Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey

Between 1991 and 1995, Isabel Fonseca journeyed among the Roma through Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland & Germany, among other places. Unusually, she manages to gain the trust of many of these people, and was accepted into their lives - although American, and have to communicate mostly through a translator.

The stories she recounts here are fascinating ones. Sad and depressing, without doubt, the future of the Gypsies looks pretty bleak. With a lack of willingness to improve their own lives, governments who simply want to transfer the problems elsewhere (or forced settlement of these often nomadic people), and a lack of a legitimate homeland, these people exist on the fringes of society, in often terrible conditions. Organised violence, regularly resulting in murder and displacement by the people who live near the Gypsies regularly and systematically goes uninvestigated and unpunished (there is a lot about this in the book, and many examples).

So really there is too much going on in this book for a real summary. It is an engaging read, and one that elicits sympathy for the situation these people are in.

As someone with only the briefest of encounters with Gypsies (in the UK and Ireland, where, as usual they are not see as law-abiding members of a community), there was a lot of background to the culture and their origin (see below for the now accepted Indian origin theory) which I leaned.

The title of the book is part of the translation of a Romani phrase “Bury me standing. I've been on my knees all my life.” P304 of the book.

Some interesting quotes follow.

P97
Early on in their Balkan existence, Gypsies held a curious position in society: they were at once more powerful and, by the nineteenth century, less free than they ever have been. Both conditions had to do with the structure of rural feudalism. The Gyspies were wanted, and detained - not for crimes, but for their talents. Tinsmiths and coppersmiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths especially, as well as the esteemed musicians among them, were valued and even fought over.

p100
...the study of Romani has also yielded a controversial ethnic possibility. This lies in the word the Gypsies widely use to refer to themselves (and literally to mean man or husband): rom among European Gypsies; lom in Armenian Romani; and dom in Persian and Syrian dialects. (And so we see that the term Rom, as in Romany, has nothing whatever to do with Romania, where, confusingly, the Gypsies have lived in great numbers for many centuries. Nor it is, as English Gypsies told the social anthropologist Judith Oakley, “cos we always roam.” Rom, dom and lom are all phonetic correspondence with the Sanskrit domba and the Modern Indian dom or dum, which refer to a particular group of tribes who look similar.In Sanskrit domba means “man of low caste living by singing and music.” In modern Indian tongues, the corresponding words have similar or related meanings: in Lahnda it is “menial”; in Sindhi, “caste of wandering musician”; in Panjabi, “strolling musician”; in West Pahari it means “low caste black-skinned man.” There are references to the Dom as musicians from the sixth century. The Dom still exist in India; they are nomads who do number of jobs: basketmaking, smithing, metalworking, scavenging, music-making. Not surprisingly many people have leapt on a Dom theory of origins for the Gypsies.