Today I walked into the store near my flat to buy some chocolate. The owner, Jonida, petite with wavy brown hair and a kind round face, fixed her dark and clever eyes on me. She greeted me heartily âHow are you? Where have you been? I havenât seen you in awhile.â
I ensured Jonida that I hadnât gone anywhere this week, but that last weekend I did visit a shoqe in a nearby town. The word for friend in Albanian changes depending on the gender, shok for a male and shoqe for a female. She inspected me with a smile rolling across her face and asked âWas it a shoqe you visitedâŠor a shoqe me pantallona?â (Female friend with pants) I wasnât sure exactly what that was supposed to mean but I thought I understood a hint of connotation, so I asked Jonida to explain. She laughed and said âIn the old days women wore skirts or dresses, not pants, and so the expression is really to ask if you were visiting a man.â
As an outsider to the culture of my small Albanian town I was originally surprised at the strange, calculative, and sometimes uncomfortable gaze I would receive from community members when I, an unmarried women, would casually say âIâm going to visit this shok or that shok in (insert other Albanian town names here).â After uncomfortably giving way too many awkward explanations such as, âItâs not like THAT, heâs just another volunteer, itâs not my fault heâs a man, thatâs what he is, a shokâ I stopped insisting that male friends existed in my life altogether. Â Instead, everyone I ever met or saw became a âshoqe.â As you can see, my life is built on a pile of lies. Unfortunately itâs just easier that way.
The existence of this expression âshoqe me pantallonaâ confirms for me that women have felt they must lie or at least smudge the truth about the company they keep in order to avoid a community of raised eyebrows. In other words, Iâm not the first girl to completely erase âshokâ from her vocabulary in order to scoot by with a few less questions.
Cultural pressure exerted on women and men to satisfy community and familial expectations can be intense and sometimes unreasonable. But things are changing. Years from now I hope weâll be able to ask each other questions and not feel like we have to lie or speak to one another in code. I hope the gender dynamic begins to open up as it did with pantsâŠbecause I wear pants, and there is nothing strange or shameful about that, nor does anyone think so.Â
