Warsaw is home. But what is home if I lived away from this capital of suddenly remembered state for, now, most of my life? Is it going back to the twisted beauty and the richness of my slavic-latinized tongue? I try to explain to my English boyfriend that we have about 100 ways to say the word cat = KOT. But nobody says "kot" unless you are a veterinarian... My parents' big black cat - Zulus - he is so big he is a "kocur"...Yet my mother calls him "kociu", "kiciu", "kociaczku", "kiciuniu", "kiciaczku", "kiciulku", "kocinko moja"... It is in the lost in translations ways that my friends and I address each other when we meet after years over a few too many glasses of beer, our lifes twisted with time and circumstances but the friendships still the same. It is in our sense of pride, the history of my ravaged city reconstructed only with the sheer force of love and perseverance... And then about watching as an outsider how the insane capitalist drive takes the better and the best of us. We have always been the nation of survivors, the in -between of Germany and Russia with an older statehood then both. Now, given the chance, we are proud to show off what we are capable of..
I experience Poland as an inside-outsider. For I am Polish - not only because this is the only citizenship I hold for which I curse the current Polish powers to be for their shortsighted inability to integrate with Europe. Poland is young. Poland has children. This strikes you if you live in Italy. Poland, though, to me, is not about its landscapes but about the Poles. We are tragically irrational in our capacity or rather incapacity for dealing with foreign affairs - the stigma of the Iron Curtain’s fall less then 20 years ago. Romantically carried away, we say what we mean, hence the English diplomacy is fails us all. Yet, comparing us to Russians with whom we share the "Slavic souls" is wrong for we are too straightforward in comparison. Uncapable of the Russian grand scale skimming perhaps because we are just too democratic in the sense that no Pole would allow another Pole to rule over him unconditionally. "Freedom" is the word to which too many Polish rock songs have been dedicated to. Economy is booming and I see my old country transforming with the force of the young people unafraid to take risks. What a difficult past we have had: it is refreshing to think of our 18-year-old MTV generation that doesn't remember any of the communist education. Yet, at the same time disturbing to see them raised in the mindset forgetful of what we and who we are. I am sad, very sad to see our political system being played out in terms of domestic divisiveness for the sake of power and not for the sake of what is good for the country. Yet, I know it will pass because the young generation, however MTV it is, will not fit into the Catholic fascism of the current, short-lived, stage. It is just sad to see that the Polish politicians are destroying our potential, that everything is suddenly defined in anti-communist terms forgetful of the fact that we have had a Soviet imposed system which is currently denying us the capacity for a healthy social democracy. At the end, it is the frustrations of lack of social state that led the right wing to reign. So I hope that one day I can be a liberal Polish leftist without accusations of Soviet sympathies.
Home. Home is in my language. Not politics. Home is my dog and my cat, my friends who show up in a small bar in Warsaw to be together. Home is a place where friends give me their skates so that I don't have to rent them out when I go ice-skating. Home is our dinners, home cooked, our immense and overbearing hospitality. Where everyone makes homemade liquors, where food is love, where conversations are filled with intense passion and laughter. Home is where people call me by my name. Home is where people argue through a series of articles over the meaning of postmodern Polish art...
Home is Warsaw. Being away means romanticizing it and we know that romantic means Polish. THis time, the very first Polish Christmas without snow was still romantic...even if less visual. Maybe a little lonely becuause what I hate about Poland is that if you are not married with children then you are not eligible to be happy as a 30 year old Polish woman on Polish political terms. But these are the terms imposed by a Polish minority. And I am happy.
