Elżbieta Matynia - An Old Bridge and a New Agora

I think the challenge is additionally amplified by the fact that the two categories, multiculturalism and agora, which both seem to be sources of hope for the organizers, are themselves riddled with problems… though perhaps less so when taken simply as inspiring visions and ideals (even if realized in the past), not as actual, currently existing institutions. In the latter case multiculturalism is seen not just as a set of differences embedded and sustained by culture but as a set of policies designed to provide recognition for, and manage the co-existence of, multiple ethno-cultural groups, or multiple cultural programs with within one state, thus ensuring for them separate but equal treatment. We know that such policies were at work several centuries ago in this very region, the Balkans. Implemented by self-governing cultural/religious communities recognized by the Ottoman Empire as millets, they were designed to maintain a measure of harmony between various religious groups within the empire. 

One of the problems of today’s policies of multiculturalism is their uneasy relationship with the expectations of a world order based on the principles of international human rights. A frequently cited shortfall is that, while multiculturalism privileges and advocates the recognition of the uniqueness of cultural and ethnic groups, it also tends to assume a rigid and permanent makeup of cultures, and aims at preserving them while preventing the potential conflicts between them. In effect such policies reinforce the separateness of the groups, and can turn them into impenetrable islands, or separate, parallel worlds, in which group rights take precedence over the rights of individual members of the community. (The culture of such a group as a whole may be dismissive of the rights of one part of the group, for example women, barring them from exercising the rights guaranteed to all citizens of the larger multicultural state. ) The result is that what is called multiculturalism looks more like an archipelago of monoculturalisms. 

But what’s important for us to notice here is that while the policies of multiculturalism, a product of the liberal state, can be affirmative vis-a-vis a group’s culture, they usually stop short of doing anything else beyond regulating the group’s relation to the state and towards other groups, and therefore allowing the minority group to close itself off. What I am trying to say is that these policies are passive and seem to reward selfishness, as they rarely provide for that link, that extra space that we are interested in here, that active space in-between that could facilitate inter-group dialogue, and even friendships… I also agree with those who say that in a world characterized by the flow of people and ideas we have to think about multiculturalism as an arrangement that not only recognizes the values of other cultures, but includes into that mosaic indigenouslocal cultures. 

And one familiar word of caution concerning the other category, the agora: as inspiring a vision as it still provides of a restoration of Athenian direct democracy, we all know that in its original Greek version it was a highly restrictive space, open only to male citizens of Athens, and excluding most of its inhabitants and laborers: foreigners (other Greeks), barbarians, those free non-citizens called metics, slaves, and women. 

Still, I do understand that when we refer here to a new agora, we have in mind an inspiring vision for a world in which societal hopes are rapidly declining; that we are trying to envision such sites, sources, arrangements, or conditions that generate dignity rather than humiliation, trust rather than suspicion, productive coexistence rather than ruinous conflict, benevolence rather than malevolence. And the question is, what does it take for such a promising arrangement to emerge and to be sustained? 

I think that – following the practices tested and developed by the Borderland Center – we ought to look locally, on the ground, at the places each of us knows best, at sites and narratives that have helped each of us to transcend political or cultural divisiveness, to ease tensions, mend fences, launch friendships, and to sustain what have turned out to be realistic dreams. 

The projects or arrangements I have in mind, and that I have experienced myself, not only as promising but also as actually delivering on the promise, are of a kind that create a public space where none has been, or re-activate one where it has been taken for granted. Such public space – what Hannah Arendt, the chief philosopher of dialogue, has called the space of appearance – is the necessary condition for any dialogue to begin, as it facilitates conversation, and makes it possible for us to get to know each other and each others’ idioms, to learn about our respective ways of knowing, and to figure out how to negotiate our differences. 

In a work I am currently completing, I discuss the gradual creation of such public spaces, ones that helped those previously silenced to regain their voice, and forced authoritarian, dialogue-hostile regimes to enter into dialogue. I call such processes performative democracy, and I explore a variety of its manifestations, among them semi-official theatrical movements, the emergence of a home-made mass press, and the roundtables that brought an end to both one-party rule in Poland and apartheid in South Africa. Performative democracy, which does not readily lend itself either to theorizing or to institutionalizing, is the life experience and imagination that people bring to the system they live in, in order to transform it collectively. 

I would like to argue that tangible and sustainable hope is rooted in such locally-inspired, perhaps even parochial initiatives founded on provincial local knowledge and often discredited by self-imposed centers of knowledge and culture. And in my opinion we should look at local knowledge as a source of new arrangements and practices that can address matters that divide communities and societies. 

In times of crisis like ours, people try – just as we are trying to do here – to conjure up hopeful images that help them to see possible solutions. Such imagery has been created and explored more frequently by artists than by politicians. Poetry is known for having such a capacity, as it captures an otherwise inexpressible combination of historical and visual experience, of time and space, of insight and emotion. I myself have found such a stimulating image of a civil world, or a new agora before my eyes, an image that I have been thinking about for some time already, which comes from a novel that takes place not far from Sarajevo, written in the middle of the last century by Ivo Andric, and entitled “The Bridge on the Drina”. 

The very imagery of a bridge and the effort to bridge is frequently used in discussions on social capital, networking, and the need to bring people together in an increasingly divided world. But the bridge in Andric’s book is a very special one – not because it is so old and picturesque, and not even because it bridges Bosnia and Serbia – but because of its unusual design, as it doubles in the middle to allow for something more than just a crossing of the river on foot or on horse. Thus it is not just the bridge itself I am thinking of, but this additional physical space in the middle of that bridge envisioned by a 14th-century architect, called thekapia. This bridge’s social, cultural and political power lies in this extra space, the kapia, with its terraces andsofas on either side that can accommodate conversations, get-togethers, or the savoring of Turkish coffee by those who most frequently used the bridge: Muslim Bosnians and Turks, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and later on also Catholic Croats and Jews. 

The kapia was a place where those who would otherwise not meet could look at each other, sit together, and get to know each other. Not a market place, not a temple, not a court, not a school, the kapia was a place that people did not have to stop at, or come to, but they did. With its sofas on both sides, a stand with a brass coffeemaker, and a constant flow of people speaking different languages and worshipping different gods, thekapia was a space which people made really good use of. This neutral space, in the middle of the bridge, made it possible for people get to feel at home with each other, to look through each other’s lenses, and to plant the seeds of trust. If we could lift the image of the kapia from the novel, and look at it as our new modern agora, this richly textured space, inhabited by diverse voices and faces – what would be, if any, its new features and principles? 

In a way the kapia is like a borderland, except that the very notion of a border is here conspicuously absent. Still, a kapia, a place on a bridge, is a threshold, a turning point, a place of challenge and transformation. Kapiais about horizons, not borders, and in times of crisis it provides new opportunities, openings to the future.Kapia is a lookout, and I do not mean a patrol or a guard, but a place from which one can see much more. Such lookouts used to be the harbor-cities of Gdansk, Odessa, Lubeck, or Cape Town, full of different flavors and voices. This is where foreign sailors came, with their different languages, foods, costumes, and customs. Akapia then, a site hosting various cultures, where one can see more and imagine more, is one that, though a man-made construction, may be indeed be called a natural site for dialogue. The idea of a kapia is not a ready-made possibility, but rather something people have to work on, to envision, and then to build. The kapia, with its space of appearance, makes performativity possible. 

In the course of a rather personal conversation, a friend from Warsaw recently reminded me of a remark by the Roman poet Quintus Ennius, who observed that he had more than one heart, as he spoke not one but three languages: Latin, Greek and Oscan. He meant that this made him at home with three different ways of comprehending the world, that each language opens for him a new way of knowing… What I like about this observation is that it does not suggest that one has to lose one’s own self in order to understand the other. On the other hand, it makes it easier to see oneself through the eyes of the other. (Or perhaps to try to see oneself in that way, as in reality this can never be fully achieved.) I have been thinking about this, as I am a person who over the past quarter of a century has grown a strong second heart – an American one – and I understand now that it is not possible to have my two hearts achieve a state of blissful harmony. Perhaps it would be easier to do some trading, and then to pretend that I am a new person, with no traces of my old self. Perhaps. 

But it is also possible to choose another – and I believe healthier, though not easier – route, and enter into a state of perpetual exchange, discussion, and dialogue that eventually leads to the achievement of a certain level of reciprocal understanding or mutual consideration between one’s two hearts. Only quite recently have I realized that virtually everything I have done since I left Poland has been an effort to bridge my experiences of the two worlds, to domesticate an unfamiliar stock of terms, and thus to expand my own – and my compatriots’, whether Poles or Americans – ways of knowing. 

Such mixing-and-matching efforts are no less taxing than the never fully successful effort to switch hearts and to assimilate; and I believe – as I am a strong advocate of such practice – that this captures my vision of multiculturalism more fully than do the multicultural policies of a liberal state that are aimed at reinforcing the borders between cultural groups. I’d like to argue that mixing and matching reduces the fear of the different other – so easy to exploit for political gain – and helps to build trust. I am talking now at the individual-personal level about meetings within oneself; but one can imagine ways in which these very much subject-centered answers could be transmitted into arrangements at the community level. On a far broader political level – not the individual/personal or community level – such an effort has been undertaken by the construction of the European Community, a place with gradually dissolving borders, with strong local self-governments, and a thriving variety of local cultures and perspectives opened up – at least theoretically – to each other. 

The other day I found on the website of the Borderland Center a lexicon of the builder of the Mostar bridge, a man named Neimar, an amazing effort by the Borderlanders to understand the space between the two towers of the bridge, the Tara and Halebija, as a very specific space expressing and embracing both diversity but also individuality; a space disclosing difference and at the same time a space suggestive of accord. I often think about the impossibility of translating terms conveying culture-specific categories, or about introducing to one’s own language terms from other cultures in their original form. I noticed such an initiative in the Polish version of Neimar’s Lexicon, where the names of people and things intimately linked to the place, like Czardak, Mostari, Usulija, Hajrudin, Czuprija, Kapija, and Jurodivy, were left as they are when used in their original context. Bridges, and above all kapias, help us to think in terms that – though initially alien, with their strange-sounding, difficult-to-pronounce names – make it possible for us to enter the space and have a sense of sharing in it. 

Kapias – like borderlands – are dynamic, and not because of the frequent shift of borders, but because of the flow of diverse peoples. I think of New York City as such a borderland kapia, with people on the move, a site of continuous re-positionings, transfers, and transformations, mirroring the other, echoing others’ voices, inserting foreign words, mixing languages, elevating remoteness, hardly noticing outlandish looks, discerning affinities and contradictions. Bakhtinian polyphony, multivoicedness, heteroglossia are the ruling principle here, though it has nothing to do with losing one’s capacity to maintain one’s own voice, while communicating with and living next to the other, and celebrating the mix. Kapias are sites that facilitate goodneighborhood, help to develop neighborliness, lessen borders (real or virtual), and extend the sense of home; sites of diversity where recognition takes place, and where it is granted naturally. A space where work has to be done. And this is the last point I want to return to: the principle of mixing. 

I am not the only one who questions the lingering power of the two-century-old ethno-national romantic paradigm developed in various parts of Europe in the age of empires. The paradigm was to mobilize cultural differences in the salvational service of national politics, more specifically in the task of gaining, or regaining, the status of a sovereign nation-state. I know about this, of course, since I am a grateful Pole whose country in 1918 was awarded by the western powers its own independent state; I know that the strategy of salvational culturalism, or salvational monoculturalism, was one of the few available roads to modernity for the subjected peoples of colonized eastern and southern Europe. And I know that this strategy assigned prominence to the unifying ideological core of what was considered unmistakably national Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Hungarian or Serbian traits and values. But, again, I am not the only one who has noticed that the lingering power of this paradigm today – at a time of construction of a larger European community – is responsible for spreading the fear of losing identity, for feeding the phobias about others who are interested in weakening them, and for mounting a new host of divisive politics, even within those nations-states that are ethnically homogeneous and have no minorities to speak of. 

Yet in such a context free of impurities, as in Poland, one has also been able to observe the fairly recent emergence of a substantial – and to many, surprising – counter-movement of active and creative exploration of a forgotten, multifaceted world, its erased diversity, silenced voices, vanished words, music gone… It is an effort to reinsert these back into the world they once belonged to, an effort that for many critics seems hopeless, forced, or artificial. And though the movement is of little meaning to those who are gone, who are not there anymore, who cannot speak for themselves, it is of real significance to those who live there, as it opens up – and not just symbolically – their long-locked communities, it extends their horizons, it dynamises them, and helps them to get to know. 

Those efforts are virtual kapias, and I know them from Poland, with a master initiative already launched some time ago by the Borderlands Center, a work that not only spans and melts the immediate borders, but also crosses the ocean. The peculiar thing about some of the recent efforts in my old country is that they force my compatriots to see the absence of the other, a potential participant in an encounter, and perhaps in a dialogue. One of the controversies surrounding the very popular annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow is that the thousands of young people who come to Krakow to take part in its events – both joyous and solemn, designed in a participatory, interactive mode – are almost exclusively Poles. The Jewish Krakow is gone, and what is sharply articulated there is that tangible presence of its absence. And I want to stress that presence. 

Another kapia, one that also actively brings back voices into the place they were once a part of, and that challenges the romantic national paradigm, was established by the people of “The Gate” in Lublin. “The Gate” is a real space, a physical 17th century building, and a few storeys high, which served as an elaborate entry to the Jewish part of town, at the foot of the Lublin castle. Once in a state of disrepair, it was given to a young theatre group that worked on it, restored it, and saved it from being dismantled. It is this group which now, using various art-mediated forms, facilitates encounters of the people of Lublin with their absent Jewish citizens. 

Bakhtin would have appreciated their efforts to return polyphony back to the town, and to serve as the proxy host for those who were rounded up, taken away, and murdered in a nearby concentration camp, Majdanek. In this case (as in the case of the Krakow events) the idea of hospitality takes on an entirely new meaning. Though the “Gate” people cannot speak with the voices of those who are absent, nor see themselves through the eyes of a modern Jewish population that was still thriving 70 years ago but no longer exists, their initiatives launched in Lublin are preparing the ground for a conversation. They are hospitable to a dialogue. 

Still, the idea that one could launch a dialogue in which one party to the exchange is absent, and is represented by somebody else (an idea that can be traced back to Socrates), strikes many as theatrical and artificial and therefore not honest. It strikes me – no matter how sentimental this may sound – that such a committed work, one involving the emotional, the ethical and the cognitive, might also be an effective way of growing that second heart, pluralizing perspectives, and paving a pathway to transformation. But, again, there is nothing easy about building the conditions for a dialogue to take place, and then entering into it. As you know, it often requires personal courage, and more often than not, knowing – which brings both shame and pain – creates a threshold for change. 

As a result of such efforts the superiority of cultural purity is challenged, and instead, what Anthony Appiah calls the case for contamination can be revealed. I myself have wondered whether Appiah’s argument for contamination (he describes himself as a mixture of Africa and Europe) resonates with our task in the 21st century, or whether his is a proposal for the kind of cultural syncretism that Leonard Swindler cautions us against. Appiah says: Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into contamination; change is rather a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from the rules and the rulers, in the conversation that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. 

Whether we call them borderlands, agoras, gates, or kapias, we know that they exist, and I’d like to recommend that we try to find them, or build them, as in the case of Café Europa. These small places of encounters, with all their local distinctiveness, are also places where mixing and contamination can occur, helping us to think in terms that are not ours, and facilitate a gradual but meaningful transformation. And this should fill us with hope.