Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Pyzik Agata

Author:Pyzik, Agata [Pyzik, Agata]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780993959
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

Poland as a post-colonial country

The most inspiring claim in Janion’s disquisition is the portrayal of Poland as a country that is, in a sense, postcolonial. Inspired by Said’s Orientalism, Janion presents Poland as a country of dual entanglement: colonized but at the same time colonizing (in Kresy, i.e. Borderlands, its ‘eastern marches’, an empire that once stretched across what is now Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia). This duality and lack of statehood brought about the lack of a coherent identity. The subject is present in Witold Gombrowicz’s prose, where the eternal Polish complexes go hand in hand with a lordly contempt for the otherness of the East. In Janion, colonialism intertwines with gender questions: Poland’s masculine arrogance, brimming with a sense of superiority, juxtaposed against the image of it as a degraded female. It would be hard not to notice this gender moment; as in its iconography, Poland the Brave is always a woman. This “Logo Polonia” in manacles is heroic or melancholic as the Black Madonna, suffering and unhappy in ‘Melancholia’, the famous painting by Jacek Malczewski, in other iconic paintings chained to a rock, bound with a chain or put into stocks. A woman passes the test as a symbol due to her indefiniteness and lack of a permanent place in culture. In a natural way, the womanhood of Polonia also symbolizes her frailty.

What identity, after all, can we talk about here if the tradition of this state, besides Poles, is claimed also by Ukrainians, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Karaims, and Tatars? The most tragic dimension of this lack of communication between the nations is naturally present in the Jewish community. Even such national heroes as the revolutionary nationalist Tadeusz Kościuszko hailed from Orthodox Ruthenian gentry. Mickiewicz’s family had similar roots. It is interesting that in diagnosing our tendency to mythologize defeat, and falling into melancholia, we hardly ever notice how the Polish experience as mediator between the East and the West has been accompanied by a mysterious self-destructiveness. Our identity took shape in the no man’s lands between a suppressed Slavic spirit and an assimilated Westernness, between rationality and “barbarianism”, betraying later all the symptoms of the experienced trauma. Poland’s ostentatious turning towards the past and the inability to live “in the present”, which is always in this or that way unsatisfactory, has also made it impossible to get even with what has been suppressed. To hide away, to ham it up – this is “our” way of coping with trauma that every now and then come to the surface. It seems that the Polish tendency to fantasize themselves as ‘Sarmatians’ the ancient Iranian tribe that allegedly came to Poland and whose myth endures in the Polish aristocracy, the fantastic projects that sprang up from the minds of Polish writers and artists, took their source from a certain cultural deficiency We endlessly play up our funerary ceremonies, traumatically repeating our defeats.

(A tragic-absurd epilogue to this was written on the April 10th, 2010, when 93 Polish

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