillips to say that besa eludes translation—that is, its flexibility and multiple nature—are those that make it so pertinent for the challenges that we face today.

Oakland, California

Photo: ink drop / Stock.adobe.com.

In this issue, we are pleased to begin a new collaboration with the Residency in Literary Translation, directed by professor Daniela Bentancur, of the “Juan Ramón Fernández” Institute of Higher Education in Living Languages of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This text was translated from English to Spanish by María Victoria D’Ercole, who took part in the residency.

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Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet’s mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims.

Over the past decade or so, a new cadre of female Latin American writers has emerged in English translation. Although each is distinctive in her own right, these writers share enough overlapping themes, approaches, and styles that we might refer to it as a “school,” if not a “movement.” On their common ground are the misogynistic violence that pervades the lives of Latin American women; bodily autonomy, especially around access to abortion; the ongoing definition and redefinition of gender; internet culture and how it mediates identity and personhood; and brushes with the existential. These writers have responded to such themes in common ways; most notably, by embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. Their literature speaks particularly to a younger, female audience, and these authors seem to have a collective finger on the pulse of their readers’ lives.

Although I cannot pretend to have an exhaustive list of the writers in this group, I can name off the ones that currently stand out to me in English translation. In no particular order, they include Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Melchor, Liliana Colanzi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, Nona Fernández, and Lina Meruane. Certainly there are more currently at work in Spanish as well as others emerging in English translation.

A good example of the prototypical novel of this group of writers is Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda’s 2018 novel Mandíbula, published in 2022 as Jawbone in Sarah Booker’s translation. It tells the story of a schoolteacher for an elite preparatory school for upper-class girls who goes mad, kidnapping one of her students and subjecting her to experiences of body horror. On one level, the book captures many of the central concerns of Latin American writers like Ojeda—body autonomy, the socialization of girls within Latin American society, mental and physical horrors perpetrated against women of the continent—yet it also communicates on levels that are detached from a Latin American context, as it speaks in languages comprehensible to young women throughout the developed world. Specifically, Ojeda speaks in the language of true crime podcasts, streaming serials, creepypastas, and the world of therapy. Regarding some of her literary influences, Ojeda told me: “I have a thing for true crime documentaries. I don’t like to like them because they really hurt me, but I keep going to them. And creepypastas, of course. Not all of them, but some are so very powerful.”

One of the striking things about Jawbone is how it comes across as something along the lines of a true crime podcast or a creepypasta—did you ever hear the one about the teacher who went mad and tortured her own student? It converses with the media resonating with young women across the globe, giving it a currency that transcends its Ecuadoran context. Yet even as Jawbone feels very of the moment, it also connects up with deep-rooted aspects of the Latin American tradition. For instance, the book includes chapters that read as though they are transcripts from one of the main character’s therapy sessions, the speakers only denoted by a Q or an A, and the questions asked by Q not included in the transcript. This tracks back to the powerful psychoanalytical writing that was a core aspect of twentieth-century Latin American literature, reminiscent of Manuel Puig, in particular. In addition, the suggestion that the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is involved in the school weaves in a political aspect, staying true to the propensity for Latin American authors to let politics infuse their narratives in subtle and unexpected ways. It also brings to mind canonical Latin American writers like Roberto Bolaño, who referenced the sexual abuse scandals, misogyny, and supposed ties to right-wing dictatorships held by Opus Dei.

The Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel covers areas overlapping with Ojeda—girlhood, psychoanalysis, the quandary of being embodied—doing it with her own twinge of horror and the gothic. For instance, her 2011 novel El cuerpo en que nací, translated into English in 2015 by J. T. Lichtenstein as The Body Where I Was Born, takes the form of a woman recounting her traumatizing childhood to a therapist (see WLT, Jan. 2016, 65). “We perpetrate unto the newest generation the neuroses of our forebears, wounds we keep inflicting on ourselves like a second layer of genetic inscription.” The narrator recounts a life lived with a scar on her cornea—how this mark of difference has impacted her throughout her lifetime, and how she has come to terms with that congenital wound.

As with Ojeda and other writers of her school, the narrator’s childhood is inflected by the political realities of the period. Nettel’s narrative implicates the political turmoil that gripped Latin America throughout the 1960s and ’70s, including Mexico’s own infamous massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the disastrous Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Nettel also brings in the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, a watershed moment for the nation and a pivotal turning point on its long, slow journey out of single-party dictatorship and into pluralistic democracy.

Like Ojeda’s book, Nettel’s is about how women are taught to be the subjected gender during childhood and adolescence and the narrator’s own struggle to free herself and to inhabit her body as an autonomous being. The book’s title comes from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Song,” in which he writes: “I always wanted / to return / to the body / where I was born.” For Nettel’s narrator, claiming ownership over the body she was born in—despite it being disfigured by a debilitating scar over one cornea—is tantamount to learning to live as an independent woman in a world that has taught her at every turn to be dependent and unfree. It is a struggle familiar to the women—whether adults or adolescents—in Ojeda’s Jawbone, and it is a theme running through Nettel’s work. For instance, her short-story collection Natural Histories, translated in 2014 by Lichtenstein, similarly documents women struggling to define freedom on their own terms despite heterosexual relationships that subject them to a variety of misogynistic forces. As in her novel, in these stories Nettel pares back the narrative frame to the basics, letting her focus more closely on the emotions, demoralization, and confusion that her women experience as they seek to gain an understanding of their situation, and ultimately a degree of agency over it.

If Ojeda draws us closely into the existential situation of Latin American women, and Nettel closer still, then perhaps no other female Latin American writer throws a reader as boldly and completely into this state of existential confusion and peril of women as does the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin. What is most striking about Schweblin’s narratives is that they tend to sit somewhere between realism and allegory, providing enough detail to take them down from the realm of myth or fable but not providing anywhere near enough detail to give a full sense of the reality her characters inhabit, as you would get from typical realist fiction. The result is that when reading Schweblin I always feel very closely—and very intensely—attached to the protagonist’s world of emotions and sensations, as this is usually the bulk of what Schweblin gives a reader to grab onto. Unsurprisingly, it is a world characterized by extremely heightened states, crisis moments, and extremes of mental and physical functioning. I would not be surprised if reading Schweblin significantly raises my cortisol levels.

The results of Schweblin’s particular way of storytelling are narratives that feel like very strange, distinctive, and original takes on concerns familiar to her feminist peers. For instance, her story “Olingiris” is framed around a complaint common to women everywhere: the rituals and practices necessitated by the societal imperative that women have skin free of hair. But Schweblin makes it peculiarly her own: the story’s frame tale is one of women being paid for some never-explained reason to harvest their body hair in excruciating fashion by a team of women wielding tweezers. “Headlights” centers on a woman calming the emotional pain of being scorned by her husband while having a bizarre encounter with an older woman amid a backdrop of the wails of similarly scorned women. Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate, translated by Megan McDowell as Fever Dream (2017), is at heart the tale of two mothers coming to terms with the ever-present potential that their young children might die, but told via the titular fever-dream narration of a woman slowly succumbing to death.

Although the political realities that sit so squarely in the work of Ojeda and Nettel might seem a more difficult fit in the strange worlds of Schweblin, events from the political life of Latin America do make themselves felt in the tales she tells. Schweblin herself has said that Fever Dream was informed by the widespread use of toxic pesticides throughout her native Argentina, which have been linked to disease and death for the townspeople within their range, these pesticides being necessitated by Argentina’s place as a major producer of soybeans in the global economy. Her 2015 collection Siete casas vacías, translated by McDowell as Seven Empty Houses (2022), references the widespread misogyny that has led to epidemics of femicide throughout Latin American nations. One of the book’s epigraphs comes from Juan Luis Martínez’s “The Disappearance of a Family,” widely understood as implicating the politicized violence that Latin American governments visited on ordinary citizens during the twentieth century.

These three writers—and many of their peers, whose work I cannot discuss in detail for reasons of space—are independently arriving at overlapping territory in ways that feel meaningfully similar, despite the originality each brings to her work. They are invoking a universalized idea of womanhood ensconced in the middle and upper classes that is broadly familiar for the way it is reproduced throughout film, TV, music, Instagram, advertising, and so many other forms of media. While they are doing this in a way that is deeply true to their particular cultures and identities as Latin Americans, their stories also feel relevant to any woman who has managed a certain level of stability and material comfort in her life. For instance, the way that Ojeda brings internet horror folklore into her Jawbone, or how Schweblin brings in widespread unease about the ways we connect over social media to her Little Eyes, gives these books a broadness and a relevance as contemporary world literature.

For the mostly female protagonists and antagonists in these narratives, the world is a place not their own—they strive to stay afloat, and they learn the rules to their worlds via trials-by-fire. These worlds generally involve a level of danger that the protagonists are continually trying to determine, even as they seek the signifiers of normality that women are pushed to aspire toward, such as beautifying themselves, finding lasting and secure love, raising children, and leading lives full of self-care and stability. If Ojeda, Nettel, and Schweblin find resonance and meaning in the realms of horror, the political, and bodies, and if these realities in turn resonate beyond their Latin American context, it is perhaps because they are in touch with something basic about being a woman in the early twenty-first century.

As Ojeda told me, by writing through the lens of horror she is able to drill down to the basics, which is how writers have always created art that speaks most broadly. “I think we all know fear just as much as we know love. We fear because we love, we fear because we are fragile, we fear because we are all going to die. Love is so beautiful and strong and nevertheless is vulnerable like a flower. What can a flower do against all the dangers in the world? So we tremble, so we try to protect the flower because it is so delicate, so precious. Writing horror makes you think about this kind of stuff and takes you back to myth and symbols, which I love.”

Photo: Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, by Mely Avila.