“Cursed Be Whoever Opened It”: The School as Villain in Kokalari’s As Old Neno Tells Me

The opening story of Old Neno’s Stories is a single unbroken monologue. No narrator sets the scene, no second voice pushes back, no authorial commentary intervenes. There is only Neno — an elderly woman in southern Albania, sometime in the late 1930s — addressing a young girl who has had the temerity to ask how things were in the old days.

What follows is one of the most combustible opening movements in Albanian literature: a torrent of complaint, pride, exaggeration, and genuine anguish about a world Neno no longer recognizes. She rails against bare arms, swaying hips, laughing too loudly, marrying for love. She recalls with satisfaction a wedding day when her legs trembled and she did not once look at the man she was marrying. She announces, without embarrassment, that she bore her husband six children and never once called him by his name.

And then, near the story’s emotional climax, she identifies the source of everything that has gone wrong.

“It’s the school that’s turned you wild, child! I’m telling you — do you hear? It took even that little bit of sense you had, and it went fiu. Cursed be whoever opened it — it ruined our home. May that learning disappear.”

The outburst lands with the force of a genuine conviction. For Neno, the school is not a minor irritant. It is the agent of catastrophe — the thing that reached into her household and scrambled the order she had lived by for decades.

The irony at the heart of the book

Here is the detail that changes everything: the young girl Neno is addressing — who writes, who sings, who scribbles nonsense and wants to be a teacher, who has the temerity to ask how the old people lived — is, in all but name, Musine Kokalari herself.

Kokalari was born in Gjirokastra in 1917. She studied literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, returning home in the summer of 1938 with a growing sense that her fiction needed deeper roots in the social world around her. What she did next was to move through her community with a notebook — listening to the servant women, the laundress, her mother checking folk sayings, the sister-in-law at her handiwork. She collected voices. She recorded the living speech of a world that had never thought of itself as worth writing down.

When a neighbor noticed what she was doing and remarked, “Bless this girl; she goes to a big school and starts writing this nonsense,” Kokalari answered simply: these things are needed.

The first collection of ten stories, Siç më thoëtë Nënua plakë — As Old Neno Tells Me — was published in 1939. The book you are now holding, the first English translation of Kokalari’s work, takes its title from that collection.

Which means that the voice Neno curses — the school-educated girl who scribbles nonsense and wastes her time on foolishness — is the same voice that preserved Neno’s monologue for the past eighty-five years. Without the school Neno despises, neither the writer nor the book would exist. And without the writer and the book, Neno’s voice itself would be lost.

What Kokalari does with that irony

The remarkable thing is that Kokalari does nothing with it. She does not point to it, does not signal it with a knowing wink, does not soften Neno’s curse or follow it with a corrective. She simply lets Neno speak — in full, without interruption, without commentary — and trusts the reader to feel the contradiction.

This is the first and perhaps the defining gesture of the collection: radical non-intervention. Kokalari steps entirely aside and allows a voice to occupy the page on its own terms, with all its fury and contradiction and vulnerability intact. Neno is not mocked. She is not framed as a relic. Her anguish about a dissolving world is rendered with the same care and precision as everything else she says.

What emerges is something more complicated than a simple portrait of tradition resisting change. Neno’s condemnation of the school sits alongside a moment of almost unbearable tenderness — “my eyes weep to see you a bride, my precious girl” — and a confession of exhaustion that borders on grief: “By God, the earth in my grave will taste like honey.” The woman who curses whoever opened the school is also a woman who loves the girl in front of her, who is frightened by old age, who has watched a world that gave her life structure and dignity dissolve faster than she can process.

The school is the villain in Neno’s story. But in Kokalari’s story, the school is also the reason we are reading.

A note on the translation

“Cursed be whoever opened it — it ruined our home. May that learning disappear.” These lines appear in the original Albanian with the full incantatory force of a traditional curse formula — the kind of expression that, in Albanian speech, combines religious invocation, exaggeration, and moral judgment in a single breath. The translation preserves that structure rather than smoothing it into neutral English, on the principle that Neno’s voice should remain as direct and unsparing on the page as it was in life.

The story that opens this collection is titled “As Old Neno Tells Me” — the title of the original 1939 Albanian publication, and the source of the book’s English title. It is the right place to begin. It introduces the voice that will guide readers through everything that follows: sharp, funny, proud, vulnerable, and entirely unafraid of its own contradictions.

Old Neno’s Stories is available now:

• Amazon

• Barnes & Noble

About this series

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring the stories in Old Neno’s Stories one by one — their language, their characters, their cultural world, and what they reveal about Musine Kokalari’s craft as a writer. New posts appear every Tuesday and Thursday.

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