The Areas of Homelessness
The word „homelessness” is usually referred to a specific social problem, bad fortune of lame ducks, occupying the areas of railway stations or hospices for homeless people, who bring to so called common people the feelings of mercy, anxiety or impatience when they ask for “pennies for a roll” in a non-obtrusive way. Homelessness, however, can be understood more broadly, putting the word into other contexts. In a way homeless are also people, who despite having a roof over their heads, due to different reasons function on the margins of society as “The Others”, freaks, outsiders. Homelessness afflicts also rich postmodern nomads who everywhere “feel like home”, which in fact means that they – mentally suspended in-between – nowhere are at home. The different areas of homelessness are the subject of the main section of “Czas Kultury”, issue no. 2.
Homelessness appears most often as a threat, danger, acute absence which needs to be substituted for, through building home. Such a substitue may be music, as Waldemar Kuligowski is convincing us in the article Hip-hop: w poszukiwaniu domu (Hip-hop: In A Search For Home). The author says “hip-hop was most often adopted by marginalized minority groups, victims of discrimination. Within these frames it served not only as an entertainment but also allowed to scream out pain and anger, express their own judgement on the world, sing a story about longing for a place to be called home”. Hip-hop music gives a universal language necessary to “sing one’s own story” and a set of values (created around the bounds common to “ziomale”), which are attractive for the young from different parts of the world. Kuligowski shows how artists from countries so different like the USA, Palestine and Israel search for feeling like home.
It happens also so that homelessness gains value, or – to put it differently – lack of permanent rooting inspires people, making them create interesting pieces of art. Such a case is described by Paulina Reiter in her text Mieszkaniec Krain Nierealnego (Inhabitant of the Realms of the Unreal), devoted to Henry Darger, an American born at the end of the 19th century. Despite the fact that he lived in a big city, Chicago, he was out of the way of the local society, considered to be “a harmless madman”, who “collected rubbish from the bins in the neighbourhood, spoke almost to nobody, but until late hours argued with God or led multivocal discussions with himself”. Almost until Darger’s death nobody new he worked on a monumental piece of art – on 15 thousand pages he wrote a novel entitled in a baroque manner Historia Dziewcząt Vivian, w tym co jest znane jako Krainy Nierealnego, albo Glandeko-Angeliniańska zawierucha wojenna spowodowana Buntem Zniewolonych Dzieci (The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion). The story is illustrated with a few hundreds of pictures which were reviewed by critics and art experts as brilliant realization of art brut. Where is there homelessness in the inspiring story about Darger? Reiter suggests that Darger was alienated from the real world, that he mentally migrated to “the Realms of the Unreal”, lived in them and for them, trying at the same time to treat his childhood trauma by writing. Darger's oeuvre is a kind of message from outside the reality well known to us, and perhaps this is the reason why it is intriguing so much the contemporary art audience.
An unusual form of homelessness is presented by Joanna Mizielińska in the article Bezdomne ciała w bezdusznym świecie (Homeless Bodies In the Callous World). The author shows and analyses the experience of intersexual persons, arguing that “intersexual bodies are a particularly drastic example of homeless and meaningless bodies in our culture”. Polarized system of the gender is a norm: a woman – a man. What should be done though with people afflicted with biological anomalies who possess both female and male biological features? “Unrooted” unambigously in a female or male gender the homeless bodies of the intersexual people are subjected to medical oppression supported by the ideology which protects what it considers to be a norm. Intersexual people are subjected to “corrective” surgeries of genital organs, medical and educational treatment, most often in their childhood. Mizielińska, discussing specific cases of intersexual people, shows that the medical treatment legitimized by law and custom means often violence upon the outsiders; violence whose results may be tragic. Leaving the “sexual homelessness” is burdened with the threat of total disintegration of identity. It appears that sometimes it is better to leave home which is governed by too strict rules.
The problem of homelessness is also touched upon by Monika Żółkoś in her review of the play Pamiętnik z dekady bezdomności (The Diary of the Decade of Homelessness) performed at Teatr Wybrzeże entitled Pułapka realizmu (The Trap of Realism). However, I would draw special attention to the motif of the idea of realism in contemporary theatre present in the review. Żółkoś writes in a critical way about the „new realism”: „ in the assumptions of the ’new realism’ there is some falsity. They follow from the conviction that there are areas of social experience of which the contemporary theatre is afraid, and therefore it does not problematize them. Such thinking is limiting the category of the stage truth to theatre only, which is reflecting the reality in a scale 1:1”. This problem refers not only to play writers but also to prose writers and other artists who attempt to touch reality with realistic tools. At the same time they often forget that the “bare truth” itself, confirmed with individual experience only, is not enough to make a piece of art/ literature – a trick, an idea how to process and show the material “taken from life” is necessary. Without this idea the art and literature turn into intervention commentary.
Robert Ostaszewski
Translated by Małgorzata Pilewska
Discussed journals: Czas Kultury