Regular readers of Tychy will be aware that the website is often concerned with the representation of Polish identity within English Literature, and particularly within Edinburgh’s own splendid literary canon. The website frequently portrays the immigrants whose labour stokes the prosperity of the city, but who rarely contribute to its literature. Tychy’s interest in these themes is informed by specific historical precedents. The University of Edinburgh historian Owen Dudley Edwards wrote an account of the Burke and Hare murders which, amongst other things, demonstrated that little would be known about the Irish immigrants who worked on the Union Canal had not the contemporary reports of the murders licensed a documentation of the murderers’ lives, homes, and personal relationships. Dr. William Maginn (1794-1842), whose biography is being belatedly serialised on Tychy, observed and contributed to the negotiation of Irish identity within English Literature. His early twentieth century biographer, Miriam Thrall, has noted that Maginn abhorred “sentimentalising on Irish themes,” and that in “the guise of his favourite pseudonym, Sir Morgan O’Doherty, Adjacent, Maginn dared to thrust into the pages of polite reading the broad, bullying head of a true Irishman.”
Polish identity seems to have no equivalent champion, and accounts of Polish immigrants in modern Britain are often sentimental, disparaging, or simply false. Tychy never fails to be incensed by Anna Crilly’s “Magda” – the Eastern European housekeeper from the BBC sitcom Lead Balloon – who is just as much a “white nigger” as Andrew Sach’s hapless “Manuel.” Yet not only is Magda less funny than Manuel, but Bernard Manning could probably perform a better impersonation of a Polish woman than Anna Crilly.
If Britain’s increasingly-conspicuous Polish immigrant community has yet to be portrayed in any popular novel, this may reflect a general decline of nationalism, in which the newspapers and novels through which the national community is “imagined” are superseded by internet websites with multinational readerships. One may consequently hypothesize that the novel is an inappropriate means of portraying a new cosmopolitan class of immigrant workers, and it is with this in mind that we approach the sociologist Anna Triandafyllidou’s 2006 study Contemporary Polish Migration in Europe: Complex Patterns of Movement and Settlement. Triandafyllidou’s staff conducted fifteen “qualitative in-depth interviews… with Polish legal and undocumented migrants in Britain, Germany, Greece and Italy in 2002”, and the transcripts of these interviews were translated into English and gardened into fifteen “biographical narratives.” All of the interviewees have assumed names and many work illegally (one should note that the interviews were conducted before Poland’s accession to the E.U. in 2004).
Although Triandafyllidou’s study initially appears to suggest that cosmopolitanism merely complements national citizenship, the Polish star within its pages because they furnish a unique example of an entire people, rather than merely a social elite, who have pioneered new cosmopolitan attitudes towards citizenship. Triandafyllidou attributes this to Poland’s “centuries-old history of temporary patterns of migration”:
Between 1871 and 1913, an estimated 3.5 million emigrants, namely 10% of the population, left Polish soil…. Many left hoping to return when they accumulated enough money to make a better life for themselves. According to some estimates, 20-30% of those emigrants returned to Poland.
90% of the population were, of course, left behind, but the testimonies of those who returned both defined and unsettled an emerging sense of Polish nationalism. Modern Poland was repeatedly occupied by foreign superpowers and it suffered from a steady drain of both political dissidents and economic migrants. Triandafyllidou writes of “a public feeling characterised as migratory psychosis, namely the belief that the only accessible and acceptable life option was emigration to the West.” Yet this is not so much a “public feeling” as a national tradition. Long years of national dissatisfaction resonate in the words of the twenty-three year old “Michal”: “…everyone said, that abroad it is cool, that there is money abroad, so I wanted to see that world, that foreign world and to try to get that foreign virus.” For those such as “Michal”, Poland is like any home: it is dreary and unremarkable, it hosts the long years of adolescent frustration and a distant realm of retirement.
Travel seemingly complements, or even reaffirms, these migrants’ sense of belonging to Poland. On foreign soil there is little sense of exile or rupture from the nation, which is apparently omnipresent, and sustained by institutions such as the Polish Social council or Polish churches. Many of the interviewees remain fiercely proud of their nation. “Zbigniew” indignantly complains that a German company “will take five Poles and five Germans. And those Poles will be working for those five Germans…” “Magdalena” concludes that, “I have not heard of any Pole stealing… A Pole would not do that, I have never heard such a thing” – a remarkable claim, especially when any sensible Briton will admit that their entire ruling classes are a shower of thieves. However homesick “Magdalena” may appear, she vows that, “I will not ever become Italian. I will speak Italian but I will not be an Italian. I will cook Polish food, delicious, I will attend Polish church and I will be in general Polish…”
Yet Triandafyllidou’s narratives ultimately demonstrate that “traditional” social identities cannot remain contained within other cultures. Triandafyllidou herself studies how traditional Polish gender roles fare on foreign soil, and she finds that it “is not clear, from our interviews, how the migration experience… may have changed the gender roles and power balance within the family.” Wives, for example, continue to “find it reasonable to acquiesce to their husband’s wishes even if they disagree with them.” Triandafyllidou observes, however, that there are a greater number of what she rather alarmingly describes as “female jobs such as house cleaning” available within the European job market, and that consequently “men no longer hold a leading part as the main breadwinners and primary agents in migration.” Moreover, she identifies a new sort of migrant matriarchy: a “gender coalition between women of different generations that help each other during the migration experience…”
The encounter with the West has inflicted a far greater damage upon Polish class identities than all the efforts of the Soviet Union. In the European job market, Polish social classes tumble through the looking-glass, into a topsy-turvy world where “Derek”, a “university graduate in bio-chemistry” finds himself as a cleaner, amongst “the lowest class of working people”; the petty-bourgeois “Renata” now lives with ten other people in a “two bedroom flat”; “Alexandra”, who had studied dentistry as an undergraduate, works in a “fish factory” for “£1.50” an hour; the former civil servant Zbigniew sleeps in the Berlin Zoological Gardens; the “shy” “Magda”, who has no “professional experience” in Poland, discovers a newfound confidence and skills in Germany; and “Gioska”, who has failed to graduate from university in Poland, establishes a professional career in Greece. “Derek” contends that he can earn far higher wages as a cleaner in Britain than as a biochemist in Poland:
Life here is easier… I have a computer, video, satellite dish. These are the things I’ll take with me to Poland, the things I’ll need in Poland. And in Poland I would never be able to afford to buy them.
The Polish bourgeoisie may emerge somewhat demoralised from their encounter with Europe. The graduate and somebody who has made a pig’s ear of their education can both attain the same high standard of living in the West. Social mobility and the acquisition of wealth no longer entirely depend upon a university education, or training and promotion within companies, but upon one’s fortunes abroad. Class conflict is consequently almost eradicated amongst Polish migrants, who together resemble an impromptu lumpen-proletariat.
A Polish sense of gender and class was therefore determined by the nation’s encounter with foreign cultures. Whatever resources the imagined community may command are here helpless to prevent a transformation in the fundamental characteristics of its citizenry, and the needs of Triandafyllidou’s interviewees are more likely to be met by non-governmental institutions than the efforts of their sovereign government. Many of Triandafyllidou’s interviewees work illegally in unregulated conditions, and they meet a high demand for unskilled labour whilst being daily threatened with arrest and deportation. Polish churches and community groups together provide the sort of welfare which the migrants should rightfully expect from these illogically exploitative and unwelcoming societies. Many of the migrants equally depend upon social networks in which jobs and accommodation are sold. These networks may consist of citizens from the same nation, although they need not do – they entail little national solidarity. “Derek” insists that “Poles don’t help one another for free. Poles make money on one another.”
Some of the migrants equate nationalism with dependency, or they find that relationships with national institutions and networks are simply unnecessary. “I was amongst English people only; I had nothing to do with Polish people… I learned faster language somehow,” “Renata” insists. “Alexandra” and “Lila” both marry citizens of their adoptive nations; Gioska comes to depend upon “good [Greek] boss who is always close to me”; and Nikolas identifies more with Berlin’s Buddhist community than other Polish migrants. Triandafyllidou’s study here identifies “a pattern that has been described as return illusion: the plan to return is adhered to but always postponed, so that, in the end, it may never be realised.” Significantly, the wealthiest of Triandafyllidou’s interviewees, “Marek,” is also the most traditionally cosmopolitan. He is a legally-employed I.T. specialist who enjoys such financial security that he and his family inhabit a jolly world of cosmopolitan adventure, rather than remaining “at home” in Poland.
“Marek’s” privileged lifestyle may appear to serve the argument that cosmopolitanism is the preserve of the wealthy, and that for the less better off a cosmopolitan lifestyle is involuntary, insecure, and lonely. “Konstantino” finds that, “You go somewhere, where you don’t know, what will happen. In the dark. You go! Whatever happens.” “Gioska” compares her lifestyle to “a game” and enthuses that “I am alone, for me it is like paradise…” These migrants are anything but victims and exiles, and one is more likely to be awed by their strength and resourcefulness than to lament their misfortunes. Yet none of them are members of trades unions, and nor do they vote (in their adoptive nations). “Michal” laments that, “…maybe we could organise something. But there is no such attitude, everyone comes and thinks about himself.” As well as new forms of literature to narrate the stories of these immigrants, there is clearly a need for a new type of politics – and new political institutions – which can protect the interests of migrants, whilst putting aside the distractions of receding national identities.
Tags: Anna Crilly, Anna Triandafyllidou, Benedict Anderson, Book review., Books, Burke and Hare, Class, Cosmopolitanism, Dr. William Maginn., E.U., Feminism, Imagined Communities, Immigration, Irish History, Lead Balloon, Marxism, Nation, Nationalism, Opinion, Owen Dudley Edwards, Poland, Polish Immigration
