Crossing Borders: James Hopkin, Marek Krajewski & Joanna Pawluskiewicz (12/07/08)

by Eva Oddo

In spite of my critique of the conceptual starting point of the Booking Passage events, some important issues were raised, especially ones about crossing borders and getting oneself out of one’s comfort zone, which seems like Step 1 in the process of intercultural dialogue.

In the first event I attended, the connecting link between the three authors was Poland. English author James Hopkin moved to Poland to write his novel, ’Winter Under Water’, in which Joseph moves to Krakow in pursuit of the woman he is in love with, while Polish filmmaker and writer Joanna Pawluskiewicz writes about her trips in the US as a student. Both of these are physical border crossings, as a means of discovery and as escape from the everyday, respectively. Xiaolu Guo unknowingly echoed Pawluskiewicz’s sentiments, that travel/migration is also a way to escape from the mundane, to always seek something new.

Marek Krajeswki, a Polish author living in Wroclaw and writing fictional crime stories set in pre-WWII Breslau to post-WWII Wroclaw, also speaks of crossing borders, but here the narrative of displacement is brought about by historical and geopolitical change, rather than personal migration. This theme is also raised by Bosnian writer Vesna Maric, part of the Refugee Encounters event, whose memoir of growing up as a young Bosnian asylum seeker in the UK is soon to be published. As she stated, she was born in a country (Yugoslavia) that no longer exists – by the very nature of impermanence of worldly things we are much more than our nationality or non-nationality. Like Krajewski said, his literary meanderings are across (movable) borders, (changing) cultures and time, with memory being the crux of this last element. Krajewski’s own personal journey started with what he described as a “cognitive chaos” – seeing German words written around his city while its German history had seemingly been erased from collective memory.

Krajewski’s dialogue with things mirrors Hardi’s, who writes about possessions as the vectors of memory which they are. Combined with the constant need to seek something new (and consequently discover something of ourselves) is the need to be grounded in what we know (possessions, environments, habits, memories; Maric crucially mentioned friends). Here lies the dichotomy of intercultural dialogue: knowing oneself well enough to have the voice to participate in an equal dialogue, while at the same time being prepared to take a dip into unknown waters.