“I was returned to the Polish border military, stripped naked, provided an American translator and released after 10 hours on the basis that I was eligible to apply for asylum in Poland.”
The Ghanian artist Joseph Awuah-Darko became insta-famous when he announced on social media that he was bipolar and planned to seek assisted suicide in the Netherlands. A few days later, he posted that he had launched “The Last Supper Project,” an open invitation to be a dinner guest at anyone’s house. A New York Times feature followed and after over 150 dinners (and no plan to commit suicide), Awuah-Darko reports from his new home, for now, in Poland.
Dear Poland, Am I Home?
BY JOSEPH AWUAH-DARKO
“Smacznego!” That’s what every gracious host in Poland says just before the first sip of żurek from a soft bread bowl or the first bite of pierogi on a four-hour intercity train ride. At least that’s been my experience. It partially means “bon appétit,” but it feels heavier here. A benediction. A reminder that you are being fed, seen, included.
Since my arrest, handcuffed and bewildered, at the German Polish border on July 22nd, I was returning to Amsterdam on a Flixbus and apprehended on the grounds that my Schengen visa had expired in April; I was declared an illegal alien there and then. The Germans border authority sent me to Łęknica where I was returned to the Polish border military, stripped naked, provided an American translator and released after 10 hours on the basis that I was eligible to apply for asylum in Poland. It was arguably one of the most traumatic ordeals I’ve faced in a while. But life continues.
I’ve been to more than twenty dinners across six Polish cities: Gdańsk, Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Wrocław, and Kraków. This is how my journey with The Last Supper Project of over 180 dinners has continued. It began last year on a December night at Trattoria Capolinea in Milan, after I had spiraled on Instagram during a manic episode, confronting my desire to disappear in the most public way possible. Anthony Bourdain was right when he said, “The journey changes you.” Mine has. And one thing I’ve learned along the way is that I unapologetically adore Polish food.
From the austere nostalgia of the chaotic milk bars I frequent with my Bydgoszcz gal-pal to the precise choreography of Michelin-starred spaces like Baba, run by Beata Śniechowska, I’ve tasted a complex country blossoming into its future. I’ve eaten zapiekanka and bigos, flaki and pyzy, leniwe dumplings and pierogi, all washed down with kompot in every imaginable hue. But great cognitive bias, my favorite thing of all these has to be the milk bar or bar mleczny; they are these fabulous government-subsidized eateries that offer very affordable, traditional Polish food. I frequent them to write and thoroughly enjoy them to meet friends who visit.
My heart, though, remains in Wrocław (vrot-swaaf); a place I endlessly mispronounced and did not know existed four months ago. Now I speak of it like a lover. It’s where I had my whiplashed courtship with Alexandré, my autistic Slavic-American fiancé, in a whirl of sweat and laughter while hunting for bronze gnomes under the July sun. We giggled at how hostile the cobblestones in Old Town were to his wheelchair and pressed on, drunk on light and absurdity. He’s back in the United States now, finishing Harvard, trying to make sense of a country where mass shootings are routine and lobbyists write the laws. I do not envy him entirely.
“I had spiraled on Instagram during a manic episode, confronting my desire to disappear in the most public way possible.”
When I announced my plan to pursue medically assisted death in Holland in December last year, I could not have imagined I’d end up here—alive, restless, in Poland. Life has a way of mocking your plans. My Schengen visa apparently expired in April. In July, during a Flixbus journey back to Amsterdam as a newly engaged person, I was detained under border controls introduced by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. After the Polish-border military took hold of me in Łęknica, I was granted the right to seek asylum as a “raging homosexual,” (the phrasing is mine) under European human rights protections. As a writer and an artist, I’m simply content that I am allowed to continue indulging in the things I find meaningful even in the most unsettling circumstances.
Ghana, my home, is not kind to people like me. It’s only LGBTQ+ center closed weeks after it opened in 2021. I was blackmailed in 2023 by a man in Accra who tried to weaponize my orientation; he took illegal nudes of my body while I was asleep after sex and threatened to share them. A proposed “family values” bill threatens to legalize conversion therapy and advocates for the arrest of LGBTQ allies. Even for someone raised in a relatively wealthy Catholic family, this is a cruelty that I have no interest in over-intellectualizing.
“As a visibly Black man, I am met with stoic stares in the train stations I frequent and hushed curiosity. The weight of being “elsewhere” in every room.”
So here I am having chosen this, a West African asylum seeker, eating my way through a central Eastern European nation still grappling with its own fractured history. As a visibly Black man, I am met with stoic stares in the train stations I frequent and hushed curiosity. The weight of being “elsewhere” in every room. And yet, there is something familiar about Poland’s tension between fear and freedom. At a dinner hosted by a gorgeous gay interracial Polish-Tanzanian couple, we spoke about this tension. They live in Katowice in Southern Poland. The Tanzanian man identifies as queer and shared harrowing stories of being spat on at a bus stop after a racial slur was hurled at him and being bullied mercilessly at university. He unraveled the complex intersection of being Black and gay in a country that does not always know what to do with either. The issue is that speaking about this reality without appearing to indulge in self-victimization is nearly impossible. I could see his Polish boyfriend trying to change the subject with the best of intentions.
Living here continues to be an exercise in de-centering myself in order to embrace that Poland was closed to the world until 1989 when communism fell. Prior to that the country was Soviet sealed behind the Iron Curtain. Travel, art, conversation—everything essentially monitored and rationed in Orwellian fashion. The idea of “elsewhere” came through smuggled music and Western records. It by no means excuses ignorance or moments of racism, but it somewhat explains them.
When the New York Times photographed me in Kraków for dinner #151, I told the photographer that “home” had always been a strange word for me. I am strange. My life is strange. There is a loneliness in being a perpetual dinner guest, a quiet isolation that follows even the most heartwarming meals. Later that evening, my host, Anna Maria, who lives with AuDHD, served me black spaghetti with shrimp. I felt something I hadn’t in months: the possibility of belonging. Poland, for all its contradictions, has been kind to me. Perhaps nothing in life is as arbitrary as we think. The architect who designed my Ghanaian grandmother’s home in Accra in the 1960s, a man who survived Auschwitz, was indeed Polish. That home, which holds some of my dearest childhood memories, had parquet floors. During dinner #156 in Poznań, I noticed the same floors in my host’s apartment. I had to hold back tears.
As I wait to see what becomes of my application for asylum, I continue to go to dinners. I spend my time writing. I spend even more time worrying about not writing. I paint. I bed rot. I talk to chefs. I carve sculptures of my bed-rotting out of soap. I indulge in 5pm negronis. I take longer and longer walks. I desperately search for normalcy and closeness where I can find it.
Maybe Poland will be home. Or maybe it already is.
