Reclaiming anger and doubt
Pajtim Statovci manages to be graceful even when talking about anger and spite. The public in Teatro Bibiena, sitting in the stalls or perched on its finely decorated baroque boxes, can’t help but be struck by it.
Marco Archetti, who moderates the event, describes reading his novels as “entering a cave with only a match for light,” because of the constant sense of danger and unease they evoke. In his view, the world in his books is perpetually at odds with the individual, continually preventing people from being themselves and subjecting them to relentless resistance.
Identity itself is never singular: it is at once individual and collective. Finnish and Kosovan, like Statovci. Yet, as he observes, his characters rarely dwell on whether they are one thing or the other. It is the world around them that insists on such distinctions, imposing categories and expectations. What interests him are “the structures that make us choose." Although he is acutely aware of the assumptions people make and of how they perceive him, he simply wants to “bloom and flourish” and move lightly through the world. “It’s funny”, he says, “how he writes so much about identity and cares so little about it.”
Prompted by Archetti on whether writing in the Finnish language made him more objective in writing about Kosovo, he wholeheartedly agrees. As his second language, Finnish creates a distance from what he writes, giving him "the courage to be more furious, more angry”. It provides him with a different toolbox from his native language, allowing him to be “the person that he needs to be when he writes”. He describes his writing process as a dissociative one.
The Cow Gives Birth at Night explores, among other things, the limits of forgiveness, healing, and empathy. A story of anger, spite, and revenge, it serves as a testament to their importance and inevitability. The Cow is an appeal to “bring back” these affects and use them as a driving force in critical and violent times.
Rage and national identity are two complex themes, burdened by expectations, assumptions, and judgements. The claustrophobia that accompanies Statovci, a member of the Kosovan diaspora, cannot simply be shrugged off on the page. For him, writing is not a liberating process, but a continuous and perennially unfinished effort borne out of “disturbance, fear, the need to explain something that bothers him about the world”. The structural incompleteness of this project is why he keeps returning to it.
Statovci stands out for the elegance of his speech, the deliberateness of every single word, and the kindness and generosity he extends to the interpreter, the audience, and the moderator. Still, as the conversation draws to a close and the crowd prepares to leave, his final words remain true to the themes he foregrounds: “I want to get into an argument and fuck some shit up!”
