🇬🇧 A Country I Do Not Return To
On an emigré’s right to hope, the price of safety, and a homeland that survives only in memory.
Seeing in the Dark | 12
I. Krakowskie Przedmieście
On the evening of the seventh of August 2020, I was near Krakowskie Przedmieście when the court ordered two months of pre-trial detention for Małgorzata Szutowicz, known as Margot, an activist with the Stop Bzdurom collective, accused of damaging a van belonging to an anti-abortion foundation. The crowd that gathered that night was not yet what would later be christened Rainbow Night: it was, rather, an anxiety searching for a form, people who had turned up without quite knowing what to expect, and found themselves bearing witness to what, only in the unfolding hours, would prove to be one of the most brutal police crackdowns on a peaceful demonstration Warsaw had seen in years. Forty-eight people were charged that night with taking an active part in a riotous assembly. I was not one of them. I was merely there, in the crowd, close enough to remember the sound of police cordons shifting across the cobblestones, and far enough away to return home that night without charges and without bruises. I remember the smell of tear gas reaching us after a delay, carried on the wind from the direction of Nowy Świat, and I remember someone beside me, a stranger, beginning to weep, not from physical pain, but, or so it seemed to me then, from sheer rage mingled with helplessness. I did not write down any dates or names that night. I recorded only that sensation: that the state in which I lived was capable of violence against its own citizens in a manner I had never before witnessed at such close quarters.
I do not recount this scene to claim a heroism that was never there. I was a spectator, not a participant in any legal sense, and the distinction between these two roles is essential to this essay, for it bears upon the central question I ask myself: who has the right to speak of a country they have left behind, when even standing at the scene of the event, one can be merely a witness, not a full participant?
II. A Right and an Obligation
The premise of this essay is this: an emigrant has a right to hope for the country they have left behind, and an obligation of honesty toward their distance from it. These are two sides of the same coin, and neither must be privileged over the other. The right to hope without the obligation of honesty turns into sentimentalism, into a longing for a country that survives only in memory, an unrevised version of a reality that has long carried on without the person who departed. The obligation of honesty without the right to hope turns into cynicism, into a surrender of all engagement, rationalised by the convenient argument that, after all, the opinion of someone no longer on the ground cannot possibly matter.
III. The Doctrine of Maisons-Laffitte
Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the Paris-based journal Kultura, published from 1947 in Rome and from 1948 in Maisons-Laffitte outside Paris, formulated, alongside the circle of contributors gathered around the review, the concept known today as the ULB doctrine: the recognition of the independence of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus as an indispensable condition for Poland’s lasting security, running counter to the revisionist temptations of those emigrés who dreamed of a return to the pre-war borders. This doctrine was far from self-evident to the diaspora of the time; factions gathered around London, rooted in the government-in-exile, regarded it with suspicion, seeing any revision of pre-war frontiers as a form of capitulation. This dispute, waged across the pages of Parisian and London emigré journals over decades, is proof in itself that the diaspora never spoke with a single voice, and that absence from one’s native soil is no guarantee of consensus on what might be best for it. Giedroyc formulated this doctrine from an absolute geographical distance, from a villa outside Paris, without ever setting foot in the countries he analysed in these terms; and yet decades later, his vision would prove to be one of the cornerstones of Polish eastern policy after 1989. This example matters to me because it demonstrates that physical distance from a country need not entail intellectual distance from its future: one can write about borders one has never crossed, and be right.
IV. Twenty-Two Days in October
On the twenty-second of October 2020, two and a half months after Rainbow Night, the Constitutional Tribunal, sitting in a composition that raised grave doubts as to its independence, ruled that abortion on grounds of severe and irreversible foetal impairment or an incurable illness threatening the foetus’s life was incompatible with the Constitution, which in practice amounted to a near-total ban on legal abortion in Poland. The ruling triggered the largest street protests Poland had seen since Martial Law, protests that lasted for weeks across dozens of cities simultaneously. I took part in some of those demonstrations in Warsaw, though I do not intend to describe them at length here, for that is not the point of this essay; I mention the ruling only to show that August and October of 2020 were not, for me, isolated episodes, but chapters of a single, months-long experience of mounting confrontation between a segment of society and the institutions of the state.
V. Severance in Paris
On the fifteenth of May 1951, Czesław Miłosz, then a cultural attaché in the Polish diplomatic service in Paris, publicly announced his rupture with the authorities of communist Poland and sought political asylum in France. He found sanctuary, as did so many other emigrés of that generation, within the circle of Giedroyc and the Literary Institute. It was during this period, in the immediate wake of the break, that he wrote The Captive Mind, an essay analysing the mechanisms by which a totalitarian system enslaves intellectuals: not by physical violence, but through the pressure of conformity, the convenience of compromise, and the dread of marginalisation. Miłosz wrote that book from the vantage point of someone who had only just chosen the opposing path, and who knew the emotional price exacted by such a rupture: in Poland he was instantly branded a traitor, his books were purged from libraries, and several former friends severed contact with him. The essay itself was written under conditions that could hardly be called comfortable: Miłosz composed it amid financial precariousness, partly supported by the emigré community, well aware that every sentence he set down would be read in Poland as the word of a traitor and in the West as an exotic testimony from behind the Iron Curtain, seldom as what it actually was: a rigorous philosophical analysis.
It is worth noting that in his later writings Miłosz never evaded the question of whether he had the right to pass judgment on the country he had abandoned. Rather than sidestepping the question, he made it an integral part of his writing, returning to it time and again across different chapters of his life, never granting himself final absolution.
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VI. Vence, July
Witold Gombrowicz, after decades spent in Argentina, finally settled in the French town of Vence, where he died on the twenty-fourth of July 1969. His intimate diary, Kronos, kept over decades and published only in 2013, revealed an emigré far less monumental than the figure familiar from the works published during his lifetime: a man consumed by household bills, failing health, minor slights, and daily irritations, not merely by great literature and intellectual clashes. That publication, delayed by decades, proved that an emigré’s life, even the most creatively prolific, consists in equal measure of momentous texts and petty, unheroic anxieties that rarely find their way into biographies.
Gombrowicz, unlike Miłosz, never articulated a political program for Poland. His relationship with his homeland was far more ambivalent, steeped in an irony directed as often at the exile community as at the country itself. This ambivalence is, I believe, every bit as legitimate an emigré stance as Giedroyc’s committed agenda or Miłosz’s personal confession: not every departure needs to culminate in a doctrine or a manifesto. One might argue, though I can find no direct quote here that I could honestly lean upon, that an emigrant sheds illusions faster than anyone else, because distance, rather than softening the portrait of one’s homeland, often sharpens it, stripping away that layer of daily habit which, within the country itself, allows people to overlook the most painful truths. This distinction, between illusion and attachment, is perhaps the key to understanding why the three writers invoked in this essay, despite the bitter disputes dividing them, never ceased to write about Poland, even though not one of them ever returned to live there permanently.
VII. The Fifteenth of October
On the fifteenth of October 2023, I was in Warsaw, casting my vote in the parliamentary elections, in which turnout reached 74.38 percent, the highest since 1989. I stood in the queue outside the polling station longer than I had anticipated, surrounded by people who, judging by the mood, had arrived with a similar conviction that something momentous was being decided that day. The queue that morning was unlike any polling queue I remembered from earlier years: longer, quieter, filled with people glancing nervously at their phones, as if terrified that something might go wrong before they managed to cast their ballots. An elderly woman ahead of me in line said, to no one in particular, that she had been waiting for this for eight years. I did not ask what she meant precisely. I did not have to. I voted, walked home, watched the results unfold that evening, and felt something that, from today’s vantage point, I would describe as cautious relief, not euphoria.
A year later, I left Poland. This sequence of events, voting in a historic election, and then leaving despite the change in government, is, I believe, the most uncomfortable fact in this essay, and I have no intention of smoothing it over. I did not leave fleeing direct political persecution in the literal sense, as Miłosz or Giedroyc had. I left after the country had, at least formally, changed course, which complicates any simple narrative of me as a political refugee and forces me to look for other words to describe what my decision actually was.
VIII. The Accusation
Several times after my departure, I was told, in various ways and by different people, that I had run away. I do not intend to quote anyone verbatim, as I do not have their consent, but neither do I intend to pretend that the word did not sting. It hurt precisely because I could not entirely refute it: I had left just as the political climate in the country was formally improving, which to some who stayed behind and continue to fight for change could look like desertion at the very moment the front line had finally begun to move in the right direction.
I take this accusation seriously, rather than brushing it aside in reflexive self-defence. I have no elegant answer to offer. I have only a distinction that seems honest to me: leaving does not have to be an escape from something; it can also be a movement toward something, in my case toward a life with Louis, in a city where we could hold hands without calculating the risk on every corner. This does not invalidate the pain of those who stayed, nor does it render my departure morally neutral. It merely makes it more complicated than a single word, you ran away, can hold. I debated for a long time whether to mention this charge at all in this essay, or whether to leave it out, as something too private to expose to public scrutiny. I decided to write about it because an essay that pretended such a reproach had never reached me would be dishonest to the guiding method of this entire collection: a method that demands naming uncomfortable facts outright, rather than glossing over them for narrative effect.
IX. Who Has the Right to Speak
The central question of this essay, who has the right to speak of a country they have left, has no single answer applicable to every circumstance. Giedroyc was right about Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, even though he wrote from Maisons-Laffitte, not from Kyiv or Minsk. Miłosz had every right to write about the machinery of subjugation, even though he had physically escaped it. At the same time, neither of them had the right to cast a vote in Polish elections from abroad in any literal sense until such a right was formally instituted, and neither claimed the authority to dictate matters that concerned only those living on the ground, day after day, under a specific regime.
The distinction I arrive at is this: the emigré’s voice holds value where it offers a vantage inaccessible from within, a doctrine, an analysis, a testimony, but forfeits its credibility whenever it presumes to dictate the price others must pay for staying behind. I am not claiming that this boundary is easy to draw in every instance. I only know that it is essential, for without it, the voice of the emigrant degenerates either into futile lamentation from a comfortable distance, or into claiming the right to arbitrate another’s risk, a risk one no longer bears. On the fifteenth of October 2023, I paid my share alongside the others, waiting in that same queue. Today, writing this essay from Marseille, I no longer pay that same price, and I must acknowledge that plainly, rather than pretending that my vantage point is equivalent to that of the people still standing in those lines.
X. Return as Fiction
I do not plan on returning to Poland, at least not in the sense that the word return is usually understood: moving back for good, reconstructing the life I had before I left. Yet I know that if I were to describe it, I would call it a fiction, not because it is physically impossible, for flights leave every day, but because the country I would be returning to is no longer the country I left behind, just as I am no longer the man who stood in that queue on the fifteenth of October 2023. A return, strictly speaking, would require rewinding time for both parties simultaneously, for myself and for the country, which is fiction in the most literal sense of the term: a tale of something that will never happen, because the conditions under which it could occur vanished the moment I boarded the plane.
Lou sometimes asks whether I would ever want to go back for good. I always give him the same answer, and every time I surprise myself: I don’t know. I don’t know, because the question presupposes the existence of a place to which one could return, and with each passing year I am less and less certain that such a place exists at all, outside of a map and a passport. Perhaps that is the most precise answer I can give to the question of who has the right to speak on matters of the homeland: someone willing to admit, out loud, that they no longer know the answers to questions that once seemed self-evident, and that this unknowing, not a false certainty leaning one way or the other, is the only honest departure point for any further conversation.
I close this essay without an answer to the question with which it opened, because it feels far more honest to acknowledge that, ten essays into this collection, I am still asking it of myself, than to pretend that I have discovered a resolution in the interim. Perhaps this is the only form of return I can afford today: a return to the question, not to the place. And so I leave the country where it is, and return only to that single sentence spoken to myself: I don’t know, and that I don’t know is today the most honest thing of which I am capable. For now, in all honesty, I have nothing further to add, and I would rather concede that than conclude this essay with a line in which I could never fully believe.
