BOOK REVIEW

LEA YPI’S BOOK is set in Durres, which, since 1961, when the Soviet Union abandoned their submarine base at Pasha Liman, just south of Vlora, has become the only significant port town in Albania.

Her book is largely biographical, and opens symbolically in December 1990, when she was eleven. The choice of her route home from school sets the scene, and ultimately the structure of the book.

She can either go left via the home of her best friend, who is looked after by her widowed father. Her friend lost her mother at the birth of her little sister, who for economic reasons, is in an orphanage in the north of the country.

Or, she can turn right, passing the state-owned (everything is state-owned) biscuit factory, where children often successfully hassled the workers for free biscuits.

But instead, she goes straight ahead from the school gate and encounters a rioting mob in conflict with dogs and police chanting “Freedom democracy, freedom democracy”.

In fright she runs to find refuge in the garden of the Palace of Culture not far from the port. She ultimately finds sanctuary hugging the thigh of Stalin's statue. When she recovers her composure and stands back, she realises the statue has been decapitated by the hooligans/insurgents.

But to this reader, the statue's leg has a hollow ring to it. In 2008 when visiting King Zog’s son, Leka, pretender to the Albanian throne, I saw Stalin’s statue well-preserved, but facing into the corner between two nearby buildings like a naughty school boy. The statue was unharmed and had simply been moved to an inconspicuous and safe location near the end of the prince’s garden.

The cult of damaging statues had not started again by 1990, particularly so in Albania, where the people’s respect and fear of such actions would not have allowed it. Also Hoxah’s censorship would have protected them from the knowledge of what happened in Budapest on the 23rd October 1956 when the 8m tall Stalin statue was cut off at the knees and towed to Blaha Lujza Square for dismemberment. Tearing down statues only gained its recent popularity in 2003, when, in Fardoz Square in Baghdad, the then head of state made his symbolic drop under the protection of the bloody-handed Americans. More recently, the pathetic Sunday afternoon spectacle of a delegation of middle-class Bristolians dislodging Edward Colston from his perch 300 years after he had given up his Royal African Company interests, puts this activity into perspective.

This a well written book telling the simple story of a child, her parents and brother, and one remaining grandmother growing up in the last truly Stalinist state in Europe during the period when so-called Democracy turned up.

The author’s family were hampered in their statecontrolled lives as they have a “biography”. One of her father’s grandfathers was a former prime minister, the one preceding the Zog regime, well before Uncle Enva’s takeover in 1946.

During my visits to Albania I have made many good friends, amongst them is Andi Nallbani, whose father Hasan also an artist, has produced a series of paintings which tell the same story as the book. Andi has selected some of these for this piece. They include a portrait of a land worker from the Hoxah period in the socialist realism genre.

Also various aspects of the flux of population out of Albania are portrayed: the human trafficking, particularly of women; the horrors of flight by sea; and “the car” period.

I have also included a photograph of the astonishing sight of the overloaded freighter The Vlora which was highjacked in Durres, with reportedly 20,000 onboard.

Between 1990 and now, the population of Shqipëria, aka Albania, has shrunk by more than 12% of the 1990 figure to just over 2.8 million. This Exodus is also generally portrayed in his paintings.

The “car period” is interesting too. Under Enva Hoxah the car population grew to about 3000, all state-owned of course. That is one car for every 11,000 people - what a dream. In 1998 the Independent newspaper reported that Albania was home to more prestigious German cars per capita than Germany itself - 90% of them stolen!

Lea Ypi amusingly describes the jargon, which accompanied the new capitalist overcoat which most of the communist world donned post 1989.

“Privatisation” was in much demand by the populace. What they actually wanted was privacy and in particular an end to the post office workers’ practice of routinely opening post before it was delivered. Her father worked during that period as a port official and had to deal with “structural reforms” - a euphemism for mass sacking - at the behest of the World Bank and other interested agencies. But, he shrank from wholesale redundancies of poor Roma port workers.

I had a similar experience of understanding jargon in Tirana when I sought help from the British Embassy. The Ambassador, Fiona McIlwham, was out, so one of her assistants, probably recently graduated (LSE maybe) explained that I needed an “interlocutor”, significantly a word which Lea Ypi uses on page 201. None the wiser, I went back to my hotel and found an English dictionary which gave the following definition: “Centre man of Negro minstrel troupe such as on a Mississippi show boat”.

Even in 2009 such persons were few and far between in Albania.

Like a swarm of bees in the Adriatic! Astonishing what happened then.

In the text the interlocutor /centre man is Lea’s southern (Tosk) grandmother trying to facilitate an understanding between three French, all lady, NGO members and her northern (Gheg) daughter-in-law Doli (Lea’s mother) on the subject of women’s freedom. Doli later admits to them that she was always able to facilitate her personal woman’s freedom with the aid of a kitchen knife.

The three ways at the start of the book are echoed later. Lea’s school friend was trafficked by her boyfriend to Italy where, Lea hears through the diaspora grapevine, that she works the street near the Stazione Centrale Milan. A biscuit maker at the factory she hears has moved into the lucrative European import export trade, namely cocaine and hashish, while she herself went via the universities of Rome, Berlin, Oxford and the Australian National University, in Canberra to LSE were she teaches political science as a professor. Dialectic materialism is but a part of her specialisation.

The final words of her book state that it was written “to reconcile and continue the struggle”. After such a challenging childhood I am pleased that she has and is.

I cannot finish a piece for a Somerset-based magazine without mentioning Aubrey Herbert who, in more imperialist days, was encouraged to take up the position of Head of State in Albania, a country he loved. But his old Oxford friend and tutor Hilaire Belloc advised him “to stay home and create a good wine cellar”. He finally settled for being the MP for the South Somerset Division and then Yeovil from 1911 until his death in 1923.

Faleminderit Vizitorë që lexoni komentet e mia.

Footnote 1: Hasan Nallbani (b, 1934) in Berat Albania. In 1949 he studied at the Artistic Lyceum “Jordan Misja” in Tirana. From 1949 to 1954 he was the student of painter Nexhmedin Zajmi.

In 1954 he worked as a stage designer in the National Theatre in Tirana. During 19591964 Nallbani studied at the Art Academy in Tirana, in the atelier of the painter Guri Madhi.

He has begun to exhibit paintings, such as “Refugees” and a series of landscapes in Tirana. In 1968 he won the third prize in the National Contest of art picture “Letter from Headquarters”.

His solo exhibition was opened in 1984 in the National Gallery in Tirana. At the same year he exhibited at the Alexandria Bienniale, Egypt. He projected the Iconographic Museum “Onufri”, with the auxiliary facilities of the Cathedral of “St. Mary” in the Castle of Berat. From 1986 to 1988 he exhibited at the Ankara Bienniale, Turkey.

After the ’90s Nallbani was part of many exhibitions in Albania. In 1993 he exhibited in France. In 1998 Nallbani exhibited the “Magazin” and “Mediterranea” in Bari, Italy.

In 2008 he was qualified as Best Visual Artist of the Year and in 2010 was given the “Onufri” International Competition Award. [Onufri was a 16th Century painter of Orthodox icons from Berat]. Philip George.