Sworn Virgin

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Elvira Dones is one of the most distinguished Albanian authors writing today. Astonishing, brilliant, and unabashed by taboos of any kind, she is as much at ease in Albanian as in the rest of European literature. This is not only because she writes in two languages — Albanian and Italian (a tradition that goes back to the late middle ages, when the Ottomans prohibited written Albanian and our writers used Latin as a second language) — but because her vision of art and of the world is in harmony with both Albanian and European culture.

Her novel Sworn Virgin takes an apparently exotic subject, but one drawing on literature’s oldest archetypes: the creation of a double, and the transformation of a human being. Hana, the attractive young woman who is the protagonist of this novel, agrees of her own free will to ‘turn into a man.’

The story refers to an ancient if rare Albanian custom that has been preserved into the modern era, according to which, for various reasons — such as the absence of a man in a household or, as in Hana’s case, the fear of rape — a ‘conversion’ was permitted and a woman could change her status from female to male. She would gain all a man’s rights and freedoms, adopt male behavior and dress, take part in assemblies of elders, and go out to cafés to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, with the sole condition that she preserve her virginity.

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