Albania: a tormented and tormenting country

Leman, one of the main characters of Indignity, describes Albania with a compelling series of adjectives: “beautiful, tormented and boring”. Leman's creator, author Lea Ypi, Marxist philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics, radicalises this assessment, saying Albania is simply “tormented and tormenting”. Her conversation with journalist Christian Elia touches on a wide array of urgent and complex topics, ranging from identity to nationalism, freedom and dignity.

For those studying the Balkans, a region where citizenship and nationality are thorny issues, one question emerges naturally: can citizenship become an antidote to nationalism? For Ypi, the word “nationalism”, understood as a container of identities, carries a positive meaning. It becomes problematic when used as a synonym for nation-state, a vehicle for the ecocentricity of the right. Citizenship, in this sense, is less an antidote than a way of holding several identities without forcing a choice among them. This hybridity is not always valued. “Italo-Albanians do not exist in countries that do not recognise hybridity as a value: we are Albanians in Italy and Italian in Albania”.

This same refusal to force a single identity onto a complex reality runs through what is arguably the most significant element of Ypi’s work: the close relationship between history and memory, between family memories and official archives shaped by the dominant ideology. Balancing academic rigour with the sometimes fragile ground of emotional geography is no small stylistic exercise. In Albania, a country still processing the transition from communism to capitalism, this is the elephant in the room.

Ypi has been criticised in her country of origin for writing through the filter of personal memory, an act the author claims as a political choice. “Perhaps fiction that does not pretend to be something else is more authentic than the truth presented by national archives that favour the power in charge”.

Choosing personal sources over official ones may be a useful lens for studying events not extensively covered by mainstream media, such as the ongoing Flamingo Revolution. It brings the conversation back to the theme at the heart of Ypi's latest book: the dignity of protesters lies precisely in their capacity to activate a critical consciousness capable of setting grassroots resistance movements in motion.