For International Romani Day: On the Romance of “Gypsies” and “Bohemians”

I couldn’t let International Romani Day pass this year without adding a piece to our recent spate of posts about the roots of theatre and the variety arts. I’m pretty sure most folks don’t know who these people actually are. They’ve been misunderstood and misidentified for centuries. Until quite recently they were popularly known as “Gypsies” due to the misconception that they had originally come from Egypt. Leaders in their community voted about a half century ago to do away with that name with reference to themselves as it had acquired a lot of derogatory baggage, and was often used pejoratively. The majority now call themselves Roma or Romani, although there are other related groups that call themselves by other names.

Linguistic analysis and genetic evidence have both confirmed that these people actually originated in India. Their ancestors left South Asia circa 600 A.D., then moved North to Persia where they lived for about another six centuries, before then moving into Armenia, Byzantium, and then the Balkans. The invasions of the Ottoman Turks drove them further North and West into Romania (hence the name) and Hungary, and then Central and Western Europe by the late 15th Century. This is top of mind for me, having written recently about Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with its depiction of Esmerelda and her tribe arriving in Paris around the 1480s.

It’s perhaps understandable why some folks would be uncertain about the cultural identity of the Roma. They are in many ways an admixture of all the numerous different societies they moved through over those centuries, from Hinduism to Zoroastrianism, to Judaism, to Islam and Christianity. In Anatolia they would have picked up the Middle Eastern dance styles, which were popularized in the U.S. by Little Egypt, very influential on burlesque dancing. From their native India the Roma brought the Snake Dance. They would later make their mark on Spanish dances like flamenco and the tarantella. In South and Eastern Europe, they would have absorbed local folk music. The tambourine is very much associated with Roma. Charlie Chaplin, who was part Roma, obsessively played the violin, and worked this into his “Gypsy” themed comedy The Vagabond. The most famous Roma guitar player is Django Reinhart. Naturally it is the Romani association with performance that draws us to them in our own exploration.

And above all, their reputation for being skilled at fortune telling, the ability to read palms, and tea leaves, to divine the future from decks of cards and the movements of the constellations, and by gazing into crystal balls. The Roma are by no means the only culture associated with such practices; most traditional societies have their own soothsayers, witch doctors and mediums. In fact, many Roma techniques and beliefs were drawn from the nations they moved among. But the itinerant nature of Romani society meant that they became especially reliant on earning money by such means. They moved around from place to place in caravans, which necessitated livelihoods drawn from short-term employment. Those of them that performed would pass a tambourine or a hat for money, for example, a model quite close to roving theatre troupes, medicine shows, and later, circuses. The Roma men became well known for other trades as well, such as blacksmithing, and they could also work as field hands, or perform other sorts of day labor. But of course it’s the performance we care about particularly. The music and movement influence on show business is self evident; obviously the divination stuff made its mark on professional stage magic, and was transplanted pretty much whole cloth into carnivals and sideshows.

Since time immemorial the Roma have been regarded suspiciously by the more settled peoples they moved among, and developed unfair reputations for thievery, sharp practices, kidnapping, and sexual predation. (For a cinematic example of this prejudice, see D.W. Griffith’s first movie). In reality, incidence of criminality among the Roma people is no higher than those of other ethnic groups, and this has been proven empirically. As is the case among other ostracized groups, their outsider status could conceivably lead to acts of desperation. And it’s not illogical that those who are tied down would hate, fear and envy those who are not.

Now, I want to briefly discuss another misnamed offshoot of this same community of people. Many (though not all) of that group that settled in Paris in the 1400s had come from the Kingdom of Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. As they were a separate people who largely kept to themselves, this became the nickname for all those who chose to live as outsiders in Paris (especially in the Latin Quarter): artists, the intelligentsia, musicians, nonconformists, and those who wished to live outside the bounds of institutions like marriage or the workplace. A life of voluntary poverty, free love, and a certain amount of “live for today” hedonism. In time, “Bohemian” became the nickname for people everywhere who chose that lifestyle. Obviously La Boheme and Rent are about such characters, as is Trilby (a.k.a. Svengali). The title character in Carmen, a Spanish “Gypsy”, is referred to as a “Bohemian”. There’s more French literature about such characters than you could ever possibly catalog. It’s the culture of the cabarets and cafes and revolutionaries, Apache Dances, absinthe, drugs, dissipation, debauchery, everything that begins with A and C and D.

In America, Greenwich Village and San Francisco are especially associated with this manner of living, stretching back as far back as the 19th century, but peaking in the mid to late 20th century with the Beat Generation, Off-Off Broadway, the Hippie Movement, Punk, Post-Punk, and No Wave filmmaking. As someone who identifies strongly (nearly exclusively) with all of the above, it is distressing to me to see no evidence of anything like it percolating in younger generations. In the post-Reagan, Late Capitalist era we seem to have arrived at a culture so brainwashed by consumerism, that art and ideals for their own sake have become something like punchlines, a form of suicide. As I wrote in my piece on A Montage of Heck, I’m pretty sure on some level that’s why Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. What do you do when you write poetry and make music, but they’re valued primarily as a product? I think I’ve been on this jag lately because our society seems to have gone insane? Maybe it’s time to stop regarding avarice and cruelty as the sane alternatives? How about just earning what you need to live and be happy? I know I’m not the only one out there who thinks that way.

On a related topic, see too, my post In Praise of Tramps and Hobos.

For more on like topics, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.