Lea Ypi > Quotes

“In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the color of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who had urged us to break free. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated as criminals.

Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years [1990s] would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to "protect our way of life." And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“I thought about killing myself but was sorry for Nini. It only lasted 15 minutes. I need to find a new book to read.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In the end my grandmother said, “We’re always in charge of our fate.” Biography was critical to knowing the limits of your world, but once you knew those limits, you were free to choose and you became responsible for your decisions.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In March, they said we were all victims. They accepted us. In August, they looked at us as if we were some kinds of menace, like we were about to eat their children.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“It’s probably better to better to spend time with fictional characters than miss the ones I’ll never see again.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“For some, leaving was a necessity that went under the official name of ‘transition’. We were a society in transition, it was said, moving from socialism to liberalism, from one-party rule to pluralism, from one place to the other. Opportunities would never come to you, unless you went looking for them, like the half-cockerel in the old Albanian folk tale who travels far away, looking for his kismet, and in the end returns full of gold. For others, leaving the country was an adventure, a childhood dream come true or a way to please their parents. There were those who left and never returned. Those who went and came back soon after. Those who turned the organization of movement into a profession, who opened travel agencies or smuggled people on boats. Those who survived, and became rich. Those who survived, and continued to struggle. And those who died trying to cross the border. In”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“Socialism had succeeded in ripping the veil off women's head, but not in the minds of their men. It had managed to tear chains carrying crosses from their wives' chests, but those chains still shackled their husbands' brains.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the colour of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who used to urge us to break free. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated like criminals.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“NEVER ASKED MYSELF about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“I don’t want to leave. Leaving makes you forget things. It makes you forget people.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“My mother did not fight and conquer her fears. She never knew fear in the first place.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“Don’t cry. Crying never helped anyone. If I had ever thought about crying, I wouldn’t be here. Do something. Read another book, learn a new language, find some activity.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation.

My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past.

And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.

[...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“I accepted the different explanations of what had caused this or that, how the international community had warned about such-and-such decision, how the Balkans had long had an explosive history—how one must factor in the ethnic and religious divisions that pervaded that corner of the world, and the legacy of socialism too. I 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. I 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.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“El apoyo que ofrecía era solo por caridad, nunca por solidaridad.”
― Lea Ypi, Libre: El desafío de crecer en el fin de la historia

“Era un poco como los vales de comida durante el socialismo. Como todo el mundo recibía su parte no podía existir el hambre. Si decías que tenías hambre, te convertías en enemigo del pueblo.”
― Lea Ypi, Free

“Descubrió que, aunque nadie le ordenaba qué decir ni adónde ir, tenía que decir algo e ir a alguna parte sin tener siquiera tiempo de reflexionar sobre ello, de estudiar los beneficios y sopesar los riesgos.”
― Lea Ypi, Libre: El desafío de crecer en el fin de la historia

“Our heroes were ordinary people, and there were millions of others like them in the world; our language was a patchwork of words that had emerged from who knows where. We existed not as a product of our efforts but of the mercy of others, more powerful enemies perhaps, who had decided to let us be, whose marks of victory were thousand smaller places in their own image, which all looked like one another, and all thought themselves to be different.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“Era una gran ironía que se hubieran casado porque, en otra época y en otro lugar, es muy probable que hubieran sido enemigos acérrimos. La historia los convirtió en aliados.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“It’s like everyone’s gone mad at the same time. They destroy everything.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“The stars, medals and certificates, and the very title of 'Pioneer', would soon become museum relics, memories from a different era, fragments of a past life that someone had lived, somewhere.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In the following days, the first opposition party was founded and my parents revealed the truth, their truth. They said that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century. That the universities which had haunted my family were, yes, educational institutions, but of a peculiar kind. That when my family spoke of the graduation of relatives, what they really meant was their recent release from prison. That completing a degree was coded language for completing a sentence. That what had been referred to as the initials of university towns were actually the initials of various prisons and deportation sites: B. for Burrel, M. for Maliq, S. for Spaç. That the different subjects of study corresponded to different official charges: to study international relations meant to be charged with treason; literature stood for 'agitation and propaganda'; and a degree in economics entailed a more minor crime, such as 'hiding gold'. That students who become teachers were former prisoners who converted to being spies, like our cousin Ahmet and his late wife. Sonia. That a harsh professor was an official at whose hands many people had lost their lives, like Haki, with whom my grandfather had shaken hands after serving his sentence. That f someone had achieved excellent results, it meant the stint had been brief and straightforward; but being expelled meant a death sentence; and dropping out voluntarily meant committing suicide.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“Para ellos, amar a una mujer y controlarla era prácticamente lo”
― Lea Ypi, Libre: El desafío de crecer en el fin de la historia

“He knew what he was against, but found it hard to defend what he stood for.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“«Hay que hacer lo que se pueda, brigadista», concluía mi padre, «pero al final, para cambiar las cosas, hace falta una revolución, porque nadie va a renunciar a sus privilegios sin que lo obliguen».”
― Lea Ypi, Free

“We must never return to those backward customs. There is no God anywhere. No God, no afterlife, no immortality of the soul. When we die, we die. The only thing that lives eternally is the work we have done, the projects we have created, the ideals we leave to others to pursue on our behalf.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

“The people he admired were nihilists and rebels, men and women who spent their lives merely condemning the world they inhibited, but without committing to any alternatives.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“He would never be able to win his seat back from those dirty communists bastards without the right colour socks.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“To think that people deserve a different fate than the rest of nature does was to be a slave of myth and dogma at the expense of science and reason. Science and reason were all that mattered.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History