Romani

For my 18th birthday, my parents allowed me to commission a painting by the Flemish post -expressionist artist Raul Vanden Heede, whose  work they were very fond of and who was also a friend of the family. He had painted a watercolor of a princess coach for my sister Goedele. I asked him to do a portrait of me as a gypsy girl. To this day, I have the painting, it is in my living room and I enjoy it every day. I identify very much with the portrait, as I have always had an interest and affinity for gypsies, or Romani, to use the proper ethnic and cultural term. When I was growing up in  Belgium, Romani were only allowed to stay for a 24 hour period. I loved it when they came through our town. A lot of people did not like them, but I thought they were beautiful, with their jet black hair, their dark skin and brightly colored clothes. They would camp about 10 minutes from our house, near the town railroad tracks. I still see their campfires at night, their caravans of trailers and old beat up cars. I remember their laughter, their voices, the guitar music, the women in long bright skirts,their waist long hair, their smiles, in spite of being looked down on and avoided. They would walk to our neighborhood, and sell their services of fortune telling and sharpening knives, and fixing small appliances. One day, two boys of about 10, with massive grins on their faces, told my mother and I that they would sharpen our knives for "10 francs le centimetre". We knew that was outrageous, as one Belgian franc fluctuated between 35 and 40 francs to one American dollar. Those were going to be some very expensively sharpened knives! But my mother agreed, and off they went snickering knowingly that they had just fooled the well to do house wife, not realizing my mother just  played along. It was a touching act of kindness towards children who were treated as outcasts and with suspicion by most. Red poppies grew by the rail road tracks, and to me to this day they are a reminder of all that was left to remember the Romani had been in town 24 hours earlier, as the tracks were empty of their presence again, and the quiet poppies no longer were surrounded by music and exotic gypsies. To me, the visits by the Romani  were exciting, because to me they represented freedom. Freedom from routine, from school, regular work routines, preconceived notions of propriety and social standards, expectations. I wanted to be a gypsy. Of course , as a 10 or 11 year old I had no idea of the horrible persecutions these people had endured, and continue to endure. Just recently the former President of France had 51 Romani camps demolished and forcibly removed the inhabitants back to their country of origin. That was in 2010. And the Romani have endured persecution since they arrived in Europe around 1322. The Nazi are responsible for at least 1 million deaths of Romani. No one seems to have been kind to these people, who from the time they entered Europe through the Middle East and North Africa, were forbidden to speak their language, to wear their ethnic clothing, to play their music, to keep and ride their horses, and who were sold as slaves as late as 1852 in Bucharest. Their plight strikes me as very similar to the tragic plight of the Native Americans. My husband and son both have Black Foot Native American blood running through their veins. I am neither a Romani nor a native American, but I have great empathy for both cultures. I read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown when I was 16, and I can still recall the rage I felt at the systematic genocide described in the book. There is a great new article in the latest National Geographic Magazine about the Sioux Indian reservation, Pine Ridge in South Dakota, called "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse". The continuing struggle with appalling poverty and alcoholism, depression, suicide and unemployment are a sad testimony to the legacy of persecution and abuse. Fortunately, the culture is making a come back. I pray the same will be able to be said of Romani culture in the end. For now, with economic tensions world wide, it seems the specter of persecution is looming again, in the name of yet again finding a scapegoat for society's troubles.