“The Roma are a people—that is essential,” he says. “We are a dispersed people, and yet we still have a language, Romani, of Indian origin, which remains the language of communication among the fifteen million or so Roma around the world. Because we are a dispersed people, without a state, there is some particularity to our feeling of belonging. For instance, the word tsigane”—the traditional French word for Roma, and used by most French people—“is not a word in Romani, but tsigane doesn’t correspond to anything precise. It corresponds to an image made of stereotypes.” “But where the stigmatization of the Roma is so strong, as in France right now, the Roma begin to divide. No French person will ever say, ‘I’m French above all!’ It’s too . . . Vichy. But lately I’ve heard this phrase said by Manouches!” He sighs. “And, listen, just six years ago, there were no young Roma who robbed in the Métros. The young Roma who rob in the Métros are children who were born in France. But when they are born in France and have known only the bidonvilles”—as the French call their shantytowns—“where nothing is really regulated or possible, where you don’t go to school, the one thing that you can learn to do to live is . . . that thing there. I’ll say this. The Roma who rob in the Métro are the children of the French Republic before they are ours.” Mile’s words are typical of what Stéphane Lévêque, the editor of the Journal of Tsigane Studies, describes as the recurring “discourse” of the Roma in France: they are a people, helpless and disorganized, and therefore distasteful; they are a nation, exotic and sinister, and therefore frightening. This twoness infects everything that is said about them. People who want to speak in defense of the Roma in France ask that you make distinctions and discriminations among them—not just between the few who steal and the great majority who don’t but among the many ethnic divisions within the group. The same people then go on to insist that the one thing that Roma lack is a proper sense of unity, without which they will always be persecuted. It’s an old predicament of identity politics. We are manifold and must be respected as individuals—and we are completely different from the rest of you, with our own culture and history, giving us a collective identity that allows us to belong to the larger world of nations, just as you do. It’s our being completely different from the rest of you that makes us like the rest of you. “In Eastern Europe, it’s worse than under the so-called Communist regimes,” he says. “We are no longer even allowed to claim the right to wander that we have always had. That is the essence of our history. Why should we integrate? We’ve been here for centuries without integrating.” The fate of Jews and Roma is linked. Something like a quarter of the European population of Roma were murdered in the camps and killing grounds of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, one repeated Roma grievance is that they remain second-class Shoah citizens, relegated to the margins of martyrdom, their suffering winning at best a footnote and a side chapel at the sites of commemoration.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:12:43 +0000
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