Flora BROVINA
BIOGRAPHY
Flora Brovina (b. 1949), poet, pediatrician and women’s
rights activist, was born in the town of Skënderaj in the
Drenica valley of Kosova. She was raised in Prishtina where she
went to school and began studying medicine. After finishing her
university studies in Zagreb, where she specialized in pediatrics,
she returned to Kosova and worked for a time as a journalist
for the Albanian-language daily newspaper Rilindja. Soon
thereafter, she returned to her true profession and calling of
health care and worked for many years in the Pediatrics Ward
of the Prishtina General Hospital.
As the political situation in Kosova deteriorated in the nineties
and fighting inevitably broke out, Brovina ran a health clinic
in Prishtina in which she distributed health care information
on matters as diverse as snake bites, dressing wounds and delivering
babies. She also used the centre to shelter an increasing number
of orphaned children, many of whom had lost their parents during
the fighting and expulsions. She and her fellow workers were
taking care of up to twenty-five children at any given time.
On 20 April 1999 during the Kosova war, Brovina was abducted
by eight masked Serb paramilitaries from the home she was staying
in and was driven off by car to an initially unknown destination.
She was thus in captivity in Serbia when NATO forces took the
capital and Serb troops withdrew from the country. The first
news of her abduction broke on 24 April 1999 when her son
managed to contact the international writers’ association,
PEN, with an urgent appeal that the news of her abduction be
made known as widely as possible. She was transferred to a Serb
prison in Pozharevac and, in her first month of detention, was
subjected to over 200 hours of interrogation in 18 separate
sessions lasting typically from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. On 9 December
1999, in a show trial, she was accused of ‘terrorist activities’
under Article 136 of the Yugoslav Penal Code. She spent a year
and a half in Serb prisons before being released as a result
of international pressure.
As a writer, Flora Brovina is the author of three volumes
of lyric verse. The first collection, Verma emrin tim
(Call me by my name), was published in Prishtina in 1973 when
she was a mere twenty-four years old. It contains forty-two poems
and gives proof of distinct lyric expression. Six years later,
in 1979, the collection Bimë e zë (Plant and
voice) followed which evinces a more mature style and a steadier
hand. It is in this collection that some of the main themes of
Brovina’s poetry crystallize. Conspicuous among them is
the fate of women in society, and in particular the role of women
as mothers, as life-givers and nurturers. It is here typically
that births, umbilical cords, amniotic fluid and suckling breasts
begin to make their appearance. But plants, too, grow and unfold
their leaves in her poems. These are perhaps the most ubiquitous
symbols of her verse production. Her third and last collection
of original verse, entitled Mat e çmat (With the
tape it measures), was published in Prishtina in 1995. It is
the most compelling and impressive of her volumes. Mat e çmat
appeared at a time when Kosova was obviously and perhaps inevitably
gravitating towards war. Though this third collection cannot
be interpreted as political verse to any great extent - too personal,
maternal and feminist is the world of Flora Brovina -, there
are many poems in the volume which reflect her preoccupation
not only with the problems and aspirations of individuals, but
also with the fate of her people, with freedom and self-determination.
The very survival of the verdant plants budding in the poet’s
hands had been called into question.
In 1999, Flora Brovina was recipient of the annual Tucholsky
Award of the Swedish PEN Club, a prize which has been awarded
to other writers of note such as Salman Rushdie, Adam Zagajevski,
Nuruddin Farah, Taslima Nasrin, Shirali Nurmuadov and Vincent
Magombe. She was also given the Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to
Write Award by the American PEN centre and the Human Rights Award
of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin.
Despite this international recognition, it is curious to note
that, as a poet, Flora Brovina has never been part of the literary
establishment of Kosova, nor has her verse found its way into
the mainstream of contemporary Albanian literature. A collection
of her verse has appeared in English in Flora Brovina, Call
me by my Name, Poetry from Kosova in a bilingual Albanian-English
Edition, translated by Robert Elsie, New York: Gjonlekaj
2001. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Kosova, Macedonia and Montenegro (late 20th
- 21st centuries)
