THE MORNING RADIO ANNOUNCMENT / Karolina Fedorowicz

 

 

'When I was 18, I bought a one-way ticket from Warsaw to Manchester. 

I didn’t come searching for money or a ‘western bubble lifestyle’ - I left because what was supposed to be my home never felt like one. My whole life I felt as if I was forced to live the lifetimes of the previous generations in a country stuck in a stand still, never moving forward and always, always looking back but somehow so eager to repeat all the mistakes so profoundly and loudly embedded in the history drenched in blood, so eager to go back to our world renowned status as the unfairly victimised - first, by the invading armies and now, the nonexistent enemy of what they call ‘westernisation’. We evolved from being a country who refused to stop fighting for freedom to one so violently fighting against it. 

 

And during my first year in England, I thought I found it, I found a place I could call home, even if it was just temporary - I found people that made it feel like one. I still think that if it wasn’t desperately trying to kick me out, it could have been one. 

But surprisingly, countries have the tendency to yearn for the past and take the unwilling with them. 

In the process of trying to understand it, I wrote a few bitter poems, and this three-part one is one of them. Both and only homes I’ve ever known are still stubbornly stuck in the second part of it - but in spite and because of everything I have experienced, I haven’t fully lost faith that one day, I’ll live to see us reach the third part.'