The Closing Chant: When Personal Grievance Becomes Communal Voice
The story has been building for a long time before it breaks. Durije, alone with her infant while the mother-in-law is out, is already past the point of composure when her sister Neslije arrives. What follows is a recounting — methodical, furious, and exhausting — of everything Durije has endured in four years of marriage to this household.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
7/21/20264 min read
The story has been building for a long time before it breaks. Durije, alone with her infant while the mother-in-law is out, is already past the point of composure when her sister Neslije arrives. What follows is a recounting — methodical, furious, and exhausting — of everything Durije has endured in four years of marriage to this household.
The list is specific and physical. She washed shirts burning with fever, her shoulders aching so badly she could not eat her supper. She fell like a log in the middle of the room; her eyes would not open. Her husband came home drunk. The night slipped away without sleep. She rose before the sun had fully climbed — and descended the stairs to the sound of Fatime muttering about daughters-in-law who rise in the middle of the day like babes.
She kneaded the bread. She sent it to the oven. She washed the dishes. The coffee jar tipped over, and Fatime started again from the beginning.
“The glass filled and overflowed; she brought my soul to the tip of my nose — I could not hold back any longer.”
What breaks is not impulsiveness. It is the precise, documented, accumulated weight of indignity reaching the exact point where endurance runs out. Musine Kokalari has built the story so that when Durije snaps, the reader has been given every layer of what produced it.
The Mechanism of Accumulation
May Evil Mothers-in-Law Be Gone is structured as an accumulation. Durije’s complaints do not repeat themselves; they build. Each new detail adds another stratum to the picture: the keys kept at the mother-in-law’s waist so Durije cannot access her own household stores; the shame inflicted in front of friends; the four years without crossing the threshold freely, without attending a wedding, without once putting on her dresses — they are rotting in the trunk.
The image of the rotting dresses is one of the most arresting in the collection. In the world Kokalari depicts, weddings and communal gatherings are among the primary forms of joy available to women — visible participation in the life of the community, a young woman’s right to be seen and to celebrate. Durije has been cut off from all of it. The dresses sit in the trunk not as a minor frustration but as the material evidence of a foreclosed life.
The physical toll is rendered with equal precision. Fever, sleeplessness, the husband arriving drunk and needing to be settled, a nursing infant who cried the whole night through, collapsing to the ground after the confrontation, being drenched with water by a neighbor who arrives with her head uncovered because she ran. When Durije opens her eyes, she sees her son Sefer’s face turned pitch black from crying. She draws him to her breast and starts nursing him. Her mother-in-law, meanwhile, sets her veil upon her head and goes off to her daughter’s.
Two Sisters, Two Arguments
Against Durije’s testimony stands Neslije — her own sister, who loves her, and who urges her to endure. Neslije’s argument is not abstract. She is not simply counseling patience as a virtue. She is making a clear-eyed economic and familial case: their father is old, his line is dwindling, their mother has withered. There is nowhere to return to. The father’s house cannot support Durije if she leaves. Endurance is not a choice Neslije recommends lightly — she has done it herself, she says, and not a word left her mouth.
Kokalari gives Neslije’s argument genuine weight. It is not dismissed, not caricatured as mere submission. It reflects a real constraint that shapes what is actually possible for a woman in Durije’s position. And yet Durije refuses it:
“I will not listen to anyone. Better a dry crust and peace. I’ll throw the sack over my shoulder and go begging; I’ll labor with my own hands in other people’s houses, I’ll feed myself and my son — and I will not die, for how does the rest of the world manage?”
The refusal is not naive. Durije knows what leaving would cost. She names the alternative — begging, laboring in other people’s houses — and chooses it over continued endurance. Her defiance stands alongside her sister’s pragmatism without either voice winning. The story holds the tension between them without resolving it.
The Closing Chant
The story ends not in dialogue but in a sudden shift of register. After exhausting her curses — may the mother-in-law linger until her belly rots, may she be struck down, may her mouth finally fall silent — Durije breaks into something that sounds less like speech and more like song:
Clatter, clatter, cracking — o! The old women have gone mad — o! Old women of evil ways, May the house fall and bury them, The hearth and the chimney with it.
The shift is sudden and striking. What began as one woman’s private complaint has become something communal — a chant that sounds rehearsed, passed down, learned from others who felt exactly this. The incantatory rhythm, the repeated “o!”, the folk-refrain structure all suggest that Durije is not composing these words on the spot. They exist. Someone, at some point, felt this strongly enough to make them. Others learned them and kept them alive.
The chant lifts Durije’s suffering out of the particular and into a shared tradition of female grievance. What she is experiencing is not an isolated misfortune. It has a name, a form, and a voice that has been spoken before. In this final movement, Kokalari does something characteristic of her deepest work: she allows a single woman’s anguish to open outward into the wider condition it belongs to, without diminishing either the individual or the collective weight of what has been said.
Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:
📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284
📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G
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