Nine or ten of us were sitting in a semicircle
on folding chairs, beer bottles in hand, glad that it wasn't any one of
us who had the responsibility of keeping the 30-pound pig turning over
the coals under the blazing Texas sun. That obligation belonged to the
young boys.
The conversation was about two movies with Gypsy characters that had
shown in 1996 in cinemas all across America: the adaptation of Stephen
King's Thinner and Walt Disney's cartoon version of The Hunchback
of Notre Dame. The responses were varied. One person was angry and
suggested that legal action should be taken against the hurtful stereotyping.
He wanted to know whether they'd dare make such films about any other minority
population. Someone else said it wasn't worth worrying about, because the
characters depicted were nothing at all like real Gypsies. Someone else
said he enjoyed both films simply as entertainment and didn't make a connection
with any experience in his own life. Overall, the older men were less upset
by the films than the younger men. Their point was that Romani life was
so far removed from that of the gadje (non-Roma) that it didn't
matter what they thought. Several of the younger men disagreed.
The discussion gradually turned to the question of where we had originally
come from, our status as a "legitimate" ethnic minority, and whether we
were really recognized as such by the U.S. government. And we talked about
Roma as a world population and about numbers. One estimate of 40 million
was proposed, which pleased everybody, but when it came to what the total
was for America, the generally acknowledged figure of about 1 million was
challenged on the grounds that not everybody really qualified, because
a good many of those people called Gypsies were not actually Roma
but Bayash-a cover-term for the various non-Romani-speaking American
groups, including the Romanichals, the Bashalde, and the
Romungre,
besides the actual Bayash themselves.
The talk at that slava (saint's day feast) in May highlighted
some anomalies: first, that there was no single, acceptable designation
that served to include all populations who define themselves as Romani
except a foreign-and for some people a pejorative-"Gypsy"; second, while
all Roma were Gypsies, not all Gypsies were Roma; and third, that when
it came to estimating how many of us there were globally, those considerations
didn't matter if it made us appear to be more numerous. But what particularly
stuck in my mind was the pinpointed great dissimilarity between the lowercase
"gypsy" of Hollywood and actual Romani people and its repercussions in
terms of perceptions of identity.
Prejudice Everywhere
The understanding of the Gypsy identity among the
non-Roma is vague, which usually results in prejudice. There are many reasons
for that: the association of Roma with the Islamic takeover of parts of
the Christian world; color prejudice, specifically the association of darkness
with sin; the exclusionary nature of Romani culture, which does not encourage
intimacy with non-Roma and creates suspicion on the part of those excluded;
fortune-telling, which inspired fear but had to be relied upon as a means
of livelihood in response to legislation curtailing Romani movement and
choice of occupation; the unchallenged function of the "gypsies" as a population
upon which mainstream notions of immorality and lawlessness can be projected
and thereby serve to define that mainstream's own boundaries; the fact
that Roma have no territorial, military, political, or economic strength
and are therefore easily targetable as scapegoats because they cannot retaliate;
and the fact that the "gypsy" persona has an-again unchallenged-ongoing
function as a symbol of a simpler, freer time, a representation that is
becoming more and more attractive in an increasingly complex and regimented
world.
Various of these factors have combined over the centuries and in different
places to become part of the fabric of the Western world view. People who
never met a Gypsy in their lives are nevertheless able to provide a fairly
detailed picture of how they think Gypsies look and how they live. Their
mental image, partly negative and partly romantic but mostly inaccurate,
stems
from a Romani identity that has become so institutionalized in Western
tradition that it has become part of Western cultural heritage. The racism
directed at Romani populations is intrinsically a part of that heritage
and therefore is not recognized for what it is. Just as no one would question
the fear of trolls or goblins or argue for their rights, the fear of Gypsies
likewise goes unchallenged. And although trolls and goblins are never encountered
and the six million or so Roma throughout Central and Eastern Europe are
highly visible, it is still the storybook and film Gypsy image-not the
real population-that people think of.
This re-identification of Gypsies as "images" in the cultural fabric
is best illustrated by an interaction between Diane Tong, a scholar visiting
Romani populations in the Thessaloniki area of Greece and a local Greek
Orthodox priest. After having rallied against racial intolerance in the
United States, the priest brushed aside Tong's remark that Greece was similarly
bigoted toward its Romani minority by saying that prejudice toward Roma
in Greece didn't count; it was a different thing entirely, because "they
were only Gypsies." This kind of shocking moral insensitivity on the part
of a representative of a church may surprise us, but it is nothing new.
The Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches legislated against Roma
for centuries; the priest was merely reiterating an attitude rooted in
tradition.
Once ideas become institutionalized, they are seldom
challenged, and misinformation can easily become the conventional wisdom.
This is particularly true in the case of Roma, about whom the most bizarre
things have been written and presented as fact. These range from wild statements-such
as claims that Gypsies originated on the moon (or in Atlantis); that they
have an intrinsic horror of water and washing; or that they have no concept
of obligation or danger or ownership-to such self-serving ones as maintaining
that Gypsies don't feel pain; that they enjoyed slavery; or that they have
no interest in organization, education, or leadership. Jozsef Vekerdi,
the most frequently cited Hungarian "expert" on our people, has notoriously
relied on this conventional wisdom in his work. The beginning of his 1988
article on "the Gypsy problem" in his country (published in Hungarian Studies
Review) is highly illustrative:
The Gypsies' ancestors began leaving northwest India probably about
the seventh century AD. They are characterized as robbers, murderers, hangmen
and entertainers. These professions were prescribed for them by the rules
of the Hindu caste system. Thus they belonged to the so-called "wandering
criminal tribes" of India and were obliged to lead a parasitic way of life.
Among the numerous outcast groups, they occupied the lowest rung on the
social scale.
But the Romani origins assumed in it are quite wrong, and the time
of the exodus out of India is off by four centuries. His acceptance of
a false history is reflected in the scorn that characterizes his writings,
and one must wonder whether his scholarly approach would have been more
charitable had he known the true history of the Romani people. Racism is
everywhere, but when it is expressed in the academic domain, to which policy-makers
turn for their information, it acquires tacit institutional acceptance.
Despite the usually evident physical differences and the less obvious
but hardly hidden factors of language and culture that distinguish the
Romani minority from the surrounding population, administrations have generally
classified Roma in terms of social behavior rather than by ethnic or racial
distinctiveness. That is again the result of attitudes becoming ingrained
before notions of "race" began to take shape in the 19th century. The glaring
exception to that method of classification was the Nazi era, when racial
considerations provided the rationale for genocidal obliteration.
Hiding Identity
One man taking part in the conversation at the
slava claimed that the reason he was not upset by the two films was that
he believed nobody would associate their content with him because nobody
in the non-Gypsy world knew that he was a Gypsy. In fact, he found it amusing
that the gadje were so excessively ignorant of true Romani identity. I
know of very few Roma who weren't warned as children to keep their ethnicity
to themselves outside of the community. I was reminded repeatedly at home
that telling gadje what I was wouldn't help me and would almost certainly
have the opposite effect. I was told the same thing by my mentors in the
academe, people who thought in all sincerity that they were offering good
advice.
In the cases of my mentors, their own negative stereotypes and their
desire to help my career were the motivating factors. But the cases of
my own family and of my friend, who essentially claimed that he didn't
care about anti-Gypsyism because he could pretend to the outside world
that he wasn't a Gypsy, reveal an institutionalized response to a deeply
rooted racism. The friend's response, however, was atypical in one respect:
he did not care about anti-Gypsyism because he could hide his ethnicity.
In most cases, however, Roma care very much about anti-Gypsyism while having
to hide their identity. For example, I know a successful businessman who
asks for all Romnet-a Romani Internet mailing list-messages to be forwarded
to him but is quite unwilling to subscribe to or participate on Romnet
himself out of fear that his Romani identity could be revealed. That man
is a tireless collector of anti-Gypsy press cuttings and lives with a frustration
that has no outlet.
Imposed Identity
For a very long time, Gypsy identity has been in
the hands of the non-Gypsy specialist, especially politicians and academics,
whose ideas about who and what we are have given sustenance to the Gypsy
image. Non-Romani folklorists and anthropologists select those aspects
of their subjects that they find appealing, while ignoring others for a
number of reasons. Some might simply be more attractive or exotic. The
extent to which that selectiveness can place the expert in the position
of bystander is well illustrated in Susan Lepselter's 1996 article in Roma
magazine ("The Poetics of Folklore Discourse"). Analyzing the topics covered
during a ten-year period embracing the Holocaust (1937 to 1947) in The
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, the leading publication devoted
to Romani studies, she found that the contributions dealt with, inter alia,
"Welsh and New York Gypsy life, Hungarian Gypsy fiddlers, linguistic work
on the Spanish Gypsy dialect, and Polish Romani vocabulary." She went on
to ask "Why would professional Gypsiologists [maintain] an essentially
apolitical journal at such a crucial moment in the lives of their subjects?
Scholars of Romani culture did not, or could not, vigorously protest the
fate of those they studied and befriended. They did not engage in political
critique which might have led to action."
Claus Schreiner's introduction to the 1990 U.S. edition of his Flamenco:
Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia shows that the kind of thinking
where the real Gypsy experience takes second place to the expert's pet
interest is alive and well among Gypsiologists: "Lately a new wave of anti-Gypsyism
has reportedly again raised its head in Andalusia. If so, it might prove
beneficial for Gypsy-Andalusian flamenco for pressure creates counter-pressure
which could well lead to a revitalization of flamenco from within."
Non-Gypsy scholars have always striven to control
and define Romani identity. When Gypsy behavior has asserted itself in
ways contrary to the specialists' expectations, it has been seen as a shortcoming
on the part of the Gypsy. Thus, Alexander Paspati, a 19th century Gypsiologist,
claimed that "works published in Europe, several of them even by authors
who wrote down what the Gypsies dictated to them, are often inaccurate
because of the stupid ignorance of the Gypsies." A century later, Doris
Duncan, writing about the difficulties of analyzing the Romani verbal system,
attributed this to the fact that the "major problem is that no Gypsy really
knows what a verb is." Government officials haven't shied away from using
that line of thinking. As The San Antonio Express reported in March 1984,
a Czechoslovak government spokesman defended his government's program of
taking Romani children from their families and placing them in foster homes
by saying that it was "the Gypsies' fault for refusing to let their children
be civilized."
Because of a history of exclusion of Roma from education and because
of cultural restrictions on greater integration of Roma in the mainstream,
the Gypsy image has taken on a life of its own and real Romani populations
have been administrated and studied through the filter of that image. There
is another, more disturbing political aspect to the created identity, which
is reflected in the increase in the presentation of the Gypsy as an illiterate,
inarticulate buffoon in post-communist Europe. Such characters-played by
non-Gypsies-appear in variety shows on television in Bulgaria, Romania,
Slovakia, and elsewhere. Like the turn-of-the-century black and white minstrels
in America, they help maintain a status quo in which Roma are merely figures
of fun and are therefore non-threatening.
Image Deconstruction
Only in the past few decades have the Roma been
in a position to resist the manipulation of identity. But while we are
now beginning to speak out against anti-Gypsyism, we have a long way to
go before our voice is taken seriously. Examples abound. When the London-based
publisher of Shel Silverstein's 1984 book of children's verse, Where
the Sidewalk Ends, was asked to remove a poem called "The Gypsies are
Coming," with its accompanying illustration of a hag-like Gypsy woman with
hooked nose, earrings, and scarf carrying a sackful of stolen children
over her shoulder, the only concession was that subsequent editions changed
the word "Gypsies" to "Googies." The illustration remained. When a British
comic publishing company, John Brown Ltd., was asked to remove its 1990
cartoon strip entitled The Thieving Gypsy Bastards it replaced it
with the sarcastic The Nice Honest Gypsies, keeping the offensive
cartoon characters. The producers of the films Thinner and The
Hunchback of Notre Dame didn't respond to a single request for fairness
and accuracy from Romani organizations, at least six of which wrote to
them while the films were still in production.
In order for things to change, the Gypsy image must be deconstructed
and replaced by a more accurate one-in the bureaucratic structures as well
as in the textbooks. Education, both of Roma and of gadje, is clearly the
key to avoiding another catastrophe involving our people, and the means
of attaining some measure of understanding, if not respect, for Roma and
Romani history and culture. But identifying the solution goes only a short
way to resolving it. Before educational programs can be put in place, the
facts of Romani history must be understood and the notion of identity made
acceptable to both Romani and non-Romani populations. Given the great number
of differing interpretations of those very basic considerations, reaching
a consensus will not be easily achieved.
European or Asian?
Lepselter concluded from her analysis of mid-20th-century
gypsiology that the Gypsies are both "the 'heart' of Europe and radically
'other' to it." The debate surrounding that paradox has centered around
the "real" identity of the Romani people, both in terms of genetic descent
and in terms of our status as "true Europeans" (as a 1996 declaration by
European parliamentarians put it).
The idea that Roma are really local people who have intentionally darkened
their skin and who speak a deliberately concocted secret jargon dates from
at least as far back as the Renaissance. In his book The Gypsies,
published in 1973, Werner Cohn maintained that "Gypsies are thoroughly
European a majority of their ancestors probably came from old European
stock." Judith Okely and Wim Willems are currently the most vocal champions
of that view among those who study Roma. Both of them maintain that Gypsies
are "a motley rabble of diverse origin," an indigenous Western population
whose identity was "invented" over time by writers and policy-makers. But
neither Willems nor Okely denies an ethnic identity (or series of identities)
for Gypsies; the argument is simply that Romani origins are ultimately
mixed and mainly European, and that the "Rom" is a product of 19th-century
European Orientalism and ideas of human-group classification.
Although the Indian origin of the Romani people is beyond dispute not
only on the basis of linguistic but also of cultural and serological evidence,
the issue remains largely the concern of academics. While early Romani
populations on their arrival in Europe were able to say that they had come
from India, that fact has become lost over time and is still generally
unknown to the vast majority of Roma, many of whom have internalized instead
the notion of an origin in Egypt.
For very particular reasons, I have been among
the most vocal in insisting that Roma are a people who originated in Asia.
I take the position of the sociolinguist, who sees language as the vehicle
of culture. And we indeed speak a language and maintain a culture whose
core of direct retention is directly traceable to India. The acknowledgment
of that position is essential, because the alternative is to create a fictitious
history and to have, again, our identity in the hands of non-Romani policy-makers
and scholars.
Furthermore, those who minimize the Indian connection are not linguists
or historians, although they frequently feel entirely qualified to make
linguistic and historiographical pronouncements. (That has been a major
criticism of Isabel Fonseca's recently published Bury Me Standing: The
Gypsies and Their Journey). The most elementary linguistic evidence,
such as the fact that the Romani word for "cross" (trushul) originally
meant "Shiva's trident," is left unaddressed. It is hard to reconcile such
facts with the "indigenous origin" argument that Romani language and culture
were passed like a relay runner's baton from population to population along
trade routes, rather than being brought with one migrating people.
Besides being scientifically defensible, the pro-Indian-origin position
was corroborated in practice by Indira Gandhi's open acknowledgment of
Roma as an Indian population outside of India. Moreover, the Indian government
was instrumental in helping our people achieve representation in the United
Nations and in creating the First World Romani Congress, and it is currently
supporting our claims for the return of gold and other possessions taken
from Romani Holocaust victims and currently on deposit in Swiss banks.
Quest for Compromise
For the majority of Roma, the identity issue is
overridden by the more pragmatic concerns of work, shelter, safety, and
providing for the family. For the average Rom, whether we are European
or Asian, or neither, or both is not a matter of much consequence. For
the leaders, however, it must be. The future of the Romani population is
in the hands of those Romani intellectuals who interact with the representatives
of national governments and human rights and educational agencies.
There are three approaches to formalizing a consensus on Romani identity:
either that we are European, or that we are Asian, or that we are both.
The case for being considered European rests upon our widespread dispersion
throughout Europe, as a truly transnational people. But as the Romani scholars
Andrzej Mirga and Nicolae Gheorghe have pointed out, we are a global-not
just a European-population. Are the Roma in Peru also "true Europeans?"
One's identity has to be evaluated in terms not only of what one perceives
oneself to be, but also by whether members of the population one identifies
with share that perception. In other words, one might identify with a group
that doesn't want to open its doors. In the late 1970s, Guyana-an English-speaking
South American country with an almost entirely African and Asian population-mounted
a national campaign to re-identify itself as a Latin American nation. The
rest of Latin America, however, did not see Guyana as being a part of their
cultural and linguistic world, and the attempt withered and died.
The arguments for stressing the "Indian connection" seem clear. In these
times, when Europe is divided into nation-states, being identified with
an actual homeland brings legitimacy and a measure of security. Furthermore,
it is the Indian factors-linguistic, genetic, and cultural-that different
Romani populations share; it is the more recently acquired non-Indian factors
that divide us. If I want to speak in Romani to a speaker of a dialect
different from my own, it is the European words we must each avoid, not
the Indian ones.
But are Roma, in fact, Indians? From the very beginning,
the population has been a composite one, and acknowledging that fact constitutes
a third approach. Evidence points to Dravidian, Scythian, and even East
African (Siddhi) input into the early mix of militia and camp followers.
Once in Europe, the migration-by this time a conglomerate ethnic population
whose diverse speech had crystallized into one language-encountered other
mobile populations and in some cases joined and intermarried with them.
Sometimes the Romani cultural and linguistic presence was sufficient for
the newly encountered populations to be absorbed and become Roma in subsequent
generations; sometimes the Romani contribution was not sufficient to maintain
itself, and other, non-Romani populations such as the Jenisch emerged.
During the centuries of slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia and under conditions
of oppression elsewhere in Europe, Romani women bore unwanted babies by
non-Roma fathers. Cohn has estimated the mean percentage of European "blood"
in the European Romani genetic makeup to be 60 percent (the non-African
representation of the African-American gene pool is about 30 percent).
That very capacity to absorb and acculturate disparate populations is
particularly characteristic of the Roma. The truly remarkable thing is
that it has been possible, despite this kind of incorporation of outsiders
and despite the lack of a national territory, to maintain a linguistic
and cultural cohesiveness that stretches back for a thousand years. As
weak as it may be, it remains strong enough to identify all Romani groups
as being exactly that-Romani groups. Many of the problems that Roma are
having with non-Roma are rooted in the vague and muddled notions of who
and what Roma are, and what the Romani experience in Europe has been, and
what Roma have contributed to European culture. One step toward ensuring
a safe and productive future for Romani populations in Europe is to develop
educational programs for the schools, both Gypsy and non-Gypsy, where Romani
history and culture can be taught and the findings of current historical
and linguistic scholarship made better known. Legitimization will lead
to respect, and in that way the foundation will be laid for a clearer understanding
of Romani identity, and a more credible image of our people.