Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  According to Milena, Gypsies left their outside space to rot because for them (“as in India”), other people’s garbage was regarded as especially unclean and contact with it could bring symbolic contamination—to them a greater danger than the disease it would probably also bring about.

  For their part, Gypsies can as easily be stunned by examples of gadjo squalor that the gadje aren’t even aware of. For example, keeping dogs as pets in the house, and, worse, tolerating cats, and indeed upholding them as unusually clean animals. Among Gypsies, the cat is widely regarded as mahrime because it licks its fur and genitals and so brings dirt inside itself. Just as the Gypsies kept the insides of their houses neat, those who had not totally lost their culture were fiercely on guard against having their own innards polluted through improper cooking and washing; by analogy, as Judith Okely has pointed out, an animal’s regard for the crucial distinction between a zuhho (pure) inside and a mahrime exterior determined whether or not it made an acceptable pet, or meal. And so hedgehogs, whose spines assure cleanliness, are regarded by some Gypsies as a delicacy. And everywhere horses are beloved, partly because they do not foul themselves by licking.

  The interior of a typical, tidy Rom household, in Sintesti, Romania, 1994 (photo credits 2.4)

  Some of the poorest Roma live in the many rural settlements of eastern Slovakia. Zehra, 1991 (photo credits 2.5)

  Among British Gypsies some animals, such as snakes and rats (referred to only as “long tails”), could not even be mentioned without risk of pollution. Saps, or snakes, were particularly disgusting and dangerously contaminating because of the way they shed their skins, thus converting the inside into the outside, and because they ate other animals whole, devouring their dirty skins. These taboos are observed with varying degrees of rigor and range, but nowhere are they absent, neither among the assimilated nor among the most deracinated slum-dwellers. So were these customs the trace remains of Oriental caste control, as Milena would insist? Or were they just the superstitious vestiges of hygiene practices that would have been very sensible in nomadic times?

  Many customs among the Roma would seem to claim an Indian ancestry, not just in Eastern Europe but wherever they live in diaspora, from Australia to Argentina. Specialists warn against the temptations of theories of cultural monogenesis and stress that sometimes non-Roma also participate in these activities. But the thesis remains an unproven, and for some an irresistible, possibility. The Gypsy activist and historian Ian Hancock points out the use among Roma of the Indian bhairavi musical scale, as well as a type of “mouth music” known as bol, which consists of rhythmic syllables that imitate the sound of drum strokes. In Hungary a form of stick dancing called in Romani rovliako khelipen has Indian parallels (and is also parallel with, for example, British Morris dancing). The Hindu custom of burning the possessions of the dead continues among the Gypsies of Western Europe; British Gypsies still torch the caravan of a dead elder. (And, long ago, in a practice known as “lustering,” their widows also went up—which has obvious parallels with Indian sati.) The traditional mechanism for solving internal disputes among Gypsies east and west is the tribunal called (by its Greek word) the kris, identifiable with the Indian panchayat, which takes roughly the same form and serves the same end.

  In India, Shiva is known by the trident, or treshul, that he carries. Contemporary European Roma use this word to refer to the Christian cross. The worship of the Romany goddess of fate, as she has become, attracts a large pilgrimage to the French Camargue each May, at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. St. Sara, as she is known in Les-Saintes-Maries, was the Egyptian maid of Jesus’s two Aunt Marys; she is also identified with the consort of Shiva, the black goddess Kali (also known as Bhadrakali, Uma, Durga, and Syama).

  “As in India” (in Milena’s fond phrase), only certain groups may eat together without risk of contamination. Because the proper jati affiliation of one’s acquaintances cannot be assumed, some utensils may be outlawed. Contact between mouth and shared implements is scrupulously avoided in even the poorest households; very often each person has his own knife, which he will carry with him in case he has to eat away from home. In conservative Romany culture (called Romipen or Romanipen), liquids are poured into the mouth through a container held away from the lips, so that they do not touch the rim; and smoke from a shared tobacco pipe is drawn (and in Romani “drunk” rather than “puffed”) through a fist made around the pipe’s stem. (Anne Sutherland describes a meal with some Rom-American friends in an Illinois diner, during which they preferred to eat with their hands rather than risk the diner’s forks and knives.) As in Indian custom, the Roma divide illnesses along ritual lines. There are those which “naturally” (and increasingly) affect the group, such as heart conditions and nervous tension, which may be treated by Gypsy folk doctors, and then there are those which are invasive, in the sense that they spring from unwarranted contact with gadje (for these one must consult the relevant physician—i.e., a gadjo doctor); these include, of course, all sexually transmitted diseases.

  It was only a matter of time before the Roma in their search for a positive identity would recognize and seize on their Indianness.

  In May of 1991 I went to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, in southern Yugoslavia (as it was then), which had been rebuilt after a massive earthquake in 1963. I arrived at the outset of the three-day festival of Erdelez, or St. George’s Day, celebrated with verve by Muslims as well as Christians among Europe’s largest Gypsy settlement of some forty thousand, who live in what has become a separate town, called Šuto Orizari, or Šutka (pronounced “Shootka”) for short.

  I was paying a visit to Šaip Jusuf. He was a Djambas Gypsy, which meant that his ancestors had been horse traders or, as he thought, acrobats. Šaip (pronounced “Shipe”) had himself been a gymnast, indeed a “Professor of Gymnastics,” until he lost a leg. Šaip had also written one of the first Romani grammars and had, in 1953, established the first pralipe (brotherhood), or Gypsy club, in Yugoslavia.

  The taxi driver from Skopje’s Grand Hotel (every East European capital has its Grand) dumped me at the edge of Šutka. He refused to enter the Gypsy quarter. But I was more lost than that. As it turned out Šaip didn’t live in Šutka, as I had crassly assumed, but rather—as a friendly young Rom pointed out, looking at my scrap of address—in a mixed neighborhood nearby. This was a run-down suburban sprawl with planted front yards, pebble-paved paths, and rusty gates fronting whitewashed, detached, and modestly curlicued family houses along wide and winding residential streets.

  Finally, despite wrong directions gratefully received from a cheerful squad of nine- or ten-year-old barefoot Gypsy boys pushing wheelbarrows of screaming baby sheep, I found the Jusuf household.

  Šaip’s large, bosomy, giggly wife, Keti, was out in the front yard doing a jig on top of a rolled-up water-soaked carpet. Erdelez was a time of spring cleaning, and everything in the house, from the collection of Indian figurines to the bed frames, would come out for a hosing. The cement yard was slick with water.

  Beyond Keti (an Erlije, or Turkish Gypsy) I saw Šaip sitting at a table with two books, a conical polished brass Turkish coffeepot, and matching thimble cup. He didn’t see me until I was with him. He was taking off his leg—a pink plastic prosthesis of East European make—to put his shoe on it. When the shoe was on the foot and the leg strapped back onto Šaip he offered me a Sok. The bright-green Macedonian soft drink was produced and we settled in for a delightful one-sided talk of the kind in which Šaip specialized.

  “Aksha, ak, yak; khan, khan, kan. Nak, nak, nak. Jeep, cheep, cheeb …” he began, demanding my repetition after every set of words, complete with comic facial punctuation. I record it phonetically, these words in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Romani for eye, ear, nose, tongue. His excitement was quickly shared, because there were many correspondences, all of them obvious to an amateur. For water there is paniya, pani, and pani; the Sanskrit for hair is vala; in Hindi and Romani it is bal. “People” is manusha in all t
hree languages. The Sanskrit for sun is gharma, which became gham in Hindi and kham in Romani.

  “Me pina pani,” Šaip said, Hindi for “I drink water” (or literally, “I to drink water”). “Me piav pani,” Romani for the same. “Me piav Sok,” I offered, doing what I could.

  In 1948 Šaip had traveled among the Chergari, nomadic Turkish Gypsies (whose distant relations I would meet in Albania), collecting their stories and their words for his grammar. When he returned to Skopje he began to recite these tales of Romany life to groups of gathered Roma. What must have astonished them most was not the stories themselves, but that he called them out publicly in a strong voice, for in Tito’s postwar Yugoslavia, one wasn’t allowed to be a Gypsy. As under the reign of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, when Gypsies were “elevated” to the status of “New Magyars,” Tito’s Gypsies would become “Yugoslavs,” and, as was equally hoped by other communist regimes, ethnic differences would fade away.

  Šaip encouraged people to claim their Rom identity, which for him had become a positive identification only with his own discovery of roots in India. The discovery came from an uncle who as a soldier in the Turkish army had been imprisoned in India in the First World War, and who had found that his Romani gave him Hindi. And Šaip encouraged people to write.

  His activism had galvanized his fellows, though he had been displaced by younger and more charismatic—or anyway more militant—leaders by the time I met him. But he was still in there, belt cinched tighter than it wanted to go, the top layer of his white hair dipped in ginger henna; and still he was honored—everyone in Šutka seemed to know him.

  Šaip had been very much involved in the organizing of the first World Romany Congress, in 1971 in London, which had been partly financed by the Indian government. It was on the basis of the India connection that the International Romani Union would eventually accede, in 1979, to the United Nations and be recognized as a distinct ethnic group. At the 1978 Congress, in Geneva, the Indian theme was already becoming somewhat theatrical: one of Mrs. Gandhi’s ambassadors arrived with pocketfuls of symbolic Indian salt and symbolic Indian earth; and ever since (albeit only from one or two corners), there have been cries for the reunification of “Indian World Citizens” and Amaro Baro Them, Our Big Land, or ancestral homeland.

  It was getting dark in Skopje; gathering the rattling brass coffee service, now sludged over with grinds, we moved inside. And there, past the motorcycle which had taken his leg, Šaip’s obsession shone.

  The Jusuf parlor was a bazaar, or a temple, or both: it was a shrine arcade. There were plaques and figurines and pictures of Ganesha, the Indian god with an elephant’s head. Šaip kept shrines for the mother goddesses Parvati and Durga, and for Kali, the black goddess and, among Roma, the most popular. Kali is the crazy cross-eyed one usually portrayed with her tongue hanging out. Sometimes she has hundreds of breasts.

  There, below a satiny Indian flag, above the nailed-up skipper’s wheel—representing a wagon wheel and therefore emblematic of the Gypsies—were the Indira shrines: blown-up color snaps of Mrs. Gandhi, Mrs. Gandhi alone, one with Šaip just recognizable behind her right shoulder, another with Šaip beside her in profile. And finally there was a large portrait of Tito, another patron saint of the Jusuf household (Šaip had translated a book about him, which he declined to show me but which he called “a tribute”). On a sofa sat a round young man called Enver, a family friend. He peeled the cellophane off a new packet of Alas cigarettes and delicately stretched it over a wide-toothed comb. This he brought to his mouth and, as a kind of welcome, played on this homemade kazoo a very good “El Condor Pasa”: “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would. If I only could I surely would.…”

  “In 1971,” Šaip continued over the entertainment, pausing to rearrange the sorority of plastic Indian costume dolls arrayed across his bookshelves, “24,505 Yugoslavs declared themselves Rom.” I imagined 24,505 Gypsies standing up as in a mass AA meeting and “declaring” themselves. “In 1981, 43,125 had.”

  But the local intelligentsia, the poets of Šutka, had reached beyond describing themselves as Roma. One young man, Ramche Mustapha, a garbage collector by day and a poet by night, showed me his passport: under “citizenship” it said Yugoslav; under “nationality” it said Hindu. Ramche Mustapha, Hindu!

  They were not trying to disguise that they were Gypsies—as were the many Bulgarian Roma who insisted they were Turkish. Nor were they denying that they were Muslims; they just didn’t see any contradiction. Similarly Šaip—originally Muslim but now Hindu—and his Muslim wife thought nothing of going to a Greek Orthodox service at the local church on St. George’s Day. When I asked him why they went to Mass, Šaip just said, slowly and clearly, as if he was talking to a very stupid person: “It is St. George’s Day.” Rather, the poets were embellishing, or simply exposing, their Romipen, or Gypsiness—superficially eclectic, but at bottom something distinct and recognizable—which here they had pinned to the land of origin.

  Šaip did not want to hear about how dangerous such claims to a foreign identity had been for Gypsies in the past. For instance, I assured him that the first recorded Gypsies in the British Isles, who in 1505 presented themselves to James IV as pilgrims from Little Egypt, were smartly deported as the foreigners they claimed to be.

  In any event, Šaip dismissed events of this kind as “ancient history”—more ancient, apparently, than the exodus from India. And so I mentioned how in 1983 a Rom from Radom, in Poland, had swiftly made an outcast of himself among local Roma with his campaign to “repatriate” all European Gypsies to India. Šaip wasn’t suggesting a permanent return, he protested—“In that case, we would do better to claim America as our homeland.” And to be fair, like most Roma and unlike the rest of mankind, Šaip nurtured no ambition for a homeland, a Romanistan. Certainly such aspirations could be counterproductive: in Germany, for instance, some Gypsy activists’ demand for dual citizenship (which Germans are not allowed) plays into the hands of authorities who wish to disown them.

  Partly due to other reservations, Šaip’s salon of perhaps a dozen young poets was in any case regarded with a certain amount of scorn, especially from the older Roma of Šutka. (The young poets were interested to hear the story of Papusza, who had been so ostracized by conservative Polish Gypsies in the fifties.) That they were writing, and beginning to publish, marked them out from traditional, mainstream Gypsy culture: a culture which emphasizes the collective and eschews the introspective; a culture, above all, that is live, as if transcription were the literary equivalent of trading in one’s wheels for a trailer.

  Poets weren’t the only young people in the neighborhood to take up the Indian trend. “Tunes like ‘Ramo Ramo’ and ‘Sapeskiri’ (the snake) both inspired by Indian films,” the American musicologist Carol Silverman notes, “became instant hits” in Skopje. Many of the young women of Šutka, fed up with the baggy-bottomed Turkish trousers they were supposed to wear (and which used twelve meters of fabric a pair), had begun to wear saris. A popular Indian film festival could also explain the new fashion; whatever the Gypsy girls understood of their connection to the actresses, a spontaneous identification had been made.

  Of course in a way it was absurd, this India business: imagine making a cult or taking on the costume of the land your own ancestors inhabited over a thousand years ago. To be sure there were customs and values that had been absorbed by the Gypsies in diaspora; but without a religious component and the dynamic of a promised land it seemed altogether anomalous; Šaip’s plastic Ganesha collection, all those cute figurines with little-boy bodies and elephant heads, might just have been toy trolls. In the event, it didn’t matter: they worked.

  One might wish for a Gypsy hero, a Gilgamesh or a Gawain or even a Zapata—a warrior or a poet and not this cuddly Dumbo. Yet on closer inspection Ganesha was not a bad mascot for a nascent group of Gypsy bards: Hindu tradition has it that Ganesha was a poetry lover and that he sat at the feet of Vyasa and took down the ent
ire Mahabharata. More than that, Ganesha honors the fledgling sense of Rom-Hindu identity, for the elephant god is the patron saint of beginnings.

  THREE

  Antoinette, Emilia, and Elena

  THOUGH I AVOIDED the war in Yugoslavia, all over Eastern Europe I visited battle sites: the burnt-out or torn-down Gypsy settlements. But while following the nationalist torch, from rural Romania to industrial Bohemia, I also became aware of more subtle and covert violences: often they were committed against Gypsies by other Gypsies.

  In Bulgaria I found this destructiveness expressed in the stories of two totally dissimilar Gypsy women. Along with Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria is the place where Gypsies have been most comprehensively uprooted from their traditional culture. Many no longer speak Romani. The deep squalor of their settlements—urban and rural, indoors as well as out—is indistinguishable from the worst favelas of Brazil, and attests to their loss of Romipen. But there are different kinds of deracination; one also saw it among the privileged. Antoinette was a bright, articulate woman who, as a girl, had been plucked in hope by the Establishment from the usual Gypsy destiny. Emilia, on the other hand, was a victim of the rigorous Gypsy value system which, in the interest of group survival, exists precisely to combat social mobility.

  I met Emilia only on the last of several visits to Bulgaria, through her friend Elena Marushiakova—a Bulgarian ethnographer who had herself been punished for challenging the officially designated status of Gypsies. Elena was skinny. She constantly smoked rough BT cigarettes (“Bulgarian Tobacco”) and dressed like a student, in a sagging sweater and jeans. With her scraggly, unbrushed hair and freckles, she looked about sixteen—a sixteen-year-old who smoked for show. In fact, she was in her thirties and the mother of children ages ten and four.