Winner of the Polityka Passport Award
Winner of the Kościelski Award
A revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and
survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one
of the twentieth century's most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from
award-winning Polish journalist Margo Rejmer.
For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel
dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country's
borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags
and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that
lingers today: thirty years after the end of Hoxha's regime, its victims
are still waiting for justice.
In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence. Margo Rejmer
spent years in Albania gathering interviews that shed light on the four
decades of Hoxha's rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and
children, imprisoned and exiled writers, nuns and factory workers. She
arranges the voices of her interlocutors into a chorus that bears
witness to how ordinary people lived and died. We are immersed in
desperate border crossings, prison revolts, and everyday struggles to
make a living. We meet a writer who finds secret freedom in a tiny
village library of banned books, overlooked by censors. We meet a man
who still only speaks in a whisper, afraid of being overheard.
While Albanians endured surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under
Hoxha, they also read books and fell in love, raised families and found
ways to survive. In the tradition of Svetlana Alexievich, Mud Sweeter
than Honey is our most vivid, intimate portrait available in English of
this little-understood corner of Europe.
