Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

As a result of these events, which he only ever watched on Italian or Yugoslav television, my father had developed his fascination with revolutionary groups, those who rejected legal rights and parliamentary democracy altogether and believed that without the violence of the people one could never overcome the violence of the state. He was fascinated by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who’d set up a publishing company and whose stance he said he admired because it had catered neither to the family’s capitalist interests nor to the democratic rhetoric of the liberal state. He told me the story of how Feltrinelli had died carrying his own explosives during an operation of the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana revolutionary group. He described his death with such narrative precision and refined psychological detail that you would almost think he had been present and had narrowly escaped. He told me the story before I could really understand what the operation was about, or why it was necessary to blow up electricity pylons to spark a revolution.

learned that the former prime minister whom I had grown up despising, and whose name my father bore, did not have the same name and surname by coincidence. He was my great-grandfather. For his entire life, the weight of that name had crushed my father’s hopes. He could not study what he wanted. He had to explain his biography. He had to make amends for a wrong he had never committed and to apologize for views he did not share. My grandfather, who disagreed with his own father so much that he had wanted to join the republicans in Spain on the opposite side of the struggle, had paid for the blood relationship with fifteen years in prison. I would have paid too, who knows how, my parents said. I would have paid, had my family not lied to keep the secret.

One might also have called it theft, except that an individual appropriating common resources constitutes the very foundation of private property. Bottom-up privatization would be a better description.

He then turned to her, his eyes flashing with anger. He yelled that, just because anyone could now go out and sell what they wanted, it didn’t mean you were entitled to exploit your own child. My mother initially ignored him. Instead, she turned to me and asked: ‘Didn’t you want to go yourself?’ I confirmed with a vigorous nod. My father shook with rage. ‘Of course she did!’ he shouted. ‘It wouldn’t be exploitation without consent. It would be violence.’ My mother stayed calm. She explained that I was no longer a child, that I would soon be twelve, and that it was very normal for Western teenagers to be involved in flourishing family businesses. ‘But we haven’t got any family business!’ my father screamed back. ‘Neither failing nor flourishing!’ ‘And you never will,’ my mother muttered back.

Now that he no longer had a job, they also needed the connections,

Mule had recently joined civil society. She topped up her meagre school salary by helping out a couple of foreign NGOs that had opened branches in our town, often enlisting her pupils to help with event organization. The transition from when she’d organized evenings for the communist youth groups and put on shows to celebrate the birthday of Enver Hoxha had been seamless. My father joked that some skills were eminently transferable. ‘Why does the Mule want you to translate

‘Civil society’ was the new term recently added to the political vocabulary, more or less as a substitute for ‘Party’. It was known that civil society had brought the Velvet Revolution to Eastern Europe. It had accelerated the decline of socialism. In our case, the term became popular when the revolution was already complete, perhaps to give meaning to a sequence of events that at first seemed unlikely, then required a label to become meaningful. It joined other new keywords, such as ‘liberalization’, which replaced ‘democratic centralism’; ‘privatization’, which replaced ‘collectivization’; ‘transparency’, which replaced ‘self-criticism’; ‘transition’, which stayed the same but now indicated the transition from socialism to liberalism instead of the transition from socialism to communism; and ‘fighting corruption’, which replaced ‘anti-imperialist struggle’.

There was this lingering suspicion, or perhaps residual cultural memory, that without social control greater individual freedom would entail the freedom of individuals to harm themselves. That social control, it was now assumed, could no longer be entrusted to the state. This gave greater urgency to the need to embrace civil society. Civil society was supposed to be outside the state but also something that might replace it; it was supposed to emerge organically, but also had to be stimulated; it was supposed to bring harmony while acknowledging that some differences could never be resolved. Civil society was made of many different community groups and organizations, which sprang up like friendships in a socialist queue, some as a result of local initiatives, but most with help from our foreign friends. One of the problems of our country, one often heard, was that we didn’t have a functioning civil society.

My teenage years were years of hyper-activism in civil society. Like many others, I was not blind to the benefits. Those were both spiritual and material. With the debating teams of the Open Society Institute, for example, you could discuss such motions as: ‘Capital punishment is justified’ and learn about the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. Debating ‘Open societies require open borders’, you could learn about the function of the World Trade Organization. With the Action Plus information campaigns about AIDS, you could kill an afternoon eating free peanuts and drinking Coca Cola in the former ping-pong room of the Palace of Sports. With the Friends of Esperanto, there were promises of travelling to Paris. With the Red Cross, one could hang around when distributing groceries to families in need and get a free packet of rice. This was different from the rice we used to borrow from our neighbours; firstly, there was more of it; secondly, it came from the West; and thirdly, it contained a ‘use-by’ date which informed you of when you were supposed to eat it, usually the week before.

The Crocodile had salad for dinner in the garden with his friends. The Crocodile said it reminded him of Greek salad. The Crocodile dated a girl who worked for the Italian Catholic school, then her friend, who translated for the Soros Foundation.

Of all the habits Van de Berg had, this was the one that perplexed people the most. He was never able to recall the exact names of the places he had seen, or the people he had met and the things he had done. Different sounds, flavours and encounters were all filed in his mind like documents in a chaotic desk of which only the owner knew the order. Whenever we suggested a new dish to try, or a tourist site he might like to visit, or whenever we wanted to teach him a common word in our language, he welcomed the recommendation without surprise, thought of another experience he could compare it to, and let himself be guided without showing signs of disorientation. Likewise, when we tried to warn him of challenges, or to help him cope with difficulties. Vincent was grateful to receive the tips, but one was always left with the impression that he didn’t strictly need them.

He had never believed in the rules he was now asked to enact. He did not have much faith in socialism either. He hated authority in all its forms.

The clubs I used to attend as a child, for poetry, theatre, singing, maths, natural science, music or chess, had all come to an abrupt end in December 1990. In school, the only subjects to be taken seriously were the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, maths. For the humanities, either new classes were introduced, such as when Market Economy replaced Dialectical Materialism, and we had no textbooks at all, or, as with the history and geography material, they still described our country as ‘the lighthouse of anti-imperialist struggles around the world’.

A few pubs and clubs had started to open. Most of them belonged to people-smugglers, drug-dealers or sex-traffickers. These were all mentioned as normal occupations, in the same way one would have explained in the past that so-and-so was a cooperative worker, a factory employee, a bus driver or a hospital nurse.

But Ilir never understood. Or perhaps he never accepted it. After a few visits in which I would play with him, read stories or take him to the beach, he became more insistent. ‘Mama here!’ he would shout every time he saw me. ‘Go Mama beach!’ Then, when it was time for me to leave, he would cling on to my leg, throw himself to the floor and kick his carers, insisting that I should either stay with him or take him with me. ‘Bring Ilir home,’ he would cry. ‘Mama take Ilir.’ He became increasingly difficult to handle in my presence: he refused to come out of the water at the beach, eat his food or go down for his naps. When I tried to leave, I noticed that my bag was missing, or my sandals had disappeared. It could have been normal toddler behaviour, except that babies at the orphanage never cried, and toddlers never threw tantrums. The problem, the carers explained, consisted in my presence, in his attachment to me. Ilir didn’t have to be miserable like that; he would be fine if I just kept out of sight. I was asked to reduce my visits to the toddler room and moved to a different area of the building, one with younger babies, who forgot people more easily.

We won the national Soros debate. The motion was ‘Open societies require open borders.’

Only then did it occur to me that all his life my father had admired politicians only once they were dead.

accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the Albanian civil war could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by the long-standing animosities between different ethnic groups, the Ghegs in the north and the Tosks in the south.

accepted it despite its absurdity, despite the fact that I didn’t know what I counted as, whether both or neither. I accepted it although my mother was a Gheg and my father a Tosk, and throughout their married life only their political and class divisions had ever mattered, never the accents with which they spoke. I accepted it, as we all did, as we accepted the liberal road map we had followed like a religious calling, as we accepted that its plan could be disrupted only by outside factors – like the backwardness of our own community norms – and never be beset by its own contradictions.

This second reference to Marx was more alarming than the first. Whenever my parents said that ‘so-and-so was a Marxist’ or that ‘so-and-so is still a Marxist’, what they meant was anything from ‘so-and-so is stupid’ to ‘one ought not to trust them’ to ‘so-and-so is a criminal.’ Being called a Marxist was never meant as praise.

But they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs.