The Read: Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving (And Is Posting on Saturday)
Why did I get this book?
I read a long review essay about it that really grabbed me (and acquainted me with Ypi’s scholarly work as well).
Is it what I thought it was?
It was accurately described by the review that I read. But even though that review had a lot to say, I also was pleased by how fresh and engaging the book was in its own terms (so I didn’t feel as if I’d already read it via the review).
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s on my mind as I do some revisions on a current manuscript. I could imagine using it in a course about liberalism or political transitions, but it’s pretty far outside the range of things I teach and know even in those contexts. Another interesting cluster of readings that I’d put it with might be memoirs that try to inhabit the point-of-view of the author as a child, which is a very hard stylistic and aesthetic challenge. (This book succeeds, I think.) I’d heartily recommend it to colleagues, at any rate.
Quotes
“I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.”
“I tried to think like my teacher. We had socialism. Socialism gave us freedom. The protesters were mistaken. Nobody was looking for freedom. Everyone was already free, just like me, simply exercising that freedom, or defending it, or making decisions they had to own, about which way to go home, whether to turn right or left or walk straight.”
“Biographies were carefully separated into good or bad, better or worse, clean or stained, relevant or irrelevant, transparent or confusing, suspicious or trustworthy, those that needed to be remembered and those that needed to be forgotten. Biography was the universal answer to all kinds of questions, the foundation without which all knowledge was reduced to opinion.”
“Behaving respectfully in the queue or joining forces to uphold queuing standards could mark the beginning of lasting friendships.”
“The tourist children had bright, unusual toys that looked so different from ours that we sometimes wondered if they were toys at all. They splashed around on floating mattresses displaying characters we had never seen, had strangely shaped buckets and spades and exotic plastic material we had no word for. They smelled different, a smell that was enticing in an addictive way, one that made you want to follow them, to go and hug them so you could smell it some more. We always knew when there were tourist children nearby because the beach smelled weird, a hybrid of flowers and butter.”
“It had never occurred to me, before that rainy day in December 1990, after the encounter with Stalin, that my family was the source not only of all certainty but also of all doubt.”
“I learned that the former prime minister whom I had grown up despising, and whose name my father bore, did not have the same name and surname by coincidence. He was my great-grandfather. For his entire life, the weight of that name had crushed my father’s hopes. He could not study what he wanted. He had to explain his biography. He had to make amends for a wrong he had never committed, and apologize for views he did not share. My grandfather, who had disagreed with his own father so much that he had wanted to join the Republicans in Spain, on the opposite side of the struggle, had paid for the blood relationship with fifteen years in prison. I would have paid too, who knows how, my parents said. I would have paid, had my family not lied to keep the secret.”
“For the Party, the sacrifice of individual preferences was a matter of historical necessity, the cost of transition to a future better condition…For my family, there was nothing to explain, to contextualize, or to defend; there was only the pointless destruction of their lives.”
“‘Privacy,’ my mother said. ‘Privacy is so important. We never had any privacy before.’ Then she suggested that nothing would happen before the post office was privatized. Only privatization could respect privacy.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
In terms of my earlier point, what makes a memoir that spends a lot of time in a child’s point-of-view succeed is when it feels consistent and credible in reproducing how that child thought without always apologizing for, amending, or correcting the child in a way that gives the adult writer the satisfaction of thinking that their own righteousness or accomplishment in the present was always part of them. E.g., when someone tells the story of their life where they are always the same person from the beginning of memory until now, I fundamentally disbelieve them. But equally I dislike it when the difference between the child then and the adult now is simply that the child is a stupid or sheltered version of the adult that the adult looks back on with loathing or regret. That doesn’t seem true either most of the time. A book I still really like that does the job well is Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, which is resolutely unsentimental about her child-self’s racial (and racist) consciousness. Ypi’s memoir has a different stylistic strategy but I think it does really well at inhabiting her Albanian child-self’s understanding of Enver Hoxha’s regime without regret or recrimination and in a way that feels authentic and complicated, especially in the way that she as a child began to peel back the layers of her own family’s histories and see how much she didn’t know about them—and thus about the world they lived within.
I particularly appreciate the way she captures a child’s desire to be good, to do good, and the fierceness of the imagination that can generate, especially in a situation where adults dare not even hint at the vast gap between what is being taught in a school or put on the news and the reality of their own lives and the lives of other adults. “I was one person, then I was another”, she says, against the backdrop of her family’s unveiling of their own historical truths and the changes sweeping over Albania—a moment where she isn’t just changing from one kind of truth to another kind, but where she is going from being a child who builds her own interpretations of the things she is being told so she can inhabit the world virtuously to hurtling towards adulthood being changed involuntarily by changes in her world, with no way to assemble the new truths into something she controls or imagines—a situation shared by many people across the former Communist world after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The “falling action” of the memoir, as it were, dealing with Albania and her family after it became ‘free’ (in actuality, as she points out repeatedly, anything but) adds to a considerable number of other accounts of just how incoherent the kinds of things the triumphant representatives of the Washington Consensus spoke into the space of the former East Bloc sounded, how the language of an abstracting, generalizing social science actually was understood, as both alien and farcical. I don’t think that’s changed much when it comes to major international organizations or the most prominent bilateral organizations: they speak to the people who have been trained to be their partners, their facilitators and their clients throughout the world, but not to the populations that will be momentously affected by the policies and initiatives they are supervising. (One especially painful example: when Ypi’s father tells her that he and other port administrators call Romanies desperate for work and assistance ‘structural reforms’.) If it’s not quite as absurd as it was in the moment that Ypi is remembering, it’s only because knowledge of that vocabulary has diffused into the wider world more (even if it is still so far away from local reality) and because of access to social media and the explanations it can provide. In some ways, it feels that the things Ypi sees in the transition are the origin story of the world we’re all living in, the global neoliberalism that unfolded after the Berlin Wall fell: a world of words from social science that are as far away from the cruelty they authorized and oversaw as any of the farcical untruths of a regime like Enver Hoxha’s, an undescriptive and insensate managerial haze settling over the world everywhere like a smog. (The reason why Ypi has gone on to do the academic work that she does, judging from the end of the book.)