When I heard that a big-budget Hollywood movie was going to be made of the musical Les Miserables, starring Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman and a bunch of other very attractive people, I was apprehensive.
I couldn't say exactly why I was apprehensive. I just was. I have a few friends who are dedicated history buffs who were excited for the movie, and I watched their excitement grow with a detached sort of unease. I think this sense of unease is probably very common - it is the unease that the marginalized feel when romanticized versions of history become popular. Les Miserables takes place in France, in 1815, at a turning point in French history. It is written by Victor Hugo, whose portrayals of Rromani people in Europe and specifically in France were problematic to say the very least.
The cast of the blockbuster Les Miserables movie is quite, well, white. I don't know the whole ethnic backgrounds of every actor, but I don't know if it really matters - what escalated my vague sense of unease about the musicals newfound popularity was the casting of the character of Javert, and specifically, the dialogue around it in fan circles.
Take a look at this. A fan expresses the (frankly racist) opinion that a Black actor should not have been cast as the character of Javert. Others point out, correctly, that people of colour existed in Europe in the 1800's and that the practice of "colourblind casting" (horrible term, good casting practice) has been ultimately beneficial in bringing new, thoughtful, skilled and dynamic artistic takes on old characters.
Then... the subject of whether or not Javert is a "gypsy" comes up.
For the record, the fluent French speakers I have spoken to seem to agree that the idea that Javert is Rromani is incorrect and based on a flawed translation. Javert comes from a "bohemian" family, presumably petty criminals; as an adult, he has grown to hate criminals and political dissidents alike. In the first English translation, "bohemian" was translated to "gypsy", and Javert was referred to as hating criminality because he hated his own "nomadic race". It's a trope that I find particularly troubling; the "gypsy" who is villainous because they hate themselves for being a "gypsy" - that for translators, a hatred of criminality would be read as a hatred of his own race is especially offensive, the implication being that criminality is inherent in his race ("gypsy"), and his conflict with criminals stems from a conflict with himself and his natural inclination to turn towards a life of crime.
But this interpretation of Javert is one that many fans have latched on to. They call it "headcanon" or "fanon" - an interpretation that they hold to be as true as canon, but mostly a matter of personal preference. "Javert is a gypsy!" It goes unremarked-on that this interpretation is rooted in an understanding of Javert that implies some very unpleasant things about what it means to be Rromani. It also goes unremarked-on that it is far less common - in fact, I've seen approximately zero cases of this, and I've spent the last few days looking into it - for peoples' "fanon" interpretations of any of the more clear-cut protagonists to be Rromani. Nobody says that Marius or Cosette, the romantic leads, might be part Rromani; nobody suggests that the revolutionary furor of one of the characters leading the June Rebellion might be due to a desire to see some improvement in the lives of their oppressed community.
I am troubled by this because it's one of those things that well-meaning gadje often fall into - thinking that by championing the idea of Javert-as-Rromani they are championing the representation of us in fiction, when in fact all they are championing is a gadje's (racist) idea of who we are and what defines us as a people. Meanwhile, in order to be viewed with any kind of true complexity, any dimension beyond the most simplistic ("he hates revolutionaries because he's a self-hating gypsy"), a character must be read as white. Characters who are not read as such are denied a full understanding of their humanity, their motivations boiled down to an outsider's impression of their race.
It is good to push for more historically accurate representations of Europe - representations that include Rromani, Sinte, Romanichal, Pavee, and Traveller peoples! But it is also necessary to challenge our understandings of why these representations have been lacking, and where existing representations are coming from. If they do not come from us, who do they benefit? What purpose do they serve?
We are compared to animals enough. We are dehumanized enough. It is enough.
Your dogs and cats are adorable, and I have nothing against them. They have no say in what you name them.
I sometimes want to plead with you to refrain from this out of courtesy to your pets. "They're so innocent! Don't burden them with a name like that just because you're ignorant about what it means!"
But then I get angry, because the fact that that is the argument my mind falls to indicates that, on a very real level, I expect you to have more sympathy for your pets than you do for other human beings.
So please, just don't call your pets "gypsy". Not because it would be unfair to your pet, but because it is unfair to many, many people, who have faced intense persecution because we are "gypsies". Actual, born, human Gypsies.
Have you seen the travesty known as "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding"
I have deliberately avoided seeing it. I have, however, read a lot about it - I track the "gypsy" tag here on tumblr, which is probably not the best thing I could do for my own peace of mind - and it seems incredibly racist.
There are many, many people who have soundly critiqued the show, and done a better job than I could do of this. I think the fact that it has had multiple seasons and some degree of commercial success is what disturbs me the most about it - I expect the show's content to be racist, upsetting, potentially even violent, and just generally horrible, but the fact that it has found an audience of people who revel in these racist stereotypes is deeply upsetting.
I love the cartoon Futurama, but I remember this episode.
Figures like this - fortune-telling women in turbans with a specific type of look and accent - are often not referred to right out as "gypsies", but we all know what they are supposed to be.
This is racist and anti-ziganist.
Gypsies - Rroma and real Traveller people - do not have psychic abilities. We are real people, not caricatures. When a Rroma/Walking Person does resort to fortune telling, it is as a person of color being forced to conform to racist stereotypes of their own people in order to survive.
This happens disturbingly often. My own grandmother did tarot readings with gadje for money when times got tough, but she always told me, if she caught me doing anything similar, she would tan my own hide.
Just curious here, but, Rroma and Rromani are the correct spelling of the words, right? I've seen it spelled as 'Roma' and 'Romani' before, and I was just wondering if it was differences in languages (like american english and uk english, for instance) or if Roma is just incorrect.
It depends! Often it is regional and based on dialect. I use Rroma as an alternative to typing out the specific accent used by my fathers' family.
Many Rroma communities have different dialects and refer to themselves in different ways. "Rroma" is also a very general term; some groups prefer to be called "Rromani", some prefer to be called by more specific names, etc.
I have used "Walking People" and "REAL Travellers" and "Rroma/Rromani", etc, as terms, but also tried to specify more specific groups as well. For gadje, if you are referring to or talking to a specific person, group, or community, I HIGHLY recommend respectfully asking what that person/community refers to be called! "Rroma" is a very general term and may not always be appropriate.
I am having a hard time, lately, thinking of things to write about
It took me weeks to write my most recent post.
I find myself wishing people would ask me things. I would love if you used this tumblr feature! To ask me things specifically about being mixed race/Gypsy/Rroma, to talk to me if you are Rroma/Romani/a REAL Traveller of any kind and have an issue with anything I have said, if you are gadje and have a question you want to pose to me and-slash-or my readers...
I would appreciate if you would send those things to me! I will try to respond in a timely and respectful manner. Thank you!
-STFU Gadje
P.S. I don't always get e-mail notifications - looking in my tumblr inbox I realize many of you have contacted me already! I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you, my friends - so, so sorry. I will be posting answers and answering privately over the next week or so.
I do a lot of contract work in my field. Until a few months ago I worked with a bunch of you. It seemed like it was all going well with you - with my gadje co-workers. I liked everyone I was working with, I liked the environment I was working in, I was doing good work. You asked me about my racial and cultural background and, feeling good about things, I told you: I'm Rroma, I'm diddikai...
Months later when my contract ended, you withheld my final pay, while you accused me of stealing from you. Thieving gypsy. You, so pro-Palestinian, so sure you couldn't be racist because you had Black friends, you said I was a thief.
I still do not know if you fully understand the implications of what you accused me of, knowing that I am Rroma.
I get asked - by you, gadje - what race I am a lot. You would come up to me in laundromats and in libraries, in bars and bookstores --
Gadje: So, where are you from?
Me: Well, I was born here [in North America]...
Gadje: Oh, but where are you REALLY from? Be honest now! Where is your family from?
Me: I'm not sure what you mean... [I always knew exactly what you meant, gadje, but we mixed race people, we gypsies, we know how to lie and we know why it's necessary. I hope you will forgive me my dishonesty.]
Gadje: You're so... exotic looking. Are you from Brazil? Are you middle Eastern? Are you Jewish?
Gadje, I was raised not to trust you. My grandparents suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder at your hands. My eldest aunt was born on a freight train, fleeing your violence, your hatred. This is what my family - half of my family - taught me: to appease you. To get along with you. But never to trust you.
I think about this particularly when it's hot. It's June right now. It's been sunny for weeks, where I am. I walk around outside and my skin, normally pale, absorbs the sun, darkens fast, and suddenly I am bombarded with your curiosity, your entitlement. Who am I? You never care when you think I'm one of you. Winter-white, I contemplate tanning salons. I wear eyeshadow that brings out the brown undertones of my complexion, I read poems by Leah Samarasina and quote her in my mind when you make offhand racist remarks to me, assuming I am one of you:
Brown is the color
Of an unlived land
Whose dust I scatter
Wherever I go
You have no idea.
Gadje.
I made this blog for you.
I know many of you are upset with me, because I tell you to shut the fuck up.
You fight with me, like my own mother. She says: I love your curly black hair. You're so lucky, it's so thick. Your olive skin, it's so pretty, you have that exotic look. I know you were bullied as a child, but I always knew that when you were an adult, you'd be appreciated for the exotic beauty you are. She says, it makes sense you've married a [Native] man. After all, I fell for your father! I always loved colored men the most. I wonder what color my grandchildren will be!!
My father purses his lips and does not say much. He smokes his cigarettes and reads his books. He's glad I found a husband. He wishes I'd married a Rroma man, but he will make do. He always has. He says, why make such a problem of things? Tell people you are white! They'll never know, so what's the harm? You can just say you are Italian, or maybe Jewish, or Greek, or Spanish. There are so many things I could be for you, gadje.
My husband says, I think of myself as something new. He is Native and white. Our skin tones match almost exactly. He says there's no word for what he is, but there are words for what I am, in many dialects. Diddikai. Pharnavi. Light skinned. Mixed race.
He says our children will be unique. They will be 1/4th Rroma, 1/4th Indigenous Turtle Islander. 1/2 white, settler. They may be dark skinned, like some of their relatives, but more likely they will be light skinned. I am afraid they will not be able to relate to me, my light skinned children, my something new.
(Or perhaps just my white children.)
Gadje, you may be my grandchildren someday.
I want you to know that I do not hate you.
Gadje.
You outsiders, who deem me other, often while implicitly including me in my own othering.
What am I to do with you, gadje? When you say you want to be a "gypsy". When I tell you who - what - I am, and you laugh, and spend the next hour telling me about how you hopped trains as a teenager, thinking that I'll be able to relate to that because I must have grown up like that, right?
I am often angry with you, gadje.
I do not know how to make you understand this anger! I do not think you can ever really understand. And I'm sad for that, I really am, because I WANT you to understand, gadje! I really do. I wish I could make you understand.
But I know you cannot.
And so I write these things. I shout into this void, a void I straddle when I think about my own parents.
I write things like this. I spend weeks on these writings and post them in fits of boldness.
Dear gadje, I wish you could just make it easier to love you.
Dear gadje, I wish I could hate you without feeling as though I am hating a part of myself, and most of my friends and many of my loved ones.
Dear gadje
Dear gadje
Dear gadje
what am I to do with you?
sincerely,
STFU Gadje, a woman who is half you, half Gypsy, and so often torn between the two.
I want to you close your eyes and try to imagine being a Rroma person. Imagine that "gypsy", for you, as a real Rroma person, has your whole life meant fear: fear every time your landlord knocks on your door, fear when you look for work, the fear passed down by your parents who were forced out of their homes, forced into poverty, perhaps even forced to flee the countries of their births - fear of displacement, of genocide, the fear that comes from having family members in mass graves somewhere and knowing that they were killed for being gypsies and they are never, ever coming back.
Imagine that you have lived your whole life with this burden.
Imagine that you are walking down the street one day. Perhaps you are walking your dog (some of us have dogs, although some of our traditions view dogs as unclean - bet you didn't know that, gadje. I have a cat, which is so not marime!) Or perhaps you are carrying some grocery bags back to your house to cook dinner for your family. Perhaps you are on your way to school. Perhaps that's your car parked there - you were in a hurry when you parked it and you didn't look to see what you were parking besides - and now you turn a corner and come face to face with this, a full scale mural, covered in images of non-Rroma, proclaiming itself to be "GYPSY".
Think, gadje, think very, very hard. I know some of you are capable of empathy, even if you can never truly understand, and so I want you to really TRY to imagine, for one moment, what that would feel like to you.
Can you feel your stomach turn in knots and start to sink? Does your body feel cold? Does it make you want to cry?
I want to talk about why I felt it necessary to have a hiatus - the emotional toll of writing about cultural appropriation, racism, and anti-ziganism, even for a short time, from my own perspective which I am still negotiating... the overwhelming nature of the emotions such writing stirs in me... the pride and shame and fear I have about my heritage and the pressure of "living up to" standards set by gadje and the impotent frustration of knowing that most of the gadje who read this blog will never understand.
And we Rroma, we (real) Travellers, we Irish and Scottish Travellers and Pavee and Romanichal and Sinti and Manouche and Spanish Rroma and Russian Rroma and on and on, sometimes I despair that we will ever even understand each other. But that is something for US to negotiate amongst OURSELVES, and when I read back through my old writings I am sometimes angry with myself for opening up about these negotiations as much as I have for gadje to read.
Shortly after I stopped updating this blog, another blog started, created by more Walking People, dedicated to "calling out" racist gadje - Look At This Fucking Gadje. They wrote with humor and strength and I admired the things they wrote. But eventually I saw that they were struggling with many of the same things that caused me to break from this blog myself - the sense that in revealing so much of ourselves to gadje, I was giving them an "out" of some kind. Empathize with the angry Gypsy, share her outrage, and you are not like all those OTHER gadje! The more non-Walking People read my blog, the more readership it gained, the less comfortable I became writing it.
I have much internalized fear of gadje. I have much internalized fear of talking about my life, my heritage, anything to do with my family. I was taught from the moment I was born to never trust outsiders. I kept this blog anonymous for a reason. I have even tried to an extent to somewhat disguise my writing style, even though my "web presence" outside of this blog is nil.
I was in a bar with some friends a few weeks ago and one of them started talking about Look At This Fucking Gadje, and before I knew it, I'd told him that I had a blog of my own, STFU Gadje. His reaction was to be thrilled and start peppering me with questions. Am I 100% Romani, or am I mixed? What parts of Europe are my family from? Have I ever experienced discrimination for being Rroma? Would I mind telling him about my culture?
I really like this friend and his questions were well-meaning - he genuinely was curious, "I love learning about cultures other than my own!" he said, he was trying to be respectful, he was so enthusiastic and eager to learn, but it made me so uncomfortable. I am not an expert on my own culture, and that brings me a lot of shame. I know only my family, our stories and traditions. I am not an ambassador of the Rroma people. The number of people I have told of my ethnicity, outside of my own family, are in the single digits.
So do I even have the right to write this blog?
What good has it done? When I started writing I got so many messages from other Walking People, more Walking People than I ever knew existed on tumblr, and that made me happy, it made me feel like I was helping people, like I was providing catharsis of a sort. But then I started getting questions from non-Rroma and as much as I appreciated them - appreciated the willingness of some gadje to reach out and educate themselves - it spiked my anxiety levels to an unhealthy degree. What if I left something out of my response? What if I erased a group of other Walking People? What if I was a bad source of information?
One of my secret hopes when I started writing this, one that I did not state, was that writing it would help me overcome some of my own fear and shame about being Rroma. Has it done that? I do not know. Sometimes when I write things for this blog, my hands shake. Is it harder to stop or keep going? I have no idea.
I do not know what the future of this blog will be. I am still thinking, still struggling, much as I do with my own life in general. It is an ongoing project. There are so many factors to consider: how gadje relate to this blog and how I feel about that, my own fears and anxieties, my light-skinned privilege, my nationality as a north american Rroma whose family are European Rroma, how I deal with the inevitable hate that comes my way from daring to speak up. My love for my people and my sadness and isolation from them.
The one thing I can promise you is that this is not the end of STFU, Gadje. I want to keep writing. But I need to think about how I do that.
I thank you for bearing with me - specifically I thank my Rromani, Pavee, Sinti, Irish and Scottish Traveller, etc, etc, cousins. Your support and readership has meant the world to me and your input has enriched me in ways I cannot even put into words.
So, today I opened my YouTube and noticed I had new comments. They were from one person and said:
“Cigan, Ciganka, Cigos, Gypsy. Whatever you call yourself your people and your culture is filth. There is NOTHING to be proud of in your bullshit blood. Go back to pakistan where you orginate from and take your tribe with you, noone in Europe wants you, and noone in Europe likes you!”
“We do not care if you are half, or can pass as European (white). You are tainted and forever deserve to rot with the rest of them. Europe doesnt want you, North America doesnt want you. Noone wants you.”
This was so hard for me to read, but I want gadje to read it and understand. This is what you gadje are contributing to when you dress up like a "gypsy" for halloween. This is what you reinforce with your ignorance. How are you, in your cluelessness, any different from this person? At least they are open and honest in their hatred.
As I've said before, I'm fairly busy at the moment. I started this blog when I had some free time, and for the next couple of weeks or so it's looking like I don't have so much free time as when I started.
I will be saving things as drafts and putting them in my queue for publication until I can dedicate a bit more time to writing more comprehensive posts, as I have in the past.
Much love to all of you, especially my Rroma, Pavee, etc followers!
Apparently it is very offensive to dress as a ‘gypsy’ for Halloween. I’m offended that you could be so overly sensitive about something that is so commonly used as a costume for people of all ages.
I will apologize for my ignorance. I don’t know anything about the history of ‘gypsies’. Nor had I...
Gadje, I haven't even had coffee yet, so I'm going to be brief: you should be thanking those who took the time to point out your racism to you, for their efforts to enlighten you and make you a less oppressive, bigoted person. I mean this. You should be on your knees thanking them, because in order to make the effort to educate you, they had to work through all their anger and frustration and their lifetimes of history dealing with racism and anti-ziganism. You think that's a walk in the park? Even if they were a bit harsh, it was 100% only what you deserved for acting in a way that was hurtful and perpetuated harmful stereotypes.
I am so tired of gadje pulling this "oh, I'm so offended/hurt" bullshit when faced with the realities of their actions and prejudices. Gadje, PLEASE. Get over yourselves for two seconds. How do you think WE feel?
The mere fact that you would lend this bullshit, obviously-made-up anecdote credibility just because the people involved were "gypsies" betrays your racism and anti-ziganism, gadje. Shut the fuck up.
#I laughed too hard when I read this. #India #LOL #funny #offensive #sort of.
GET IT? The joke is that gypsies are thieves! Look out, we'll even steal your internet!
I don't have nearly enough time or energy to even begin with this bullshit, so I will simply direct you, gadje, to the title of my blog, and encourage you to take a cue from it and shut the fuck up.
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