Our ancestors had slaves, but, oh well, ”Those were the times”
I went to the theatre performance about the 500 years of Roma slavery — ”The Great Shame” — written and directed by Alina Șerban, who has examined dozens of historical documents about Roma servitude on Romanian territories and has tried to understand our silent treatment of this subject. Are we, for any chance, living in some kind of paradox where abuse towards the Roma is more ”condonable” than towards others? I asked myself a lot of questions while watching the show and I can’t say that I had found any answers at the end of it. At least, not any that would paint us, Romanians, in a positive light.
A recent FRA study (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) shows that 80 per cent of the Roma population in Europe lives below the at-risk threshold of extreme poverty. The same source shows that, even though they’re the largest ethnic minority on the continent, they’re far from receiving equal treatment and access to elementary public services. 82 per cent of the Roma population in Europe are not aware of the existence of anti-discrimination campaigns. Meanwhile, in Romania there are 2,000 Roma ghettos which host approximately one million people. The issues of such a blatant, yet such an often ignored reality.
In front of the Bucharest National Theatre, the venue of ”The Great Shame”, a group of people were smoking their last cigarette before the show.
I got there in a frenzy, because in the sea of corrupt politicians and street manifestations that focus our main attention at this time, I didn’t see in due time the press release about ”The commemoration of 161 years since the freeing of the Roma people from slavery”. Slavery on Romanian territories is a subject that I’ve been meaning to learn more about for some time, but the lack of a handy source of information, the silent social pact that ”we don’t speak of that” and partly, I admit, my own laziness, got me to the point where I had to learn from o theatre performance (excellently documented) everything we haven’t been told in History classes in school. School being thus that place that only taught us the ”favorable” version of what happened a long time before we were born.
I don’t smoke, but I took the opportunity to gather myself after my sprint to the theatre. No matter what people say, smokers give me a sort of Zen feeling with their ritual of the ‘last cigarette’.
It was there, among those who smoked their cigarettes to the filter, that I ran into Marian, a Roma boy from my neighborhood, also an old classmate from elementary school and the reason why I wasn’t cut into pieces in my childhood, because for years he considered me his ”protégé”.
‘Marian, how are you?’ I said and patted him on the back.
He looked at me a bit lost and I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then he said, with the same husky voice that I hadn’t heard since I was 13:
‘Oh, my, Gabi, what can I say? I’ve made a serious man out of myself, can’t you see?’
We laughed and we went inside. I only saw him again two hours later, in the foyer.
“No matter how high you jump, at the first mistake, you’re still a crow.”
Alina Șerban, the author of the play The Great Shame is a Romania-born Roma actress who studied acting at the I.L. Caragiale University for Theater and Film and devising theater at the The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. In 2013, she won the Richmix — Stories of London competition with her play, Home, which is also when she started to write and direct on a regular basis. As of this writing, she’s starring in the movie Seul a mon Mariage, directed by Marta Berman.
Alina Șerban’s show recounts the story of Magda, a young woman who wants to do a doctorate about her ancestors’ history in the Romanian principalities.
Magda’s life is built in a conventional way, around characters whose roles are precise: a Romanian life partner, with whom she often debates about racial discrimination, a good friend, Elena, whose mother has a seminary of ”Roma culture” at the Letters Faculty, and her brother, a priest who, when he suggested that he performed a bilingual service (Romanian and Romani), was almost lynched by his parishioners, who ”didn’t want to be ministered by a Gypsy” — a case based on true events.
What’s less conventional in “The Great Shame” is its structure. If the first part focuses on Magda and her personal trajectory, the second part is pure history, with quotes of noblemen and noblewomen taken from official documents, or with lines of dialogue that illustrate their opinions about the Roma slavery. The public laughed at the hilarious exchange between Kogălniceanu and a boyar:
“Kogălniceanu: Do you have a Penal Code for Gypsies?
Boyar: The law doesn’t let us kill them, but we beat them and they die by themselves.”
The second act has a very important educational component, and I thought the way it was adapted for the stage was at least a successful one: the information isn’t delivered in an overly sentimental manner (as it may have been tempting), but more as a series of apt sketches.
However, it was the first part, the one where Magda’s character decides to do a research on Roma slavery and has her personality forever changed by this research, that speaks to people today, to those who will be in the audience, in a language that they can understand from their everyday experience. This is also the part that addresses a lot of the clichés and preconceptions of the social interactions between Romanians and the Roma (”Do you know that saying about the Gypsy who is a Gypsy even on Easter day? My boyfriend’s father said that.”)
The more she finds out about her ancestors’ history, the more Magda’s interactions with the other characters becomes more strained. Her boyfriend tells her that she has “gone mad since starting this PhD”, and the brother she provokes to have a conversation about the Orthodox Church being the greatest slave owner, accuses her of “trying to disconnect him from his faith”. Even her PhD coordinator tells her to have a more peaceful attitude, because her paper “should contribute to eliminating the sources of tension, not accentuating them”.
The professors tell her that her indignation against the Romanian society, whose conscience doesn’t encompass the 500 years of Roma slavery, is inappropriate:
‘Miss, we can’t judge, with our present sensibilities, the way things were back then! What, was it me who had slaves? Should I answer for my ancestors’ mistakes? I haven’t bought a car since I don’t know when, what kind of slave owner am I?’
With limited resources, Alina Șerban made the most coherent and complex theatre performance about Roma history that I have seen so far. A special mention for the script written by her, which I found truly good.
Everybody watches attentively what happens on the stage. Diagonally from where I sit, at the balcony, I can see Marian, my childhood buddy. He’s filming part of the show with his phone. I get inspired to take out my camera and record one of the most powerful moments onstage, although I know that filmed theatre will never have the same impact as when it’s live. I’m talking about the scene where Elena, the daughter of the Roma history professor, says a few words to her mother that really stick to your eardrums:
”So what if you’ve always been the best professor, they still called you a <<damned Gypsy>>. Do you really not see that, no matter how nice you can talk, or how high you jump, at the first mistake you’re just another crow, like all the rest?”.
After the show I met Marian again in the elegant and crowded foyer. For a second I felt like we were both disguised in the bodies of two adults, with so-and-so manners, although inside we’re still the same kids who won their influence in the neighborhood by swearing. Which, actually, we never really had, thanks to the poverty in which we were born and which condemned us to social irrelevance. The real hustlers didn’t pay us any attention and in a way, even we, who annoyed everybody else, took care not to step on the toes of the rich.
I stood face to face with Marian and didn’t really know what to say. So many years had passed since we’d last seen each other. I didn’t even know if he had gone back to school after he’d been expelled, and I couldn’t imagine what he was doing now.
I started by saying that I felt moved by the show and that I learned a lot of new things. He said that he didn’t know about them either. I told him I felt bad, as a Romanian, not to know anything about the Roma’s ancestors. He said, in a low voice: ‘We, Gypsies, didn’t know either.’
I didn’t think that to be an excuse for our, the majority’s, ignorance, considering how hard Roma’s access to education is, comparing to that of the Romanians, which is not so great either.
I asked Marian if there was anything that made a particular impression on him. He mentioned a fragment inspired from the document studies of the historic Petre Petcuț. There was a phrase in the show saying that:
“There were observed thousands of newly freed (from slavery, a.n.) who wandered naked on the streets of the Romanian capital.”
This image of people running aimlessly in all directions, disoriented after a lifetime of not knowing what freedom is, stayed with me for a few moments.
I exchanged phone numbers with Marian and we promised each other to meet up. I wanted to ask him a few questions for my article, and he agreed. He hasn’t answered me since.
In the first grade I had five Roma classmates. By the fourth grade, they were all left behind — retained — not because they were necessarily worse students than the worst Romanians in our grade, but because parents and the teacher wanted a “clean classroom”.
This sort of ethnic cleanse of Romanian classrooms in the ’90s was something so natural that nobody seemed surprised by it. The first pupil our grade, 1st D, said goodbye to, was Paganel, a Roma boy who, after being retained, never got back to school. I remember he was quiet, seated by the teacher in the first row, so that he could see what was written on the blackboard. He was a lot shorter than any of us.
The last to leave our grade was Roza, a chubby girl, who used to shake the desks with laughter. Extremely smart, she would always rely on what she had heard during class, without ever taking notes. She seemed eternally absent-minded, but she would always surprise us with her on point answers. She never did her homework (a big part of grading in the 1st to 4th grades) and the teacher finally had enough: she failed her. Before the end of the school year and saying goodbye forever to the little girl who laughed like nobody I had heard before, the teacher said to her:
“It’s such a shame, Roza, because you’re not stupid at all”.
The teacher’s dream to see our class “cleaned up” didn’t last long –it lasted as long as the summer holiday between the 4th and the 5th grade. We were grade D, the last one in alphabetical order, so it was a given we’d get saddled with all the kids that got left behind, to the discontentment of a few parents.
I remember my primary school teacher, on the first day of the 5th grade, at the school yard assembly. She’d become our form teacher, because she was also qualified as a history teacher. She stood in front, with two boys and a girl, who were obviously older than us.
“Are you sure you’re in our class, in D?” she huffed with malcontent.
“Yes,” a guy taller than all of us by two lengths of a head replied.
The girl and one of the guys were Roma. They’d gotten left behind the second or third time and, in spite of our form teacher, who’d created an unfriendly context, they were well received by the class as a group. They actually became distinct authorities among us.
The girl, Diana, was extremely well-liked by the class, and her family owned one of the most popular florist shops in the area. We’d waste time there quite often after classes.
The other one was Marian, the guy I recently saw again at Alina Șerban’s show. He was feared by many. For reasons he alone knew, this guy often ended up defending me. Although I had a pretty big mouth and a propensity for causing a fuss, despite my slim build, I never got whooped. Marian would laugh at the jokes I cracked at other people’s expense.
“This guy’s criminal. If anyone of y’all hits him, you’re hitting me, too, you got it?”
His protection encouraged me to poke fun at everyone I stumbled on. I was completely moronic, but as long as he was around, I knew nothing bad could happen to me. I only calmed down in the 7th grade, when they eventually expelled Marian for good.
Seeing Marian again made me remember that, although discrimination was a constant in our childhood, somehow, strangely, in my reality, at least, my friendship with Roma kids left a different kind of mark than the one expected by the authorities I knew at the time: the racist teachers, the foul-mouthed store clerk at the corner shop that would shoo away the lot of us, because we were dirty and penniless, and, every now and then, the ones my dad would’ve expected.
When I was a kid, school inoculated us with the idea that we need to be humble, because “it’s hard to stumble when you’re on your knees” and “knowledge is power”. They advised us not to “let democracy get to our heads”. We were encouraged to separate on ethnic grounds, lest we be “negatively influenced”.
This kind of motivational slogan in education didn’t work with us. What’s more, like many of my Romanian friends at the time, I’d started to talk like the Roma. Not because I’d learned Romani, the language some of them spoke at home, but because I’d taken on a lot of their accent in Romanian.
Our ideals in a poor neighborhood in the nineties were completely different than the ones expected by the peripheral “elite” of a society who’d just escaped Communism. In theory, we knew we were Romanians, not Roma, but we didn’t jive much with these theories. We were far more sensitive to the immediate realities.
Getting left behind was never shameful, but rather commendably gutsy, a defiance of the system against which we rose, but without knowing exactly why. Prizes were for the humorless geeks, who didn’t know how to be friendly and lived for the teachers’ approval. We lived for a better spot on our social ladder built on the streets, led by the most agile one of us, the one who was always one step ahead of the others and knew how to set the beat for the whole gang.
To speak the language of the many was a virtue. To speak by the book was to take on the risk of being humiliated to an extent that no adult could save you from. I was somewhere in the middle. I did well in school, but my gall and desire to belong to a group always disqualified me from being among the top two students in my class.
The part of the street-smart thug I played in order to be accepted by an entourage entwined with the feeling (that never left me) that I wasted a whole lot of time in school without learning too much. Although, I did want to learn — at one specific point in particular.
I broke away from milieu behind once I left the neighborhood, got to high-school, and discovered the Internet and cable TV. Marian and the gang from way back when started partying to a frequency I could no longer tune into and it seemed we no longer lived on the same street — even though, in reality, we were all still there.
I only learned about discrimination against the Roma, formulated as a theory per se, toward the end of high-school/early on during college, even though the issue had been right under my nose all along, in how my primary school teacher behaved and what the adults said. The concept was new to me.
I didn’t believe and didn’t know that the problem was this serious, that the majority sees the Roma as a sort of inferior breed. To me, they were still those characters in my childhood with whom I used to play with and, oddly enough, everything that came after that simply happened too late to alter my perception.
To this day, my mind cannot shift perspectives in order to see the Roma, the masters of the streets I grew up on, as second rate citizens.
In the study Romanian Roma: Identity and Otherness, the researcher Ligia Livadă-Cadeschi answers some of the questions that concern a segment of Romanian society by analyzing several samples of historic evidence in context.
So, is it acceptable to refer to the ‘Roma’ as ‘gypsies’, or isn’t it? If we’re talking about the ones today, no, it’s not ok, because the term ‘gypsy’ is historically synonymous with the term ‘slave’. It defines one’s allegiance to a lower social class, which no longer exists today, and it definitely did not refer to ethnic background. Mere logical reasoning shows us that, since slavery no longer exists today (at least not in the same form it did centuries ago), there’s also no reason to keep using this term in order to define the ethnic Roma who are our contemporaries. Especially since, nowadays, there are plenty of voices in the community who take offense at the pejorative connotations that the word has taken on in time. It’s also worth noting that the term ‘gypsy’ took on a special nuance from the 14th to 18th century, when it was used in documents to identify people who were not free.
“But they call each other ‘gypsies’, why can’t I call them that?” This is one of the most frequent arguments regarding this term that I’ve heard from ethnic Romanians. The way in which a member of the community defines herself is strictly her individual choice. However, when it comes to our shared history, which we’ve been learning from alternative sources, because, for decades on end, we were too racist to include it in the textbooks, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to be a bit more mindful next time we use a phrase like “you were such a gypsy to me” in public. It’s an unfair, racist generalization to assume that all those who belong to a certain ethnicity have the negative habits that we condemn through the use of such phrases.
In the same study, Irina Năstasă-Matei notes that, of all the minorities on Romania’s territory, the Roma top the discrimination charts. And this, she explains, is because the ethnic Romanians find it difficult to break away from the stereotypical patterns of thought they’ve been passed down from generation to generation.
My hope is that, today, when we’ve got so much information at our disposal, just one click away, we could at least pause to nuance our public discourse — that is, if we’re not yet ready to ransack our box of stereotypes :)
A few speeches were held before the commencement of the play The Great Shame, on the scene of the National Theater in Bucharest, Mihai Neacșu, the president of the National Center for Roma Culture — Romano Kher gave one example that stuck with me:
“We all know Barbu Lăutaru. Barbu Lăutaru is one of the slaves that regained their freedom.”
He then added a few pieces of information regarding the attitude that our currently elect hold toward their work:
“After the two previous cabinets our mission has become more difficult, because the current government has slashed out budget by 60 per cent.”
Actress Oana Rusu delivered a message from Alina Șerban, who could not attend the event. It ended with the advice: “Remember not to forget.”
A petition was also circulated in the audience — one that seeks to determine the authorities to grant the elderly Roma survivors of the deportation to Transnistria their state pensions.
You can sign the petition here.
Cast: Ana Maria Carablais / Alina Șerban, Oana Rusu, Elena Duminică, Alexandru Fifea, Radu Ciobănașu
Set design: Maria Crețu
Text & Direction: Alina Șerban
Technical team: Maria Crețu, Ionuț Dumitrașcu, Cristian Constantin, Tania Cucoreanu — VeiozaArte, Alina Manea — Black Horse Mansion, Roland Tarus
Executive producer, 2nd director: Ștefan Pătrașcu — Dinadins