Musine Kokalari and the Power of Images: law, aesthetics and memory regimes in the Albanian Experience

Concluding remarks

In this article I have argued that a photograph arouses strong emotional connections that go beyond its intended meaning. I used tarot cards to guide the reader through the life and background of the subject of the photograph, whose image continues to have an impact on Albanians. The use of the cards also served to provoke questions about the manner in which lives were lived at that time. A photograph can raise questions about the past that are quite distinct from the written record. The image’s punctum serves to startle the spectator, whose attention is then drawn to the details of the case, the fate of the condemned, and the subsequent measures of justice. The image is a means to talk about the past through itself, and in its materiality. The image conveys a continuous message that subsists, and a consciousness of having been there. The manner in which the photograph is used is in reality propaganda. In this way, photographs from the trial served an important purpose for the regime, generating knowledge about the general population and the ‘traitors’ in its midst. On the other hand, the narratives between past and present are interwoven. The photograph continues to be a part of propaganda about the country’s past. And the focus of my discussion, the photograph of Musine Kokalari from her 1946 trial, and Albania’s approach to ‘remembering the past’, reveals a number of lessons. First, it is not an easy matter to unravel a dictatorial regime.⁹⁶ Intellectuals in dictatorships tend to forge escape routes, whether real or imaginary, and never trust themselves.⁹⁷ In Twilight of the Eastern Gods, Ismail Kadare sets out a fictionalised account of his experience at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow in the late 1950s. The main protagonist of the story, also a writer, is much preoccupied by the Albanian legend of Kostantin and Doruntine.⁹⁸ According to the legend, when Doruntine marries and moves away, Kostantin promises his mother that he will fetch her for weddings and funerals. And when he and all his brothers are killed, his ghost takes on the same task. In Twilight of the Eastern Gods the writer comes to realise that his days are numbered, as Albania and the Soviet Union drift ever further apart. The writer becomes a veritable ghost in Moscow. In other words, he turns into a ghost even to himself, as a means to survive the terror. The intellectual, in this sense, lives amongst ghosts.

These ghosts, or experiences lived during the dictatorship, inevitably have an impact upon legal measures aimed at redressing the injustices of the predecessor regime, given all of the voices silenced through repression and the later, self-imposed censorship, the result of inexperience and fear. This state of mind has been well captured by Rubinlir:

The epidemic of persecution mania first afflicted intellectuals of western education, since the ones who were educated in the east were immune to Stalinist ways. But in a few years it spread to the most humble peasant in the land….At each turn he would look carefully back to see if the devil from the table in front of him was still following…it was enough for him to be caught by the ‘Sigurimi man’ crisis.⁹⁹

Secondly, when initiatives are presented as changing everything, they in fact change nothing. The best example is the official confining of the past to history on the grounds that the populace was complicit in perpetrating it. This in turn silences the role of the law. When art engages with the law, and law meets art at its apex, as in the case of a photograph, the silences have the potential to turn into opportunities that can then go on to overcome some of these obstacles to the recounting of certain narratives. For example, the tarot cards, used to guide us through the events and the image’s meanings, show not only that Musine’s name was on everyone’s lips in Albania then, but also that her image is before everyone’s eyes in Albania now, and a part of the construction of a master narrative about the communist terror. In either case, her personal narrative is suppressed, and any accompanying text is sidelined. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the meaning-making of the visual image. Musine’s hidden legacy points to the importance of making sure that reckoning with the past opens up new avenues of learning about the nature of the dictatorship, and that the process of historicising does not underplay how significant justice is for societies emerging from a dictatorship. This is an especially critical moment for a country that is examining the nature of the dictatorship. The adoption of law and aesthetics analysis is key and it points to a vital question, namely, the capacity of the law to create affective justice. The answer to ‘what’s in a face?’ is that Musine’s face is the story of many ‘Musine’s’.
REFERENCE LIST

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1. 
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2. 
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3. 
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5. 
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6. 
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7. 
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8. 
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11. 
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Books

12. 
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13. 
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14. 
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15. 
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16. 
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17. 
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20. 
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21. 
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22. 
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23. 
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24. 
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25. 
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26. 
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27. 
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28. 
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29. 
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30. 
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31. 
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32. 
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33. 
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34. 
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35. 
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36. 
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39. 
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40. 
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41. 
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42. 
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43. 
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44. 
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45. 
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46. 
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47. 
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48. 
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49. 
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50. 
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51. 
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52. 
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53. 
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54. 
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55. 
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57. 
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58. 
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59. 
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62. 
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63. 
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64. 
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Films

64. 
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65. 
    Sophie Scholl: the Final Days (dir. Marc Rothemund, 2005)
    

Images

66. 
    The tarot card images are taken from Commons Wikimedia and in the public domain because the copyright has expired PD-US-not renewed.
    

Interviews

67. 
    Ismail Kadare, 6 October 2014, Paris
    
68. 
    Linda Kokalari, Musine Kokakari’s great-niece, correspondence 21 July 2013
    
69. 
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70. 
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Newspaper

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Online documents

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1^ Freedberg [26, 440] observes, in referring to Roland Barthes, ‘So much for the magnificent fullness of the photograph. It transcends death and peculiarly replenishes the lost being. What is lost or absent seems present, but we cannot know why. As soon as we strive to grasp that presence in all its fullness, we either fail or set out to tame or destroy it’, p. 440.

2^ Such as David King, [31] Red Star over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Death of Stalin (London: Tate, 2010).

3^ In this article image is used interchangeably with photograph. Of course, image can refer to ‘any likeness, figure, motif, or form that appears in some medium or other’, W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xiii.

4^ Roland Barthes [13, 9] refers to the Spectrum of the Photograph, and its relation to the ‘spectacle’, which ‘adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 9.

5^ Frances A. Yates [50 and 51]., ‘In the Cards’, The New York Review of Books, 19 February 1981 and by the same author, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

6^ Otto Kirchheimer [32, , Political Justice (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 419].

7^ This is a point discussed in semiotics and semiology, beginning with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course on General Linguistics (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1972)[44], based on a summary of his lectures delivered at the University of Geneva between 1906-1911. His work serves as a foundation for modern investigations into what underpins perception and communication. Charles S. Peirce, who worked on similar problems at the same time, made an important contribution to the debate with his notion of ‘Firstness’ as the primary perceptive event that is endowed with semiological meaning. See Justus Buchler [17, , Philosophical Writings of Charles S. Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 80].

8^ This paper develops the work set out in Agata Fijalkowski and Raluca Grosescu , [28]eds., Transitional Criminal Justice in Post-Dictatorial and Post-Conflict Societies, Series on Transitional Justice, Intersentia, 2015. There is now a wealth of studies in the field of transitional justice. See for example, Ruti Teitel [54], Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For considerations of domestic accountability in post-dictatorial societies, see Lavinia Stan [53], ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2008); Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [42]); Roman David [22], Lustration and Transitional Justice: Personnel Systems in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Mónika Serrano and Veselin Popovski, eds., After Oppression: Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe (New York: United Nations University Press, 2012); Adam Czarnota, Martin Krygier and Wojciech Sadurski, [21eds., Rethinking the Rule of Law after Communism (Budapest, CEU Press, 2005). Other works in this field analyse the politics of memory applied through historical commissions and museums, such as Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzales-Enriquez and Paloma Aguilar [23], eds., The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and, finally, James Mark [39], The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

9^ Peter Rush [60, , ‘Introduction’, in Olivera Simić and Peter D. Rush, eds., The Arts of Transitional Justice (Springer, 2012), pp. v-xi, at p. vii].

10^ Peter Rush [60,, ‘Introduction’, p. vii].

11^ Evi Girling [58,,, ‘The Witnessing of Judgment: Between Error, Mercy and Vindictiveness’, in Austin Sarat and Jürgen Martschukat, eds., Is the Death Penalty Dying?: European and American Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 109-125, at p. 109].

12^ During her exile Musine was extremely careful about making contact with anyone. Under constant surveillance by the Sigurimi, she never discussed her account, or perhaps only with select family members, but contact with them was severely restricted. Interview with Linda Kokalari [68], Musine’s great-niece, correspondence 21 July 2013. Musine’s writings have not been revisited or reissued by the state in the post-dictatorial period. This was done only by private initiatives.

13^ Walter Benjamin [52, , ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 395].

14^ Walter Benjamin [52, , ‘On the Concept of History’, p. 395].

15^ Benjamin [52, 395]..Ibid.

16^ Susan Sontag [57], Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

17^ Kathryn A. Heard [59, , ‘Unframing the Death Penalty’, in A. Sarat and J. Martschukat, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 126-149, at p. 130].

18^ For example, see Costas Douzinas and Lynda Neal [24] , eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) or W.J.T. Mitchell [40 and 41], Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and by the same author, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

19^ Eamonn Carrabine [5] , ‘Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology 52 (3) (2012), pp. 463-489 and Phil Carney [55], ‘Crime, Punishment and the Force of Photographic Spectacle’, in