For many Albanian women, the domestic is a space of terror and violence; what could be more heroic than surviving and writing in spite of that? How is it that a formal literary curriculum can almost completely erase the works of a group of proficient, formidable writers?
I could make a long list of my grievances about the Albanian educational system, but I have generally appreciated the breadth of my literary education. I no longer retain the official list of my required reading, but it is not hard to find a contemporary equivalent. I graduated from high school in , and in eight years, the list selected by the Ministry of Education does not seem to have changed much, which I find questionable. While I am grateful for my literary education, with the years I have become acutely aware of its flaws, the most egregious of which is the complete dismissal of women writers, especially Albanian women.
Dozens of books, an entire year dedicated to Albanian literature during my senior year, and yet I graduated without having heard the name of a single Albanian woman writer. But of course, they do. Albanian women have written and continue to do so, although Albanian students rarely speak their names. And their continual erasure from our school curricula raises a number of issues.
The bulk of our literary education takes place in classrooms. School curricula dictate what we read and what constitutes—and will continue to constitute—the national literary canon for centuries to come.
Removing the work of Albanian women from such curricula ultimately means deeming them somehow unworthy and erasing them from our collective memory. This has consequences that are not limited simply to literature, but to our understanding of what it means to be a woman in Albania. What are the names of the women we have pushed into literary oblivion and what part of our history, of who we are, have we lost by never hearing their voices?
