Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (20 page)

3.1 FEMEN, on their annual protest against the regular summer hot water switch off in Kiev.

“To despair is to be Romanian”, “I’m ashamed to be a Romanian.” “Romania will never become a culture (nation).” “They can’t blame anyone but themselves for being a total historic failure.” It recalls the complaints of many bourgeois intellectuals, incapable of contributing to their own culture. But also it’s said with the exasperation of someone whose ego doesn’t allow him to withdraw for a bit and think that he and his experience may not be representative.

At the same time, this man, whose aphoristic writing never achieved nor strove to find a traditional coherence of prose, is perfectly attuned to the smallest shivers of his soul that provoke his weird logorrhoea. But it was precisely Cioran’s capability to endlessly dwell on the catastrophe that made him, despite or maybe because of his uprootedness, good material for a post-war thinker “of ruins”, of a fallen civilization, and of the margins – his
own marginality helped his writing talent to flourish. If you construct your whole life as an exile in the world, then you model it as sick, and then you parasitically live off the sickness. A weird hubris is feeding this as well: everything, starvation, blasphemy, only not to become a “poor, unknown stranger”. This was a fear of another exile, a poet, who we couldn’t polarize enough against Cioran, the Shoah survivor and a fellow Romanian (although not of choice) and Jew, Paul Celan. Living at the very same time in Paris, Celan had similar thoughts and anxieties, feeling trapped within a world that was meaningless to him, with his language for his only homeland – and that was German, which precisely was the most sublime tool of his torture. He never could write in any other language, but thanks to this he is now a poet of the canon – would that be the case, if he had chosen to write in Romanian or in Yiddish?

Cioran enjoys today an ambivalent fame, to a degree like Louis Ferdinand Celine, as a thinker with whom the difficulty is that his brilliance cannot be distinguished from his despicable racist views. He died in 1995, never wanted to go back to Romania, for a few years before his death already “freed” from the Ceauşescu regime. What would he see, a character in every possible way from a different era, looking at the country he abandoned in shame, after years of its destruction and marginalization? Cioran, no doubt the least likely hero for any positive political post-socialist movement, someone who was banned under Ceauşescu, is interesting, as looking through him we discover suppressed truths.

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, the author of his only English biography, herself a political, though self-imposed exile, left Romania in the 70s with an attempt to break completely with the past. In the 1990s, wanting to write on her hero, she had to come back and she’s obsessed with finding the downfall in anything: the plane is full of smelly, Securitate-like unpleasant men, making rude jokes. Everything is dilapidated, as if two, not one natural disasters came upon the country. Cities are dirty, she chokes with fumes,
drivers are irresponsible. Streets are Dickensian. “I live in a slum. The whole country looks like an extended slum.” She can only compare herself to a Proust, when stumbling upon a pothole. The country “looks like a vast apartment that has just been ransacked by the Securitate and left in shambles. Heaps of junk, piles of garbage, stones, earth broken pipes, and other machinery. Broken down cars everywhere.” Everything is “chaos”, wheeling and dealing. The mafia do their trafficking, “gypsies” beg and peasant babushkas do their business in the market. She goes to see their old flat, but can’t photograph it, as it would break her mother’s heart. The mafia is mushrooming, red Ferraris stand next to beggars and thieves. Bucharest, with its concrete towers, clearly disappoints her, she feels shame for being there, because she IS from there. Their shame is her shame. Sometimes she can see a glimpse of the old, less grim Bucharest, but then returns to her alienation.

It is an image of a country in ruins, no doubt, but ruined not only by its mad ex-dictator but also by the later neglect. As we’ve seen, post-communist economies almost entirely experienced a massive collapse in the early nineties, as they were seen only as a land ready for exploitation by foreign investors that didn’t always come. Truly no-man’s lands, looking towards the West, they gained only in as much that they were now exploited in the Western way.

Zarifopol sees everywhere sad, disillusioned, dejected, aggressive and despairing people – they were supposed to be like that before, not after the magical ’89. In the face of all this she can only repeat her master’s voice: how can one be Romanian? But is really an uprooted ex-fascist émigré the best guide to what Romania should be? The typical reaction of migrants who came back overlapped with the countries’ own view of themselves: dismissal. We suck. We are poor. We failed. It is the West that is beautiful. Where the invisible hand cleans everything, without the help of human sweat. Zarifopol managed to interiorize the Western attitude and perceptions, but not completely, as the part of that is ashamed reveals a post-colonial subject. Also, the recent interest in
Eastern European art could be easily qualified as orientalism, in the way the recent Western publications on Eastern European art define us and ‘discover’, as if we weren’t just a few hundred kilometres from them. Interestingly enough, out of this feeling of dissolution, it was Romanians who created the most acute, accurate films about the transition, especially after the EU accession, presenting a country in flux, full of social tensions, new problems, for which there are not names yet.

Cioran creates a tension between the center, that is the West, Western thought, the Enlightenment, the dictatorship of the one and only Reason and the periphery. Modernism challenged that, but still, until quite recently, scholars had problems with placing “The East”, which becomes a mythical and phantasmal, rather than geographically accurate place. This aura of the mystical, irrational east is still going on, despite the communist years, which from the perspective of the West were years of “disobedience”. The province versus the center is also something that was and still is persecuting me. One of the most prevailing elements of that inferiority thinking would be: “there wouldn’t be a center without the province” or “the province had to have it shitty, with all the perils of totalitarianism, communism, lack of democracy, so that the rich west could boast with their social democracy and regard for human life”. This would be attractive, if it wasn’t challenged by the existence of countries like Spain, Sweden or Norway, who despite being geographically and historically peripheral, managed to become affluent like the West and to remain culturally in the mainstream circuit.

Popular culture in the Western sense didn’t make its way to us until the late 80s. If you ask me what was the major cultural feature of the socialist Poland, I’ll tell you: high-mindedness. We also had our mass culture, but we didn’t have permissiveness for schlock. Lacking that, we also, until the 1990s at least, didn’t develop any postmodern easiness or ironic distance towards this schlock. The first thing that I observed, when I started being a regular user of the internet, was its capability to write on everything as if ideas were lying in a supermarket. When I go to the former republics, I take the dilapidation for what it is: a sign of impoverishment, and that’s it. There’s too many people to blame. It wasn’t always like that, though. Contact with ‘the West’ may still cause a shock by the level of consumption. My first trips abroad on my own, since I was 15, that is in 1998, were all to the West. London shocked me, then Italy – grand tour, France, mostly Paris. Blind towards my privilege, I saw myself there rather than in the streets of Moscow, which I must’ve imagined exactly as Zarifopol describes Bucharest. Then when I moved to England in the middle of the post-2008 crisis, nothing was more sobering. It was living in the overpriced, shabby and ratty flats of London, which more than anything resembled the inflation-mad, drowning, death-driven Weimar Berlin, dancing over a volcano which killed the idea of “the West” for me, as preserved by the Eastern European intelligentsia. And as if from the disgust of that image, I started travelling East. The East, that besides short school trips, I deliberately stayed away from. Yet the perhaps most important experience I took from these trips is that, of course, the Eastern and Western Europe still constitute an entity of the West in any comparison with the real east, like China. In
every respect, Europe, this pitiful, self important tiny strip of land, culturally is connected in ways more intricate than we can imagine, and this we owe perhaps also to the Cold War. In this sense, even if throughout this book I use the expression ’former East’, I can use it only parodically, ironically. I can use it to indicate financial and emigrational differences between them, yet still bearing in mind how restricted this view is. This book perhaps should be even ashamed of how little of our problems it manages to cover.

3.2 Malczewski’s Polish Hamlet torn between two Polonias. the youthful and the old one, in chains.

Can we turn the communist experience into an advantage? The popular response from historians and theorists is usually: no. For instance, Marci Shore’s recent book
The Taste of Ashes
on the aftermath of communism in Europe, hesitates between the appreciation of basic facts (communism meant a lot of evil to a lot of people. Many suffered censorship and torture in it), and coming to terms with the stereotypes that are produced about it, finding herself unable to reject all of them. Current migration doesn’t have the luxury of self-recognition, not being based on the previous class and cultural signifiers. Unlike the Polish or Russian emigration to the US or UK before, this emigration is equipped with less cultural capital, yet that doesn’t limit its capacity of creating a meaningful relationship and domesticating their new home – perhaps to the contrary even. It is the end of migration as a privilege of the rich, intelligentsia or middle class.

It is commonly believed among Westernized liberals, that “Russia is not Europe”. Especially today, even speaking from diametrically different political stands, it’s impossible not to criticize Russia, which embraced a criminal economy and heads towards nationalist theocracy. Yet this polarization of the East and West seems growingly a fantasy of the two sides previously involved in the Cold War conflict. On one hand, liberal pundits like Anne Applebaum still embrace an idea of the “West” which is strictly Cold War-like. Upon Margaret Thatcher’s death, the late British PM
got praise from Applebaum as someone who “understood the power of the West”; on the other hand, we have recurring projects of building the alternative, an Eastern European Union, a project vivid especially in right-wing circles. This inscribes into the thousands of years long rivalry between the East and the West, when any balanced values of one and another were crushed with the brutal Christianization, even upon peaceful Eastern civilizations. Since then, an image of the East persists, as in love with feudalism and despotism, subjugational, undemocratic “by nature”. Why not rather: permanently colonized by the West in a persisting Drang nach Osten?

Yet, despite both the influence of the west over the impoverished Bloc, and the subsequent westernization after 1989, for obvious economic and cultural reasons we often seem worlds apart. Recently the feminist Ukrainian collective Femen came to prominence, famously demonstrating half-naked in cases of women’s rights abuse, coming from a country with an extreme and enormous sex industry, abuse of women and patriarchy, and also third world levels of poverty. They’re known for their performances, often in Eastern European countries known for their lack of respect for human rights, like Belarus, where they were beaten and abducted, but also increasingly in the West, stopping various international summits and ceremonials. But then they started to ‘recruit’ young Muslim women in France, criticizing them for wearing headscarves as limiting their freedom as women, conflating, stereotypically, Islam and patriarchy/misogyny. But in doing so, they were not only racist, they neglected the meaning of years of struggle that are behind defending the rights of women from different than European/white background.