Spaces of nomadic figurations in Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk’s prose

The article in an attempt at reading two contemporary Polish women’s texts (Olga Tokarczuk’s Historie ostatnie [Last Histories] and Izabela Filipiak’s stories Korzenie [Roots]) in the perspective of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory. As analytical instruments there appear such notions as: rooting/uprooting, settling in/homelessness, desire/longing, kinship/affinity, and foremost genealogy. That last category, which, after Foucault (and Nietzsche) Braidotti perceives as a negative discourse ("continuity in discontinuity"), turns out to be a key to understanding the sense of the project of women’s cultural nomadism. The trope of the mother’s relation, which is here a metaphor of the past, with her daughter, explains in the text the ambivalence inscribed in the process of transfiguration of "a migrant" or "an outlaw" into a "nomad". A condition of transforming a negative sense of uprooting into a positive feeling (possible but not forced) of rooting is the persona’s creation of his/her own genealogy. It takes a form of a retrospective map of the places where we are not any more.