Toward Xenopolis: Visions from the Borderland

The idea of “xenopolis,” the city of others, is at once utopian and, for many people, a bit scary. However, it organizes this thought-provoking book and offers readers an insight into some problems in postcommunist Central Europe. Or are there such problems elsewhere as well? In The New York Times, the op-ed columnist David Brooks writes, “What stories do we tell or what rhetoric do we use to define who we are? If we use rhetoric and tell stories that expand the definition of ‘we,’ if we continue to emphasize how complicated personal and national identities are, if we emphasize overlapping and inclusive identities, then we have a shot at making something special out of all this diversity.”1 The diversity Brooks refers to is that in the United States, but it exists elsewhere as well, including in the Polish/Lithuanian borderland region where Krzysztof Czyżewski and his wife and friends set up the Borderland Foundation in Sejny in 1990 and later also the International Center for Dialogue in Czesław Miłosz's former family house in Krasnogruda. Czyżewski's work and the work of the Borderland Foundation involve the very emphasis on “complicated personal and national identities” and “overlapping and inclusive identities” that Brooks refers to. The Foundation approaches this work in ways that at first may seem disparate and unconnected: for example, it runs a publishing house that has released numerous books, it produces theater and musical projects that involve local adolescents, and it has been invited to work in various conflict zones, such as Bosnia, Indonesia, Israel, and Ukraine. However, when looked at in light of Czyżewski's philosophy, eloquently articulated in the essays in Toward Xenopolis, the varied activities of the Borderland Foundation seem not only unified but also necessary.The essays, originally published between 1996 and 2019, have been organized by the author and his editor, Mayhill C. Fowler, into three sections: “Concepts,” “Places,” and “People.” In the opening section, the central concept articulated is that of “connective tissue,” originally formulated by Czesław Miłosz in his book Native Realm,2 and the spirit of Miłosz permeates Toward Xenopolis. In Miłosz the Borderlanders found a kindred spirit, a person who was so taken by their desire to foster connective tissue among the kresy inhabitants of the Sejny region that he gave them his ancestral home. How does one build connective tissue among those who may regard themselves as having different national identities? The Borderlanders’ solution is to welcome the presence and contributions of Others, listen to each other's stories and songs, to learn not to talk past each other, and above all, to pay attention. It sounds simple, but in practice, it's not so easy, and there are powerful forces, not only in Poland, but in many other countries in the world that are constantly working to convince us that our own people have been neglected, and so they are the only important ones to listen to.This tension between what is “ours” and what belongs to the “xenopolis,” the city of Others, permeates the book. In the essay “The Drama of the Polish Outsider,” Czyżewski quotes a line from Paweł Pawlikowski's film Zimna wojna [Cold war, 2018], where Kaczmarek, a communist functionary who escorts two musicians gathering material for their folk ensemble, says of a Lemko song, “Pretty. Shame it's not ours” (p. 41). In the same essay, Czyżewski says, “The Polish psyche is affected by the tragic conflict between what is ours and not ours” (p. 44). The communists, of course, were determined to cleanse non-Polish influences from borderland territories. When I lived in a so-called newly recovered territory in the 1980s, propaganda signs (still!) proclaimed “Byliśmy, Jesteśmy, Będziemy!” However, this impulse did not die with communism: Czyżewski mentions the postcommunist “profascist” ONR (p. 43) and also discusses an essay by Irena Grudzińska-Gross called “Podejrzane pochodzenie jako kategoria polskiej kultury” [Suspicious origins as a category of Polish culture, 2012], in which she examines the contortions that various “specialists” go through to disprove the Jewish origins of Polish authors and artists (p. 195).3 Czyżewski himself, like Miłosz, is committed to a broader version of Polishness, one that includes everyone in the xenopolis, not only ethnic Poles.“Places” and “People” discuss locations and individuals that have influenced the author's thinking about the xenopolis. The map in the book's front matter shows the places the author describes, all of them in Central Europe, overlaid with the names of the various people he mentions in the volume; some of these places and people get whole chapters, others only brief discussions. Central Europe represents for Czyżewski a place to “practice” his borderland ethos, a place where various identities abide and enrich one another. For example, the cities of Chernivtsi/Czerniowce in Ukraine and Vilnius/Wilno in Lithuania epitomize inspiring places of interlayered multicultural heritage: from Chernivtsi's rich mix of Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Romanian, Armenian, German, and Turkish to Vilnius's of Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Karaite, Tatar, and German. The Hungarian regions of Romania and the country of Bosnia have been more problematic but equally full of potential for achieving the ideal of xenopolis. People Czyżewski writes about at chapter length include Mircea Eliade, Jerzy Ficowski, Stanisław Barańczak, Tony Judt, Tomas Venclova, and Irena Grudzińska-Gross; with the exception of Eliade, these are all people whom Czyżewski knows personally and whose thought has influenced the work of Borderland.In an earlier book about the Borderland Foundation, Borderland: On Reviving Culture, Dorota Sieroń-Galusek and Łukasz Galusek connect the foundation's philosophy with the Polish tradition of hospitality (gościnność), which they playfully rewrite as two words meaning “hosting difference” (gościć inność): “Framing hospitality in this way is an invitation to embrace encounters with Otherness, with the dissimilarities between host and guest. It represents a readiness to face Otherness, to learn the difficult art of letting in that which is different, and hence potentially a source of fears and doubts. But if we shut ourselves off in any way from accepting difference, we are violating the principle of hospitality.”4 The essays in Toward Xenopolis were all written prior to the invasion of Ukraine, so they do not discuss the hospitality that Poles have shown toward Ukrainians. Rather, most of the essays were written against the background of the reaction to perhaps the most famous book that the Borderland Foundation has published, Jan Tomasz Gross's Sąsiedzi,5 as well as the anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, populist rhetoric of the Law and Justice Party and other groups to its right. Nevertheless, Toward Xenopolis is far from being a political polemic.Instead, this collection of essays is a profoundly humanistic book. The work of the Foundation innovatively links the arts and humanities with the project of integrating the diverse peoples who people the xenopolis. Czyżewski speaks more about artists and writers than he does about politicians. Yet, as an American reader, I found my thoughts drifting again and again to our own situation. Clearly, Czyżewski wants—in Brooks's idiom—to “use rhetoric and tell stories that expand the definition of ‘we.’” Could the Borderland's methodology and solutions apply here, in our own polarized polity? On the one hand, America is more or less the ultimate xenopolis; on the other, we are in a historical moment where a great many people would like to eliminate those unlike them from the polis altogether. We can be inspired by the Borderlanders’ fearless resolve to pay attention to the Others among us, to listen to their narratives, and to mutually pay attention to what the whole population has to say while still not minimizing the fear that this process evokes. Although it is certainly true that many of our institutions need reform, perhaps repairing what we already have may be the way to start, as the Borderlanders did with the old synagogue in Sejny. Can the Borderland philosophy, as articulated in Toward Xenopolis, play a part in creating out of us—not only Central Europeans, but Americans too—what Czyżewski calls neimars (bridge builders)? I think he would say that this process is long and hard, but with patience, it can be achieved. I hope so.