The Magic Word:
‘Gypsy’ Witchcraft, Love, and Breaking Tradition in Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă’s Poem “The Apparition of Choxani”
“Magic,” she said, “is only in words, in the naming.”
- Qristina Zavačková, from “Magic and Magpies—Akhaljiben the Kakaraske”
I first discovered Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă, Romanian-born Romani poet and fiction writer, when I bought Roads of the Roma: a PEN anthology of Gypsy Writers, in preparation to teach my class on Romani literature, culture, and representation at Florida State University. Cioabă, a speaker of Rromanès (Kalderash dialect), Italian, and Romanian, writes about Romani women’s lives and experiences, often drawing on Romani folktales. Her poem, “The Apparition of Choxani” (116), narrates the appearance of a witch to the speaker, the two kisses they share, and the resulting arc of desire; the piece is enchanting both as an artwork and as a critical puzzle. The version I shared with my students, translated from Italian by Minna Proctor, stayed flagged throughout the entire three semesters I taught the class.
Part of the poem’s enigma rests in the fluid, varied nature of choxani, supernatural beings or spirits in Romani folklore who can be good, evil, or both; the other part rests in the ambiguity of the speaker’s gender. The poem’s first person point of view does not make allusions to gender identifiers or self-description. Instead, the poem is entirely focused on the sensory experience of the meeting with Choxani, underscoring the sense that experience, or the state of being, is all that matters: “And looking in her eyes/ I saw sadness…” (5-6), “I took her flower with a kiss.” (9), “And now, though I am alive, I taste death” (17).
My students would almost always read the poem as an exchange between a man and a witch; when I would ask, “How would this poem change if the speaker was a woman?,” and there would be a tense silence. Eventually, their reactions ranged from “That’s impossible because they kiss,” to “Maybe the poem describes a more spiritual love,” to “Maybe the poem is making room for same-sex love in the Romani tradition.” — our word for the Romani tradition or the Romani way of life — is the guiding force for Roma’s social, personal, mundane, and spiritual life. And, much like the culture of many of my students in Florida’s Bible Belt, traditional Romani culture is strongly heteronormative and issues of LGBTQ relationships, sexuality, and identities are taboo, unspeakable, and untouchable.
I interviewed Carpathian Romani writer and scholar via email, and she explains the silently forbidden nature of LGBTQ Romani life thusly: “Our communities, especially if traditional, are very black and white about certain issues. Loving another woman is one of them. It is unacceptable, impure, and a crime (according to Romanije/Romanipen). To be gay, is to (most usually) live a hidden life, meeting on the roads in the dark, at night, as ghosts and witches.” Alternative relationships, gender identities, and issues surrounding gender and sexuality, like contraception, sex before marriage (for women), and same-sex marriage, are traditionally seen as “impure,” or against Romanipen, and the insular nature of Romani society has ensured that the more traditional clans and families hold tightly to these beliefs. At the same time, Romani communities are made up of individuals, and it would be absurd to suggest that all Roma who hold their traditions dear are unaccepting of LGBTQ identities, relationships, and rights. Love for family and friends is a core value of Romanipen, so many Roma have not seen embracing their LGBTQ family and friends as compromising their values at all. But the social tensions surrounding this issue remain as change is brought about slowly; and this poem seems to utilize gender-neutrality as a means of dealing with the controversial embrace of the Romani lesbian experience.
The evolution and preservation of Romani customs and taboos are complex, and to understand them, you must look to our history. And while customs vary among the various Romani clans depending on the diasporic routes their ancestors took, where they settled or travelled, and how they lived, we all share the experience of persecution, past and present. Wherever Roma during the diaspora from India in the 11th century, they were met with hostile, xenophobic locals. Legitimate fear of outsiders made the Roma protective of themselves and their way of life, stories, and beliefs. Taboos arose—associating too much with gadjé (non-Roma) is seen as (ritually unclean). The close and closed nature of Romani culture ensured that many centuries old traditions, stories, and wisdoms survived from generation to generation in spite of centuries of genocide, slavery, poverty, and apartheid. As such, the Romani world-view tends to rest on this binary: that which is Romanipen and that which is not, that which is pure and that which is impure.
Even today, we live in a world where many Roma can’t find work because no one will hire a Gypsy, you can’t feed your children because shops don’t serve your kind, and your house may be bombed by neo-Nazis, or taken by your government, just because you are a Rom. In this world, your ethnic identity is charged with overwhelming power, and to assimilate into gadjé society is dangerous, not just socially but spiritually. This is why Roma believe that when you are out in the ‘gadjé world,’ your spirit is depleted and that energy can only be regenerated by returning to an all-Roma environment. This belief springs in part from Romani purity laws, but I can assure you, there is emotional truth in this too. I’m constantly explaining that criminal activity, sloth, and filth are not Romani cultural practices, or grasping for polite ways to tell people that appropriating and misusing Gypsy is equivalent to using any other dehumanizing racial slur, even in the industry. The effort is soul-sucking.
A significant part of the Romani experience is colored by taboo, that which cannot be mentioned, and whether that’s our sexuality or the pain of memory, they are usually the topics that deafen us with sound from the inside. Likewise, what is withheld in any piece of writing is equally important as what is divulged; it is for this reason that the unnamed speaker of unnamed gender in Cioabă’s poem rings in my ears. In Romanian Romani folklore and in Cioabă’s poem, Choxani is the guardian of Romanipen. While there are many types of choxani (witches or spirits), in the poem’s footnote, Cioabă explains that that Choxani is “a witch who brings retribution to those who stray away from the Romani culture,” and yet, there is no disclosed reason for Choxani’s appearance (116). Because Cioabă’s speaker and the nature of Choxani’s visit are unlabeled, only the love between them names the liminal, mystical space that their intimacy exists in, both in life and in Romanipen, regardless of gender, and that consecrated liminality both acknowledges the forbidden nature of same-sex love and unshackles it from silence and shame.
“The apparition of Choxani” occurs in the night, which resonates with the choxana in Bosnian Romani folklore that Lee discussed in our interview, which
“Hedina Sijercic described as a ‘night butterfly’ that sucks the blood of children in her Gurbeti Romani dialect in a poem in her published book of poems, Dukh – Pain (Magoria Books, Toronto) ….She was using choxana where I would have used Liliako. In Kalderash Romani this would be liliako, vampire a word which is obviously related to Lilith…. In some Balkan folklore, the witch is seen as a non-human supernatural being.”
Sijercic expands more on the night-visitor choxani in her correspondence with Lee: “Choxani is this brown butterfly that cames in the dark in night and quells the dream.” But the poem’s Choxani doesn’t seem to pose such a threat. She has a “flower between her white teeth” and seems “a goddess” (1-3). In that moment, perhaps she is deified, or cast as a kind of incarnation or manifestation of a goddess. And while it’s impossible to generalize about Romani, there is one goddess who is recognizable to most Roma: Sara-la-Kali.
Sara-la-Kali, also known as Sara Kali, Kali Sara, Sati Sara, The Black Madonna, and Saint Sarah, depending on the region and religion of the Roma who worship her, is The Mother, the protector of Gypsies, and the goddess of Fate, Time, and sometimes Chaos and Death. Ronald Lee explains in his article, “,” that Roma’s shaktism, or goddess-worship, comes from the Roma’s Indian origins and the Roma who worship Kali Sara are continuing the worship of the Hindu goddess Hindu goddess(es) Kali-Durga. Attributes of the goddess(es) survive in the Romani goddess, though Kali Sara is much more of a healer and creator than she is a destroyer. Still, she is a balance of light and darkness—Fate is sometimes cruel and kind, and sometimes, the hand of Fate is not present at all. Ian Hancock explains in his article, “,” that Roma believe both in “kintala” (kismet) and free will. My family has always understood to mean that there is a certain amount of destiny in the universe, or times when the hand of Fate dips into our lives, but the goddess cannot interfere with a person’s free will, and free will adds that bit of necessary chaos to the universe. In poem’s lines, “through the darkness,/She was light” (3-4), Choxani embodies the duality of Sara-la-Kali. The literal and metaphorical darkness is her natural element, but she herself is light. In the same way, the speaker who has strayed from the Romani way in some respect to warrant her appearance may be ‘in darkness,’ but that darkness does not permeate the person. Perhaps the darkness is merely a context, undefined and unchanged by what meaning humans project onto it.
The complexity of Choxani deepens when the speaker looks into Choxani’s eyes, she sees “sadness through and through” (6), and just as Choxani is elevated to a witch-goddess, she is humanized a moment later, at least in this manifestation. The reader must remember here that Choxani also carries the burden of projection. Just as LGBTQ relationships are so often reduced to the physical act and thus demonized by heteronormative society, Choxani is reduced to a retributive witch in the footnote of the poem. Zavačková, in our interview, expanded on this observation, adding that, likewise, “Romani are often reduced to footnotes in any commentary on any subject (history, gender, ethnicity, etc).” In response to her sadness, the unnamed speaker takes “her flower” from Choxani’s mouth “with a kiss” (9). The “flower,” also heavy with symbolism of female sexuality across many cultures and ages, also reduces a woman to her tainted or untainted state, and depending on how that flower was taken or given; a woman, once unburdened of her virginity, may never shake the reductive epithet of “whore.” Darkness, witches, Roma, women, and gays have all been imbued with the burden of sin in folklores and stories from all over, but in the poem, theses painful reductions are stripped off, layer by layer.
There is not a great deal of written information available on the retributive witch Choxani that Cioabă depicts—Romani literature has been an oral tradition much longer than a written tradition. Even today, though they are no longer enslaved in Europe, many Roma continue to suffer from illiteracy. This tragic phenomenon is due to a lack of access to educational resources and a lack of interest in formal education, brought about by systemic bullying and harassment of Roma students: especially in Europe, . They are also often sent to special education classes, because school officials regularly assume that all Romani children are, by definition, mentally disabled or deficient. However, our tradition of oral literacy proved a strong resource in my research on this poem.
Folklore is marked by its one-dimensional characters, and in Romani folklore the witches have many names and manifestations, each with its own function. The figure of the witch looms large in our folk stories, and according to Milena Hübschmannová’s entry on ROMBASE, the word “bosorka” refers to a number of beings besides witches, including ghosts, evil spirits, and possessed peasant women. A bosorka may be an “old wom[a]n from another world” who exchanges unbaptized (or otherwise religiously unaffiliated) babies with her own evil offspring (Hübschmannová). She may be a malignant spirit that haunts the forests or possesses Romani and gadjé women. The gadjé bosorka variety is always up to no good and can transform men into animals and ride them around at night. A bosorska-čohaňi, or Romani bosorka, is more morally ambivalent. She can work healing magic and control the elements, but she is also feared because she can send for death and illness and control that which only the gods should control (Hübschmannová). Even if we were to only to think of the poem’s Choxani’s function as retributive, it’s important to note that to note her moral ambivalence. While she is powerful and dangerous, she doesn’t prey on innocent babes or animals. She has rationality: she is a protector of the culture, and like a warrior, she destroys to preserve, much like the Hindu gods of destruction who destroy to create, or destroy as a necessary part of the cycle of regeneration.
Ambiguity and ambivalence also characterize Romani folklore in general Qristina Zavačková explains:
“A lot of Romani stories are ambiguous – there are no clean cut fairytale endings. They also employ some common themes found in Native literature/poetry, for example the idea of the Trickster character, circular narratives, and fluidity of time (as opposed to linear time). Choxani, it is often claimed, took the place of the ‘second wife’ in traditional Indian stories (where the second wife would search for ways to remove the first wife from the picture). Since it’s thought that [Roma] stopped practicing polygamy pretty soon after the start of our migrations out of India, the traditional canon of stories replaced ‘second wife’ with ‘Choxani’. There are as many stories in which the Choxani is young and beautiful as those where she is old and bent. There are many stories in which a prince, about to marry a beautiful princess will be bewitched by a Choxani who wants to marry him herself. [Cioabă’s] poem seems to have a little of all of these things in it.”
It is this dance between human and inhuman, light and darkness, love and sex, right and wrong, that all human stories are in some core way concerned with, and in this particular narrative, the poem’s (presumably) beautiful Choxani steps in to deal with all of it. Their intimacy warms in the next lines:
She lifted star dust from her breast
And brushed it on my eyes.
Saying the magic word kamavtu,
She stretched toward me and took her flower
Returning to me my kiss. (10-14)
Kamavtu, Rromanès for “I love you,” is the magic word, and the goddess taking the flower back and returning the kiss suggests mutual transference of energy. Usually when flowers representing virginity or female sexuality make their appearance in literature, they are taken or plucked, thus destroyed by or forever belonging to the almost always male ‘plucker.’ But here, between this witch and perhaps female speaker, Choxani’s flower returns to her with her decision to return the kiss, and for a moment, the two figures are equal and connected. Because there is room for the speaker to be a woman, the kiss that Choxani returns seems to sanctify, or honor, the kiss the speaker gave her, makes room for the profound spiritual, emotional, and physical love shared by same sex couples and thus sanctifies that love.
This is especially interesting considering that the exchange of the flower and kisses mirrors the traditional Romani folktale chavo’s (hero’s) exchange of polite words with the choxani. Zavačková explains:
“Bosorka (another name for Choxani) can often be won over by the young Rom, as long as he is polite to her (and yes, it’s usually a young man who meets a witch). There is somewhat of a formal greeting they’d always use, “Mi del o Del lačho djives, mri kedvešno phuri daje” (may God grant you a good day, my beloved grandmother), the idea being that if a Rom cannot greet the Choxani in proper Romani style, she will kill him (hence … retribution for straying from Romani culture). I’ve also heard stories that featured initially good witches who became bad when they found out that a Rom was dating a non-Romani woman or a chavo had tricked another … or had otherwise strayed away to win over the bosorka.”
Unlike the traditional chavo’s tactical chivalry, the poem’s speaker reacts to Choxani’s beatific sadness and “tearful lashes” (8) instead of merely acting out of a fear of retribution. If the folkloric exchange is like a prayer, hurried, scripted, and preventative, then the poem’s exchange is an invocation in a ritual of manifestation, imbuing their meeting with compassion and complexity and shaking off the archetypes. Paralleling the exchange that proves a Rom worthy, pure, and true to the culture with the kiss between two women does more than suggests there is room in the tradition to accept LGBTQ relationships; it suggests that accepting LGBTQ relationships is tradition. Love is the truest tenet. And the “star dust” (10-11) that Choxani brushes from her own breast onto the speaker’s eyes could be what opens our eyes to this—it is truly seeing.
Just when it seems that Choxani has motivations outside of punishing, the kiss is followed by the lines, “And then she disappeared into the night/taking my heart and my eyes (15-16). This might feel like a macabre turn to the dangerous kind of choxani that Ronald Lee described via email interview. He looked to Kalderash Rromanès, Balkan, and Romanian language and folklore to explain the word choxani and its many manifestations:
“The basic meaning of choxani in Kalderash is a female ghost/spectre and it has a masculine declension in choxano….However, because of the osmosis from surrounding non-Romani folklore in various countries, it can take other meanings such as ‘witch’ which often appears as chovihani in Welsh and British Romani … In Kalderash, choxani means succubus and choxano means incubus …. Russel Demitro, described choxano/choxani as a ‘shape shifting supernatural entity’ that could take on the appearance of a specific human being to then make this person commit a crime such as murder.”
This violent shape-shifter comes up in other traditions too. Qristina Zavačková, originally from Slovakia, shares a story that she grew up with about choxani:
“…[T]here is one terrifying story my grandmother used to tell me about an indžibaba (an evil choxanji) who could become anything that she wanted to—she could be the poker by the fire, the mug holding your tea, the chair you were sitting on. In her true form she was all teeth and claws and would devour Romani who strayed from [R]omanija or became lost in other ways. If she became, say a cup and you brought it into your house you had invited her in – so she could come and go as she pleased. The only way you’d know she was there was a cold breeze or chill that suddenly came over you, or the sound of rattling chains or a barking dog in the distance.”
While this choxani is the very embodiment of change and brings violent change (death) to the Roma she visits, what stands out in Zavačková’s example is that the choxani must be “invited” before she can change another being, and in Cioabă’s poem, the speaker is the first to initiate intimacy and let Choxani into the body. From that point on, the speaker changes rapidly, first kissed by and united with Choxani, then given new vision by the “stardust from her breast,” then abandoned and seemingly maimed, then “alive” but “tast[ing] death,” and finally united again with the line, “She is hidden in me” (23). It is this final change that marks Cioabă’s Choxani as related and yet unique.
In Ronald Lee’s conversation with Hedina Sijercic, a Muslim Romani writer, Sijercic expands on the indžibaba that Zavačková’s grandmother told tales of:
“The word indžibaba is created by two words, indži, what is in Bosnian Romani or Gurbeti Romani anywhere hand and means itching or any kind of change on the skin, any kind of reaction [that] …makes you scared or feel …[different from how] you normally feel…. Also… [the] word baba… means any grandmother or phuri dej (daj)….”
Sijercic notes, though, that Bosnian Roma wouldn’t use the word baba for grandmother — they would say nana, a “loanword” from Bosnian language. Considering this, the shape-shifting kind of choxani might literally be translated to itching grandmother. The word itch conjures feelings of shame in indulging in a possibly harmful or unseemly behavior, perhaps a peccadillo or taboo. There’s also a sense for the intense desire for relief—the tension between two people who cannot or should not act on their attraction for each other is a kind of itch. An itch can be a forbidden love, and it can be a call to action. In the poem, it is the impulse for the first kiss.
To an outsider, Choxani stealing away the eyes and heart of the speaker might sound like a brutal punishment for scratching the itch and letting the itching woman inside. However, Choxani’s action is a literal expression of Romani idioms about love. Delia Grigore, Lecturer of Rromani Language and Literature Chair of the Oriental Languages Department, writes in her article “Purity and Impurity in the Traditional Romani Family” that “[t]he colloquial greeting ‘te xav tirre jakha’ (‘let me eat your eyes’) is a sign of affection and of the need for protection.” And in Adam Gopnik’s article, “The People Who Pass,” he quotes Sarah Carmona, a leading Romani historian of Roma in Europe, and she explains that “…[i]n Romani when you tell someone that you love him you might say, ‘I eat your heart’ or ‘I eat your belly.’” So taking the speaker’s heart and eyes could be read as returning, even protecting her love. Compounding this, Zavačková points out that the eyes and heart are invoked in spells, and they are body parts most commonly affected by magic. “For example,” she writes, “in my dialect ‘jakhaljiben’ is bewitchment, and ‘del jakhalo’ (give the eye) is to put a spell on somebody (as in the evil eye we are so well known for!).” Love is the itch, love is the magic, and love is the change she wields.
This view of Choxani comes closer to the kind of witch Ronald Lee is familiar with. He explains that in Kalderash Rromanès, usually a “witch” would be called “drabarni, a wise woman versed in herbal remedies; farma-katarka, a weaver of spells (white witch)…” as opposed to “vrezhitorka, sorceress (an evil witch).” Choxani is more than human, certainly not bound by the petty restrictions that people put on life, but she is also depicted as emotive. While she is not of this realm, as is her nature, nature reclaims her: “The forest swallowed her./ The mountain hid her./ The water covered her” (19-21). In these lines, Choxani’s departure feels less like a punishment and more like the natural course of love: we all part, either by death or by choice. The speaker describes herself as alive, but tasting death (17), a state not unlike the orgasm’s other name, le petite morte. The speaker’s liminal state, somewhere between life and death, parallel’s all of Choxani’s liminality, as well as Sara-la-Kali’s, the goddess who can give life and take it.
The speaker ends with one last transformation, which is ambiguous in the tradition of Romani folklore endings: “[Choxani] is hidden in me, And she wants to touch my hand/Kiss my lips” (23-25).These last lines could suggest that Choxani and the speaker’s love for her is naturalized, that Choxani returns her love, or evoke another itch for Choxani to manifest again, or, as Zavačková suggests, the ending may be “an expression of the longing to be able to be in love with a woman, openly [.]” The ending might encapsulate love’s inevitable promise of parting and the eventual acceptance that the only intimacy that remains is that which was internalized or assimilated. It conjures the paradox that intimacy is impossible without separation, which may suggest that the speaker is burdened with an itch that, for now, cannot be scratched.
But change is constant, and if Choxani appears because of a transgression, perhaps it wasn’t the speaker’s transgression that brought her. Choxani is the change-bringer, yes, but she is also the force that acknowledges love “with a flower between her white teeth.” She opens eyes and protects hearts as well as she is able. The speaker’s utter sensory immersion to the point that all self-identifiers are rendered unimportant reminds me of an aphorism that my father is fond of saying, “Love is not a state of mind; it’s a state of being.” Choxani’s liminality, elemental force, and function of change may all suggest that this aspect of Romani tradition is changing, and that Romanipen, our universe, is constantly expanding to make room for our individual natures, for survival, and for necessity.
In closing, it feels important to note that Cioabă herself occupies a liminal space as a contemporary writer who is extraordinary, and yet under-translated and under-appreciated, primarily because she is Romani and therefore practically invisible. Today, there are twelve million Roma world-wide, but despite the , past and present, from all over the world, I rarely see any mentioned as part of the literary canon — sometimes, Papusza gets a shout-out, if we’re lucky. But Romani art has so much to offer, not just in terms of education and inclusion, but in terms of understanding, community, and groundbreaking scholarship. Zavačková explains that it’s this kind of complex symbolism and reference that makes her love Romani poetry so much, and this poem especially: “To non-Romani it’s a visit with a ghostly witch, leaving the subject confused and feeling alone. To Romani, it is like one of our paramisa – it tells a full story, beginning to end almost. It is a condensed ballad about love and loss, life and death, and the keeping of Romani traditions!” The Romani arts and culture scene is an extraordinary force of change in its own right.
Bibliography:
Djuric, Rajko, Siobhan Dowd, and Ian Hancock. The Roads of the Roma: a PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers. University Of Hertfordshire Press. 1998. Print.
Hancock, Ian. “Romani (Gypsy) Religion.” The Romani Archives and Documentation Center. August 2001. Web. http://www.radoc.net/
Hübschmannová, Milena. “Bosorka” ROMBASE: Didactically edited information on Roma. January 2002. Web. http://rombase.uni-graz.at/
Lee, Ronald. “The Romani Goddess Kali Sara.” Kopachi. October 11, 2009. Web. http://kopachi.com/
—- Personal Interview (email). October 2, 2014.
Zavačková, Qristina. Personal interview (email). October 2, 2014.
Jessica Reidy is a mixed-Romani (Gypsy) heritage writer from New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and Outreach Editor for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and Art Editor for The Southeast Review. She also teaches creative writing, yoga, and sometimes dance. Jessica is currently working on her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about Coco, a half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter.
