The truth about Europe's ancient hatred of the Roma
As a Roma woman with a doctorate from a British university, Madeline Potter often notices that the outside world can perceive her as 'one of the good ones – someone who's somehow managed to make something of myself despite being Roma'. By way of riposte, she has produced a book, The Roma, that is part narrative history, part memoir and part cultural celebration, hoping it might 'offer a model of resistance' for those 'forced into poverty, precarious living conditions and socio-political vulnerability'
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Born in a post-industrial town in the foothills of Romania's Carpathian mountains in 1989, the year history caught up with the Ceaușescus, Potter never saw her people roaming the land in bowtop wagons. The long-travelling tradition had vanished. Her great-grandparents, however, had lived as nomads; their vitsa, or subgroup, the Kalderash, was and still is among the largest in the region, its men traditionally coppersmiths. Although her grandfather told her stories of the old days, Potter didn't discover much Romani history until she was in her 20s. Nonetheless, she always 'felt a strange sense of belonging to a past from which I had been cut off'.
Now an academic at the University of Edinburgh, Potter clarifies her terminology at the outset. She uses 'Roma' as a plural noun to refer broadly to all subgroups of the Romani people; 'Rom' is the singular masculine, 'Romni' the singular feminine. 'Romani' is an adjective. 'Gypsy', short for Egyptian and therefore a misnomer, barely comes into it. As for the origin story, there is, Potter says, 'no written account of our migration westwards from the territory of present-day Rajasthan in India, and there are no exact dates, but most historians agree that it probably happened in waves during the sixth or seventh centuries.'
The book is arranged geographically, following the author's travels through 10 countries in pursuit of both cultural roots and present-day Roma (hence the subtitle, 'A Travelling History'). Some lands Potter already knows well, such as Germany, home to between 170,000 and 300,000 Roma; others, such as Bulgaria, she has never visited before. The story of the US Roma, a million strong today, didn't follow the overall pattern of migration (the ancestors of Roma there came from Europe). A fifth of American Roma live in California.
The mass deportations of Roma by the Nazis in the Second World War, the Porrajmos or Samudaripen, was 'a genocide rarely given the same status and attention as the Holocaust'. Some of Potter's relatives from eastern Slovakia perished in Dachau. Estimates used put the number of murdered Roma between 200,000 and 500,000: according to the author, 'historians now think the figure might have been much higher, perhaps reaching one-and-a-half million.'
The book is at its strongest when it compares the experiences of these various national groups, and, of course, it's the specificities that hit home. At an anti-Roma protest in Bulgaria in 2011 (where the Roma population is about 800,000), chants of 'Gypsies into soap' persisted; later, an MEP called on Facebook for euthanasia for alleged criminals.
To a certain extent, The Roma presents a digest of this marginalisation, persecution and the erasure of history, all reflected in Potter's own experience as she moves around as an observer. In France, she reads blogs and public safety bulletins warning tourists of 'Gypsy scams'. In Spain, where she enrols for the Madrid marathon, she quickly feels stereotyped. She notes, everywhere, the widespread sentiment 'that our culture is inherently bad and harmful to society'.
Potter is a clear-headed witness to racism and abuse. And yet I would have liked more on why the endemic hatred and prejudice first took root, and went so deep. Beyond slightly vague talk of fear of the Other, and the information that a negative status clung to Roma from almost the minute they led their horses out of Asia, Potter doesn't tackle the issue. It's a mightily complex subject. But The Roma begs the question.
Despite, or perhaps because of that prejudice, Potter defiantly honours the spirit of Roma culture wherever she finds it. Music comes up a lot, and she describes the first feminist Romani theatre company in Romania and the first ever Roma Pride (in Bulgaria). On the other side, the 'fetishisation' of the Roma by artists outside the community gets an airing. In 1867 the composer Franz Liszt published an essay on 'The Gipsy in Music', she writes, which was blind to the history of the subjugation.
The author cites a range of sources from Romani scholars to the memoir of Philomena Franz, from the Sinti sub-group found mainly in Bavaria, and poetry by Jo Clements, whose collection Outlandish appeared to acclaim in the UK in 2022. Potter's prose, however, often deployed in the narrative present tense, tends to be flat ('I soak up the atmosphere'), and at times one senses the dead hand of the academic; her first book was a specialist monograph, and she tells the reader three times she is 'a scholar of Gothic literature'. She wants to celebrate, as well as memorialise, but although one hears that 'all vitsi are beautiful, each one a voice in a polyphonous Romani choir', not many pages really sing.
Potter's excursion to the famous Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria conjures a lively scene, but her overall portrait of Romani Britain is bleak. Roma arrived in the United Kingdom when Henry VIII was on the throne; there are about 200,000 Roma Britons now, including the Welsh Kale. And yet, as Potter puts it, Roma face a 'hostile reality'. Since the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act entered the statute books, 'trespassing in the United Kingdom has become a criminal offence.' The law, therefore, Potter firmly believes, now 'poses an existential threat. At the risk of having their property confiscated by police, [the Roma] are in danger of being left – paradoxically – homeless, and pushed further into the black hole of precarity and vulnerability.'
Again and again, contemplating dark times, Potter celebrates 'resilience and survival'; she wants her book to be seen 'not as a history of victimhood, but of resistance'. And this it is. 'Our bodies', she writes with spirit, 'speak of that survival: we are here, alive, singing and dancing, and still carrying on, and nobody can take that away.' As she concludes: 'The road goes on.'
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