Give up being a woman to conquer the privileges of man

The protagonist is Hana Doda, a young woman who, in the mid -80s, decides to leave her university studies in the capital, Tirana, to return to her remote village in the damn mountains, near the border with Kosovo. There his uncle Gjergj has just died, who raised her when her parents lost their lives in a bus accident. In this isolated place, however, there was an old and repressive custom, with five centuries of history, which prevented women from working, being family heads, administering goods, traveling alone, deciding their future, marrying freely and even entering the bars or smoking. In short, live in freedom.

As it emphasizes Elvira Jones (Durës, Albania, 1960) In fiction originally published in 2007, which now sees light in Spain for the first time, “women are reserved obedience, but Hana had a problem with obedience.” Therefore, after rejecting a marriage arranged by his family, at age 19 he decides to transform himself into a man, as happened in real life hundreds or thousands of women in that region of the country. They cut their hair, they swore to stay celibate all their lives, they were renamed with male names, to send in their clans, do the toughest jobs, smoking, drinking alcohol and mixing with men. And they all respected them – or respected – as one of them.

They became ‘Burneshas’, which is known as ‘Juradas Virgins’, which was the only solution they had to administer the legacy of theirs without depending on a man outside the family. Once his oath, his life and his rights were made to dictate the ‘Kanun’, a compendium of tribal laws that has been transmitted orally in northern Albania, from generation to generation, since the fifteenth century, although in the nineteenth century they put themselves in writing.

The transformation

This is explained by Hana to little Jonida in the novel, after moving to the United States to try to recover her female identity again: «Transforming into a man does not cost so much. I made the oath that I would never marry. It is a custom that exists only in the north of the country. I tell you: when there is no male offspring in a family, one of the daughters swears behave like a man and continue to be until the end of his days. From then on it assumes all the functions and tasks of a male. That’s why I became the son that my uncle never had.

Although Jones turns this metamorphosis of Hana into an act of love and gratitude towards his relative, he acknowledges that reality is much more terrible than the plot of its protagonist. He confirmed it in 2009, when he traveled to the damn mountains to meet six of these sworn virgins – probably the last ones that were alive – to record a documentary. «The tradition of sworn virgins has died in Albania and Kanun has lost power in the north of the country. Calculation that five or six should be left, although a serious anthropological study was never counted or made. Of the six that I interviewed, three have died and with two I already lost contact, because they spent a lot of time in the mountains, ”the author of the author of ‘Virgin Affidden’ (Errata Naturae).

Three of them are the ones that illustrate this page. Haki, for example, was raised as a boy for his parents since he was born, because a derviche – a kind of monk – predicted that the couple would have a child, but was wrong. Not having brothers, her parents made her a sworn virgin, so she could manage family heritage when her father disappeared. Since then it has a completely autonomous life in a small lost farm in the Albanian Alps, taking care of cultivating the land and respected as a farmer more among its neighbors, which always treated it like a male. “You don’t confuse me with a lesbian,” he warned a journalist a few years ago.

“I felt free”

Lule also considered himself a child since he has memory, according to the only interview he granted in 2008, when he was 56 years old. During the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, he worked as a tractor and mechanical driver, being accepted and respected by his companions. Her father made her the man in the house because there were 11 sisters. “I felt freer and is a good life, but very lonely,” he acknowledged.

When I was 16 years old, Shkurta, already deceased, tried to marry a neighbor of the mountains. As he did not want, his only exit was to make the oath. “I chose to be with men,” he said in 2016, after turning 76, wearing his short hair and his beret. Assumed her identity from a young age, she commented that those who appreciated her called her by the male form of her name: Shkurtan.

Jones thus answers in ABC to the question of the young Jonida: «There were two reasons why a woman could not assume the tasks without giving up being a woman. An economic era, because Kanun saw women as a mere receptacle to have children. They occupied the lowest step of society and could not do anything related to money, not even inherit, unless they transform into men. The other is the honor, which was fundamental in that macho and patriarchal society. It was usual to arrange marriages of girls at birth and it was unthinkable that they reveal themselves against the will of the clan. He could only escape that life as a sworn virgin ».

“What shock me the most,” Jones remember, “is the loneliness that united them. Socially they had conquered many rights and enjoyed status in their community, but they had all fallen in love with a boy and could not even tell it, because if you become a sworn virgin you cannot turn back according to the ‘Kanun’. You have to behave and dress like a man until you die. That made them feel incomplete, because they had never had sex, neither mothers nor consummated that love with a man. His identity as women was frozen, even physically. One of them regretted and went to live with his sister to the United States to recover his female identity, after twenty years as a man. Once I asked if I had met someone. He told me no, he was afraid. He had resigned and concluded that it was too late to meet a man and rebuild his life sentimentally as a woman.