Prison poetry and aesthetic resistance in Visar Zhiti: language, memory, and totalitarian power

This study examines prison poetry in Albanian literature through the work of Visar Zhiti, focusing on how poetic discourse transforms experiences of imprisonment and repression into forms of moral and aesthetic resistance. It explores how imprisonment, censorship, and systematic dehumanization are transformed into poetic expression that preserves dignity, identity, and spiritual continuity. Drawing on literary hermeneutics and theoretical perspectives on power and discourse, the study analyses selected poems from The Secret Manuscripts of the Prison. Special attention is given to figurative language, symbolism, and recurring motifs such as memory, dreams, childhood, and the maternal figure. The study demonstrates that Zhiti’s poetry does not merely document suffering, but reconfigures it into an aesthetic structure in which language becomes a space of survival and resistance. In this sense, poetry functions simultaneously as testimony and transcendence, enabling the lyrical subject to reconstruct subjectivity under conditions of extreme oppression. The findings suggest that prison poetry should be read not only as historical documentation, but also as a conscious aesthetic response to totalitarian violence. Consequently, Zhiti’s work contributes to a broader understanding of resistance literature, where ethics and aesthetics intersect in the articulation of human endurance under coercive regimes.