On June 28, 2009, as the Western press watched with bated breath, Albanians entered polling stations to elect their new government and the prime minister who would lead it for the next four years—would this, the first national election since Albania’s induction into NATO, finally be a peaceable one?
In addition to Albanian, Rama seems to read in English, French, and Italian. In addition to Aleksandr Rodchenko, the consummate artist-politico, Rama invites comparison to Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and a multitude of other mayors from across the globe (their umbrae populate the book in the form of newspaper headlines). And in addition to these voices, the sketches themselves sing with crescendo and fervor. They are intricate, ambitious drawings, often figural, smothering dates, names, places, and times in their steady approach of the borders of the page. Sometime after the painting of Tirana’s housing blocks in 2003, they change from blue and black pen to color, as if daubing the façades of buildings had produced a minute revelation in ink on paper. It is these shrunken melodies that lift the book from deconstructed visual medium to acoustic whole—in Sala’s words, “It’s a book about being a book.” Sala’s aural fascination has taken him from his homeland, where he hired a lip-reader to decipher a soundless videotape of his mother in the 1970s, to Senegal to explore phonemic phenomena in the Wolof language. Usually a film artist, he casts Rama as the dirigent of voices local and far-flung, causes historical and contemporary, priorities artistic and populist.
On July 4, 2009, with the votes in one precinct in the Socialist-leaning south still to be counted and the election hanging in tenuous balance, Berisha announced his decision to form a coalition with the third party, the Socialist Movement for Integration. If accepted, the coalition would signal the SMI’s betrayal of the left, and another four years of conservative chokehold on local politics. Though the election itself had passed with clemency, the Democrats took a no-holds-barred approach to vote-counting, cajoling, buying apostasy, and in some cases outright lying. For all of Albania’s pre-election punctilio and eagerness to join the European Union, the government seemed intent on keeping things pretty much the same. Perhaps in truth, Albania is not ready for a man like Edi Rama and his colorwheel politics. Perhaps the message is still too variegated, the medium too succinct.