Today, non-Roma mainly learn about Roma through media representations, TV soaps and music, and all of these are for the most part controlled by non-Roma. Ian Hancock (1987), a prominent Roma scholar, points out that when other nations are portrayed as stereotypes, the school curriculum provides the necessary information to help students distinguish between fact and fiction. However, there is widespread amnesia about the past with regard to Roma, and very little information about Roma on mainstream school curricula, either in Romania or beyond. Artworks and fictional representations by non-Roma have for a long time been the only sources of information about Roma available to the public at large. Non-Roma works featuring stereotypical representations have created a whole field of signifiers similar to Orientalism, defined as stereotypical representations of Asia and the Middle East in the West (Said [1978] 1994; see Lemon 2000). These stereotypes continue to be quoted, recycled and perpetuated, to the extent that Roma use and quote them themselves.
Literary critic Katie Trumpener (1992) has eloquently argued that in Western literature, Gypsies function as triggers of memory and nostalgia, as a people without history, and as memory keepers for other nations. Other scholars have shown that ‘literary Gypsies throughout Europe figure nationalist nostalgia – they are envisioned as a kind of time capsule for storing national forms (music, folklore, traditions) and a simpler past’ (Lemon 2000a, 41). Trumpener argues that the mythologization of Gypsies as timeless preservers of the past is ambiguous, as it veils their marginalization in forgetfulness: ‘The function of nostalgia is to restore innocence, by covering up other memories, harsher realities of tension and hostility and fear’ (Trumpener 1992, 853). Gypsies have played this role in literary works from Mérimée’s novella Carmen to Virginia Woolf’s novel Three Guineas. Given how little known Roma are as a people with a history beyond the stereotypes, in this section I provide an overview of Roma history in relation to Roma representations in the arts.
It is not widely known in Romania or elsewhere that Roma – the self-ascription of most individuals using the Romani language, and of other groups identifying as Ţigani, Rudara, Sinti and so on across Europe – share a common ancestry with the tribes that migrated from India in the twelfth century. Their language, Romani, which derives from Sanskrit and shares characteristics with today’s South Asian languages, is the strongest evidence of this migration (Hancock 1987). Even though Roma were mentioned in official documents from the territories of today’s Romania as long ago as 1385, many non-Roma in Romania see Roma as foreigners. Roma are probably the most heterogeneous among the different populations in Romania’s territories, mainly because no state-sponsored Roma nation-building process has institutionalized Roma ethnocultural identities, as has been the case with Romanian, Hungarian and more recently Jewish ethnocultural identities.31
Most scholars divide Roma in Romania into several groups, based on traditional occupations, structures of social organization, family configuration and religion. The majority of Roma in Romania are Vlach (Vlax), one of several Roma denominations, which encompasses several smaller groups (natsija or vitse) including Vatrash (‘assimilated’ Roma, employed in agriculture), Lăutari (musicians), Kelderara (coppersmiths), Argintari (silversmiths), Boldeni (flower sellers), Lovara (horse traders), Ursara (bear handlers), Ciurara (knife makers), Pieptanara (comb makers), Fierari (smiths), Rudara (goldsmiths, later woodcarvers) and Karamidarja (brick makers). In Transylvania, a large number of Roma are Romungre (musicians), influenced by Hungarian culture and not Vlach. However, as anthropologist Alaina Lemon argues:
No single, organic, segmentary Romani social structure exists; thus there can be no single way to name social relationships or categories. This does not mean that there are no Romani social orders or structures. It does mean that Romani rifts and affiliations have multiple historical causes – they are not the result of a single, internal principle (such as pollution or ‘tribal law’) that generated an ordered fission. (Lemon 2000a, 90)
These differences are determined by a variety of factors, including geographical location, gender and descent. Several dialects of Romani can be found across Europe and beyond, and the literary, standardized Romani, based on the Kelderari dialect, is familiar to most Roma.
Contemporary Romania’s territory covers several historical provinces (Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Dobrudja, Bucovina and so on), and the history of the Roma across these regions varies accordingly. For example, in Moldavia and Wallachia Roma were slaves until 1856; while in Transylvania a very small number of Roma were slaves, mostly in areas previously part of Moldavia and Wallachia (Achim 1998, 44). For Roma, ethnicity overlapped with low socioeconomic status during slavery, when the terms ‘Ţigan’ and ‘slave’ were synonymous. ‘Ţigan’ meant ‘slave’ in Moldavia and Wallachia until 1856, and the two terms were used interchangeably until the second half of the nineteenth century, when slavery was abolished. In Transylvania ‘Romanian’ signified one of the ethnicities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while in the principalities it meant the majority ethnicity of various social classes, including serfs. The term ‘Ţigan’ has preserved its connotations of lower social status into the present. The origins of Roma slavery represent a point of contention in Romanian historiography, and by extension in Romanian politics, as I show in Chapter 1.
In nineteenth-century Romanian literature, the Ţigani – as Roma were known at the time – played similar roles to Gypsies in Western literature. Ion Budai Deleanu’s Ţiganiada is a comic epic that parodies the fate of the Romanian people under the mask of Ţigani; written between 1800 and 1812, it was first published in 1875. Both Ţigani and Romanians were minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to which Transylvania belonged, and Budai Deleanu used Ţigani to reflect the oppression of subaltern Romanians. However, Budai Deleanu’s background included Roma ancestry, and this work is often cited as an example of early literature by Roma. Vasile Alecsandri, an aristocrat, abolitionist, author and revolutionary from Moldavia, draws on autobiographical details to portray a Ţigan slave from a slave owner’s point of view in his short story Vasile Porojan, published in 1880. The tragic fate of a female Roma slave, Zamfira, is also a subplot in his other work, Story of a Golden Coin (1844). Alecsandri’s short stories represent the best-known literary representations of Roma slaves.
The literary and visual portrayal of Roma in the arts in the Romanian territories fit in the larger European mythology of the noble savage. Exceptions include Gheorghe Asachi’s 1847 play Ţiganii, which describes the emancipation of privately owned slaves and imagines Roma and Romanians becoming one nation (Szeman 2017, forthcoming). In the early twentieth century most representations of Roma recycled old stereotypes; while during socialism the state denied the existence of an ethnocultural Roma identity, and as a result Roma were absent from the arts. Roma artists and intellectuals were assimilated into the nation, and their ethnic background was never mentioned officially.
Persecution and Erasures in the Twentieth Century
Between the two world wars, the unification of several territories into Greater Romania was marked by the Romanian state’s increased attempts to assimilate other ethnicities (Livezeanu 1995). Roma activists and intellectuals in organizations such as the General Association of Ţigani in Romania and the General Union of Roma worked to establish a public Roma presence and to craft a modern identity – one based on integrating Roma through an emphasis on their Christian values (Potra, 1939). Despite the fact that Roma were recognized as an ethnicity, they were not included in the constitution, and the majority of Roma were impoverished and uneducated.
Perhaps the darkest period for Roma across Europe was the Roma Holocaust during World War II. Alongside Jews and homosexuals, Roma were the target of Nazi and fascist extermination campaigns. In Romania, Marshal Ion Antonescu sent around 25,000 Roma to concentration camps in the territories of today’s Ukraine.
While slavery and the Holocaust
