Among many events within the 2011 Literary Festival at LSE, there was a talk with two Polish women writers, Izabela Filipiak and Grazyna Plebanek on the importance of moving, travelling and migration in their writing.
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110219t1030vWT.aspx
I had a pleasure to welcome everyone to the panel on Crossing Borders in Polish Women’s Writing which was generously founded by Polish Cultural Institute. I also tool few minutes for introducing of the two outstanding Polish writers, Izabela Filipiak and Grażyna Plebanek.
A few reflections from my talk:
Before the writers tell us a little about their writing and about the importance of themes such as movement, migration or emigration in their writing, I wish to share with you a few, short reflections on Izabela’s and Grażyna’s writing as well as on the notion of (e)migration; I also want to say something about the place of such questions in contemporary women’s writing in Poland.
Crossing borders has never been easier than in the times we live in. Of course, by crossing borders I mean movements within the European Union and by “our easy times” I mean the last 6 and so years for Polish migrants. The dismantling of border controls and the facilitation of borders-crossing may give us a notion (or, unfortunately, an illusion) of progress, change, transition, a better world. I did not hesitate to add the word “illusion,” because – as we can glean from the growing problem of xenophobia in Europe, especially in the time of present economic crisis – the so called “opening of political borders” has not eliminated the most important borders that result from historical developments of religion, nationalism and prejudices against the Others.
Nevertheless, the organizational changes that got rid of the obstacles to leave and return to one’s country have affected the linguistic domain: “emigration” became “migration,” and “the emigrant” (someone who would come to foreign country to stay and dwell in the foreign country as a foreigner and therefore a stranger) became “the migrant” (a concept somewhat nomadic, not that easy to categorize and hence control).
There is no doubt that the politics and poetics of travel and space have changed in recent years, and the Polish “émigré literature” has become a kind of traveller’s tale (unsurprisingly, perhaps, since 1989 many of the literary scholars announced the end of emigration in literature!). Nevertheless the experience (often a very painful experience) of displacement and homelessness stay untouched.
In a recent interview, Marek Kaźmierski,the English-Polish writer and publisher living in London, stated that in today’s Europe it is easier to be an emigrant, a someone from somewhere else, then to be a native, referring to the today’s outmoded politics of identity, from which the emigrant easily slips away. I am not sure that such categorization is valid any more. It seems that there are no more easy answers to questions such as who is a native and who is an emigrant? What’s belonging? What is home? What rights do I have and to which spaces? These are the questions which are under negotiation in modern humanities and perhaps the search for the answers is at the very core of our contemporaneity. In my reading, the fiction of Izabela Filipiak and Grażyna Plebanek tires to present the complexity of those relationships which one may have with the homeland and the new country: the experience of exile, and living in a foreign language as well as their evocation of Poland from a sceptical, distant perspective (something probably facilitated in their case by their experience of living abroad). Both of them have had to face a predominantly masculine world of Polish literary criticism, in which women’s writing still maintains the stigma of being a little worse, or in many cases, second-rate literature.
Izabela Filipiak probably started all this with her Śmierć i spirala (The Death and the Spiral, 1992), a collection of shorts stories, which, though not autobiographical, refer mainly to her experience of living in the US as a political emigrant during the 1980s. In the 1990s Izabela comes back to Poland and publishes in 1995 one of the most influential book of that decade Absolutna amnezja, a metaphorical narrative that directly criticizes the Polish construction of family and the notion of political engagement in politics. In 1997 she published Niebieska menażeria—a collection of short stories on immigration, the search for a space of one’s own, with a leading I-narrator, who gives the collection a very autobiographical flavour. In the second half of the 1990s she has become a feminist icon in the literary scene. One of the first Polish woman writers of fame after 1989, she openly admits that she is a lesbian and, in 2002 she published a collection of poems, perhaps first openly lesbian collection of poems in Poland, entitled Madame Intuita. She openly criticized the conservative and homophobic elements in Polish culture in Kultura obrażonych (2003). She also published the interesting novel Alma, the play Em, as well as the book on Maria Komornicka (Obszary Odmienności. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej). Her literary journey goes from writing about the experience of emigration and dealing with the notion of physical displacement towards the criticism of the domestic culture, and the attack on the mechanisms of psychological or cultural oppression.
Grażyna Plebanek’s case is different. She started her literary journey in 2002 with a novel Pudełko ze szpilkami that describes the position of a young, Polish “modern” woman in the post 1989, free market. In 2005 she publishes her second novel, a story of friendship between girls who began their lives in Communist Poland and witnessed the political and cultural changes of 1989 first-hand. The Dziewczyny z Portofino is a book on the Polish working and low middle class and its problems: alcoholism, family problems and political mayhem. The novel deals with crossings, in this case, the crossing of a very important border: between Polish Communism and Polish Capitalism. Similarly her 2007 Przystupa and her latest novel Nielegalne związki (2010) deal with the experience of migration. For Grażyna—who lived in Sweden for many years and who lives now in Brussels—the experience of migration contains a strong element of liberation or freedom. Grażyna’s literary constructions on emigration are optimistic; Przystupa, the cleaning lady, has no problem in acquiring a new language; the characters of Nielegalne związki are “new Europeans,” a group of polyglots swiftly juggling between Polish, English and French, or indeed any other languages that are needed.
Izabela Filipiak seems more sceptical, she describes the problem of leaving not as much as leaving a space but as abandoning one’s language, habits, and one’s comfortable and known routines. For Izabela leaving is a complex process:
Autumn. I have just come back to Poland. The return is not something one can experience easily, just like that…you come back and that’s it, you are here. No, one comes back under layer upon layer; each one deeper than the previous, deep to the core of your bones, to the pain and the forgetfulness. One leaves in the same way. Bit by bit, you rip off what was common, what belonged to us both, to us and the others, to us and the place.
In Nielegalne związki where the couples tend to be mixed, blending various countries and cultures, different languages, living in Brussels and working mainly for the European Union, abandoning one’s home has not only become a problem but it actually is a sign of progress. As we read in Nielegalne związki:
When the conversation went towards the comparison between the Belgian reality and the fatherlands, which accented on the superiority of the cucumber’s soup over the local speciality, the carbonara, Megi leant towards Jonathan and whispered:
-Can’t they see that there is no conflict of interests between liking that what is here and that what is there?
In Grazyna’s latest books we can track a specific confident European project.
As the above passages establish the experience of migration can essentially be seen from two main angles: on the one hand it cannot be instantaneous or immediate. In order to live it, it is necessary to abandon the domesticated space, the place of familiar coordinates, and to go through a radical shake-up, a kind of emotional disturbance which takes over even when ‘home’ might not have been all that cosy or friendly. On the other hand, it can be seamless, easy, un-traumatic and even liberating from the national narrow-mindedness — in Grażyna’s novel, this national narrow-mindedness is symbolized by the reference to Józef Ślimak, the Bolesław Prus protagonist from the novel Placówka, who desperately holds on to his land against the German settlement.
When looking at the main scope of writing on emigration by writers who have lived outside Poland both temporarily or permanently, the optimistic view on the experience of migration and crossing borders is very rare. Contemporary emigration literature does not limit itself only to the politically determined problems of nationality, visas or the lack of proficiency in a foreign language – after all, all these form only a sum of worthless inconveniences associated to modern travel. Much more critically, these narratives pick up on estrangement as a deeply conflictive position: it is the predicament of being the stranger, a foreigner ideologically and culturally, mainly linguistically, as well as in all other everyday senses such as physical appearance and eating habits. The foreigner’s condition has more or less a defined set of symptoms. Firstly there is recognition of loneliness, both as perceived and real, and a sense of being chronically misunderstood and rejected. The foreigner is a threat to the harmony of ‘the family, the clan, the tribe,’ as Julia Kristeva once put it.
The contemporary literature written by writers based outside Poland today plays a central role in the process of re-negotiating the notion of belonging to Polish culture and politics and as a part of a discourse on the contemporary belonging. This is the case of Izabela Filipiak, Grażyna Plebanek, but also others: Joanna Pawluśkiewicz (Pani na domkach), Iwona Słabuszewska Krauze (Hotel Irlandia) or Olga Tokaczuk It is also the case of many other texts such as books by Dana Parys-White Emigrantka z wyboru. Opowieść londyńska (2008) and Justyna Tomańska Polka w Londynie (2004). These texts are accompanied by many contemporary narratives by male writers such as Grzegorz Kopaczewski’s novel Global nation (2004) on the generational experience of London and Polish emigration there after 2004, Bronisław Świderski’s Asystent śmierci (2007) on the thirty-something Pole living in Denmark; finally, simplistic and naïve narrative of Daniel Koziarski Socjopata w Londynie (2006) and many others.
When investigating the phenomenon of crossing borders in contemporary Polish literature, more questions and directions of the new research are appearing, especially in the light of the new political ideologies and ideologues, and new centres and margins created by new Europe, new technology, new citizens. It is a new space in which the tales of a woman in the state must still face borders more difficult to transcend than geographical limits. They must still find ways of crossing the psychological frontiers that divide a world charted by patriarchy, xenophobia, primitive fear that “the Other” will take over... whatever, “our spaces, our jobs, our languages”...
Thank you,
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