[Spotykach] Experience of East-West meetings

[Laure]

Hi Will! Good you got things started. :-)


You wrote:
One situation that comes to mind took shape at one one of the painfully
slow, multi-lingual assemblies at the meeting in Prague in 1994.

Laure: Let's please come back to the language question in a future mail
because it's quite important.

You wrote: For a few days no one from Poland had been at the meeting at all,
it seemed, but then a group turned up. Anna Niedzwiecka was one of them.
Unfortunately the people were very withdrawn and I don't remember them
making any contribution, verbally or otherwise (e.g. helping with cooking,
fetching water, etc.). I think something was really wrong with the "vibes"
there, but I never found out what. Several months later I saw a rather
negative report on the meeting in Mac pariadku, but my Polish is poor and my
memory even worse, so I never understood what it said. I can imagine that
there was some perception of predefined dominance - it would have been great
to understand how those people felt the dynamics to be.

Laure: I'll be speaking with her maybe today or tomorrow and I can ask her
about her impressions.

Although I don't know what the situation was there, I can say for sure that
there is a problem that some people from Poland have with some international
meetings --- and to tell the truth it is a little mysterious for me but it
is hard to get to the bottom of things as people are usually not forthcoming
about feelings.
The reason I can say that is that, well first, we know that for years, when
there were some international projects, people from here tended not to
engage in them, although this has changed somewhat. Secondly, we have had
now a number of international projects in Poland, most notably Anarchy 2003
and anti-border camps.

At Anarchy 2003, while there were of course people from Poland actively
taking part in meetings, and maybe even at some being dominant, in general,
most of the people remained completely passive to it. Most of the people
from Warsaw either came and just hung out and didn't come to any meetings or
didn't even come. Which is amazing for me because how many times to hundreds
of cool people come to this city.

I suspect that the problem is actually something a bit different. (I don't
want to say this in a way that might be considered offensive to such people.
How should I word it?) The scene here is more oriented, at least it tells
itself, on "action". So some people take a stance that sitting around and
talking about anything is bullshit. I happen to think that this is a bit of
a defensive reaction which has its roots in many complicated things. For
example, in the hierarchical nature of the Polish scene and in certain
complexes. What do I mean? About the hierarchy, I hope it is changing and
has changed in many places, but there was for a long time this tendency of
certain people to be dominant in meetings in the way that they verbal beat
people with other ideas, or perhaps with less theoretical background. I
think that because of this maybe some of these people reacted like, "oh,
bla, bla" and there developed a strong anti-intellectual strain. Further,
any intellectual pursuits and then treated like some form of exercise of
power. I can see that there is some partial reason in this when or if this
has been abused, but it usually tends to be a knee-jerk reaction and used
because maybe those people feel they have nothing to contribute on that
level.

This doesn't explain it completely. Some things, despite the fact I've lived
in Poland for over 5 years, are rather still mysterious for me. But one
thing that is clear is that even in Poland, there is only a small portion of
people ready to engage in any type of discussion whatsoever, which is
evidenced by what happens at events like the last FA meeting when a few
people stayed in the other room chatting the whole time and never showed up
in the discussion room. (Actually, FA would be a good example of something
where rather most people are engaged rather than not.) I just cannot
understand why they didn't come to discuss, but I know that those people are
that way and that they are rather typical of people around here.

Or another mysterious thing is what I've seen at some parties when I've had
foreign people. For example, if I have some foreign guests at my house and
one friend from Poland, even if he or she doesn't speak the language, we can
translate a bit and interact. When there is more than a couple of Polish
people though, some willl sit in another room together and there becomes
some sort of apartheid. Not everybody is like that, but it happens quite
often. It's quite alienating. Last time a couple of folks from the US
visited, we were at a party and something like that happened. And they
really wanted to meet some local people. So we went to the kitchen where the
locals had run and I was determined to try to integrate people - and it was
a total flop. We had to retreat and only one person, who didn't fit in the
clique either, showed up to chat. So I wanted to point out that there is
this sort of closedness amongst people that's quite common and a problem
with even starting to speak with foreigners that's highly illogical, but
some people have. I don't think this applies to Anna actually, which is
maybe why of the people present at the meeting you mentioned, you remember
her and not the others. But even so, it may be that in the company of other
people, even somebody who has fewer barriers can retreat.

So, I find it important to point out that, in east-west relations, it is not
always a west-dominant dynamic that causes a problem. I see very clearly a
problem stemming from some dynamic here.

It may also be that in Prague, people maybe weren't of the stereotypical
"action-faction" type of anarchists, in which case you may have been alien
to those people. A lot of the movement here 10 years ago was very young and
heavily based in the counterculture. I'm sorry to make overgeneralizations,
but some people like that have an integration problem.

On the other hand, there is some ways in which some discussions started from
western people can alienate eastern ones. I have to go to work now, but I'd
like to return with this later. I think that we had quite interesting
discussions on this in light of some experiences at the PGA meeting in
Belgrade. Unfortunately, I think that some valuable criticism got washed
over because of certain other issues in the background (like a split in the
Belgrade organizing group, conflicts with anarcho-syndicalists) and that
some people didn't want to consider these because they found them linked to
something else. But I'll come back with that side later.

Laure