Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).
Prologue
As a child, I used to hide under the long colourful skirts worn by my mother. Thinking this was my place in the world, I felt protected. Sometime later, I started to have skirts of my own and, with them, I had to walk my way. Little by little I discovered, through the looks they gave me and the infinite fears of my family, how painful this task could be. Living in this world of Others who are almost nothing like us, even when they seem to be, it took me a while to find my place. I realised that to achieve this, despite loving our beautiful skirts and everything we move through them, I would have to abandon them at some point. I continued walking until, in the end, I understood that just like the home of colourful skirts, my place in the world was called family. I feel it must have always been like this among the Roma.
Often framed as ‘foreigners in any land’ (Stefanovsky 2015, 74), for many Roma, family can also be synonymous with place: as lived, shared space; of survival and continuity. Still, having grown up with the gadje[1] part of my own family, for a long time I occupied a kind of ‘in-between place’ (Stefanovsky 2015). An uncertain and conflictive position, revealing the multiple and complex nuances of the (re)production of Romanipen[2] (Ferrari 2010; Stefanovsky 2015; Shimura 2017). Between Roma and non-Roma, two well-defined halves of my previously fragmented family group, I saw one of the two worlds indelibly overlapping the other. I feel it must have always been like this for the Roma.
As an anthropologist, I cannot help but constantly question myself. It may have always been like this, or almost always, but that does not mean it cannot change. Roma people have reaffirmed their existence, over the course of time and in all corners of the world; they have done so countless times, struggling to ensure a dignified life. Invisible, except when pursued, or when allocated to the terrain of the exotic. In the wake of a dichotomous representation, between stigmatisation and idealisation, this paradoxical relationship of (in)visibility emerges (Guimarais 2012; Cairus 2018), expressed, for example, in the interaction between the Roma and the state. Actions marked simultaneously by racism, bureaucratic indifference (Gay y Blasco & Fotta 2023) and tutelage[3] (Oliveira 2014), when magnified to a borderline condition within a scenario of global crisis, denude the tacit knowledge that, for the Roma, there can be no other destination than the margins.
However, we know there is. And while reading Romani Chronicles of COVID-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, all of this seemed very latent to me.
Chronicles of (im)permanence, hope and resistance
I remember it well. At its peak, when the COVID-19 pandemic seemed unstoppable, between fear and chaos, the imminence of the end hovered, rarefied. With what morbid ease do we face the idea of ‘the end of the world’? Of course, we actually knew that was not the case. Or, at least, we perceived the co-existence of multiple layers of complexity in the assumed end of days: it was not swift, just as it was not inevitable, nor unpredictable. But more importantly: it was certainly not the same for everyone. Indeed, we faced radically different versions of the same crisis.
The new coronavirus pandemic has proven particularly lethal for historically marginalised populations. A fact that, when added to the accumulation of previous experiences, leads us to understand and highlight the centrality of delineating the local and markedly situated action of a global phenomenon (Segata 2020). The chronicles we read here compellingly demonstrate how to make this proposition feasible. For the Roma people in south Brazil, the place where I speak from and conduct my research, the effects of this ‘paradox of (in)visibility’ have intensified, materialised in the deepening social exclusion, state negligence in the face of arbitrary expulsions and worsening hunger (Comitê Pampa 2021), and in the proliferation of hierarchical actions that are fundamentally based on antiziganism.
Concerning the plurality of voices, contexts and conceptions evoked in the chronicles, in each of the experiences reported, the perception of everything that brings us together and what differentiates us emerges and becomes tactile. We understand how the historical memory of violence and segregation, but also of resistance, are distinctive of the way in which the Roma population faced the pandemic, from notably different places but under similarly extreme conditions. Brazilian writer Davi Arrigucci defines the chronicle as ‘a form of time and memory, a means of temporal representation of past events, a record of life seeping away’ (Arrigucci 2021), an exercise in remembering and writing. In addition to communicating and recording, this apparently noncommittal movement operates in the subjective domain of digression and choice: it speaks of everything that we deeply desire to keep and recover among that which remains of the lived experience (Arrigucci 2021). I believe these are precisely the elements that make the Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 so unique. Living and writing ‘in the eye of the hurricane’ (Fleischer et al. 2021), chroniclers generously allow us to access their lives, memories, records and choices.
When put into dialogue, the reports not only reveal themselves as intrinsically diverse but also act to shape a heterogeneous and politically nuanced panorama of experiences of solidarity, autonomy and confrontation, typical of the positions occupied by the Roma during this critical event. When coupled with the chronicle method, ethnography becomes fundamental to capture them, since it makes the reciprocity between experience, writing and scale tangible.
In these terms, I could not help but notice how paradigmatic the efforts by Roma communities were at demonstrating compliance with social distancing and isolation guidelines, their dedication to prevention measures and their strategies to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, represented in the chronicles of all five countries. These actions were carried out despite the progressive deterioration in their living conditions, the absence or impotence of the state, the fear and anguish typical of each of the scenarios reported. Directly contrary to the stigmas historically perpetuated around an alleged inaptitude for citizenship and compliance with social norms (Gay y Blasco and Fotta 2023), the Roma faced the effects of the virus and the worsening of pre-existing conditions of omission, discrimination and vulnerability, in one moment. And we continue, because it has always been like this among the Roma.
Finally, I particularly liked the mention of the intensification of daily struggles, made by Beatriz Martín in the Spanish Chronicles, as a synthesis of the situation of Romani peoples bound by the pandemic (chapter 3). I believe that this enables us to go beyond dichotomous conceptions concerning continuity or rupture, sensitively deepening our view of all the experiences portrayed. As a horizon of possibility, the chronicles call for the urgency of the struggle, for non-hegemonic ways of existing and producing knowledge.
[1]In Roma culture, gadje is a person who lacks Romanipen (see endnote 2). Though this most often means someone who is not ethnic Roma, it can refer to Roma who live outside their culture, and is frequently used to refer to non-Roma neighbours living close to Roma communities.
[2] Romanipen encompasses the totality of the Roma spirit, culture and law.
[3] Here, I seek to dialogue with the definition proposed by Brazilian anthropologist João Pacheco de Oliveira (2014, 130), for whom ‘Tutelage is a form of domination marked by the exercise of mediation and anchored in the paradox of being conducted by contradictory principles that always involve aspects of protection and repression, activated alternatively or in combination according to different contexts and different interlocutors.’
References
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Cairus, Brigitte Grossmann. “Ciganos Roms no Brasil: Imagens e Identidades Diaspóricas na contemporaneidade.” 2018. Doctoral thesis, Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina.
Communication Fld. “Durante a Pandemia Do Coronavírus, Grupos Nômades Do Brasil Viveram Situações De Vulnerabilidade – Comitê,” Comitê dos Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais do Pampa (blog), December 16, 2021, https://comitepampa.com.br/noticias/2021/durante-a-pandemia-do-coronavirus-grupos-nomades-do-brasil-viveram-situacoes-de-vulnerabilidade/.
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Guimarãis, Marcos Toyansk Silva. “O associativismo transnacional cigano: identidades, diásporas e territórios.” 2012. Doctoral thesis, Universidade de São Paulo. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.8.2012.tde-22022013-124150.
Oliveira, João Pacheco de. “Pacificação e Tutela Militar na Gestão de Populações e Territórios.” Mana, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 125–61. <https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132014000100005>
Segata, Jean. “Covid-19: scales of pandemics and scales of anthropology.” 2 Apr. 2020. Somatosphere. <https://somatosphere.com/2020/covid-19-scales-of-pandemics-and-scales-of-anthropology.html/>
Shimura, Mário Igor. “Ser cigano: a identidade étnica em um acampamento Calon itinerante.” 2017. Master’s dissertation, Universidade Estadual de Maringá.
Stefanovsky, Voria (Soria, Ana Paula Castello Branco). “‘Juncos ao vento’: literatura e identidade romani (cigana): El alma de los parias, de Jorge Nedich.” 2015. Doctoral thesis, Universidade de Brasília. <https://doi.org/10.26512/2015.07.T.19111>
