If, in the pursuit of social justice & a better way, I ever did anything other than drop coins in a tin, shamble with a few thousand fellow zealots through the streets of London & blather to all who would listen, it was through my involvement with Gypsy rights. In the '80s & '90s I was an active participant in a long, enervating & largely fruitless struggle for the provision of sites for Britain's Gypsies. It's a battle that continues today & one that looks set to persist for as long as Gypsies remain a legitimised target for prejudices that, in principle at least, have been proscribed against all other minorities.
I'm not an active participant any longer. But my interest in 'the affaires of Egypte' remains acute & only the priority of my current family circumstances prevents my becoming practically involved again. Maybe when the kids are all at school & I'm not I shall - ageing sinews & dwindling wits permitting - commit time & energy to the struggle again. One thing seems certain: however long it is before this might come to pass, those basic rights are likely still to be withheld.
GYPSIES – TRAMPS & THIEVES?
[1.]
By & large, whatever sense we make of the information, in the Western World today we’re probably more aware of & knowledgeable about ethnicity than we have ever been. There isn’t a large city anywhere in Europe, the Americas or Australasia that doesn’t contain substantial representation from non-Western races, creeds & ethnic groups. Mosques, Hindu & Sikh temples, synagogues, halal butchers, Chinese supermarkets, Japanese sushi bars are commonplace in any conurbation. Even those who lament the incursion of alien peoples into our pure Aryan culture might choose to weep into their pints of lager down at the local curry house of a Friday night. So whether we welcome them into our midst & celebrate the cultural diversity they bring or resent them as interlopers & mongrelisers, our consciousness of their distinguishing features is acute.
It intrigues me, therefore, that our perception of an ethnic minority that has been amongst us for upwards of 500 years is so wilfully incurious. Apart from the sentimentalists who regret the passing of the colourful Romany chief, Nature’s Gentleman, & his motley clan in their brightly painted wooden caravan, the large majority see, & have always seen Gypsies as nothing more than a social plague & a blot upon the landscape. They are indifferent to issues of ethnicity, distinct cultural practices, anthropological origins & a rich dialect based on a once-fully inflected language of Sanskrit roots. They are aware only that Gypsies live in trailers, which they park, sometimes in large numbers, at roadsides, in fields, on car parks or on derelict ground & that when they go they leave rubbish behind. Additionally, it is held to be common knowledge that they pilfer & cheat, are abusive & violent, avoid paying taxes & live of welfare.
In short, Gypsies the world over fall far outside the battered & constantly shifting ring-fence of respectability that contains even the most nominally accepted of ethnic minorities. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Gypsy represents for many the last available pariah, the remaining target for legitimised persecution at local, regional & national level. It is almost as if the loathing & despisal that is directed at Gypsies is distillation of all the choking bigotry that is now proscribed by law against other, more conspicuous minorities. Equally, it is no exaggeration to claim that in certain quarters at certain times, anti-Gypsy hostility is, at best, tolerated &, at worst, positively fomented by the authorities at the highest level. It acts as both a safety valve & a diversion within a persistently uncomfortable multicultural society.
So who are the Gypsies & what are their origins? If they are to be declared as having distinct ethnicity we need first to trace it to its roots & then to examine its present substance & functioning. It is now widely acknowledged that the ancestors of the Gypsies can be tracked back to Northwest India over 1,000 years ago. As members of low-caste linked tribes, variously identified as the Dom, Rom or Zott, they took on the despised trade of metal smiths. Whether nomadism was a lifestyle factor brought on by economic demands, it became an imperative as the tribes moved into the religious, political & cultural melting pot that was the Middle East, Asia Minor & Europe at the beginning of the first millennium. The rapid & widespread diaspora of these Gypsy ancestors took them into every region of the settled world. And, over the centuries, with a remarkable capacity for selective absorption & adaptation based on their powerful, self-preserving sense of ethnocentricity, they absorbed & synthesised cultural elements – linguistic, artistic, social, spiritual – from the regions through which they travelled & in which, by the middle ages, they had settled.
The first record of their presence in Britain comes from Scotland in 1541 with mention of conflict between King James V & one John Faa, Faw or Fall, supposedly the ‘Earl of Little Egypt’. Faa & his followers were ordered from Scotland & the process of active & relentless persecution began. A Scottish law passed against Gypsies in 1579 declared that ‘their ears be nailed to a tree, & cutted off, & them banished the country; & if thereafter they be found again, that they be hanged…the idle people calling themselves Egyptians’. By the enlightened times of the first Queen Elizabeth, laws had also been passed in England meting out the same sort of terminal justice.
With the liberalisation of thought that came with the 18th century, perspectives on this remarkably tenacious & self-sufficient people began to alter in some quarters. Artists were drawn to the exoticism of the Gypsies, to their dark features & decidedly un-English mode of dress. Musicians & composers were drawn to their striking affinity for music & song. Linguists were drawn to their language, Romani, at that time still a fully inflected tongue, based on Sanskrit, but peppered with words from all the regions through which, over time, the Gypsies had roamed. Poets & writers were drawn to the very aspects of the lives of the Roma, real & imagined, that so frightened those who despised them most – their nomadism, their apparent lack of adherence to civil laws & religious commandments & their ostensible indifference to conventional cultural & moral restraints. And there began during the years of the Age of Reason the lionisation of what was perceived by artists, intellectuals, scholars & dilettantes to be the Romany way of life, a romance which intensified greatly during the repressed & inhibited Victorian era & which, adapted to the tenor of the times, prevails amongst the same groups today.
The realities of the contemporary day-to-day lives of Gypsies in Britain today are starkly different. At a time in which consciousness of imperilled minorities across the world is being raised constantly, those few laws that, for a few years, afforded British Gypsies some reasonable hope of protection & comfort have been repealed. Where once there was some opportunity within law to obtain permanent caravan sites from local & county authorities, providing both a settled base & a chance to spend some time ‘on the road’, now, thanks to a draconian toughening up of laws relating to nomadism, the thousands of Gypsies who have no recourse to established sites live a precarious existence only days ahead of prosecution for trespass & constant eviction. (Continued)
