Explorers, writers and other creative strangers - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanna Kujawa
LONG BEFORE I READ PASZKOWSKI'S BOOK, I already had my favourite explorer: Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), writer and sailor – my teenage idol. His beginnings carry the drama of adventure. He was born Jozef Korzeniowski, his parents exiled by the Tsarist Russian government for their political activities as Polish patriots, so his uncle, Stefan, a nobleman with lands in the Ukraine, became his father-figure. Young Korzeniowski dreamed of exotic travels and wanted to be a sailor – an unusual choice for a young Polish nobleman. His uncle, however, agreed to send him to a school in southern France to follow his dream.
In France, Korzeniowski got involved in shipping guns for a revolutionary cause, fell in love with an unsuitably mysterious and revolutionary woman, went into debt and attempted suicide. His uncle saved him from his financial – if not romantic – trouble, and Korzeniowski went on to London where he gradually progressed from first officer to captain, and became a British subject. He sailed the seas of South-east Asia (the geographic setting of many of his books) and South America (Nostromo), as well as the Congo River in Africa (Heart of Darkness). By his own admission, he was hot-tempered, swore in Polish while riding horses, and spoke with a thick accent: a bizarre mixture of his native Polish and a dialect of southern French. For me, as a teenage girl in communist Poland, he was an irresistible combination of the adventurous and creative aspects of a life lived passionately.
From Paszkowski, I learned that Korzeniowski also travelled to Australia and had a few stopovers in the ports of Sydney and Melbourne in 1879, 1888 and 1889. All the stopovers had a literary history. In 1879 the young seaman sailed from London to Sydney, and while waiting there to join another ship heard about the scandal of the steamer Jeddah whose crew abandoned 953 Muslim pilgrims when it seemed the ship was sinking. The news created a great upheaval among officers and seamen and became the theme of his masterpiece Lord Jim. He described Sydney Harbour as "most beautiful" in The Mirror of the Sea, and some of the personalities he met in Sydney – including an Australian mate, Charles Born – became characters in his books. In 1888, Korzeniowski returned as the captain of Otago. His name was so horrifically misspelled in Sydney newspapers that by the time Otago reached Melbourne he had changed it to Conrad.
|
T |
he metaphor of the explorer is not only my personal passion; it has always played powerfully on our collective imagination. Perhaps the first explorer, wanderer and "migrant" of a sort was Homer's Odysseus. His journeys have inspired a kaleidoscope of interpretations throughout the ages. The ancient Greeks saw him as a courageous warrior tested by the gods for his brilliant trickery. To the Romans, he was the epitome of a "deceitful" foreigner who, through his insidious plan, destroyed the city of Troy. After the displacements and tragedies of the World War II, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer thought that Odysseus was the despairing exile who is always out of his cultural context in the world.
My encounters with Jerzy Zubrzycki and George Smolicz, two intellectuals who left Poland during World War II and eventually settled in Australia, suggest yet another interpretation of the "exile". Both Zubrzycki and Smolicz managed to creatively transform the traumatic experiences of war in a way that helped to shape and enrich Australian multiculturalism. Zubrzycki told me that when he arrived in Australia he aimed to correct the errors of pre-war Poland, which had failed to embrace all ethnic and religious groups in the 1930s. He wanted to prevent the same situation being repeated in Australia. Throughout his career at the Australian National University, he worked to implement multiculturalism as an integral part of Australian life.
Smolicz crossed Central Asia and the Middle East, and lived in an endless string of camps for war refugees as a child refugee. His experiences inspired him to reform the Australian educational system in a way that would allow children of all backgrounds to learn about their original culture and language. He envisioned Australia as a country of infinite cultural richness. That is the cultural contribution of explorers.
INDEED, MANY OF THE POLES WHO ARRIVED HERE more recently, such as award-winning composers of scores for Australian films (Cezary Skubiszewski), poets (Anna Walwicz), designers (Kajetan) or actors (Jacek Koman), call themselves explorers. They belong because of their intellectual and artistic contribution. Their journeys often led to Australia through several other countries, each a space of learning and contribution. They are all interesting strangers who, through their journeys, redefine what it means to belong, whose "souls are about larger belongings" not confined to one land or language.
Bruce Chatwin once said that the appeal of explorers and nomads lies in their "irreverent and timeless vitality". And the most potent image of the explorer is of someone who, with great courage and creativity, responds to the challenges and complexities of life that arise – someone who encompasses the courage, enthusiasm and drive of the adventurer and the reflective and creative qualities of the artist that are eventually integrated into a larger society. The explorer is not a poetic or an exotic term. It is the "newcomer", "migrant", "exile" seen from a different, more complex vantage point, and allowed to participate creatively in their new society.
There is yet another journey to undertake – not only by the "newcomer" but by the host society as well.
That might be even the more challenging exploration. It asks the society to give up prejudice, a presumed and often unconscious sense of superiority and rigidly defined ways of belonging "here". In this version of explorations, Odysseus arrives at a new land knowing that not only he, but the entire population of that
land, will share this journey, taking the known and familiar to uncharted shores of new visions and self-discovery. ♦