When Franciszka talks with her friend, Gosia, about poetry, she is not sure who she really is, as she believes that only males can write poetry. The classmate reminds her of Wisława Szymborska, the Polish female writer who, in 1996, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, while the grandmother casually throws out the word “Sappho.” The protagonist, intrigued, goes to the library to check what it means. Guided by a librarian, she reads a book about Sappho and learns that she was a great ancient poet from Lesbos. Franciszka reads that the Greek woman had a daughter named Kleïs, opened a school for girls for and about whom she wrote poems, and was accused – as the book says – of “morbid feelings” towards them (for the main character, however, no love can be called “morbid”). The book also says that Sappho was in love with a man named Phaon and that, because of political intrigues, she was forced to leave Greece and escape to Sicily.* Franciszka is astonished by the story of the poet (the girl cannot believe that such a woman, as she was described by some, could have committed suicide). Soon, the grandmother gives her several yellowed pages with poems, “a letter” from Sappho. The main character of the novel reads the Ode to Aphrodite (Sappho Fragment 1) and a poem about Kleïs, “a beautiful child” with a “form like golden flowers”** (Sappho Fragment 132), and she links these two works to her own experiences. After that, Franciszka is sure that Sappho is her favorite female poet – but, asked about it by “the hag,” she realizes she only knows two of them.
This fragment of the novel can be seen as a first step in Franciszka’s initiation into the world of women’s poetry. Szymborska, a twentieth-century Polish female writer, represents the last link of the chain of poetesses, while Sappho, the metaphorical foundress of women’s writing and “mother” of later girls and women creating poems, is its first link. Between these two figures, as the girl discovers, lies an overwhelmingly great tradition of poetry written by women. The reference to Sappho seems to be particularly important, as this example makes the protagonist aware that women like her, writing poems, are nothing new, since such women lived thousands of years ago and were famous because of their achievements. By introducing her character to subsequent female poets from all around the world, Anna Piwkowska highlights the matrilineal genealogy of writing, which contrasts with the image of poetry as a patriarchal, male-only space. In a way, this corresponds to Clarisa Pinkola Estés’ description of young women gathering the bones of the old ones.*** This metaphorically symbolizes, as Katarzyna Slany explains, “[…] the active memory of experiences inscribed in a matrilineal line,” which serves to indicate that girls need to “[…] search for and reevaluate unwritten [but not only such ones – M. S.] stories of old women in order to interiorize female perspective and specific experience which disclose unnoticed, neglected or silenced facts, contexts, and meaning in women’s history.”**** This also has its reflection in Franciszka’s own life, as she discovers the family “herstory” and becomes a member of a now-reunited triad of women, along with her mother and grandmother, separated and angry with each other for years.
Classical antiquity is referred to in the book for the second time when Soraya, a refugee girl from Rwanda, joins Franciszka’s class. Children, after discussing the myth about Ariadne and Theseus, are told by their teacher to draw the Minotaur. One of them, Monika, suggests that they should portray Soraya instead of the monster. This episode of the novel, by making Monika compare a new student with a mythical creature, serves to indicate that the black girl is seen as the “Other” by some of the protagonist’s classmates. The act of symbolically monstering, or even dehumanizing Soraya, is the beginning of the process of alienating her. Franciszka and Maciek oppose these actions and make friends with this character, who later becomes more and more integrated into the class, which in turn may be interpreted as a form of accepting the “Other” by the community. Therefore, Piwkowska’s book is not only a novel about women and poetry, but also a one which supports multiculturalism and, at the same time, condemns racist behavior.
* Note that not everything that Franciszka reads about is confirmed by scholars.
** Sappho Fragment 132, as translated in: Diane J. Rayor, André Lardinois, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 78.
*** See: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992, 38.
**** Katarzyna Slany, “Rutka Joanny Fabickiej jako przykład postpamięciowej literatury dla dzieci” [Rutka by Joanna Fabicka as an Example of Post-Memory Children’s Literature], Maska 3(35) (2017): 81–94, 83. Quotation translated by Maciej Skowera. In the cited paper, Slany uses Estés’ concept when analyzing Joanna Fabicka’s novel Rutka (2016).
