“I’m not your Pole” by Ewa Sapieżyńska – Reviews and recommendations

A few weeks ago I carried cardboard boxes up the stairs to a new apartment. The building was not quite finished, and everywhere I met busy craftsmen. I heard a voice from the floor below me. A man spoke a language I didn’t understand, I think it was Polish. I was stumped. The reason I was stunned was that he spoke for a long time. He sounded friendly, downright happy. Then I heard the answer: an even gentler child’s voice laughed a little and posted about something or other. Another reality Rather shamelessly, I stood and listened, before I got over it and moved on. I thought I might have glimpsed something significant. A reality that exists, but next to mine. Because there was a father sitting facetime with his child in another house. A house that was far away, a house that was home to both of them. The episode resurfaced while I was reading Ewa Sapieżyńska’s debut book “I’m not your Pole”. Frustration and anger It is a book full of frustration, grief and well-placed anger over a non-chosen, imposed role as the stranger – and thus both overlooked and overlooked as a human. Once a Pole, always a Pole, first and foremost. However, it does not stop with the anger. The book is more than that. By offering the reader an insight into her own well-traveled and exploratory biography, Sapieżyńska reflects thoroughly and interestingly on topics that all touch on belonging (or lack thereof). This applies to class, but also international variations in encounters with other people, a different background and a different language. Stigma and prejudice. TO BELIEVE: Ewa Sapieżyńska tells about the experiences of Poles who work and live in Norway. Photo: Publisher Manifest Polish Black Lives Matter? A Polish plumber is going through Europe, wrote the German Die Zeit in an article about increasing labor immigration from the East. That was after the EU enlargement in the 90s. Today, Polish labor migrants make up the largest immigrant group in Norway. And in this way the Poles are not only out of good company. They are often discriminated against and subjected to racism, writes Ewa Sapieżyńska and argues strongly for this. She writes in the extension of a thread that is drawn back to the Black Lives Matter movement and other strong phenomena in our time. Gross discrimination “I’m not your Pole” is largely based on interviews with a number of people, most of whom are Poles who work and live in Norway. The experiences the reader is presented with span a wide spectrum: from almost comical idiocy and tactless ignorance to downright spiritual brutality. For some so-called employers, the willingness and ability to gross exploitation, cheating and fraud in employment is unlimited and devoid of shame. Disparaging comments, contempt and dubious humor at the Poles’ expense are commonplace, says Ewa Sapieżyńska. And the reader believes her. As when the author and her Norwegian partner are looking for an apartment in Oslo: Shortcuts This is reminiscent to an astonishing extent of what people from northern Norway could experience in the years after the war, and what immigrants in general have had to endure from the 70s onwards. Some of the misery Sapieżyńska describes, I probably already knew about. But it is strong reading. There are nevertheless examples in the concise text where claims can be left somewhat unfounded: True enough, perhaps, but here the class hatred comes out of the blue. The road can sometimes be short from meetings with the attitudes of generally stupid people to generalizations about attitudes in society. Racism? Far from it, the fundamental question I am left with after reading Ewa Sapieżyńska’s excellent non-fiction debut is this: Is it productive to insist on the degrading discrimination and exploitation of people from Poland as racism? And then I mean the term, not the description of reality, even if the author refers to international definitions that allow for this. She also writes that it can be painful to have one’s experience explained away by better experts. The last formulation is not just easy to get around in a book review. It is tempting to ask if discrimination is not serious enough if it is not called racism? Concepts are most useful when we can agree on their content and refrain from dilution. Easy to believe It is, as I said, easy to believe in Ewa Sapieżyńska’s description of Polish experiences in Norway. They are not lustful. At the same time, she explicitly draws attention to her love for the best aspects of this country. I believe her too, and that’s fine. Earlier this year I read “Bare en jobb” by carpenter and author Ole Thorstensen. He traveled the “opposite” way: to Poland to work as a carpenter. It was a seminal read in several ways. Now that I have also read Sapieżyńska’s book, I sit with the feeling of having understood a little more of the experience in the stairwell – when I heard a father here talking to a child there. news reviewer: Photo: Linda Bournane Engelberth Title: “I’m not your Pole” Author: Ewa Sapieżyńska Genre: Nonfiction Publisher: Forlaget Manifest Number of pages: 140 Date: Autumn 2022



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