Lea Ypi is chatting to me from Delhi, where it’s 10 at night and she’s just opened a beer: but neither the lateness of the hour nor the heat - not to mention the exhaustion of a month combining a family holiday with teaching and lecturing commitments - diminish her ability to conduct an extraordinarily complex and wide-ranging conversation.
Over the course of an hour, we discuss her new book, Indignity, the successor to the award-winning Free, which detailed her life both before and after the fall of communism in Albania in 1990; dissect the concept of dignity and moral agency, with reference to philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche; ponder whether truth is more readily found in the panoramic 19th-century novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than in non-fiction; and address ourselves to the great story of political exclusion that began with the first World War and the Treaty of Versailles.
Indignity encompasses all these areas and more besides, but first and foremost it is the story of Ypi’s grandmother, Leman, who was born in Salonica - present-day Thessaloniki - in 1918, but emigrated alone to Tirana, the capital of Albania, when she was just 18, spurred by a desire for independence, an ambition to study economics and grief at the death of her beloved aunt Selma. Leman was a constant presence in her granddaughter’s life, Ypi remembers: “I am who I am in part because of who she was and what she taught me. Really, she brought me up, and a lot of her experiences had been transmitted to me, but in this very pedagogical way, whereby she always told the stories for my sake. It was never from her perspective.”
When her grandmother died in 2006, Ypi was a student in Italy, and returned to Tirana, a seismic experience she recounts in the book. “Alone in our kitchen during the obligatory 40 days of mourning, I struggled to accept that, after decades of teaching me the importance of following rules, she’d vanished from my life without a word of warning. I had once told her that I would return to care for her, just as she’d cared for me throughout my childhood. It was now too late – I could no longer keep that promise. Tirana became for me the capital of remorse and, perhaps to ease my guilt, I blamed the city.”
She now lives in London, and is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but she couldn’t avoid Tirana when an unknown man posted a photograph on social media, showing her grandmother and her grandfather, Asllan, the son of Xhafer Bey Ypi, a former prime minister of Albania, on their honeymoon in the Alps in 1941. It wasn’t the picture itself that shocked Ypi, but the fierce discussion beneath it, which culminated in the accusation that her grandmother was a fascist collaborator during the second World War and, subsequently, a communist spy.
Compelled to tell the true story of her grandmother’s life, Ypi realised that she would have to gain entrance to a forbidding, frightening and murky building: the archives of the Sigurimi, the state security and secret police force of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Indignity recounts her attempts to locate and unlock the most hidden of files and thereby to discover whether Leman had once lived a life about which she knew nothing.
That must have been emotionally testing, I suggest. It was very sad, she agrees, “because you realise there’s so much that the person didn’t tell you, that they were carrying so much trauma that you never really understood because they were trying to shelter you. Obviously they didn’t want to burden you with their tragedies. And so somehow you then have to inhabit the tragedies.” And there was also the apprehension of where months and years of painstaking research might eventually lead, an experience common to many living in post-totalitarian societies, “this great fear of approaching the archive with this sense that you might find something really horrible about the person that you’re extremely attached to”.
Ypi brought two particular approaches to writing Indignity that helped her to mitigate these painful realities. The first was to deploy the rigour of her philosophical training in order to explore the questions and contradictions raised by writing about the past and its relationship with our personal and political selves. “Throughout my life,” she tells me, “I’ve been working on Kant’s philosophy. And Kant’s core idea is that, basically, freedom is this capacity that we have to act on the basis of moral imperatives. Freedom is not to do whatever you like or to follow your whims; that’s like the tyranny of senses. What always made me really interested in this alternative philosophical idea of freedom was that actually freedom is asserted in the moment in which you say, I’m not going to follow my inclination here, I’m just going to hold back because I feel responsible.”
Kant’s conception of dignity, she continues, relies on the human ability to reason and to consider, and Ypi in turn wanted to use her book to test philosophical ideas like this against the reality of lives lived under political pressure, in which power is unequally distributed and immense shifts - of geographical borders, political allegiances, social structures - are constantly taking place. “We always live these philosophical dilemmas,” she insists. “It’s not that they’re so abstract: every day we have to make decisions, we have to choose between different kinds of obligations. And so I think all of us live philosophically in one way or another. And if you explored lives with these questions in mind, then you would also engage with the questions in a slightly different way.”
Her second strategy was to take inspiration from the great 19th-century novels that first introduced and attracted her to philosophy, “where you have a narrator that is standing back and just letting the characters speak for themselves and playing out their conversations and their dialogues and their dilemmas”. Much of Indignity reads like just such a narrative, complete with a cast of major and minor characters, numerous evocative vignettes, dramatic revelations and changes of pace. There is, for example, a scene in a city cafe, in which politics is discussed in heated tones against the backdrop of Albanian folk music, and a young man, a beret on top of his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, takes his leave. Who was that, Leman asks Asllan. “Enver,” he replies. “His name is Enver Hoxha.”
In Free, Ypi gave readers an electrifying glimpse into life in Hoxha’s Albania, and an equally alarming view of what befell its citizens when, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism collapsed, to be replaced by mass unemployment, financial corruption and an accelerated gangsterism. I ask her how she feels about describing the country of her birth, past and present, to readers outside of Albania who may know little about it.
“I like to think that it makes you inhabit multiple perspectives at the same time, more so than someone who is in a more kind of hegemonic culture and a more hegemonic discourse,” she replies. But she also points out that her experience of connecting with readers of Free showed her that Albania’s story resonated far and wide. “There are a lot of small countries out there, actually, because in the end, the big power centres that make history are very minimal, a very reduced number. The vast majority of the world, their history is much more like mine.
“I discovered when I was writing about Albania, people would come to me and say, you know, I grew up in Iran, and it was like this. Iran is not a small country, but it’s certainly at the margins of discourse; people don’t know as much about Iran as they know about the United States or other places in the Balkans or eastern Europe. Even in Ireland, I remember when I was presenting Free, people were saying, ‘I grew up with the Catholic Church imposing their kind of ideology and their way of thinking.’”
The story Ypi tells in Indignity, aside from her personal family history, she thinks tells us a lot “about the collapse of empires and the effects of the collapse of empires on these kind of sub-imperial units, all of which at some point have to fit into the nation-state narrative, whether they have a story or not. They have to create a nation, and a nationalistic narrative, so that they can make sense of this world that emerges after World War One and Versailles and so on. World War One and the conception of the nation that emerges after this collapse of empires is responsible for a lot of the exclusions of the 20th century, and indeed the exclusions that we experience now.”
Does she feel any optimism about the political landscape - both local and global? She replies carefully that she believes in “small, democratic openings”, but warns that “it’s very much a question of politics. And sometimes we think because we managed to entrench certain norms in law or in constitutions, we have human rights. We have what we think is progress, which is legal progress. We think that that makes us immune, then, from regressive politics. And the problem is that it doesn’t make you immune, because rights also have to be constantly defended. If you don’t keep fighting for them, they will just be trashed at some point, which is exactly what happens.”
[ Lea Ypi investigates a family mystery and hidden historyOpens in new window ]
It’s getting late in Delhi now, and our conversation has gone far beyond the surface details of Ypi’s books; indeed, it’s felt like an invigorating intellectual workout. What remains as we say goodbye is the sense of a mind constantly alert to the gaps and deficiencies in the historical record and to our own limitations as we attempt to decode the past and to carve a path into the future. Ypi has told me how vital her grandmother was to her survival when Albanian society changed, seemingly overnight; her key lesson was to resist all identities that are imposed upon you, to constantly question the obligations that conforming to expectations will require.
It seems that Leman’s granddaughter learned the lessons well.
Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi is published by Penguin
