Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (21 page)

Expectedly, they were dismissed by Western feminists for crypto or even open racism and nudity-obsession, regardless of the context. In this case, both sides misunderstood the delicate circumstances. Intersectional, progressive Western feminists, concerned with the risks of racism and (post) colonialism, speak of Femen’s
unhealthy obsession with nudity with suspicious disdain, not seeing that behind the admittedly “primitive” methods and controversial approach there’s a very specific reality that Femen are fighting.

Femen’s message and actions are not universal, and it would be good if the activists were aware of that. In a Guardian piece responding to critics, Inna Shevchenko gives a clear message of her obsession with Putin, his regime and Ukrainian situation. This is Femen’s context: the post-communist desert of sex industry, sex clubs, girls at your wish every minute of the night and day. When you check in a hotel, you’re totally expected to be interested in the wide offer of sex infrastructure, with “Gentlemen’s Clubs” at every step of the city centers. Their protests before and during the Euro 2012 football tournament alerted many to the degree that the event would increase the exploitation of Ukrainian women, whose bodies would be in high demand. It is common to present Eastern European women as a commodity: in the popular series
The Wire
we encounter a container stuffed full of Ukrainian women, who were sold and smuggled in those inhuman conditions for prostitution.

To this there’s the post-communist neglect or permissiveness to the worst kinds of women abuse. There were recently several cases that left the Ukrainian-only context, which shocked the public opinion. In one, Roman Landik, son of a renowned politician Volidimir Landik, was observed publicly beating a young woman for half an hour in a restaurant, to which nobody reacted. Later the comments in the media were basically suggesting the girl was “asking for it”. The other, much more serious case concerned Oksana Makar, young girl who was gang raped repeatedly and then burned alive. This terminally barbaric case ended in Oksana’s death and without any attempts at pursuing and catching the perpetrators, as, again, they were too prominent.

Easterners may be white Europeans but the Western feminists refuse to see varieties within that. For the first time in the UK
actually, I heard that Eastern Europeans are not really considered white! Few Westerners see the abuses of post-communism. Femen are an example of an interesting strategy, powerful in its own right, which may outside of its context, go wrong. Their stripping not only makes them resemble the women who are exploited and who they’re defending, they symbolize women’s position in the society, whose presence and often meaning is reduced to their bodies. The terror on the politicians faces proves they manage to touch something visceral, something that they can’t even openly address. Their fearlessness, or flippancy, disrupted and disclosed the hidden meaning of situations that otherwise would have gone undisturbed. Yet the latest clashes with the Muslim community in France reveal the limitations of a victim’s position, who becomes selfish and wary only of its own suffering. Now it seems a typical case of mutual misunderstanding, with each side blind to each other’s concerns: Femen doesn’t see racism behind their calling patriarchy “Arab”, and the Western pro-underprivileged women of color feminists see in Femen only the distasteful theatre of naked boobs, which overlooks their needs, not seeing how they remain blind to the post-communist reality Femen represent. How “intersectional” is that?

White doesn’t always mean ‘privileged’ - especially for women in the UK, seeing how many Eastern European women are working in the sex industry in here, not having much other choice, or clean or serve in restaurants and do other unqualified jobs, despite often holding degrees in their native countries, And funnily enough, because of a similar experience of ‘colonialism’, though in a much wider sense than the obvious, those two groups should recognize the mutual underprivilege and abuse. Still, it’s painful to see the notions of ‘postcolonialism’ only in the most obvious places. The post-communist “east” had and still has its own share of colonization and suffering, which should be recognized. The accusation that Femen are “fast-food feminism” suggests that those women come from some areas full of bling and money, when in
fact this should stand only for how precarious they really are.

There’s many reasons why the ex-Bloc may feel resentful towards the West, but does it mean we shall embrace any idea of nationalist East supremacism, building a mirror-empire? Not only does this idea appeal to many, but, already, Vladimir Putin, who once openly told Russians that “you and I live in the East, not the West”, would much rather ally economically with China. The new Cold War, indeed, in the way we deserved it.

But is the answer building the counter-empire? The answer to that is no, of course, not only because the Western empire is visibly crumbling, as the desperate PR efforts from the Keep Calm Britain or American liberal pundits like Applebaum prove. We are witnessing what may be the final decline of the West, which, it can be said, has been in decay for the last several hundreds of years. A State of Permanent Crisis is something the West knows and indulges in for a very long time, needless to say, with splendid influence on culture. There are waves to this state: periods of aridness interweave with those of fruitfulness and richness. Yet the feeling of depression is now too overwhelming. As the economy shifts to the East, this process is too scary to even think of. The ways this shift may fertilize our dried out, dying culture remain yet in the dark. Yet, the intelligentsia, regardless of their economic class, shouldn’t reject those “Western” values, that brought ideas of socialism, equality, tolerance, respect and protecting the weak. We’re irreversibly children of this twentieth-century formation, and its gains should be kept.

We Poles have an overdeveloped psychotic factor. History is to us traumatology – we were beaten, enslaved, tortured, killed, humiliated. This traumatology becomes then a traumatophilia – if you tell us that someone has suffered more, like the Jews, we go into a competition of trauma. Is there a life beyond this ‘Christ of nations’?

3.3 National history as a delirium. Jacek Malczewski’s Melancholia.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” This sentence uttered by Stephen Dedalus from Joyce’s
Ulysses
fits Poles like no one else. Czesław Miłosz wrote that Polish literature, and generally Polish culture, is like a “jacket with one sleeve for a dwarf, and the other one for a giant”. The larger sleeve symbolises our ambitions of being a part of Europe, the smaller one is the expression of “the oppressed nation”, fighting for Polishness. On the one hand, there is the idolization of the West, and on the other – contempt and a sense of superiority towards the East. Poles – for many decades bereft of their own statehood – are not happy to revise the elements that comprise their national identity. The writer who has devoted most energy to analysing Polish culture and its tensions, displacements and limitations kept hidden under its unrevealing cloak is the academic Maria Janion.

Janion deals with representations, apparitions, delusions, hoaxes, hallucinations, dreams, and illusions, and the impossibility of expressing them. She subjects history to revaluations, seeing the history of Poland as an amalgamation of disorderly narrations; full of cracks, tensions and displaced traumas. Thus frequent in her works are questions about the experience of transgression, about
the bones of content in Polish identity, about the revival of meanings that have seemingly been classified. Hence the portrayal of the unnoticeable marginalizations and the focus on themes that have been glossed over in history.

In the latest link in her odyssey to the hidden history of Polish phantasms,
Niesamowita Słowiańszczyźna
(roughly translatable as ‘Uncanny Slavism’) Janion finds the source of Poland’s complexes in the rejection of its specific heritage, meaning our Slavic identity, together with its mythology and beliefs, displaced due to the exceptionally brutal Christianization of the Polish lands that began in the tenth century and continued until the thirteenth. (There are still some sources that claim traces of pagan religions could be found in Poland as late as the seventeenth century). For Janion, the amputation of Slavic spirituality, and together with it, of a complex identity, founded on a dual Slavic– Christian pedigree, as well as the introduction of monotheist Christianity left Poles bereft of a founding myth, and at the same time forced us to seek a new one. Following the logic of a “libidinal economy”, the wild nature displaced from the Slavic spirit and represented by the world of “primitive” beliefs was replaced with a nationalism that finds its fulfilment in the form of Polish Messianism. In this way, our suffering, inabilities, and lack of independence immediately gained a new meaning: Poland, in national poet Adam Mickiewicz’s phrase, is ‘the Christ of nations’, suffering for millions. The identification of Christianity and the West with “civilisation” and the disdain for the “primitive” Slavic beliefs resulted in a rift in Polish spirituality, a wound that could not be healed or covered by scar tissue – a place “misbaptised.” Devoid of their mythical origin, Poles became the orphans of Europe, marginalized in the West and unable to find themselves among the Slavic culture they lost. Naturally, they were helped in this by history: the tense relations with Russia and the Partitions of the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, and the lasting reluctance towards an East identified as Russia. The surrogate phantasm of Messianism that our national
myths have fed on for centuries became necessary for the theodicy of Polish martyrdom. Janion sees in this a strategy of displacement, of being orphaned.

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 10
^th
, 2010, when 93 Polish politicians, writers, heroes and dignitaries died in a plane crash over Smolensk, en route to the site of Polish martyrology, the Katyń forest, where thousands of Polish officers were killed by the Red Army in 1940. Accordingly, Smolensk has become a founding myth of the new far right in Poland. I say new, but it is actually very old. Mentally, this formation is precisely the un-dead of a Polish right-wing Catholic/Russophobe/anti-Semitic/homophobe formation, that haunted Poland since the regaining of independence in 1918. therefore the huge wave of reaction which is de facto a restoration of the interwar, chauvinistic Poland.).