Shadije was regularly insulted and beaten by her stepmother. She was an Albanian girl living in Tirana, Albania’s capital, at the beginning of the 20th century. Her father forced her to marry a man she did not want to. During the wedding night, her husband raped Shadije. At the time, she wasn’t even twenty. A few months later, she died of tuberculosis. Her mother passed away when she was four years old. After finishing primary school, her father and her stepmother prohibited her to go to school. In her late teens, however she began to keep a journal.
Now known as Sikur të isha djalë (If I Were a Boy) her diary can still be found in Albanian bookshops. The author of the book is Haki Stërmilli (a man), not Shadije. She is the narrator in his epistolary novel. It is not that important that Stërmilli has written the teenage-girl into life: the experiences fictional Dije – her nickname – relates in the book were commonplace during Stërmilli’s lifetime. Moreover, it would be a lie to say that many events of the book do not occur in contemporary Albanian society. Regarding the image of women, the state of mind from the beginning of the 20th century still exists in Albania.
Published in 1936, and Stërmilli’s best-known work, If I Were a Boy is the first feminist book in Albanian literature. The novel is about a hapless girl’s struggle for equality in a society in which a woman is seemingly worth nothing. Although her chances are always slim, Dije challenges her oppression – up until the moment she dies. The result of her fight for self-determination in a society dominated by men is sobering. The male ruler, her father, always has more pull. To put it plainly, the head of the family approves every little step Shadije takes – as she reflects on the Kafkaesque state of helplessness her family situation has upon her life: “my torturer is at the same time my judge.”
