Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
in public spaces tolerated and sanctioned by the state, these events’ radical potential can be either heeded or ignored, depending on the participants’ perspectives. As Floya Anthias (1998) has argued in a British context, the true test of multiculturalism is not adding ‘cultures’ devoid of historical and social context, but renouncing hegemonic symbols and paradigms. For non-Roma in Romania, the true test of inclusivity is the confrontation with the self beyond binary definitions of Self and Other, and the willingness to listen to counternarratives that might be uncomfortable or seem inflammatory at first.
Despite the President’s urging (cited at the opening of this chapter) that schools should teach about the Roma Holocaust and slavery, only Roma students learn about them. In general, the curriculum teaches optional courses on Roma language and culture to Roma students only. Unlike in Hungarian and German schools, where the whole curriculum is taught in the respective language, Roma students are taught mainly in Romanian. Despite recent publications and the reappraisal of Antonescu’s role in Romanian history, the curriculum does not teach the fact that the Romanian state was responsible for the deportations of Roma and Jews from Romanian territories. For example, during an International Roma Day celebration I attended in 2008, the exhibition outside the performance hall displayed documents about the Holocaust and explained that the German state had sent Roma to concentration camps; the Romanian state was not mentioned. Furthermore, only Roma students attended the celebration. Discussions of Roma slavery are equally controversial as those of the Holocaust, if not even more so, because in the case of slavery it is difficult to shift the blame onto other nations: the owners of Roma slaves were Romanians – royals, monasteries and nobles. Collective accountability is absent from national history narratives, where the victimization and resistance of the nation are the main motif.
A focus on Roma history as minor history entails undoing victimized images of the monoethnic nation and breaking open the binaries inherent in its construction. There is no centralized place, in the sense of an institutionalized location (de Certeau 1984), for writing Roma history, even within one country; but the many Roma communities’ diverse perspectives are often seen as arising from their own lack of unity and coherence, rather than from a lack of centralized institutions. For example, the presence of different words in Romani for the Holocaust, such as ‘Porrajmos’ (‘the Devouring’) (Hancock 2006), also spelled by some Roma as ‘Pharrajimos’ (Bársony and Daróczi 2008) or ‘Samudaripen’ (‘Murder of All’) (Cioabă 2006), point to the many perspectives from which Roma history is written, and reinforce the importance of considering national and transnational perspectives simultaneously when discussing these events.
Roma activists, artists and intellectuals have published oral histories and archival research and created documentaries and artworks that break the silence on Roma history, challenging national histories that present the Romanian nation as a victim of the Nazis, Communists or earlier empires while excluding Roma and Jews. Oral histories and testimonies have revealed the marginalization and neglect of survivors upon their return home from concentration camps and other places of deportation after World War II. Prominent Roma poet and activist Luminiţa Cioabă (2006), in an oral history project with Roma Holocaust survivors, has shown that many survivors did not have the know-how to successfully apply for the compensation to which they were entitled.
Despite the fact that the complex history of and around World War II has been reappraised and rewritten many times, including after 1989, the Roma Holocaust is little known, and not only in East Central Europe. Across Europe, the Roma Holocaust – a result of ‘racial science’ and an attempt to completely annihilate the Roma during Nazism – was the most extreme moment in a long history of Roma marginalization. The 1935 Nuremberg racial laws involved ‘mixed’ Gypsies’ incarceration and sterilization on the one hand, and ‘pure’ Gypsies’ group resettlement and ‘species preservation’ in special camps on the other. Prisoners in the separate Gypsy camp at Auschwitz were assigned the most debilitating labour (Trumpener 1992, 855). In Romania, one of Germany’s allies during World War II, authorities implemented similar anti-Roma policies, including the deportation of 25,000 Roma to Transnistrian labour camps after confiscation of their belongings. The deported included all nomads and the majority of sedentary Roma. Those who survived the harsh camp conditions returned to Romania after the war (Achim 1998).
In East Central Europe, national narratives reproduce binaries of Self versus Other, binaries exacerbated by fascist and Communist ideologies. In Romania, Communist-era World War II historiography focused on the anti-Nazi victory; since the fall of Communism, history has been rewritten with a strong anti-Communist ethos. The reshuffling of hero/villain roles between Communists and Nazis after World War II conveniently displaced any blame from the ‘nation’ while portraying it as the victim of either of the two extremist ideologies. The new heroes of the nation after 1989 were anti-Communists or local fascists who may have fought against Communism, such as Marshal Antonescu, who ordered the deportation of Roma and Jews in Romania. Pressure from Jewish communities has put an end to what was becoming a national admiration of Antonescu, who sent tens of thousands of Jews and Roma to their deaths.
The pictorial display inside the museum at the 2002 Roma Fair, ‘Între o Del şi o Beng’, was an exercise in NGO historiography. It aimed to offer ‘an image-based excursion through the material and spiritual aspects of Roma culture in its happy or miserable interaction with Romanian culture, from social fracture to resolidarization and intercultural dialogue’ (Jurnalul Naţional, 2002, 1). The display included exoticized representations of Roma by non-Roma. Such bohemian representations of Gypsies need to be approached cautiously, and to be treated as artistic conventions rather than as historical referents. In the nineteenth century, Gypsies became a favourite topic for Western artists, who projected onto them their own condition as outsiders in an increasingly mercantile society (Brown 1985). Romanian artists joined this trend, portraying exotic and beautiful Ţigănci who were often presented as lustful and oversexualized; some of these portraits featured in the exhibition. The oversexualized and idealized images of Roma women on display were also similar to current representations in Gypsy soaps on television.
Through an invocation of the past, this display at the fair offered a critical analysis of such representations by juxtaposing them with historical documents about slavery and the Roma Holocaust. From a minor history perspective, the juxtaposition of Roma representations by non-Roma with historical documents about slavery and the Holocaust cuts across the forgetting of Roma history and critiques the stereotypical representations of Roma. However, by exercising their hegemonic ignorance, visitors could still enjoy the consumption of Roma culture and images that complied with neoliberalism and globalization and that maintained the citizenship gap for Roma.
Minor Histories and Social Etymologies: ‘Ţigani’ and Slaves
Through its name – ‘Mahala şi Ţigănie’ (‘Slums and Gypsydom’) – the Roma Fair signalled that it brought together low and high culture, by bringing the slums and Gypsydom to the centre, and thus implying a reversal in the ordering of centre and periphery within the city of Bucharest. ‘Mahala şi Ţigănie’ indexed the social etymology of two words, both of which are derogatory in Romanian today. ‘Mahala’, a Turkish word, initially meant a Turkish district or quarter, and later became a synonym for ‘slum’ with an Orientalist undertone. ‘Ţigăn/ie’ is used negatively in the Romanian language to imply a place or a group characterized by disorder and chaos, irrespective of the ethnicity of its inhabitants.
The organizers of the fair were inviting the audience to rethink the meanings of these words within the precincts of a museum that had erased the histories they represented (Ţigani, like all other ethnic minorities, had been absent from the museum; and both ‘Ţigani’ and ‘mahala’ were associated with negative foreign cultural influences, from the Roma and the Middle East respectively). However, depending on the participants’ perspectives, the hegemony of ethnonationalism in the museum and the commodification of Roma cultural elements under neoliberalism framed this project in ways that threatened to undermine its radical potential.
‘Ţigan’ meant ‘slave’ in Moldavia and Wallachia until 1856, and the terms were used interchangeably until slavery was abolished in the second half of the nineteenth century. The territories of Moldavia and Wallachia,