A Question of Identity
by Christian Kobluk
The topic of identity is extraordinarily thankless, and writing about it is almost crazy, especially if you don’t have any peers who can support you with their experiences and awareness. At the same time, this question is tactless enough that you cannot answer it deftly; I doubt if in general you can answer it properly at all. Maybe I am writing it only for myself and no one will gain any knowledge from this; in this situation, someone can ask if it’s even worth speaking about identity. But I know this book[1] would not be whole if I didn’t try to do this extra hard task, which is asking about identity and — what is even harder — trying to give an answer.
I cannot speak about it easily, with the grace of a talented ballerina or gifted pianist. I will walk on this minefield like a bull in a China shop. Moreover, I won’t finish the topic, which is multi-dimensional, still incomprehensible. A draft drawn by interrupted lines, awkward flounces, fingers worn by arthritis — this is how I can describe this essay. I can only hope it is enough.
Being bi-national and, I should probably say, bi-continental, I embrace the position of being an outsider on many levels. I have grown up in two different countries, but my birthplace, where I was educated and where I found my first friends, is Poland. One should know that Poland is a very monoethnic country, and almost everybody is white. That is why, I suppose, my way of thinking is strongly connected to this dilemma – what does it really mean to belong somewhere.
A Black European is in a thoroughly different situation than his African or American brother. Opposed to them — who may feel they are at home — he feels like a stranger. African Americans built the United States, co-created American culture (if something like this even exists); the role of Black people in Africa speaks for itself. But here, in Europe, someone who is Black is connected to Europe differently than Afro-Americans or Africans to their continents. In this is something absurd and mysterious — Black people foreknow Europe, Europe is present into their social memory as a torturer and coloniser, but at the same time they recognise European culture, art, or even political concepts like human rights. It can make one amazed, and leads to the question: how could this beautiful Europe be the same Europe with such a long history of oppression?
But we are supposed to ask about identity and search for answers. I believe identity is built on the collision of the Big Other with our individual feeling of identity. This quasi-dialectic concept is not trying to appear as a serious psychological theory in any sense; it’s just an observation of certain mechanisms existing in our societies. Although, that concept doesn’t mean identity has any structure: The Big Other, feeling of identity and — let’s say — real identity. It is a more processual vision of identity, meaning identity is not something stable, it’s a journey to understanding one’s own Me. At the same time, it isn’t about the possibility of absolute autocreation — identity is fluid, of course, but in this sense that no one can fully understand who they really are.
The notion of the Big Other appears for the first time, I believe, in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), a French psychiatrist, and Freud's commentator, states that the Big Other, simply put, is a part of symbolic order (law, language etc.), whose role is to control us.[2]
I believe The Big Other is also some kind of social structure. Society as The Big Other dictates a certain identity for us. The basic and first form of that is family relations. For example, the concept of the family is — except biological, although not always — some kind of a social construct. After all, it is also a legal, cultural or economic phenomenon. Perhaps teenage rebellion is the very first moment when we actively object to an imposed identity and start searching.
Thereafter, The Big Other in its different “incarnations” imposes on us different identities or elements called social roles: we are wives and husbands, employees and employers, left- or right-wingers and so on, and so on. That is probably what Simone de Beauvoir meant when she wrote: “One is not born but becomes a woman.” Often we agree with The Big Other because we are finding his despotic decrees ourselves, we see in them our individual feeling of identity. But occasionally, we have to face the question: “Am I really that as The Big Other says I am?”
Perhaps that is the biggest question which Afro-Europeans have to ask themselves. Even more often, this question is asked by descendants of Africa and Europe, children of whiteness and blackness. Their situation is a little bizarre, very ambiguous and tragically absurd. They are treated as bastards of Europe, unwanted, but still children of the Old Continent, and The Big Other is reminding them they are at the same time African. I know what I am saying because I am in this dubious situation myself.
It’s hard to understand this connection between me and Poland, with Polishness, with her culture and language, with her history — this is my legacy, but that exact legacy is rejecting me. How can I read In Desert and Wilderness by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Polish Nobel Prize Laureate, as anything other than as an attempt to convince the reader about the superiority of White over Black, Europe over Africa? But I do not have to run to extremes. When I am admiring paintings of Malczewski or Matejko, I am watching Wajda’s or Kieślowski’s movies, I see only white faces and I cannot find myself fully in that.
I cannot find myself fully in Europe either. Not in Dostoyevsky’s or Kafka’s novels, neither in the plays of Beckett or Bernhard, nor in Rembrandt’s or van Gogh’s paintings. I look in vain for my traces in Notre Dame in Paris, in the architecture of Utrecht, in the Danube flowing lazily through Budapest, in the busy streets of London. I know there is a part of me, I do feel it — but it is not all, it’s only part of the story.
And though I hear the rumble of steps in Barcelona and Vienna, I see Celtic crosses in Wrocław and Dresden, I listen to the racist voices from the House of Commons and Chamber of Deputies. Yes — I am their descendant, but I am treated as a bastard, one is still trying to take from me my part of the legacy.
Occasionally, I hear: “go back to Africa, you N*gga!”. But where exactly should I go? This is also my home — but it is a foreign home, unknown to me. The streets of Johannesburg or Bujumbura were never my playground, I never smelled Luandian air, I never learned in a Nairobian school. My mother did not read me African folktales to sleep, and I never knew African mythologies. Africa is a land from which I was eradicated and in which perhaps I will never put down my roots.
Sometimes also — even often — a friendly white fellow says: “it is so obvious you are a Pole!” They do not understand the difficulty of my situation. This, what is obvious to them, I feel I have to prove, rip away, fight for. My Polishness is different from theirs; it doesn’t mean one is better, and the other is worse. But I know I cannot always run away from that difference. This difference constitutes my identity, is an inherent part of it, which I have to understand going on; perhaps I am that difference. When I hear that sentence, sometimes I am ashamed of my own fear — a fear which was not my choice, something I was thrown into. But this white monoethnic Poleness is for me like a too tight outfit, in which I look foolish and in which I cannot breathe. I have to make my own — I know that for sure — but to achieve that I need the help of my peers.
I was always threatened by this confidence my friends had, their unquestioned identity. This firm feeling that they belong to some community, some nation, some country. The feeling that they have a home.
Somewhere in the middle of the fourth season of Atypical, Casey, the main character’s sister, opens up in front of his classmate:
We went to this meeting, me and Izzie, with the GSA at school, and she just felt they got her. She found a community there immediately. And I feel like she knows herself better. And I’m… I don’t. I feel like I’m not supposed to not know. I’ve just done all this work on myself, in my head, trying to figure out what I want (…). But I just feel like that’s not enough. Like, I feel like I need to be, you know, I need to do more, and say more, and be more certain, but I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be loud, and bold, and political about something, if I don’t even know how to talk about it yet. I mean, is there something wrong with me because I don’t know exactly who I am?
This scene moved me, a lot — before I liked Casey, perhaps she was my favourite character, but only then I felt I have identified myself with her, I am her. For a long time, I was like Casey. I was loud, and active, and political even, but at the same time I felt that was not enough, that something was missing. I still feel like this. And I still do not know who I am. Is there something wrong with me because of it?
It is a year after I heard Casey’s words for the first time. I still have goosebumps.
One of the hardest things I face every day as a Black man is being a Pole and European. I love Poland and I love Europe. My childhood was in Wrocław’s street and Utrecht’s Plompetorengracht. My first books were Andersen’s Folktales and Bible for Children. But I cannot, I must not reject Africa; I love her also, but this love is different. And — in order to take care of my Europeanness — I have to understand my bond with Africa.
For many of my fellow citizens, for The Big Other the fact I speak Polish perfectly does not mean I am not a N*gga. I am still a stranger. For a long time, I couldn’t face it. My identity was not waiting for me. I had to, I still have to, create it from the beginning.
I am not a N*gga — I am Black, I am Polish, I am African, I am European. And I know my struggle for identity has just begun.
[1] This essay is a part of my book “Notes of a Polish Negro,” which was originally published in Polish in November 2022. You can buy the English translation here: https://ridero.eu/pl/books/notes_of_a_polish_negro/.
[2] I am well aware that Lacanian psychoanalysts would say it is far more complicated, but to elaborate it properly, I should write another book to explain it.
Christian Kobluk is a Polish-Burundian essayist, public speaker and Human Rights Advisor in Tomasz Aniśko MP's Office (Polish Green Party), where he works with non-European refugees.