Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Lea Ypi’s Family Secrets

In the political theorist’s genre-bending book on Albania and historical memory, Indignity, she interrogates how much one family can be implicated in a country’s becoming.

The narrator of Lea Ypi’s Indignity is a woman on a mission. When the book begins, she’s lost in Tirana, the capital of Albania, on a busy street called Paris Commune, trying to find the archive of the Sigurimi, the former Albanian secret police. People keep asking, “You’re not from here, are you?” It’s complicated. The narrator has the same name as the author of this book, who is described in her bio as a “native of Albania,” and she says that she’s had an address on the street for years. But she hasn’t spent much time in the city since the death of her dear paternal grandmother, Leman, in 2006. Almost everyone the narrator meets keeps asking her to explain why she’s come back.

Indignity: A Life Reimagined

The best version of this question comes from a taxi driver in a MAGA hat who takes the narrator to the archive: “Are you going there for work or fun?” “For fun,” she guesses. For work, Lea Ypi the author is a political theorist at the London School of Economics, best known for Free, her great memoir, sometimes also called a novel, based on her childhood as a follower of “Uncle Enver” (Hoxha) in the last years of the dictatorship. The bio in that book mentioned her “expertise in Marxism and critical theory.” (After the success of Free, that phrase was cut to make room for “prizewinning,” “international bestseller,” and even “one of the most important thinkers in the world,” but going mainstream has only made Ypi more ruthlessly self-critical.)

The soldier outside the archive asks, “What is the purpose of your visit today?” He doesn’t really care, but the narrator’s elevator pitch involves a lost photograph of Leman and her husband, Asllan, on their honeymoon in the Italian Alps in 1941, which showed up on Facebook and “went viral in Albania.” The archivist Vera D. asks, “Did you apply to see the files as a researcher or a family member?” (Copying fees are waived for people investigating relatives.) “I applied as a researcher,” the narrator says. But she feels like an “archaeologist in the temple of mutilated knowledge, a shaman leaning over a rotting corpse.” An archaeologist might intrude into a house of worship to look for the fragments of some mysterious old faith. But what is a shaman supposed to do with archival remains, or with the restless spirits of her own ancestors?

Indignity shares some characters and philosophical concerns with Free, but it’s a very different kind of book—more passionate, more intellectual, messier in a way that’s more engaging and provocative. Its basic design is simple: A frame story about doing research leads into historical fiction based on the first 30 years of Leman’s unfortunate life. Born in 1918 in the cosmopolitan city formerly known as Salonika—Thessaloniki since its annexation by Greece in 1912—Leman decided to migrate to Albania when she was 18. In the late 1940s, after the arrest of her husband, she was sent with her infant son (the author’s father) to dig ditches on a collective farm.

Leman played a central role in Free as well, but as a sheltering presence rather than a painful absence. She was a moral anchor in a world of illusions and dark ironies, a wise and enigmatic steward of simple truths. The conceit of Indignity is that, even if you break through the lies that you’ve grown up with, there’s not necessarily a truth behind them waiting patiently for you to arrive. Ypi is no longer protected from the past by her parents and by Leman, as the child was in Free, but her knowledge is still limited for specific reasons as well as universal ones, just by the nature of imperfect memories and time. Some of her sources are informants with incredible code names like The Tribune, White Chewing-Gum, and March Wind, whose testimony can hardly be trusted. But all dead grandparents are mysterious in their own ways, even when the sources are abundant and reliable. They’re history incarnate.

Each of Indignity’s three parts begins with a chapter called “Prologue.” The first one centers on that lost photograph of Leman and Asllan on Facebook and the nasty comments posted underneath, a MacGuffin that perfectly represents the author’s loss........

© The Nation