Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  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.

  Not Really White

  It is commonly believed among Westernized liberals, that “Russia is not Europe”. Especially today, even s
peaking 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.

  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.

  Misbaptized

  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 lif
e 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.