Photo: Sam Beale.

International SQUALL

Mending The Mirror

Belonging to a race which has no written history is both liberating and frustrating. Romany history, barring academic studies, is oral, musical, and dance-based. Every mystery, myth and legend, religious or folkloric could involve Gypsy people. Sam Beale investigates the myth.

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pp. 44-45..

The theory of Gypsy origins most widely accepted by experts and Gypsies themselves is that their journey began in North Western India over a thousand years ago. Through studying the Romani language experts have, they say, ascertained which countries Roms travelled through and how long they stayed. Linguistic evidence suggests they arrived in Eastern Europe early in the 14th century.

During a long and heated discussion around the Rusenkos’ kitchen table about the ancestry and movement of Gyspies, whilst women and children prepared food, versions of stories were swapped. Like the one which says that Roms were given the gift of fortune telling as a reward for hiding Mary and Jesus from Herod’s baby-slaughtering soldiers. (Margita believes that “during the time Roms are fulfilling themselves with negative things, material things, this gift has disappeared”.) A hundred questions, presumably pondered by enquiring Gypsy minds many times before, were asked: “Are we, as some say, the lost 13th tribe of Israel?” “How much of the Old Testament was rewritten for use as an instrument of power?” (Was something of the history of Roms lost in this expediency?) “Was Genghis Khan a Rom?”

They had forgotten who they were, where they were from and where they were going.”

Whatever the ‘facts’ the subject obsessed the Rusenkos/Rusenkovas and everyone had a theory to posit. Finally, shifting the mood in the kitchen from the realms of frustrated realism and highly questionable guesswork to simple folklore, Margita Reiznerova told a story. Not an ancient one, but her own. It speaks plainly for itself. It is called Romano Gendalos, Romany Mirror, and sipping her vodka and chainsmoking, this is how she told it:

This happened a long, long time ago when Roms lived in their own country. At that time they had a good life because they had a good king. He loved them as much as he would his own children. He taught them everything that his parents and grandparents had taught him. But, as it usually is, a time came when the king was supposed to die and go to heaven. So he called all the Roms and he started to talk to them: “Listen Roms, I’m not going to be here anymore. I’m going to die. So remember the words I am saying now. After I die you won’t stay here. You will spread around all the corners of the world. What I have taught you you are going to teach the other people you meet wherever you go. Wherever you go you will bring joy, peace, fortune telling. Your songs and dances will please the hearts of people. I will give you a very old mirror to take with you. Look after it. Don’t break it. And keep together. Always stay together. The mirror is going to show you the way. When you look in it you will know who you are, where you are from and where you are going. And you will know what is going to happen. If you break the mirror you will forget everything you knew. You will forget who you are, where you are from and where you are going.

So, they buried him and just as he said, it happened. Wherever they went they were welcome. And they travelled through a big part of the world and they came to one country where the people were as dark as Roms and they stayed for a long time. But then one of the families wanted to keep going, to travel on, and so who will keep the mirror? That family wanted the mirror and those who were staying wanted it as well. And then it started. They began to fight because of the mirror. As they fought they started to pull it this way and that and finally the mirror fell and broke into thousands and thousands of little pieces. And when the Roms saw what they had done they stopped fighting and each of them took a little piece of the mirror. The ones who kept a piece of the mirror had better luck, those who didn’t have any of the mirror just had their eyes for tears.

After that wherever they went nobody wanted them, everyone just wanted rid of them, they were humiliated because they had forgotten who they were, where they were from and where they were going.

But today Roms want to know who they are, where they are from and where they are going. So now they are asking all the people, whoever has got a little piece, or who knows who has got a piece bring it, to put the mirror together so we know again who we are, where we are from and where we are going. So people! Bring the pieces, the sooner the better.

Later, talking about the problems faced by European Roms, Margita remembered a Gypsy Conference in Budapest. She noted that she hadn’t wanted to speak publicly about the difficulties of Czech Roms: “I didn’t want to talk because of the horrible things happening to Roms in Yugoslavia and elsewhere... I found my problems ridiculous next to theirs. We don’t suffer that much anymore.” To an extent this is true. These Roms are not living in the abject poverty faced by many elsewhere in Europe. But this family is far from well-off. They are fortunate that their work is still in demand; unlike many Gypsies whose traditional skills have long since been superseded or forgotten, performing folk songs still appeals. This is an acceptable part of Romany culture which authorities and often hostile gadjes can stomach.

There is grotesque hypocrisy in this acceptance of the colourful, smiling, somehow ‘other’ nature of Gypsy song and dance when coupled with rejection, demonisation and blind hatred of the people who produce it if they are not singing and dancing but starving or looking for jobs. As a tourist attraction Gypsies are appealing; as a race, a long-time part of a community in need of work, housing, education and tolerance they are ‘the Gypsy problem’.

Assessing the fate of European Roms from a distance there is little hope: racism - institutionalised, random and sometimes violent - is on the increase. The descendants of those forced to settle because their freedom of movement was perceived as a threat are, now that their nomadic heritage is all but lost, treated with the same hackneyed suspicions and still do not ‘belong’. Now it is their blackness and the tight, closed caution that intolerance and exclusion have effectively forced upon them which make Gypsy communities suspect.

However, welcomed into a creative, radical and politically aware Rom home, pampered and included, showered with the most intense hospitality and good feeling imaginable the mirror starts to look less shattered. Most of all, the Rusenkos would be happy to know there was hope from their children, who revealed a grace, a self-reliance and a perception of the needs of those around them that they have learnt young from living in a large family who have little and are permanently up against it. Romany traditions are complex and sometimes hard for outsiders to swallow. But the quiet, instinctive, day-to-day tolerance and respect this family practise is something from which those in the West, who would reject the dog-eat-rabid-dog values of the system the Czech Republic is now embracing, could learn much.