Seeking refuge
My clearest memory of my maternal grandmother is her death rattle.
I was five and we co-slept, as women often did in the pre-democratic Poland where I grew up. She was my primary caregiver; I, her first grandchild. And I’m pretty sure I loved her.
This middle of the night moment was our last interaction — her splintered breathing, and me not being able to wake her up from it.
I don’t remember anything more about that night. My mother likes to tell me how I woke her up from a cold-medicine induced coma. How she banged on the doors of our neighbours but, they, thinking she was a vagrant, refused to get out of their beds. Our apartment didn’t yet have a phone. We had been on the official list to get one since I was four, but my mother had few government connections, and the phone didn’t show up until three years after my grandmother’s death.
My mother shuffled to the nearest phone booth, but the phone had been ripped off the wall. It took two hours for help to arrive. My grandmother had suffered from a stroke and, two weeks later, she was dead.
I grew up behind the iron curtain. Store shelves were empty. We didn’t own things. Sometimes there were tanks in the streets — but mostly in Ludz or Warsaw. My mother bought flowers, hoarded coffee for when she had to visit a government office. Once, she was teargassed in a cafe.
The phone booth, empty shelves, and tanks blur into a kind of normal. It has taken many years of tenuous self reflection to acknowledge its oddity. It will take many more to process the trauma.
Around the time that the photo of me on a boat in Gdynia was taken, my mother met a sailor. We were spending our government-supplied vacation at the sea, where my young, attractive, and unwed mother and I spent most of our time in cafes. While in one, I marked the sailor as a good target for free ice cream. “Would you like to be my new father?”, I asked, after cornering him on his way to the toilet. I got ice cream; my mother got a boyfriend.
Later that year he arrived in Vancouver, walked off the boat, and never returned. But my mother had left an impression, and he spent a few years trying to, legally, immigrate us to Canada.
The Polish government, however, did not support capitalist immigration so, in 1986 (I was nine), my mother and I left Poland on a seven-day trip to Athens. Our luggage consisted of cameras, crystal, and leather goods.
We never got back on the plane, and I quickly became well acquainted with what it takes to survive as an illegal. It was my new normal and it took dumb luck to get through it. For a year I didn’t go to school. We had no fridge, no medical care, and no tenant rights. We hid from the police, and tried to survive within a system that only took care of its own. And we were definitely not its own.
In a society that doesn’t privilege equality and care, some portion of its people—whether the illegal or the less connected—will live outside the system.
My experience as a refugee is now just a memory. Living in Canada, I pass as an insider thanks to my light skin and hair, and blue eyes. I hold privilege through access to resources and my education. I pass, unless I open my mouth or someone is forced to attempt the pronunciation of my name. And even when my non-Anglosaxon origin is made obvious, I am never perceived as a bad immigrant, a refugee, or a religious minority. I am never seen as an obvious threat to life and liberty in the country I now call home. These benefits have helped me assimilate, and edge around the stigma so many non-birthers have to face.
The fact that I experience limited prejudice has nothing to do with who I am. It’s dumb luck that—at this point in time and history—I look enough like those in control of the system to be considered an us, instead of a them. But for those outside the system, there is no refuge and no safety. And no amount of dumb luck will change their skin-colour, hair colour, eye colour, and their lack of resources.
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I teach, design, and research as a feminist scholar, usually located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. You can see some of my work, or find out more about me, at http://milenaradzikowska.com. I am on twitter as @candesignlove.
Thanks to my dearest colleague, Professor Sean Holman, for his mentorship while writing this piece.
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