Soroczka

According to Polish folk tradition, the community of family and neighbours would gather in a dead person’s house during the night before the funeral. It was called the empty night. The participants would stand around white-covered tables with a crucifix and candles, say the rosary and loudly sing the many stanzas of long mourning songs. There are areas where this tradition is still maintained, and it became Angelika Kuźniak’s point of departure for writing the book: affecting literary reportage about preparing for death and attempts at planning it. The author gives space mainly to voices of women from rural communities, who talk about how they want to leave this world. Kuźniak chose a theme which, in our fun-focused civilisation, might seem shocking.

‘When Antosiowa told me you wanted to come, I really thought you’re an odd bird: what young person wants to talk about death now, and look at burial clothes?’ This is how they react, but they gladly speak about how they buried their loved ones and how they want to be buried themselves, who will come to the funeral, what they will bring, how they imagine the event. The women show the clothes they have prepared, talk about how they’ve selected them; they bring up anecdotes and funeral customs (knocking the coffin against the door three times when it’s being carried out), speak about their life, their family and friends. All this serves to reveal beliefs, superstitions (if a body remains unburied on a Sunday, someone else in the family will die soon), dreams, folk notions about death: a mixture of Catholic teachings and a plethora of traditional beliefs.

The author preserves the original style of the speakers’ dialectal expression, and her interlocutors unveil an extraordinary, obscure part of Polish rural culture. The material, gathered over the space of more than ten years, accustoms the reader to death, shows how alien our culture of origin is to us today, and how difficult to understand we find it.