Thursday, November 24, 2022

I Am Not Your Pole by Dr. Ewa Sapieżyńska; Bieganski, the Brute Polak in Norway.

 


From Onet; full story here. Excerpts below.

A Polish woman conquers Norwegian bookstores. "I'm not your Pole", a bittersweet story about emigration

 

The book "Jeg er ikke polakken din" (I'm not your Pole) by Ewa Sapieżyńska conquers the Norwegian best-seller lists, and the Norwegian Culture Council has decided to deliver the book by the Polish woman to libraries all over the country. And so the discussion about what it means to be a Pole in Scandinavia, what racism is and where are its limits.

 

Anna Kruczynska

 

October 30, 2022, 07:24

 

In Norway, we systematically encounter worse treatment of minorities not only because of skin color, but also because of the country of origin - reports the situation of Poles in Scandinavia, Dr. Ewa Sapieżyńska, whose book "Jeg er ikke polakken din" ) storms Norwegian bookstores

 

Although the book is not yet available in Polish, the Polish woman's publication has caused a stir among Norwegians, revealing what many migrants in Scandinavia have been silent about for years

 

"Poles do not know how to smile or think, because they are horses. They work 14 hours a day," says one of the Norwegian employers about Poles

 

— Polish thinking in exile: "I'll bite my teeth, I'll last five more years, and then I'll come back to Poland and we'll build a house" - the sociologist explains the mechanism

 

 

I read all the publications that came out in Norway before the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Norwegians have sworn that there is no discrimination against minorities.

 

Scandinavian idyll - there is money, order, peace, space, respect for rights...

 

Meanwhile, in Norway, we systematically experience worse treatment of minorities not only because of skin color, but also country of origin or ethnicity. Reading and crying over stories of discrimination, I noticed that there are no Polish voices at all.

 

Meanwhile, Poles are the largest minority in Norway! According to statistics, nearly 105,000 people live here permanently. Poles. Norway is a small country with only 5 million inhabitants, so 105,000 Poles matter.

 

In fact, there are almost 200,000 here. Poles, if we take into account people coming to work seasonally on drilling platforms, on construction sites, in fields with potatoes or strawberries, as I started myself. These voices are not heard.

 

…For Norwegians, a Pole is a poorly paid worker who does not make demands, most likely speaks bad Norwegian and drinks a lot, or maybe he is a criminal at all.

 

…One Polish woman living in Norway wrote that she hears jokes about Poles being stupid at least once a week, some joke "how many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb"...

 

In Norway they say "Polish working hours", when you work much more than Norwegians, they also talk about "Polish jobs", i.e. painting, cleaning, construction work.

 

…When you look at the list of bad words that Norwegian youth use in high schools, "Pole" ranks high, it is often used the same way as, unfortunately, "Roman" is used in Poland. Among this list, at the very top is a whore and gay, and below that is "Black", "Jew", "Pole", "Pakkis", meaning someone of Pakistani descent.

 

…In Norway I often don't feel seen as a human being, I am "only a Pole".

 

…I tried to forget about neighbors who asked me to take my Polish name off the mailbox because property prices in the area would go down. This is pure racism.

 

…The interviews conducted by the researchers show that if you are Polish, you are suitable for physical work, but you are no longer suitable for a hotel reception.

 

"Poles do not know how to smile or think, because they are horses. They work 14 hours a day and do not have to think," says one of the Norwegian employers about Poles.

 

…We bought a flat from a lady who turned out to be Polish. She was ashamed to speak Polish, she changed her name to make it more European, she changed her surname, she hid her origin. I tried to convince her: "After all, we can talk in Polish." She looked at me like an alien. She made me understand that it was a shame to speak Polish and switched fluently to Norwegian.

 

After many years abroad, I forgot for a moment that it was a shame to be Polish in Norway.

 

… It turns out that in Denmark he met the same aversion to Poles and Polish names in public places, especially where real estate could lose value, "because a Pole lives there".

Thank you to Jerzy for sending this in. 

9 comments:

  1. The title has been coined after 'I am not your Negro', a documentary based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript 'Remember This House'. Regarding 'fluent Norwegian'. There are at least two standard languages Bokmål and Nynorsk and their two separate Wikipedias. There exist still many dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_dialects

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi translator:

    did Eva mean Roma [broadly defined] or Romani or Polska Roma?

    Since when - and why - did Nordic countries care so much about their property prices?

    I understood for a long time this was a concern in Anglosphere because of their overblown property market [especially in the USA and Australia - and in the UK's London].

    Norwegian dialects were a big controversy among Wikipedians in the 2000s when they were wanting to make their Nynorsk-L and Bokmal-L separate from each other.

    I picked up the "I am not your Negro" sentiment.

    it also has the connotation of being someone's child or pet.

    Or being - well - owned - by that person.

    [No point about false delicacy here!]

    "No longer suitable for hotel reception" - or indeed any public-facing work.

    And forcing Polish women to smile - is emotional labour.

    Adelaide Dupont

    PS: I remember Korean migrants and adoptees in Sweden speaking about these very things in the early 2000s [2001-02].

    ReplyDelete
  3. There is a text "Poland" by Lil Yachty. It begins "You fucking with that, F1LTH'? (Wake up, F1LTHY)
    To Poland
    I took the Wock' to Poland"
    I do not understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9PzYuVwCSE Pure poetry allegedly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jerzy:

      Wock is a particular kind of cough syrup.

      It is also an ingredient in an illegal drink called lean.

      So when Lil Yachty sings about leanin'...

      And our singer had this water bottle - Poland Spring.

      That is part of the reason the film is shot in a New York train station.

      https://auralcrave.com/en/2022/10/11/the-wock-to-poland-the-meaning-of-lil-yachty-song/

      Perhaps, Dr Goska, some of your students have seen this video.

      Adelaide Dupont

      Delete
    2. Thank you!

      Delete
    3. I had a quick look at the site, and this looks like a rap song, and given the lyrics of some of them, I would rather not know.

      Delete
    4. Fair point, Sue.

      I appreciate rap and hip-hop through their lyrics first and only secondarily through the music.

      Also dance and movement are central to these genres and their social and cultural impact.

      I was still a pre-teen when hip-hop became mainstream in the Anglo-American context

      [though I did have access to some of its precedents and antecedence].

      So the genre did go through my consciousness, especially in its more whitebread/censored forms.

      And there is such a subgenre as Christian rap - in fact several leading practitioners.

      [some of it does fail both as Christian music and as rap music - hip-hop for me is the poetry and the dancing and how it was expressed in various streets over the past 50 years].

      Glad you took a dip in.

      A lot is indeed repugnant and repulsive.

      There is indeed a Polish rap and hip-hop culture - and the clothes seem to be very important. Some 16 years ago I encountered the *dres*.

      Several of my peers and contemporaries really appreciate the "dirty rap" [ie: the rap which is not processed through parental controls and/or cultural and social censorship - it might have hateful words and actions for instance; also drug use and sexualised content and overt and covert violence].

      Adelaide Dupont

      Delete
  4. A watercolor by Kandinsky was stolen from Polish National Museum in Warsaw in 1984, later in the USA, sold in Munich 1988 and recently in Berlin. Polish government protests. https://apnews.com/article/travel-business-europe-1bde1f2b546452065eb258189560019c

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kanye West praises Hitler https://www.dw.com/en/kanye-west-praises-hitler-in-antisemitic-interview/a-63960092

    ReplyDelete

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