Harabel is the Albanian word for sparrow, small, unremarkable, built for flight, found everywhere and belonging nowhere in particular. Harabel pa bisht, tailless sparrow, is something more specific: a creature that has lost something in its crossings and flies anyway. It was given to me as a nickname in Paris in 1999 by a childhood friend, a dismissal, not a compliment. Harabel pa bisht: incompetent, half-formed, not quite enough. He was wrong. But the nickname stayed, because the condition it described, caught between worlds, never quite belonging to either, trying and failing and trying again, never entirely went away.
The memoir traces my journey through the identity documents that made and unmade me: an Albanian passport flushed down a toilet on the Eurostar, a fake Greek passport that failed when a policeman asked me to write my own name, a Kosovar birth certificate bought for twelve dollars, British asylum papers, and a US diplomatic passport with holes punched through it by an HR officer when I resigned from the State Department in June 2025.
The arc runs from communist Fier, Albania, through illegal crossings into Greece, asylum in England, Oxford, Princeton, twenty years of fieldwork across Central Africa, and the US State Department, ending with a return to Albania thirty years after I first left it as a teenager.
A piece from the memoir, “A Passage”, came out in the New Yorker on August 22, 2026.
A Passage – My New Yorker essay
Crossing into England, at twenty, with a false story.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-passage
An excerpt:
Time had stopped in Calais. The Albanians in Paris who had helped me plan my crossing had said that the train would remain at the station for five minutes, ten at most. Then it would enter the tunnel, and the passage would be over. England would be next.
But I’d been holding my breath for far longer than ten minutes and we still hadn’t moved. I was sweating through my suit and through the Acqua di Giò my cousins had pressed on me a week earlier in Milan. A whole bottle, very expensive, they’d said. Everyone knew undocumented Albanians couldn’t afford that kind of cologne. I hadn’t much cared for cologne before, but I had used it liberally—sprayed over the cheap suit, some behind my neck, a dash on each cheek. Now, as my anxiety climbed, the smell was becoming inseparable from the fear. This was twenty-seven years ago—March, 1999, about a week before my twenty-first birthday—but to this day a whiff of Acqua di Giò brings back the nausea.
On Laiko and surviving Greece as an undocumented teenager in the mid 1990s – an essay for The Quietus
An excerpt:
“A glass of death tonight I will drink to get drunk, the summers alone – tell me how I can survive?” he sang, certain and melancholic at once, strong and surprisingly vulnerable. Mitropanos’s ‘Θάλασσες’ has carried me through difficult times for decades. So have ‘Ξαναζητώ στη Θεσσαλονίκη’ and ‘Roza.’ His were the first Greek songs I appreciated beyond the melodies. As my Greek improved, working as a waiter at a waterfront café, I began to understand the complexities of a language I couldn’t help but devour. I am still stopped by these lines, as much by how they sound as by what they mean:
Αφού με έσπειρε μια μοίρα αυτοκρατόρισσα
Μήτρα με γέννησε αρχαία Μακεδόνισσα
Μ’ άδεια φαρέτρα πολεμάω το χειμώνα
Από το κάστρο στην καρδιά του Πλαταμώνα
(Since I was seeded by an imperial fate / A mother bore me, ancient Macedonian / With an empty quiver I fight through the winter / From the castle to the heart of Platamona.)
Mitropanos also pulled me toward the zeibekiko, the improvised solo dance laïko produces almost involuntarily in its listeners. Some call it the dance of the Greek soul. More emotional release than celebration, more defeat than victory, its limping pulse felt an appropriate companion to my entire journey in Greece.
Ledio Cakaj 