Free by Lea Ypi
This is Lea Ypi’s account of growing up in Albania in the 1980s before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s an everyday coming of age story which is made absolutely uneveryday by the fact that prior to 1990 she describes living in a totalitarian communist state and, thereafter, a ‘wild west’ capitalist country that descends into civil war.
Before reading this book, my knowledge of Albania seemed as comprehensive as I required: I knew their formal royal family was led by King Zog but that following the second world war, Enver Hoxha became the “much loved” Marxist leader of a totalitarian state. Like Tito, he kept himself distanced from the twin communist superpowers, Russia and China, and stayed in power until his death in 1985. With Hoxha’s love of Norman Wisdom and his determination to keep the country cut off from and untainted by decadent western influences, I’d always perceived Albania as an amusing oddity from the cold war. Ypi’s book provides a much more personal and nuanced picture.
This book is very funny on occasions and it is also a wonderful insight about what it was like to live in a socialist bubble – a world that the young Ypi knows is different from everywhere else but which, throughout her childhood, she has been told is the only country doing things right. And then almost overnight, as an eleven year old in 1990, she discovers that everything she ever believed about her country and the world around her is wrong; more than that, all those people who loved her most had never been truly honest with her.
The first half of the book is disorientating because Ypi presents her perceptions of growing up in Albania from her child-like perspective without any knowing references to what is actually going on. To her, the endless queuing is more like a traditional Albanian pastime than a failure of the country’s economy. It is the glimpses of Italian television that seem odd to her as she focuses on the socio-economic inequalities in the soap operas that so transfix her. Of course, this is inevitable as Ypi ingenuously catalogues the daily lessons about Hoxha’s wisdom and the moral superiority of Albania’s socialist society. She so absolutely believes that Albania is an earthly paradise that the simple meze food and continual socialist school projects she throws herself into give her life richness and joy. Yes, Ypi is the victim of lifelong, pervasive brainwashing but she is not a thoughtless dupe. In fact, she is the opposite, a bright and curious narrator constantly asking questions - but she is at the same time a trusting, innocent child.
This memoir is as much about Ypi’s family as the strange world of Hoxha’s Albania. And this is where the skill in her presentation is most evident. Her mother is strong, self-reliant and pragmatic and her father is a soft-hearted, romantic. They seem constantly at odds with each other in everything except their fierce love for their family and one another, as well as the fierce intelligence they share. They carefully avoid any criticism of the strange world in which they live, yet subtly exude a querulous lack of enthusiasm for it. Ypi is smart enough to know that her parents are in some mysterious way at odds with their country. It may be because neither seems to hold a job linked to their abilities, or from the way they always promise to get her framed photograph of the glorious leader but never do. The mystery is only partially explained by her parents’ reference to the issue of ‘biography’ - problems in their background that see them viewed with suspicion by the state.
All, of course, is revealed in the second half of the book when the restrictions of state control crumble away without soviet backing and the international community sweeps into their woefully unprepared country. I found this second section of the book profoundly moving and in many ways rather depressing. At first, Ypi has to deal with the emotional shock of having her conception of the world turned upside down and then she has to struggle to understand that her anger with her parents is unfair – their lack of honesty during her early childhood was a way to protect her and themselves from an oppressive state.
After the fall of the totalitarian regime, we see both Ypi’s parents take on responsibility for the progress of Albania’s new future through their involvement in government projects and national politics. Ultimately, though, all their efforts cannot stop Albania being exploited by financial chancers sweeping into a new market as the country embraces the rather dubious freedoms of a post-cold war world. Inevitably, in the late 1990s the country implodes into a short but brutal civil war triggered by a series of disastrous pyramid schemes that I had totally forgotten about.
The book ends at that point and I was rather unsettled by this. I guess it was because I wanted the second half of the book to end on a positive note celebrating the victory of democratic values. Ypi is more clear-eyed than this, though, and points up what has been lost from her childhood: the sense of community, people supporting one another and her own sense of purpose. It reminded me of Sebastian Payne’s book about the Labour Red Wall towns that went Tory in 2019. Time and again the people he interviewed bemoaned the loss of community and meaning in their lives even if their previous lives working in the mines, the shipyards or the factories were full of hardship and struggle.
It’s probably best to finish where Ypi finishes by dedicating the book to her paternal grandmother, Nini. She grew up in Albania before Hoxha and then outlasted him. She was the person who embodies steady love and decent values that can somehow make life bearable whatever bizarre Marxist or capitalist madness is going on.
I would strongly recommend this book.