Letter from Poland.

 

The Expat Blues

05.12.2007

The hardest thing about being an expat is that after a while you find that you don’t fit in anywhere.

By Anna Piwowarska

Not in the country that you’re living, nor in the country where you come from. This gets even more complicated when, like me, you are originally from Poland, was brought up in England and have returned to live permanantly in Poland again. There are some periods of my life that I have felt more English, for example, when I arrived here and was terribly polite to everyone and wore lots of tweed. Then, after a few years of living here I became much more Polish, that is more honest and direct (which was seen as rude by English standards) and replaced tweed with folkloric scarves. Now, to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea of who I am. However, I do know that I sometimes have the advantage of seeing things from both sides.
This weekend I was In London and I felt like a fish out of water. Every little element of ordinary London life seemed to cause me difficulties. I stood in front of the oyster card machine at Turnham Green station, fumbling around with my card and pressing cancel every few seconds. This slowness usually displayed by tourists, used to drive me mad when I was a cosmopolitan London girl rushing to get to my next social engagement. Now, I was worse than a pensioner, and I didn’t even have the excuse that I couldn’t see the screen without my glasses. Thankfully, in the end a lovely man came to the rescue and helped me top up my oyster card. The irony of it was that he was Polish. Which I guess is not surprising at a tube station in West London. Probably one in five of the passing commuters are Polish.
What I slowly realized was that smoke free pubs weren’t the only things that had changed in London. There was a more internal shift in attitudes too. When I arrived, I collected the keys to my mum’s flat from a local shop owner. He asked where I had come from, and when I told him that from Warsaw, he proceeded to ask me what it was like living there. I told him that I loved it. “So if it’s so nice, then why do they all come over here?” he asked, without irony.
This is when I realized that London was no longer welcoming Poles with wide open arms. Middle class housewives were no longer swooning when their hand was kissed by hunky Polish builders. Middle aged men in restaurants were no longer flirting with pretty, young Polish waitresses. London, and west London particularly, is over saturated with Poles and many English people are obviously not happy about it. “They have lots of kids and the schools are already really overcrowded” someone else told me after I had asked whether my theory was true. “It’s not that we don’t like the Poles, it’s just that the UK is a small island – we don’t know many we can keep on letting in.”
So, I guess the Poles are facing the similar kind of backlash as all immigrants coming to London have faced. Although, one cannot help but think that it must be easier to be accepted for a nation that is white and Christian. “It’s all Eastern Europeans that steal stuff from our shop” tells me the shop owner, “But not the Poles” he adds, as if to comfort me. That’s when I tell him that I’m also half Bulgarian. Our conversation is swiftly brought to an end.
So, are Brits being racist complaining about the mass invasion of immigrants? Don’t they have a right to make a point about their own country? When the singer, Morrissey, recently made a comment about the lack of English heard on the streets of London, many people left aghast but many more sighed in relief that finally someone had said what they were all thinking. Many people (usually in hushed whispers) tell me that they do feel that there are too many foreigners living permanently in London.
But the problem in my view is not about the amount of immigrants living and working in the capital. Poland itself is now seeing the problems that arise with a lack of good workmen, nurses, teachers and retail staff. If many of UK’s immigrants left, I’m sure that London might well come to a standstill. The problem is more that we all carry with us internal prejudices, whatever the country we come from. So despite, the UK being a diverse, multicultural society there are still certain preconceptions about what Romanians, Poles and Serbs etc. are like. Who is hardworking, who is not. Who steals, who doesn’t. Who is greedy, who isn’t and so on. Of course, this is not just In the UK. There are similar prejudices in Poland about our immigrants from Belarus or Vietnam. However, at the moment there are such a small percentage of them here that it has not yet become an issue.
So, should the English grin and bear it? No, I don’t think they should. I think that the UK is so obsessed with political correctness that many people feel gagged. However, this doesn’t mean that I think we should encourage racist outbursts so popular in some of the UK tabloids. No, I think that only through honest communication and an open mind we will be all able to overcome the prejudices that lie within all of us. The Brits shouldn’t be afraid to discuss their fears and problems with the foreigners who live side by side with them. Together, I’m sure they’ll be able to find a solution to many issues. And once, Poles feel that they are no longer being judged and are fully accepted by the British, then they will probably do everything in their power to make Britain fell proud of them.