Sometimes you take a chance. Some friends in Berlin heard about my research on a city of friends and suggested I reach out to Krzysztof Czyżewski and the good folks at the Borderland Foundation in Sejny, Poland. Using theater and poetry, Borderland explores various forms of cultural play and arts practice, aimed at expanding “co-existence of people living with strong cultural, ethnic, generational, ideological and other types of diversity.” It “runs the International Centre for Dialogue at Krasnogruda and The Borderland Cultures Documentation Centre in Sejny.”
Hearing about the Borderland, we made some contacts, set up interviews, and made travel arrangements to Suwalki. Doing so, we started learning about their work to create space for people of different cultures to talk, share space, hear each other's stories, share oral histories, create new rituals, and perform theater together. Throughout our two hour interview, Krzysztof Czyżewski shared his story of the organization and its efforts aimed at promoting peace and tolerance. There’s still lots to learn from these complicated lands and people with their evolving, interconnected histories, and ever shifting cultural dynamics.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A lot happened just getting there. The first step involved getting to Warsaw, via trains. My brother Will and I met in Warsaw, Will via Stockholm, myself a train from Berlin. And started exploring the history in Warsaw. Towards the end of our tour of the Ghetto and WWII, we asked our guide if there was a coffee shop nearby. No, he told us. The Communists did not want people to talk. But sometimes that is just what we need to do. That is the point of Borderlands.
The next day, we jumped on a bus to Suwalki, traveling all day. We stayed at an old spa converted into a hotel, very empty, the night before. Eerie quiet.
The next morning, Borderland had arranged for a driver, who picked me up and took me to Sejny. A recent college graduate from the university in Warsaw, he is amicable and friendly, driving me in his old car through the countryside, past collective farms from Communist days, ruins thirty years later.
Gradually the conversation turns to refugees and the Białowieża Forest. According to UNESCO, “The Białowieża Forest World Heritage site, on the border between Poland and Belarus, is an immense range of primary forest including both conifers and broadleaved trees covering a total area of 141,885 hectares. Situated on the watershed of the Baltic Sea and Black Sea, this transboundary property is exceptional for the opportunities it offers for biodiversity conservation.”
It's also home to refugees on the border with Belarus and Lithuania, says the driver, paraphrasing a story he sent me by Chris Koulemans. “The primeval forest of Białowieża has been a militarized zone since September,” writes Koulemans. “Access is prohibited for anyone who does not live or work there, including aid workers, journalists and doctors. Somewhere in this forest, 150,000 hectares of world heritage, migrants wander, lured by the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko with the promise of free passage to Europe.” Poland has created a zone of thirty kilometers, a sort of no person’s land for refugees, some 20,000, mostly from the Middle East. Writes Koulemans, “The forest is now a militarized zone with 15,000 police officers, border guards and soldiers….Asylum applications are refused. Border police push people back through the barbed wire; babies are thrown over. All around the forest, police checkpoints dot the country roads: dark faces, on their way to Europe, get dragged out of cars; the drivers arrested.” It's a striking story about the horror of our borders, fueled by age-old animosities.
On, we talk about dynamics. We can accept two million from Ukraine refugees, without a doubt. It's racism, says our driver. At Borderland, they try to explore these dynamics, taking oral histories with those from the region, the Roma, Old Believers, the Ukranians, and turn them into theater, into dialogue. Its the stories of the region, stories of kids, Jews hidden from Nazis. It's also about the stories that people no longer want to remember. That no neighbors came to help in the Ghetto Uprising. It's our guilt. A lot of Poles helped Nazis, says our driver. You feel the guilt here. A lot of Poles moved into the houses of Jews, after they were evicted, afraid they'd come back after the war. It's against our official story. You feel the history here, driving through the countryside. You feel it in Warsaw, where developers are doing their work, exploiting, taking over old buildings, whose owners were evicted by Nazis, profiting on the history. On we talk about the forest and the borders, between the forest and the city, East and West, those with papers and those without, Forest Europe and the border, between this world and that. It's about the forest and the space in between.
After about an hour, we stop at an old farm house in the country, where I’ll meet Krzysztof Czyżewski, the founder of Borderland. Wearing a black sweater and jeans, with a short beard, he greets me with a smile and a hot cup of coffee, taking me to his office, lined with rugs and old books of poetry and philosophy. “Borderland has something to do with good coexistence,” says Krzysztof. “The good co-existence on the edge of a national state, commons for people of different religions living together. That's how we understand it,” Krzysztof elaborates, highlighting a dynamic which seemed diametrically opposed to what is happening with the refugees in Białowieża Forest. “The art of living bridging between us. Of course, there is competition because of diversity. You learn how to live with others. Doing so, you realize there is this invisible border,” says Krzysztof, and then a wall or plans for one. “If you cross it, destruction starts - good things too, mixed marriages, friends. But if you cross it, war starts, families become enemies, sometimes overnight. A week before you wouldn’t even imagine fighting. You are worried about your future, pushed to the edge. Something is broken inside you. Sometimes the conflict is more cruel, between neighbors. The occupation is different when you start to fight with your friends, more cruel and profound. You find arguments about why you are fighting. You explain to yourself, your neighbor is a scapegoat, a danger. That happens a lot on the Borderlands. When the bridge is broken, the fire is really big. It’s always on the borders.
“Family fights with family, North vs South. The poor starve,” I reply. “That was our family experience with the US Civil War of the 1860’s.”
“You are on a border here with Lithuania, an ever changing border, altered with new nation states after WWI. New borders,” Krzysztof continues.
“People stayed, knowing who was shooting who, it's still a mindset, a problem,” Krzysztof elaborates. “What happens after the war? Until 1989, we didn’t have time to deal with the trauma. It was closed. Communism was a shut up, don’t talk about it, a new world in the shadow of negative powers. We came to work in 1989, to start talking, a dialogue. There was a White Synagogue in Seiny, it was like an agora, a meeting space for different cultures, Lithuanians, Roma Gypsies, Old Believers - like Amish people, they celebrate orthodoxies - Belarusians, Ukrainians. The question was how to celebrate, how to cope with conflicts, to find a space to talk, that's also about a border, different identity borders. Also about common cultural responsibilities for the whole community. We lost the whole beyond our narrow borders. The city is ours, our whole. Nationalism is about something else, not the whole. That's what we initiated, to talk, to be empathic to others, to let them speak in the whole. Give space to speak, even to disagree. We worked with young people coming. At the beginning they became Old Believers, Lithuanians, it's easier. At Borderland, we share songs and learn about your family story, asking others to tell us about it. Creating respect, curiosity about being the other. Lets create a performance about the story of our town, that's how we work, how we show respect, share stories. Do something together. What are our responsibilities to each other? We have no Jews here. We have an old synagogue here. There was this whole vanished culture that had been here, the Jewish people, that were gone. What happened? Why are they not here? It's not just about Germans….” Krzysztof reminds me. “You should have time. You will not have it overnight. We’ve been on a continuous process over thirty two years, things happening. Nothing is impossible. You say trauma is too long. Then slowly day by day, things open up. You start to have this legitimacy to open wounds. You live with them.”
In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman talks about the need for safety and trust, before beginning a story of reconciliation. “There is a need at the bottom on the heart,” says Krzysztof.
“If you stay with the trauma, there is a slow positive step to show it, to move, for a neighbors' culture is delivered in a different house.The US is all about multiculturalism. But it is an archipelago, separate. We need a new space, to find a new space. The Borderlands is a new space, a new language to celebrate what's between us, new rituals.”
Borderlands has worked to fashion countless such rituals. Krzysztof refers to “August 22, the Day of the Bridge, a mystery at the Bridge,” in homage to Stari Most, the rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, destroyed in 1993 during the Civil War in Yugoslavia. “We stage ‘Mystery of the Bridge’” says Krzysztof, referring to the words he delivered at the porch of poet Czesław Miłosz’s manor mouse in Krasnogruda before the Mystery of the Bridge, at 8.30 p.m., 22 August 2015: “Hayrudin, who built the Old Bridge in Mostar in 1566. The Ottoman civilization referred to him as the “architect of the space,” one who had “absolute pitch” that allowed him to combine various, often contradictory elements into one harmonious whole. An expert on body and soul, on the physics of engineering and metaphysics of being, on the laws of nature and human relationships, on the production of the binder that equally combined all parts of the bridge 17 and the neighborly community… One of the children who worked with us, when asked what the greatest mystery of the bridge was, answered: a bridge is a whole, a unity of different parts, it is enough to remove one beam, just remove one part, and the whole structure will collapse. To break a bridge just takes: inattention, inhospitality, ignorance, forgetfulness, lack of understanding, omission, exclusion, maltreatment, neglect, distrust, being blind or hard of listening, indifference, a sense of superiority…” Rebuilding the bridge involves combating the hostility. “Do something together,” says Krzysztof. “There is no owner of the day. We all own it… Create a space for something together. Invent a line to cross these borderlands. We start in 1990…”
Before Borderlands, Krzysztof was involved in Avant Garde underground theater as well as underground publishing, free of censorship. “I learned about Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1980. His books introduced me to the Borderland. I wrote my master's thesis about the Borderland, a myth in literature, about the tradition.” In the forward to Miłosz – DIALOGUE – BORDERLAND, Krzysztof writes: “Czesław Miłosz’s life and thought are enclosed by the circle of return. It was apokatastasis, rendered in poetry and heading for existence. The exile shared the fate of fugitives, emigrants, and others deprived of their roots, those displaced by the winds of history, thrown into the outside world. The wanderer built his home in his mother tongue and remained true to it. He observed the world around him like Gucio Enchanted, the hero of his favorite children’s book: first, at close quarters… then, from far away, like a world traveler encompassing continents, languages, generations and epochs... Just like many inhabitants of Wilno…and the borderlands of Eastern and Central Europe, Miłosz lost his family home, swallowed by the ‘abomination of desolation.’ But he had a dream of return. … He would often repeat the Hegelian formula he had learnt in his schooldays: ‘overcome while retaining.’ The Returner overcame the Exile, a victory to a large degree assisted by the memory of his childhood and his stubborn refusal to accept the verdict of history as final… drawing closer to the past. Immersed in ‘now’ we …try to transpose what was into a new dimension…. the ‘abomination of desolation’”.
In the same way Milos’ life forced him to contend with totalitarian systems, first National Socialism and then Communism, Borderland has sought to make sense of what happened. “Communism was homogeneous and nationalist,” says Krzysztof. “To break it down, Miloz was our guide. Is it possible to practice it?”
“Seen through a telescope aimed at the earth or sky, the tissue resembles a constellation, society or community,” writes Krzysztof in Toward Xexopolis; the connective tissue Miloz described would be a guidepost, linking communities instead of separating them. “Instead of going West, we go to this small town to explore this tradition in the culture. A new Poland, a new Europe should be built in the East, the Soviet Border, Everything frozen from the past, In 1990, it was difficult to cross to the USSR. It was the end of the world. Suddenly, we become the center of the world. The problem with borders in the East, in Sarajevo became crucial. The source of new wars was always there.” That was the 1990’s, civil war raging as Yugoslavia crumbled, descending into an abyss. “Yet, the new war, one between Belarus, Ukraine and Poland, it's something that hangs over us,” says Krzysztof. “We should emancipate ourselves from it. Be autonomous, not Russia, not the US, not Brussels. We are capable of solving our own problems.”
On we chat about our heroes, Judith Malina and Gary Snder, poets of the road and living theater, his friend Mimi Abramowitch, crossing borders. “We had a performance at La Mama theater in New York City a few years ago. The NY Times ran a review of it.” (See “Yes,”Borders Everywhere, but Nary a Barrier in Sight” on the “Sejny Chronicles.”) Borders on the stage, prison cells rising in the Brigg, the borderland is in our hearts, between this life and that. I saw it when Dad died. That night I sat at the Living Theater, walking through that liminal space over the Brooklyn Bridge, looking at all the world as a stage.
Krzysztof shows me a copy of his new book, Toward Xenopolis: Visions from the Borderland. “This is a vision of the border, this word xenopolis combining other and polis, or community, which means the other is at the heart of the world. There is no community without others. You are not yourself without the other, you and community,” other and self, others as self. I was poor and you fed me. “You discover something else which holds you within the community. It's about us. It's not a utopia. If you do not have them, you do not have a full community or a city.” You do not have a full self.
“I like you refer to Whitman,” says Krzysztof, as we chat about Whitman’s city of friends. “Miłosz translated his poetry. It's about living the real life, to be truthful to the whole around you, connect existence, connective tissue with all around you. You live with a connective tissue to build a bridge. Otherwise, it will be lost. Poetry makes your reality dense. It helps you pay attention to nature, to the world, to borders, to like others, be attentive to it. It can teach you to make a space dense. When it is not dense, when something against it comes against it, nationalism comes in, making you blind, a kind of blindness. It helps spiritual life, for bridging Whitman, seeing a lineage to Milosz. When you lose the ground of real things, uprooted, you become abstract, about ideologies, nationalism. Something is lost from reality. Good poetry connects you with others. Without it, we are separated. This is Putin and the clash. It becomes the 20th century generalizations, who cares about small towns. Yet to build democratic neighborhoods, we need that density.
“I think it's easier to have a bad fight,” says Krzysztof, referring to the fights that happen in the city of friends. “A good fight is harder. A good fight, it might be good to be the loser, to not win, to be wrong, to learn from someone. A good fight leads to a good future. A bad fight, you don’t care about the future or the family, not rooted. I destroy here. I go elsewhere. A good fight, you want to stay. You invest in others, in neighbors. The problem with the 20th century is people lost futures, deported to Siberia or off to the West. People lost a future here, when there is no belief in the future. After 1989, people saw a shift in life. You became more rational. You shift in your life. You have good fights. You find negotiation.
Krzysztof tells me about his workshops in the Lower East Side on the Borderlands. Why did it happen there, he wonders. There were so many problems, so much poverty. But the 20th Century wars didn’t happen there. In New York, you had a future, for kids for the future. Invest in a life; develop a life. Our life is getting a future. Cope with the past. The future is opening. A new story takes hold.
But in the US, we can’t talk about the Civil War. Many can’t talk about slavery and genocide of the Indigenous people, or our other our past sins, I reply.
If you can’t talk about the past, then you can’t talk about the future. And a Trump emerges, says Krzysztof.
Yet, Mandela suggested we could be friends with our prison guards. We could be larger than this. We could have truth and reconciliation, with justice.
“It's not about us, the reconcilers,” says Krzysztof. “It's about the guards not ready to heal, not ready to learn. It's easier to say forget about it. Don’t touch it. That's no way for healing. I’m against this easy way. Take this war with Russia. You can make a peace treaty. Life goes on. If you don’t allow the loss to settle, then the loss remains. Critical memory is needed. You give people a chance to mourn and learn. If you are too quick to label, push it into the corner. This is about a cultural way of making change. You give space to change. You do not stigmatize those who failed or didn’t learn. Critical memory is for one’s self. I am a Pole. We can be victims. And you can be open about what your people did.” Krzysztof tells me about The Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan Gross, a book about the Poles who assisted the Nazis. “A profound moment, our president apologized for what we did. Others said, care about our suffering, not our guilt. That's the old answer. But if you are critical about your own role you encourage others. Then it makes it possible to remember and heal together,” says Krzysztof.
“There are three levels of memory: 1) critical, 2) common, you understand and you heal others, including others' memories. These are other’s stories of what happened. And 3) good memory, the hardest, at the bottom of your soul, you remember good things about others. Even in the dark times, you become the other because you helped the Jews. You will not be welcomed for it. Have the courage to say it. Have this memory of this good gesture to share it.”
I recall the white people who helped the civil rights movement in the US who were scored in the South, who endured ridicule for it, ostracized for it in their own communities.
“After the war, we came to Mostar,” sayd Krzysztof. “We started to talk about the war. The question was did you help each other? Did you hear each other? Nobody asked the question. You are a hero for fighting, but not for helping neighbors. Just simple questions are difficult. You can see yourself as heroic, bigger than others. Of course, I have this possibility. Others didn’t. It doesn’t make me special or better,” says Krzysztof. He is quick to point out that puritanical, sometimes sanctimonious dynamics we see in the left that are not useful. Righteousness is not useful. “This is where guilt can happen. This is the wisdom of the Borderlands. Do not judge others. When they did good things, support them. Be thankful god gave me the chance to change.” He worries about people becoming arrogant or self righteous.
We talk about ways he paces himself. He gets out into nature. He reads poetry. “You are involved in conflict, in poetry, in writing poetry. It's connected, writing poetry, you have to have the good feeling. You should overcome something. You have to follow the light,” says Krzysztof. He pauses and smiles. “I was in New York reading poetry for 24 hours on New Years at the poetry project.” I was too. We might have been in the room together, reading in that space where Allen Ginsberg used to preside. And Eileen Myles and a whole community of freaks and storytellers still read. We talk about Beat poets. “Gary Snyder is my friend,” says Krzysztof. In awe, I’m thinking of Japhy, the Gary Snyder character in Dharma Bums, the legendary poet, hiker, and Buddhist; Snyder is still around reading. “He’s a lover of my book, the Path to the Borderland. Gary invited me to read in his town in Nevada City.
Our conversation turns back to refugees. “Refugees in this area are treated differently,” Krzysztof tells me. “Borders with Ukraine are open. It's porous. Refugees from Syria struggle with our government over a right to live. They build a wall, bad for all. It's bad for the climate and bad for us, a huge violence. It's a lot of work to be ready to be willing to help. The question is who are our friends? The Ukranians, we have a lot of history together, even hatred. The Syrians have a different religion. It's harder for us. The Ukranians will win. It's inevitable. The struggle is for victory. What will victory look like? Not to be on the right side. But what's victory? Ready to sacrifice, not to compromise, which will help us? A new way of thinking is needed. We will fight to the victory we need,”says Krzysztof.
We talk about Gandhi and non violence. “I was a pacifist until I got to Sarajevo. This was my experience. We are waiting for help and they could attack. There was Srebrenica (the genocide of July 1995). We are going to use weapons to stop the attacks on us. You do it to save life. You do it with love, not hatred to save yourself and others. It's different. I would rather live and share the guilt and not have to say I didn’t do anything in the face of attacks. It is better to do something. So you can live with yourself.”
Eventually, it was time to go. On we drive back, through the country, past decaying factories, ever changing landscapes, spaces which saw the worst, flux constant, to catch the bus. I spend the whole trip home thinking about the ways Krzysztof links pieces of his life with poetry, dialogue with Milosz, with Whitman, the connective tissue with Gary Snyder, the living theater, between forests and cities, rebuilding bridges, dismantling walls, new stories and ways of looking flourishing, ever dueling with thanatos, living and forgiving, the borders on the outside, the bridges inside of all of us.
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