Lidia Ostałowska

Roma are Roma

Excerpt

The journalistic collage Roma Are Roma was written in the late 1990s. Although Lidia Ostałowska’s writings here touch on issues specific to a particular time and place, their universality is one of this book’s undisputed qualities. Somewhat of an ethnologist, somewhat of an historian, and sometimes adopting the role of social activist, the author journeys throughout central and eastern Europe. For it is here that the Roma have for centuries spun the yarn of their perigrinary life. And in this way, Ostałowska weaves a singular history, an account that most people – even those implicated in it – would be hard pressed to match.
“Roma don’t need a common religion, government, or a state; memory and time are of no concern to them. Roma are Roma,” says Badzio, one of the heroes of this book, as channeled by Lidia Ostałowska. Elsewhere we read again, “The Roma’s fate is in escape.” Because in this book the Roma, though settled in different countries – from Bulgaria and Macedonia through Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, as far as Poland – are always escaping somewhere. In attempting to catch hold of the Roma mid-flight, Ostałowska took on a difficult task. With tenacity, empathy, and attentiveness to a variety of points of view, the journalist provides a succession of images in which individual histories – colourful, but often tragic – are alternated with a meticulously described social background. The author is objective, however. Although she expressly sympathizes with her protagonist, she does not, for example, shy away from stories that reveal the misogynistic side of Roma life.
The narration of the book flows at a variable tempo. Depending on their mood, the melody of these recounted histories is at times sentimental and slow, at times lively and dynamic. Sometimes the stories flow with the melancholy movement of prolonged locutions. Most often, however, the sentences are short, fractured, as if Ostałowska were attempting to reproduce the Roma temperament syntactically: Colourful, but volatile, cut off from other people, who often see the Roma as a threat. It must be remembered that this book is not just a palette of colourful personalities, but also an unsettling document about the life of a powerful community. And as Lech Mróz reminds us in the foreword, Roma society in central and eastern Europe “has been and remains, more often than not, a target of violence and an object of hostility.”

Marcin Wilk

Lidia Ostałowska (born 1954) is a journalist and reporter of the Gazeta Wyborcza. She writes about the underprivileged and the disadvantaged: the ethnic minorities, women, youth subcultures.