„Jeśli rozprężę wdrukowane kraty”. Borderlands-within-us as an interpretive category for Joanna Mueller’s trule

Abstract

In Joanna Mueller’s latest poetry volume, trule (2023), a discernible tension emerges between that which aspires to be individual and subjective and that which remains external and hegemonic. The categories of violence and refuge, solitude and being-together (‘feeling-together’), speech and muteness, along with a reflection on the very possibility of speaking up – the question of the actual possibility of confronting the successive discourses shaping our cognitive-linguistic fields – recur throughout the text. This article seeks to offer insights into the voices that emerge within the trule and into the relations between them. For its interpretation, the category of the borderland-within-us is proposed, seen not through the prism of a specific physical and historical space, but rather as an imaginary sphere of self-examination in which various orders of discourse intertwine, collide, and collapse. We should, therefore, consider it in its multiplicity, as plural borderlands-within-us, as demarcation lines between clashing narratives, as zones where our masks nest and words exceed their imposed meanings. These borderlands-within-us, as spaces of epistemic confusion and examination of the structures that govern our modes of expression and thought, thus become the very spaces of poetry. Primarily, they represent an unmediated encounter with the innermost aspects of life, an insight into the reality of the petite misère, only subsequently giving way to an effort to challenge the hegemonic.