Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

Memoir · 336 pages · Paperback · Published 2022 by Penguin

A word for everything

At eleven, Lea Ypi hides behind a decapitated statue of Stalin and trusts its bronze legs to shelter her from the police. She has mistaken a crowd demanding democracy for a gang of hooligans. Free does not correct her. The memoir runs on a sequence of governing words, and biography is the first: a term her family uses for everything and explains to her as nothing.

Biography decides who studies what and who may teach. Her father is barred from mathematics on the grounds that it might make him a teacher, and his biography bars him from teaching. Forestry is what remains. The category reaches back a generation. Her grandmother Nini, niece of a pasha, married a man arrested at twenty-eight for agitation and propaganda and sentenced to hang, then to fifteen years.

What fills the childhood, though, is talk about universities. Every visit brings news of who has graduated and which professor was severe enough to be discussed in a whisper. Lea, on the floor with her dolls, tries to match the initials the adults use to university towns. In December 1990 her parents decode it for her. A degree was a sentence, graduation release. The initials were camps, B. for Burrel. The subject named the charge, so that literature stood for agitation and propaganda, and expulsion meant execution. Dropping out, voluntarily, meant suicide.

This is the memoir's best stretch, and the early chapters are warm and often funny. Her mother buys an empty Coca Cola can for the price of a Skanderbeg painting and sets it on the best embroidered cloth beside the photograph of Enver Hoxha, Albania's dictator, and when it is stolen two families stop speaking for a summer. None of that changes when the code breaks. What changes is the reader, who now knows what the adults were saying over the coffee. The family never lied to her. They spoke a second vocabulary in her hearing, one word for one word, and let a decade of prison news reach her as gossip about higher education.

After 1990 the cipher is replaced rather than abandoned, and Ypi sets the new table out herself: civil society takes the place of Party, privatization of collectivization, transparency of self-criticism, fighting corruption of the anti-imperialist struggle. Her old Marxism teacher, whom the family took for an informer of the Sigurimi, the secret police, tops up her salary at a foreign NGO. Her father notes that some skills are eminently transferable.

The port he manages is where the new lexicon does its work. A World Bank adviser wants a road map whose first step is lay-offs. Hundreds of Roma load cargo at the port, and her father is to fire all of them. They arrive in his courtyard before dawn to plead with him, and what he says comes apart in his mouth: he makes the decision, he tells them, using a phrase that has already carried the decision out of his hands. The men in the courtyard hear only the phrase, not the hand that signed it.

Seven years later the family runs out of words. Pyramid schemes collapse in 1997 and the country tips into civil war. The prose stops narrating and starts recording: diary entries in which a school debate on open borders sits beside a crush on a boy, then machine-gun fire outside the window and a father in parliament warning her not to leave the house. Asked whether she wants to try for a boat to Italy, she opens her mouth and no sound comes out. She writes that she has lost her voice and does not know if it will come back. No code word arrives to organise this. The diary entries just continue, plain and dated, next to nothing to decode.

The epilogue then supplies one for the whole book. Socialism means removing what stops a person reaching their potential, Ypi tells her students, and liberalism means removing other people from the decision; both extract a debt from somebody. She does not decode this one. She endorses it. A book that earned its authority by cracking words open closes by issuing one, and the last chapters hurry to reach it. The memoir is thinner over 1997 and after than over the years it took its time with.

By the time her father stands in his own courtyard the mechanism has come home. Structural reforms is the World Bank's word for what is done to him and his own for what he does to the men at his gate. It once put a government's actions out of an eleven-year-old's reach. It now puts a father's out of his. Power, in this book, does not stay in one place. It moves through whichever word is nearest, indifferent to who speaks it.