The literary scholar’s The Roma blends a history of Romani persecution and civil rights struggles with her own experiences of discrimination as a Roma woman in Britain.
Your book is partly a memoir and spans many countries’ histories. How did you settle on the scope?
It was a process. I knew that Britain had to be in it, because of my experience being a woman from Romania, now living in Britain. My mum lives in France, so that was a country that was obviously important for me. Other countries entered the picture as it became clear how much of a Romani population they had.
Are there dedicated archives of Romani history that you were able to draw on?
There are some, but they tend to only preserve traces, records of prisoners being shipped to Australia or to the U.S.—to Louisiana, as was common. Records that weren’t written by the Roma. So I tried to supplement them with oral history—poems and myths.
Your area of focus as an academic is on the gothic. What drew you to that? Are there connections between it and the subject of this book?
I’ve always been drawn to the gothic. I joke about it, but growing up not too far from Transylvania was its own influence. I think the gothic is actually a really interesting way for people who are marginalized or who have suffered trauma to make sense of their experiences and to reclaim their identities. I think that’s what it was doing for me from quite a young age. I’ve been thinking a lot about how 19th-century literature has shaped misconceptions that exist today about Romani people. In my book I talk about Carmen, for instance, but there are so many examples of this gothic image of the Romani witch who throws a curse. In the 19th century, these novels were tremendously popular and these tropes started building up—the sense of bohemianism, of tragedy and the uncanny moment, of not being able to be pinned down. I was quite surprised to find how much these depictions still have a hold on how people think of the Romani today.
In Europe and the U.S., there is a lot of heated debate over immigration right now, and a rise of nationalism. Did writing the book change your perspective on those developments?
The way I see it, it’s a kind of slide down the continuum that I have experienced as a Romani person growing up in Europe—I can see how this is us sliding further down that scale. I don’t think it was a flip of a switch; I think these things were bubbling in the background. We think of history as something that happened in the past. Initially I thought maybe that’s what the book should be; it should stop in the past. But then I realized that history is not the past. It’s happening today.
