Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  From the language we can tell that the Gypsies did not stay for very long in the Arabian Empire, which is why the most conservative historians tend not to include the Zotts of Zottistan in their posy of theories. While there are many Persian words in Romani, fewer than ten words of Arabic origin survive (discounting Turkish words that would have been picked up later, in the Balkans). Only two Romani words are definitely from the Arabic: kis (purse) and berk, which means breast.

  A pair of Rom children playing in the river at Copsa Mica, Romania. In this Transylvanian town all the sheep are black—along with everything and everyone else. The residents drink great quantities of milk in the belief, according to one long-term resident, that it will at least “keep their insides white.” (photo credits 2.3)

  Yet the language is peppered with Armenian: dudum is gourd; bov is oven; chovexani is witch; grast is horse; and the Romani for leather is the Armenian mortsi. Therefore the Gypsies must have passed through Armenia on their way to Europe. But the most significant influence of Armenian on Romani was a shift in sound. Words pronounced with a “bh”—that is, an aspirated “b”—came to sound like “ph.” So that whereas in Middle Eastern or “Asiatic” Romani the word for sister was, and is, bhen (as it is in Hindi), in Armenia, and subsequently in Europe, the word is phen. It was on the basis of this shift—indeed of this word—that the English linguist and Gypsiologist John Sampson in the 1920s became the first to classify Romani dialects, and thus the Romany migration, into two major groups.

  According to the language fossils, however, the invasion of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century uprooted the Armenians as well as the Gypsies who lived among them. They moved into the western-Byzantine territories of Constantinople and Thrace—areas still heavily populated by Gypsies—where the first reference to them appears in 1068, in a hagiography written at Mount Athos. From there they spread into the Balkans in the thirteenth century and, soon enough, over the rest of Europe.

  The period of Byzantine influence was powerful. Romani contains many Greek elements; and the Greek term for Gypsies, Atzinganoi, formed the basis for the Italian zingari, the French tsiganes, the German Zigeuner, the Hungarian ciganyok, the Romanian tsigani, the Czech cikan, and many other current and generally unfriendly names. The slander was not a late development: the Greek term Atzinganoi derives from the name of a heretical sect called Athinganoi (with which the Gypsies were branded for telling fortunes). By the end of the fourteenth century the Gypsies themselves were being listed among the reasons for the decline of the Byzantine Empire.

  Ahead of the Ottoman Turks they moved into the Balkans: an order placed by two Gypsies with a goldsmith of the Republic of Ragusa—that is, Dubrovnik—is dated 1378. (There is evidence that they were in the Romanian principalities as early as the twelfth century.) More than any other part of the world, and despite how inhospitable the region has become, since their first appearance there in the Middle Ages the Balkan provinces have been a kind of homeland to the Gypsies. It was from the Balkans that they made their major westward migrations—in the fifteenth century, in the nineteenth century, and now, again, in the postcommunist era. And it was to Eastern and Central Europe that they were repeatedly to return.

  Early on in their Balkan existence Gypsies held a curious position in society: they were at once more powerful and, by the nineteenth century, less free than they ever have been since. Both conditions had to do with the structure of rural feudalism. The Gypsies were wanted, and detained—not for crimes, but for their talents. Tinsmiths and coppersmiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths especially, as well as the esteemed musicians among them, were valued and even fought over.

  With their ability to move between radically segregated classes, between peasant and landowner, and to serve both, they managed to dig out for themselves an economic niche. In social and family life they stuck to their own—by exclusion, to be sure, but also (or eventually) as a matter of choice. Indeed, their preferred lines of work have always enforced separateness and solidarity; as much as the language itself, their professions are a key to their cultural survival (a fact that was appreciated by the communist regimes, who tried, and failed, to convert them into a new and anonymous proletarian force). It must be significant that, even today, Gypsy groups are most often identified by their traditional professions, even if they have not been brickmakers or combmakers or herb-gatherers, and so on, for generations.

  Such a group or workforce, typically arriving by migration rather than by conquest, is known in sociological jargon as a “middlemen minority.” They are culturally marginal and, as sojourners, they may be ill-at-ease both in their new place of residence and among other equally isolated “relations,” off at some other end of the diaspora.

  A parallel, at least so far as early Gypsy-peasant relations in the Balkans goes, might be found in the experience of the Central European Jews who migrated to the American South after the Civil War, and made their living selling door-to-door to recently freed slaves. In his book on the Jews of Atlanta, Strangers Within the Gate City, Steven Hertzberg speculates:

  … commercial intercourse was rooted in the marginality of both vendor and purchaser. The Jew had little capital, spoke broken English, was unfamiliar with regional mores, and in some cases was perceived as an intruder by native whites. Similarly, the freedman was disdained and feared by ex-Confederates. Perhaps more importantly, prior to going South, few of the newcomers had encountered blacks, and this made them “more willing to respond out of actual experience of the Negro than out of a twisted history of slavery, guilt and pathological hate.…”

  Hertzberg quotes from Eli Evans’s The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South: “When the Negro smiled at the Jew … the Jew smiled back.” But though many Jews now regard any implied link with commerce as slanderous stereotyping, among most of today’s Gypsies this attitude towards non-Gypsies proudly prevails: dealings with outsiders are largely confined to business. In hard times, Gypsies, like Jews, have always been cast as “the enemy within”; they have also, like Jews, been traders working for themselves, whatever else they also were, and therefore scorned by people tied to the routine exigencies of agriculture, or by those who worked as employees, for wages.

  In both Bulgaria and Romania people described to me the sort of work Gypsies have done since 1989 as “Jew work” or biznitsa. They meant any work that was not manual; any work in which you made “a lot” of money without a lot of sweat, and which was therefore, by definition, corrupt. For example, some Bucharest Gypsies sold Carpati, Romania’s roughest and cheapest cigarettes, from open suitcases on the pavement. Their “trick” was to get up very early on the day the limited supply of Carpati appeared in the city, buy up the lot, and resell them at an inflated price. Or they might go to Turkey and bring back a truckload of distressed blue jeans and sell them at a markup. This was Jew business, Gypsy business—not capitalism, a word that was still identified here with smart Western imports and American aid. But it wasn’t just the concept of profit that rankled with locals steeped in communist ideology. It was fear of work itself. The Gypsies, like the Jews, were guilty of showing initiative: which was strange and suspect and threatening to people who, under the communists, expressed their contempt or their despair by doing as little as possible in the jobs that were their birthright.

  In medieval Central and Eastern Europe the Gypsies had work: they labored on their own in the jobs that no one else would or could do, and they sold their goods and skills door-to-door. But this for the moment is where the parallel between Gypsies and Jews as migrant middlemen ends. Far from the start of a brilliant career, their situation in the Balkans came more to resemble that of American blacks. Their labor was highly valued—and they paid taxes; but from late in this period until the middle of the nineteenth century they were also enslaved.

  Jan Marcinkiewicz, the King of the Gypsies on the estates of the Radziwill family in Lithuania, pays a visit to Prince Karol Radziwill in his palace at Nieswiez. This engra
ving, from a drawing by Wojciech Gerson, appeared in Jan Jaworski’s Kalendarz Polski Ilustrowany za rok 1867 (Illustrated Polish Calendar for 1867), though the historical event took place in the previous century. (photo credits 2.4)

  Despite their large numbers (some twelve million, as compared with the roughly thirteen million Jews in the world today), the true story of the Gypsies—their origins and diaspora and remarkable internal cohesion—remains an area of almost occult interest. Even the romantic versions of Gypsy life which became fashionable in painting and novels and operas in the nineteenth century did little to arouse serious investigation. And you still won’t find an arrow for them among those marking the movement of peoples in the great Times Atlas of World History. One must look instead to small-circulation, special-interest publications such as the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society—and, perhaps most interestingly, to linguistics.

  In addition to a place of origin and the migratory route, the study of Romani has also yielded a controversial ethnic possibility. This lies in the word the Gypsies widely use to refer to themselves (and literally to mean man or husband): rom among European Gypsies; lom in Armenian Romani; and dom in Persian and Syrian dialects. (And so we see that the term Rom, as in Romany, has nothing whatever to do with Romania, where, confusingly, the Gypsies have lived in great numbers for many centuries. Nor is it, as English Gypsies told the social anthropologist Judith Okely, “cos we always roam.”) Rom, dom, and lom are all in phonetic correspondence with the Sanskrit domba and the Modern Indian dom or dum, which refer to a particular group of tribes who may look familiar.

  In Sanskrit domba means “man of low caste living by singing and music.” In Modern Indian tongues, the corresponding words have similar or related meanings: in Lahnda it is “menial”; in Sindhi, “caste of wandering musician”; in Panjabi, “strolling musician”; in West Pahari it means “low-caste black-skinned man.” There are references to the Dom as musicians from the sixth century. The Dom still exist in India; they are nomads who do a number of jobs: basketmaking, smithing, metalworking, scavenging, music-making. Not surprisingly, many people have leapt on a Dom theory of origins for the Gypsies.

  But not everyone. Judith Okely, with particular reference to British Travelers, deplores all talk of an Indian origin, which she sees as just another way of exoticizing, and marginalizing, this widely traveled and long-resident European people. At the same time, many contemporary Gypsy writers and activists are intrigued, but they argue for a classier genealogy: we hear, for example, that the Gypsies descend from the Kshattriyas, the warrior caste, just below Brahmins. There is something useful about ambiguous origins, after all: you can be whoever you want to be. Among Gypsies, continual self-reinvention has been the primary tool of survival, but the not-knowing has of course also had terribly alienating consequences, as did, for example, the forced name-changing in Bulgaria in the late 1980s. Already, many Bulgarian Gypsies cannot remember their own names. Or at least (and which is worse?) they pretend they cannot. Such experiences have intensified the need to establish a properly Rom identity. For some this has merely meant the ear-bursting clamor of formerly banned Gypsy music, day and night. For others a new identity, which one might call “Hindupen,” is growing out of an unprecedented pride in origins.

  Geza Kampuš lived at the smart end of Krompachy’s Gypsy quarter; roses lined the paved walkway to his door. But just down the road the scene disintegrated into a squalor that, though entirely unremarkable, never failed to shock me. One family, which seemed to consist only of a continually drunk father and three cross-eyed children, lived in an abandoned underground cement bunker. Most of the other families were deficient in menfolk, who were more often in jail than at work (as in Albania, and every place in between, redundancies were soaring in eastern Slovakia, and Gypsies were always the first to go). They seemed to live more or less in the open air. In front of their frayed shacks these Gypsies had yards of mud and rubbish and broken furniture, constantly churned by playing children and the mangy family rikono, or dog. Gypsy dogs—ever present, though not quite pets—all seem to be lame or one-eyed or stub-tailed, as if their main job wasn’t to protect or to appear faithful but to make people feel better about their own shortcomings. And in this region, which according to one published study could claim the highest incidence of inbreeding in Europe, shortcomings were many: cross-eyes, wall-eyes, facial tics—these were trifling defects.

  Though the interiors of Gypsy houses in even the poorest quarters of Krompachy were tidy, the outside was invariably a tip (and this, apparently, has always been the Gypsies’ preferred arrangement: two British writers, S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy, who in the 1860s lived for three years in Bulgaria, noted the same phenomenon). The squalor was startling in contrast to the lots of the proud, neatly pressed peasants next door, among whom the Gypsies predictably, and in this case understandably, were unpopular. No matter how high the Slovaks tacked that chicken wire, or how assiduously they topped their walls and dividing ledges with broken bottles, they were always planting for the Gypsies as well as for themselves. The Masai of East Africa are said to believe that all cattle belong to them; the Roma of eastern Slovakia, it seems, feel the same way about potatoes.

  Even where they had not been nomadic for hundreds of years, as in Slovakia, they were not planters. Only in Albania and in pockets of Romania did I meet Gypsies who worked the land—or whose ancestors had. Gypsies might get work as seasonal pickers, but they didn’t grow their own—whether because they thought it beneath them (which they certainly did), or because in their minds or in fact they might be moving on before harvest, or because they had never owned any land. Gypsies worked on cooperative farms under the communists; but they started with nothing and they ended with nothing, pushed off formerly communal land as collectives gradually returned to private hands.

  Roma children playing in their settlement in Krompachy, eastern Slovakia, 1991. In addition to bicycle wheels, the children were keen on tiddlywinks, which they played with bottle caps and tin lids. A group of art students from Prague spent a week painting with the Krompachy kids. The little girls mainly drew fairies and princesses and angels, all with blond hair. (photo credits 2.3)

  A different explanation was offered by Milena Hübschmannová, a linguist and Gypsiologist from Prague with whom I traveled in eastern Slovakia: no one in their original Indian caste had ever touched a spade. Similarly, as V. S. Naipaul notes, “Land reform does not convince the Brahmin that he can put his hand to the plow without disgrace.”

  Dr. Hübschmannová had been to India several times and never missed a chance to point out the cultural and social parallels which for her, in addition to language, were the final proof of Indian origin. There was, for example, the jati system of economic organization, in which class is linked to and defined by profession (technically, jat just means caste, but among nonspecialists castes have been reduced to the four varnas—Brahmins, Kshattriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras, plus Untouchables—when in fact there are about two thousand jats). The system had clearly been replicated among the Roma, and weeding wasn’t recognized by them as a job description. The ban on certain kinds of work for the group, or just for their women, was not the only surviving aspect of Indian hierarchy and regulation; equally important was the manner in which a chore was carried out, with elaborate concern for ritual purity.

  Milena was so absorbed in her intricate explanation of the jati system (counting the numerous castes on a thin finger), that she didn’t even notice the middle-aged peasant women who barked us out of the quarter—“Go home, Gypsy-lovers!” and “Why don’t you take them back to your institute, you city-scientists, or send them to Africa!” We waved goodbye to the pack of Gypsy children who had followed us to Milena’s orange Lada and, as we drove away, I asked her about the squalor. Their houses were so clean inside, so lovingly and prettily painted … but the yards! The communal space was unusable because of the smell.

  I wouldn’t quickly forget the slime-covered bur
ial mounds of dead tires; the tangy vegetable pâté of silted-up garbage; the cans and bones and fishheads; the abandoned appliances with their cartoon springs and forlornly obsolescent, detonated look. To my eye, this looked like the ordinary despair and poverty of, say, the inhabited garbage dumps of Bombay. And yet the Gypsy community was full of normally vain teenagers (tattooed, lipsticked, and preening); the adults too were far from resigned, if constant and noisy complaint was any indication; and the children were nothing like inert: a large population of junior mudlarks, so long unwashed that you could hardly make them out, climbed among the ruins, cheerfully playing the games that all children play—pushing wheels with sticks, flipping rusty lids and bottle caps in makeshift tiddlywinks. “It wasn’t dirty,” Milena impassively explained. “It just looked dirty.”

  Specialists often see what they know to be true rather than what is in front of their eyes. Standing in a stinking slum, Milena could point admiringly to “true Rom culture.” She could never see any bad in any Gypsy—a thief was not a thief but, say, someone who, divested of his traditional economic niche, had adapted to a new but still symbiotic relationship with the gadjo, from whom he earned his goods in exchange for status in a period of economic and political crisis, status conferred on the gadjo by the Rom, who, in the act of unburdening him, offers himself up as a sacrificial scapegoat, etc.… She wasn’t kidding; nor was she entirely wrong.