Abstract
Poles are one of the largest non-UK born ethnic groups in all countries and most regions of the United Kingdom. Since Poland’s accession to the European Union in May 2004, thousands of Poles have migrated to the UK, hoping for better professional opportunities and higher standards of living. It was thus only a matter of time before Poles started to put their experience of migration on paper. One example is A.M. Bakalar, whose literary debut, Madame Mephisto (2012), was promoted as the voice of the new wave of Polish migration and the first novel to be written in English by a Polish female author since Poland joined the EU in 2004. This article centres on Bakalar’s protagonist, a thirty-year-old Pole in London, with the aim of revealing how cultural myths and beliefs feed into the process of identity formation and what it takes for the experience of migration to go awry. By exploring Magda’s problematic relationship with her home country, represented as oppressive and insular, this article inquiries into the nature of contemporary migrant experience and the role which national identity plays in the process of cultural adjustment.
Highlights
Engl. stud. 28 2020: 1-10 post-accession influx to the UK was analysed mainly from the perspective of social sciences: economy, sociology and psychology, the growing body of migrant literature written by Poles is the object of study of literary critics and scholars,4 and a tangiblecultural testimony to the phenomenon
Joanna Kosmalska, co-leader of a research project on Polish migrant literature produced in Britain and Ireland after 2004, points to more than eighty works of fiction, poetry and drama written by Poles who live or used to live on the British Isles
This article seeks to analyse Bakalar’s fiction, focusing on Madame Mephisto, with the aim of revealing how cultural myths and beliefs feed into the process of forming migrant identity and, in a broader perspective, what it takes for the experience of migration to go awry
Summary
Polish migration to the UK has a long history, dating back to as early as the 16th century (Gałka 2016: 38), the 2004 Treaty of Accession by which Poland joined the European Union “precipitated an unanticipated and unprecedented influx of immigrants to Britain” (Kershen 2009: xviii). Mind in terms of melancholy, the amalgamation of nationality and femininity and the resulting sense of displacement, exclusion and, in a broader perspective, a split within the self lie at the heart of Bakalar’s novel Bakalar subjects her characters, most importantly Magda and Poland, which in the novel is in multiple ways synonymous with Magda’s mother, to the processes of othering, and turns them into the agents of excluding and labelling those that do not fit their vision. Since Magda holds a deterministic view of national identity— “the essence of my being was formed where I came from” (Bakalar 2012: 5)—we should trace the Matka Polka myth to the protagonist’s ‘formative years:’ the late stage of communism in Poland and the subsequent post-1989 transformation As for the former period, it is Magda’s mother that evokes the contemporary incarnation of the myth, which Anna Titkow (2012: 33) situates within a specific version of ‘matriarchy’ characteristic of communist and post-communist East-Central Europe. Magda’s arbitrary rejection of the notion of Mother-Pole, understood as a contagious mindset which will eventually be adopted by most Polish women but herself, prevents her from empathizing with her twin sister, resulting in an even deeper sense of estrangement and, in a broader perspective, a symbolic ‘demolition’ of home in homeland
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