Uncertainty, Embarrassment, Shame

Nominally, I’m part-Polish. My connection to the national identity is contingent. It’s slight.

It’s a breakable link to a litany of familial and national histories, or a rubber band pulled back by a thumb, away from an index finger. My band could snap in the opposite direction to Poland at any moment — landing far ahead, out of sight.

I’m ambivalent about my status as half-Polish, or quarter-Polish. It’s murky definitional territory. My Dad was born in the UK, to parents born in Poland. My Mum was born in the UK, to parents born in the UK. My Dad is British, in every conceivable sense of the word, but his case for halfness has more conviction. He can understand and speak the Polish language. I cannot.

Even quarterness is a generous designation, but it makes sense for me to be othered. I’m not like the friends I grew up with, whose Grandparents spoke in thick regional British accents — similar to my friends’, similar to mine. My Grandma is not like the Grandmothers of the friends I grew up with, who I have never known as “Grandma”, who to me has always been, and will always be, “Babcia.”

My ambivalence invites undesirable feelings in on a conveyor belt: uncertainty, embarrassment, shame, other. I yoyo between these feelings, controlled by circumstance.

*

I put my half- or quarter-Polishness under the self-interrogation lamp as Paula, my German wife, sits next to me in the waiting room of our local Life in the UK Test Centre. Paula has lived and worked in the UK for six years, been married to me for three, and has paid £50 to take a 40-minute, 24-question test about British traditions and customs. It is just one of many hoops she must jump through. The golden ticket? British citizenship.

The waiting room has the kind of nauseating minimalist interior design usually reserved for job centres and dentist offices. It’s all whites and greys. Chairs with too much padding that remain stiff because they’re infrequently sat on. Plastic smiles from staff and awkward eye contact with others waiting to take the test — or waiting for their loved ones to finish taking the test.

It’s a shared indoor social space that may as well have a maze of 10-foot partitions dividing it into compartments.

The moment Paula and I are in is indisputably British, from the Oasis song reaching us through tinny speakers to the stacks of leaflets decorated with Union Jacks, which glare at us from their portrait countertop holders. More often though, “British” is malleable, as it should be.

‘Paula Dibicki.’

Despite knowing it’s time to do the opposite, Paula clings to her official Life in the United Kingdom handbook like a life raft — dog-eared and with an assortment of colour-coded post-it notes spilling out of it.

I hold one hand out expectantly and place another on her shoulder. She sighs, relinquishes the life raft, and mimics my hand-to-shoulder gesture, then scoops me into a hug.

‘You’ll be fine. You know the book by heart,’ I whisper into her ear.

‘I know.’

‘Then why are you nervous?’

‘I don’t know.’

*

Paula goes in for her test. My thoughts knock and enter, not waiting for the knock to be validated with permission to enter. Because they enter en masse, my yoyoing between feelings becomes a juggling act.

I predict that dropping any of these thought pins will cause me to lose balance and slip on a series of banana skins, then fall through a trap door, then drop down several flights of stairs, then land at the bottom of a well, on a bed of snakes.

I’m uncertain of what my half or quarterness makes me. I’m uncertain of exactly how the world defines me, how I should define myself, and whether there’s any correlation between the two. I’m uncertain of whether exactitude is helpful. I’m uncertain of whether fluidity is more helpful.

I’m embarrassed that I don’t know more — a salve for my uncertainty. Knowing more about my dead Polish Grandparents might not tie me up with a bow or give me a concise identity label… but it would give me more to think about. It would give me more to say, when I want to talk about my Polishness though the words don’t come.

I’m ashamed that I didn’t ask Babcia more questions before it was too late. She was the untapped root of knowledge I left to grow old privately, in solitude, before joining her husband somewhere in the sky.

*

Paula’s otherness is more transparent than mine. The German aspects of her identity are nudged centre stage by her accent and grammar. Sometimes, her Germanness announces itself vociferously, brilliantly — in the clothes she wears or the allusions her conversation makes.

I code shift and begin to think about Paula. She is why I am here in this waiting room, and she is who must more imminently circumnavigate British borders and obstacles.

I stare at Paula’s Life in the United Kingdom handbook. Life in the United Kingdom stares back at me. I imagine the handbook growing legs, hopping down from Paula’s chair, and scurrying out of the room. Its legs would be comically small, comfortably fitting into tiny slippers. The book would put its middle finger up to us all on its way out. It would have comically small fingers. The book would sprint away from the Test Centre and never look back.

George Oliver is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. He has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature and is the author of Hybrid Novels: Post-postmodernism, Sincerity, and Race at the Turn of the 21st Century (Routledge, forthcoming). His short stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Brussels Review, Freshwater Literary Journal, grist, and The Interpreter’s House, and he was shortlisted for Ouen Press' 2019 Short Story Competition.