Claiming My Romani Heritage

As a young girl, my grandma Charlie used to tell me about her own grandmother, a Romani woman believed to be German Sinti. "She was always looking out the window from her bed. She never left her bed," my grandma used to say. She would tell me how sad she seemed, how once she met my great-great grandpa her family never spoke to her again, how she always wore her hair in two long braids and how, though it was much darker than my own, it never, ever went grey. That last bit of mystery was my favorite part, before I ever worried about getting grey hairs. (Sadly, I haven't inherited that gene.)

"Where was she from?" I would ask, and my grandma would give me a list of places she'd heard her grandmother mention in passing: France, Hungary, Poland. I never got a single answer. 

"She was a Gyspy," Charlie would say, and that was all she knew.

At that time, I too knew very little about what "Gypsy" meant . . . only that I needed to learn more.

As I continue to do my research for the novel I'm currently working on, I keep thinking about my great-great grandmother. I hope to write something she would be proud to read, something that might ultimately bring light to the painful problems that affect Roma everywhere, even today. Writing anything that might bring her memory shame is my deepest fear, and that fear---a fear that I consider healthy---guides me as I struggle to portray an era and a people who are so frequently misrepresented in fashion, media, and importantly, children's literature, as well as adult literature. The problems of fetishization, stereotyping, and racism have left the Roma deeply misunderstood. 

I understand that mine is a complicated dream, what with the secrecy surrounding Romani culture, but I dream it nonetheless. I believe that if she knew about the international human rights crisis plagued by her people, about how the Porrajmos has not just been forgotten but ignored in our history lessons, she might wonder if the time for secrecy is past.