Returned to Sender

The package was sitting on the doormat, my name and address still visible beneath the labels accumulated during its journey – from one side of Warsaw to another, and back again.

Inside were two books. Both mine. Both signed. Both written out of two years of work, therapy, humiliation, memory, argument and pain. I had sent them, in effect, to myself via a Poland that did not want them.

They were not casual gifts.

I had written them sentence by sentence while my marriage collapsed, my family changed shape, money disappeared and the stories I had told about myself became steadily harder to sustain. They had been paid for in hours of therapy, sleepless nights, panic, shame and the slow excavation of things I had spent most of my life avoiding. Whatever their literary value, they had cost me something.

Five weeks earlier, I had wrapped them carefully, written the address and sent them across Warsaw.

Now they had returned.

There was no letter.

No explanation.

Nothing had been crossed out or angrily marked. No accusation had been added. The package had simply completed its journey and come back to the place from which it had departed.

There it sat. Returned to sender.

The fantasy did not end when she said, “I don’t love you.”

It did not end with unanswered messages or postponed meetings.

Fantasy survives language remarkably well. It feeds on ambiguity. Silence can always be converted into waiting. Distance can become caution. Refusal can be interpreted as fear. Another postponement can preserve the possibility of another beginning.

Fantasy requires almost nothing in order to continue.

A returned package is different.

The package said something language had failed to say: There is no exchange here.

That was the moment the fantasy collapsed.

There comes a point in every analysis when the question changes.

For years I asked why Poland would not let me in. Then I asked why I could not leave.

Both questions assumed the same thing: that Poland possessed something I needed, and that my task was either to obtain it or escape its absence.

That, I now suspect, was the fantasy.

Analysis reveals the structure that organises experience. The symptom is not merely a mistake, but a solution. Desire is not simply directed towards an object. It circles a lack that no object can finally repair.

My mistake was to imagine that the object was Poland.

It never was.

The object was the position that Poland allowed me to occupy.

For twenty years I have lived here as a foreigner. Not simply as someone born elsewhere, but as someone occupying a symbolic position: neither inside nor outside, close enough to observe but never close enough to belong.

I reported on Poland. I taught in Poland. I married twice into Polish families. I spent Polish Christmases and Polish summers. I learned the names of the dead, the dates of the uprisings, the rules of the family table and the emotional meaning of food. I spoke Polish badly enough to remain foreign and well enough to imagine that one day I might cease to be.

That day never came and never will. Nor, perhaps, could it.

This is not an accusation against Poland. Poland remains one of the European countries most determined to insist upon itself. It has resisted becoming culturally anonymous. Its language, Catholicism, geography, partitions, occupations and repeated losses of sovereignty have produced an intense concern with the boundary between inside and outside.

Identity is not merely assumed.

It is articulated, protected and defended.

The foreigner therefore performs a function.

He is useful precisely because he remains foreign.

He removes messages hidden inside newspapers and carries them elsewhere. He can be the bottle that carries the message. But not the message itself.

But that bestows a certain romantic status, the place from which Polishness can become visible to itself.

He provides the foreign gaze through which Poland can imagine how it appears beyond its borders.

But he does not become Polish.

I spent years interpreting this as a personal failure. I had not learned the language well enough. I had not understood the rules. I had been too confrontational, too English, too impatient, too unwilling to submit to hierarchy.

Some of that was true.

But it was not the whole truth.

The outsider is not excluded only because someone dislikes him. The outsider is required because every symbolic order produces an outside from which the inside can be distinguished.

The border does not merely surround the nation, it helps create it.

What I failed to recognise was that I had become attached not simply to Poland, but to the position it offered me.

The edge became my home.

That explains a great deal.

For most of my time here, I earned my living somewhere else. London. Germany. Bulgaria. Turkey. Egypt. International organisations. Foreign readers. Foreign editors. Whenever I entered Polish institutions directly, the same pattern tended to repeat itself. Invisible rules emerged. Hierarchies asserted themselves. Credentials were recognised and then suddenly questioned. Someone appeared whose authority depended upon my acknowledgement of it.

Sooner or later, I was standing outside again.

I blamed Poland. Sometimes I blamed particular people. I still do. Some were pompous, cowardly, dishonest or simply incompetent. Analysis does not oblige me to pretend otherwise.

Rarely did I ask the more difficult question:

Why did I repeatedly choose situations in which belonging would remain impossible?

Analysis eventually forces that question because repetition makes innocence difficult to sustain.

Two recent encounters exposed the structure more clearly than theory could.

The first concerned a well-known Polish television personality who wanted his autobiography translated into English.

He was already famous in Poland. His face was recognised. His stories belonged to a national circuit of television, gossip, scandal, suffering and redemption. Outside Poland, almost nobody knew who he was.

Yet English promised something.

The translation was not simply a commercial transaction between languages. English occupied the place of the Big Other: an imagined international authority capable of granting a second and supposedly more universal recognition.

The fantasy was not merely that English readers would buy the book. It was that translation itself might transform Polish recognition into recognition as such.

The West would look.

The West would understand.

The West would confirm that the local object possessed universal value.

Whether this recognition was likely to arrive was almost irrelevant. Desire was organised around its possibility.

I was useful because I could provide access to that gaze.

I could translate the Polish self into the language of the Other.

The second encounter was more painful because it revealed the same structure inside what I had imagined to be a relationship.

A woman whose writing I liked wanted her work translated into English.

I listened to her.

I listened to trauma, family history, illness, legal and political battles, the theatre of death, and a long, often narcissistic love affair with her own suffering. I listened to tortuous sexual histories, betrayals, humiliations and the endless retelling of pain.

I listened because I cared.

I listened because I desired her.

I listened because I believed that listening placed us inside an exchange.

When she wanted parts of her book translated, I translated them. I entered her idiom and attempted to carry it into mine. I read closely. I searched for rhythm, equivalence, voice and form. I treated her words seriously.

That direction of travel functioned perfectly.

Polish pain moved into English.

Her book entered my language.

I became translator, reader, witness and perhaps confessor.

Then I reversed the direction.

I sent her my books.

Not fragments. Not promises. The completed objects.

The things I had made from my own wreckage.

That was the package that returned and sat on my doormat.

That was when the asymmetry became undeniable.

I had imagined reciprocity where there was only function.

I had mistaken listening for exchange.

I had mistaken usefulness for intimacy.

I had mistaken my willingness to enter her symbolic world for evidence that she was willing to enter mine.

She was not.

The package did not tell me that she was cruel. It did not disclose some hidden truth about her personality. It did something worse.

It revealed the structure.

Within that structure, I was permitted to translate, interpret, reassure, witness and carry. I could mediate her passage towards another linguistic and symbolic order.

But I was not the author.

I was not the equal interlocutor.

I was not, whatever I had imagined, the object of desire.

Only when I attempted to reverse the exchange did the relation become legible.

The package said: There is no exchange here.

Fantasy does not simply hide reality. It provides the frame through which reality becomes bearable and coherent. It supplies intention where there may be none, reciprocity where none has been promised, and meaning where the structure itself remains indifferent.

I had not merely hoped for an exchange.

I had required one.

I had invested in the assumption that it existed because, without it, I would have had to confront my own position much earlier.

That is why the returned package broke me.

It did not merely represent rejection by a woman.

It destroyed the frame through which I had interpreted the relation.

The package was not a metaphor.

It was an object.

Cardboard, paper, glue, ink.

Something from the Real, sitting on the doormat, refusing interpretation.

It could not be seduced into ambiguity.

There was nothing left to decode.

For years, I thought experiences of this kind demonstrated something primarily about Poland.

Perhaps they do.

Poland often wants the foreign gaze while resisting the foreign interpretation. It wants to be translated, but retains the right to decide what the translation must mean. It asks to be recognised by an international order while defending a national idiom that is frequently suspicious of precisely that order.

This contradiction appears everywhere.

In politics, where Poland presents itself simultaneously as the truest European nation and as the victim of Europe.

In culture, where recognition abroad is treated as confirmation of national greatness, while foreign criticism is dismissed as ignorance or hostility.

In institutions, where fluency in English and proximity to the West provide status, but authority remains embedded in local hierarchies that outsiders are expected to respect without ever fully understanding.

The international version of Poland often remains organised by Poles speaking to other Poles about how Poland should appear internationally.

The foreigner may be invited to participate.

He is less often permitted to determine the idiom.

I encountered this repeatedly in journalism, universities, state institutions and television. The declared environment was international. The underlying symbolic order was not.

There were gatekeepers who had obtained degrees, offices, titles and institutional positions, and whose material and psychological security depended upon the recognition of rank. They could buy a small flat, take holidays on Western beaches and send their children to private schools to learn English. They could consume international modernity while maintaining a local hierarchy that remained rigid, Catholic, familial and often pre-modern in its understanding of authority.

My credentials were valuable when they decorated the institution.

They became troublesome when I behaved as though they entitled me to independence.

I found myself dismissed, unpaid, ignored or standing once again on the street, furious that the institution had failed to recognise what I believed myself to be.

The question is not whether my fury was justified.

The question is why I continued to seek recognition from structures whose inability to provide it had already been demonstrated.

Why did my desire repeatedly select objects that guaranteed resistance?

The unavailable woman.

The institution that would never fully accept me.

The publisher perpetually just out of reach.

The commission whose payment would finally rescue me.

These are not separate disappointments.

They occupy the same structural position.

The object changes.

The impossibility remains.

Poland was therefore not the cause.

It was the stage upon which my own libidinal economy became visible.

That does not absolve Poland. Analysis is not a moral washing machine. It does not transform exploitation into misunderstanding or hierarchy into cultural difference.

But it removes the comfort of believing that I was merely acted upon.

I participated.

The poverty that kept me in Poland was not only financial, but libidinal.

I told myself that I could not leave because I lacked money. Sometimes that was simply true. Poverty is not a metaphor when there are six złotys in the bank.

I blamed Poland for not allowing me to earn enough money to leave Poland.

The circularity should have been obvious.

As long as I believed that one more commission, one more relationship, one more publisher or one more act of recognition had to arrive before I could move, I did not have to confront the possibility that no final permission was coming.

Impossibility had become an investment.

There is enjoyment in remaining outside. Not pleasure, but the painful satisfaction obtained from the repetition of a position one consciously claims to hate.

The outsider is never fully judged because he never fully enters.

He does not have to surrender his exception.

Perhaps that is why I stayed.

Not because Poland trapped me.

Because Poland allowed me to inhabit a position that existed long before I arrived.

The returned package crossed all those borders.

Two books moved towards the object of desire and were returned to their point of origin.

There could hardly have been a more exact diagram.

Yet something changed when I picked them up.

The collapse of fantasy is not liberation in any cheerful sense. It is painful because fantasy was doing real work. It organised time. It sustained hope. It kept the object alive and postponed the encounter with lack.

When it collapsed, nothing appeared behind it.

No hidden love.

No final explanation.

Only the books.

Analysis does not end when we discover who we truly are. It does not end when we obtain the object, because the object was never capable of resolving the lack around which desire was organised.

It ends, perhaps, when we relinquish our investment in a particular impossibility.

It is not forgiveness. It is certainly not happiness. It is something harsher and quieter: the recognition that impossibility was not merely imposed upon me.

I was using it.

I was preserving it.

I can stop asking Poland to answer a question that was never really Poland’s.

I can stop asking unavailable people to prove that I exist.

The analysis ends where it began.

With a package on the doormat.

Two books returned from an impossible destination.

I picked up the package, opened it, repackaged the books and sent them to people who might want to read them.