Black Madonna

Faith & Family

Many thanks to my good pal Jim for giving me the heads up about this text. It’s a great piece about the life of the post-war Polonia, that is the Polish people who came to the United Kingdom after World War II (as part of the UK Polish Repatriation Act) as opposed to those Polish people who have come to the UK post-EU accession. I’m ‘posting’ the text in full (copyright The Guardian 2009):

As a child growing up in Derby in the 60s I spoke Polish beautifully, thanks to my grandmother. While my mother went out to work, my grandmother, who spoke no English, looked after me, teaching me to speak her native tongue. Babcia, as we called her, dressed in black with stout brown shoes, wore her grey hair in a bun, and carried a walking stick. She was the hub of our household – she could cook Polish delicacies, play Chopin on the piano and make paper storks. I adored her.

My father, Jerzy, had escaped from Poland after the Germans invaded, travelling on foot across Europe to England, where he became a pilot in the RAF. At the end of the war, he met my English mother at a dance organised by my maternal grandfather to help lonely young Polish pilots. In 1957, he arranged for my grandmother, Maria, who was living in a tiny flat in Warsaw in increasing distress under the privations of communism, to come to the UK.

Like other Polish families in the area, we spent our weekends in the vast Polish club that kept our community’s culture alive. My father helped to establish Dom Polski (Polish House) in the 1950s and it was known as the air force club because the founders were pilots. It provided a focus for all those old comrades and their history. I remember one woman at the club who had a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm, and another whose husband and daughter got off the train transporting them to Siberia to buy bread, only for the train to leave without them. She never saw them again. There were people who had been taken east through Russia as slave labour, others who were taken west to provide a workforce for German farms and factories.

The walls of the club were covered with black-and-white photos of Polish pilots, and a huge propeller from a Spitfire was fixed to one wall. On Saturday mornings my sisters and I would study Polish at the school it ran, and on Saturday nights, my parents would go dancing. On Sundays, we played tombola there over lunch.

But my love affair with Polish culture began to fade when I was five – the year Babcia died. We had been so close that when she was dying, her last words were to ask that I should be looked after. I couldn’t believe she was dead, and went from being confident and cocky to a very quiet child.

Without Babcia’s childcare, my mother had to give up her full-time job and take part-time work in a school across the road. I was placed in the reception class and, accustomed to being at home alone with Babcia, I hated it. I don’t remember making a conscious decision, but in shock I refused to speak Polish until I saw Babcia again.

My sisters and I continued to go to Polish school, but the language would not return. Despite the efforts of my father, even a family trip to Poland in 1965 could not bring it back. When six years later my father died too, at just 53, our Polish connection almost ceased to exist. I left Derby and went to university in London. I never spoke Polish, never ate Polish food nor visited Poland. My childhood was gone and almost forgotten.

Then in 2004, more than 30 years later, things changed again. A new wave of Polish immigrants had arrived and I began to hear the language of my childhood all around me – every time I got on a bus. I saw Polish news-papers in the capital and Polish food for sale in the shops. The language sounded so familiar yet somehow distant – as if it were something I tried to grab but was always out of reach.

In Derby, Dom Polski had closed down. The building was decaying and up for rent; the old soldiers and air force men were almost all dead, and the second and third generations too busy to worry about it. But my memory had been jogged. I began to write a novel about a fictional Polish family and, at the same time, decided to enrol at a Polish language school.

Each week I went through half-remembered phrases, getting bogged down in the intricate grammar and impossible inflections. When my book was published, it put me back in touch with schoolfriends who like me were second-generation Polish. And strangely, in my language classes, I still had my accent and I found words and phrases would sometimes come unbidden, long lost speech patterns making a sudden reappearance. I had found my childhood again.

Joanna Czechowska

Her book, The Black Madonna of Derby (or Goodbye Polsko) is published by Silkmill Press.

Magna Graecia

Italian Greece

As many of you may have guessed by now, I have an unquenched curiosity for history and minority languages. Whilst on my travels, I had the august pleasure of visiting the city of Lecce in southern Italy and driving around the surrounding area (namely the pennisula of Salento) and the easterly parts of the province of Puglia. What strikes one about this area is its glorious natural beauty, breathtaking in a very literal sense; its delectable food and wine; and exquisitely rich culture.

Grecìa Salentina
Salento is a hidden gem for a number of reasons. Santa Maria di Leuca, the picturesque little town at the tip of the pennisula, witnesses the meeting of two seas: the Adriatic and the Ionian and, in a sense, symbolises the history and heritage of Salento. The Adriatic has always been equated with the Romans, the Italians and their respective cultures whereas the Ionian with the Greeks and their culture. Salento is a meeting of these two cultures.

Greek Union

κατεπανίκιον Ἰταλίας
The southern part of Italy, including Salento, had been colonised by the Greeks since the 8th century BCE, although some sources claim that there was a Greek presence in Italy as early as the 7th century BCE. Southern Italy was a part of the Byzantine Empire for several centuries and, as such, experienced a large influx of Greek speakers. The Catepanate of Italy, as it was called, then witnessed the formation of a distinct Greek community.

Griko-Κατωιταλιώτικα
Although Salento is now thoroughly Italian, traces of its former Greek culture permeate to the surface. In several villages that lie between the city of Lecce and the town of Maglie, a dialect of Greek is still spoken today nearly a thousand years after the end of the reign of the last Italian Catepan, Mabrikias, in 1069. The Griko language centres around nine towns (united together in the Unione dei Comuni della Grecìa Salentina) in which some of their inhabitants speak Griko.

Minoranze Grike dell’Etnia Griko-Salentina
As always, numbers vary but there are said to be between 10,000 and 15,000 speakers of Griko (this includes Grecìa Salentina and Grecìa Calabra, in Calabria). Grecìa Salentina comprises the towns of Martano, Calimera, Corigliano d’Otranto, Soleto, Castrignano de’ Greci, Sternatia, Melpignano, Zollino and Martignano (in order of size) whereas there seem to be very few, if any, native speakers of Griko in Grecìa Calabra (around 2,000 speak the language here).

Estinzione linguistica
Fortunately, the EU seems to be supporting the language and the Italian parliament even recognises people of Griko-Salentinian ethnicity, which seems to be a rather quirky little construct. However, the future for Griko seems precarious. Grecìa Calabra is a lost linguistic community to all intents and purposes. Grecìa Salentina will, in effect, be the place where Griko makes its last stand. With a decreasing young population it could be difficult but the hope is that with EU support Griko might still live to fight another day.

Networking Art

There once was a little boy called Czesław Mozil who had to leave his home town in Poland at the age of five and make life anew in the distant Kingdom of Denmark. Now, many years on Czesław Mozil has become Czesław Śpiewa (Czesław ’sings’). He lives in Copenhagen, owns his own bar/pub and has become something of a star in Denmark.

Phoenix from the Flames

His story is one of linguistic and cultural rebirth. Czesław is Danish (by all accounts) and was brought up in the land of the Danes, however, there is and always was something peculiar about him. He was (kind of) Polish.

Polish Influence

His (re-)aquantaince with the language and culture of his fore-fathers has imbued his music with an odd form of nostalgia packaged in a shiny wrapping. Apparently, Czesław was talked into singing in Polish by his good friend who saw in Polish a great source of inspiration for him. His music is heavily inspired by all manner of Polish folk music, Polish rock and one can even hear similarities to alternative Rock (such as Kazik Staszewski). But what makes his music so fascinating is the real ‘oddness’ about it. The album Debiut is both very Polish in its feel and very un-Polish, Danish perhaps.

Polish Language

What some (Polish) people may find ‘cute’, ‘quaint’ or just simply interesting is Czesław’s accent. He sings with a Danish accent. His Polish is soft, typcal of much of the post-war second generation Polonia (like my peers) who soften many Polish consonantal sounds. However, the fact that Czesław does use Polish is testament to his love of his motherland and should also be respected. It takes great courage for someone not only to speak but to sing in a language that is not quite as strong as your first. Hats off to Czesław.

Social Networking

The biggest surprise of Czesław’s album entitled Debiut is the fact that all the lyrics were written by the online community and overseen by Michał Zabłocki. This is social networking at its greatest. The poetry was written line-by-line by a variety of online poets on Multipoezja. This means that one online poet would get the ball rolling with the title and it would be followed up, Chinese Whispers-style, by another poet. This meant that any one song lyric or poem has at least fifteen to twenty authors. The result is tongue-in-cheek poetry that makes for wonderful song lyrics.

Polonia Fights Back

Perhaps the future of the Polish ex-pat community may be similar to that of Czesław Mozil aka Śpiewa. Influenced by their time in the west, they may return to Poland with new ideas, a new culture and re-inspire the ’scene’ in Poland. However, they may do the opposite, like Czesław. They may take the best of Polish culture and re-invigorate their local English, Irish, German or French cultures and arts with their own brand of creativity. Vive la différence!

Czesław’s MySpace site: Czesław Śpiewa.

Strange Words

Language reflects the world around us and reading Kayla Hope’s Transubstantiation has given me a lot to think about. Two of the posts in particular. The first post (which you can find here) is about the – now infamous – words of Tadeusz Mazowiecki. What I found interesting was the fact that Mazowiecki never actually said the words “gruba kreska” but “gruba linia”. It may be of little concern to some people but I find it ironic that a phrase which has become so loaded was never actually uttered by the man everyone believes said it. To some the phrase “gruba kreska” (roughly translated as “thick line”) is a positive term which set out the politics of post-communist Poland, that is to separate previous communist governments from the newly-formed ‘free’ government that was headed by Mazowiecki. The idea was that all that was in the past should stay in the past and Poland should look to the future with all political factions working together. Of course, the idea of the “thick line” has been interpreted differently by others who believe Mazowiecki gave the communists carte blanche to do whatever they wanted and get away with past crimes.

The second post on Transubstantition (to be found here) is about several neologisms that can be found on the billboards of every major town in Poland. The controversial Janusz Palikot of opposition party Civic Platform (PO) has decided to advertise his blog (http://pepepe.pl) on these billboards. Part of the campaign has been to plaster the billboards with bizarre, yet amusing neologisms. The idea to translate them on Transubstantiation is brilliant and highlights the difficulty we have in translating terms from one culture into another. My particular favourite is “odwkurzacz” which is a combination of “wkurzać” (to annoy) and “odkurzacz” (vacuum cleaner) so it is something that sucks away stress, a ‘de-stressant’ or ‘anti-stressant’.

Poland has become a linguist’s dream in recent years with politicians and advertisers taking full advantage of their new found freedom. Terms like “gruba kreska” or ”odwkurzacz” show the need for the Polish language to shake free of socialist linguistic shackles and communist newspeak and find a new voice. However, Poland’s politicians have shown their inability to rise to the challenge and their language and politics often seem to be worryingly similar to what we were accustomed to before 1989, note Speaker of the House Ludwik Dorn’s “łże-elity” (lying elites) or other examples given in a previous post here.

What’s in a name?

I honestly believe that in order to know yourself you have to know your history and everything that it entails. A recent scan of the internet looking for the name Uzar gave amusing results as some of you may recall (–> here).

On a more serious note, however, I think it’s useful for people to know a little bit about their family history and, for example, where their surname comes from. This has proved quite problematic for me and has resulted in conflicting results but they all – surprisingly – seem to lead to the same source.

I was given a few ideas by my grandmother whose knowledge of history and geopolitics was poor to say the least but she was convinced that the family was given the surname by King Jan Sobieski III in honour of their heroics in battle. Perhaps.

This, however, doesn’t explain why the form of the name is ‘Uzar’ and not ‘Hussar‘ which of course would be more appropriate for Sobieski’s soldiers. As is known, the Hussars, or more appropriately, the Polish Hussars were a mighty and feared set of warriors.

Yup, this I like. I wouldn’t mind being one of those. My own little theory is that the name Hussar changed over time to Uzar. Not at all improbable seeing that the family’s origins are somewhere in western Ukraine – the dropping of the ‘h’ sound and hardening of the ’ss’ into ‘z’ would not be out of the question.

Another theory that also seems to gravitate towards Ukraine is the myth of the Khazars which I find particulary alluring and romantic. ‘Khazar’, also, is not far off ‘Uzar’ and the shift is quite smooth:
Khazar –> Azar –> Uzar. Hey, presto! What I love about the myth of the Khazars is that the whole civilisation/culture is shrouded in mystery. By some they are seen as one of the lost tribes of Israel, by others a people whose king was petitioned by Muslims, Christians and Jews to convert to their religion and this choice ultimately sealed their doom. There is so much mystery surrounding these people that it’s difficult to pinpoint who they were or where they came from and why they disappeared - a kind of Eurasian equivalent of the Mayas/Incas who allegedly disappeared off the face of the earth.

Politician Speak with Forked Tongue

The world is full of politicians who deliberately (or even unwittingly) try and effect language. Historians give countless examples of witless (or even intelligent) political schemers who have made their mark on language. Either through the coining of new compounds, bizarre collocations, alternative set phrases and mixed metaphors or through commentary about politicians by observers are we forever introduced to a variety of odd constructions that sometimes bubble and sink in the linguistic melting pot or float to the top like unwanted excrement refusing to disappear.

Poland’s politicians are no different and are busy at work trying to stamp their authority on the Polish language. I was filled with linguistic glee (whatever that is!) when I learned that Roman Giertych, of ultra-catholic, right-wing fame, won his battle for the re-introduction of uniforms in Poland’s primary and high schools because of the fact that some people have begun calling these uniforms Giertyszki or Romanówki - a great example of Polish’s delightful penchant for possessive-diminutives. This also reminds me of Borówki (which also means ‘berries’) referring to the team of people closely associated with Marek Borowski, leader of the SDPL.

However, what really drew my attention to the linguistic shenanigans of Poland’s political classes was Transubstantiation in which we find the following examples of political gobbledygook:

łże-elity,   bure suki,   lumpen liberałowie,   wykształciuchy

All these words are usually uttered with venom (or bile, take your pick) and are generally always directed at politicians of the ‘liberal persuasion’ (don’t say it out loud – this is Poland) by members of Law and Justice (PiS). Anyone who belongs to any sort of elite, intellectual grouping, academic team or is a liberal (struck out to make it less offensive) can be classed as one of the above.  As Transubstantiation tells us (but with additional commentary of my own) łże-elity are the ‘lying elite dogs’; bure suki is another subtle reference to dogs and it generally means ‘drab dogs/bitches’ (how nice!); lumpen liberałowie is a classic and shows the disdain with which PiS views liberalism – these are the ‘lowly liberals’, the ‘uber-scum of Poland’; the final one wykształciuchy is a brilliant perversion of the word ‘educated’ giving it a contemptuous coating. I’ve heard it used to refer to academics and journalists who refuse to be vetted by government authorities.

Whatever you think, you can’t say that politicians don’t have the gift of the gab. Yes, they’re ill-mannered, unfriendly and unethical, but they have the ability to make me smile when I hear the verbal garbage they use. The phrase that seems to have the greatest political (and statistical) currency in Poland at the moment is IV RP which has nothing to do with Received Pronunciation but is an abbreviation of czwarta Rzeczpospolita or ‘Fourth Republic’, a fantasy utopia coined by Poland’s President Lech Kaczyński to imply a new state that aims to cut all ties with the (post-communist) ‘Third Republic’ (1989 and onwards). The idea is interesting but has met with little support outside government circles leading to the even newer concept of the ‘Fifth Republic‘ put forward by Lech Mażewski.

We certainly do live in interesting times.

Semantic Diligence

“Watch your words”, “Be careful what you say”, “Look before you leap”. I was told to mind my words as a child, but it never stopped me getting in trouble with teachers at school. I was the naughty little boy who was always told off for talking too much. “Chatterbox”, “always chatting”, “natters like an old woman” would sum up my yearly school reports. Not much has changed nowadays and I often find myself having to bite my tongue in situations where I might blurt out the inappropriate.

This leads elegantly to the issue of watching your words in the international media and political discourse. Journalists and politicians earn their daily bread by pushing interpretations to the limit. Recently, two stories have been dominating the headlines in Poland.

The first concerns Russian outrage on the decision of the director of Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to not allow a Russian/Soviet exposition to be open for viewing. The reason why it has been put on hold for a number of years is the insistence by the Russian government that a number of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Polish nationals who died in the concentration/death camp were Soviet citizens. The Museum directorship have made it clear that these individuals had Soviet citizenship forced upon them through the realisation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and should not therefore be seen as citizens of the Soviet Empire but as nationals of their respective former countries. The International Auschwitz Council has spoken of its disgust at the Russian government for using Auschwitz victims as pawns in its continuing Anti-Polish political campaign and has agreed wholeheartedly with the decision taken by the Museum’s director.

The second story concerns the publication by Axel Springer’s Die Welt Online of captions poking fun at Pope John Paul II, especially recent calls for him to be made a saint and the fact that he had Parkinson’s disease. Most Polish commentators and journalists claim the captions are in bad taste and simply point to the fact that the editors and publishers of Die Welt have shown no respect for one of the most positive figures the world has ever seen, and have simply shown us their lack of style and culture.

The first story shows how far semantic manipulation will go to put the political needs of a nation above the memory of a group of individuals. The fact that people died in Auschwitz far outweighs the need to harp on about where they actually came from or what passports they held (or were forced to hold).

The second story shows us how the right to freedom of speech is exercised to – what some might see as – its very limits. One side will fight for the right to make fun of anyone they deem fit to be made fun of, whereas the other side believes there are borders to this freedom based on a sense of good taste and style.

Attention to Detail

I’ve never actually explained the real point of this blog, so I think it’s about time. After reaching over 5,700 hits (which comes as a massive surprise to me – why on earth would anyone want to read what I have to say?) I’ve decided to key a few words about what function this weblog is supposed to serve (if any function at all).

Weeeeell, methinks the best illustration for what I’m all about is the title and picture that lead the blog: “into the unknown”. Life’s all about discovering, learning and being surprised. I suppose, in a horribly sweet and clichéd way, it’s the childish wonder that we all have in our eyes when we see, learn or hear of something new; it’s all about the curiosity that keeps us ‘alive’.

The picture? I took the blog title photograph a few years ago. I love taking pictures of things that appear to be normal but actually are not quite right or have something ‘extra’ about them. The photo is of a sunflower but if you look carefully there’s a bumble bee buzzing its funky stuff in the top left-hand corner. Life, for me, is also about attention to detail. Many of us spend so much time looking up at the sky and dreaming, planning for the future, looking beyond today that we don’t see what’s under our feet, and we forget about the hear and now, the little cracks in the pavement, the £20 note we’ve just missed or the dog shit we’ve just failed to avoid. 

Attention to detail keeps us fresh and it keeps our senses alive. I often use a little trick that keeps my senses buzzing like nobody’s business. I’ll wake up in the morning and pick a colour (or a type of smell) and my mission is to find that colour (or search out that smell) wherever I can. It’s amazing how powerful the mind is and what you can find.

Ego Surfing

Ego surfing I think it’s called when you look for yourself on the web. Obviously, I’ve done it. I’ve done it lots and lots of times. The term brilliantly sums up the process of using the internet to pander to our egos.

Anyway, in an effort to break with my usual preoccupation of looking for myself on the internet – I mean I know what I’m going to find – I decided to search for the most bizarre links I could find using my own name as a reference point. My search didn’t go unrewarded.

I found that my name (or rather my surname) was shared by a host of wierdos, oddballs and freaks. Well, at least in my warped way of thinking. I tried to put myself in these situations and that’s when it started to get wierd. Uzar is many things on the internet – I’m Turkish, I’m an evil aquatic being, a body builder, a jailbird, you name it.

Once I trawled through the usual crap including my academic publications, radio work and other bits and bobs, I decided to filter out the serious stuff and focus on the wierd. As I mentioned, I share a surname with famous body builder Mike Uzar - I sincerely hope he’s family (!); I was sent to a page called – get this – “Find a Grave” – thoughts of DIY grave-digging sprung to mind; I found a news article about good old Charlie Uzar, one of the oldest inmates around – 96 years old and still in prison. Last but most certainly not least was the infamous (no, I’ve never heard of it before) film entitled Uzar’s Revenge which I simply must get hold of. It sounds like an absolute gas. My namesake is an evil alien aquatic scientist. If anyone out there is able to get hold of this, let me know.

And the point of all of this? Life’s a lot more amusing then we might think.

Silesia – city state or ethnic region?

Recently, the Poland’s Minister for the Interior and Administration Ludwik Dorn publicly announced that the government are moving forward in their plans for the creation of a super-Silesian urban aglommeration. The superpolis will swallow up seventeen towns and cities who will have no option to opt out of being part of the new metropolitan area. The idea is that Śląsk (Silesia) will be able to compete with the other larger cities – Warsaw, Poznań, Wrocław and the Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot aglommeration for business. Katowice is most interested with the city mayor happy with the idea. However, it seems that the other sixteen city and town mayors are not too keen on relinquishing their positions for the greater good of the region…

Śląsk is most definitely a defined and definable European region. It’s enough just to look back into history and see that the Śląsk tribes were well and truly active already in the early stages of the development of Slav-dom. The tribes that settled in the Upper Silesian (Górnośląski) region or were in close proximity to the region were primarily the Ślęzanie. Also, the Opolanie, Golęszyce, Bieżuńczanie and Dziadoszanie.

There is a lot of historical weight behind the move to create a super-city that will cover a huge area from Gliwice to Jaworzno. But will this help to unite the people of the region or will it cause tension between the proud denizens of each city who will all be lumped together?

There are calls for Śląsk autonomy and the Movement for Śląsk Autonomy has been very active in recent years pushing for more legislation that will help self-determination. Recently, a Śląsk took on Poland in a football match. Ironically, the game finished 1-1. Self-determination is of great importance. The criteria for nationhood can often be encapsulated in: (1) ethinicity, (2) language, (3) territory. There are some countries that do not possess all three. Belgium? Luxembourg? Switzerland? Many believe Śląsk possesses all three conditions. Nobody can doubt there is a definite ‘Śląsk-ness’. The Ślęzanie were Slavonic tribes and their genes have slowly filtered down, albeit watered down, but still. Some Silesians are calling for “Śląski” to be included in their passports as a mark of their different identity. Statistics show that around 300,000 people believe in their ‘otherness’. Estimates suggest that a further 3 million people belong to this ethic category. With regards to language, there is a dialect-language problem here. There is no point getting into this, but the differentiation between dialect and language does not preclude nationhood. As for territory… perhaps the Śląsk city state is close to being born…