Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979), Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, has obtained critical and public recognition with this excellent sample of memorial literature, a biography of her childhood and youth in the most exotic of the European communist countries, the remote Albania of Enver Hoxa.
What would a place like that look like to the eyes of a girl, the strange Albania that was mentioned in Franco-era passports in a peculiar legend: “Valid for all countries in the world, except Albania, North Korea and Mongolia Abroad”; the self-described “only socialist country in the world†after its break first with the Soviet bloc and, later, with Mao’s China; the last Stalinist country on the planet?
A country in which, after Stalin’s death in 1953 and when Khrushchev had revealed part of his crimes at the XX Congress of the CPSU, Hoxa went to his statue in Skandërberg square, giving him an oath of allegiance on behalf of all the Albanian people. and, together with the members of the Political Bureau and the tens of thousands of people who occupied the square, he knelt before her.
And it is at the foot of the statue of Stalin that this melancholic story begins, although not lacking in humor, which refers to a dark past with delicacy and restraint: in 1990, at the time of the collapse of the regime, when a girl walks On the way home from school, he witnesses the riots of those days and takes refuge next to the effigy. She looks up, searching for the dictator’s friendly whiskers and his warm smile, but sees that he has been beheaded during the riots and that the world she knew will never be the same.
Lea, an intelligent and sensitive schoolgirl who is fluent in French thanks to her fascinating grandmother Nini – a character worthy of GarcÃa Márquez’s Macondo – is still unaware of the nature of the country where she was born. Until then, what she wanted was to be part of the youth organization of the party – the Pioneers –, admire the great friend of the children, Uncle Enver, and be a good communist. Because, although she may seem untrue, when she had already been disgraced by her crimes and her ineptitude, communism was still the illusion of a good part of humanity.
What Lea then discovers is that her great-grandfather had been prime minister in pre-communist Albania and that made her a member of a lineage of traitors; that his grandfather paid for his father’s political sins with twenty years in prison and that his parents were two defeated beings whose biggest illusion (one of the most tender and comical scenes in the book) was to exhibit an empty can of Coca in the dining room -Tail, icon for which they end up breaking up with their best friends.
Also that those supposed universities in which family and friends spent long years waiting for graduation were nothing more than prisons and work camps for disaffected with faulty biographies in the eyes of the regime. Lea remembers her bewilderment when her neighbors flee from this “lighthouse of the world working class”, occupying the embassies and storming the ships in the port of Durrës, turned into desperate hordes eager to conquer the western paradise.
That same West that filled its mouth with “the free circulation of ideas and people” and that wasted no time in expelling as soon as possible those whom it despised as miserable barbarians from the other side of the sea. Those who stayed lived through the chaotic Albanian transition, the success of the pyramids and the most mafia capitalism and a new isolation based this time on poverty, not ideology.
Lea Ypi was able to escape and give us this magnificent story. Since she left, at the age of eighteen, she has not visited Albania again.
