Sandman and the Fast-Food Fighters

Two new novels take shots at Poland's underachievers in the global age. by Wojciech Kosc 18 February 2003 Wojna Polsko-Ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwona (Polish-Russian War Under the White-Red Flag), by Dorota Maslowska. Warsaw, Lampa i Iskra Boza, 2002.

Transformejszen (Transformation) by Edward Redlinski. Warsaw, Muza, 2002.

Poland is at war. On one front, Russians are laying siege to the provincial town of Wejherowo, where buying tax-free cigarettes from Kaliningrad is proof of treachery. On a second front, a sturdy married couple, small time entrepreneurs, battle a McDonald's that threatens their own patriotic fast-food outlet.

Wejherowo is the setting of 19-year-old Dorota Maslowska's sensational fiction debut, Polish-Russian War Under the White-Red Flag. The ubiquitous hamburger chain is the enemy in veteran Edward Redlinski's Transformejszen (a simple phonetic transcription of "transformation"). The newcomer and the established author both adapt local jargons and dialects for fictional use, but to very different purposes.

Polish-Russian War consists of an interior monologue by Andrzej Robakowski, a.k.a. Silny (which means "strong"). Not only has his girlfriend just dumped him; he also has a problem with drugs and his own worldview. Especially the latter. Describing his political views--which in itself is perhaps unexpected--Silny calls himself an anarcho-leftist and then goes into a drugged vision of how he would head his own anarcho-leftist party to rule over Poland in a sort of distorted parallel to Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party. At party headquarters in Silny’s Poland, you would be able to get amphetamines from vending machines and sex from the secretaries.

In one of many interviews after her book's release, Maslowska, herself a Wejherowo native who by no means knows Silny's world only from the outside, said she used to meet people like him daily in front of her apartment block. "Drugs were the factor that made people from different social backgrounds intermingle. After all, they used the services of the same dealers.

"I learned very quickly to use their language,” she added. “Now I use it automatically. Eventually it occurred to me that I could write this language."

Silny's lingo is at once funny and terrifying, a mixture of everything he reads, hears, and especially sees on television, all of it warped by his heavy use of amphetamines. Ideas, tabloid headlines, television commercials flow endlessly through Silny's mind in a vertigo-inducing kaleidoscope. He expresses his thoughts in a specific language that mingles obscenities with corrupted phrases he has heard somewhere and deems intelligent-sounding:

When I woke up by the sea, the fact that I got a biro is pretty much all I can remember. On the biro are the words: Zdzislaw Sztorm, Sand Production, March 12th Street something. I imagine this sand, how it is produced by modern technologies, modernly packed into a bag, modernly distributed. I can remember my thoughts of a truly economical character that could have saved the country from doom, like I already told you, from the doom prepared by fucking aristocrats in trenchcoats, who, if only they got the opportunity, would sell us, citizens, to the West, to brothels, to the Bundeswehr for organs, as slaves. The only solution is to expel them from their houses, expel them from their blocks of flats so as to make our homeland a typically agricultural homeland producing ordinary Polish sand for export so it will have a chance on global markets all over Europe.

Silny is the quintessential street character that many Poles treat both with an air of superiority and fear: He is one of the dresiarze, young men whose career goals tend toward gang membership and who can be identified by the trainers and track suits (dresy) they wear. According to a recent article in the weekly Polityka, dresiarze are fast becoming the driving force behind organized crime in Poland.

DANGEROUS BURGERS

Redlinski's characters are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Mining themes not unlike those in his best-known novel, Konopielka (made into a fine movie by Witold Leszczynski), he presents people who are quintessential in their hillbilly simplicity. Jura is a former Solidarity activist, his wife Wala was an athlete, their daughter Zuza seems to have limited her educational drive to attending a cooking school nearby. The family runs a peculiar fast food outlet that serves only Polish cuisine, pardon the expression. Their unchallenged, though relatively prosperous life seems headed for even better times when they learn that a carpentry shop is about to open opposite. Soon, however, the vision of hungry workers stuffing themselves on Polish specials is ruined: Rather than a local shop, the newcomer is McDonald's, treacherously opening another outlet!

"The hamburger is America's most dangerous weapon!", says Wala, as if declaring war on America and the symbol of its imperialism. Before quintessential Poles can react, it is too late: The West's encroachment on their lives is a fact. Poland is no longer itself; the globalized world has sucked it in. This is transformejszen.

Maslowska's Polish-Russian war, in contrast, is one the Poles may have an chance to win. At the very least they can flout their patriotism. A special commission goes from door to door asking people's permission to paint their houses in Poland's national white and red. Objection to this is a sign of anti-Polish character. Soon the whole town is white and red and Silny wonders whether this is real or yet another monstrous creation of his drugged-out mind.

Dorota Maslowska said in an interview that the Polish-Russian war was inspired by an extreme right-wing, fundamentalist Catholic newspaper. "I wanted to see how the exaggerated xenophobia that I described is related to the reality. And I was surprised. The paranoia in Nasz Dziennik is even greater. For example, I read in it that in the EU, farmers add engine oil to pig feed."

Compared to the experienced Redlinski, teenager Maslowska's take on today's Poland is fresher. Redlinski's theme has been heavily exploited in rock music, cabaret (most of it embarrassingly bad), and the general juxtaposition of the New (read: Western) against the Old (read: Poland before transformation) where the New has generally been welcomed, even if at times looked down on with the kind of cynical grin bestowed on Polish yuppies and new businessmen.

In Maslowska, there is no clear distinction of that kind, perhaps because for Silny, transformation is something that already happened, only that he is on the desperate side of it. Reading Redlinski, the grotesque provokes laughter, but in the end nobody gives a hoot for Jura and Wala. They are hicks, but they will manage to keep their heads above the water. Silny won't and he lives right next door to you.