Ideas When your grandmother is accused of being a 'fascist spy'
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Feb 24, 2026 Lea Ypi, Albanian philosopher and memoirist, digs into a wartime photo that ignited accusations about her grandmother. She mixes archival sleuthing, literary reconstruction and family memory. The conversation probes how dignity, identity and political surveillance shape personal histories. It follows choices, exile and the costs of integrity across shifting regimes.
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Archives As Constructed Narratives
- Ypi found archives are not neutral: they reflect the compilers' standpoint and deliberately exclude women's perspectives.
- She therefore blends literary reconstruction with documents to recover lives the bureaucratic record erased.
When Fiction Reveals Hidden Truths
- Ypi calls the choices archivists make a 'creative intervention' that can produce a fiction of the archive.
- She argues honest literary invention, flagged as such, can yield a fuller, perhaps truer reconstruction of excluded lives.
Identity Born From Empire Collapse
- Early displacement in Salonika shaped her grandmother's hybrid identity and sense of never fully belonging.
- Ypi links collapsing empires to forced identity consolidation as nation-states pressured people to 'choose' a homeland.
