26:50 - A pair of barbed wire handcuffs

Tom Lynham reflects on trying to find a hook to hang his 50 words on.

I started the 26:50 ball rolling with the Albanian writer Musine Kokalari. I was nine years old in 1960. My parents’ idea of a Sunday afternoon out in the car was to visit and befriend inmates in prisons all over East Anglia, so I had a taste of the futility of locking people up pretty early on.  

Musine was born in 1917, and following a literary degree at the University of Rome she published collections of poems and short stories. In 1944 she co-founded the Albanian Social Democratic Party - around the time Enver Hoxha appointed himself communist leader amid the chaos of the post-war Balkans. Hoxha was a fanatical Stalinist and instituted tribunals to ‘judge’ thousands of ‘war criminals’. Musine was branded an ‘enemy of the people’ for advocating freedom of expression. She was forbidden to publish and sentenced to 20 years in jail. On her release she was confined to construction sites and community cleansing departments until she died in 1983.  

Virtually all her work was destroyed – but I did find shreds online. She was a highly articulate and incisive writer, passionate about Albania’s cultural heritage and championing the voice of the people.

Having only 50 words to play with, I hunted for a metaphor to conjure up a compelling picture and stumbled across a single heartbreaking fact. When Musine was posthumously declared a ‘Martyr for Democracy’ by the President of Albania, they exhumed her body and found her wrists had been tied with barbed wire. This act summed up the malignant thuggery that still governs so many repressive dictatorships, but also the fantasy that you can suppress ideas by killing the words. The other device that delivered a dramatic wallop, was to write the poem from the point-of-view of the regime and the smug assumption that they had the power to control people beyond the grave.

Comments

[Tim]

Tom, this is a terrific demonstration of the value of determined, imaginative researching; particularly the way insights can inspire imagery. There is a pervasive idea that striking images and metaphors appear to writers when they are in the act of staring at a blank screen. This happens sometimes, but in my experience powerful ideas and images are usually the result of hard work, particularly the persistent application of brain to sources of information. I think this is especially true in business writing – the thoughts and examples that might set a company apart are more likely to be found through research (reading, interviewing, visiting, questioning, looking, smelling) than through moments of creative revelation. Writers need to actively pursue insights, not passively await their arrival in a cerebral taxi. Flashes of creativity are often needed to bring research alive, but it's very difficult to retrofit a flash of inspiration to research (although quite a few ad agencies try). That old saw 'rubbish in rubbish out' may be simplifying it a bit, but a writer who conducts half-hearted or misdirected research is less likely to find the raw materials they need.