Re-Membering Bodies in Black Ecologies: Elżbieta Łapczyńska’s “Bestiariusz nowohucki”

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The article offers a close reading of Elżbieta Łapczyńska’s “Bestiariusz nowohucki” (2020), a collection of short stories set in the time of the construction of Nowa Huta, an industrial district of Kraków, built in the early 1950s as a socialist new city. The interpretation is set in the context of the problems raised today by environmental humanities, which seek ways of stepping outside the binary of natural and civilizational forces, in search of ways of recounting the past which open up futures beyond the myth of return to pristine nature. The article posits that in Łapczyńska’s collection Nowa Huta is depicted as a black ecology, defined by the philosopher Levi R. Bryant as a speculative view of relationships between entities composing environment that decenters human perspective and invites an exploration of how “societies are themselves ecologies … embedded in the broader ecologies of the natural world”. With reference to Karen Barad’s notion of re-membering, the article identifies in the literary material in question an attempt at representing the past of Nowa Huta as a black ecology in terms of a non-human memory, that questions the linearity of time as a basis of post-apocalyptic narratives. This problem is approached from a doubly situated perspective: the interpretation of “Bestiariusz nowohucki” is set in the context of the current ecological predicament in Nowa Huta and the author’s experiences of growing up in the area in the 1980s, in times of both political unrest and ecological emergency.