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Compromise

The question of their Romani identity may keep some individuals anguishing privately, and for all Rroma it is an ever present awareness because the outside world provides a constant reminder that the barriers are in place; but for the great majority, it is an awareness which is overridden by the more pragmatic concerns of work, shelter, safety and providing for the family, For the average Rrom, whether we are European or Asian or neither or both is not a matter of much consequence; just being different brings trouble enough. For the leaders, however, it must be. The future of the Romani population is in the hands of those Romani intellectuals who interact with the representatives of national governments, and with human rights and educational agencies, and in whose power it is to influence the decision makers. But these individuals too face a double task, for it can be as difficult for them to reach the vast majority of ordinary Rroma as it is to reach the establishment.

For all that the growing academic trend represented by Okely, Willems, Wexler, Sandland and to some extent Mayall is attempting to dismiss the genetic distinctiveness of the Romani populations, it has been precisely because of it that Hitler's intent to eradicate us as a people was put into effect. The recently-released news that Sweden had been selecting individuals for compulsory sterilization on the grounds of "undesirable racial characteristics . . . recognizable Gypsy features"(44), and the existence of similar programs in Switzerland, Denmark, Slovakia and elsewhere also testify to the dangers of being of Romani descent in the real world, despite what these academics want to believe.

Approaches

There are three approaches to the formalizing of a consensus on Romani identity: treating us either as Europeans, or else as Asians, or as both. Each is attended by arguments, for and against. The case for being considered European, for some at least, rests upon the fact that over the centuries our genetic makeup has acquired a generous infusion of European "blood," for some Romani populations clearly far outweighing the original gene pool. Secondly, we might be considered European because of our widespread geographical dispersion as a truly transnational people. But as Mirga and Gheorghe have pointed out (45); we are a global, not just a European population. Are the Rroma in Peru also "true Europeans"?

One's identity has to be evaluated in terms not only of what one perceives oneself to be, but also by whether members of the population that one sees oneself as identifying with also share that perception. And it depends, furthermore, upon the attitudes of the out-group, which is the third dimension; in other words, one might be attempting to become part of a population which has no intention of letting one in. A 1993 poll asked both the Rroma and non-Rroma residents in Kremnica, Slovakia, whether Rroma "should live together with Slovaks and have the same living conditions as Slovaks have." One hundred percent of the Rroma said "yes." Ninety one percent of the Slovaks said "no." In the late 1970s, Guyana — an English-Creole-speaking South American country with an almost entirely African and Asian population — mounted a national campaign to reidentify itself as a Latin American nation. It did this because of its location, and for reasons of regional trade. The rest of Latin America, however, did not see Guyana as being in any way a part of their cultural and linguistic world, and the attempt withered and died.

I spent a couple of hours in a local bookshop going through several works with such titles as An Encyclopedia of Western Culture, A History of Europe, A Compendium of European History, A History of the Western World etc., but no Rroma graced their pages. For whoever wrote them, we were not considered to be part of European history or culture. Interestingly, H.G. Wells' The Outline of History (1920) was the only work of this kind I found, which devoted any space at all to our existence. We can't be Europeans unless Euro-peans want us to be as well, and the very clear message is that they don’t as the title a recent issue of Transitions concerning the situation of the Roma reflects ("Still Knocking on Europe's Closed Doors").

I have lived in the United States long enough to see that despite the best intentions of representatives of the African- American population to bring the Black minority into the mainstream, prejudice is still an everyday fact of life and African Americans remain the "other." The same is true of the Aboriginal experience in Australia.

Although the collapse of Communism and the spread of Western ideas has introduced racist rhetoric from the West, and while it is beginning to find expression in eastern Europe, where journalists are increasingly using the terms "black" and "white" to distinguish Rroma and non-Rroma populations, this distinction has always been a part of the Romani world view. Another term for "non-Gypsy" is goró, which in India means "light-skinned," while a Romani self ascriptive label found in northern and western Europe is Kaló, which means "black." One Romani term for eastern Europe, where the highest concentration of Rroma lives, is Kali Eropa, i.e., Black Europe, while western Europe is Parni ("white") Eropa. Traditional Romanichals in America, British Gypsies who are largely indistinguishable from the general Anglo population, nevertheless talk about 'white people’ in contrast to themselves. These are boundary-maintaining labels which persist in culture while no longer having any manifestation physically (46).

The arguments for an Indian origin have already been made. In these times when Europe is divided into nation- states, and national minorities in other countries have governments to speak in their defense, then being identified with an actual homeland brings legitimacy and a measure of security. Furthermore, it is the Indian factors, linguistic, genetic and cultural that different Romani populations share; it is the more recently acquired non-Indian factors which divide us. If I want to speak in Romani to a speaker of a dialect different from my own, it is the European words we must each avoid, not the Indian ones.

But are Rroma in fact "still" Indians? From the very beginning, the population has been a composite one; and acknowledging this fact constitutes a third approach. In any case, the label is a geographical, not an ethnic one, since evidence points to Dravidian, Scythian and even East African (Siddhi) input into the early mix of militia and camp followers. Words do not travel independently of people; they have no lives of their own, and we must accept that, during the prolonged stay in Persia, long enough for over a hundred Persian words to come into Romani, social intercourse insured that the gene pool was further added to; likewise in the Byzantine Empire, when over two hundred Greek words were absorbed into Romani. In Europe the migration, by this time a conglomerate ethnic population whose diverse speech had crystallized into one language, encountered other mobile populations and in some cases joined and intermarried with them. Sometimes the Romani cultural and linguistic presence was sufficient that the newly-encountered populations were absorbed and became Rroma in subsequent generations; sometimes the Romani contribution was not sufficient to maintain itself, and other, non-Romani populations such as the Jenisch emerged. During the centuries of slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia, and elsewhere in Europe under conditions of oppression, Romani women have given birth to unwanted babies by non-Rroma fathers. Cohn (47) estimates the mean percentage of European "blood" in the European Romani genetic makeup to be 60% (48). Sandland (49), basing his argument on Fraser (50), says that

even assuming that Gypsies were a 'pure race' on entering Europe, four marriages for every hundred would have led to a latter-day population which is 70 per cent non-Gypsy in ancestry, even one in every hundred would have realized a Gypsy population less than 50 per cent ‘pure’.

The rate of out-marriage obviously differs from place to place, evident in even a cursory comparison of phenotypical features between the Romani populations in, say, Macedonia from those in, say, Finland. Sandland's reference to a "pure" race is outmoded and potentially dangerous, and in any case smacks of a double standard; the English people are composed of Saxon, Celt, Norman and Viking, but have nevertheless an extremely strong sense of single and even superior identity, one which prompted historian Thomas Macaulay to call the English "the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw" (51), and an editorial in Fraser's Magazine to declare that "the English people are naturally industrious, they prefer a life of honest labour to one of idleness. They are a persevering as well as energetic race. . ."(52). Race is clearly in the head. But it is no less real because of that.

The fact of having multiple origins is not unique. It is the very capacity to absorb and acculturate disparate populations which is particularly characteristic of the Rroma. The truly remarkable thing is that it has been possible, despite this kind of incorporation of outsiders and despite the lack of a national territory, to maintain a linguistic and cultural cohesiveness which stretches back for a thousand years. As weak as it may be, it remains strong enough to identify all Romani groups as being exactly that - Romani groups.

Many of the problems which Rroma are having with non-Rroma are rooted in the vague and muddled notions of who and what Rroma are, and what the Romani experience in Europe has been, and what Rroma have contributed to European culture. Our safety and well-being do not rest upon proving that we are either Asian or European in origin; those are issues of human rights and the acceptance of the fact that wherever we are from, we are a people with a distinctive language and culture, in that respect no different from the Germans or the Italians or the Slovaks, and equally deserving of acknowledgment and respect. One step towards ensuring a safe and productive future for Romani populations in Europe is to develop educational programmes for the schools, both Gypsy and non-Gypsy, where Romani history and culture can be taught and the findings of current historical and linguistic scholarship made better known. Legitimization will lead to respect, and in this way the foundation will be laid for a clearer understanding of Romani identity, and a more credible image of our people.

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