There She Goes, My Beautiful World: A Memoir by Gosia Buzzanca

Desmond Clifford

Whenever I meet a Welsh person whose life journey began somewhere else, I’m curious to know where they started and how they got here.

In my experience most people are happy to talk about their journey, if asked in the right way, although a couple have been offended or else just don’t want to engage about their past.

That’s fair enough, and sometimes people have good grounds for being suspicious.

In the UK Polish people are the largest ethnic group and the Polish language is the third most spoken in Britain after English and Welsh (though Welsh is complicated by counting methodology).

Even after Brexit there are around 700,000 people of Polish origin in Britain of whom around 25,000 live in Wales. Ironically, the UK was among the first countries to allow east European migrants to join the workforce after they acceded to the EU; most EU countries imposed a seven-year delay.

Britain was a good place to come; before the banking crisis the economy boomed like never before.

Twenty years ago, a Polish doctor could earn much more – measured in “purchasing power parity” – working in a British petrol station than they could practicing medicine at home.

Since its EU accession, Poland has got continuously richer and may well surpass Britain before too long (our economy, sadly, is going in the other direction – and we all know why).

Until now, Polish people in Wales have largely lacked a literary voice.

Gosia Buzzanca gives us her story. It’s not necessarily representative, it’s individual, as all memoirs must be, but confronts elements common to many migrants. She is from Poznan (an interesting and historic town, near the German border) but couldn’t wait to get away.

After experiencing early life traumas, she followed her brothers, and thousands of other Poles, to Britain. Circumstances eventually brought her to Cardiff, then Barry.

Unsuitable relationships played a part in her early life as she adjusted to the human adventure of hormones and the dilemma of what the heck to do with them. She became embroiled in an unsuitable exploitative relationship with an older man, not illegal, it seems, but contributing to a sense of Poland as being a place she wants to leave behind.

Casual jobs

She supported herself in Britain, as immigrants most often do, through a succession of casual jobs in cafes and offices. She undertook courses in creative writing and this book, her memoir of childhood in Poland and arrival in Wales, and making sense of her life, is the fruit of her passion.

The later part of the book is a kind of love letter to Ty Newydd, the former home of Lloyd George and now the National Writing Centre of Wales, at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, where she found her tribe and a safe spot.

It was time well spent because she is an excellent writer. She arrived in Britain with only an uncertain grasp of English, but her written English is superb.  Like her compatriot Joseph Conrad, who visited Cardiff as a merchant sailor, she writes in an acquired second language (English was Conrad’s third of fourth after Polish and French, and likely Russian too).

There is nothing in this book which would identify its author as anything other than a native English speaker. Amazing.

The accompanying blurb with the book describes Gosia as leaving Poland aged nineteen “in search of a bigger life” – and finds Barry!  There’s the thing, sometimes the bigger life is just a matter of going elsewhere and opening new doors – a life of your choice, to the extent that’s possible, rather than the one allotted to you at birth. Migration is part movement and part imagination.

Rooted

Gosia tried writing in English to explore whether writing would come to her as naturally as it did in Polish. She says, “It was almost as if writing turned out to be language-less. It felt rooted in a place or spirit of its own rather than one created of human-made marks.”

This is interesting territory. How close is literature to the language through which life was experienced by the author?

Nabokov wrote the first half of his literary output in Russian and the second half in English, reflecting shifting geographies as he fled Russia after the revolution. Gosia describes her life lived in Poland then in Britain, but her adult experience has been lived substantially lived through English.

RS Thomas learned Welsh and yearned to write poetry in it, but was absolutely adamant that he couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of language proficiency so much as feelings which, as a non-native Welsh speaker, he didn’t feel able to inhabit or access. He did, though, write his memoir (Neb) only in Welsh.  It’s a complicated topic.

Part of the memoir is written in the first person and part in the third person, so she uses the construction “at her desk in the library”, as if describing someone else.

Occasionally she deploys the second person, “if you get out, you will probably never return.” It sounds like a recipe for untidiness, but it works well.  It’s clear throughout that she’s talking about herself, but the shifting viewpoint introduces a measure of, if not objectivity, then of appraisal and perspective.

I like memoir as a form. It’s inexhaustible as a source and everyone’s story has drama and complexity.  I sometimes wonder why writers bother confecting novels when real life awaits.

Interesting questions arise as to the difference between them, which is a lot narrower than it looks.  There’s an argument to say that memoir is a type of fiction even where it describes events which are “real” in the mind of the writer.

Events may be real but the memory of them is personal, necessarily subjective and by no means an objective truth. At best, memoirs can only be an effort at truth – and the effort is what’s compelling.

There’s equally a sense in which a novel can relate stronger truths than autobiography. We learn more – I contend – about James Joyce from Ulysses, and Emily Bronte from Wuthering Heights, than we would from a memoir or biography.

The intermediate life of the migrant is tough, and the challenges are laid out here.

Just as migrants move towards something, so they’re also moving away from something.

Social connections

The newly-arrived have no social connections, no context, their language may be limited or conspicuous; work, accommodation and money are often difficult. The past and the future in any life have to be accommodated but in the migrant’s case are often compartmentalised and difficult to connect.

My parents were migrants are suffered – I think “suffered” is the right word – in that way.

Happily for Gosia Buzzanca, she found writing, which is what makes her happy. She has a real talent for it. Her writing has depth and literary sensibility.  Some episodes in her life are painful to relate though not painful to read. She has found a home in Wales, in Barry, and I hope this book marks the beginning of a long contribution to Wales’ literature.

Maybe a Polish version might be possible sometime? I wonder what a Polish audience would make of her experience and the little, literary country she has embraced and now calls home?

There She Goes My Beautiful World: A Memoir by Gosia Buzzanca is published by Calon and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.