Cognitive liminality in Martin Camaj’s work ‘Djella’

This paper analyses the poetic prose ‘Djella’ (1958) of Martin Camaj, using the concept of M. Basseler’s cognitive liminality and the notions of V. Turner’s liminality/liminoid, and situating the text within the Albanian socio-cultural context dominated by a canonical norm. Our objective is to examine how the work structures the experience of ‘being on the verge’ (between tradition and modernity) as a psychic, ethical, and narrative state, and how this state generates identity tensions, moral conflicts, and deviations from the collective order. The methodology followed by us combines textual-interpretative reading, and this is achieved by operationalizing theory categories (liminal/liminoid) on three signifying relations: (1) Bardhi-Curri (matchmaking and social mediation), (2) Curri-the elders/cousins (inheritance, property, tribal consent), and (3) Djella-Curri (the allusion of murder, responsibility and punishment/impunity of the woman in the light of Kanun). The analysis indicates that intentional narrative fragmentarity and imperfection function as an aesthetic strategy to articulate the crisis of honor codes and the process of loosening the tradition. Conclusively, ‘Djella’ presents liminality as a critical mechanism that exposes contradictions of canonical order and suggests the orientation towards a modern consciousness, in which the individual, choice, and social negotiation restructure community relations.