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 my first cousin Armando, 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 on foot in the middle of the night.
A piece from the memoir, The Passing, is forthcoming in the New Yorker in August 2026.
Ledio Cakaj 