The Normal Times

Isabel Fonseca, 1995

“The Gypsies — with their peculiar mixture of fatalism and the spirit, or wit, to seize the day — have made an art of forgetting. Historically the Gypsies have not had an idea of, or word for, themselves as a group. In place of a nation, they recognize different tribes and, more locally, extended families or clans.”

I picked up this book to piggyback on a book I finished reading in April; The Gypsies by Angus Fraser. Fraser’s focus is very academic, there’s a lot of real estate given to linguistic analysis. As a linguistics grad school dropout, it was an amazing book, but it’s not what I came for. I’m an American whose ancestors came here in the 1920s as a result of the Greco-Turkish War. My relatives were of a type that never shared intimate information or opinions with anyone. Whatever thoughts they had on the old country and its people were unknown to me. However, one Halloween when my grandpa asked me what kind of costume I wanted him to get for me, and having just seen Hunchback of Notre Dame at a friend’s house, I said “A gypsy!”, and all the elders on the porch groaned. They didn’t explain why, and I still don’t quite get the gypsy thing. I know just enough about it as an adult that I thought researching it might help me come up with some worldbuilding material for an otherized population of slum dwellers that I’ve been loosely cultivating in one of my writing projects.

I bought this one after finishing the Fraser title. Fraser gives the root sources for the Romani language and the likely site of origin. There’s an impressive degree of archive trawling shown in his work. My issue was there was no real human image given. Fonseca’s account reads like an anthropology study combined with a travelogue. She’s fair in her reporting, she doesn’t mock her subjects or put them on pedestals. I’ve learned more about Albania, Romania, and Transylvania than I thought I would, but I didn’t have a lot of assumptions, but those that I held were mostly informed by online western Europeans. Their characterizations made gypsies sound not dissimilar from some train hoppers I’ve known. My one experience with a possible gypsy occurred when I was a 23 year old walking home from my bartending job in New Orleans. In Jackson Square I passed a tarot reader, not uncommon, but his hype man lightly grabbed my elbow and gave me one of those “You got a little gypsy in ya?” jokes. I was not expecting to find out how conservative they are. Their taboos are wild to a modern American, especially me as a broad. They wash women’s clothing, cutlery, and whatever else separately from those of the men to prevent contamination. The entire female lower body is a source of contamination, which is the biggest taboo in their culture. Women can’t even sit around and smoke until they’re post-menopause, something the men do from their days of spring.

I’m not trying to get all feminist with that, it was just something like the opposite of what I expected. But why did I expect some kind of hedonistic sub-culture group? Another fascinating source of contamination is dead people, but not because dead bodies contain weird bacteria. They have to burn every article of the dead person’s property, down to the plate they ate on, or they’ll be deservedly plagued by ghosts. It’s weird, because these people are, with a small few exceptions, poor as shit regardless of what country they’re in. Yet they’ll burn an entire ornately carved caravan or car with all the useful items the dead one ever touched. They arrange their children’s marriages and have a formalized metric of dowry. Even the rich ones are weird, keeping a nice house but sleeping in a massive tent behind it.

It’s a decent book that is raised higher by the lack of literature on the subject. My only big complaint is that I can’t find anything about Travellers/Tinkers in Britain and Ireland, and I’m not quite getting how they’re associated with gypsies/Roma beyond what seems to be a chosen lifestyle. If anyone has a recommendation on that front I would appreciate it.

If you’d like to muck around with the gypsies, you can buy a copy here.