Andrzej Chciuk: The Theme Of Identity Is A Problematic Issue In Poetry

Introduction:

Andrzej Chciuk migrated to Australia from France in 1951. He was a Polish. At the age of twenty in 1940, he was able to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland to France. From there he migrated to Australia. In Australia, he continued writing Poetry in the Polish Language along with working as a school teacher in Melbourne. In many of his poems, he talks about the cities and towns of his childhood. Lwow, Boryslaw and Drohobycz were the places where he grew up. They used to be Eastern Poland. When Chciuk was writing poetry in 1950 these parts of Poland had become parts of Soviet Ukraine. He was displaced, doubly displaced actually. On the one hand he himself was displaced and on the other hand, his homeland was displaced. As a displaced

Identity is a problematic issue. The theme of identity can be found in the poetry of different poets. Each poet brings out the problematic of identity. Identity is a multilayered issue/problematic issue. It dates back to Homer when he talks about the journey of Odysseus in the Iliad. In the episode when Odysseus talks to the one-eyed monster in that argument we can see that how going back to his land would give him the status that he has lost. He feels that without being in his land Ithaca he is nobody. Since then many poets have taken up the issue of identity in their poetry in different forms. For some identity is connected with the land for others identity is in wandering. Some of the poems of Andrzej Chciuk will be discussed in this paper from transnational aspect and this will show how the poet is connecting his identity to his land being a displaced person from his

He remembers the land where he learnt the Polish language. Lvovian is the land where he imbibed Polish and this is the land that he belongs to and a fool to say something otherwise. He asserts his relationship with his land Poland. Throughout his poems, he tries to have an assertion of his identity in looking for land that is his. He is not integrated into the society he lives in. Australia is not his home and his home Poland is taken away from him. He is in a limbo, caught up having lost his identity. Recovering the lost land would be recovering his identity. World War Two has changed the identity of the Poles and now they are displaced people living as immigrants in foreign lands. A new identity is forced upon them. As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem THE SLAVE IN THE DISMAL SWAMP explains that identity can be forced upon people. One may not get the identity one wants but it is the others that force it upon you. The slave in the dismal swamp is a person like many other blacks that are removed from their homeland Africa and taken to Americas as slaves. From free people, they have become slaves. In the same way Chciuk’s poem ‘Of Lwow’s Balak’ shows that the Poles’ identity has been taken away from them by the occupants. The British and other Europeans took away the identity of the Africans and the Nazis and the Soviets have taken away the identity of the Poles from them but they remember their