Explorers, writers and other creative strangers
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanna Kujawa
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Joanna Kujawa's biography and other articles by this writer
In homage to Lech Paszkowski and all creative strangers
In the immigration office in Paris, I had one chance to convince the person in charge why I should be allowed to stay. Someone in the waiting room cried as he was handed his deportation papers. People of all nationalities, and their children, waited their turn. When it was my turn to face the immigration officer, I was determined to show that all was fine, that I was worthy of staying, that I was non-threatening. But something betrayed me to the woman in charge. She looked at me with professional suspicion.
"Why are you here? We have enough people from your country, from every possible country, staying here illegally. You have no money, I suppose?"
"But yes, I do. A little. Just enough," I whispered.
"Just enough for what? And how have you earned your money without a working visa?"
How could I explain to her that I dreamed of a fuller life? This was inexplicable within the confines of her world. That people worked illegally because they could not work otherwise. That I walked the streets of Paris whispering verses from Baudelaire wanting to breathe the air that Modigliani and de Beau-voir had breathed. In her eyes, I was an Eastern "barbarian" at the gates of Paris, who came to deceive and take other people's jobs. My imagination ran wild. Was it the stamping of Cossacks' horses on the Eastern steps that she heard when I was answering her questions? Did she disapprove of the freezing winters drowned in glasses of vodkas drunk by my ancestors? Was it something about my Eastern European face? Eyes too big to be fully civilised? Or was it the "red curse" that worried her?
Under any other circumstances, I would not identify myself with these symbols, but then I wanted to throw them back at her to mock her suspicion and rejection. To mock the system that categorises people, a system too restrictive to define anything of significance about another person except as an "intruder" with low economic assets. How could the questions on an immigration form encompass the qualities of Slavic vitality I love, or the writers who created the cultural narrative in which I grew up, or the adventurers and revolutionaries who shaped my imagination?
Similar incidents happened in North America. There, people put me into the category of vodka and sausages when they tried to be friendly. My American friend with a degree from Berkeley was surprised that there was "Polish literature" despite Czeslaw Milosz, a Pole and the 1980 Nobel Prize winner for literature, teaching at her university for decades.
An ironic reversal of roles took place some years later in Southeast Asia, where I suddenly became a "rich Westerner". My young, soft-spoken guide took me to remote temples in Cambodia and confessed on the last day of my trip how angry he was about "serving rich Westerners" like me. He believed (wrongly) that I had enough money to smuggle him out of the country to find a better life in the West. I understood his dreams. Like myself years earlier, he too religiously studied French and English. He wanted to see the world and be a writer.
I knew that feeling. After the incident in Paris, I knew that there was a very long and treacherous bridge that a stranger and a foreigner must cross. A bridge crowded by rigid rules of "rich" and "poor", of desirable and not. I knew that the bridge led to another side of being, an open-ended and creatively intuited belonging unfolding in front of me. This thought exhilarated me.
I wanted to explore other possibilities of being and belonging.
SOME QUESTIONS, HOWEVER, STILL NEEDED TO BE ANSWERED because how does one describe an experience as diverse as belonging without reference to the traditional notions of "sameness" of territory, language and history? These are not only intellectual questions; they are, rather, natural promptings as one experiences belonging beyond bureaucratic formulas and social expectations.
Twenty years, four continents and three passports after my Parisian experience, I came across a historical account of Polish adventurers and artists in Australia before World War II. I learned that, since its very beginnings, Polish immigration to Australia was different to that in North America – or anywhere else for that matter. I discovered this – the wonderful gift of another writer, Lech Paszkowski – in a book he wrote – Poles in Australia and Oceania 1790-1940 (ANU Press, 1987). I found this book by sheer chance as I was researching my PhD. And, through Paszkowski's book, I found the roots of my nomadic belonging. Paszkowski claims that Australia has always attracted the most adventurous spirits. This was welcome news. I felt at home with them here. The Poles he wrote about came, stayed or left, but always left a mark with their lives, with their unorthodox choices, and with their indefinable forms of being and belonging. Often misunderstood, they sometimes became Australian icons, such as Paul Strzelecki, known for his explorations of Gippsland and Tasmania as well as for naming the highest mountain in Australia after a Polish patriot, Thaddeus Kosciuszko.
It is not clear why Strzelecki left Poland, but theories suggest his involvement in one of the splendid, but disastrous, uprisings in which Poles seem to specialise. Another version is that he was a restless spirit, in romantic and financial trouble in Poland. Indeed, Strzelecki had a romantic interest in Poland: a young woman called Adyna who patiently – if naively – waited for him as he voyaged the world, measured and mapped blank spaces on all continents, accepted honours from the Royal Geographical Society in London and published acclaimed books about his geographical discoveries in Australia. Until her death, he wrote her "dashing" letters, and I suspect that she enjoyed the vicarious pleasures of travel and adventure from his letters.
Then there is the wonderful, nomadic Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist and ethnologist who travelled from Poland to Australia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Africa. His most important works were written about his research in Australasia in the early twentieth century. On a prolonged stay in Melbourne, he romanced and married Elsie Masson, the daughter of a "local professor" – as he wrote in a letter to his relatives in Poland. They went off together to the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, to conduct the first anthropological study of the islanders. It was a prolific time – Malinowski wrote about intimate aspects of the lives of the islanders, including the classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Coral Gardens and their Magic, Myth in Primitive Society as well as two detailed and illustrated books on sexual life of the islanders.
Paszkowski's book revealed smaller "stars": tiny jewels of stories about Polish adventurers in Australia, such as the colourful Sygurd Wisniowski and Joseph Sabatowski.
Wisniowski was an incorrigible globetrotter. During the 1860s and '70s, he travelled incessantly to North and South Americas, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia. Australia was his favourite destination, and he made a fortune in the goldfields near Ravenswood. As the story goes, he soon lost it in a shipwreck, and again devoted himself to travelling and writing. His memoir, Ten Years in Australia, was published upon his brief return to Poland, and his novella about Maori communities in New Zealand (Tikera or Children of the Queen of Oceania) was translated into English and published in Auckland in 1972, nearly a century after it was written.
Sabatowski, on the other hand, was more a patriot and a revolutionary than a globetrotter. I like the story of his life because of his puzzling end and obsessive commitment to fight Polish oppressors at that time: Russia and Prussia. He left Poland after the failure of the January Uprising against Russia in 1863-64 only to join the Turkish army to continue fighting Russia, then the Austrian army to fight Prussia and then the French army to also fight Prussia. Freud would no doubt have a theory about him, as after years of fighting wars and uprisings, Sabatowski eventually settled in Sydney and became a gynaecologist.