When I was in middle school, in late Communist-era Albania, we were made to memorize lines of poetry. Inevitably these were lines by men: heroic dead men, men whose busts adorned city squares and whose stern portraits were endlessly reproduced in textbooks. Very few women made it into those books, and women’s life writing was never given its proper place in the study of literature more broadly. Recent trends have been encouraging, however, and Bavjola Gami Shatro’s Essays on the Awareness of Loss in Contemporary Albanian Literature is a move in this welcome direction.

This is a collection of essays centered on the concept of loss within a wide-ranging body of work by five authors. The first section focuses on three women: Musine Kokalari, the pioneering interwar author who was eventually imprisoned and persecuted by the Communist regime in the 1940s; Bedi Pipa, one of the first known women to have authored a diary in Albanian letters; and Drita Çomo, a talented young writer who was born into a family with a tragic history and whose writing only saw the light after the collapse of the dictatorship. The second section then takes up the contemporary Albanian poetry of Fatos Arapi and Ali Podrimja, both leading lights in the genre and lyrical explorers of pain, loss, and love.

It is not that the second half is uninteresting, but both men are firmly established in the pantheon of Albanian letters. To my mind, then, the rewards are to be found in the exploration of the painful but rich legacy of the women discussed in the first half. Loss is a theme that runs through their personal lives (Kokalari’s loss of physical freedom; Çomo’s social isolation and later cancer diagnosis in a country that shunned her) as well as in their literary paths (by way of writing that remained confined to drawers for decades).

But the other theme is survival from oblivion, against the odds. The central chapter on Çomo, for example, powerfully brings out this imperative to bear witness. She was the daughter of Liri Belishova, a high-ranking Politburo member who was scapegoated as a party enemy in the 1960s and sent into internal exile. A toddler at the time, Drita grew up in banishment. Hers was a harrowing life spent in isolation. Ordinary people avoided “party enemies” like her as if they were bearers of a deadly virus. Drita turned to writing as a mechanism of making sense of the world, including writing about those very few people—wondrous exceptions in totalitarianism—who defied political and social norms and insisted on staying close to her.

Çomo’s words were never meant to survive, let alone be published or inspire. The security police (Sigurimi) kept a watchful eye on her. But much of the writing did survive, in part thanks to her mother, who outlived the dictatorship that had once elevated and then punished her. Gami Shatro shows readers how Çomo “remained a poet when writing her diary” (136), how she “coexisted with death” but insisted on living too (139).

“Çomo reaches us across time,” she writes, movingly, “as she lives her second life” (184). This second literary life can also serve as a kind of testament on the legacy of a dictatorship now no longer understood by a younger generation of Albanians, who increasingly struggle to separate fact from fiction when it comes to a regime that produced its own state-backed auto-fiction consumed by the masses as history.

Post-Communist Albania has tended to canonize Musine Kokalari as a standout icon of suffering, but Essays on the Awareness of Loss reminds us of the value of comparative work. Gami Shatro favors the vignette and the open-ended approach, as a kind of invitation to the reader to roam around, to explore parallels, to consider texts side by side. It is not an easy feat to introduce complex biography and history, alongside translated poems, to an English-reading audience. The book has interesting things to say about the relation between loss and grief, articulations of freedom, and the stubbornness of the power of human observation set against cruelty. These were lives lived against the hard frame of a centralizing state that spoke in universalisms, in a male-dominated culture. The choice of an open-ended reading is therefore apt.