A crushed, empty can of Tyskie not on the streets of Warsaw, but Falkirk. It’s sometimes the simple, mundane things that draw your attention to the connectedness of Scotland and Poland.
When we were kids in the seventies and eighties it was different, of course. Then, it was the sense of distance and separation that was the most obvious link between the two. Mr Domowski’s Saturday morning Polish language lessons and Monsignor Drobina pressing a krowka into the palm of your hand, father and mother in ‘the club’ where the Poles would gather, that was our Poland.
But it was different one from the real Poland a thousand miles away. Divided not just by difference but also by ideology. I got a real sense of that when I went there aged eight, travelling in dad’s car all the way from Falkirk to Warsaw, through a hole in the Iron Curtain where I saw Red Army soldiers for the first time.
And it all seemed so alien, not just to my little bit of Poland in the heart of Scotland, but also to my Scottish life away from the confines of the exiles, our parents. Maybe also irrelevant, to some degree. We were Polish Scots, with the latter more important to us than the former, or at least that’s how it seemed to us whose ‘Polishness’ was diluted by one of our parents’ choice of partner.
We had our heritage which was different from our day-to-day existence and that meant our ability, and desire, to in some sense be Polish was lost. Scotland, and Falkirk, was where we were meant to be, not in the Communist world where they were supposed to be our enemies. But 1989 pulled that rug from under our feet.
Two things immediately struck me about the end of the People’s Republic of Poland, that far off place which seemed to have cut me off from my heritage and family.
First, I could travel to the new Polish Republic more easily and less bureaucratically and without coming under suspicion simply because I was from an émigré group. Second, I could, if I so wanted, become a Polish citizen with a passport and everything.
As the trips to the forgotten land began, the wasted opportunity of not being able to fully legitimate your Polish identity began to strike home. For some of us it felt as though the chance “be Polish” had gone completely at exactly the moment where it should have been possible. Like Alex Haley’s Roots, it was where I was from but was not really part of the person I was. There was a sense of regret at that, maybe for the first time I wanted to be a Scottish Pole.
So I read and I learned and used the internet to increase my understanding and connections with people allowed me to seem a bit more Polish, at least to myself.
Then the EU influx opened up my eyes to how I really wasn’t that Polish at all, at least not next to those with real lived experience of the place. In one sense it was good to have your own home, and the people in it, exposed to the kind of culture you had grown up understanding you had some, often tenuous-seeming, link to. There was the ability to buy Polish food in the shops, hear it spoken on the streets, have Poland and the Poles discussed in the media.
But, deep down, it created a feeling of somehow being an outsider. The eventual realisation was having a foot in both camps left me with a sense that I didn’t really belong in either the group marked “Scottish” or the one labelled “Polish”.
I am one thing but want to be the other, knowing full well I will never be able to tie myself to one identity. Is that multiculturalism ?
When we were kids in the seventies and eighties it was different, of course. Then, it was the sense of distance and separation that was the most obvious link between the two. Mr Domowski’s Saturday morning Polish language lessons and Monsignor Drobina pressing a krowka into the palm of your hand, father and mother in ‘the club’ where the Poles would gather, that was our Poland.
But it was different one from the real Poland a thousand miles away. Divided not just by difference but also by ideology. I got a real sense of that when I went there aged eight, travelling in dad’s car all the way from Falkirk to Warsaw, through a hole in the Iron Curtain where I saw Red Army soldiers for the first time.
And it all seemed so alien, not just to my little bit of Poland in the heart of Scotland, but also to my Scottish life away from the confines of the exiles, our parents. Maybe also irrelevant, to some degree. We were Polish Scots, with the latter more important to us than the former, or at least that’s how it seemed to us whose ‘Polishness’ was diluted by one of our parents’ choice of partner.
We had our heritage which was different from our day-to-day existence and that meant our ability, and desire, to in some sense be Polish was lost. Scotland, and Falkirk, was where we were meant to be, not in the Communist world where they were supposed to be our enemies. But 1989 pulled that rug from under our feet.
Two things immediately struck me about the end of the People’s Republic of Poland, that far off place which seemed to have cut me off from my heritage and family.
First, I could travel to the new Polish Republic more easily and less bureaucratically and without coming under suspicion simply because I was from an émigré group. Second, I could, if I so wanted, become a Polish citizen with a passport and everything.
As the trips to the forgotten land began, the wasted opportunity of not being able to fully legitimate your Polish identity began to strike home. For some of us it felt as though the chance “be Polish” had gone completely at exactly the moment where it should have been possible. Like Alex Haley’s Roots, it was where I was from but was not really part of the person I was. There was a sense of regret at that, maybe for the first time I wanted to be a Scottish Pole.
So I read and I learned and used the internet to increase my understanding and connections with people allowed me to seem a bit more Polish, at least to myself.
Then the EU influx opened up my eyes to how I really wasn’t that Polish at all, at least not next to those with real lived experience of the place. In one sense it was good to have your own home, and the people in it, exposed to the kind of culture you had grown up understanding you had some, often tenuous-seeming, link to. There was the ability to buy Polish food in the shops, hear it spoken on the streets, have Poland and the Poles discussed in the media.
But, deep down, it created a feeling of somehow being an outsider. The eventual realisation was having a foot in both camps left me with a sense that I didn’t really belong in either the group marked “Scottish” or the one labelled “Polish”.
I am one thing but want to be the other, knowing full well I will never be able to tie myself to one identity. Is that multiculturalism ?
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