Performing the Polish-Ukrainian Border: Situated Epistemologies in the Theatre of Recent Years
Ewa Bal*
Abstract
In recent years, the Polish – Ukrainian border has become a field for reflection on the causality of situated knowing, which I understand as the possibility of diagnosing and learning about the world through art in the given context. The situated knowing enables to encounter and negotiate different local epistemologies in order to overcome top-down and supposedly objective perceptions of Central and Eastern Europe. In the performances I am discussing, three variants of this negotiation are outlined: Undermining the border-activated dualistic thinking about the division into a supposedly developed Western Europe and a backward Eastern Europe by activating the memory of the forced resettlement of ethnic minorities; expanding the field of recognition of the language of the dominant culture or resisting its epistemic violence by including minority languages in it; and finally, giving a stage voice to war refugees in order to build their subjectivity or create the conditions for a free critique of the Western episteme. The above-mentioned case studies are based on performances made in the last few years by artists from Poland, Ukraine and the Polish-Ukrainian borderland.
Keywords: situated knowing, local epistemologies, ethnic minorities, migration, border, borderland
Over the past two years, Poland’s eastern border, which is also the eastern border of the European Union, has become the scene of two major waves of migration. Beginning in September 2021, thousands of migrants from Middle Eastern and African countries arrived at the Polish-Belarusian section of the border in an operation planned by Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime, while in the aftermath of 24 February 2022, Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, nearly 5 million citizens from Ukraine crossed the Polish border. The reactions of the Polish border guards in both cases were extremely different, as shown not only in press reports but also in the fact-based recent film directed by Agnieszka Holland, Green Border (2023).
In relation to the wave of migration from countries in the Middle East and Africa, the Polish border guards used tactics unacceptable from the point of view of human rights to push people beyond the borders of the European Union back into the territory of Belarus, which resulted in numerous cases of people dying in swamps, forests and rivers due to exhaustion, disease, cold and hunger. Indeed, the Polish government did not allow humanitarian organisations to enter the border.
On the other hand, the same border guards behaved in quite the opposite way towards the Ukrainian citizens at the border crossings: they showed help, and support, with the huge involvement of volunteers and the whole of Polish society. Thus, it can be said that Poland’s eastern border, in the last two years, has joined the already repeatedly described maritime and land Gates of Europe (Zaroulia), which, like refugee camps, constitute a paradigmatic figure of biopower, or a laboratory of biopolitical practices in the sense of Michel Foucualt (227) and, after him, Giorgio Agamben. They boil down to using the category of race the way it serves to fracture the population by considering some groups of people as more deserving of the name of human and others, standing lower in the hierarchy of beings, as so-called bare life.
However, my intention in this article is not to re-explore the very dualisms of thinking that borders trigger. Rather, with the aforementioned images still vivid in my mind, I want to look at the performativity of the Polish-Ukrainian border as an assumed circumstance of interpersonal and intercultural encounter in the performing arts. For, in the latter, borders function as a cognitive frame, or as a field of situated knowing (Bal and Chaberski). The concept of situated knowing, as I understand it, derives in part from feminist standpoint theory (Haraway; Harding), recent performance theories (Taylor) and Bruno Latour’s conception of the performativity of knowing-creative processes, and implies that the researcher treats the performing arts as a kind of knowledge-making laboratory:
that may serve to develop a new model of episteme based on situational and contextual processes of knowing. So instead of using technological apparatuses, magnifying glasses, telescopes or sociological surveys, as laboratories of knowledge-making, scholars turn to artistic performances, which generate sensory, cognitive, and affective processes of knowing.
Bal and Chaberski 5
This process, which results in emergent meanings and senses, enables a bottom-up look at the dualistic ways of perceiving the surrounding reality, which are usually generated by the border. It is therefore a question of capturing the epistemic causality of the space in which performing arts are staged, the geopolitical and cultural background of their creators and actors, or even the languages assigned to them. And when I speak of the epistemic productivity of situated knowing, I mean, for example, undoing the geopolitical divisions between the Eastern and the Western Europe (or Global North and Global South),[1] benefiting from the appearance of the Other in a border space and deconstructing the concept of what a border possibly contains or what area it delimits, especially when it comes to the European Union, considered as an oasis of peace in the world.
I would like to look at these three issues in the example of performances by Polish and Ukrainian artists of the last few years: a performative reading of the play by Ukrainian author Olga Maciupa, entitled Piłka leci na wschodni brzeg (The Ball Flies to the Eastern Bank, 2020), the performance Granica (The Border, 2021) and Lwów nie oddamy (Lviv, We Won’t Give It Back, 2018), directed by the Polish artist of Ukrainian origins Katarzyna Szyngiera, and the performance Opowiem ci jutro (I’ll Tell You Tomorrow, 2023), based on the script by the Ukrainian author Liuba Ilnytska and directed by Nina Khyzhna from the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin, as well as Mothers. A Song for Wartime (2023) directed by Marta Górnicka (from Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin and Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw).
Reperforming Eastern and Western Europe
The Ball Flies to the Eastern Shore is a play by Olga Maciupa, a Ukrainian playwright living permanently in Poland, whose performative reading was organised by the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw, in May 2022. The plot of this autoethnographic play diagnoses a kind of epistemic gap that has been created between Poland and Ukraine as a result of Poland’s accession to the European Union. As Maya Harbuzyuk says in a recent lecture, referring to the findings of Marko Pavlyshyn, the cultural specificity of countries such as Ukraine, which are only just emerging from the supremacy of the colonial power matrix of the Soviet empire, is usually assessed in terms of the degree of affiliation to the so-called centre and is often situated on the margins of the dominant (post-Soviet or Western) culture as a local exoticism or still remains invisible. This is why identifying marginalised cultures and diagnosing this marginalisation in the performing arts seems to me to be particularly worthwhile.
Olga Maciupa’s play (2020) attempts to discuss and diagnose the alleged invisibility or inferiority of Ukrainian culture in relation to the Western world by situating its action at a Polish-Ukrainian border crossing during the 2012 European Football Championship. The characters of the play are simple passengers of a Ukrainian coach, waiting to be allowed into the Gates of Europe, devoid of any individual features and function in this play, rather as voices representing different attitudes towards the undoubtedly burdensome situation of being controlled by the Polish border guards.
Although the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, which is still in force, allows visa-free travel and a stay of up to three months for citizens of this country on the territory of Poland and the E.U., Polish customs officials do not believe that any traveller holding a Ukrainian passport would actually be engaged in tourism or would only be going to a football match. All Ukrainian passengers are therefore thoroughly checked, interrogated by the Polish customs officer about the purpose and motives of their journey and treated as potential smugglers of alcohol and cigarettes by default.
However, if, as suggested by the playwright (who portrayed herself in this play as a Ukrainian theatre student traveling by bus from Lviv to Poland), we listen to the individual life stories told by the travellers, it turns out that they are almost a mirrored reflection of the life stories of migrating Poles in the 1990s and early 2000s. This is because they are usually looking to improve their financial well-being, discouraged by the poor development prospects in their home country; they simply want a slightly better life. This means that Poland, after entering into E.U., in the last 20 years, has transformed from a country of emigrants into a country of immigrants. This, of course, raises the idea that the imaginary boundaries of Eastern and Western Europe, as described by Larry Wolff in Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment—that is, as a map of civilizational progress that ends somewhere in the suburbs of Warsaw and beyond which only the marshy and backward marshes of the East unfold—have in recent years only been shifted in the imagination of Europeans a little further to the East.[2]
This static image, however, of the division into two supposedly different spheres of life in Eastern and Western Europe is disturbed in time by the figure of a Polish customs officer, who briefly steps out of her official role and begins a monologue about the history of her own family, resettled after 1945 from the ethnic Ukrainian areas in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains to the north of Poland, as part of the communist relocation of ethnic minorities. She recounts how, as a child, she had to forget to speak Ukrainian in order not to arouse the aggression of her Polish neighbours, and that she only learned her native language as an adult, mainly to understand who she was and who her ancestors had been. One Ukrainian passenger, on the other hand, reveals that her visit to Poland is linked to a desire to visit the graves of her grandparents, where the Ukrainian ethnic group Lemkos once lived. This population, like the ancestors of the Polish customs officer, was resettled by the communist authorities after 1945 on the territory of the Communist Republic of Ukraine, in line with plans at the time to create a culturally homogeneous Polish national state.
These two characters—the customs officer and the girl—thus reveal to the viewer the fragile ontological foundations of the so-called nation-states, associated with some mono-ethnic model, which were attempted to be built by force in Europe after the Second World War in the hope of preventing further conflicts. Meanwhile, as can be seen from the above example, the so-called borders of national states often run across lands once inhabited by the same ethnic communities. Thus, both on a macro scale—relations between the east and west of Europe—and on a micro-scale—relations between the two Polish and Ukrainian nations—it is difficult to sustain, as Olga Maciupa seems to suggest, dualistic divisions imposed by the logic of geopolitical borders and maps. Because it is undermined both now and in the future by the directions of forced and voluntary migration.
The Other and How to Overcome the Epistemic Gap
Polish director Katarzyna Szyngiera treats the border as a framework for intercultural encounters in a slightly different way in her performance entitled The Border (2021, Theatre in Rzeszów), as Ukraine appears in it rather as a transit country for the wave of migrants arriving from the more distant countries of the Global Majority.
The performance is directed by an artist who has been exploring Polish-Ukrainian relations through theatre for a long time; she herself comes from a family of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. She usually collaborates with Mirosław Wlekły, a reporter for Poland’s most important daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, when working on plays. In their dramaturgical work, they use interviews and direct surveys, as well as actors’ improvisations, which then become elements of the plays’ dramaturgy. Szyngiera also makes use of various forms of delivery, acting, songs, film footage or, as in The Border, simply weaves an entire mockumentary on the work of customs officers at the Polish border into the framework of the performance.
The procedures accompanying the verification of travellers at the Polish-Ukrainian border that she portrays can be seen as the embodiment of the practices of so-called nanoracism (Mbembe). They consist of legal, bureaucratic and institutional micro-procedures that allow discrimination and segregation to be practised on a daily basis in broad daylight (Mbembe). Interestingly, as Mbembe argues, this racism no longer needs to invoke biology or skin color for its legitimacy. It is enough for it to invoke at least the vilification of foreigners or to declare the incompatibility of their “civilisation” or “religion.”
Szyngiera takes an in-depth look at this racism, as the idea for her play The Border was born during the pandemic, in March 2020, when Poland and Ukraine, like other European countries, closed their borders to visitors. The choice of such particular circumstances seems to me not coincidental, as the pandemic has revitalised nationalist and racist discourses of national homogeneity and purity around the world. Alt-right populists did not hesitate to reproduce discourses of racial eugenics in the management of the pandemic, which, as it turned out in the meantime, very democratically took over the whole world without making a breach in any social group. In this situation, the Polish and Ukrainian authorities left a short window of time for their citizens to return to their national territories, after which they ordered the borders to be closed for fear of infection (literally by the disease, but figuratively by “strangers”). However, as Szyngiera’s play makes clear, entire ecosystems of specialised middlemen, organised smuggling of people and goods, have emerged in the border areas in the thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and have not ceased their activities even after the borders were closed due to the pandemic.
In a mockumentary, Szyngiera shows, for example, how Polish customs officials in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, taking advantage of the existing economic and political inequalities between Poles and newcomers from the Global South, illegally charge smugglers a lavish fee. Accustomed to the idea that almost every person crossing the border is a potential war or economic refugee, they assume that Ukrainian citizens may, in fact, be someone else, migrants arriving from the even more distant eastern parts of Europe or Asia. At a key moment in the mockumentary, a car pulls up to the border guard’s booth, whose driver is carrying a mysterious female passenger. The woman, presumably traveling illegally, is holding a fake Ukrainian passport. The customs officers ask her about her real nationality and name, but the woman stubbornly does not answer the questions. She only repeats her assumed Ukrainian name and date of birth in broken English. She also refuses to take a Ukrainian language test when the customs officer asks her to read a Ukrainian newspaper. Neither does any detail of her dress indicate her origin, making it difficult for the customs officers to apply racial prejudice to her and speculate on her nationality or religion. The woman herself is also not very aware of where she currently is (because the name “Poland” does not say much to her), nor is she able to place Poland on a map of Europe. This, in turn, eloquently points to Poland’s poor global geopolitical recognition as an insignificant country in Europe. The customs officers, and with them the audience, are thus somewhat helpless, not knowing the woman’s true identity. But they do realise that they have been confronted with a phenomenon that effectively eludes their previous cognitive categories developed within the Western episteme.
The actress playing the mute refugee in the documentary film projected during the performance appears after a while on the stage right in front of the audience, which shifts the cognitive impasse from the relationship between the spectator and the mockumentary fiction to the real physical encounter between the “Woman Without Identity” and the audience. Standing on the proscenium, the woman recites, accompanied by ear-wrenching music, a secular litany of stereotypical terms often attributed to refugees from the Global South—she refers to herself as “I am a prostitute,” “I am an ecstasy pill,” “I am a candidate for president of a warring state,” “a victim of human traffickers,” “a girl for sale.” After a while, however, her words become difficult to understand and her voice timbre so squeaky and unpleasant to the ear as to be almost unbearable.
From the point of view of overcoming creatively the epistemic gap resulting from the encounter with the Stranger, this scene seems to me to be crucial. Appearing on the proscenium, “Woman Without Identity” restores, as it were, the lost simultaneity of the encounter between the cognizant and the cognized subject, and in so doing resists those mechanisms of the colonial gaze that structure the world according to the well-known categories of Us-Others. As Elisabeth Povinelli writes (428–42), in a world dominated by Demos and Logos and their proper commons, subjects who escape these dominant cognitive categories find it difficult to live. But it is from their Otherness, novelty, incomprehensibility or even, as in the case of the Woman Without Identity, cognitive resistance, that the opportunity to decolonise our cognitive systems emerges. Its form forces us to suspend or unlearn those conceptual systems to which we have become accustomed and which we use all too easily.
And one of the tools of cognitive violence can be, for example, the language of the dominant culture. Cezary Wodziński, a Polish philosopher and disciple of Derrida, wrote about this violence of language in his essay on hospitality as follows:
Our world (…) has proved – extremely, exterminationistically – inhospitable . At the core of ‘our world’ is the experience of the extermination of the Other. (…) In welcoming a guest who is infinitely Other, I renounce asking him any questions – especially about his identity – but I should also renounce using my language at all. (…) That is, I renounce the violence that my language brings to the encounter. The language of hospitality (…) allows the Other to be without definition, i.e. without a pre-defined role and without the defining principles of understanding and coexistence in the encounter situation.
Wodziński 6-7
That Polish, too, can contain a charge of violence or, at least, exert a kind of pressure on foreign-language actors, was already stated in a slightly earlier production by Katarzyna Szyngiera Lwów nie oddamy (We Won’t Give Up Lviv) from the Theatre in Rzeszów. It was important insofar as it denounced the essentially paternalistic attitude of Poles towards Ukrainians, who used to come to Poland in search of work even before the outbreak of full-scale war, and also drew attention to a kind of colonial nostalgia for the so-called “eastern borderlands” lost by Poland to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.[3]
The play begins when a Ukrainian actress, Oksana Cherkashyna, suddenly joins a group of somewhat bored Polish actors spread out on stage. She tries to cross the platform stretching across it, which represents the Polish-Ukrainian border. Dressed in a flamboyant peasant scarf and equipped with several packs of Ukrainian cigarettes, she thanks the Polish director, theatre institution and audience for the extremely valuable opportunity to perform in front of a Polish audience. At the same time, she apologises for the mistakes she makes in Polish, promising that her pronunciation will soon become fully correct (and until then, she will ask the lighting engineer to switch on the Polish subtitles). She deliberately pokes fun at the stereotypical image of the migrant woman from Eastern Europe at the outset and dismantles the audience’s possible expectations about the correctness of the Polish language she uses. She plays out her foreignness as a newcomer in front of the Polish audience and, initially, even agrees to play the role of a “typical Ukrainian woman,” as written in the script (which she receives from one of the Polish actors). But she almost immediately rebels against it, countering it with her own biography of an actress from Kharkiv—clearly contradicting this stereotype.
Naturally, the director was primarily concerned with dismantling the cognitive frame that Polish audiences used to treat newcomers from Eastern Europe. She also wanted to show the degree to which the Polish language can constitute a kind of inconvenient, if not oppressive frame within which a person coming from another country and wishing to settle here must operate. Szyngiera’s performance, four years before the influx of the great wave of migration, thus opened, in a way, a discussion on the Polish language as an embarrassing cognitive and epistemic frame and, at the same time, a difficult obstacle to overcome in intercultural communication.
Rarely present in the Polish linguistic landscape until 2022, especially in theatre, the Ukrainian language appeared on stage in Katarzyna Szyngiera’s production as a detonator of cognitive comfort. It appeared in the Polish linguistic landscape expanding its field of acknowledgment, in a similar way that precarious bodies in public space in Judith Butler’s work expanded the field of acknowledgment of subjects. In other words, widening the field of recognition of the Polish language allows one’s own dominant language to be alienated, to be seen in a new guise (Bal). And not only by hearing Polish pronounced with a foreign accent, but also by hearing a foreign language that even forces the viewer to experience semantic exclusion.
Thus, if we are to recognise someone’s subjectivity in language, understood very materially, like the phenomenal body in Erika Fischer-Lichte’s, we need to create the stage conditions for this language to resonate in the first person. This, among other things, is what Yana Meerzon demanded when she spoke of “dramaturgies of authenticity”—that is, that the dramatic characters and the actors playing them should also bring to the stage reality the whole baggage of their life experiences, biographies and cultural references that are embedded in their languages and bodies.
The two examples discussed above, show two different strategies of dismantling the Western episteme, in which the dominant language, in this case Polish, and the cognitive categories and pre-established cultural and social hierarchies contained therein are negated, on the one hand, through a gesture of radical silence and rejection by the newcomer and, on the other, through the subversive use of Polish with a strong Ukrainian accent, which precisely emphasises and accentuates the actor’s onstage and offstage identity in order to reinforce his or her subjectivity.
The Slow Death of European Peace
The previous two examples of performances triggered, in my argument, the dynamics of situated knowing on the Polish-Ukrainian border, bringing into discussion the dualisms of thinking about Eastern and Western Europe (and Global North and Global South) and the cognitive gap between different epistemic systems, expressed, for example, in language.
The final examples I would like to discuss here are the play Opowiem ci jutro (I’ll Tell You Tomorrow), based on a script by Ukrainian author Liuba Ilnytska and directed by her compatriot Nina Khyzhna from the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin (Poland), and Mothers. A Song for Wartime, directed by Marta Górnicka, co-produced by the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw.
They constitute a clear critical voice against the ideological attitudes of Western Europe, and especially the European Union, towards the preservation and defence of a mythologised internal peace. Both performances make use not so much of the material and territorial borders between Poland and Ukraine but, rather, speak from a liminal position—the certain geopolitical situatedness of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus in between Western and Eastern Europe for whom Western Europe has so far been the object of various social and cultural or economic aspirations.
The performance I’ll Tell You Tomorrow was created during an artistic residency of Ukrainian women artists in Poland after the start of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine and can be seen as the voice of the young generation of Ukrainians, who had high expectations of Western Europe and hoped (perhaps rather idealistically) for its active involvement in the defence war against Russia. As is well known, their expectations were not fulfilled, or only to a limited extent, as Western countries did immediately rush in with humanitarian aid and arms supplies, but none of them, after all, intervened directly militarily and sent their troops to Ukraine. Nevertheless, Ilnytska’s and Khuzhna’s play attempts to discuss, in the presence of the audience, the so-called system of European values, including the structural pacifism of European Union states in the face of the challenges of the current war in Ukraine.
The play begins with a somewhat grotesque scene. The guards find a strange creature on the eastern border area of the European Union, of a shape difficult to recognise, who bears the meaningful name PAX. The creature, although still giving some signs of life, is not breathing, has no palpable pulse and is generally difficult for doctors to perform CPR on it, as no one knows where its heart and mouth are.
However, rescuers attempt to resuscitate it by applying medical apparatus at random, and after a few seconds, the creature’s pulse returns. As the doctor states, PAX bears the marks of numerous illnesses and injuries, as it has probably never used its claws or fangs to defend itself. It is not difficult to guess that the peace in question, or rather the peaceful life of Europeans, is therefore under threat because E.U. has not for a long time used radical means, armed force to defend its values. Instead, it uses soft measures such as expressing sympathy or concern, launching competitions for scientific grants to finance research on the effects of the war traumas happening outside its borders, imposing economic sanctions or releasing a symbolic flock of doves as a sign of peace.
All these gestures, however, remain performatives with diminishing causality because, as the doctor in charge of the patient in the intensive care unit admits, despite the interventions carried out, the terminally ill being named Pax unfortunately died. As causes of death in the hospital chart, the doctors write: “Orders to shoot at inflatable refugee boats in the Mediterranean.” “Orders not to help refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border.” “Agreements to sell arms of EU countries to Russia.” On Pax’s body, they also find traces of the unexecuted “1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” In addition, traces of the “uselessly awarded 120 Nobel prizes.” However, the doctors warn Europe: “There will come a moment when the question will be asked: are you ready to give up some of your privileges and risk your own security?”
This text, composed from the actors’ improvisations according to the Verbatim method, which attempts to capture the voices of the Ukrainian community since the outbreak of war, clearly implies that the time of peace has passed and the time of difficult decisions has come: to take up armed struggle and to strengthen internal solidarity, which requires sacrifices. Listening to these voices in a country like Poland, I think that viewers may even share the position of the show’s authors. However, I get the impression that the further one travels to Western Europe the less understandable and irrational these voices become because they are formulated in the face of a threat that is not directly perceptible in countries that do not have borders with modern Russia under Putin.
I’ll Tell You Tomorrow, therefore, uses artistic strategies similar to the performative practices of Femen, or Pussy Riot in Russia, an open, public critique of the establishment, which instead of an open war with Russia prefers to use half-measures, negotiation, inducement and persuasion. The impasse of the encounter between the epistemology of armed resistance to a military attack and the epistemology of persuasion stemming from the desire to preserve the status quo, as Liuba Ilnytska and Nina Khyzhny seem to suggest, is leading to the slow death of the values on which the European Union was founded. In other words, the war is already in Europe, only not all Europeans want to see it yet.
Similar reflections are also prompted by Marta Górnicka’s latest production, Mothers. A Song for Wartime, although I suspect it will have somewhat broader repercussions than the rather local initiative of the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. For it is the result of a co-production between the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, and it has just embarked on a European tour. As an artist, Marta Górnicka is known for creating performances based on rhythmic collective recitation, which is why she calls them all choirs or songs. She herself usually simply conducts her choir during a performance, standing illuminated by a spotlight in front of a score somewhere in the middle of the audience. This time, she has invited women migrants from Ukraine and Belarus (where the political repression of Alyaksandr Lukashenko’s regime is still ongoing following the protests after the rigged presidential elections in 2020), who settled in Poland after the tragic events in their countries of origin.
In this performance, the director juxtaposes two different understandings of the trauma of war. On the one hand, the actresses sing about the trauma of women and children raped or tortured in front of their loved ones during the war in Ukraine, which cannot be told in words, but only passed over in silence or carried in the body as a life-long experience of death. On the other hand, the actresses recite, in a somewhat ironic light, arguments about the trauma of the Second World War, which Western Europe has repressed in the last 80 years thanks to the economic capitalist success of the Common Market. The effect of this repression is the rejection of thinking about the possibility of a re-occurrence or involvement in a war conflict. There are no individual voices in this performance, only a collective chant, shout or melo recitation that exhorts the Western European audience to react. Or, at other times, the women ironically hum to Western Europe a lullaby to the well-known Polish tune “Aaaa, kotki dwa” (“Aaaa, sleep my little two cats”), in which Górnicka has changed the words into “Aaaa, Europa” (“Aaaa, sleep my little Europe”). The longer Europe remains immersed in lethargy, a sleep through which it fails to notice the crumbling world it has created, the more it risks its existence. Unfortunately, Europe’s only response is “you can’t kill war with war.”
This is perhaps the most strongly expressed voice of Ukrainians’ disillusionment with Western European attitudes in recent months. It can be said, then, that the last two plays I have discussed, although they speak fully in the voice of contemporary Ukrainian citizens, in their own name, tend at the same time towards a rather pessimistic conclusion. They raise doubts about the possibility of bridging the epistemic gap that war marks between those who have experienced it and those who hope never to experience it again. Nevertheless, in the context of the question of situated knowing that I have raised in this article, this voice certainly does not fall into a vacuum in that part of the world that is geopolitically located in between the Western and Eastern parts of the continent, in the so called Central- Eastern Europe.
Endnotes
[1] In the case of such generalised terms, it is good to keep in mind that the terms Global South and Global North have a mainly economic background and indicate disparities in the wealth between citizens of developed and developing countries, and they do not necessarily reflect the location of these countries on the world map. Nevertheless, in the sense given to them by cultural and sociological scholars of decolonial studies—for example, Boaventura de Sousa Santos or Arturo Escobar—contemporary countries of the Global South, once objects of colonisation, are still struggling with its effects today, as they are separated from the Global North by the so-called abyssal line, equivalent to an economic cultural and social divide. The remedy for overcoming this gap would be the idea of a pluriversum, the epistemic construction of many equal systems of cognition in spite of the scientific, economic and cultural domination of the countries of the Global North. The distinction between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, dates back to the Illuminist era (Wolff; Mignolo) and reflects the economic gap that emerged between the colonising countries of Western Europe (growing rapidly rich) and the non-colonial, feudal-economy-based countries of Eastern Europe under the greater or lesser influence of the Russian Empire and the Augsburg Empire. This division, updated in the twentieth century in Cold War discourse, or today in indicating the difference between E.U. member states and non-member states, as argued by Walter D. Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova, as well as Larry Wolff, is still a comfortable matrix of thinking in the Western world, and therefore needs to be unlearned in order to avoid an obvious denial of the subjectivity of the countries belonging to so-called Eastern Europe.
[2] See: Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. It is worth noting that a much more recent and contrastingly different conception of the imaginary location of Ukraine from Larry Wolff’s is proposed by Serhii Plokhy in his recent book The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. He presents Ukraine, as situated between Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East; land that has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
[3] At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the participating states: Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, determined the shape of the so-called new order in Europe after the Second World War. Under this treaty, it was decided that Poland’s pre-war borders, which included parts of present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Western Ukraine, would be shifted westwards, and that the Soviet Union would take possession of these lands. In exchange, Poland received the so-called Western Territories, which had belonged to the Third Reich before the war, West Pomerania, Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia, as well as East Prussia and the city of Gdansk. This new order resulted in the mass displacement of the population of both the German territories of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as the large-scale forced relocation of the Polish and Ukrainian populations in the former Eastern and Western Galicia carried out in various phases in 1945 and 1947–50 (Hrycak). The loss of lands in the east was often the subject of a nostalgic-colonial discourse in Poland after the Second World War, expressed, for example, in the term “kresy wschodnie,” which is no longer used today, to refer to the territories of present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Western Ukraine, which were a casual reference to the Russian imperial concept of “okrainy” (oкраины). The term “kresy” is considered colonial today, as it negates the subjectivity of the ethnic communities and nations that once inhabited the territory of the Polish state and is not used in scholarly writing (Kamusella).
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*Ewa Bal, PhD, Professor at the Jagiellonian University in the Department of Performance Studies, Head of the Research Laboratory of Knowledge-Creating Practices of Local Cultures. Previously, she was a lecturer at the University “L’Orientale” in Naples. Her early research interests focused on Italian drama and theatre, to which she has dedicated two monographs: In the Footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella. Cultural Mobility and the Localness of Theatre, Peter Lang 2020 (2017 in Polish), and Corporeality Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theatre and its Possible Continuities, 2006. Her current research interests include issues of cultural mobility, nationalism, indigenous studies, dramaturgies of linguistic minorities and critical methodologies in the field of (de/post)colonialism in Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Spain. She has co-edited several monographs, most recently with Mateusz Chaberski: Situated Knowing. Epistemic Perspectives on Performance (Routledge, 2021). She is the editor-in-chief of the series Performance Studies—New Perspectives, published by the Jagiellonian UP.
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