Piotr Ibrahim Kalwas

Home

Excerpt

This is the fifth book written by Kalwas, who is unique in that he is a Polish writer and a Muslim, and it is different from his previous work. "Salaam", "Time", "The Door" and "Mystic Race" were novels about searching, about journeys through Africa and India, which were also expeditions into his very being, helping to gain self-knowledge. In contrast Home is a tale about establishing roots, about adapting to a place. About two years ago Kalwas moved out of Warsaw to base himself permanently in Alexandria in Egypt. It is Alexandria that is the main subject of the novel. So what led the writer to move home? It was his growing disillusionment with the consumerist, increasingly materialistic West. Kalwas has frequently focused on this theme in his writing; in "Home" you can also find some very bitter passages concerning Europe and Poland, but they are not central to this book. I would describe this book as a series of reflections on getting to know a city and growing to be part of it; reflections which have a very individual character and are completely different from the travel writing genre, which has recently been so popular in Polish literature.
So what sets Kalwas’s writing apart and how is it different? The author writes: “walking around and looking - that is my work.” The point is that he notices things, which are generally missed altogether by other people: he watches a woman, who, for no reason we know of, spends her time standing on the beach day after day; he observes ants wandering along the walls of the mosque; he observes the daily rituals of people living in the neighbourhood; he tries to solve the puzzle of the mysterious, fluorescent arrows on the wall. In this way he creates his own personal view of Alexandria, the place which he has chosen and come to love. On the other hand, in Home the writer takes a very particular point of view, which is largely the result of his own paradoxical situation: he sees himself as a person “from and of many  places”, yet he tries to settle into one specific place. This leads to him describing the Alexandria of his imagination rather than the real city: roaming around the Egyptian city turns into wandering in time and space as the current reality  is interspersed with memories of communist Poland, numerous literary references (for example to the writer Edmond Jabès) and philosophical musings. It is unusual prose, but it is exceptionally beautiful in all its strangeness.

Robert Ostaszewski
Translated by Kasia Beresford

Piotr Kalwas (b. 1963) is a novelist, essayist and TV scriptwriter. In 2008 he decided to emigrate to Egypt and settle permanently in Alexandria with his family.