Europe is home to 10–12 million Roma, yet many Europeans are unable to answer the basic question, “Who are the Roma?” Even fewer can answer questions about their history.
It is a complex and highly contested narrative, partly because the “Roma” are not a single, homogeneous group of people. They include Romanichals in England; Kalé in Wales and Finland; Travellers in Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Norway; Manouche from France; Gitano from Spain; Sinti from Germany, Poland, Austria and Italy; Ashakli from Kosovo; Egyptians from Albania; Beyash from Croatia; Romanlar from Turkey; Domari from Palestine and Egypt; Lom from Armenia and many others. It is also partly because many of these groups have differing narratives of their history and ethnogenesis (their origins as an ethnic group).
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What “binds” or unites the communities in all this rich diversity? The idea of a common heritage of exclusion certainly contributes to the sense of shared “pasts”—the notion of always being the “outsider”, the “other.” There are connections too in the languages; the important words for water, bread, road, blessings, luck, greetings and farewells can be common to Rromanës dialects. Terms for horses, tools, numbers and others are sometimes close enough in many cases that one Roma person can “trade” them with another—a favourite game in many communities, as language holds the “key” to our past in its core and “loan words”, gathered over time and migration routes. Language experts have identified these commonalities and drawn from this heritage to illuminate this shared past and heritage.
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The remarkable thing is that (as a famous historian of the Gypsies once noted), unlike many other peoples in this context, we have no one priesthood, no single holy book, no promised land to return to and yet we not only endure and survive, we truly live in the world. The need is to go beyond this and to flourish, to achieve equality and emancipation from poverty, exclusion and misery, to become full citizens in the lands we inhabit and to achieve the kind of potential that the creative genius of our existence so far, clearly suggests we can reach.
Source: www.opensocietyfoundations.org
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