Reversing her mother’s trajectory, Roxy Freeman exchanged the gypsy life for a flat in Brighton, where
I can’t see or feel the change from one season to the next, I crave greenery, and I constantly wrestle with the emotion of feeling trapped. I spend half my life opening doors and windows, trying to get rid of the airless, claustrophobic feeling that comes with being inside. I get woken up by bin lorries, the rush-hour traffic and my neighbours shouting, instead of birdsong and the wind in the trees. I can’t sense when it’s going to rain because I can no longer smell it in the air, and when it does rain I can’t hear it landing on the roof.
She lives near the sea, she says, because it gives her a sense of “openness & freedom”, then ends: “it’s easy to feel trapped. But to reach my dream, I have to put down roots.”
I certainly understand Ms. Freeman’s (what a resonant name!) dream, but then there’s this:
“Our education was learning about wildlife and nature, how to cook and how to survive. I didn’t know my times tables but I could milk a goat and ride a horse. I could identify ink caps, puff balls and field mushrooms and knew where to find wild watercress and sorrel. By the age of eight or nine I could light a fire, cook dinner for a family of 10 and knew how to bake bread on an open fire.”
What a reservoir of knowledge and experience is preserved in these communities! With access to such lore becoming ever more difficult in our civilization, I hate to see it traded in for skills that are, relatively speaking, commonplace. On the other hand, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea, which just occurs to me, of Gypsies and Travellers offering “vacation experiences” to the upscale tourists who flock to the Amazon and the Himalayas–though if offered the chance I would have a hard time refusing.
JG Ballard would have appreciated the ironies of reversal. The mother’s trajectory is reversed. The trajectories of contemporary yearning are reversed. The free woman arcs back in time to the early 1950s, when air was being swapped as quickly as possible for air-conditioning. That the “dream” can only be attained by interiorising the exterior world seems like the most perfect illustration of the Ballardian journey into the mall.
Speaking as someone of Rromani extraction who grew up in a caravan (albeit one parked in a scrapyard) & as someone who consumed too many triple-decker fantatwee novels in my youth, something about the article tweaks my nipples a bit. I appreciate that this person has had a particular upbringing that has attuned them to specific things & given them certain skills. But I really don’t think it’s part of anyone’s “heritage”, other than a shared, non-racial connection to where you have lived, who you have seen, who has brought you up & how.
On reflection, I don’t think it’s the article so much as my perceptions of others’ reactions to it. My lot have enough problems as it is, without being Joanne Harris’d to the status of “Magical Off-White person”. We are not keepers of specialist knowledge that is not specific to our situations or particular upbringings: for instance, I know nothing about magical wonder herbs, but could strip down & rebuild a Pinto engine & knew how to prepare a Mark 2 Granada for banger racing by the time I was twelve.
This was not due to innate Mystical Rroma Lore, or if it was, I can’t imagine Johnny Depp playing me in a film about it.
As to binkie’s comment above, we’ve always traded on the image of ourselves that is present in Gadjé minds: the fortune tellings, the insistence on oral history, the deliberately cultivated air of mystery, are all traits designed to keep outsiders mystified, probably so they wouldn’t burn us & chase us away, or at least to keep you distracted while we chored the horses. This deliberate manipulation of expectations & the exclusionary nature of (for want of a better word) our culture has led to vast amounts of problems too. It’s a double-edged sword.
I’m sorry I’m off & rambling, but I did think it necessary to point out that talking about the “vast store of knowledge & experience” without mentioning the oppression of females, unreported physical abuse, the deliberate tribal justice meted out to those who seek to reject the unspoken exclusionary ways, the lack of education & about fifty other things, is to already reduce us to the status of “vacation experience”.
We’re already a fucking sideshow for white people, & the thing that really gets my goat is that it’s partly our fault — the exclusionary tribal thing that has kept us a distinct ethnic group in our thousand year exodus has created roles that we’re too happy to fall in to: we can’t preserve our traditional way of life & demand access to education, health care et cetera without giving up some of the things that make us, well, us.
Or to put it another way, our entire racial identity — both the identity of our selves & the one we project as a camouflage, a ruse, a disguise & a shield — is built on a heroic myth of non-integration, which is fine & dandy until you need to go to the hospital for chemo, which my mother didn’t get, so died at home raddled with cancer.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Apologies if I’ve missed or misconstrued anyone’s point.
Nels Stanley: All the apologies belong to me. I was talking in my sleep again, and I thank you for splashing water in my face. One’s education never stops (he said optimistically). I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something “mystical” about the “lore” possessed by some but not all Rroma, much less that it was matter of heritage–if by “heritage” you mean more than what one generation happens to pass on to the next–or, God forbid, race. I agree that it’s a much more neutral thing, “a particular upbringing that has attuned them to specific things & given them certain skills.” But I used the article as a self-serving springboard into my own issues, to lament that neither I nor my family will ever be as close to nature as Roxy Freeman was. And my flippant suggestion about “vacation experiences” was meant as a dig against the kind of tourists who think their liberal values or simply their money entitle them to intrude on any culture, anywhere. But these people represent my own culture, and I share many of their attitudes, with ambivalence and fluctuating awareness, hence my being torn at the end between a refusal to participate in them and a desire to learn useful things from people who might know. As for all the other things you talk about, white people’s heritage of Gypsy stereotypes and the experience of Rromani society from the inside, they never crossed my mind, even though I should know better. I am less likely to be so thoughtless in the future. Thanks again. (And forgive me if I’ve misused “Rroma” and “Rromani.” I want instruction here as well.) I’m sorry about your mother.
Binkie: it’s fine mate. Thank you for the kind words. I didn’t mean anything as a personal attack — apologies again if it came out that way. Romanticising (hahahaha) us makes me a touch uncomfortable, is all. The double R is a glide of the pronunciation.
I’m sorry I’m not as close to nature as the girl who wrote the article, either, but I never really have been. I used to know a climber who said to me once: “I like climbing with you. I’m not worried if we get stuck out here, with you around.”
“Why?” I asked (thinking it was because I always went out with a ‘teenth lodged in my sock).
“Well, you know. You’re genetically disposed to it, aren’t you? Open air, hardship. That sort of thing.”
I really didn’t know what to say.
Uzwi: I do apologise for stomping all over your blog. I thought the stuff you wrote about the Ballardian trajectory was very interesting & utterly true, but may I ask: where do you think it goes next? Is there a chance that succeeding generations will walk away from the mall, & will there be anything left to go “back” to if they do?
Hi Nels. I don’t know. I think the West will take a pay cut over the next generation or so. In that sense, history may not have ended after all & as a result the uncommodified life may make a comeback. Supporters of the kind of life we have now will present that as a defeat. They’re from the bubble years, so “dreams” –in the sense of commodified aspirations–are all they ever knew. But every generation selects for a dominant character type & there’ll be a new one by then. No one wants to have to go back to picking potatoes for a living, sure; but when you have to, you do. Anything you tell yourself before that is the story of your own sense of entitlement. If you ask me we do a little too much of that.