Lea Ypi’s book speaks to and for an Albania uncertain about change
Writers are often most celebrated in and by the country they have long left. So it is with Lea Ypi, an Albania-born professor of political theory at the London School of Economics.
Her book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History speaks to and for a conflicted Albania.
Having rid itself of communism 35 years ago, Albania doesn’t seem entirely charmed by the system it embraced. Life today is the polar opposite of state control and communal solidarity. It is all about inchoate market forces and desires. It is about “the destruction of solidarity”, to use Ms Ypi’s words.
A Tirana-born-and-bred thinker told me sadly that as a child, there were lots of green public spaces all around the centre of the Albanian capital. Now, many of these have been sold and built on by unscrupulous developers with no regard for planning, traffic or environmental best practice. So, we have apartment blocks, shops, restaurants and bars — and traffic chaos, pollution, noise and ugliness, said my interlocutor, pointing around the Blloku, the hip and hopping district where the Communist elite formerly lived and worked. He is no champion of the old ways — total control by the Communist state — and yet, there seemed to be a wistfulness about some of the good bits that have been lost in Albania’s transition from closed socialist state to an open market society.
So too a sense of community. Back in the old days, as Ms Ypi’s book describes, people stood together, cleaning the streets (by Party order) on Sundays and helping each other, as needed: “We relied on friends and neighbours for everything. Whenever the need arose, we simply knocked on their door, regardless of the time of day. If they did not have what we were looking for, or if they could not help with whatever we needed, they offered substitutions or recommended another family who might be able to help”.
Much of that is gone and Albanians feel it acutely.
That is why Ms Ypi’s book seems to chime with the way sections of Albania think and feel today. Unsurprisingly then, the book is everywhere in Tirana. It’s also prominently displayed in the bookshop at Nene Teresa international airport. (Airport bookshops, I would posit, from an informal survey in disparate parts of the world, send a clear message about what story a country wants to tell and who it want to tell it.)
That Ms Ypi’s book is big in her home country is a compliment to the story she has told, as Albanians seem to be keen readers. Books are sold on pavements. I saw a prominent mural of a bookcase in the centre of Tirana. In the airport, there is a Bookstore & Café that serves as a reading nook with well-thumbed second-hand books and comfortable armchairs — an open invitation to reach a different place and time through the printed page without your having even started that other journey.
Coming soon: More on Lea Ypi’s book: What it was like to live in ‘Uncle Enver’s’ Albania and while it wasn’t freedom, liberation from that system also falls short of the ideal.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
