Fly, Wild Herons – 19 September 2025
‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ Lea Ypi is asked repeatedly as she tries to enter countries and archives. Fun, she tries on one official, to little mirth in response. Personal research. Academic inquiry. Dignity, perhaps.
At the start of Indignity, Ypi asks a taxi driver in Tirana to take her to the secret-service archive. (He does. Must try that sometime.) There she has permission to view documents relating to her grandmother, Leman, a woman whom she admired and loved, from whom she learned compassion and morality and about whom she perhaps knew little.
This realisation was sparked by a photo posted on social media of her grandparents, ostensibly enjoying a lovely honeymoon in a luxury ski resort, a time that Lea recalls her grandmother describing as the happiest of her life. This is Italy in 1941. While her grandparents were skiing, playing bridge and dancing, horror and death dominated headlines and lives. What does this signify about her?
Ypi’s subsequent investigation leads to a non-fiction novel, or a fictionalised biography, about Leman, who grew up in Salonica amid the fresh trauma of the First World War, as new borders were drawn and people forcibly relocated, and made a life in Albania during the Second World War, after which her husband was imprisoned for being an enemy of the state and she was forced to work in a labour camp while caring for a young and unwell child.
Interspersed with these scenes are Ypi’s own memories – not infallible, she knows – and her experiences of conducting the research as well as extracts from the archive documents, the facts: the surveillance reports, the meeting minutes and excerpts from judicial files. Except that some of the facts are demonstrably false. Like the death certificate which has Leman dying before the granddaughter who grew up with her was born.
The resulting narrative affords Leman a dignity which the historical record does not. Perhaps a truth too though we can debate that.
What is dignity? What is the point of dignity? What is it to act with dignity or to treat another with dignity? Can you impart dignity to someone who is no longer alive, to a group of people? How does dignity relate to agency, freedom, humility, humanity, respect, suffering, blame?
Anyone who knows how easily I trip over my own feet will be relieved that I am not suggesting I have answers on the subject. But Ypi’s writing does address such issues, as well as interrogating dignity during wartime, during its aftermath, under controlling regimes and in the judgement of someone else’s actions.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet and Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang also offer novelistic histories, written even as memories fade and evidence is lost, and are full of such considerations.
Reading Jung Chang’s follow up to Wild Swans I feel a constant mixture of awe and outrage. Despite the shocking treatment of her parents during the Cultural Revolution, it took the author years to place blame on Mao. The man she was taught to view as a deity could not be at fault.
When Jung came to the UK in 1978 as a student, the Chinese authorities, no matter the distance, exerted control over her clothing, her social activities and her reading. Not only did she become the first Chinese person to receive a doctorate from a British university, she also bought herself a dress at a jumble sale.
The way she writes about her mother and what her mother gives up so that her daughter can speak is deeply moving though she should never have had to do so and, of course, Jung is not free either – her books are banned in China and she is unable to visit her mother’s deathbed. Yet there is no space for despair. Optimism, rooted in reasoning, is at the core of her mother’s being and Jung wants the same to be true of her.
Meanwhile at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Kabul, a survivor of every kind of political system imposed by force over the past seven decades, we meet the cleaners, managers, bellboys and chefs who keep going and keep the hotel going in the face of changing politics and unpredictable conflict. If Ypi wonders about her grandparents going on a honeymoon during war, Doucet shows how war is not comprised of battle scenes alone, how things carry on even as a country faces destruction, more than once. A history, rooted in this place, becomes also a testament to a people’s hospitality and sanguinity.
Having said that, the hotel’s grandeur faded long ago, the building is surrounded by cordons, every door is bullet proof and in summer 2021 a wedding celebration was cut short by news of the Taliban’s return. Their sign above the hotel reads ‘Intercontinental for Everyone.’ There is now no one left who remembers the hotel’s first years but, Doucet writes, ‘the hotel remembers. Its balconies are like eyes watching over the city, its glass and stone pocked with bullet holes, its spaces so full of stories.’
What is the purpose of their visit? Lea Ypi, Jung Chang and Lyse Doucet offer their characters a story beautifully told and an esteem which matters.
May your weekend be dignified with books,
Lizzie
