Visiting Xhevdet, in Mexico City

Visit an exhibition in Soma this week, intimate and simple, of personal photos taken by our friend Edon Cana, when he visited the late poet Xhevdet Bajra in Mexico in 2002.

“The Rose”

I am quite certain that

when for the first time

she did meet with man,

the rose birthed thorns.

(Xh. Bajraj)

Xhevdet Bajraj was born in a small and poor Kosovar village of Ponoshec, but was raised in Rahovec, Kosovo’s famous wine-producing town. He was a poet, a screenwriter and a translator. His brother Fadil is also one of the best known translators of beatniks’ literature in the region.

In 1998, after the Serbian forces burned Xhevdet’s town and committed some of the worst atrocities of the Kosovo war, the International Parliament of Writers offered him and the dissident Serbian author Vladimir Arsenijevic, a fellowship and a residence in Mexico City. Xhevdet never returned to Kosovo and died in his beloved Mexico City, leaving a considerable mark on the contemporary Albanian literature and a legacy of being one preciously few bridges connecting the literary landscape of the tiny, war-torn Kosovo with the enormous Latin American world of books (Ernesto Sabato, of Arbereshi origin but of Argentinian fame, is another such bridge between the two distant worlds, but this is of course - a different story altogether).

Edon Cana is also from Rahovec, but studied and lived in London. In recent years he served in Kosovo’s diplomacy as an Ambassador in Bulgaria and Consul General in Strasbourg. But in 2002, more than two decades ago, he visited his friend Xhevdet and stayed with his family, wife and two sons, in the magical neighborhood of La Condesa in Mexico City.

He made bunch of photos from this trip and this exhibition shows some of these personal mementos - random, intimate moments captured on camera between two friends.

Exhibition “Mexico City Days” is open today, 25th of June, in Soma Book Station .