My language

Albanian is my mother tongue, the first language with which my parents spoke to me, the first language I learned and spoke in my childhood, with a slightly vlonjat accent mixed with the gheg one. A funny accent. My mother’s side made fun of me because of the vlonjat accent, my father’s side made fun of me because I often mixed my vlonjat with gheg words.

I learned Italian when I was 4 years old and I learned to write and read at 5. But it’s curious how I also learned to write in Albanian having never gone to Albanian school. My mom studied literature at Shkodra University, she wrote poetry, novels and painted. She was an artist. One day, when I was 6 while I was home alone I found her collection of poems and love letters inside her closet, hidden behind a pile of folded clothes. I started reading slowly, and I was excited to understand all those weird words were in Albanian, even if I didn’t understand the meaning of her poems. I also began to read the letters she sent to my father, with lipstick kisses staining the papers, passport photos, and the phrase “të dua” at the end of every letter. I started to idealize love but also to write in Albanian. I took some blank sheets and like a scribe, I copied all of her poems. As soon as I heard her footsteps on the entrance stairs, I closed everything and put it back in place. I knew that they were something secret, otherwise she would have no reason to hide that swag of diaries, notebooks and letters.

Every time she left the house I went to her room to retrieve all her writings and i used to read and transcribe everything. This process lasted until we moved house and I no longer discovered the secret place of her works, but that’s how I learned to put the two dots on the right “ë”s.