Antonina Tosiek
- Poland -
Antonina Tosiek (born in 1996) – poet, essayist, literary critic. A final year PhD student at the Adam Mickiewicz University’s Doctoral School of Languages and Literatures in Poznań. A Student’s Nobel Prize laureate in the field of literature and journalism. A member of the academic editorial staff at the quarterly journal Czas Kultury. The author of a historical essay Przepraszam za brzydkie pismo. Pamiętniki wiejskich kobiet (Apologies for My Ugly Handwriting. Memoirs of Rural Women) as well as two volumes of poetry: storytelling and żertwy (burnt offerings). Her work was recognized with multiple accolades such as the Wisława Szymborska Award, the Adam Włodek Award, and the Capital City of Warsaw Literary Award.
“well, name it”
In I Built the Barricade, her 1974 volume of poems, Anna Świrszczyńska constructed a literary experience of naked care. In the poem “I Carried Bedpans,” she wrote: “I was an orderly in a hospital / without medicines and without water. / I carried bedpans / with pus, blood and feces. / I loved pus, blood and feces, / they were alive like life. / All around, there was / less and less life. / When the world was dying, / I was only a pair of hands handing / a bedpan to the wounded.”
I return to this poem through Antonina Tosiek’s żertwy. I remember it, but I do not remember it exactly; I have to return to the already worn-out collection. I read it once again so that it may resound, and so that I may forget it once more. Each time, I wonder what is so difficult about this seemingly simple poem, why it slips from my mind, why I lose it. It is raw, not only because of its economy of means. It is raw toward the reader: it does not cover, muffle, or soften. It points to and names what was not supposed to fit into words, leading the reader beyond the boundaries of her comfort zone. In her poems, Świrszczyńska practiced care understood as a kind of ethics, grounded in relations and human interdependence understood as practice, not only as abstract values. This remains a radical position; it still provokes unease; it still cannot fit into many people’s minds. The echoes of the revolution—within the poem, within values—carried out by Świrszczyńska continue to ripple through Polish literature to this day, as evidenced, for instance, by the recently published anthology They Came to See the Poet(ess), edited by Barbara Klicka and Agnieszka Waligóra. Exactly half a century after the publication of I Built the Barricade, Antonina Tosiek, at the end of “gnosis,” one of the poems included in żertwy, calls out: “well, name it.” “It,” that is, what is repressed, obscured, softened, pushed outside the frame of the poem, left ungrasped by the literary imagination: the experience of care, which has nothing to do with the established stereotype cleansed of dirt, suffering, and torment. Responding to this call is by no means easy, neither for the writer nor for the reader. Tosiek insists, however, on following this difficulty, along the path marked out by her predecessor—or rather: predecessors, since in the half-century between I Built the Barricade and żertwy there were many of them.
In that collection, published twenty years after the outbreak and defeat of the Warsaw Uprising, Świrszczyńska writes life. She waited two decades, as if the poems from I Built the Barricade had to strip themselves of habits, grow out of too-short, too-tight, or perhaps no longer fitting patterns for the history of struggle. Writing about “hell” — the title of one of the book’s sections — Świrszczyńska clings precisely to life: “pus, blood and feces” are “alive like life.” In żertwy, Tosiek bears witness to lessons well learned; she can grasp what is still alive in the process of decay, in illness. It does not have to be pleasant; indeed, it should not be pleasant in a radical poem that confronts the challenge of care. The message, the image, should not be softened. Care is not easy; relations do not have to pay off, to yield returns like a good investment. The costs must be entered into the budget; one should not count on cuts, nor turn a blind eye.
“I make a żertwa,” Antonina Tosiek ends the poem “neo-Gothic.” A żertwa is a burnt offering to the old gods: harsh, ruthless gods — but have gentler gods ever existed? “The Lord gave us smoke. Gave us the forest / and the faces of saints in Gothic / churches,” writes Tosiek. And what of it? Suffering as a value, as the organizing principle of Christian life, especially Catholic life, has little to do with the practice of social life. Suffering elevated onto altars, but outside temples shown the door, is rendered invisible; those who suffer, the chronically ill, the elderly, are not granted full civic rights, and Tosiek writes this contradiction into her poems. The church in the neo-Gothic order resembles the interior of a person emaciated and devastated by dying: there are crosses, there are ribs. The person taking up the challenge of care, the person performing care work, must enter this bodily space. Who is the person in suffering? Who is the person accompanying the sufferer? Sacrifices made out of love disperse like smoke, settle in the bones; they do not pay off, they do not yield returns. “pain does not ennoble,” Tosiek stresses clearly, so that no one falls into the traps set here and there. In these traps, it turns out not only that suffering is supposedly better, but also that there is nothing to talk about, nothing to write about, because fate, because destiny, because God’s will. Tosiek tests whether, in the 2020s, emancipation from the power of such thinking is already possible.
Antonina Tosiek writes within the order of care. Family relations, bonds of blood, ought to force reflection on the body. Yet the body is stubbornly replaced by metaphors, narrated with the exclusion of what — as Anna Świrszczyńska wrote — is alive like life. Tosiek sets the apparatus of the poem so that it captures what is raw, sticky, on the eve of decomposition. She writes the ends of worlds and beginnings. The love songs of żertwy also raise questions about the reproduction of life: not only care for the life that already exists, that bends in pain toward its end, but also for planned, nonexistent life. In the face of the ends of worlds — żertwy is set against the landscape of climate catastrophe, wars, genocides — how is one to think about motherhood? “am I only a place / waiting for life,” she asks, only to declare in another poem: “before I give birth to you, I promise / to erase the minefields.” In these poems there is fear for one’s own, still nonexistent child; fear for other people’s children, already alive; fear of what care, a sense of connection, responsibility, and awareness of existing relations may push one toward. The love relationship does not exist here in the singular; it exceeds the pair of lovers, spills widely outward, stretches across generations, not always according to the order of blood. “I will take care / of your weakening parents” — perhaps the most powerful declaration, the most powerful commitment. “no one has ever said / more to anyone — ” writes Tosiek.
Tosiek summons old goddesses, such as Hecate with her dual nature — capable of bringing both peace and misfortune, which is somewhat the case in żertwy as well, a book that encompasses both ending and beginning — because “contemporary poems written by a woman” are lined with darkness, anger, and the desire for happiness alike. Tosiek brands the system when, in “care at altitude,” she exposes the soullessness of those who professionally care for people in need: the elderly, the sick, the infirm. Yet these poems are far from idylls. Guilt cuts the language, perhaps cuts the poem too, and “relief is the most sinful of feelings” (“ballad of narayama”). That relief which comes when death ends the suffering of the sick woman, and brings respite to the caregiver — how is one to write it? Where can one draw the courage to grant oneself the right to relief? How can taboos be broken? A poem, as simple as possible, raw, and therefore audacious, may prove useful here. The social engagement of Tosiek’s poems allows problems to be clearly indicated. She is raw toward those who find it easy to throw words around: “you dreamed a line about care, / salon little sisters, / caviar little brothers, / looking into the poem / covering the camera’s eye, / while on a leash only simple words / underground passages, lightbulbs, / suds and dust.” Salon sisterhood and brotherhood are not enough. The poem works; it can be followed.
Raw in Tosiek’s poems are biological residues, testimonies of a stubbornly living body, as in Świrszczyńska. A ball of feces hides in the throat of the person who passes excrement for two days; “the unpleasant smell of decay” reminds us of the approaching end. The diminutives “little ball, little neck, little slime” sound like caresses whose task is to tame a malicious monster. Is the body a beast disobedient to the intellect, bucking, inflicting pain, humiliating, pulling us down to earth? The body here is not an addition to a powerful, superior reason; it is not merely a case for the brain. Tosiek also writes that the relations between the component parts of the human person are not hierarchical. To care for one’s own body is to care for oneself; to care for another person’s body is to care for another being. The poem may serve to think the other way around: to think the body as that which — through a series of biochemical processes, through neurobiology — influences the functioning of the brain and organizes the work of the intellect. This is no small operation performed on the imagination. The body dictates the terms; the poems are an attempt to record them. In her work — not only her poetry — Tosiek gathers more than one turn: from the affective to the folk. żertwy may be read within a postsecular order. Tosiek does not forget darkness, but her main task seems to be measuring bright light. “come, bright little apostrophe,” she calls in the poem that closes the collection, in this secular prayer for strengthening. We will not find here conclusions that offer hope on credit, and that is good. What is at stake here is not easy solutions; a relational project of being in the world assumes openness to challenges that already exist, as well as those still to come.
Anna Marchewka
Poetry
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vinegar, stinging / ocet, szczypiące
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it’s not certain, no, but it can happen, though / to nie jest pewne lecz tak może zdarzyć się
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hatching / lęg
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the second; thistles / drugi; osty
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neogothic / neogotyk
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who sees ahead, who knows what will be / kto widzi w przód, kto wie, co będzie
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a contemporary poem written by a woman / współczesny wiersz napisany przez kobietę
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the first poem about love / pierwszy wiersz o miłości
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puppy blues / puppy blues
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turning towards objects / zwrot ku przedmiotom
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naturalism 101 / naturalizm 101
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a poem for her / wiersz dla niej
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the ballad of narayama / ballada o narayamie
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I asked other women about that, too; / Pytałam o to także inne kobiety;
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the second poem about love / drugi wiersz o miłości
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little sisters, little brothers, why is it that we still / siostrzyczki, braciszkowie, co nami powoduje, że jednak
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all in needles, doll in needles / cała w igłach, lala w igłach
