NOTES ON THE ROMANI PEOPLE
“Truly … it’s a salamander, a nymph, a goddess, a bacchante from Mount Menelaus!” At that moment, one of the ‘salamander’s’ plaits of hair came down and a yellow copper coin … rolled to the ground. ‘Ha! No it’s not,’ he said, ‘It’s a gypsy girl!’ All illusion had vanished.” This is the exoticizing portrait that Victor Hugo paints when introducing Esmeralda, a Romani woman, for the first time in his 1831 novel, Notre-
Dame de Paris. Romani people have been present in Europe for centuries and are the continent’s largest racial minority. Roma are deeply woven into the tapestry of Europe both in historical and fictional ways. The plethora of novels, paintings, operas that portray Romani people as an exotic “other” to European whiteness are a testament both to the ways in which the white gaze has misrepresented Roma – as hypersexualized women or wandering vagabonds – but also to the fact that Roma have been a constant presence in Europe since the 12th century. Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda is one such example. As scholar Allison Craven posits, “Esmeralda’s role is formed in a lineage of fictional [G]ypsies that stems from the Orientalism of Hugo’s own time.” The Romani people are a diasporic community who left Northern India starting in the 10th century, migrating west through Persia, the Middle East, and Anatolia. Linguistic analysis has helped scholars determine the migration path of the Roma. As a person of Romani descent myself, I join the majority of my community in rejecting the term țigan (“Gypsy”) as it is a pejorative and racial slur. Roma (noun) and Romani (adjective) are ethnonyms used to refer to members of Roma and Sinti diaspora more broadly. The term “Roma” was adopted at the First Romani World Congress in 1971. The terminology Roma or Romani as opposed to Gypsy in all its variations is generally considered to be more widely accepted by Roma as an ethnonym. The term is derived from the word for “man” or “husband” in Romanes, the Romani language. The term Gypsy—an exonym first coined from the false ascription of Roma as originating from Egypt —has progressively acquired pejorative connotation in many countries in Europe. Țigan, its equivalent counterpart in other European countries – Zigeurner, czigany, etc. – has etymological roots in the Greek term tsingános, “untouchables.” In the context of the Romania in particular, the word țigan accrued a negative and dehumanizing connotation during the 500 years of enslavement of Roma in Romania. From the moment they set foot on ‘European’ territory, Roma people have been Orientalized, exoticized, and misrepresented. Romani peoples have long been racialized, demonized, or romanticized in the social imaginary. For centuries the Western imaginary conceived of Roma as dirty and disease-ridden creatures that could blacken you with a single touch, or as over-
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