 | Dom Wydawniczy Tchu
Warsaw 2005
135 x 205
252 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-89782-12-X
rights available |
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Izabela FilipiakThe Book of Em
Excerpt
Filipiak’s first drama is a candid tale about the cultural elements that shape the identity of an individual. If I had to identify the most important of its many themes, I’d choose the relationship between sexual and national identity. But one thing at a time…
In 1907, thirty-one-year-old Maria Komornicka, a recognised but controversial writer, announces to her closest friends and relatives that she is a man – the incarnation of Piotr Włast, one of her mediaeval ancestors. This event and the further fortunes of the author of The Wronged are the basis for the drama and the point of departure for some thoughts on the Polish identity.
In terms of gender, Komornicka’s decision is an example how the so-called “third gender” is formed. She does not become a man from the biological point of view, but nor is she a woman. Her consciousness exists on the border, or rather in the space “in between” the status of Gentlemen and the status of Ladies (Filipiak uses Jacques Lacan’s metaphor for the wanderings of the sexual identity brilliantly in the scene where Komornicka and her mother are on their way to the psychiatric unit).
Next comes a confrontation between the “third gender” of The Changeling (as Komornicka calls herself) and the Polish national identity. In one scene the main male character, who is a politician, uses gender as a metaphor to characterise the individual features of nations. “There are male nations and female nations,” he says, then adds: “The Polish nation is female,” – in other words it is characterised by a submissive, emotional and volatile temperament etc. Meanwhile the clash between Komornicka’s gender change and the Politician’s way of thinking about nations shows that identity is by no means a given thing, but that it is formed by a complex process involving the interaction of factors such as family, political system, culture, and finally nation.
Izabela Filipiak aims to draw attention to the fact that the issue of Polish national identity is an open question, still worth consideration. Here she has asked herself whether or not Poland can have a “third gender” – an open, ambiguous gender that avoids cultural simplifications; this drama is an attempt to provide some answers to that question.
Igor Stokfiszewski
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