On July 4th, 2020, I read the following tweet:
“I have some Polish blood. I did not grow up in Poland nor do I know my Polish relatives. I technically am Polish. I can be happy and proud, learn Polish, learn the culture. I can’t lay claim to the identity. It would be weird to play dress up and speak over Polish people. Get it?”
Tanya Tagaq @tagaq on Twitter
I ‘liked’ it; her words resonated with me. Seeing an important person mention their connection to Polish ancestry meant something to me. It’s a bit absurd, I realize. There are many people of Polish ancestry scattered across the world; the Polish diaspora is one of the largest globally.
Nonetheless, seeing the connection, I felt a kinship to Tanya, however distant.
I recognized however, that she was not laying claim to being Polish, far from it. She was sharing the many ways she couldn’t assert that identity.
I also “liked” the Tweet because of how she asked the question about “being able to lay claim to an identity”. I felt like I’d been down this road before, identity, the ability to speak for “a people”.
For the moment however, liking her tweet made it part of my digital timeline; a passive way of connecting two strangers, and an easy way to come back to it later on. I couldn’t give her question the attention it deserved.
But I did come back to it. In fact, for months now, I’ve come back to it dozens of times. I’ve sat quietly, sometimes for hours, looking at her words. I read them over and over again. The initial ‘warmth’ if I can describe my feeling that way, subsided. I pondered how I would answer her question, “get it?”
Initially her tweet made me feel ‘woven in’. I had no ancestors here, not as far as I knew. We were the first to arrive, my family, from our familial line. Any connection I imagined between Tanya’s ancestry and my own was fictional, and yet, it offered the thinnest thread.
Why was that so important to me? Why was answering her question, ‘get it’, so important to me.
Did I ‘get it’?
Yes, I think I did get it.
I mean I thought I got it when I first read it. But the question got stuck, as though the quick answer was incomplete. Her words were calling me back.
I took the tweet apart, line by line; I tried to understand the inferences, and then I answered the question again, more fully.
If what she said is absolutely true, that a disconnection from language and culture means that we can’t lay claim to an identity, then what I am “technically”? What identity can I “lay claim to”?
Am I Polish?
Yes, because that is where I was born, where my parents were born, my grandparents, great grandparents, and every ancestor as far as I know. But I left when I was seven years old; I never attended school in Poland, I never learned the language to adult fluency, I never internalized the cultural values. Yes, I lived there long enough to be shaped by it, but not long enough for it to full form my identity.
Could I lay claim to that identity now?
If I couldn’t, could I lay claim to any identity? If I am not that (Polish), what am I?
Hours turned into days and still I wondered.
This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about this. It seems to me, I’ve been trying to establish my identity almost my entire life. I suppose it comes down to feeling that if I know who I am, I will know where I belong.
Like in nature…
If you are a star, you belong in space.
If you are a fish, you belong in the ocean.
If you are a bird, you belong in the sky.
But that doesn’t follow to people. Like if you are a person, you belong in the world. Nope, it’s not enough to be a person. We’ve eliminated the human being from being a species, each part of a larger whole. We created countries and cultures and used them to divide ourselves.
There is no identity as a human being. In order to belong, we need an identity that connects us to a place, to a people, to a language, to a history.
But how do we establish that connection? And who decides when it is established, who determines the threshold of identity? Is it a birth certificate, citizenship, statehood? There are a billion people on this planet today who do not have a birth certificate. Do you exist if there is no record of you? When you disappear, will anyone know? If no one sees you, if no one lays claim to you, can you lay claim to the identity to which they belong, to which you believe you belong?
One has to be seen to come into being.
I realized in my reflections, that a life lived unseen, unacknowledged, unclaimed, unknown to others, does not really exist. Because we are not built to exist alone. We know who we are based on the relationships we have. In the absence of those relationships, we are lost.
Back to Tanya’s tweet…
So is being present in a place, speaking the language(s) of its people (who are ‘its’ people, who gets to decide who are its people – so many questions), adhering to whatever culture defines it (same questions as in previous brackets); is that what’s needed to lay claim to an identity?
Had I been able to stay in Poland longer, maybe until I was a young adult, would it have been enough to solidify my identity? Does our identity ‘solidify’?
Tanya’s words… “I can’t lay claim to the identity.”
See, I am one of five children. On arrival in Canada we were thirteen, eleven, eight, two years old, and our youngest brother was four months old.
Our sense of self was different, for each of us. The boys, I think, likely didn’t remember life before Canada. What they knew came from stories they heard, the Poland that lived in our home, and the community my parents kept us connected to. But Canada was all they really knew.
The three older daughters however, we were aware of two worlds, two versions of ourselves. We had our own memories, relationships with people and places, we had begun to take root before we were ripped away.
We also knew that until we left Poland, until we arrived at the refugee camp in Germany, we didn’t really have an “ethno-cultural” identity. The Poland of my childhood was a very homogenous place; most people there could trace back their family tree for generations. Most, except those who lost some of their history because of the wars that tore apart our country, or because of how the victorious shifted its borders, changing Poland’s shape on the map. More recently, some lost their history because of the Soviet occupation. The occupation lasted decades, Russian was taught in most schools, streets were renamed, and history was being re-written. The Polish ‘inteligencia’ was persecuted, scholars, linguists, intellectuals, political resisters. They were being systemically eliminated.
Anyway, history lessons for another day.
The point is, in my memory, there existed a time in which I just existed. I was not on the inside or the outside of anything. I know now as an adult that that is not absolutely true. Within Poland there were minority groups, I just wasn’t one of them. I was part of the dominant group, the ‘default’. I had all the privilege of absolute belonging. Mine and the narrative of that land were one and the same.
Fast forward to life in Canada…
My parents begin to rebuild our lives here. They painstakingly learn ‘the’ language, English. They learn how to move around, how to speak with people, the ‘norms’. But they do this very much as settlers. We have not yet birthed or buried anyone in this land; we stay on top of the earth, rootless.
I don’t know if they ever became ‘Canadians’, I can’t answer that. But I imagine they didn’t, not entirely. Until she died, my mother was an immigrant. She became a Canadian citizen, she took an oath to this land, but she didn’t have enough time to get to know it, or for it, to know her.
Let’s just say, I don’t believe my parents ever fully become part of the Canadian ‘default’; white, Christian, of European descent. Which is interesting, because they were white, Christian, and European, but even in that racist hierarchy, they were ‘too new’ to really belong.
I don’t know the extent to which they were aware of that, being kind of on the outside. And if they knew, I don’t know if it bothered them. After all, they were indisputably Polish. The way Tanya describes being able to lay claim to an identity, they could do that. They had the language, the rich cultural knowledge, the ‘inside’ jokes, the common points of reference, the metaphors, the idioms, the mannerism, even the clothes. It is who they were; it was their identity, claimed.
And I don’t think they ever struggled to reconcile the two worlds they knew? Or if, like pieces of a puzzle, over time, they chose what they liked best from each and put them together. They learned their Canadian identity, But I doubt they ever felt it, not in the depths of their hearts.
But I will never know.
And yet for… identity is a still unfinished journey.
I know this place more than they did, I think. I know a more truthful history of Canada. And I know that being ‘Canadian’ isn’t the ‘benevolent, polite hero’ that’s been marketed to the world. Yes it offers some freedoms, but there’s a price. I’ve come to understand that being Canadian means being part and parcel to genocide. It means benefiting from the oppression of Indigenous Peoples. It means maintaining a façade despite knowing it will fall short of what it promises, time and again. It’s knowing that it is more than imperfect; it has about it an ugliness.
And yet…
I’ve come to love the place I feel so disappointed in sometimes.
I cherish it as I criticize it.
I’m grateful for the life it’s given me understanding it’s denying that life to many others.
I could keep going, but I think you understand. It is such a complicated relationship. A relationship that is so much harder in some ways because I’ve gone back. I’ve seen ‘home’ from the other side, I’ve lost the nostalgia of longing, I’ve experienced Poland’s ugliness. I can somewhat put them, Poland and Canada, side by side and look at them with discern.
And the truth is, I choose this place. I choose Canada. I would always choose Canada.
I choose it because here, as imperfect as it is; we’re so much further ahead in seeing our own ugliness.
But as to my own identity, I am still somewhat of a jumbled mess.
——————– to be continued tomorrow —————————
