Untitled Agnieszka Michalska BA, Hampshire College, 2003 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado Boulder in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of English 2012 This thesis entitled: Untitled written by Agnieszka Michalska has been approved for the Department of English Jeffrey DeShell Karen Jacobs Date: April 5, 2012 The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Agnieszka Michalska, (MFA, Creative Writing [English Department]) Untitled Thesis directed by Professor Jeffrey DeShell This work of creative non-fiction explores belonging as a concept that binds two narrators, a mother and daughter—both on journeys, both torn—though what each wants to belong to becomes part of their individual exploration. The daughter’s narrative hungers for her mother’s sense of home, and in the process, her own. The mother’s narrative actualizes rupture. It begins in Poland with an impressionable memory that destabilizes her childhood when she learns her mother is not her biological mother, but rather her aunt. To be in between mothers and later in between countries is not a coincidence or some great metaphor, but the reality of many families fleeing the residual effects of World War II and the oppression of the Eastern Block. The mother, not only speaks of the past, but embodies history. She is Poland. According to Avtar Brah, who wrote Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, “All diasporic journeys are composite.” It is a conflation of personal narratives, memories and re- memories with the historical circumstances of the economic, political and cultural specificities within the diasporic experience. The immigrant, therefore, lives in two worlds. The first is imbued in the materiality of the everyday, a locality more than a “home.” The second is in the imagination and the dense layers of dreams, the place where the “home” resides. This book-length project thrives on the tension between connection and disruption since that is the space of the immigrant experience. To emphasize the in-between, the book vacillates between two first-person point-of-views. The voices are meant to impress and bleed into one another, to destabilize the concept of personal narratives and bring attention to the gossamer space in identity formation, language learning and historical constructs, which are created both for ourselves and others. iii for my family Contents Epigraphs……………………………………………………………….Page 1 Thesis…………………………………………………………………...Page 2 Bibliography………………………………………………………...…..Page 143 v “’Home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return.” Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities “A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild.” Bukowo Phrase, Poland, James A. Michener 1 Flying over Toronto with the sun hovering on the horizon. Summer is near. On this day the sun sets at 8:32 in Toronto and at 8:36 in Poznan. Toronto is not home; it’s a stop over, but already the sun feels familiar. Lake Ontario radiates dusk, glows next to a circuit board of liminal lights, where dispersed sunlight has softened the effect of electricity. Security has had to escort a man onto the plane. This is new. Escorting a drunk in rather than out. The old man stepped with sleep, staggering between dreams, between two airport guards. The extremes of exile collide within Lot Airlines. A couple sits in front with Dolce and Gabbana glasses, Hermés silk scarves. The wife wants a better seat. She leans out for attention. The flight attendants listen but don’t seem to care. Blue scarves with blue skirts or pants for uniforms, depending on the woman and they’re all women. All around Polish sings its sibilant tongue. While waiting for takeoff, an erratic discoloring formed in the sky—strokes of black calligraphy that disappeared as quickly as they appeared. A rapidly shape shifting cloud. Only when the plane got closer did the image clarify itself into a swarm of starlings. Watching, mesmerized by their nervous unison, never colliding. No bird left isolated for easy attack. Hundreds of thousands of them—all together. Later, the cart rattles up the aisles and the drinking begins. The man next to me orders two beers and three double shots of vodka. Asks me what I want. I say no thank you, but he insists, so one 2 vodka for company it is. Ivan has done this for twenty years, flying back and forth to his wife and three children who no longer are children, but rather have children of their own. He’s a butcher outside of Toronto. His Polish is of the East, of Russian influence. Even I can pick up on his accent. He smells of aftershave, wears a beige leather coat with polished shoes and pressed slacks. He looks at the flight attendants and tells me they get uglier every year. Do cows eat corn in Canada? I ask. He tells me he’s seen the feedlots. He shakes his head, in English says I know, I know, like he’s forgotten something. He repeats the refrain throughout our conversation, always in English. He tells me a joke about Yashiu and Stasiu sitting in a bar, watching the waitresses. Yashiu orders the first round; Stasiu comments on the ugly women. Stasiu orders the next round; Yashiu comments on the ugly women. They do this two more times and then in the fourth round, Stasiu says, We better get out of here. The waitresses are starting to turn me on. Ivan points to one of the flight attendants and says, She’s not so bad. A man stumbles through the aisle to the bathroom. Ivan keeps talking. Tells me the older he gets the more he wants to return, but he can’t. He’ll still miss things here. He’s tired, but keeps talking, almost afraid to close his eyes. A few rows ahead of us, the escorted old man starts sneezing convulsively. The flight attendants move the man next to him, pity in their eyes, not for the escorted man—here, they laugh, we all laugh—but pity for the man next to him. Another man comes to the flight attendants’ station, orders more drinks. All these men are in their sixties. All these men drink with conviction. Not like the young ones who toast to the future with beer, and then sleep. These men of their sixties know a different history. It’s not a simple matter of generations. 3 My cousin Michal, only a year younger than me, tells me he remembers minor details of communism, but he says the up and coming generation knows nothing. He says, Still we all carry the guilt of time. We got lucky. Our parents didn’t. A flight attendant chitchats with Ivan while he orders two more vodkas. She looks me up and down and tells Ivan to be on his best behavior because he’s sitting with a lady. I blush because I just laughed about the size of her ass. Ivan can’t believe I came to the US when I was six. Your speech is refined, sophisticated, he says. I grow aware of our class difference. But I have been raised to understand class beyond its economic implications. I have learned about the simple gestures of history. Like with the Russians during WWII and beyond. When they divided intellectuals from workers by a simple display of hands: coarse to the right, smooth to the left. The gulags for the intelligentsia. To dig coal and gold. To make room for farmers and workers, who in turn occupied those vacant homes in the cities. Livestock roaming streets, feeding on spurts of green between cracked concrete. I can’t get an image out of my mind. It’s from a book I once read about General Anders and how he walked the Polish Army out of Russia to assist the allies first in the Middle East, then Northern Africa and finally Italy. Most never returned to Poland. Exiled or dead. But the image I can’t get out of my mind is from the northern reaches of Siberia in those gold mines, where frost erased limbs, leaving stubs of legless, armless men to slither in the snow. I don’t know why we left Poland. 4 My mother tells me it was a matter of napkins. On a visit to a half-sister in Sweden two hours vanished in an aisle in a grocery store, her mind spinning from abundance. She pattern-played with prints and color as a child locked into possibilities. It was the seventies. Swedish drunks didn’t look drunk wearing suits—so clean shaven and fresh. Highways had more than two lanes. Houses came in colors. Concrete didn’t crack. She fell in love with turquois polka dots. My father tells me a joke. A man dies and goes to heaven, but quickly gets bored of all the praying, chaste men and women, so he tells Peter heaven’s boring. Peter decides its time to show the other side and schedules a visit to hell. There, men and women drink, play cards, act glutinous, fuck, have fun. A week later, after returning to heaven, the man tells Peter he wants to move to hell. Are you sure? Peter asks. Yes, yes. When the man gets to hell, Satan greets him and orders him to enter a pit of billowing flames.