Truth and Memory: On Lea Ypi’s “Indignity”🔒 SSL Verified

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"Lea Ypi’s first memoir, Free, began with a scene of her hugging a headless statue of Stalin in Durrës, Albania as a child. The image was effective in showing the young Ypi’s devotion to communism, which was important as the book dealt with her disorientation upon its fall and the realization that much of what she believed about her life had been a lie. Some readers, however, took issue with what they considered Ypi’s excessive use of artistic license: there was no statue of Stalin in Durrës, just a small bust with its head intact."

"This controversy was related in Thomas Meaney’s review of Free in the London Review of Books, with Meaney siding with Ypi’s critics. Ypi responded, in the first instance, by referencing Walter Benjamin’s essay “Excavation and Memory,” which argues for a more nuanced understanding of truth and history, and in the second instance, by questioning those who would try to “police the memory of an eleven-year-old.” In Indignity, Ypi’s new book detailing both the life of her grandmother and her own investigation into that life, Ypi doubles down on her storytelling approach blending memory, historical fact, and imaginative literature, but she faces an even more difficult task as she is dealing not with her own memories, but those of her grandmother."

"In “Excavation and Memory,” Benjamin writes that memory produces “an image of the person who remembers” and that this person must note “where he gained possession of” a memory. In other words, how one remembers is just as important as what one remembers, and the two cannot be neatly separated. Understood in this way, Ypi’s memory of hugging Stalin could be considered “genuine” in that it captures a historical consciousness unavailable to the present-day reader—the feeling of an eleven-year-old girl who thinks there’s nothing better in the world than communism—and it does so more effectively than a dry accounting of historical fact can. Ypi’s insistence on “the memory of an eleven-year-old” is key as well—for the past to come alive, it can’t be revisited through the perspective of the adult Ypi, only that of the child."

"But how does one do this with memories that are not one’s own? Read more »"

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