I’m very excited to publish the below essay by Jessica Suzanne Reidy, which looks at a Romani poem about the apparition of a witch, a traditional character in Romani folkore. In the interest of readers fully understanding the culture that this poem (and this essay) come from, I would like to provide a brief introduction and some context.
Romani denotes the ethnic group more commonly referred to as Gypsies. Dr. Ian Hancock, Romani linguist and scholar, explains in Roads of the Roma that the first Romani were likely many groups of people in Northern India, from low-caste Indians to African migrants, sent to fight an invading Muslim army, around the 11th century C.E. After the war was lost, most of the enormous army moved with their families through the mountains and West toward Europe (Hancock, 15-17). Throughout the journey, Romani were met by hostile and xenophobic locals. They endured a very long period of enslavement in the Balkans. At some point, due to their complexions, they were given the designation of “Gypsy” by the fairer-skinned Europeans who enslaved them, because it was thought that they originated from Egypt. Traditional Romani, or “Gypsy,” nomadism was born out of repeated encounters with hostile outsiders (Hancock, 18): these people continuously moved around to escape murder, rape, enslavement, and racially-motivated hatred — not out of some whimsical wanderlust, as is always implied in popular depictions of “The Gypsy.”
Gypsy, an outdated term, is often used as a racial slur; it has made its way into the English language in a variety of negative contexts (e.g., the word “gypped,” meaning “cheated” or “deceived,” stems from the idea that “Gypsy” is synonymous with thief/criminal/con artist). “Gypsies” are repeatedly cast, in media ranging from children’s stories to , as a race of thieves, tricksters, , , and sorceresses. Even reference manuals like thesaurus.com don’t list “Roma” as a synonym for “Gypsy”—there’s only a list of stereotypes like “vagrant,” “bohemian,” “bum,” and “derelict.” There’s also the weird, current social trend of young white women referring to themselves as “Gypsy,” usually as part of some sort of self-bestowed nickname, to suggest that they are sexy, free-spirited, spontaneous creatures — Manic Pixie Dream Girl 2.0: The Millennial Hipster Version.
Fashion retailers and magazines also frequently describe their wares in terms of “Gypsy” style — Disney Princess Esmerelda But Sexier: off-the shoulder, billowy tops, long (often translucent) hippie skirts. Although intended to reflect complimentary attributes, this kind of behavior is greedy and entitled: it erases and stigmatizes the true culture of the Romani/”Gypsies,” because it has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with other people, outside the culture, who have the privilege of not enduring racism and abuse, mis-representing the culture and its history, and applying it in an overly simplistic way to themselves. As someone who was once violently accosted in the streets of eastern Germany by a neo-Nazi skinhead for naïvely disclosing my “Gypsy” heritage, I find myself deeply unreceptive to this kind of appropriation and misinformation. I can’t imagine how people who deal with that kind of treatment in their daily lives must feel when they see this behavior around them.
“Gypsy” has been so misused that many people, particularly in North America, don’t realize that the word refers to an ethnic group at all, which is particularly worrying considering the Romani genocide during WWII. In “,” Dr. Ian Hancock reports that at least an estimated one to two million Roma were persecuted and executed alongside the Jewish community in The Holocaust — or, as the Roma call it, O Porrajmos (literally: “The Devouring”). This genocide is rarely acknowledged via reparations, memorials, or even simple educational inclusion when this portion of world history is taught to schoolchildren. When Roma are still fighting for basic human rights (in Eastern Europe, the Romani have recently faced institutionalized hate crimes such as forced sterilization), it is a kind of violence to continuously erase and ignore their identity as an ethnic group — or to presume to appropriate, or define through ignorance, a cultural identity that does not belong to you.
For these reasons, you will not find the word “Gypsy” in Jessica Reidy’s essay below, but that is the culture this literature comes out of. This essay refers to it as Romani culture. The word “Romani” comes from the Rromanès word for “man” or “human being.”
- F3
