The bazaar of Leiden is a constant marvel for me, every Saturday. For an Arab fruttivendolo who, being asked by a Dutch woman how much for a little branch of ginger root, answers: It is a gift from me, with such a caliphal smile as if he was just offering her the Queen of Sheba's very best necklace. For the happiness of an elderly Guinean buying fish for nearly 30 euro. He picks his sardines one by one from the container, till his bag is full to burst. And other fishes as well. I imagine what a Guinean soup of apocalyptic proportions he will cook. Cut off the heads?, the fisherman asks. No, of course not. If one thing I remember from West African usages, eating the meat of fish heads is considered the privilege dos mais velhos. 
I buy my two kilos of rode poon, and, with the proud gesture of a white woman who of hanger in Africa knows from books, I ask for the heads to be removed, as well as the skins. I also buy grapes, and Lebanese pita bread, the authentic. As always, the florist's bank is a big puzzle. Lilies stand as tall and proud as Christian martyrs. But perhaps I don't have a suitable jar to keep them. Finally, I buy those big, thick roses. This is one of the last varieties that still conserve the subtle aroma proper to their kind. The French sometimes make them come by air from Mt Kenya. But I hope these ones I bough are local, splendid as they are with the pearls of a sudden shower that caught me on my way. 
With a tall flute of white wine, as if taken from an old Dutch painting, I choke with beauty and happiness and blessing of this place. God, I thank Thy for the provisions of my life, and that I am not the head of any Portuguese & Lusophone Studies department at the hour of demise, but Thy refugee in this swamp, as Thou brought Thy righteous out of Sodom.



*Kanfurbat, also spelled kanfúrbat (Kriol) or kanfúrbate (Portuguese), is a Guinean soup, seasoned with lemon and piri-piri, cooked either with fish or, alternatively, with any other source of proteins available, such as lungs or even sheep's or goat's head and eyes. In an article that is currently submitted to "Teksty Drugie", I discuss to what degree this expression, originating from an unidentified West African vernacular, can be treated as a cultural key word brought into the shared thesaurus of global literary expression. In my reading, it is supposed to be connotative of humble food obtained at the time of scarcity, the very frontier of hunger, just as it is frequently experienced by the peoples of Guinea-Bissau. Here, I re-employ the word to connote the complex, bitter-sweet taste of a modest, yet so prodigious abundance in the mouth of a refugee. That is something to choke with happiness, just as I choke with my European wine right now. 

I recon it is not the wrong mountain that I climbed; I climbed the mountain that was there to be climbed, given my biographical circumstances. I climbed it to the top, and I came all the way down to climb this other mountain that is here.
Yesterday I talked to an old Dutch guy who taught Arabic at Oxford for the best part of his life. I asked him what choices he made when he was young. There was no wrong mountain. I studied Palestinian poets in the 1970s, he said, and then I felt attracted by the old stories of Baghdad. This is something that would happen to anybody, I think. I would probably go very similar way. Overall, his story was, to my mind, striking with simplicity. He used to translate, including my favourite untranslatable, Ibn al-Farid. He was competent, very competent, I presume, and made an acknowledgeable part of the academic corporation.
As I think about it, my own life appears to me as desperately filled with overcompensation. I try to find similar academic biographies, people who went the same way as mine. Certainly, there are: Mircea Eliade, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben. People who started studying medieval poetry and ended up writing theories of the Holocaust and teaching seminars on Paul's apostolic letters. That seems truly my style, in a way. The only difference, perhaps, is that he taught it in Greek, I mean, based on a close reading of the Greek source text. But after all, it is this way that I'm coming. This is why I'm in Leiden, and I asked to participate in Arabic close reading sessions. Never pretended to buy it cheap. 

Overall, when I observe those biographies and lifestyles of the top of the planet, I notice one crucial difference: they respire simplicity, clarity and order where my life seems to be chaotic and overloaded. It is like the difference between my own space and the interiors of the houses that I penetrate with the glance during my evening wanderings through Leiden. As rich as they are, they seem to have little stuff. The richer they are, the emptier the rooms where they live, less stuff they appear to possess. I feel it myself. That I have more than enough, even if I hardly brought to the Netherlands a half, or a third of all my possessions. Also intellectually, I start to feel less omnivorous. Hard to explain. I don't mean I've lost my love for all the tribes of the world. I start to feel that I can do with less. But probably, in reality, it doesn't mean less items, it only means neater order. It is like having a library instead of a profusion of books. This is what I missed since my underclass childhood; this is the Gewimmel, perhaps, that I really must see. 

I start to have worries about future. Perhaps because the term of contract for renting my apartment is closer. Overall, I see less and less possibilities to come back to Poland. And it's no longer about what I fancy, it is about survival. I am afraid of not finding a doctor to take care of me when I really need; in fact, I was afraid of this all my life. Only now it becomes more palpable, more probable that I might have cancer or something. I'm worried because there was a Monumentendag yesterday, and I just cannot stand all the beauty of the place where I am. And this is what makes me worried; I cannot face the perspective of leaving it. But on the other hand, how could this beauty be really mine?
I'm worried about the prices of those little housies in the centre of Leiden. Perhaps I will have to resign myself to living in a featureless apartment, as I did all my life, and stop aspiring for more. Oh, but on the other hand, if I do, the money would accumulate in the predictable future (if actually there is a future to predict of me as a Leiden University professor). I would never be happy and glad with any apartment. 
All this is coping with incertitude, facing my uncertain future and worried how I will cope with Leiden real estate market.
And even more worried how I will cope with my own work. What I progressively learn in Leiden is that I should stop the habit I acquired early in my career - that of participating. That of adopting to external research agendas, such as calls for papers or all sorts of collective projects. I should follow my own path and not to move even one step beyond it, no matter what is proposed to me. Because those external proposals constantly draw me back, just as that idea of discussing, in "Konteksty Kultury", the postcolonial theory as a sort of program for 2020. By Jove! We have war in Saudi Arabia!
Yes, we have a dictatorship in Poland and a war in Saudi Arabia. Both statements are somehow exaggerated of course, but both may come uncomfortably true any day of these. For the moment, I have more faith in Arabian cunning than Polish love of freedom. I give some 60% chance of succeeding to the former and only a cautious 2% chance to the latter (I mean, I give 2% by caution, otherwise I would say its 0,2%; but I recognise the power of constantly surprising us, inherent to History). Most probably, I believe, there will be nothing out of it in Saudi Arabia, and nothing in Poland. No event. But this uneventfulness will mean something else in both cases, lead to quite different consequences. Be that as it may, the time is to stop frolicking around. What just ended may have been our last summer of peace. 
There is no more space to be silly or inefficient. I see only one practicable way to solve my problems - becoming a visible intellectual, sort of new Agamben just to put it shortly. Start to sell well. Everything else is just frolicking around. I should probably make a full stop in all accidental research, write nothing at all except for the development of my theory. Put it as boldly, as prominently as I find it feasible. 

Gosh, I can't believe this. I had such a realistic dream. Or nightmare? That I was back in Kraków, proposing them to make a serious department of Portuguese & Lusophone studies.
The old country is as good as lost now. The party is even more popular in the opinion pulls. I'm striving to understand what is the reason why the History happens. How is it possible that someone comes and says openly he will wipe away whatever happened in Poland since 1990 to 2015, just wipe it clean -- and he is on the shortest way to win the elections. For a long time, I thought it is an invisible Russian invasion, that they obviously strive to reconquer the satellite territories they had lost in 1989. Now I am no longer sure about it. Well, this is also something I believed for a long time, to be honest: that the change that happens is fully autonomous. We just spontaneously return to the orbit of the civilisation where we belong. Nothing but Huntington made real. We had received Christianity from the Czechs, and that makes us use Latin script, but it doesn't mean we have ever been Western Europeans. And certainly, we have never been on the top of the planet. Never had colonial empires, and have no excellent universities now. These facts are connected. Excellent university is produced by colonial knowledge, by the strive to power that colonial knowledge gives. That's the urge of exploration. It creates a relationship with the world. While in Poland, national culture is the only thing that really matters. And no one would understand why I feel what I feel every time I pass in front of that decent professorial house, painted in white, with the words "Snouck Hurgronje" written on the lintel of the door. What kind of binding obligation it creates for me. 
I have felt truly attached to the Jagiellonian University; it explains why I still have that kind of dreams (nightmares), even now, when the cosmic order returns to its eternal configuration and the gravity pulls us back to the old orbit. But I was an alien element there, and it is not realistic to expect they will ever ask me to organise their department of Portuguese & Lusophone studies, no matter what roads the History takes. Now I feel truly attached to the University of Leiden, that little piece of swamp that deserves so well to be defended. My presence here deserves to be defended. As one of Europe's hidden treasures. 
I don't know where I've read that anecdote dating back from 1914, about an old lady asking an Oxford student why he is not on the front defending the civilisation. -- Dear Madam, the student answered, I am the civilisation they strive to defend.

I've come down to the empty drawer. Practically all my papers are clean, finished and published (or submitted). From now on, all my work is present, updated, based on my current life, not any sort of experience coming from behind. It is solidly planted in the fertile ground of the western academia.
Is that so?
Yes, of course, many ideas, many unfulfilled aspirations come from behind. But the real question is to get rid of their negative balance, of that what they never managed to be. And if they never managed, how could they start to be now? This is the only mechanism how they kept me in the outskirts of what I call real academic life. This is why they were to be qualified as bad habits. 
The best part of all this experience is to see how I am growing, passing through stages. Perhaps I do enjoy the ride, this adventure of meeting and getting to know diverse academic contexts, just as Bulgaria and Roumania now. I feel tempted to go for a conference to Lithuania. I have never been in any of those Baltic countries. 
Perhaps because I feel I will still have time to enjoy Oxford, till the point of getting sick of it. I want to have this full scale academic experience. To understand the scale of real competence, of a real achievement. To fathom the difference between what is mediocrity and what is something more. 
It is a curious sensation -- to reach this recognition of the fact that I was mediocre myself. I used to see myself as someone exceptional since my childhood, and for sure it gave me strength to find myself where I am now. Otherwise I would never reach this point; I couldn't have been more humble than I was. Only now I can permit myself to see my own insufficiency, all those invisible links between myself, between what I agreed to interiorise, and my mediocre contexts. There is a moving frontier of my mediocrity. Now I feel that more or less everything I wrote before 2016 was in a way participating in that minor reality I have left behind. Only my writings from 2016 on are really decent, not shameful, representative of myself. That's what I feel.
I had to do this enormous amount of more or less worthless work to be here where I am now. Nothing came to me cheaply. I'm ready to start seriously scratching items from my official list of publications, to condemn them to damnatio memoriae. Which, in the Polish context, I suppose, is very easy to obtain. In any case, no one ever reads these research publications we used to produce. The only profit of them is to make the ladder I need for my constant climbing higher and higher.  

And what do I say to what happened today, in the very city where I was born?
I only say this, these few verses from a 16th-century song:

In Godes vrees te leven
Heb ick altyt betracht,
Daerom ben ick verdreven
Om Landt, om Luyd ghebracht.
Maer God sal mij regeren
Als een goed Instrument,
Dat ick zal wederkeeren
In mijnen Regiment.

I saw an old, splendidly sculpted cupboard in massive walnut wood; they merely ask 475 euro for it, and probably would be more than happy to get rid of that ancient stuff, so Nederlandish that I suppose the very sight of it makes everyone else vomit. But I hope to buy it for my new house, I'm interested in buying a past. I have been unjustly evicted from my land, from my university. But every single bit of my symbolic domain shall be restored to me. 

That's it. There is nothing else to add. No more tears to waste. 

Another quiet, beautiful day in Leiden, full of sun and rain and the smell of trees and the earth. Yes, I did a bit of the paper for Bulgaria, and then I started new things, those from my project. I don't know where I will publish them, but I will chose a decent journal in western Europe, perhaps a German one. There is no more time to go circling around. It's time for habits of seriousness, maturity. For being who I really am.