Albanian philosopher and writer Lea Ypi talks to BIRN about exploring the importance of freedom and dignity through the plight of her grandparents, who were persecuted by the communist regime.
Throughout her childhood, Lea Ypi knew her parents were “talking in secret”.
“My childhood was full of mysteries about my family,” she recalled.
Ypi, author of the acclaimed 2021 memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History and, more recently, Indignity: A Life Reimagined, was 11 when communism in Albania crumbled and only later came to learn of the suffering her grandparents endured under the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha.
“I grew up as a girl in a communist system, a child who believed in the truths of that system, while I understood that there was something in my family that was not exactly the way I saw it,” Ypi said in an interview with BIRN during a visit to Pristina as a guest lecturer at the annual International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature, and Culture.
“But they were not speaking about these topics, it was taboo in the family; they never said that my grandfather was in prison,” she explained.
“The consequences of these family persecutions were carried by the younger generations, so it wasn’t something that could be said or talked about openly.”
When Ypi found an old photograph posted online of her grandparents enjoying their honeymoon in an Italian resort in 1941, she began digging into its origins, pulling together the strings in Indignity, published last year by Penguin Books.
“A part of the book is a family saga which is based on my grandmother’s story,” Ypi said. “It is a philosophical story on the moral and political meaning of humanity and also a kind of political history of the Balkans from the fall of empires to the fall of communism, to talk about the consequences of changing systems on people’s lives.”
‘Leading political thinker’
Albanian writer Lea Ypi during the interview with BIRN. Photo: BIRN.
In late August, Ypi was awarded the 2026 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought by the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences, a prize that recognises individuals who contribute to political thought and action in the tradition of the German and American historian and philosopher.
The jury praised Ypi as “a leading political thinker of our time”, the IWM said, “highlighting her ability to bring philosophical reflection into conversation with political and historical experience”.
Born in Albania, she left in 1997 with the country in the grips of civil unrest. Emigrating to Italy, Ypi graduated in Philosophy and Literature at Rome’s La Sapienza University.
Now 46, Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Her grandmother, Leman, had left an aristocratic life in Thessaloniki, Greece, to marry Ypi’s grandfather, Asllan.
But with the arrival of communism in Albania at the end of World War Two, Asllan found himself sentenced to 15 years in prison for “agitation, propaganda and collaborating with Anglo-Americans” as one of the Group of Deputies, 24 anti-communist parliamentarians and intellectuals.
Her grandmother Leman was forced into work at a state-run agricultural cooperative, one of Hoxha’s rural forced collectivisation enterprises established after the abolition of private-owned land.
“She came to Tirana as a young girl, alone, in search of her life and independence,” said Ypi.
“The life of my grandfather and grandmother is a way to reflect on the concept of dignity and what it means to safeguard dignity even in extreme political and historical circumstances in which everything is against the individual.”
Kosovo Albanians’ fight for freedom and equality
Asked if today she feels equal, living in Britain and teaching at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, Ypi replied:
“I say that no person is ultimately free or equal in a society which is not equal for everyone. Of course, there are aspects of integration that are there and are very important, but there are also other aspects where we are not equal because we speak a different language; I do not have the same expressive ability in English, for example.
“There are always dimensions of inequality that accompany you throughout your life, despite the equalities you find,” she added.
There are two dimensions to freedom, Ypi continued: “An internal one, which is the freedom of moral responsibility that we feel, always have and never lose, and an external dimension which is what is guaranteed to us by institutions.
“And in the space between these dimensions, a freedom as an ideal and a freedom as an ideology lies that demand for change and the critical part that makes intellectuals, activists, ordinary people fight for freedom outside of themselves.”
As an example, Ypi cited the resistance of Kosovo Albanians to the repression meted out by Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, culminating in Kosovo breaking free in 1999 with the help of NATO.
“It is precisely this responsibility, this sense of moral responsibility, this recognition of internal freedom, that has led the Kosovar resistance to fight, to demand this dignity and this recognition from the rest of the world and is also an example of hope for all those who, in very repressive conditions, struggle and sometimes become discouraged because they say that it is not worth fighting for freedom while others have it in their hands,” Ypi said.
Albanian protests ‘change something’, but can’t change everything
In an opinion piece published in The Guardianin June, Ypi praised ongoing protests in Albania against the government’s corner-cutting and disdain for environmental protections in pushing through permission for the construction of luxury tourist developments on it’s the country’s coast, most notably a project linked to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Almost three months since the start of the so-called Flamingo Revolution, protest numbers have dwindled, but still people turn out to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama after 13 years in power.
Ypi expressed caution about the eventual outcome. While such protests “change something”, she said, “we should not expect a protest to change everything”.
“It is important to regenerate a democratic will and, for me, protests that generate this democratic will are very important and should be supported, while also being aware of the limits of these types of protests in all countries of the world.”
With Free and Indignity translated into more than a dozen different languages, Ypi said she is working on a third book.
“More than about family, this is an immigrant story,” she said. “The book begins where the book Free ends and talks about the immigrants’ efforts towards equal integration into the society to which they have travelled.”
“Of course, some of the stories are personal stories but as always it is a mixture of personal stories with philosophy and the political history of Europe, in this case, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
Source: balkaninsight.com
