Who Decides Your Name?

A name is linked to identity….but who gets to decide your name?

“Look at that dirty gypsy!” the woman at the hospital said conspiratorially to K., my new friend.  All three women had recently had babies and were recovering in a hospital in southern Serbia.  The ‘gypsy’ had been handed clean clothes and told to shower daily, but she had not showered even once. 

K. looked at the woman angrily.  “How dare you call her a gypsy?  Call her Roma!” The woman looked  startled at her passionate vehemence.  “Do you want to know something?  I also am Roma.”

“You?” The woman said, shocked.  “But you don’t look Roma.”  After K. convinced her that she was indeed Roma, the woman apologized for her behavior.

“Some doctors and nurses still call us gypsies at the hospital,” said K. who is in her early 20s and a mother of two. “They are educated—you would think they would know better.”

I  took a sip of my Nescafe and settled myself comfortably into her couch, happy to have a chance to hear a young Roma woman’s perspective.  K. was educated, reaching the final year of tourism school before quitting to marry her now-husband.  “Tell me about your years in Bosnia,”  I said.   Her parents had felt called by God to be missionaries in Bosnia after the war. I allowed myself to be drawn into her stories about her childhood experiences, fascinated at the role her family had in serving the young church in Bosnia.

“Once we were visiting this village…and those people there were real gypsies.”

I almost choked on my coffee.

“Wait, why are you calling them gypsy?”

“Well, they were really dirty and the way they were living….” 

“But I thought that word was very offensive to you?”

“It is…but if people are really living like gypsies….”

“So it is okay for you to call them that but not non-Roma?”

“Yes.”

“But…so…gypsy is referring to how a Roma lives and personal hygiene?”

She looked at me with a half-smile, shrugging her affirmation.

I left that conversation even more confused about Roma self-identity.  A month earlier, I had been in a Roma village in northern Serbia.  Each Roma village has a different aura and character, yet each has the similar feeling of separation between the majority culture neighborhood a few streets away.   As I was interviewing some people there,  I asked a question referring to them as “Roma.”

“We are not Roma,”  they declared. “We are Romanian (meaning from the country). We don’t speak gypsy…we speak Romanian!”

“Oh…” I said, weakly.  “So because you speak Romanian and not Romani, you are not Roma, but Romanian?”

“Yes.”

Days later, I was back in Croatia, and I described the village and the people to  some Romanian friends and asked them what name they would call people from such a village.

“Tsigani [Gypsy],”  they said.

“But they call themselves Romanian…in fact, they speak Romanian!”  I said.

“They are not Romanian.  Are you sure they were speaking Romanian?”

In another village, a Roma pastor smiled as he told me, “My people say they are not Roma because they send their children to school and are not dirty.”  He laughed.  “Except sometimes, when they have to be Roma to accept certain governmental help….then they are Roma!”

My identity is so easy.  I am an American because I was born in America and grew up there.  But what is it like to have no country associated with your ethnic identity, and to have other people name you, or to slip in and out of your identity depending on how the other person might respond?  What is it like to have one of your  identifying names mean “dirty and  uneducated”?  A name has incredible power—every name has a host of implicit meanings for identity.  It does not really surprise me that there are so many ways Roma self-identify or others identify them.  Roma history is complicated, and there are numerous languages and dialects, cultural groupings and nuances—all combined with hundreds of years of marginalization and discrimination.

“Those people should be proud to be Roma, ” my friend K. told me as I related my confusion about the village in northern Serbia. “It takes a special person to be Roma….we have so many challenges and obstacles to face….not everyone could be Roma.”

The Next Generation: Seeds of Hope

The distance from one world to the next can be as close as a single step.

Stepping into the Roma village from the Serbian part of town, I am greeted with a boldly spray-painted sign across a building:  This is Tsigani [Gypsy] Territory.

“The press photographed this graffiti, assuming it was made by Serbs,” G. told me, grinning, “but actually Roma did it.”

And indeed we had entered Roma territory—the sights, smells, and sounds  were extraordinarily different from the street we had just exited.  Three-storied houses crowded forward for the best position on the narrow, half-heartedly paved street. The occasional unsightly pile of garbage or unused materials littered in between houses.   The street was alive with people—kerchiefed older women with bags of vegetables, children running and playing, men manning tables of raw pig meat for sale. One man tottered down the street driving his three geese in front of him with his cane.   Greetings were shouted to one another and people often stopped for a few minutes to chat amid the loud strains of the intoxicatingly haunting  Roma music pouring out of windows.

Periodically, we would stop and greet someone, and G. would introduce me to “this brother” or “that sister.” To the smiling men, I would shake their hands—but the older women would often grab me by my shoulders and smack the traditional three kiss greeting on my cheeks.

We were on our way to the Sunday school pick up point and soon arrived at a corner where masses of children awaited.  The church van pulled up and happy, loud children squeezed into every inch of space.

“Why are so many streets in the Roma villages unpaved or badly paved?” I asked G. later.  “Shouldn’t the city pave them just as much as they pave the next road over in the Serb part of town?”  G. shrugged at the question, nonplussed.  “It’s how it has always been.” Every town has a Roma representative that is supposed to act as an advocate and communicator between his community and the majority community—with varying results.

We pulled up at the large tent-church and kids spilled out of the van, splitting into two different groups.  I hopped between both groups, reveling in their enthusiastic singing  as two young boys kept an impressive beat on the drums.  Even the youngest group took an offering, kids automatically pulling coins out of their pockets to put in the bucket.  Cultivating a culture of giving at such a young age?  What a wonderfully transformative idea!

These kids are probably the second or third generation Christians of this 25-year old Roma church in Southern Serbia, which boasts between  500 and 700 people.  After all that I have experienced  in Roma villages over the last months, I felt an incredible joy  to see such Christian formation, done by Roma and for Roma.  Who knows but that God will raise up some of these children to continue leading and advocating for their people?