William Kenney

The Roma in Europe
When I told my friends that I would be living in St Denis, my news was met with a mixture of skepticism and alarm. Hadn’t I read the stories? they asked me. St Denis was filled with young hooligans waiting to attack innocent bystanders. Worst of all, I was told in a low almost embarrassed whisper, were the Roma or Gypsies who lived in shanty towns all across La Seine St Denis. This last piece was not new news to me.
I had been warned about ‘the problem of the gypsies’ long before I set foot in Paris for the first time in 2003. To me, coming from the United States, the gypsies, called “Gitans” “Roma” or “Tsiganes” were the brightly colored fortune tellers who lived in quaint caravans as illustrated in Tintin, or the “Pikeys” from the movie Snatch. Free from the mundane constraints that affect most people, the Roma seemed to reflect a certain degree of freedom that can only add to the mystique of an old European city. [1]
When confronted with Roma for the first time, I didn’t know how to react. Five minutes out of the Notre Dame metro station and my most romantic misconceptions were destroyed. It happens all across Paris every day and goes something like this:
A hapless tourist, stuck in an endless line that zigzags its way toward Notre Dame is suddenly stirred out of his daydream.
“Do you speak English?” An elderly Roma wearing a head scarf says in perfect English. (They might not be able to say much else but they nail that line every time.)
“Yes,” says the unsuspecting tourist. At which point, the Roma whips out a bluntly written sign asking for money.
Completely embarrassed, the tourist who is still stuck in line looks around, puts his hand over his pockets says, shakes his head, trying as best as he can to end this decidedly awkward stalemate. If the Gitan women notices any sign of weakness, she cowers a little lower, grimaces a little more, as if by sheer acting ability she might change his heart and get a couple of centimes. Should he extricate himself from this Gitan, the tourist soon realizes that there is no escape. The queue isn’t going anywhere and another Roma is slowly making her way towards him.
The Parisians, on the other hand, have been trained from years of metro solicitation, and petty pickpockets. When a Parisian sees the telltale signs: gold teeth, cheap lace skirts an unkempt beard… they know how to look way away, while nonchalantly securing all of their belongings to their bodies. If the Roma asks for money, the Parisian usually says in a commanding voice, “je ne suis pas touriste, laisse moi tranquille.”[2]
Fiona Meadowes is a petite French and English dual national with large circular glasses and hazel colored hair tied back in a two braids. She has the sort of boundless energy I find impressive if not a little exhausting, along with an enthusiasm for all types of community service associations. She and her French Cameroonian husband Lamyne, a member of the Peul tribe gave me my first inside view of Gypsy life. They don’t see the gypsies as the social miscreants who steal and beg, but rather, as a group of people who have been, for their entire history, relegated to the outskirts of society.
I met Lamyne and Fiona last November when I was searching for an apartment. They were looking for a renter and someone who might share their causes. Being young, naive, and with the native ‘sure-why-not’ attitude of most Americans right out of college, we soon struck a deal. I had no idea how quickly I was going to be brought into their whirlwind world of fighting injustice and trying to bring about change at a community level.
Alarmed by what they see as the growing animosity of the French state towards the “Roma problem”, Fiona’s very own Organization d’Architects Alternatifs had organized collaboration with a Roma organization Parada, to help the large Roma population in St Denis. The most immediate problem was looking after the children in the camp while the Roma parents were crossing the border in Belgium. Despite the fact that many of the children who are born in France have legal rights here, the parents have to make this trip four times a year to renew their papers. (M. Sarkozy is encouraging the Roma expulsions by giving 300 euros to every Roma who leaves France.)
I set out for the encampment at 10:00 in the morning in the stifling summer heat. I turned left off of Avenue President Wilson, the large avenue which connected Paris to St Denis. All around me were the large office buildings displaying France’s enormous financial vibrancy: Gaz de France, Usine, ArcelorMittal, of course the biggest structure around was Stade de France which dominated the landscape. The road that turned and immediately the terrain seemed wilder and less pristine. At the very end of the road, I could see the flower-laiden car of Fiona and Lamyne’s two hippie assistants who live in a cozy homemade chalet in our backyard. The feeling of relief at knowing that I was in the right place soon was replaced by a feeling of uneasiness as I saw a dirt road lined with caravans. There was not a friendly face in sight. Rusted decomposing metal was interspersed with broken windows. And though I can’t be entirely sure, I really do think that the elderly Gitan woman was staring at me suspiciously. I placed my hand over my pocket before I realized that I was once again behaving likes all the tourists that I had seen and pocked fun at whenever I was in Paris.
Like most under classes, the Gypsies represent often contradictory elements. On the one hand they are extremely visible in the community: interacting with the rest of society in numerous ways. Yet they are also hidden and isolated: Their customs, history and living condition being largely unknown.
Originally considered lower class Hindus in Northern India, the gypsies immigrated eastward like all immigrants searching for freedom and opportunity. They first arrived in Greece and the Balkans in the 14th century. Later in the 15th century the Gitans came to Spain through North Africa. By the end of the 15th century, the two strands met in France. Almost immediately after they arrived, the “foreigners” as they were called, were treated with hostility. In Wallachovia and Moldavia the Gypsies were enslaved for five centuries. In other parts of Eastern Europe and Spain, they were forced into a sedentary lifestyle. Much like the barbarians during the Roman Empire, the Gitan formed a natural foil on which to establish a national identity. “We are civilized and they are not” was the mantra of the local population. According to Italian Novelist Andrezej Stasiuk this concept is still very much alive today, “Tous les pays ont leur Tsiganes. Sans eux, ils n’arriveraient pas à délimiter les forntieres de leur identité .”[3]
The clearest forms of persecution occurred in the 20th century with the rise of extreme nationalism. The Holocaust claimed the lives of a half a million Roma. In Communist Eastern Europe, the Roma rights were often restricted. In Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria forced sterilization took place. To this day in Hungary Roma children go to segregated schools of poor quality. The volatile mixture of centuries of oppression and a poor economic outlook has caused many Gitans to turn to crime and begging. It is often repeated that the Roma have no moral objection to thefts committed on non Roma people. Naturally, this doesn’t help the Roma to become integrated into any community.
When I arrived at the camp, Fiona, Lamyne and several other organizers were already supervising children who were writing numbers on pieces of scrap wood. I was handed a power drill and told to drill holes in each piece of wood. Though I must have looked like someone who was well practiced in using a drill, this was hardly the case!
“What a fun craft project,” I said with forced cheerfulness, looking at the mountain of wooden scraps that needed holes drilled in them.
They looked at me strangely.
“They are address plates. We’re making addresses for all of the Caravans.” Lamyne told me.
“What we’re doing is also completely illegal!” Fiona confided.
Chastened, I got on with my chore with far more dedication albeit with a little James Bond flair.
“Est-ce que je peux essayer?”
It was a young boy. He was clearly more tempted by the power drill, than by the wood pieces or my pathetic drilling technique. Apprehensively I handed him the power tool. I could just imagine this ending with someone loosing a finger. In the USA, I would have been sued or ended in jail. To my surprise, the boy approached his task with enormous concentration and skill. In the same time that I had completed only a few, he had finished double that amount. He was clearly imbued with a decent level of artistic and technical ability. Not that I should be surprised.
Throughout their history, Tsiganes often worked as craftsmen, tinkers, or carpenters, traveling from town to town trying to find work. In fact, the scarcity of these types of jobs today is one of the reasons why the Roma populations are in such a dire shape. Sadly, despite this child’s hidden talents, there is little chance that he will ever fully reach his potential. Chances are that he will spend the rest of his life begging on the street. But who is to blame? Jealous or skeptical of their children’s educational skills, the Roma adults are just as guilty as holding their children back as any government. Roma children have some of the lowest academic achievement among any ethnic group. It is common to find Roma children during the week begging for money on the streets and in the metro, when they should be in school. As Thomas Friedman would say; what a waste of human capital!
When it came time to paint chaos promptly ensued. Children grabbed at paint brushes and started going to work on any piece of wood they could get their hands on. If mistakes were made and numbers were sloppily painted, two of the older boys carefully retraced the numbers. One of the older boys, an Irish Roma visiting his cousin for the summer, took the blocks of wood and started to hang them on each caravan. Suddenly and old man came out and started speaking loudly in a Romanic language while waving his arms about. “What’s he saying?” I asked alarmed, thinking that we were going to have a fight on our hands.
“He’s angry because no one’s put an address on his caravan yet!”
Fiona was right. Despite the all-consuming poverty, anti-Roma laws in so many countries, and a stagnant and regressive outlook among the Roma, it doesn’t take much to give people hope and pride. In just a day’s work we were able to give this man the belief that just like everyone else in France he deserves to have an address on his home where people can find him.
The irony is that we changed nothing of the conditions in the encampment. The Gitans are still living in the same impoverished situation as before with the same lack of basic amenities. More importantly, what is the point of having an address when your road doesn’t appear on any municipal map in the city? They can be found – the more important question is who out there is looking for them?


[1] To those who appreciate the Bohemian lifestyle, Bohemia is in fact a region of Eastern Czech Republic with a large Roma majority.
[2] I am not a tourist leave me alone !
[3] Every country has there gypsies, without them they would not be able to define their identity. Courrier International Aout 2008 Sans eux nous ne serons riens