I am two people. Well, at least two. And I know many people like me. Maybe you do too. Maybe you are like me, and me.
One of me, let’s call her One Me is vibrant, restless, ‘unts in her punts’ as my Mama used to say. I love swimming, walking, dancing, playing ball games. I pride myself I can still take stairs two at a time. Love joking, chatting, have a loud voice. I am busy, active. To be honest I can get a bit impatient with anyone slower than me. Although my disposition is often sunny I’m also very emotional. Cry at the drop of a hat.
The other me, let’s call her Other Me, is no less impatient, though she is perhaps more sympathetic/empathetic to anyone else who is vulnerable or ill. For Other Me climbing the steps up from my flat onto the street is a major challenge. I feel weak and trembly, parts of my body just don’t work. Since my energy is so limited my window of opportunity is small. This is how winter must be in the coldest countries: very short days as the light runs out so early. You have so little time to get things done before the day’s gone. A friend who is ill says he has a new job now – appointments, treatments, recovery times and he has to fit the rest of his life around this job. I avoid social situations or schedule them in as carefully as I can. If One Me is emotional I’m even more emotional – is that even possible?!
How do the two Me’s feel about each other? Well…One Me avoids Other Me. She is scared of becoming like her again. Other Me hero-worships One Me and longs to be like her again. She thinks she is boring the way she is. I’m teaching One Me to be more compassionate and Other Me to stick up for herself. It’s clear they don’t communicate very well. That’s why I (Third Me? Writer Me?) have put them together in this blog. I have told them to hold hands as you come by to meet them. Thanks for saying hello by the way. One Me is reluctant though she’s putting on a brave face. I have been strict and told her she absolutely has to take part. Other Me is afraid – why would anyone want to hold her hand, talk to her etc etc… One Me yawns and says:
Cover image for the book from a tapestry weaving ‘Ithaca’ by New Zealand artist Wol. Background poster by @alexhouse-artwork.
I’m so excited my new poetry collection Small Odysseys* is coming out in October 2022 from Waterloo Press.
I started writing it at the same time as my last book The TrueStory of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue(Cinnamon Press) and thought all the poems would be part of one bigger book. But then The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénuegalloped off at a rapid pace in a different direction. Dr Danne Jobin who I talked to recently in their series Poetology described it as a prose poetry novella. I like that. I think of it as a story told through prose poems or as one long prose poem in fact. I had to finish it before I could write anything else. Like the book before it*, it had a unifying theme, underlying structure. There was a narrative arc in TheTrue Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue even if it was fractured or non-linear, told in intersecting fragments which prose poems hold so well.
But then once that book was out in the world I could go back to the poems I had begun and left for a while. They were waiting patiently for me. Poems are good like that. And then I began to write more and more – until I had a whole new book. I had no clear idea where it would lead. This was a slow cook. In some ways that made it harder, scarier to write. I finished it just before the pandemic began. Though I edited it, fine-combing, during lockdown I decided not to add poems about Covid 19 as they didn’t belong. The manuscript already had its own shape and logic. Having said that I’m aware how the need for human connection was brought home to us so sharply by the pandemic. (For more information about the title I chose etc there are some blogs I wrote while editing: https://wordpress.com/post/mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com/1333)
It’s a very different book from The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue. That was set in an imaginary Hispanic/American kind of landscape inspired by travels both in California and Spain. The poems in Small Odysseys are set in Europe, in Slovenia, on Crete, in Germany, Spain, in the former Soviet Union, Poland and the UK. But also more importantly in that in-between space many of us navigate as we move between cultures and sub-cultures, geographical locations, identities. It mixes prose poems with lyrical ones. It includes the strange hybrid language of Ponglish. And poems are often set in a place between past and present. Some are poems where I have reimagined historical moments.
While the book doesn’t try for a unifying theme, preferring its own different pathways, at its heart there is separation, within family, within society and how we try to deal with both. How we try to connect in the face of breakdown, implosion, distance.
When I first began writing Small Odysseys the UK voted to leave the European Union. This wasn’t just a decision about trade – although the lorry queues at Dover are a clear example of its stupidity. It was a decision of far-reaching implications – a green light given to the racism and xenophobia we had fought here for many years. Its shadow hangs over the book – indirectly as is often the case in poetry.
I wasn’t alone in feeling broken-hearted about Brexit. We were and still are being subjected to a ‘make Britain great again’ fantasy, waves of nostalgia for British colonialism and imperialism. At the same time in my homeland the Polish government was – and continues – doing its utmost to undermine democracy, decimating women’s rights and promoting hatred against LGBTQ+ communities and individuals. Narratives of the second world war were and are appropriated to serve government ideology.
Against this backdrop, history and who narrates it become even more important. I’ve always written about love and war and in this book there are both re-imaginings of the past and explorations of the present. We need all the stories we can get about the people history books leave out as well as stories about who were are now. We have to show that what is happening around us is not being done in our name.
The gap between finishing a book and publication plays tricks too. As refugees from Ukraine flee across the Polish border from the Russian government’s genocide I am even more poignantly aware of our connections both across Europe and with other continents. Bridging distances and separations with warmth and food and kindness is more important than ever. A welcome which has to include refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, not only Europe. Otherwise our whole world becomes just one immense ‘hostile environment’*.
3*The ‘Home Office Hostile Environment policy’ was first introduced in the UK under the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition government in 2012 to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for people without official leave to remain. As well as being government policy it has also become a whole social ethos. In 2018 the Windrush scandal exposed how hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to the UK had been harassed under this policy, many of whom were detained and deported to countries they had not lived in for countless years. Currently the British government continues with its plan to expel asylum seekers, deporting them to Rwanda.
