‘Broken April’ by Ismail Kadare is a novel that encapsulates the experiences in the world of the Kanun. The Kanun is a set of traditional Albanian laws that maintains order and the way of life in rural Albania. The power of the Kanun extends throughout the land of the Rrafsh, maintaining the cycle of the blood feud prevalent in the lives of the people living there. The physical environment of the Rrafsh represents the ways the Kanun has affected the characters in the story. The physical environment is also a reflection of how the law of the Kanun has pervaded its effects throughout rural Albania. In this context, physical environment refers to the conditions and appearance of the surroundings that affects a living person through physical factors,
…show more content…
The line, “it was an ordinary inn, like all the others in the mountain districts, with no signboard…”(36), shows how places are homogenized and appear the same. The ambiguity of the places Gjorg travels to applies to the anonymity and ‘facelessness’ of the inhabitants of Rrafsh. The Kanun runs almost all aspects of a person’s life in the Rrafsh leading to an effacement of identity and individuality of the people in the Rrafsh. As men are fated to follow the endless cycle of the blood feud, personality is futile. They are referred to as cattle (59) and “shackled by the same chains”(30), showing their enslavement to the Kanun and a degeneracy of personality. Even during Gjorg’s travels across the Rrafsh, the appearances of passerbys are ambiguous and names are never mentioned. The line, “the section of the road protected by the bessa differed not at all from the rest of the road”(201) is an example of how places in the Rrafsh all appear the same. The motif of repeating landscapes creates an inescapable labyrinth from which the characters, especially Gjorg lose all sense of direction, time and place, reinforcing the inescapability of the Kanun. This geography of the Rrafsh reveals how the repressiveness and inescapability of the Kanun has effaced the identity of people living there and the places surrounding
The line, “it was an ordinary inn, like all the others in the mountain districts, with no signboard…”(36), shows how places are homogenized and appear the same. The ambiguity of the places Gjorg travels to applies to the anonymity and ‘facelessness’ of the inhabitants of Rrafsh. The Kanun runs almost all aspects of a person’s life in the Rrafsh leading to an effacement of identity and individuality of the people in the Rrafsh. As men are fated to follow the endless cycle of the blood feud, personality is futile. They are referred to as cattle (59) and “shackled by the same chains”(30), showing their enslavement to the Kanun and a degeneracy of personality. Even during Gjorg’s travels across the Rrafsh, the appearances of passerbys are ambiguous and names are never mentioned. The line, “the section of the road protected by the bessa differed not at all from the rest of the road”(201) is an example of how places in the Rrafsh all appear the same. The motif of repeating landscapes creates an inescapable labyrinth from which the characters, especially Gjorg lose all sense of direction, time and place, reinforcing the inescapability of the Kanun. This geography of the Rrafsh reveals how the repressiveness and inescapability of the Kanun has effaced the identity of people living there and the places surrounding