Flower Pot Chrysanthemum Plant, Pristina

By Nitsa Anastasiades,

Fiction Writer

On Women’s Day I bought a Chrysanthemum plant. The ‘Market’ I usually go to in search of lamb, not beef – that’s plentiful here – doesn’t usually stock flowers outside. But I saw it amongst the lilies, the orchids and the tall stem callas plants – its bud, a faint lilac, peeping up. I went back inside the market past the crimson pepper heaps, the sluggish green varieties, to the back of the queue once more.

On CNN news that night, author Isabelle Allende spoke to Christiane Amanpour. She said, you don’t have to call yourself feminist, to just ‘do’ the good work – carry it on.

I downloaded her book, The Soul of a Woman on Audible, and set off the next day, up the Pandora steps to the park to have a listen. Dogs, in their usual packs, roamed the sodden earth, or lay still on the sun spots around. And soon, through Gisela Chipe’s lively narration, and the crunch pebbles beneath my newly washed and tighter fitting Nike trainers, Allende’s messages rolled and rolled, overlapping with similar, although differently expressed, concerns I’ve heard in other works: The Book of Woman, Osho, A Yogis Guide to Joy, Sadhguru, House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros, and, more recently, a podcast by journalist Sonia Faleiro on her book The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing.

Whilst Allende spoke of the corruption in Chile, and Faleiro, in her country, patriarchy, justice and the class system – Osho, the rights of women through freedom from social norms, and Sadhguru with Cisneros the pursuit of liberty in choosing one’s own true destiny’s path, I was impacted suddenly by Allende voicing women’s dilemma of what to wear when venturing out – whether too, tight, bright, or too long, or short, and the judo training I received as a Secondary school student in the UK as part of an afterschool activity, which came in handy once, amongst us girls, when fending off a bold character trying to lure us into his car one Tuesday London darkening afternoon.

Fully masked, a lady here with crutches hobbles by, a gentleman in a cap and leather jacket overtakes, and some teenagers chat, kicking the earth about the swings and climbing frames. Cars drop off, pick up their children from the nearby primary school and I marvel at the fact that through all weathers here, fine rain and snow, cold sun and wind, I’ve never yet seen an ant, or a worm – just crows, busying themselves on the leaves and breads left in plastic bags open around. Their nests in the trees and loud mating calls suggest spring, yet winter insists.

‘Refugees,’ Allende continues, as I tissue wipe my dripping nose (the condensation from my warm breath and cold air outside always does this; I put back my mask), are marginalized, same as diverse groups and sexes, the roots of which, she believes, stem from the patriarchal model ‘imposed with aggression,’ demanding ‘obedience and punishes those who defy it.’

I decide to go around the outside of the park, first for the pavement’s change, then, to catch light and yes, the sun in my eyes. The odd car passes, slows . . . past the American Embassy, the German, and ahead, beyond wide rolled wire fencing, a Turkish flag flies with another from Greece.

I take snapshots of fern petaled spring flowers – yellow – in clusters on the earth mounds between the picnic bench and the embassies’ security huts. The wind freezes my fingers and, heading back to the main road, side stepping the oncoming vehicles, I take the usual left past the abandoned aluminum coated, futuristically designed military building with asymmetric rooftops, its lower storey windows smashed, to the top of the Pandora steps where the city, steeped at the bottom spreads wide and beyond.

A young woman with two men stands by an old electricity hut with spray cans. They tell me they are graffiti artists commissioned from Albania to come, scribe, ‘Give Colours to Pristina’; they visit often, and do I know Road B where Arts Festivals are yearly held? The lilac patterns with green stenciling splayed over the long-abandoned downtown’s railway walls, fading, too, are their works.

The apartment’s hot when I return, despite not having put on the heating, and I go straight to my Chrysanthemum plant.

Hard Talk – I love that programme – discusses Kosovo through 39-year-old Vjosa Osmani’s (Acting Kosovo’s female President) perspective, as someone present and very young during the Serbia/Kosovo 90’s conflict. I recall young, young, coming from her mouth: the voices of youth – and freedom, reconciliation. Stephen John Sackur presses her, and she retaliates. World Freedom Day follows, with schools around the globe fluttering slogans for learning, individuality, expression, equality, justice, respect. Then people are shot in the States, and Allende’s words I’d switched off earlier to observe the more stoic nature, roll back: sexism, peace, honesty, race, the right to exercise ownership over one’s body, to be respected, loved, to be free.

The beef I’d bought in the end, not lamb – as I said, it’s hard for me to get that here, one day I shall – I put in the oven with star anise and cinnamon to soften, on slow, with a sharp red chilli pepper. Two days later my lilac Chrysanthemum would flower, and each day, as in the words of the great Albanian writer Kadare in his fantastically gothic and heart earthy novel Broken April, I’ll try to capture the days up to that ‘certain hour’ where they seem endless until, ‘suddenly, like a drop of water that having trembled a moment on the flower of a peach tree, falls suddenly, the day would shatter and die.’

It still snows here, the sun glares and flowers bud – I saw daffodils outside our apartment block someone had planted in a pot taking me back to UK days . . . I rather love the antagonism winter holds and springtime promises, like a bear battle I was told about by a wanderer when hiking in the Peja mountains as he guided us downward. It was with a woman tourist. But more about that perhaps in another post.

Nitsa Anastasiades has written fiction, a collection of stories: Foreign Borders based on human experiences and observations in the different countries she taught English and lived in, the book for which she seeks representation. When not exploring literary cultural landscapes and writing blogs, she works on her novel, Sea with Salty Water – a Greek Cypriot upbringing in 70’s Britain juxtaposed with the ’74 coup in Cyprus.

Nitsa has a Creative Writing Fiction MSc with Edinburgh University and qualifications in Poetry, Creative Non- Fiction, Advanced Fiction and Poetry from Oxford University and Manchester Metropolitan National Centre for Writing respectively.

More about her work, blogs and projects here:

https://lit901529925.wordpress.com/about/

https://lit901529925.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/a-leap-into-discovery/

https://lit901529925.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/tastes-and-shades-in-mother-theresa-street/