Contemporary Roma/Gypsy Narratives

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Storying Dreams, Habits and the Past: Contemporary Roma/Gypsy Narratives

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Maria Subert

December 2015

This dissertation titled

Storying Dreams, Habits and the Past: Contemporary Roma/Gypsy Narratives

MARIA SUBERT

has been approved for

the School of Communication Studies

and the Scripps College of Communication by

Raymie E. McKerrow

Emeritus Professor of Communication Studies

Scott Titsworth

Dean, Scripps College of Communication

ABSTRACT

SUBERT, MARIA, Ph.D., December 2015, Communication Studies

Storying Dreams, Habits and the Past: Contemporary Roma/Gypsy Narratives

Director of Dissertation: Raymie E. McKerrow

My dissertation seeks to explore the experiences, existing narratives, and the role of intertwined stories of the Roma/Gypsy community in Bódvalenke, in the economically and socially most underprivileged region of Hungary. Bódvalenke is a unique place, where contemporary painters of Roma/Gypsy origin have created large murals on the back walls of the houses in the frame of a permanent outdoor exhibition. In the visual storytelling of these murals about the Roma/Gypsy mythology, past and present uniquely work together, entwined with oral narratives and everyday stories in the village. My research examines the nature of storytelling in Bódvalenke in its many layers and performances, and analyzes its effects as well as probing the relationships between the stories told by the Romani people and stories circulated by others about Roma/Gypsy peoples in Hungary and Europe.

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DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the villagers and artists who befriended me as

an equal, shared with me their lives and did not exclude me for being an outsider. You

taught me so much about your way of living free and being happy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was accepted to the Ohio University Communication Studies PhD program the same year as my son was admitted to a separate PhD program at Yale. So we started our

PhD programs together. While my son and I pursued our doctoral studies, my daughter and husband stayed together in New York to support one another. During my four-year program, my daughter graduated from her undergraduate studies at Fordham University, moved to the University of California at Irvine, and completed a Master’s degree in dance and film. She will graduate when I do. Thus, I began graduate school with my son and close it out with my daughter. To accomplish this, our family of four had to live apart a great deal, and since we are so very close, this presented many difficulties and precipitated many sacrifices. For some time we were an Internet family. In the end, my husband lived alone to support his “distributed” family in pursuing their dreams. Here, at the completion of this long journey, I want to say how very proud I am of my family.

Thank you for the sacrifices you have made to help me pursue my dream. I could not imagine ever finishing this degree without your love and support.

As a non-traditional student who returned to school from a career in documentary media and who had to choose between living with my family full time or completing my

PhD, I felt sometimes very alone and vulnerable on this journey. Therefore, besides the academic relationship with my dissertation committee, my personal relationship with them was crucial to my survival. I selected Dr. Devika Chawla based on her sensitive and artistic ethnographic research and her teaching of ethnography, which raised the bar very high for beginner ethnographers under her tutelage. I am thankful for everything she taught me. And I

v would like to recognize my other committee member, Dr. Roger Aden, who continually challenged me to be a maximalist in the accuracy and morality of my research. His positive critique and advice improved my dissertation. I would like to thank Dr. Jenny

Nelson for embodying the “wise scholar” and for being a wonderful human being. She framed our relationship as dialogical and this was very important, given the often unidirectional, monologic world of academic discourse. Finally, but certainly not lastly, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Raymie

McKerrow, who was always there to advise me about both research and life in academia, encouraging me not to give up when I had no strength left to continue. His investment in this project ensured I would complete it, and his guidance, encouragement, and patience made all the difference. Working with him was an exceptional experience that I will always be proud of. I also wish to thank all the faculty members who have played essential roles in my growth as a communication scholar. Thank you for supporting me throughout this wonderful journey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... iiii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v List of Tables ...... xi List of Figures ...... xii Chapter 1: Introduction and Review of Literature ...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 Roma/Gypsies in Hungary ...... 3 Roma/Gypsies in Bódvalenke ...... 12 Purpose of Study ...... 19 Significance of Research ...... 19 Review of Literature ...... 20 Gypsy Folklore and Anthropology ...... 21 Identity Research ...... 24 Roma Society as System ...... 27 European Non-territorial Minority Research ...... 28 Research Questions ...... 31 Summary ...... 31 Outline of the Dissertation ...... 32 Chapter 2: Theoretical Framing ...... 34 Narrative Theory ...... 34 Performance Theory ...... 45 Iconicity of the Nomads ...... 48 Summary ...... 50 Chapter 3: Research Practices ...... 51 Field Site ...... 51 Research Participants ...... 56 Semi-Structured Interview ...... 58

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Informal Conversation ...... 60 Reflective Understanding ...... 60 Data Analysis ...... 62 Oral Narrative ...... 66 Visual Narrative ...... 69 Summary ...... 79 Chapter 4: Oral Narratives ...... 80 Foreword to Chapter Four ...... 80 Oral Narrative Genres in the Fresco Village ...... 87 Hypothetical Narrative ...... 88 Habitual Narrative ...... 101 Encounters with the Past ...... 106 Encounters with the Past with Tradition-saving Stories ...... 111 Core Narratives among the Villagers ...... 119 Narrative of Need ...... 119 Talk of Survival ...... 119 Need for Equality ...... 134 Need for Independence ...... 143 Narrative of Pride ...... 146 Motherhood and Family ...... 147 The Role of Mothers and Mothers-in-law...... 150 Roma Couples Stay Together ...... 153 Proud to be Clean ...... 155 Pride to Endure Suffering ...... 160 Summary ...... 165 Chapter 5: Identity and Belonging ...... 168 Sense of Self, Connecting with Others, and Balancing the Community ...... 168 Narratives of Separated Worlds ...... 168 Safe Place ...... 168 Being Locked In ...... 170 Locked in the Geographical Place ...... 170

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Locked in the “Gypsy World” ...... 171 Locked in the Pre-constructed Social Space of the “Gypsy” ...... 176 Worlds of the Gypsy and non-Gypsy ...... 177 Strangers and the Bódvalenke People ...... 190 Gypsy and Gypsy Divide ...... 192 Gender Divide ...... 194 The Dialectics of Mobility and Stability ...... 205 Begging, Peddling, Sharing, and Exchanging ...... 206 Moving and the Extended Family ...... 210 The Role of the Flexible Gypsy Home ...... 212 Summary ...... 216 Chapter 6: Visual Narratives ...... 218 Foreword to Chapter Six ...... 219 Narrative Genres of the Frescoes ...... 221 Hypothetical Narrative (Visual) ...... 221 Telling Stories to Figure Out Who We Are ...... 222 “Pouring Out Our Heart to Each Other” ...... 230 Habitual Narrative (Visual) ...... 235 The Life of the Gypsy ...... 236 The (Neo)Colonial Setting ...... 245 A Very Sad Story ...... 252 “They Are at the Mercy of this Civilization” ...... 264 Encounters with the Past and Tradition-saving Stories (Visual) ...... 270 “There is Nowhere to Go” ...... 271 “Gypsies Want to Escape From Here” ...... 275 “We Were Not Saddened or Displaced” ...... 281 The Happy Life of the Gypsy Colony ...... 285 Counter/Emancipatory Narratives (Visual) ...... 292 “The Equilibrium that Determines our Existence” ...... 292 “Portraying Resistance in a Harmonious Way” ...... 299 Summary ...... 307

Chapter 7: Conclusions ...... 313 The Results of the Study ...... 313 Oral and Visual Genres and Core Narratives ...... 313 Answering the First Research Question ...... 316 Answering the Second Research Question ...... 328 The Essentialized Roma ...... 329 The Deprived Roma ...... 333 The Subaltern Roma ...... 335 Theoretical Consequences and Implications ...... 338 Strengths and Limitations of the Study ...... 343 Summary ...... 346 References ...... 347 Appendix A: Interview Protocol ...... 369 Appendix B: IRB Project Outline Form ...... 373

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1: Genres and Core Narratives of the Artists’ Oral Narratives ...... 309

Table 2: Genres and Oral Narratives of the Visuals ...... 310

Table 3: Oral and Visual Narratives ...... 314

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: “Sitters on the Stone”...... 229

Figure 2: “Bódvalenke’s Everydays” ...... 237

Figure 3: Detail from “Bódvalenke’s Everydays” ...... 248

Figure 4: “Bódvalenke’s Ballad” ...... 259

Figure 5: “Fleeing Angels” ...... 274

Figure 6: “Dance, Tarot, Spring”...... 284

Figure 7: “Family” ...... 300

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Introduction

My interest in the Roma/Gypsies was sparked by a series of tragedies. In 2013 major international news outlets reported that a Hungarian court issued three life sentences and one thirteen-year prison sentence to four extreme nationalists, who, in a racist rage, injured 55 and murdered six Roma individuals (“Hungarian gang jailed,”

2013). Shortly after the Roma murders in 2009, a Hungarian woman, whom I will name

Project Leader to protect her confidentiality, started thinking of how Roma could gain more positive attention. She remembered an Egyptian Nubian village1 where the poor villagers decorated their houses with wall-paintings that turned their village into a tourist attraction, and she started organizing a permanent open-air gallery for frescoes2 of contemporary Roma artists with the hope that this would bring similar development in a

Hungarian Roma village (“European Parliament’s ASP5G-2 Conference,” 2011).3

The Project Leader was successful in lobbying and finding sponsors under the aegis of the “European Workshop on Culture and Cultural Society” association, from which she later switched to cooperating with the Hungarian Reformed Church Aid

1 The Project Leader recalls: “We had been on vacation 15-20 years ago in Egypt, where the tourist guide took us into a Nubian village. We had to drive two and a half hours to get there in sixty Celsius degrees throughout the desert. And suddenly there was a village where the walls were painted with beautiful pictures outside and inside.” See Laborczi (2012, p. 1). 2 I use “frescoes” and “murals” to signify the wall paintings in Bódvalenke. The terms “wall painting” and “mural” denote all types of decorative painting on walls. “Fresco” refers to wall paintings that are painted on fresh plaster, so that the pigment particles are bound in the plaster. Although they are named “frescoes,” most of the Bódvalenke wall paintings are succos, which is painted on dry walls instead of wet walls. See Rukh, L. (n. d) 3 According to the European Parliament’s ASP5G-2 Conference poster (2011), “in the Fresco Village…Romany artists paint house walls and transform a deprived Roma village into an open-air gallery” (p.1). 1

Foundation. She selected one of the poorest East-Hungarian villages where the houses’ back-walls were suitable for large frescoes, consulted with artists about the technique, and finally, with the help of Roma activists, she persuaded the mayor and the inhabitants to lend their back-walls to the murals.4 With this acceptance, she then hired painters of

Roma origin to create a “Roma outdoor gallery” of “Roma frescoes.” Since then, the village has become known as Roma “Fresco Village Project” (FVP),5 where artists from

Hungary, Serbia, Germany, Scotland, Poland and Spain have painted thirty-two murals with the slogan of composing a “different Roma story” from those circulating about them in an increasingly romophobic Hungary (Baker, 2007; Rövid, 2009).6

Bódvalenke is a unique place, where contemporary painters of Roma/Gypsy origin have created large murals on the back walls of the houses as a permanent outdoor exhibition. My research examines the nature of storytelling in Bódvalenke in its many layers and performances, and analyzes its effects as well as probes the relationships between the stories told by the Romani people and stories circulated by others about

Roma/Gypsy.

As will become clear later, oral narratives involve personal narratives, tales, legends, myths, as well as spontaneous and solicited discussions of everyday events and experiences. The term, “visual narrative,” in this context refers to 6 out of 32 murals that,

4 For other “painted houses” in the world (though with different setting) see epiteszforum.hu/ez-a- muveszet-mas-Bódvalenke-a-freskofalu. 5 The Roma “Fresco Village Project” (FVP) is led by the Project Leader alone. Her foundation administratively belongs to the Hungarian Reformed Church Aid Foundation, a non-profit organization. 6 Although my focus is on Roma in Hungary, I must clarify that antiziganism is present in all member states of the EU. As Gheorghe and Acton (2001) assert, Romani people “face an intensification, even a globalization of oppression against them” (Gheorghe & Acton, 2001, p. 56). 2

among other things, show legends, myths, and stories of Roma life, amalgamating past and present, and imagined and real spaces. Performance involves the situated act of narrating/storytelling for an audience, where both narrating and understanding are inseparable from the life experiences inscribed in the body, memory, and emotions of the teller and the audience.

By focusing on the dialogic and performative nature of the storytelling, I brought narrators with different Roma/Gypsy identities, social, economic, intellectual, and political backgrounds, nationality, and various experiences into conversation with one another and with the narrative of the FVP. This allowed a broad perspective on the FVP’s

“Roma story” and its relationship with the villagers’ and artists’ stories.

The following section introduces the circumstances of the Roma/Gypsy in

Hungary and Bódvalenke, the purpose and significance of the study, and the literature review. Following this, I introduce the research questions and summarize Chapter One.

Roma/Gypsies in Hungary

In Hungary, the Roma have visible presence because they are mostly poor, and many of them have different values and life styles than the Hungarians and other national minorities. As my introduction foreshadows, the common life of the Hungarians and

Roma is filled with tension, which is also unique compared to other Hungarian nationalities. For this reason, to understand the circumstances, it is necessary for me to review their demography, history, relationships with non-Gypsies, and the ways

Hungarians categorize their minorities and nationalities.

Roma are the largest European ethnic minority; out of about 12 million European

Roma in 2005, five to six percent lived in Hungary (Ringold, Orenstein & Wilkens,

2005). Though, as Marushiakova and Popov (2001) have underlined, census results might show only approximately one-third of the real population of the Roma in Europe, either because Gypsies identify with the nation they live in or because they fear stigmatization when identifying themselves as Gypsies. The census data are questionable also because ethnicity and race were categories absent in European censuses until the 1990s. Simon

(2012) emphasizes that the methodological dilemma of how to count the Gypsy population (which, for a long time, could not decide between self-identification and expert-identification)7 was, in fact, a problem of representation. As will be apparent in the following passages, it is still not easy to answer how to locate the Roma within the

Hungarian and European identities.

As former nomadic people who arrived in Europe in the 14th century from

Eastern India,8 Gypsies clung to their cultural heritage, therefore they faced discrimination from the earliest times in the European countries based on their

“differences.” Though, out of the three basic approaches in Eastern and Central Europe that Marushiakova and Popov (2001) identified as still existing models of treating

Gypsies (the Ottoman, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian models), the Austria-

7 Historically, European censuses contained questions regarding citizenship, country of birth, religion, mother tongue and spoken languages but not questions about ethnicity and race. Kemény, Havas and Kertesi (1998) counted everybody Gypsy whom the non-Gypsy environment considered Gypsy. This led to questionable results. Ladányi and Szelényi (1997) started a self-identification method. This also was proven unreliable. See Simon & Piché (2012). 8 Okely disputes this origin theory and hypothesizes that Gypsy culture has an indigenous origin (Okely, 1989; and Stewart, 2013). 4

Hungarian Empire’s praxis was the strictest.9 The state assimilated the Gypsy population forcibly with the official rhetoric that they wanted to “civilize” them in the Gypsies’ “best interest.” Starting in the 18th century, Austria-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa banned the name “gypsy,” forbade Gypsy marriages, and took Gypsy children away from their families to raise them in orphanages and in peasant families. Later, her son, King Joseph

II, forbade the use of Gypsy languages10 as well (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004, p. 2).

Most Gypsies in the territory of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy largely assimilated by the middle of the 19th century.

Even so, fully assimilating Gypsies remained unsuccessful. Thinking about the reasons why, Jean-Luc Poueyto (2002) points at their cultural isolation. He says:

[P]erhaps even before non-Gypsies attempted to define what the Gypsies are and became entangled ceaselessly in an infinity of terms (in France, Tsiganes, Bohémiens, Gens du voyage, Roms, Gitans, and so forth) [in Austria Zigeuner; in Hungary Cigányok], the Gypsies had already defined us in simple and invariant terms, that is, as Gadjé, Gajé, "Gorgios" or Payos [non-Gypsy]. (p. 19)

Poueyto thinks the persistent presence of the concept of Gadjé11 (denoting all non-

Gypsies) in Roma communities suggests that Roma/Gypsies define their identities versus the non-Roma/Gypsy. He points out that Gypsies have a different representation of space,12 time, and materiality, which keeps the concept of Gadjé alive. Also Hancock

9 Marushiakova and Popov (2001) assert, “First, in the Ottoman Empire’s practice, although Gypsies had lower civil status than non-Gypsies, policies preserved their status quo by offering them free choice to voluntary assimilation. Second, the Russian Empire’s policies left the Gypsy’s internal life untouched and made only minor attempts to integrate them. Finally, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the state took a paternalistic role and forced them to fully assimilate.” (p. 44) 10 In case of the Romungros this signifies the Carpatian Gypsy dialect. 11 The word is used in different forms such as Gadjé and Gadze. 12 This also includes their dissimilar relationships to the land. Peasants separate their properties from their neighbors’ properties (his/her versus others’), while the boundaries are more flexible for the Roma/Gypsies. 5

(2002) calls attention to the fact that most languages have no one universal term that signifies people of all other ethnicities, such as the Roma word Gadjé. (A notable exception would be the Jewish Goy and the Arabic Kafir, which, however, mark not only nationality but also religious differences). Hancock traces the roots of Gadjé to “gajjha” meaning “civilian” in Sanskrit, which, according to him, is the common source for the

Romani languages. Similarly to Hancock, Judith Okely (1989) observes that the word,

Gorgio, fulfills a specific role for the traveler Gypsies in Britain meaning “outsider” or

“stranger.” Summarizing the issue, Goodwin (2009) confirms that “the fundamental nature of Romani identity is the division of the world into Roma and Gadjé,” and only in this relationship can we understand what “being a Roma” means (p. 1). The concept of

Gadjé is even more important in case of the Romungros,13 the gradually assimilated

Roma in Hungary, who forgot their language and large parts of their culture, but, nonetheless, still distance themselves from the Gadjé (peasant). They have kept their separate Gypsy identity even though they no longer speak Romani languages.

Distinguishing Gadjé from Gypsies is especially noteworthy in light of the fact that various Roma/Gypsy groups do not identify all other groups as members of one large collective. It was only in 1971 that the first Romani Congress approved the umbrella term

“Roma” for all Gypsy groups “borrowing” the word from the Eastern European

Romanichal kinship. So while the collective concept of Gadjé and the umbrella term

13 The villagers are Romungros or Hungarian Gypsies, the first group of Gypsies who arrived into the territory now called Hungary. As a result of the multiple assimilationist politics, they fully lost their language that was part of the Carpathian Romani dialects. Others write the plural of the Romungro as Rumungri or Romungry. Guy (2002) suggests, “The majority of the Hungarian Roma are the Rumungry who do not speak any more Romanes” (p. 39). 6

“Roma” was created inside the Gypsy groups, the collective category of “Gypsy” signifying all groups considered “similar” was applied to them from outside (Lucassen,

1996). The name was not an ethnic category but a label for a lifestyle that seemed

“similar” for the non-Roma. Since then many groups adopted it as a self-identifier.

Because there is no consensus regarding the use of “Roma” and “Gypsy” in Roma research, it is necessary to outline how I use these terms. Most of the villagers self- identify as “Gypsy” [cigány]. Okely (1989) traces this term back to the sixteenth century when Gypsies identified themselves as “little Egyptian” pilgrims which Western historicists identified with Egypt. Although this theory was overwritten after linguistic cues connected Gypsy languages to India, the “Gypsy” word is still widely used as both out-group and in-group identifiers. Some villagers who do not identify with “Gypsy” separate themselves from a certain lifestyle that the majority labels “Gypsy” but with this, they do not distance themselves from their extended family.

However, “Roma” is used also as a kinship identifier in Central and Eastern

Europe. “Rom” means “man of the Romani ethnic group,” with the plural “Roma” indicating both males and females in general conversation, even though the female version of the word is “Romni.” So while residents in the village self-identify as

“Gypsy,” they also can be addressed as “Roma” because they belong to the Romani ethnic group, the Romungros. As will be noticeable, a few of the villagers occasionally use the word “Roma” as an umbrella term, while self-identifying as “Gypsy”; I kept their word use. On the other hand, the artists widely used both words, Gypsy and Roma, as self-identifiers, and Roma as an umbrella term in addition. The term “Roma/Gypsy”

includes all of these uses. So I use Gypsy and Roma interchangeably to address the villagers; I follow their word choice when I quote or paraphrase them, use Roma as an umbrella term and Roma/Gypsy when it is important to note that not all of the Gypsies identify with “Roma.” This form is also useful when I talk about villagers and artists together because of their different word use. Written with lower case letter, “gypsy” implies negative overtone.

Today, while the “politically correct” name is “Roma,” numerous groups use their self-identifiers (the villagers identify as “Gypsy”) and many, for example the Vlah, 14

Sinti and Manoushe, still reject identifying as “Roma.” When Romungros use the name

Roma, they often refer to the Romanichal group-identifier and not to the umbrella term.

Although nothing indicates their connectedness, similarities in the treatment of

“gypsies” have led to similar circumstances among various Gypsy groups. For example,

Romungros, who arrived in Hungary in the 14th century and settled down until the 19th century, ended up in similar marginalization as the Vlach and Beas Gypsies, who arrived in Hungary at the end of the 19th century from Romania (Marushiakova & Popov, 2001).

These developments made the Roma-Hungarian relationship more complex than just a minority-majority distinction.

Yet, even though most Gypsies were seen as “aliens” throughout centuries, they balanced their status in-between social spaces and were able to find work in early times as locksmiths, craftsmen, arms manufacturers, later as temporary agricultural workers, natural healers, musicians, even as paid storytellers–what Hungarians could use. These

14 The Hungarian version is Oláh Gypsies. 8

fields largely disappeared with the industrial and technological revolutions of the 19th,

20th, and 21st centuries.

In the 1950s, Socialism caused drastic changes in Roma life style in Eastern

Europe that made their life totally different from their peers’ in Western Europe. While in

Eastern Europe their traveling was banned and trading was tied to special permits (for which most of them lacked the prerequisites), in Western Europe, Gypsies practiced their traditional occupations and were allowed to trade on their own and to remain travelers

(Stewart, 1994a). Eastern European Gypsies were forced to give up their traditional life to the extent that they often cannot be recognized as Gypsies. This is especially true for the Romungros, whose forced assimilation started in the 18th century, and until today remain subject to multiple assimilationist programs.15 They speak Hungarian, dress like

Hungarians, and many of them adopted a lifestyle similar to the Hungarians.

Even though their travelling and trading was banned, Socialism had positive effects as well. Socialism in Hungary delivered Gypsies from racial and ethnic exclusion–at least ideologically–since it was based on the international working class, in which Roma were members employed in heavy industry, mines, and construction sites.

They received regular salary and benefits, including subsidized housing. So they were not considered “outsiders” but “insiders.” The villagers’ and the artists’ stories verify this.

However, after 1989, with the fall of the socialist economy and the cessation of heavy industry and public construction that followed, a large part of the Roma population

15 Such assimilationist programs during Socialism wanted to assimilate them into the international working class (Csalog, 2006). 9

became unemployed and slipped into poverty (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004, p. 3). In neoliberal Hungary, the gap between the rich, the middle class, and the poor became so unbridgeable that the presence of the deprived Roma, the most handicapped group, has become not only “irritating” for Hungarians, but their number-one nemesis. Drastic class differences revitalized ethnic and racial discrimination on a large scale. So much so that

Michael Stewart (2013) labeled the present “increasingly worrisome times” for the

Roma/Gypsies.

Roma identity and self-representation in Eastern Europe is still problematic, which is rooted in the fact that they do not have a homogenous culture or connection to a

“former nation” to define their ethnic or minority status. Regarding Roma ethnicity,

Marushiakova and Popov (2001) introduced the term “intergroup ethnic community,” which, as they suggest, “has no parallel among other European nations” (p. 33). This concept indicates that Gypsy communities are built from various metagroups, groups and subgroups that have different physical appearances, speak and live variously and recognize dissimilar issues as problems. Additionally, they are further divided based on their various historical, social, political and socio-economic circumstances.

Concerning the second phenomenon (that Roma have no “original” territory to refer to as their nation of kinship) it is important to add that, in Hungary, to become minorities, Roma were supposed to be first accepted as nationalities, or ethnicities. But neither of these were acceptable. They were not ethnicities because to be this they are supposed to have a former homeland; they were not nationalities because they had no former nation, either, to stand up for them against unjust treatment in their current

homeland. This locked the Roma out from being considered a nationality. This lasted until the 1990s, when the European Union urged Hungarians to acknowledge Roma as official minorities.

There were several efforts to stretch the existing categories and create new ones to make Roma “fit in.” With this attempt, the previous concept of ethnic minority–that linked ethnic groups to their former homeland–was changed by the Council of Europe’s

Parliamentary Assembly in 2006. The Council highlighted that it is impossible to translate the Eastern European concept of “nation” into English because of its multiple connotations. In the 10th point of the recommendation 1735, the Council clarified the conception implying two basic meanings to it, citizenship and national/ethno-cultural origin, and proposed that national minorities’ rights are “not territorial or connected to territory” (Parliamentary Assembly, 2006).16 Thus, their lack of acceptance as either nationalities or ethnicities in the nation states they live in led the politically active Roma to demand non-territorial status, only later realizing that non-territorial status did not solve the initial problem, their own exclusion. Even hundreds of years after they became sedentary, years after they became a non-territorial minority in the European Union (EU) and official minority in Hungary, “Roma” and “Gypsy” are still bearing the stigma of the

“different.”

The preceding “large picture” helps us to understand the Roma’s situation in

Hungary. However, there are other local circumstances that I need to explain to fill this

16 It is also closely linked to political ideologies, which have exploited its original meaning. See Parliamentary Assembly Council of Europe. (2006, January 26). Recommendation 1735, Point 4. 11

large picture with more details. Accordingly, in the following section I describe the local context of the Bódvalenke Roma/Gypsy community.

Roma/Gypsies in Bódvalenke

The paternalistic role of the non-Roma world, territorial-less-ness, and poverty, described previously from a broader European perspective, are localized in the village as well. This dead-end settlement at the border of Hungary and Slovakia has been chronicled in the codexes since 1283 as a settlement, where wealthy Hungarian landowners owned large territories and employed small numbers of Gypsies as cowherds, swineherds, and seasonal agricultural workers. These were typical jobs for the wandering and semi-sedentary Roma until the lands of these landowners were socialized by the

Communists. After this, Roma people became employed in agricultural co-operatives, heavy industry, and government constructions.

As I discussed earlier, the Hungarian Socialist government from 1958 to 1988 handled the Roma as a strictly social-political issue and denied their need for an ethnic or cultural identity. Even so, economically it was a good time for the Roma people. In the

1960s every Roma family received subsidized housing (called “Cs” house meaning

“reduced value house”) from the national government that made it possible for them to move to sturdy houses from their “pacsit houses”17 or adobe houses (Csalog, 2006).18

17 When Gypsy people built a “pacsit house,” they dug a hole in the ground and covered it with branches, leaves, and mud. 18 The Communist Party in 1961 declared that the party had to end Gypsy poverty. In 1965 they started to demolish Gypsy ghettoes. Gypsies who worked full time could apply for subsidized loans for the “CS” houses [houses with reduced value]. “CS” houses typically were built at the edge of the villages so the segregation of the Gypsies continued, but housing conditions improved greatly. Csalog (2006) reports that in 1971, 75% of the Gypsies lived in Gypsy rows without water and electricity, yet most of them (85%) had steady jobs, and most of them were full-time employed. 12

Bódvalenke’s local government let Roma build their so-called “CS” houses at the edge of the village on the surrounding wetlands, on plots that were useless for the peasant villagers. For the former cowherds this period of time was a big step forward; all men were employed in the agricultural cooperative and in the locale heavy industry, and families moved into their own government-subsidized houses.

However, with the fall of Communism in 1989, the co-operatives and heavy industry in which Roma worked were disbanded, and people suddenly lost their jobs.

Since Roma are mostly illiterate or undereducated people, and since no other workplace had been created, they remained unemployed. Many women returned to panhandling to take care of their families. Men started collecting wood in the surrounding forest, but as the forests became private property after the fall of socialism, they were jailed for collecting wood. In a short period of time all Roma men in the village had criminal records.

Neoliberal market-based capitalism, with its sole focus on flexible, versatile and self-driven employees, made the less flexible, less adaptable Roma’s prospects of employment hopeless. Lack of income, growing inflation, rising criminalization, and the re-tailored social welfare system that changed welfare to “workfare,”19 further marginalized the local Roma, rendering people increasingly dependent on the local mayor’s sympathy, since only those whom the mayor selected could work20 in the

19 “Workfare” is based on the concept that people in poverty should not be given money without work. Instead, these people should be given communal work to get money from the government. Usually the local government’s job is to employ and supervise them, but they regularly must travel to Edelény to remain in the system. 20 In 2015, the local government offered jobs for all Roma villagers. 13

community service program that pays a little higher salary than the unemployment benefit. In 2014 the Bódvalenke mayor offered steady jobs only for a few villagers. In addition, the FVP, which had opened an office in the village, had a few job openings for a handful of people in the fall of 2014 (Gorondi, 2013). So the villagers became dependent also on the FVP’s sympathy. As a result of the uneven prospects for paid work, usury, an informal (though illegal) business, had begun in the community (Baracsi, 2010).

According to the FVP’s 2014 website, out of the current population of 102 adults in Bódvalenke, less than 20 are non-Roma (former landowners and their descendants, mostly are old people). There are approximately 105 children of which 2 are non-Roma

(the mayor’s children); 38 children are under the age of four, and about 28 of these children have a mother younger than 18. Many families have seven, most often more than ten children. The mothers receive childcare assistance until their youngest child is 14 years old (Laborczi, 2012).

While the official minimum wage per month in Hungary is 98,000 Ft (approx.

490 USD), in 2014, the villagers’ average estimated monthly income was less than 8,000

Ft (about 40 USD) –equivalent to the price of two bus tickets to the closest city, Edelény, where jobless people must regularly appear in person so as not to lose their unemployment benefits (Kovács, 2014, p.1). However, many of them have no income at all, either because they cannot afford to travel to Edelény to regularly register for social welfare, or because they have not accrued 200 days in legal jobs, a precondition for a job

search.21 Those with zero income also include the families who must hand over their welfare money and child support to usurious lenders–often their more wealthy family members–the day after they receive their benefits.

As will be noted in the narrative analysis in Chapters 4 and 5, my experience in living in the community offered me the opportunity to understand Roma life and habits.

Given the lack of direct research on the community life itself, many of the observations about their social life are based on my experience living in the community. As I realized, the Roma in Bódvalenke rarely cultivate their gardens fully, which the previous peasant owners had done. They bring up various reasons such as the ground is too wet for cultivation, the kids pull out the vegetables, or that they have to focus on their large families. A few families collect mushrooms, and one of them weavs baskets to make extra money; others exchange with other family members wood that they collect in the forest for potatoes, flour, oil, and spices. Horváth (2006) describes exchange and panhandling as common practice for Roma women whose responsibility is to feed their families even after they run out of money. Horváth recalls: “If on these pennyless days the Roma woman says she has ‘itchy feet,’ she thinks, ‘Today I am going to walk a lot to get some food’” (p. 115). So food is something that women “walk out” while they bargain in the stores, panhandle some money or food from non-Roma, and visit their relatives close to them or in the nearby settlements for food ingredients. Similarly, I observed that the poorest villagers go from door to door to “kéregetni” [panhandle]22 in

21 Even if they worked, employers do not report Roma/Gypsies among their regular workers for tax purposes. 22 Tauber (2000) uses the words “mangapen” and “asking.” 15

their village or a nearby settlement within walking distance.

So there is chronic poverty and joblessness in the village since the fall of socialism in 1989. In an interview with Gábor (2011), the Project Leader addressed these in her initial program the following way:

This project [the FVP] has two goals, one global and one local. The global: to create something that our Roma peers could be proud of, and that would give them the majorities’ unconditional appreciation – I think we have reached this goal. The local aim is to better the living conditions of this people and to create jobs: for this, we have to fight with every issue that lies behind the deep poverty.

Yet, as Doros (2015) reports, every attempt to create jobs in Bódvalenke had failed. As

Doros discloses, while the local government “plays chess” with people, employing them in the communal work only for few months and then terminating their employment, many people in the village are regularly starving.

In comparison to other villages Bódvalenke seems to be very poor. The food supply is much better in some of the neighboring villages where villagers are organized by their mayor to work on their communal garden (Váradi, 2010). However, in

Bódvalenke there is no organized gardening, and they have no money to buy food. Even so, in some other villages the situation is worse than in Bódvalenke; in one of the villages females between the ages of 12 and 24 are “almost totally absent” because they are taken for prostitution by local pimps (Váradi, 2010). Media reports show that next to joblessness, housing is another significant issue in Bódvalenke (Gorondi, 2013, Laborczi,

2012).

The local government has never been accused of building substandard Gypsy houses in the 1960s on wetlands that were useless for residential lots. Still, a few years

ago the local government, along with the FVP, declared five out of the nine houses

“critically damaged.” Both the local government and the FVP bought vacant peasant houses and began to relocate Romani families from the “Gypsy row” into the village.

However, after their “CS” houses had been demolished, some families were unable to buy a new house; they were “allowed” to rent the local government and FVP’s houses. At the same time, other Roma families were able to buy other subsidized houses somewhere in the village and they started moving. With this, the “order of things” that were unchanged through generations in the “Gypsy row” were turned upside down; former neighbors were scattered in different parts of the village.

According to the FVP’s 2014 website, even though the rented houses will become the renter’s property after 10 years for only one Euro, the leased houses meant a step back because, according to their contract with the local government, families are not allowed to let other than their immediate family members stay in the house for longer than three weeks. The penalty for breaking this regulation is 10,000 Ft or two days in jail

(“Bódvalenke Freskófalu,” n.d.). This restriction is foreign to the Roma culture. Stewart

(1997) points out that in a Gypsy community, “a fundamental aspect of . . . the ‘Gypsy way,’ is an ethos of sharing with and thereby helping each other”; people come to their extended family often and live with them whenever they need to (p. 89). It is obvious that the restriction of free moving limits their possibilities to freely help each other.

Furthermore, Roma families lent the back walls of their houses for the frescoes.

But who owns the murals is unclear to them. The Project Leader, who is the only member of the FVP, acts like a curator and owner of the “open air gallery,” which consists of the

Roma family’s houses. Besides, the painters, after they finished the frescoes, waived their rights and left. So in the village, apparently, there is no one who knows who owns the murals.

Bódvalenke’s population consists of one extended family. They are Romungros, who make up seventy percent of the total Roma population in Hungary (Albert, 2011).

Their ancestors moved to the village as cowherds and family members stayed together.

So everybody in the village has the same surname, which I abbreviate as “R," except for two families, but their mothers are also related to the “R” family. Bódvalenke people are rarely able to visit family members in other villages, since most of them have no car or money to travel. There is one notable exception; the Project Leader took ten women with her to the European Parliament’s ASP5G-2 Conference in Brussels in 2012 to have them sing Gypsy songs while she performed her speech about the FVP.

These are some of the significant local circumstances that serve as the context for the deeper analysis. It seems that paternalistic attitudes toward the Gypsies, various forms of territorial-less-ness, and poverty as significant experiences for the Gypsy population are common characteristics locally and nationally.

Purpose of Study

The purpose of this research is to reach a greater understanding of the Roma self- narrative and the role of that narrative in their identity; how the depictions in the paintings parallel or differ from the way the Roma see themselves; and how the villagers understand the murals and the FVP’s “Roma empowering” narrative. I take a broad perspective and bring various Roma identities, backgrounds, and experiences into

conversation with each other and the FVP’s narrative to see the “doing” of these stories.

Since narratives do not only report about identities, experiences and social realities but also assist in (re)creating them, taking a critical standpoint, I also examine the social realities created by these narratives including what roles Roma narratives fulfill in the community and how the FVP’s narrative affects these narrators’ and narratives’ agency.

Significance of Research

Since the Roma’s situation in Hungary and Europe is troublesome, and since the

EU, private, and non-governmental organizations invest a lot to make their conditions better, bringing the various “Roma stories” together provides valuable information about different experiences and the often colliding meanings of “empowerment” and “help.” My study instantiates the intersection of contemporary local and global narratives, where the stories of the villagers and the grand narrative of Hungarian society intersect and diverge; where the stories of internationally recognized artists and the story of the open-air art gallery are connected; and where the story of the neoliberal “Roma empowerment” connects with the Roma people themselves. This research has special significance because, as far as I know, there has been no similar research conducted among Romungro

Gypsies. Besides, since the Fresco Village Project has not yet been the subject of communication research, this project has unique value.

Review of Literature

In what follows, I explore the main trends in Roma studies. Since my goal is to follow the dominant trends in past and recent narrative research, the trends that I

distinguish here differ from what social and cultural anthropologists established.23 I review the general concepts of Gypsy folklore, identity, Roma community as system, and non-territorial minority research and reflect on the power distribution seen in these trends. I conclude this chapter with a brief summary of how previous studies inform my research, and justify why certain elements are selected from these trends.

Recent scholars have examined the dynamics of Roma/Gypsy narratives without taking into account the extensive collections of early folklorists. The exception is

Stewart, who in his 1994 Daltestvérek involved Vlah Gypsy songs and considered them narratives. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) blamed the “crisis” of the folklore for the devaluation of the field and a growing suspicion regarding folkloristic findings, which are the results of the “disappearance of the ways of life that supported the bearers of traditional tales and ballads” (p. 281). The most critical argument against folklore is that

“closeness, roundedness, and finishedness are characteristics of the dying ethnic cultures” and not the living cultures, and by reducing narratives to fixed artifacts, stories lose their quintessence or the function they fulfill in communities (p. 129). However, I argue that folktales are important to understand the social/cultural/historical context in Gypsy culture. I find that the issue Piasere (1995) and Williams (1993/2003) have raised in regard to the Manoushe Gypsies is an important matter for all Roma/Gypsy communities, namely that they have never kept written records of themselves, which leads to a relationship with the past based on memory and oral tradition.

23 For example, Stewart (2013) distinguishes anthropology; ethnic group boundaries approach; Dumont and Patric Williams approach; and Leo Lucassen and Matras’ language-based approach. 20

Consequently, I distinguish four strands in previous Roma narrative research: folklorists/ethnographers, who collected a large body of folklore; Romologists who analyzed Roma cultural identity; cultural anthropologists who studied the Roma community as a system; and recent Roma research that is quite interdisciplinary, focusing on the Roma’s non-territoriality and the tension between Roma and European identities.

Each contributes a new layer to the Roma narrative inquiry.

Gypsy Folklore and Anthropology

Gypsy folklore has been an important field of study in Hungary since the 18th century.24 Before WWII and in the 1950s, folklorists collected hundreds of Gypsy stories, ballads and traditions, studied how folktales preserved cultural identity, observed patterns of cultural elements, established systems and rules for classification, and defined the ruling genres of the oral tradition in myths, fairy tales, dragon tales, and tales with Gypsy protagonists (Bari, 1990; Bartos, 1958; Csenki, 1974; Erdős, 1958; Fraser 1992;

Herzfeld, 1982; Kríza, 1993; Nagy, 1975, 1976a, 1976b; and Vekerdi, 1974). Vekerdi

(1974) lists the characteristics of Gypsy narratives as they elevate disharmony to an aesthetic experience; they mix myth, metaphysical and the real; they are improvisational, associative, built on contrast, not connected to collective work activities but to entertainment (e.g., paid storytelling); and save important rituals (e.g., vigil for the dead).

Regarding form, Vekerdi (1974) points at episodic composition, mixture of multiple

24 The Hungarian István Wáli observed the linguistic relationship between the South-Indian Malabar and the Gypsy languages. He published this in 1776 in the Anzeigen. Vekerdi (1982) in his Magyarországi Cigány kutatások története describes the foundational role of Wáli’s study (p. 1). 21

motifs, that the Gypsy hero outsmarts the non-Gypsy, and the sudden tragic ending after the hero wins the battle against his/her “enemy.”

Many ethnographers concluded that the Gypsies’ slower socio-cultural mobility helped to save an archaic story-telling culture, though they did not all agree to what extent this constitutes an “original Gypsy culture” (Bari, 1990; Görög, 1988/1994; and

Vekerdi, 1975a). They say stories told by Gypsies are characterized by an archaic narrative style where stories are not only told but “performed” with certain ritualistic elements that involve the audience’s participation as call-response, and where storytelling’s spiritual power is attributed. To locate this archaic storytelling style, folklorists focused mostly on Vlah narratives in the Vlah language (Vekerdi, 1974,

1975b; Kríza, 1993). Even contemporary researchers, such as Stewart (2013), a British social anthropologist, concentrate on the Vlah Gypsies, considering them more archaic than the largely assimilated Romungros.

To what extent we can consider Gypsy culture distinct or an adoption of other folks’ narratives depends upon the relational framework. One possible framework is a

“one-way cultural influence” that locates Gypsies in a passive, subordinate position, who only receive and never give. The “one-way” cultural influence model–that includes the idea that tales told by and among Gypsies in Hungarian language are not part of Gypsy folklore–led ethnographers to believe that it is not worth paying attention to Romungro stories because they are Hungarian stories told by Gypsies (Csenki, 1974; and Görög,

1988/1994). It was only in the 1980s and 1990s that Görög started critiquing the

assumption that Gypsies only “take in” their surrounding culture without adding their own.

Another framework is the “two-way” model. Stewart’s study (1997) explicates this model. He calls attention to the relational aspects (Gypsy/Gypsy and Gypsy/Roma), and the fact that Gypsies exist in a majority society and are in constant relationship with them, while they also isolate themselves (Barth, 1969; Okely, 1989; Reyniers, 1998; Bari,

1990; and Stewart, 1997). As Bari (1990) states, Gypsy storytelling has clear distinguishable characteristics, which makes it more than just a simple mirroring of other folks’ storytelling style.25 He describes the mythopoetic aspects of Gypsy storytelling, where storytelling started with an invocation to chase away evil spirits and to invoke joyous spirits, while the audience collectively participated.

The idea that many Gypsies lost not only their language but also their ethnic culture (which involves storytelling), is often used in connection with the Romungros.

Sociologists, who study these groups more often than cultural anthropologists, consider

Romungros simply a group characterized by a culture of poverty. It seems to me that the theory of “two-way” influence that accepts Gypsy communities as active, creative people who intrinsically build culture based on their human agency even after they have lost their native languages, is still a contested view.

In this debate, Kríza’s (1993) studies mediated between the two models. She suggested that traditional cultural elements of storytelling always bridge different

25 In the United States Lee Haring (1990), States Gropper (1975), and Anne Sutherland (1975) argue similarly to Bari (1990) that Gypsies have a well-distinguishable culture. But this was a relatively new idea even in the 1990s in Eastern Europe. 23

historical ages because stories are deeply connected to cultural beliefs and rituals.

Therefore, one part of the stories is built from archaic motifs and rituals, while another part is built from fresh experiences. Kríza shares an example of a Romungro storyteller,

Irma,26 whose fictive stories featured everyday speech and current local events as if they had happened in real life. On the other hand, the Romungro storyteller told real stories as if they were fictions. Kríza considers this as characteristic of Roma/Gypsy narratives.

To conclude this section, Gypsy storytelling was the center of attention in ethnographic and anthropological research from the very beginning of these fields. The long and vigorous debate between different views regarding the Gypsies’ agency to tell their own stories determined by their culture, demonstrates that claiming stories is a significant part of both Gypsy and Hungarian identity. These debates also reveal how shared stories mediate between cultures and communities.

Identity Research

Contemporary Romani scholars critique ethnographers for either romanticizing or demonizing the Gypsies from a Eurocentric point of view. They themselves preferred to concentrate on defining Roma from inside their communities, Roma identity as distinct from non-Roma, and on issues of Roma exclusion in western societies (Acton &

Klimeva-Alexander, 2001; Bárány, 2002; Fosztó, 2003, 2009; Guy, 2002; Horváth, 2005;

Járóka, 2012; Kovai, 2010; Ladányi & Szelényi, 2001; Liégeois, 2007; Matras, 2004;

Morris, 2000; Shaló & Prónai, 2002). Roma identity researchers wanted to create a

Romani identity either by using the umbrella term, “Roma” (that still needs self-

26 See Sinkó, R. & Dömötör, A. (1990). 24

identification), or as defined by objectively measurable characteristics based on history, biology, or cultural practices common to the Roma.

As I discussed earlier, the umbrella term, “Roma” was accepted by the 1971

World Romani Congress to remove the negative connotation of “gypsy.” Here I want to add that it was meant also to solve the identity crisis experienced in Gypsy intellectual circles. The new name opened a new collective category, and opened possibilities to the

Gypsies either self-identifying with one group–Vlah, Sinti, Romani, Manoushe etc.–or identifying with the heterogeneous sociocultural group, “Roma” (Haring, 1990;

Herakova, 2009; and Marushiakova and Popov, 2004; Willems, 1997). Nonetheless, the constructed identity, as an umbrella term, could not solve the identity crisis since the word was still associated with the Romanichal kinship, from which it originates.

Among the scholars who were looking for objectively measurable criterion to determine Gypsiness, Vermeersch (2006) identified three trends. First, Gypsy is considered as an historical diaspora based on a common linguistic root. This neglects the importance of self-identification. Second, Gypsy identity is a cultural lifestyle that various different Gypsies practice, such as nomadism, or associated with certain professions, such as wood carving, pot repairing, and horse dealing, etc. The idea that objective cultural differences do exist between Gypsy and non-Gypsy (their traditional rules of cleanliness are considered such a difference) is part of this trend. This idea leads to the Gypsies’ “special rights” and “special treatment,” and denies Gypsiness from others who do not fit in these, such as the Romungros. Finally, the third trend is based on anthropological research that wants to find intact biological kinship groups. This is

widely rejected by researchers who stress that this focus can lead to eugenics. Although

Vermeersch’s (2006) analysis is useful to identify existing major trends that appear even today, it does not consider the identity concept represented, for example by Petrova’s

(2003) claim that, to overcome these problems, Roma/Gypsy identity must be seen as a

“continuum of more or less related subgroups with complex, flexible, and multilevel identities” (p. 114).

The problematic issues are first that we cannot use one identity for a diverse

Roma population (certainly not one “authentic” identity), second, that individual, group, minority, diaspora, cultural, and “marginal” identities–which involve also Gmelch’s

(1986) category27 of those who just refuse to “fit in”–intertwine, and cannot be separated.

Third, declaring that we cannot define Roma identity from a “Eurocentric view” includes, again, the Roma’s non-Europeanness that perpetuates their “outsider” status in Europe and in their nation states. Petrova’s (2003) definition of Roma identity as a “continuum” of many “complex, flexible, and multilevel identities” involves all these identities (p.

114). However, Petrova’s concept contrasts with the homogenous Roma image in

Hungarian society and in Europe that Rövid (2009) describes as open stigmatization of an entire ethnic group. It also contrasts with Baker’s (2007) observation that the symbolic

“Gypsy” is a group of people who are “ever present but never truly seen,” and if somebody notices them, they are seen in a state of “obscured likeness and masked visibility” (Baker, 2007, p. 40). These concepts are still dominant in the Hungarian society.

27 Although many of them want to “fit in” the majority society, others do not (Gmelsh, 1986). 26

In reviewing identity scholarship I conclude that the attempt to create a

Roma/Gypsy identity based on an artificial umbrella term and/or based on some objective measurement remains problematic. In what follows, I introduce the next approach that tries to overcome the problem of an ambiguous “Roma national identity” by focusing on

Roma/Gypsy communities as systems that try to balance themselves.

Roma Society as System

Some researchers realized that Roma/Gypsy groups function as systems, and they can be understood as self-sustaining units (Dumont, 1968/1975 and Williams,

1993/2003). Williams suggested, if we accept that Roma wants to be a self-sustaining system, then studying society at large and Roma in it, or focusing on cultural bounderies and relational aspects, will not help us to understand them. He focuses on Roma/Gypsy communities as systems that strive to maintain their equilibrium while everything within the system is interdependent. I extend this thought with Lucassen’s (1996) finding that

Romani social organization is family-based and not dependent on the larger political structure.

Though, even if Roma/Gypsies strive to maintain the equilibrium of their communities, and if their social organization makes this possible, the pre-condition for their self-sustaining, independent existence would be sufficient inner resources and political/ideological autonomy. Until they have these, they cannot fully balance their equilibrium as a closed system. The next trend I consider important for Roma narrative research is the non-territorial European minority approach.

European Non-territorial Minority Research

This approach focuses on issues of integration in Europe after the European

Union’s 2004 expansion, and on possible transnational societies (Gheorghe, 2013;

Gheorghe & Acton, 2001; Herakova, 2009; Marsh & Strand, 2006; Marushiakova &

Popov, 2005; Orenstein & Wilkens, and Ringold, 2005; Rövid, 2009; Shalo & Pronai,

2002; and Szuhai, 2014). This trend emerged in the 2000s. Rövid (2009) states the concept of the Roma as “a nation without a state” was a consequence of considering that

Roma did not fit into the existing “nationality” and “ethnicity” categories. About the

Declaration of Nation written during the Fifth World Romani Congress in 2000, Prague,

Rövid (2009) says: “[T]he manifesto claimed that the Romani nation offers to the rest of humanity a new vision of stateless nationhood that is more suited to a globalized world than is affiliation to traditional nation-states” (p. 34). Rövid (2009) identifies this category as one that is recently in use by the Council of Europe, which declares the

Gypsies “a true European minority” or “a special minority with transnational character’”

(p. 11). This is a fundamentally different use of the original concept that was altered to accommodate the Roma’s different needs.

We could wonder how Roma cultural identity can be exchanged for European transnational identity on a personal level, and what kind of communication changes this brings about. Marushiakova and Popov (2005) started analyzing the palpable tension between domestic and transnational representation right after the claim of non-territorial

European minority status. They found that the most problematic issue is to figure out who is legitimate to represent Roma as transnational minorities. Others, such as McGarry

(2010), concluded that the reinterpretation of land to a territory “where one can play politics and set up municipal government,” which idea is foundational in transnationality, seems to be an “imaginary community” existing mostly in rhetoric (p. 56). As is apparent, the whole concept of a European transnational identity is challenging.

The changes following the official declaration of Roma non-territoriality brought mixed results. First, now the Roma are under the “protection” of the (neo)liberal powers, which, although they cannot guarantee safety for the Roma inside their nation states, can guarantee (limited) free movement in Europe, legislative representation of the Roma, and financial investment in “empowering” them. The EU invests not only in representing

Roma but also in educating Roma leadership to make them part of the neoliberal elite.

Through Western education, these Roma experience deliverance from their cultural struggle in their nation states (Miskovic, 2013). But the result is similar to the Socialist era, where Roma’s cultural needs were overlooked. In the EU, only their individual/group rights are emphasized. Also, once Roma become part of the neoliberal global leadership, they lose contact with the everyday struggles of their people. Those who are in day-today relationship with the people most likely don’t speak English, and cannot reach leadership positions to represent the Roma. While liberal rhetoric with the concept of

“free movement in Europe” motivates Roma to become quasi nomads and to move in the frame of the European Union, it tells nothing about their troubled situation in their home country. Roma are not welcomed in any of the European member states.

Scholars who analyzed the Roma’s double identities–ethnic and European– emphasize the communication boundaries between the two (see Bárány, 2002; Herakova,

2009; Marushiakova, 2005; and Rövid, 2009). The non-territorial minority status requires dual Roma identity, but, again, it is not accomplishable for everybody. Families who live in Bódvalenke hardly know about the international law that is supposed to save them from local injustices. As Herakova (2009) critically stated, “[N]ot only is the essence of a

Romani identity debated, but perhaps, in the case of the Roma, we need to reconceptualize our very definition and understanding of identity as a fluid singular” (p.

280). While Herakova’s (2009) effort is to overcome the singular identity theory, she asks: “The question is, then, could the debate over the development of a European identity be informed by the marginalized Romani experience?” (p. 280). The question reveals uncertainty if identity could be negotiated the same way as their artificially constructed common name, Roma. The question also points at the untranslatability of the

“European experience” to the “everyday experience” and vice versa. As Herakova (2009) ultimately pointed out, “The notion of a unified transnational Roma identity is . . . contested and seen as a political assumption more than anything else” (p. 281).

Accordingly, the search for a “universal Roma identity” or a common character such as “non-territoriality” or “transnationality” carries the risk that they are not applicable to the real human beings, so they become meaningless for self-representation.

Roma are treated as different even in the EU. While many researchers celebrate

“improvements” and “empowerment” of Roma communities who successfully assimilated/integrated, they do not recognize that this requires Roma to give up their cultural identity, their “problematic” lifestyle (see Aiello & Pulido, 2013; Diez-Palomar and Santos Pitanga & Cifuentes, 2013). Therefore the dilemma of who, in which way and

when, needs “help” and how to “improve” their lives is a sensitive issue. Junghaus

(2014), for example, labeled both Hungarians and neoliberal Europeans as colonizers.

After reviewing these four trends, I conclude that each has potential to contribute to the Roma narrative inquiry. I use theoretical concepts from these four trends selectively. I argue that the situation of the Roma/Gypsy needs urgent attention. The idea of bringing “Roma art” into a “deprived” Roma village, as something they can be

“proud” of, fulfills the rhetorical role of the attention-getter, but does not necessarily tell the “Roma story.” Therefore I give a platform to the narratives of the Roma people and artists of Roma origin, to let them talk about their lives and experiences and let others listen to them.

Research Questions

I recap the broader questions that I raised up to this point in two central questions:

 What do narratives and performances in Bódvalenke tell us about the

experiences of Roma/Gypsy?

 How do the frescoes mediate Roma identity?

Summary

The First Chapter’s Introduction described my research interest and research field.

I introduced Bódvalenke, the FVP, and my goal of analyzing the oral and visual narratives in dialogue with the context and performance of the villagers and artists. I described the Roma’s situation in Hungary and Bódvalenke, and stated the purpose and the significance of my study. Following this, I reviewed Gypsy folklore and anthropology, identity research, Roma society as a system, and European non-territorial

minority research as the most important trends in previous literature relevant to my research. I concluded that each of these approaches has potential to contribute to the

Roma narrative inquiry. And finally, I identified my research questions. The following section outlines the structure of my dissertation.

Outline of the Dissertation

In what follows the seven chapters of this study are outlined. As already noted,

Chapter One consists of the Introduction and Review of Literature. The second chapter discusses the theoretical frameworks that inform and guide this research. These theoretical concepts are: narrative theory (which considers stories fundamental to human life) and performance theory (which positions the embodied narrator and audience in the unique context). This chapter justifies why two theories are used. Finally, in connection with performances and narratives, I explore the different meanings and roles of the

“nomad Gypsy” imagery for both Roma and non-Roma.

The third chapter covers the research practices I use. I discuss my field site and the circumstances of my stay on the site. Then I describe the process of selecting participants, my data-gathering methods, and my interview practices: semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. I include questions of the interview protocol.

Then I consider issues of reflexivity, potential ethical issues, and the possible biases inherent in being a non-Roma but a minority myself. Following this I explain methods of data analysis I used for the interview data and the frescoes. I introduce Riessman’s (1993) narrative analysis and Riessman’s (2008) dialogic/performance analysis as my analytic approach and the specific methods of analyzing visual narratives that is part of the

dialogic analysis. I explain how I gathered, analyzed and validated information for both interviews and the frescoes. Chapter Four describes the oral narratives in the village. I discuss the main narrative genres and core narratives that emerged during my analysis of the villagers’ oral stories. I provide quotations from my discussions with people and from their stories. Chapter Five continues discussing the oral narratives of identity and belonging, offering quotations from the villagers and connecting their narratives to the theoretical frame. The sixth chapter describes the themes that emerged from my analysis of the visual narratives and from interviews with the artists. I compare them with the audience’s understanding of the murals. Direct quotes are cited from my interviews with the artists and from interviews and informal conversations with villagers about the murals. I also present the results of the dialogic/performance analysis as Riessman (1993;

2008) recommends, exploring the relationship between oral and visual narratives.

Chapter Seven presents the results of my research, answers the research questions, compares and contrasts the genres and core narratives of oral and visual narratives, and summarizes the theoretical consequences and implications in the light of the applied theories and literature. In conclusion, the strengths and limitations of the research are summarized, and opportunities for future research explored. The final Appendix includes the interview protocols in English and Hungarian and a copy of the Institutional Review

Board’s approval.

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMING

In this chapter I discuss narrative and performance theories that provide the theoretical frame for my research. I believe that both are useful to analyze the performed narratives and stories in the Roma fresco village. Narratives and performances are defined by different theorists in various ways, and there is no clear consensus among the definitions. Therefore, in the following section I clarify the concepts and approaches as I use them.

Narrative Theory

In this section I identify some important characteristics of narratives. While I am doing this, I discuss Riessman’s (1990, 1993, 1997, 2008) narrative theory that serves as the theoretical frame for my study. In particular, I discuss four characteristics of narratives: (1) stories are specific narratives; (2) narratives follow certain sequences and temporal orders that produce different narrative genres; (3) narratives can serve different purposes for individuals and groups; and (4) narratives are also performances. It can be argued that not all narratives are stories. Indeed, stories are special kinds of narratives.

Although so far I have used the terms narratives and stories interchangeably, theoretically they are distinct phenomena. Riessman (2008) suggests using narrative as a general class, and story as a specific prototype of narrative.

As noted earlier, narratives may have sequential and temporal ordering. Ricoeur

(1984) reasoned that, insofar as human time is organized after the manner of a narrative, then narratives reveal the specific temporal experience of particular groups. Narrative is meaningful to people only when it features their unique temporal experiences. I explicate

Ricoeur’s assertion by showing history as progression and regression. As will be illustrated in the analysis of their narratives, Roma, who experience time not necessarily as development, think about the past as not certainly less developed than the future, nor about the future as guaranteed progress. However, as Riessman (1993) states, there are narratives that do not follow linear temporal development. So when I adopt Ricoeur’s human time, I apply it also to non-linear narratives, where people make sense of their experiences without employing the dominant (classical) narrative structure, with a clear beginning, middle and ending, but using other structures. This concept is a dialogical application of both Riessman and Ricoeur’s concepts.

As another characteristic, personal stories might conflict with the group’s collective narrative. Riessman (2008) states, “Individuals use narrative form to remember, argue, justify, persuade, engage, entertain, and even mislead an audience.

Groups use stories to mobilize others, to foster a sense of belonging” (p. 8). In the village, personal and collective narratives are represented in both oral and visual narratives. The difference between individual and group narratives is explicated by the FVP’s and the emancipatory narratives. The former persuades, entertains, while the latter set the goal of liberating people from their stigmata and forced “folklorization” (see Painter I and

Painter J in C. 6).

Moreover, as will be discussed in more detail later, narratives perform. They affect not only the narrator but others beyond the narrator. This is true because narratives are situated organically connected to the narrative event,28 to the situation and

28 Narrative event and narrated event are originally Bauman’s terms. See Bauman, R. (1986). 35

performance of the “telling,” which add important new elements to both the experience and the story.

Finally, stories are also embodied: the embodied performance mediates between the story and the experience. As Langellier and Peterson (2006) assert,

“Storytelling is an activity embodied by a performer(s), with others, and within other activities of daily life and ways of speaking” (p. 157). While we tell our stories, we are always defined by our environment, which means that “we give voice to many other embodied, often previously silenced voices” (Langellier, 2003 p. 439). These provide agency to the narrative to “do” something, which means, to affect others beyond the narrator. Langellier and Peterson (2006) propose that questions regarding experiences and identities cannot be answered by focusing exclusively on the narrative as text, but must consider that the embodied narrator is entering into systems of relationships among storytellers, narrators, characters, stories (texts), and audiences, which involve also tactics and relations of power. Keeping in mind these characteristics, I employ Riessman’s

(1993) narrative analysis along with performance theorists such as Langellier and

Peterson’s (2006). And while I introduce Riessman (1993)’s Narrative Analysis, I also provide examples for varous applications to the theory.

Riessman (1993) defines “story” as a “first-person account by respondents of their experience” (p. 1). To signify that this definition is polemic, she writes, “When we hear stories, for instance, we expect protagonists, stirring conditions, and culminating events.

But not all narratives (or all lives) take this form” (p. 18). Riessman realizes that individuals narrate their experiences by using other forms of narratives that allows them

to structure their experiences and persuade their audience differently. Consequently, for

Riessman, not only the narrative content but also the form of a narrative attends to the construction of meaning.

For Riessman (1993), experiences are the catalysts in producing narratives, in which narrators “impose order on the flow of experience to make sense of events and actions in their lives” (p. 2). However, with “imposing order,” time also becomes a significant element of narrative, only differently: for Riessman’s narrative, following a predetermined or conventional order or the order of occurring events is not a criterion.

Similar to Ricoeur (1984), Riessman argues that experiences are affected by time and narratives inform about these various experiences by handling time differently.

Thus, Riessman (1993) identifies narrative genre based on certain sequence and temporal order that the narrative follows. The three narrative genres are: “habitual narratives in which events happen over and over and consequently there is no peak in the action,” hypothetical narratives that “depict events that did not happen,” and topic- centered narratives that are “snapshots of past events that are linked thematically” (p. 18).

Topic-centered narratives are made of episodes with varying thematic content and has a clear beginning, a middle and ending, answering the question “then what happened?” (p.

18). Riessman’s two other narrative genres deviate from this scheme: habitual narratives have no clear beginning, middle or ending, while hypothetical narratives do not answer the question “What happened then?”

On the other hand, Riessman (1993) defines core narratives as reduced interview responses in which investigators render the respondent’s story into a form that makes

comparison with other stories possible during thematic analysis. She changes the exclusive focus of narrative analysis from narrative clauses, which were the basic analytical units for Labov and Waletzky (1967/1997) to larger units that often just “sound like a narrative” but do not follow the conventional western narrative structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end. These larger units can be discovered by certain linguistic nuances, organizational forms, patterns, and their local and social contexts.

Riessman recalls the discovery of these narrative units during Divorce Talk (1990) as follows:

Some [women and men] developed long accounts of what had happened in their marriages to justify their divorces. I did not realize these were narratives until I struggled to code them. Applying traditional qualitative methods, I searched the texts for common thematic elements. But some individuals knitted together several themes into long accounts [of the problems that led to the divorce] that had coherence and sequence defying easy categorization. I found myself not wanting to fragment the long account into distinct thematic categories. There seemed to be a common structure beneath talk about a variety of topics. (p. vi)

In this case, coherence, sequence and common structure were the signs for Riessman that the small units are parts of a longer narrative. Thus Riessman suggests that narrative must be recognized as one organic unit and analyzed accordingly without breaking it into fragments.

However, larger narratives are not always built from small narrative clauses that show coherence, sequence and common structure; small narrative clauses can be in tension with the larger unit. Riessman (1993) demonstrates these narrative differences with an interview with a young single mother, Cindy, a longer narrative with a clear beginning, middle and ending, but which has various “story segments” with different structures than the large structure itself. For example, while Cindy talks about her 38

economic, educational and parental difficulties, at one point she starts making up a

“dream segment” about a person whom she wishes would be there for her, and makes an imaginary dialogue with this person who would say, “Hey sit down I’ll fix you a drink let’s chit chat about the day” (p. 47). Riessman labels this “dream segment” a

“hypothetical narrative,” a narrative about an event that did not happen.

On the other hand, Riessman (1993) recognizes other kinds of narrative segments in Cindy’s over-arching larger narrative that demonstrate her distress. Riessman states,

“Unlike narratives about events that have happened in the past, this one, concerning role strains and distress, lacks firm resolution and closure because the narrator is still in the middle of the conflict” (p. 48). Riessman confirms that these conditions seem to be “non- narratives” because they are enduring, repeated, durative, progressive, and unspecific conditions that allow a narrator’s experiences to unfold over time and to extend into the present. In Cindy’s interview, the “dream segment” that juxtaposes encounters of real events are surrounded by narrative segments about her enduring, unchanging condition, where there is no plot, events do not occur in sequential order, and where verbs are in present tense instead of past. In her 1990 examination of Cindy’s interview, Riessman draws the contours of three “narrative” phenomena, narrative of past events, “non- narrative” about enduring conditions, and non-real “dream segment,” which, in her 1993

Narrative Analysis, develop into the three main narrative genres: Narrative of past events, habitual and hypothetical narratives (Riessman, 1990, 1993, 2002, 2008). I have to mention here that instead of using Riessman’s (1990, 1993) “narrative of past events,” in the following chapters, I call this narrative “encounter with the past” that I feel is more

accurate because it depicts the relationship as an “encounter”: they are not simply

“narratives” that are part of a past, but intersect in the present with respect to their impact on people’s future.

Riessman (1993) demonstrates her narrative analysis with a second example, exposing Ginsburg’s (1989) thematic analysis as one she wants to overstep. She critiques

Ginsburg’s research through a step-by-step examination. Riessman identifies Ginsburg’s major steps as representing the informant’s life by direct quotes, adding longer summaries, the author’s theoretical comments and the key themes that are present in all interviews. Riessman points out that in this kind of analysis the researcher’s role is to knit the elements together and to “navigate the reader to understand the informant’s experience” (p. 27). As she states, there is a danger in this kind of analysis that the author may over-interpret the text and over-direct the reader, and concludes: “The challenge is to find ways of working with texts so the original narrator is not effaced, so she does not lose control over her words” (p. 28). Accordingly, neither exclusive structural, nor exclusive thematic analysis are sufficient; indeed, we can enhance the interpretation by using certain elements from both approaches and adding concepts of dialogue and performance. Riessman (1993) argues that by focusing on the narrative structure alongside the content, we recognize meanings that otherwise we would not realize, since meaning and textual representation are dependent on one another. Riessman’s idea that the tension between core narratives and various narrative segments and the overarching form are significant in meaning construction will return in my oral and visual narrative analysis.

As further illustrations of the application of Reissman’s approach, Chesire and

Ziebland’s (2005), and Gounder’s (2011) narrative research draw upon Riessman’s habitual narrative. Chesire and Ziebland’s (2005) recognize that one of the interviewed women tells “several narratives where the verb phrases involve the auxiliaries used to or would” (p. 23). Relying on Riessman’s (1993) narrative analysis, they recognize the significance of the habitual narrative in these women’s stories as “they tell . . . the general course of events over a period of time, with the verb forms and adverbs marking repetition and routinization” (p. 24). Accordingly, linguistic cues that express long duration of time, repetition, and routinization are markers of the habitual narrative.

As another type of linguistic analysis, Gounder (2011) distinguishes “narrative” and “narrative-like” structures in the narratives of Indian migrant laborers a century after they emigrated to Fiji from colonial India. He found that habitual narratives are “the opposite of event narrative” being thematically organized around routine life experiences, where the narrator describes his/her own or “others’ performance of regular routines, which she observed on a regular basis” (p. 86). Habitual narratives, according to

Gounder, report about incidents that habitually occur over an extended period of time, and they don’t indicate the gender or number of people. Gounder observes that her informant’s (Guldhari’s) narration is always habitual narrative, where women Girmityas29 are not identified as individuals but as a “composite group of ‘women Girmityas’” (p.

86). Gounder also concludes that the exclusive use of habitual narrative among the Fiji

29 Girmityas are descendents of indentured Indian labourers brought to Fiji to work on sugarcane plantations. 41

Indian women signifies that the women “can generalize their experiences to all women

Girmityas” (p. 87). Accordingly, habitual narrative implies a communal world view instead of an individual view, where gender and number remain unmarked. I recognize that in this case, habitual narratives reported about culture that the group members shared. Analyzing habitual narratives as everyday cultural performances is an extension of Riessman’s Narrative Analysis and provides additional opportunities for analysis.

Additionally, Ainsworth-Vaughn (1998) uses both Riessman’s habitual and hypothetical narratives with a focus on their different location in time. Ainsworth-

Vaughn concludes that habitual narratives do not follow chronological order but depict events that are typical over an extended time in a certain sequence, or narrate series of events in the past, present, and future. On the other hand, hypothetical narratives are set in a hypothetical time, and answer the question of “What if?” (p. 151). Accordingly, habitual and hypothetical narratives characterize both the event and the way the narrator perceives them. With this extension, attention to form becomes dialogical. This also justifies my extensive focus on these narrative genres.

Finally, similarly to Ainsworth-Vaughn, Hughes (2009) focuses on the “location in time,” but he figures out that, in analysis, this order can be reversed. In his research, an elderly lesbian woman, Rosemary, narrates an event when she was in the hospital, and she complains that she had no chance to disclose her lesbianism to the hospital staff. She says, “If somehow they could ask me or give me the choice of saying that…” and at this point she explains what the ideal situation for her would be by using hypothetical narrative. This wished-for conversation shows a sharp contrast between the real and

imagined worlds that should be real (Hughes, 2009, p. 168). Consequently, in Hughes’ use, hypothetical narratives are not simply “imagined” but “imagined as a juxtaposition of real,” and, as such, signify the “wished to be real.” So from the “non-existing” conditions we can conclude the “existing”; from the “ideal” we can conclude the “real.”

Yet, identifying linguistic cues and location in time are not the exclusive ways of recognizing hypothetical and habitual narratives. In the excerpt that Riessman (2008) selects to demonstrate her narrative analysis, a British female teacher expresses her wish to be free, to break out of the narrow space of her urban environment and live without the shackles of habits and conventions30 as an example that can be “read” as the wished-for hypothetical narrative juxtaposed with real experiences. As Riessman concludes, the reference in the excerpt indicates that “freedom” means to get free from the narrator’s

“own and other people’s” habits and conventions, which, because of its repetitive character, shows a habitual narrative (p. 66). In this Riessman illustrates dialogic analysis, where she brings one narrator’s story in conversation with other narrator’s stories. Even if there are no linguistic hints, because many other people have the same story, Riessman identifies it as a habitual narrative.

However, these various narratives differ not only in their sequence and sense of time, they also tell significant things about different people and their different world in

30 The excerpt of a woman teacher’s, Winfred Marcier’s letter to her friend that Riessman (2008) analyzes says the following: “Wouldn’t you like to go the America, Canada, or the great wide west? Where perhaps there might be more chance of finding what manner of being you were? –where there is more room, more freedom, and one is not hide-bound by conventions –where you could get nearer to soil, and as I said before not being stifled by artificialities and habits and conventions, your own and other people’s. …Wouldn’t you?” (p. 66)

different ways. Riessman (1993) states, “Genres of narratives, with their distinctive styles and structures, are modes of representation that tellers choose (in concert with listeners’ expectations, of course). . . . Different genres persuade differently” (p. 18). Riessman

(1993) asserts, since narratives are “meaning-making structures,” we should analyze them as units and not break them down into small parts/fragments when we analyze them. I apply this holistic concept, word use, and the concepts of hypothetical and habitual narratives and stories in the analysis of oral and visual narratives.

Although Riessman does not provide a rigid step-by-step method in her 1993

Narrative Analysis, she provides more details in her 2008 dialogic/performance analysis

(DPA), in which she extends the concept of narrative from narrative as text to narrative as performance. “Dialogic” implies that stories are dialogically produced and performed at three levels, the researcher, informants, and the readers/viewers. “Performance” suggests that narrators and audiences adjust to conventions, and dramatize their experiences for an audience either in interview settings or in everyday interactions. Accordingly, we can understand Riessman’s DPA as a trial to resolve the most criticized facet of her earlier

Narrative Analysis, namely that it is dominantly formalist, considers only the in-text contexts and pays less attention to the material and non-material circumstances of the embodied narrator and audience (See Gubrium & Holstein, 2009).

DPA slightly modifies the relationship between narratives and experiences. In

Narrative Analysis Riessman (1993) asserts that we can know the narrator’s identity and experiences by analyzing his or her narratives. Though, in Narrative Methods of Human

Sciences Riessman (2008) modifies her initial idea and states, “investigators don’t have

access to the ‘real thing’ only the speaker’s (or writer’s or artist’s) imitation (mimesis)” where both action and experience are included in the mimetic position (p. 22). So we can have access to the narrator’s experiences by listening to his or her narratives, but we

“see” them, so to say, “in a mirror dimly,” in the form of imitation (mimesis).

Mimesis, along with poiesis, and kinesis are Greek words that lead back to

Aristotle’s Poetics. The concepts highlight the different characteristics of performance as imitation, making, and struggle (or movement). Hence, I do not limit my analysis only to mimesis, as Riessmann does, but also pay attention to the two other aspects, poiesis and kinesis. For this, performance theory is a fitting adjacent theory that informs my research.

Performance Theory

Performance theory shifts focus from the story as text, to the story as embodied and situated in performance. Benjamin (1969) says performance is a two-step process.

The storyteller takes his/her consciousness of experience and makes it an experience of consciousness for the audience. This is not a linear but a reflexive and reversible process, where the audience can become storytellers, themselves. In Langellier and Peterson’s

(2006) theoretical frame, the “storyteller’s consciousness of experience,” Benjamin’s first step, is called “something that happened.” Likewise, Langellier and Peterson (2006) describe Benjamin’s second step, when the storyteller “takes his/her consciousness of experience and makes it an experience of consciousness for the audience” a

“performative doing of storytelling.” Thus Benjamin’s two steps become the initial conceptualization of the key elements of a performance, “performative ‘doing’ of a

storytelling” and “what is done in the performance of the story” (Langellier and Peterson,

2006, p. 2). Langellier and Peterson outline the basic storytelling performance as follows:

The simple act of saying “let me tell you a story” establishes a communication relationship that constitutes the speaker as storyteller, and the listeners as audience. The utterance “let me tell you a story” is, in other words, performative in that it does what it says it is doing. It performs the storytelling that it announces. (Langellier & Peterson, 2006, p. 2)

In this conceptualization, “something that happened” is a story, and “what is done in the performance of the storytelling” is also a story. But the two differ in various ways as a result of the different embodied and situated storytellers’ performance. This “second story” is what is left out of Riessman’s (1993) theory. Langellier and Peterson (2006) continue, when the storyteller “does storytelling” to others, there are invitations and restraints to the many potential ways of telling. Who, to whom, what, where, and how the teller does storytelling, his/her bodily presence (sex, gender, race, ability, appearance) add different things to the story. As Langellier and Peterson suggest, identity is marked by our “bodily experiences and discursive forces of sex, race, class, age, illness, and so on” (p. 157). Accordingly, what is excluded and included in the story, depends on the accepted rules of storytelling of a given time and place. Goffman (1959) calls this “staged performance” (mimesis) 31 saying, “[The] correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation –this self –is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it” (p. 252). This is to say, the scene and the setting very much define the performer’s possibilities for which character

31 Throughout my analysis, I use mimesis, poiesis and kinesis to highlight the different characteristics of performance. In performance studies Conquergood (1998) popularized the concepts.

he/she is supposed to perform. This describes the situatedness of the performer as both agency and constraint.

Although Hall (1966, 1994, and 1997) is not considered a performance theorist per se, his remarks regarding cultural identity fit what performance theorists say about identity. He extends the idea of situatedness by identifying the audience as “constitutive outside” to which the teller relates as “other,” what he/she is not, what he/she lacks, to which identity is represented and articulated. Hall (1966) asserts:

Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical naturally-constituted unit –an “identity” in its traditional meaning (that is an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation). (p. 4)

Accordingly, Hall asserts, identity needs negotiation with the audience, especially cultural identity that is ambiguous, contested, contradictory, and in continuous change like culture itself. Narratives as cultural performances show narrative as poiesis.

In a wider context, narratives of personal experience become part of the social, cultural, political, and ideological discourse. As Butler (1988) suggests, we create, preserve, and transmit culture by telling and retelling our shared embodied experiences in social relations. Langellier and Peterson (2006) specifies this concept of culture adding that cultures create ground rules and constraints for narratives and determine what narratives can be told in certain communities. Conquergood (2002) calls these ground rules and constraints “official,” or “objective” knowledge that colonizes non-official knowledge (pp. 145-46). Accordingly, narratives mediate different types of knowledge 47

and are intrinsic parts of the social, cultural and ideological struggle (kinesis) that are circulated in narratives.

Finally, both oral and visual cues are connected to performances. As Langellier and Peterson (2006) note, we all participate in storytelling “by hearing and voicing, gesturing, seeing and being seen, feeling and being touched, upon which any storytelling depends” (p. 157). Through this lens, narratives are connected to performances on multiple levels. This justifies my project to identify culturally determined experiences in performed narratives.

In conclusion, my theoretical frame is Riessman’s (1993) narrative analysis and

Langellier and Peterson’s (2006) narrative performance theory while drawing from other theories of performances (Butler, 1988; Conquergood, 2002; Goffman, 1959; Hall 1966;

Turner, 1982). In what follows, I narrow my scope and spotlight a specific storyteller, who reclaims the “Gypsy” as cultural identity.

Iconicity of the Nomads

As will be noted in Chapter 6, there are many frescoes in Bódvalenke that portray

Roma as nomadic wanderers; hence, it is necessary to spend some time with the topic of nomadism, and with the question why it is important for some painters of Roma origin. I start with an example. During his research, Poueyto (2008) recognized that an amateur painter in a Manoushe Gypsy camp in the 2000s has drawn a similar scene about his camp as the Manoushe painter, Coucou Doerr. Both portrayed Roma in an idyllic environment “that Manoushes call the ‘time of the horses’–a life which he in fact has never personally experienced” (p. 401). The “time of the horses,” as Poueyto concluded,

shows “fire, caldron, river, in which a woman washes linen, horse, dog, caravan and countryside” (p. 401). Poueyto asks in his study, “Why would Coucou working in the

1960s, 1970s and 1980s depict a nomadic life when in fact Manoushes were by then no longer traveling?” (p. 403). Also, why would the amateur Manoushe painter depict the same idyllic scenery without seeing Coucou’s paintings or experiencing this scene? The same question comes to mind in Bódvalenke: “Why would Roma painters depict the nomadic life when Roma are no longer wanderers?” To answer this question, we must follow what memories and myths of the Roma wandering accomplish for the sedentary

Roma, and for the people in this community. Artists with Roma roots reach back to the

Gypsy wandering, their home searching and settling down, because these lead them back to their roots. Poueyto (2008) suggested that some objects and natural elements work as signs to “evoke the Manoushe’s anonymous ancestors whose presence is hidden in the mythical ille tempore . . . [as] their common past” (p. 403). He also calls attention to the fact that when symbols, objects, and events become “markers of Gypsiness,” these want to show themselves as different symbols, markers, and objects than that of the non-

Gypsies. Fitting into Turner’s (1982) concept that common embodied experiences bring about a performance specific to people involved in that common experience, Baker

(2011) asserted that visuality is a field where we can grasp important characteristics of

Gypsy cultural identity.

Yet, we have to realize that many images that Gypsies use to evoke their mythical past are also part of the Gadjé [non-Roma] representations of Roma. For Poueyto (2008) this means that “we witness a shared exotic imagination for Gypsies and Gadjé” where

Gypsies, with their specific clothes, jewelries and vivid color selections, are characterized by the popular stereotypes (p. 403).

In relation to the nomadic Roma representation I conclude that, although there are shared elements in the Roma and non-Roma portrayal of the Gypsies, these fulfill different roles in two dissimilar narratives. I assert that, for the Roma, this portrayal is an act of performing “Roma identity” while searching for identity and belonging. On the other hand, when the nomad Roma is part of the non-Roma performance, it is part of the

(neo)colonialist, or the Eurocentric gaze that sees Roma as either “savages” or the

“Oriental Other.” The following section summarizes the Second Chapter.

Summary

In this chapter, I have discussed the theoretical and conceptual frames used in analyzing the data. In particular, I discussed narrative theory and performance theory as my choices for theoretically framing my research. Then I justified why I use two theories.

Finally, in connection with performances and narratives, I explored the very different meanings and roles of “nomad Gypsy” imagery for Roma and non-Roma. Chapter Three introduces the research practices I used in collecting and analyzing data.

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH PRACTICES

In this chapter I describe my field site and the process of recruiting my research subjects. I discuss the qualitative methods of data collection–semi-structured interviews and informal conversations–and my interview protocol. Finally, I introduce the methods applied to analyze the interviews and in the analysis of the frescoes.

I lived in Bódvalenke and Hungary for about three months, conducting ethnographic research involving 35 Roma villagers and 10 artists (ultimately I included only 6 of them in my analysis) with different Roma ethnic origins. Although Roma are minorities in Hungary, in this village they are a majority: out of 220 inhabitants, ninety- five percent are Roma (“Bódvalenke Freskófalu,” n. d.). Since there are no guesthouses or other accommodations in the village, I lived in a building housing the FVP office. The building is located in the center of the village and contains the FVP office, a computer room where village children are allowed to gather, and a room with a few sewing machines that is not currently in use. I lived alone in a separate room that opened from the kitchen. I was self-supporting. I had no car. There is one small grocery store that provides basic items, which closes at 4 pm. On weekends it is closed. During my time there, I lived in similar material circumstances to the villagers, which means I ate once or twice a day only basic food such as milk, bread, butter, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes and apples.

Field Site

Bódvalenke, in Eastern Hungary, is a unique field site for Roma/Gypsy narrative research, a “fresco-village,” where Hungarian and international artists of Roma origin

painted 32 murals on the back walls of peasant houses in which Roma people live with their families (Biczó, 2009). They were hired and paid by the FVP leader, who acts as the owner and curator of the open-air gallery. Bódvalenke consists of about 50 “peasant- houses”; most of them are more than 100-year-old adobe houses. Since the villagers’ houses are components of the “open-air gallery,” the people and the murals constantly interact. Each Roma family is the audience for the next house’s painted wall; practically, they consider “their” painting the one on their neighbors’ wall. Regarding the wall- paintings, I should note the different names that used to signify the murals. The FVP uses the word, “frescoes” and “icons,” while the artists call them “seccos.” Secco is the more precise definition of the technique because they are painted on a dry wall, while frescoes are painted on a wet wall. According to the FVP website, since it was difficult to keep the walls wet until the artists arrived, the original plans to paint frescoes changed, and the artists switched to the technique of secco. In my analysis I use the words “mural,” “wall- painting,” and “frescoes” interchangeably even though with these words I denote the seccos that comprise the FVP open-air gallery in Bódvalenke.

To describe my field site, it is necessary for me to discuss the context of the creation of the frescoes, the organizational structure of the FVP, the concept of an open- air art gallery, and the Project Leader’s role. The frescoes originated in the mind of the

Project Leader, a Hungarian non-Roma woman, whose vision was to create a Roma art collection painted on the walls of the houses in a deprived Roma village. As conversation with her revealed, she assumed that a contemporary Roma open-air art gallery might help

Roma artists to show their great contributions to Hungarian and universal culture, and

that such a gallery might provide the mostly jobless Roma villagers with some form of living. When she contacted Roma civil rights leaders with her idea, they recommended that she work with Roma activists or social workers who knew the Roma’s circumstances. It was then that the Project Leader started working with the head of the

European Workshop on Culture and Community Education Society32 –often referred to in

Hungarian media as the “European Workshop” association or “European Cultural

Workshop.” In the following I will use the nomenclature “European Workshop” to denote this association.

The European Workshop is a small organization; their main activity is to mentor

Roma families in the deprived Hungarian Roma settlements. They work with varying numbers of volunteers. After working in the region for a couple of years they discovered that most poor families in their deepest despair turn to usurious lenders, which makes their lives even more difficult because, once they have borrowed money, they are unable to pay it back and are exposed to constant harassment by the lender. In response, the

European Workshop developed the so-called “bank of the poor” (Community Loan

Office) where individuals legally lend to each other with some interest charged. After the first artists started painting their murals, the Community Loan Office worked with the

Bódvalenke people as well. However, the Community Loan Office failed to solve the complicated problems that come with usurious lending; it ceased all its activities in July

2013 (www. noba.hu).

32 Európai Műhely Kulturális és Közművelődési Társaság 53

Through the European Workshop, PG, an autodidact painter and social worker, and others were actively involved in finding a place for the FVP project, including talking with the mayor and the villagers. The gallery was the Project Leader’s idea, and her role was to find sponsors. In summary, in the beginning three people were in leadership positions: the Project Leader was the fundraiser, the “European Workshop’s” founder was the intellectual leader, and PG33 was the inventor of the technique, the expert in social work and the artistic director in the FVP. PG was also active in painting five frescoes.

The online application process was started by the European Workshop and the first painters were selected by The Project Leader and PG together. The first painters who started painting the murals were PG, PE, PD, and PC. As artistic director, PG suggested that the painters remain for a longer period of time (about 30 days) and to involve the village’s grown-ups and children in creating the murals. As a general rule, before they started painting, the artists took time to talk with the villagers, sitting with them, playing the guitar and singing for them. In the beginning, from 2009, painting the murals was a communal event; the painters stayed in the village for weeks, made acquaintances and friends with the villagers, used real people as models and informants, painted events of village everyday life, animals, objects and stories that had happened in the community, and they used children as apprentices.

33 As I note later, I am using initials to designate painters who were interviewed. See p. 62. for an explanation of initials. 54

Although the Project Leader’s main role was to manage the financial part of the project, over time, she started practicing the role of curator, and also initiated subjects for the frescoes, such as to commemorate the Formula 1 event that was staged in Hungary.

She also began to assume more expertise and started critiquing the painters’ artwork.

Finally, she began to decide who should paint and what their paintings should express.

After having a disagreement with the leader of the European Workshop foundation on how to spend the money that had been raised, in September 2010 the

Project Leader took the FVP to the Hungarian Reformed Church Aid Foundation, which agreed to sponsor the project. After having a quarrel about whether or not painting a

Formula 1 car on one of the central walls would be a proper subject for the project, also

PG left the project in 2012. Since then the Project Leader has become the sole project manager and leads the FVP. There is a social worker employee working for her, Marta, who is paid by the Reformed Church Aid Foundation. The Project Leader has no expertise in Roma issues or social work, but she has good relationships in the world of finance, speaks English, and has the flexibility to travel from Budapest to Bódvalenke occasionally since she works in her own translation agency.

The main sponsor is the CIB Social Responsibility Foundation with a donation of

10 million Ft (33,500 Euro) annually, which funds the mural painting, support of the secondary school children, and operation of the FVP office (“Bódvalenke Freskófalu,” n. d.). The Project Leader renamed the customary village day in Bódvalenke and started organizing “Dragon Festivals,” an annual event to promote the village to the outside

world, which was financed by various smaller donors each year.34 In 2012 the costs were

6.5 million Ft (21,800 Euro) paid by the OSI, Erste Foundation, and the National Cultural

Fund. As this brief history shows, the FVP went through many organizational changes that also altered the concept of the FVP. Since the Project Leader remained all alone after

PG’s departure, PG’s initial concept of building the community was dropped and the concept of the outdoor gallery was emphasized and further developed. As manager of the

FVP, the Project Leader is curator of the gallery. She exclusively represents not only the frescoes but also the Bódvalenke people in various Hungarian and European Union forums. It is unclear how these and other activities of hers, such as employing a few villagers through the social work program, fits into the outdoor gallery’s mission. After a short discussion of the FVP, I turn to the stories told by the painters and the wall- painting.

Research Participants

To find my participants in the village, I used convenience sampling, snowball sampling, talking with people living in the painted houses and speaking with the artists who painted the murals. Convenience sampling is talking with “basically every one you can find who will cooperate” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011, p. 117). After I grew acquainted with people living in the painted houses, I extended the number of participants using snowball sampling, a process in which participants recruit other participants through the process of referrals (Warren, 2002). For example, I went to Ica’s house first and asked her about her “picture.” She told me her life story, including taking in Réka when she was

34 In 2015 the Dragon Festival was renamed to Bódvalenke Festivities. 56

a 12-year old. I asked Ica to help me to speak with Réka. After she walked me to Réka,

Réka told me her life story and mentioned that her two sisters also married into the village. I asked her to introduce me to her sisters. She walked me to Mara, who told me that her husband and Hanna’s husband are brothers. Then I asked her to walk me to

Hanna, etc. Lindlof and Taylor (2011) say that snowball sampling is “well-situated to study social networks, subcultures, or people who have certain attributes in common. It is also sometimes the best way to reach an elusive, hard-to-recruit population” (p. 114).

My selection was purposeful: I interviewed 35 villagers (25 Roma women and 10

Roma men), including everyday people, people in leadership positions, and those who deal with tourists who visit the village. In addition I interviewed 10 artists (3 women and

7 men) who painted the frescoes in Bódvalenke. Organizing an interview with the artists was difficult; I spent weeks to find the most recent contact information of the artists, months to get answers to my e-mails, and days to wait for interviewees who did not show up. After the first honest answer from an artist that he does not want to talk about his

Bódvalenke experiences, I changed my method. I called one of the artists after becoming well-informed about his aristic work and philosophy, and started the conversation from this. I continued using this method with the other artists. After they “mapped” my personality, my non-involvement in the Hungaian “Gypsy industry,”35 and after they understood who I am and the nature of my research, they were ready to talk about the

FVP. Since the artists do not live in the village, I visited five of them. I conducted face-

35 Marushiakova and Popov (2011), defines Gypsy industry as organizations and programs that “subsists on the basis of stating Roma problems and which by implication does nothing towards solving these problems, because it would lose its source of income” (p. 55). 57

to-face interviews with five artists who live in Hungary as it was appropriate to their location and offered the ease of meeting them in person. I interviewed four Hungarian and one German artists by phone. After I narrowed the number of murals from ten to six

(one for each genre and one additional mural titled after the village) to make the material more manageable, only one artist remained whom I had interviewed face-to-face, and five artists whom I had interviewed by phone. I did not experience much difference in the resulting interviews: each were a little more than one hour long and similarly deep. I collected their stories using semi-structured interviews. I recorded the interviews with their oral consent.

Semi-structured Interviews

Any particular interview can be positioned somewhere on a continuum between

“unstructured” and “structured,” where the unstructured pole is close to observation, while the “structured” is close to a questionnaire. Lindlof and Taylor (2011) define six major purposes of qualitative interviews. I would bullet-point these as understanding the social actors’ experiences, knowledge, and point of view; eliciting their everyday language; gathering information about the researched phenomena that cannot be observed or learned in other ways; asking questions about the past; verifying information received from other sources; and finally, being efficient in collecting data (p. 172). From qualitative interviews, we derive interpretations, not facts.

By definition, a semi-structured interview must have some structure, although that structure should be flexible. I prepared an interview protocol that lists the key topics for the interview, but I added questions or changed their order when necessary (Creswell,

2009, p. 129). I structured the interview questions into five major groups: demography, their personal lives, the community, the murals and closing questions. The first group of questions asked the informants’ age, length of residence in the village. The second group of questions was open-ended: “Tell me something about yourself”; “Tell me about your family”; and “Tell me about your house.” These questions allowed me to probe memories that individuals find important. The third group of questions consisted of more socially oriented queries like “Do you remember any changes in the village?”; “Do you remember any conflict in the community?”; and “Tell me about the making of the frescoes.” These questions encouraged the respondents to recollect stories of collective life. The fourth group of questions was oriented toward understanding the villagers’ experiences with the wall-paintings, such as “What do the frescoes mean to you?”; “What stories do the frescoes tell?”; and “What is the role of the frescoes in the village?” The fifth group of questions closed the interview and allowed participants to ask me questions. These were questions like “Is there something else you would like to tell?” and “Do you have any further questions?”

According to Riessman’s (2008) DPA, the research interview must be dialogical36 and not dominated by the researcher’s questions or by the structure of the interview: “The specific wording of a question is less important than the interviewer’s emotional attentiveness and engagement and the degree of reciprocity in the conversation” (pp. 24-

26). Investigators need to listen to the narrator in an “emotionally attentive” and

36 Riessman (2008) follows Mishler in this conception. See Mishler, E. G. (1991).

“engaged” way to understand the narrator’s experiences. I often had to minimalize my words and change them to “uuu,” “aha,” “yuyy” “eee” vocals or to silent listening as the villagers, themselves, communicate in these ways.

My interviews were frequently interrupted by their young children or other unexpected circumstances, therefore, sometimes I conducted multiple interviews with the same person. I also engaged in informal conversations before, during, and after the semi- structured interviews. Stage and Mattson (2003) recommend incorporating

“conversational tactics” into the process of interviews to maintain openness (pp. 98-99).

Therefore, while I used semi-structured interviews to obtain answers to my questions as much as possible, I also applied informal conversation techniques.

Informal Conversation

Conversation represents the core of scholarly work in ethnography because

“conversations are embedded in social context” (Schneider, 2012, p. 58). Agar (1996) recommends informal conversations because they prevent the researcher’s domination and avoid an atmosphere of interrogation. Informal conversations are especially important in bridging cultural differences and overcoming the suspicion toward a newcomer, non-

Roma researcher in a relatively closed Roma village. Conversations helped me to get closer to my participants and maintain a dialogic relationship with them.

Reflective Understanding

As I interviewed people and engaged in informal conversation with them, I was reflexive with respect to my own position as the interviewer. I am Hungarian according to my nationality, ethnicity and culture, and had only surface-level relationships with

people with Roma/Gypsy origin before my research. Therefore, after I transcribed the interviews each night following the interviews, I went back to my interviewees to clarify use of words and content that I did not fully understand. Member checking was part of my daily routine.

I turn toward Roma/Gypsy stories in a sensitive time, when there is growing anti-

Roma sentiment in Europe–-and when this emotion is especially strong in Hungary. I see my moral responsibility as a communication scholar in creating a platform, lending an ear, and paying sustained attention to the Roma/Gypsy speaker to understand what he/she was trying to say. I wanted to bring Roma/Gypsies into the spotlight as storytellers.

I must acknowledge that there is a personal agenda to my current study. As a white European, I never thought to experience what it means to be a minority in another majority culture–-I learned this only after emigrating to the United States. After living for the first time at the margins myself, I remain sensitized toward the marginalized and discriminated-against. Consequently, I wanted to study Roma/Gypsy narratives because I believe that the stories of those who are discriminated against also accomplish something in society.

During my research I was aware that my identity as a non-Roma, middle-class,

Hungarian woman (who is also an American scholar) might affect my research, so I paid close attention to being critical and reflexive. I was careful not to slip into the attitude of the “colonizer” toward the “colonized,” the ethnographer’s attitude toward the Oriental

"other," or the all-too-common Western intellectual’s approach toward those seen as "less civilized." Also, I wanted to avoid biases based on my shared experience of marginality.

Indeed, I strived to get into dialogic relationship with my participants and to negotiate an insider/outsider status, and I kept consulting with Romani people throughout my research.

For this research I obtained a waiver of the IRB requirement for a written form of

Informed Consent based on the following three concerns. First, the literacy level of

Gypsy individuals in Bódvalenke is very low, and many are illiterate. Second, signing a form would connect their name to the stories, which could potentially violate their anonymity and make them more vulnerable. Third, signing forms is not a tradition in their culture. Signing any paper would create distrust and anxiety among the villagers. So that the villagers would open up and tell their stories honestly, I requested using oral consent to obtain permission from each villager to record our conversation.

Finally, it is necessary to clarify that I do not use real names throughout my dissertation to protect the confidentiality of my informants and people connected to them.

I used upper case letters in alphabetical order instead of the artists’ real names, so the first painter appears as Painter A (PA), and the second as Painter B (PB), etc. Since I reduced the initial ten murals to six, the remaining painters I analyze are PA, PB, PD, PG, PE and

PJ. Additionally, in place of the FVP leader’s real name I use “Project Leader.” I use pseudonyms for the villagers. For example, there is no Réka, Máté, or Tamás among the villagers, though these names are Hungarian names.

Data Analysis

I adopted Riessman’s (2008) dialogic/performance analysis (DPA) to analyze my data. As a method, DPA is a “hybrid” of the thematic and structural analyses with special

attention to the dialogue between the narrative, the narrator, and the audience and their social, historical and cultural contexts. Riessman argues that visual analysis is inherent in narrative analysis.

As part of my DPA, I conducted thematic analysis to identify core narratives. As

Riessman suggests, the weakness of this approach is that macro context is put into the center while the local context is neglected. However, this helped me to reduce narratives to their “skeleton” (core narratives) and to compare them with other narratives. On the other hand, as part of DPA, I conducted structural analysis to determine the genres.

Structural analysis pays attention to the narrative form, the details of speech, linguistic cues, compositionality, and the organization (such as temporal organization) of the content that add to the meaning and the context. Riessman recognizes the weakness of this approach in that the macro context is often overlooked. However, I believe that selective use of both thematic and structural analysis with a dialogic approach balances the weaknesses.

Here I want to clarify that while analyzing genres, I am not attempting to reconstruct the conditions in which these genres emerged. For me, genre is part of both the narrators’ meaning-making and performance in which they render their experiences and persuade their audience at the same time. Since various audiences can perceive the same story as a different genre, genre is a dialogical concept. For example, István’s story about his “rented” house, as a hypothetical narrative, calls attention to his communal world view where he identifies with the struggle of his extended family as his own. If we understand his “story” as “encounters with the past,” then it is a lie because the event

never happened. However, I figured out that he talks in the name of his relative after I heard his family member’s story and figured out the context. So I brought other narratives with the same theme in dialogue with each other.

“Dialogic” in method also means that different features of the text are brought into dialogue. In her example to demonstrate DPA, Riessman (2008) kept the narrative as a whole. To use the same example, the “aha” moment in my analysis was when I arrived at István’s question, “What if I lived there?” This single inquiry was the cue that the story about his “rented” house where his daughter is not allowed to stay is not a lie but a hypothetical narrative.

Similarly, PB talked about the happiness of the Gypsies as an event that happened in the past. The same story seems to be a “Roma dream,” a hypothetical story in the Project Leader’s understanding. These different meanings emerged when I heard from another painter (PG) that we have to read his painting “backward.” So the meaning emerged as I brought the painting in dialogue with the artist’s oral narrative. It seems that the Project Leader never asked the artist about their art work; missing the dialogue she came to a different genre, and different understanding of the same story.

In DPA the concept of a singular and stable self is challenged. The narrator brings his/her old self into the narrative performance where he/she performs a new “dialogic I” or “narrative I” for (and with) a particular audience. Tamás, for example, performed his story about the police men who brought him wine and sold his baskets for me, as a new person in the village, as an entertainment. He told me fictive stories about police since he knows that I am not familiar with the local circumstances. As Riessman (2008) suggests,

“identities are situated and accomplished with audience in mind” and narratives are

“performances for others” (p. 106). This also means that audiences witness performances of “multiple selves” where narratives are open to various readings. So narratives are always unfinished in some sense. Accordingly, in identity performances, DPA moves attention from the question “who I am” to “when, where and how who I am” (p. 37).

At this point I must identify the “narrators” and “audiences” in Bódvalenke. First, the villagers are audiences for each other. They tell stories they wish were true or things they “wish away” about their habitual life, and about events that happened to them.

Second, many artists were empathetic listeners to the villagers’ stories. Many of them went house-to-house before painting their mural. Third, the villagers became audiences for the artists’ narratives through their face-to-face discussions and by seeing the murals.

Fourth, the FVP is an audience to the people’s everyday stories and to the artists’ stories.

Fifth, visitors–among them the researcher–are audiences for all of them. I will discuss this network of audiencing throughout my study.

Furthermore, “interactional” is another word that Riessman (2008) uses to describe DPA. Interactional context signifies the meaning that emerges among people, the social historical context, and their performed identities for an audience. Therefore, I analyzed my transcript multiple times by paying attention to different concepts such as core narratives and genres, and their contexts. At the end I had to get back to construct my meta-theory about why all these things I analyzed are important from a communication perspective. In the following section I summarize how I applied DPA to analyze the oral narratives.

Oral Narrative

To analyze the interview data, I created a verbatim transcription and translated the interviews from Hungarian to English. In parallel with this, I frequently read and re-read my field notes and transcripts to ensure a broad overview of the collected material. As

Riessman’s (2008) dialogic/performance analysis suggests, first I started a thematic analysis. According to Lindof and Taylor (2011), when starting a thematic analysis, we sort out the collected data and separate it into different clusters until themes emerge. I identified “hunger,” “motherhood,” “lack of freedom,” “lack of independence,” “lack of equality,” “separation,” “movement,” “suffering” as initial themes. I read the clusters, figured out the relationships between the emerging themes, and analyzed and synthesized the themes in each cluster (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). As I followed this method, I noticed that the cluster that included “hunger” needs to be extended to other material and non- material needs. Also, “lack of freedom” was a problematic label, because “freedom” carries different connotations for the Roma/Gypsy and the non-Roma. The same was true regarding the clusters of “lack of independence” and “lack of equality.” Ultimately, I renamed the category for “needs,” because it is not their absence (lack) but their necessity that was more important. After I started analyzing “need” as basic needs, needs for equality, and needs for independence, I identified equality and independence as culturally defined categories. Similarly, although I collected cleanness narratives initially as

“separation,” after Vali distinguished Romungros from other Gypsies based on that they are not “smelly Gypsies,” I included cleanness in “pride narratives.” Mara’s rejection of the baby-mummy house (also called “Sure Start Children’s Center” for “disadvantaged”

Roma families) as a place to “clean the gypsies” proved that this was a good choice.

Next, I realized that need and pride, mobility and stability are not binaries but dialectical concepts. Although in most cases “separation” does not signify perfect separation, I kept the label because I recognized “separated worlds” as a significant cultural concept. Then, in light of the major themes, I started analyzing the interviews again, keeping whole the narrative units without fragmenting them. This led to finding linear stories and non-linear stories (hypothetical narratives and habitual narratives) in the major themes.

In following the path that Riessman (2008) recommends for DPA, I re-read my transcript and analytical notes multiple times to discover which narratives and performances were in dialectical relationship or in tension. In keeping with DPA’s perspective, I used the following principles in conducting my analysis of oral narratives:

 During my stay in the village I built dialogic relationships and encouraged personal narratives by an emotionally involved listening.37 I lived among similar economic circumstances as the villagers. I had no car. I learned their rules and respected them. I never talked with someone only for the sake of an interview, but was genuinely interested in their experiences. I sat, walked, and spent time accompanying them and I stopped asking questions when they started “performing” to me as to other “media personnel” –telling what they thought the interviewer wanted them to say.

 I paid attention to narrative at multiple levels, on the level of the narrator, the researcher, and the potential reader. While I was listening to the villagers and the artists, I continually asked myself, “What does this mean to him/her who tells me this story now?” “What does this story mean to me as another human being, as a non-Roma, and as a researcher?” “What does this mean to the communication research in the USA?” What does it mean to the potential readers out of academia?” When I transcribed the interviews each night, I re-read them, and asked my interviewees for clarification. I was an attentive audience for the

37 Reissman explicates this listening with Bakhtin’s “utterance” situated in the “I-Thou” relationship that Clark and Holquist (1986) lead back to Cohen’s concept: “[T]he isolated self exclusively engaged in thinking cannot be an ethical self. The ethical self must be engaged in action. For this self there exists no I withot a thou (p. 80). See also Cohen (2004). 67

villagers paying attention to the hidden power dimensions between the FVP and the Roma/Gypsies. This led me to realize cultutally defined non-material needs.

 I brought the parts of the narratives into dialogue with the whole story and other similar narratives. As I previously discussed, based on one single question, “What would I do if I lived there?” I was able to identify István’s story as hypotheical narrative, a story about an event that never happened. This changed the meaning of his story. Similarly, in PD’s inquiry “How can a Roma person trust a Hungarian when we are always talked down to, always told what to do and how to do it?”, “always” reveals a more universal presence of this habitual narrative throughout their common history.

 I paid attention to both micro and macro contexts. I adopted the analytical method that examines the story as a unit without breaking it into fragments, but also analyzed narrative clauses different from the over-arching narratives and identified the tension between them. For example, when Mara identifies Roma customs different from the peasant’s, she recalls receiving food in the mayor’s office. During her story, she repeated the sentence, “We give it to the dog” multiple times. I identified this sentence as a narrative of pride inserted in an overarching narrative of need. Without DPA this important segment would remain hidden.

 I located personal narratives in broader historical, economic, political contexts, and paid attention to how public issues are buried in personal stories. In PDA, Riessman (2008) recalls Bakhtin’s argument that words are “saturated with ideology and meanings from previous usage” (p. 107). My analysis includes the historical, ethnographical, sociological, anthropological, and legislative contexts of the villagers’ and artists’ narratives. This highlights, for instance, the various meanings of “Gypsy” that is an accepted self-identifyer for most of the villagers but not for those villagers who want to “come out of Gypsiness”; they consider themselves Hungarians.

 I performed thematic analysis as part of DPA, considered narratives as large units and did not break them down into small fragments. Identifying core narratives required me to leave out the details and focus on the emerging theme. For example, Réka living in Bódvalenke with her illiterate, unemployed husband and family of 15 performs and narrates her need similarly to PE, an artist who lives and sells paintings in the city. Both perform narratives of survival in recalling that they did not eat for many days. Without DPA the two narratives would hardly meet.

 As part of DPA, I also performed structural analysis paying attention to the narrative form and genre as they modify the meaning. When Tamara talks about the first and second generation of her family who “used to” live in the Gypsy row, and when Moni talks about Erin who “used to” live at the edge of the village, they

narrate what they understand as ongoing, unchanging, continually repeating experiences. This analysis brings past, present and future in dialogue with the people’s encounter. In this case linguistic cues and repeated sequences are part of the meaning and sign of the habitual narrative genre.

 DPA allowed me to recognize identities and narratives as intertwining performances. Both “Roma” identity and the “helper’s” identity are narrated and performed in various ways. For example is the Project Leader, who identifies with the Good Samaritan who “helps” the Roma village to get out of poverty. However, the artists and the villagers identify her performance differently. For the villagers “help” means to assist the other in becoming independent, able and strong. For the FVP “help” signifies the “helper’s” higher status and the “helped’s” inferiority and dependency.

 Method and finding are not fully separated in my study. Readers can see a plurivocal text, representations of different voices on many pages that contain narratives, which is also part of the finding. PDF holds that narratives perform and they speak for themselves. Accordingly, as an audience, I was positioned as a witness to the villagers’ stories among other past, present and future witnesses (Riessman, 2008, p. 107).

In the following section I summarize how I applied DPA to analyze the visual narratives.

Visual Narrative

I continued using dialogic/performance analysis in the analysis of the murals.

Riessman (2008) suggests the method is applicable to interpret spoken and written narratives as well as images, and by “reading” the images we can begin to understand the image maker’s experiences that are “‘seeable’ in ways that go beyond the ‘sayable’” (p.

143). I asked the artists to narrate their murals to “disrupt the investigator’s control and authority over the meanings of images” and to bring together the verbal and the visual narratives (p. 143). This adds an additional loop to the visual storytelling and attaches it back to the “sayable.” In this state, however, the artist’s story is only one among other possible stories told about the mural.

I first analyzed the artists’ oral narratives to identify the core narratives and genres based on Riessman’s (1993) Narrative Analysis, then I analyzed the murals starting with identifying the genres and core narratives based on Riessman’s Narrative

Analysis, and continuing with a visual analysis based on Rose’s (2012) Visual

Methodologies. Finally, I brought the artists,’ the murals,’ and the audiences/viewers’ narratives into dialogue based on Riessman’s (2008) Dialogic/Performance Analysis

(DPA). I started with a thematic analysis of the artists’ oral narratives to find the core narratives. Core narratives are the results of the thematic analysis in which the respondent’s story is reduced to a “skeleton” and rendered into a form that makes comparison with other stories possible (Riessman, 1993). After identifying the emerging themes, I “reduced” the stories to a form that made comparison with other stories possible. I defined their core narratives. Next, I realized that these concepts fit in the four core narratives I identified in the villagers’ oral narratives: need and pride, mobility and stability; these are not binaries but dialectical concepts. Then I started a structural analysis, keeping whole the narrative units but being aware of the narrative clauses as well. This led to finding linear stories and non-linear stories. Although Riessman (1993) identifies three narrative genres, habitual narratives, hypothetical narratives, and encounters with the past, during my analysis a fourth genre emerged in the artists’ narratives, which I named “counter/emancipatory narratives” because they reject existing dominant (master) narratives while they also seek to liberate Roma from their subordinate position.

Andrews and Bamberg (2004) assert, counter narrative38 is a positional category; it “makes sense in relation to something else that they are encountering” (p. x). I consider counter and emancipatory narratives similar in their role to change an unequal power distribution. They are also different. Counter narratives attempt to overwrite another narrative, so they are relational and their main goal is to contradict. Emancipatory narratives want to set free from some restraint. The Oxford Dictionary defines

“emancipate” as “to set free, especially from legal, social, or political restrictions” (2013, p. 276). The dictionary gives three examples: emancipating citizens from the power of government; setting a child free from the authority of its father or parents; and freeing slaves from slavery. Applying these concepts to narrative, we will arrive at the three major emancipatory narratives that counter/emancipatory artists represent: they want to liberate Roma (among them themselves) from institutional discrimination, paternalistic assimilatory politics, and from the neo-colonial subaltern position. Conter/emancipatory narratives unite characteristics of both narratives.

Using the same procedure as in the oral narrative analysis, I started analyzing the visual narratives by a thematic analysis. I identified seven groups as preliminary major themes: (1) tales, (2) traditional Gypsy/Roma life, (3) ancient homeland and wandering,

38 I consider “counter narrative” a genre. Riessman (1980) points at a specific narrative coherence, sequence (temporal order) that define narrative genres, which lead to distinctive styles, structures and modes of representation that tellers choose in concert with the listeners’ expectations, and which persuade differently. Bamberg (2004) says counter narrative performance contests and resists (normative) dominant narratives. Andrews (2004) adds, “A tale in and of itself . . . is neither dominant nor resistant” but is determined by the orientation of the participants and the analysts’ identification (p.174). I differentiate genres from core narratives. Core narratives are the results of the thematic analysis in which the respondent’s story is reduced to a “skeleton” and rendered into a form that makes comparison with other stories possible.

(4) historical events, (5) Greek Gods, angels, saints and Christian topics, (6) modern figural paintings with human(-like) figures, and (7) art works that mediate “wellness” or a close connection with nature. I wanted to be sure each theme was represented in my analysis, so I selected frescoes from each group that fit my aim: that tell a story; tell about an experience; and tell about identity. Other factors in my selection were the following:

One artist who painted five murals spoke neither English nor Hungarian, and, although I organized a translator for him, my multiple attempts to interview him remained unsuccessful. One artist passed away before I started my research. One artist refused to talk on this topic, another did not show up when we had agreed to an interview, and one rejected my request because his wife had just given birth to their baby. These were the unintentional factors in choosing murals that had been painted by artists I was able to interview. This led me to the following result:

1. There are seven murals which tell a tale: “Fort of Déva,” “The Birds,” “Dragon Festival,”“The Sun and the Moon,” “Smelly Witch and the Bódvalenke Children,” “Dragons,” and “Tale, Tale, Little Tale.” From this group I selected “The Birds.”

2. Four frescoes show Gypsy/Roma traditional life: “At the End of the Village,” “Dance, Tarot, Spring,” “Gypsy Life,” and “The Great Moments of the Women’s Destiny.” Out of this group I chose “Dance, Tarot, Spring.”

3. Four wall-paintings depicting the ancient Indian homeland or the nomadic wandering of the Gypsies: “India, the Odor of the Sandalwood,” “Indian Blessing,” “Going Towards the Future,” and “Romanistan.” Out of this group I picked “India, the Odor of the Sandalwood.”

4. There are three murals showing historical events: “Fleeing Angels,” “Persecuted,” and “In Memoriam to the Victims of Kisléta.” Out of this group I chose “Fleeing Angels.”

5. There are five portraying ancient mythology, saints, and angels: “Ego, id, Superego,” “Annunciation,” “The Divine Comedy,” “Guardian Angels of Bódvalenke,” and “St. Francis.” From this group I selected “St. Francis.” 72

6. There are seven paintings depicting human and human-like figures (modern figurative paintings): “Fireheads,” “Clowns,” “The Ballad of Bódvalenke,” “The Teacher,” “The Metamorphosis of Horsepower,” and “Sitters on the Stone.” From this group I selected “Sitters on the Stone.”

7. There are two murals representing nature as “Wellness” art: “The end of September,” and “Family.” I selected “Family” from this group.

8. There are two murals titled after the village: “Bódvalenke’s Everydays” and “Bódvalenke’s Ballad.” I chose both murals for analysis because their stories are exclusively for the villagers retelling the villagers’ stories.

After I identified one mural from each group, I began a structural analysis to determine the genres according to Riessman’s (1993) Narrative Analysis. This led me to find linear stories (where one or more stories are told with a clear begining, middle and end) and non-linear stories (where there is no peak in the story because the steady content frequently and endlessly repeats itself), specific to four narrative genres: hypothetical narrative, habitual narrative, encounter with the past, and counter/emancipatory narrative.

Since in visuals it is possible to “tell” more stories in parallel, many frescoes belong to more than one narrative genre. However, it is possible to determine the more dominant genre that led me to the following result: “Sitters on the Stone,” hypothetical narrative;

“Bódvalenke’s Everydays,” habitual narrative; “The Birds” “Dance, Tarot, Spring,”

“India, the Odor of the Sandalwood,” and “Fleeing Angels,” encounters with the past;

“St. Francis,” “Family” and “Bódvalenke’s Ballad,” counter/emancipatory narratives.

Since including all these murals in my analysis would make my dissertation too extensive, I had to reduce the number of the murals. I selected one mural to represent each of these four genres. “Sitters on the Stone” as hypothetical narrative, “Bódvalenke’s

Everydays” as habitual narrative, “Fleeing Angels” as encounter with the past, and 73

“Family” as counter/emancipatory narrative. I selected one more mural “Dance, Tarot,

Spring” because this is a special kind of encounter with the past, a tradition-saving story.

I added a sixth mural “Bódvalenke’s Ballad” because it is titled after the village. I believe these six murals are representative for analysis. Finally, I started a visual analysis examining these six murals based on the three “sites” (that do not signify specific place but sites of inquiry) and three modalities as Rose (2012) recommends.

I believe that visuality is not only culturally determined but also socially.

Contemporary scholars differentiate between vision and visuality based on the biological/physiological nature of the former and the socially constructed nature of the latter (Foster, 1988; Metz, 1975; Riessman, 2008; Rose, 2012). The social and cultural significance of this difference is that while the human eye is capable of seeing, “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the therein” are culturally and socially constructed (Foster, 1988, p. ix). To connect the cultural to the social, Riessman (2008) suggests using three sites for visual narrative analysis: the story of the production, the image itself, and how it can be read. With this, she draws upon Rose (2012) Visual Methodologies. In what follows I summarize Rose’s method to analyze visual materials.

Rose (2012) says that, rooted in the disciplines of semiotics and structuralism, representation has dominated visual analyses for years, paying attention to symbols, naming, and the use of signs. Contrary to this, she recommends using an affective approach to visuality that entails assumptions about the audience’s views shaped by their own unique history of seeing images and the world. While a focus on representation

involves the text, reading and decoding of meanings, using an affective approach shifts our attention to materiality, embodiment, and corporeality/sensibility. So Rose holds that we cannot truly separate vision from visuality since both are connected to corporeality.

Rose (2012) determines three “sites” for analysis–production, image and audiencing. Out of the three sites the first two concentrate on what narrative theorists study in relation to stories: production and image sites require researchers to focus on images (visual stories) as they are rooted in life experiences and, in turn, provide models of the world, the characteristics, and the agency of the images. On the other hand, audiencing, which Rose (2012) finds the most significant site, foregrounds what performance theorists called attention to: the embodied experience, the agency of the storyteller, the audience and the context (see Conquergood, 2002; Langellier, 2003; and

Turner 1982). The site of audiencing is where the meaning of an artwork is negotiated and constantly re-negotiated. As Rose suggests, images about class, race, gender, sexuality most often need multiple re-negotiations, since viewers have different and sometimes shifting social/cultural identities. This re-negotiation of identity and experience is especially vital to non-dominant cultures and marginalized communities, such as the Roma, in finding their voice. Consequently, audiencing similarly can involve the struggle for agency while negotiating the meaning of images.

Dominant and non-dominant ways of seeing class, race, gender, sexuality, etc., involve different performances, stories and social relations.

In Rose’s (2012) concept, each of the “sites” are further broken down into three “modalities”: technology, composition and social. Technological modality concerns

aspects of the making of the frescoes. For example, the fact that Hungarian and international artists travelled to Bódvalenke, lived there, ate with the villagers, talked with them and their children contributed to their decisions in painting the murals.

Similarly, selecting the artists and determining the display, which was the Project

Leader’s work, affected the visual narratives. Compositional modality denotes the material, form, content, composition, spatial organization, style, genre, discourse, and psychological factors. Choices between Western art tradition or “naïve” art, Roma subject matter or universal topics, and themes of nomadism or sedentary life, are constituents of compositionality. Since compositionality is culturally and socially determined, compositionality cannot be separated from social modality. Finally, social modality of the image refers to the economic, social and political circumstances “through which it is seen and used” (Rose, 2012, p. 20). In terms of the village, it involves the indefinite ownership and economic value of the images, and the fact that the FVP compensated the artists but not those who lent their houses to the paintings. Social modality contains identities that were mobilized in the making, the maker’s intent, and the ways circumstantial factors overwrite these original intents. In this respect it is significant that the frescoes are in a Roma/Gypsy village and not somewhere else, or in a building or a closed gallery.

Finaly, I brought the visuals in dialogue with the artists’ oral stories based on

Riessman’s (2008) DPA, adding the audiences/viewers and their contexts into the conversation bearing in mind that narrators, narratives and audiences/viewers are

continuously involved in an embodied performance. Ultimately, keeping DPA’s perspective, I used the following principles when analyzing the visual narratives:

 I recognized multiple levels of audiences. The villagers, artists, the FVP, the media (including the World Wide Web) “tell” stories to one another and to the outside world (among them to me). Before painting, many artists visited the villagers and listened to their stories as audiences. Then they painted the villagers’ stories to an audience that includes the villagers. The Project Leader was not only the curator but also an audience.

 I paid attention to the global, Hungarian, and local context of the murals. From a dialogical perspective, for example, “Fleeing Angels” reveals that Bódvalenke people, the Mohacsians and the Roma/Gypsies elsewhere in the world similarly experience life as refugees without refuge. The local meaning is that the villagers would go to find jobs, but they have no money and have no jobs even outside the village.

 The villagers’, the artists’ and the FVP’s stories enter into a dialogue. For example, Tamara, widowed at 21 with four children and living with her wheelchair-bounded mother tells how she collects wood in the forest. PB paints Tamara’s story with an imagined powerful mother figure on her site, which connects Tamara’s story to the painter’s mother and to the tragic experience of losing her own brother. PD paints one of the villagers as a half-God, and lines up the villagers’ faces behind him. Finally, PD’s mural, “Bódvalenke’s Everydays,” is in dialogic relationship with other murals, such as “Bódvalenke’s Ballad,” which includes other stories collected in the village. This way, private narratives become public narratives and vice versa.

 I conducted thematic and structural analysis. As a result, I identified PH’s comment that “there used to be shortage of bread in the village” as habitual narrative of hunger, the four children with Tamara as encounter with the past, and the whole wall painting as habitual narrative of material and non-material needs.

 I paid attention to the hidden power dimensions between the FVP and theartists. For example nobody ever realized (not even his painter peers) the gallows trees one of the artists hid in his “harmonious” landscape symbolizing that what we see is a “pretentious harmony,” behind the scene people are literally and symbolically murdered (as during the Roma Murders). I recognized this as an attentive viewer.

 DPA includes the Bakhtinian concept that words are loaded with meanings of previous use. This is demonstrated by the various meanings of “Roma” for the FVP, and for the “Roma artists” who rejected this label. Also, the image of the

wanderer and semi-sedentary Roma has romantic connotations for the non-Roma, negative for the Romungros, but, again positive for PH, a Beas Gypsy, who talks about Gypsy wandering as her own past since she has family memories about it. For her, storytelling is part of this. DPA made me recognize that each performance and narrative represents a multiplicity of performances and voices.

 DPA has led me to identify that oral and visual narrative performances are in dialogic relationship. First, since many frescoes were created based on the villagers’ oral stories and dedicated for the villagers, I identified the villagers’ and artists’ performance as dialogical performance. For example, Réka told her story to PG, the artist, who “told” Réka’s story to Ica painting Réka’s image on Ica’s wall. After this, Ica told me Réka’s story that she took her in when Réka was only 12 years old. Also, while Berti’s son helped PD in painting his mural, PD painted Berti’s image and made him for his main figure; he dedicated the mural to “Jr. Berti.” Similarly, after I added the artists’ and their audience’s oral narratives to the visual narratives, I identified them as dialogical narratives. In what follows, I summarize the method of my visual narrative analysis.

 Finally, DPA revealed the non-dialogical relationship between the oral and visual narratives as private and public performances. Since the gallery promotes an artificial (stereotypical) Roma image, the villagers’ stories are silenced. They are not listened to, and their honest opinion is edited out of media reports. Contrary to this, the murals are put on display and everybody can have acces to them. Similarly, while many visitors don’t come out of their cars to speak with the villagers because they are afraid of the Gypsies, they photograph the murals (Lilla). The villagers’ personal narratives divorce from what the FVP tells in public. Finally, the artists’ private narratives counter narrate the “official” (public) narrative of their murals.

 Finally, the dialogic approach is close to the approach Gypsy storytellers took themselves. Bari (1990) has found that old-time Gypsy storytellers often selected their motifs and altered their stories according to their audience’s wishes, and the context of the storytelling. Similar to these storytellers, the artists constantly modified their initial plans while they painted their murals as they often co- authored with the locals–which means that some painters asked the locals what to paint, let local children help to paint, and figured out tales with them–or as they re- evaluated the role of the outdoor gallery.

The following section contains the summary of the Chapter Three.

Summary

In this chapter I discussed my research practices, my field site and the circumstances of my stay on the site. I described the process of selecting participants, my data-gathering methods, and introduced semi-structured interviews and informal conversations as my interview practices. I explained my interview questions, and considered issues of reflexivity and potential ethical issues. Following this I explained

Riessman’s (1993) narrative analysis and Riessman’s (2008) dialogic/performance analysis (PDA) as my analytic approach and the specific methods of analyzing visual narratives that are part of the dialogic analysis. I explained how I gathered, analyzed and validated information for both interviews and the frescoes. Finally, I highlighted that individual and collective, private and public narratives mutually affect each other.

CHAPTER 4: ORAL NARRATIVES

In this chapter, I collect information to answer the first research question: “What do stories in Bódvalenke tell us about the experiences of Roma/Gypsies?” I describe the genres, core narratives and themes that emerge during my analysis of the villagers’ oral narratives. I provide examples from my discussions with people, their stories, and the mediated accounts about them. I add theoretical notions from applied theories and explore the emerging oral narrative genres.

During my interviews and informal talks with the villagers, I found various narrative genres: hypothetical, habitual, encounters with past events (tradition-saving stories are included in this genre)39 and four major core narratives that most specific stories depend upon (narratives of need, pride, separated worlds, and stability/mobility).

As a result, I divided the fourth chapter into the following parts: Foreword to Chapter

Four, Narrative Genres, and Core Narratives.

Foreword to Chapter Four

A small, dingy gray Renault pulls to the curb on Váci Street, one of the oldest streets in Budapest, where thick-walled houses from the 18th and 19th century still hold the splendor of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. I stand in the shadows with my luggage. This is the first time I will meet the leader of the Roma “Fresco Village Project”

(FVP) located in North Hungary; as noted, I will refer to this person as the Project

Leader. The Project Leader, a curly brown-haired woman in her 60s gets out of the car,

39 I consider tradition-saving stories as a special kind of encounter with the past. These stories answer the question “What happened?” and tell about the past. Tradition-saving stories often tell chains of stories while passing identity and culture to the next generation and thereby build cultural pride. 80

hurriedly looks around, and smiles when she recognizes my suitcases. “So you are

Maria,” she says, and without awaiting a response grabs my few pieces of luggage. We are in the car already when I finally have time to reply. “Nice to meet you,” I say.

I had seen many images on the Internet about the FVP that made me curious about the place and stories of the Romungro40 Gypsies. While the Project Leader drives through the narrow streets, impassable due to morning traffic, she starts talking about the

FVP as both her passion and the source of her concerns. She drives me to Csepel, where I spend the night, and we agree that she will drive me to Bódvalenke the next morning.

Next day I arrive twenty minutes early to Heroes Square. The Project Leader’s car is packed with tomato seedlings when she stops beside me. “I harbor these seedlings in my house for a week already,” she explains. During our drive to Bódvalenke she tells the story of the project. Though my primary aim is to focus on the Roma/Gypsy people’s stories instead of the Hungarians’, I record her stories during the entire three-hour drive to familiarize myself with her side of the story.

She tells me that she is divorced and has two grown-up children, works in her own firm that provides translation services, and that with the idea of the Gypsy murals she wanted to help Gypsies in Hungary where there is a growing anti-Gypsy sentiment.

She says that it is hard to manage her responsibilities in Budapest, where she lives, and in

Bódvalenke, where she manages the FVP’s office with Márta, a social worker and the only employee. When tourist groups visit the village from abroad, she usually guides the

40 As noted earlier, these are the gradually assimilated Gypsy group. “Romungro” denotes a particular group of Hungarian Gypsy who arrived in Hungary more than 600 years ago. 81

group through the village and organizes a few Gypsy women to cook something for them.

These days she drives to Bódvalenke and then back to Budapest, which is at best a six- hour round trip. Since the Project Leader drives to the village only if guests arrive or near holydays when sponsors send food, clothes or Christmas packages, she goes to

Bódvalenke infrequently, sometimes more than once a week, in other times bi-monhly or even more rarely.

She looks tired and tense. She constantly smokes, opening the window on her side while the wind blows through her mid-length curly brown hair, providing a final touch to her disorganized presence. She repeats word-for-word the same text that I had read in her previous interviews until she stops at the last megastore before the village to buy ten pounds of apples. “This is for the kids,” she explains.

We take the M3 freeway that merges into E79 from Budapest to Miskolc, Route

26 to Sajószentpéter, and Route 27 to Edelény. The initial four-lane expressway changes to two lanes and then to a one-lane road that leads through the Gypsy villages Szendrő,

Szalonna, and Bódvaszilas before reaching Komjáti. “Most people avoid driving through these places,” she says. I mumble an “I know” without mentioning that I hadn’t yet found somebody to drive me back from Bódvalenke to Budapest. Most Hungarians avoid

Gypsies.

I immerse myself in the calming view of the forest flanking the road. We pass the railroad. Memories of the “Black Trains”41 rush over me and how during Communism they were filled with celebrating Roma men who worked in the big cities and came home

41 The trains that transported the Gypsy workers to the Gypsy villages were called Black Trains. 82

once or twice a month to their families. They worked construction in hard physical jobs but lived “like kings” once they returned home and brought money, food, and cheap toys for the kids. With the fall of Communism, the men moved back to their villages after they lost their jobs. The trains are empty now.

After Komjáti we turn onto a dimpled road. The only car driving on this road is ours. To right and left, wetlands border the road; the area on the right bank of the Bódva River is part of the Aggtelek National Park’s nature reserve area. North

Hungarian Mid-Mountains surround the region –the inner edge of the northern

Carpathians. From the closest village, Hidvégardó, the road leads directly to Slovakia.

We leave Komjáti after passing the stone-walled late Baroque style Reformed

Church. The curvy road leads to the wetlands, which were the properties of the Lenkei,

Kőszegi, and Komjáti families from the 15th Century. Ten minutes pass on the pot-holed road when the first house with the mural of a witch, ten ponies and an angel appears. I realize that the huge painting is on the back wall of an old peasant house after we pass the building and see the front side of the long adobe house with a narrow yard. Old peasant houses line up along the main road –the only road so far. From the direction we enter the village, we see the backside of the houses. Rooftops, like mushrooms, huddle together on both sides of the winding main street. The so-called “CS” houses appear on the left; they look identical in most Hungarian villages. Damaged grey slate roofs, worn walls and empty gray concrete plots show that the Gypsy row is worn out and partially demolished.

Two “CS” houses face the wetlands as their front and back yards.

Hungarian peasants always build their houses on the West side of the plot to face the rising sun. This keeps the house cool from the afternoon-sun during summer, and saves it from the cold during the winter (Kriesch-Kőrösfői, 1911). Gypsy houses do not follow this tradition: indeed, they are built on the East side, and their entrances face the wetlands. Peasant properties are separated by living areas, poultry and pig stalls, and cultivated gardens. In many peasant houses Gypsy families have relinked these separated parts into one large area. Wall-paintings decorate almost every house. The sidewalk is separated from the road by unregulated gutters filled with dirty water. Children and women walk in small groups. We pass about fifteen houses before arriving at the two small churches, the 18th century Protestant church and the 19th Century Roman Catholic church, which compose the “spiritual” center of the village. A bus station and a small food shop further strengthen my impression that we are in the center of the village. I glimpse a signpost next to a bright yellow peasant house with the script: “Fresco Village

Project Office.” The Project Leader skillfully opens the old scrap-iron fence that surrounds the office building. We roll into the yard and park between an open-air furnace and a wheeled well. I feel the special smell of the wetlands as I come out of the car. I compliment the nice design of the huge peasant house that is home to the Fresco Village

Project Office (FVP Office). “Come, I’ll show you your place,” the Project Leader says.

The two-room peasant house consists of a large veranda with huge windows facing the backyard, an office room with two windows facing the churches and the main street, a kitchen, from which the second room (the so-called computer room) and the bathroom open. The old house also has a porch with an old, carved-wood banister. The

grass grows tall in the yard; farther on, the plot ends in the wetlands. The house looks not well maintained.

A well-dressed middle-aged woman with short permed brown hair welcomes us.

Márta is the social worker who takes the bus from neighboring Komjáti and works from 9 am to 3 pm in the FVP office. I learn that her job is to help villagers with their day-to-day

“official” issues such as making phone calls, reading and writing letters for the illiterate villagers, taking care of their welfare benefits, calling banks, doctors, and schools. Márta explains that, although the mayor’s office does the same type of thing, there is little cooperation between the mayor and the project. Before the Project Leader would show me “my room,” which opens from the kitchen, two women, Aranka and Matild, carry my luggage into “my room.” The Project Leader introduces me to the two women: “This is

Marika. She will be with you for a while.” “Oh, this is good,” the women say. I cannot detect signs of either negative or positive emotions in their reply. From now on my name is Marika, the nickname for Maria in Hungary, or Marika néni, which means aunt

Marika; younger generations address older woman as “néni.”

“My room” is a 5X4 meter area with a brown wood ceiling and thick white walls which keep the house cold even in the hottest summer. There are two windows opening onto the main street. There are two single beds in the room, one on the left next to a huge refrigerator, the other under the windows on the front wall. Small tables line the left wall with five computers and monitors upon them. In the middle of the room stands a long rectangular table. Other furniture in the room includes two book shelves full of books from the 1980s and 1990s, and cabinets, still full of the personal effects of the previous

owner of the cupboard. I choose the bed next to the left wall, which feels a little bit cleaner. I am not certain if the smell of dust, mold and dirt that permeates the room comes from the heavy velvet bed-covers or just from the room in general, which has probably not been cleaned for a long time. The room’s two windows are covered by mosquito nets. “From here I can easily follow what happens in the village,” I think to myself. Though, while I live here, the villagers can also observe me easily. From the first minute I feel myself under constant scrutiny.

To show myself to the villagers, I go out to the yard to help the Project Leader in giving out the seedlings and the apples. I volunteer to dispense the tomato seedlings: every family gets three to plant in their gardens. The Project Leader gives out the apples personally, one apple for each child who shows up in the yard. “Can I have one for the little one? I left her with the big boy,” one woman asks. The Project Leader refuses; she wants the children to come and pick up their apples themselves. While we distribute all the seedlings and apples I gain my first impression of the villagers.

The Bódvalenke people are dressed as regular country people but a little more colorful. Many of them wear neon-green and bright pink colors. Most of them are barefoot. Men and women are tall and corpulent with light brown or white skin and huge brown eyes. Most of them have black hair but there are a number of women with blonde hair. They all look very similar and communicate as members of one family. They speak a Hungarian vernacular spoken by the peasants in this area with a lexical range that reminds me of the 1970s. They are quiet and polite. Some of them, unhappy that they can take only three seedlings, send back their older kids who explain they need more plants

for their other relatives who naturally appear in the next turn themselves. The Project

Leader tells them to water the seedlings after planting. I realize the intent behind the seedling act, in which she plays the role of the mother/grandmother of all children, the benevolent helper and civilized advisor of those with “little” knowledge.

I spend this day around the office. I met Christian (59), a Hungarian man who cleans the office. On paper, he claims himself as Gypsy for social benefit purposes.

While he works he warns me to save my belongings since, as he says, everybody who stayed in this office before me was “robbed out by the gypsies.” I feel that he was not supposed to tell me this, since at least on paper, he is also a Gypsy. When everybody leaves and the office is closed, I remain alone in the house with Márta’s instruction that I must always lock the front door, activate the alarm system, and let nobody in to make phone-calls. This is where my story begins.

Oral Narrative Genres in the Fresco Village

When people talk about their experiences, they narrate their lives in different ways. Riessman (1993) highlights that it is a dominant Western idea about narratives that they always answer the question “and then what happened?” She identifies the expectation of a linear temporal development where the narrative has a clear beginning, middle, and ending, and the assumption of characters, plots and culminating events as a

Western bias, suggesting that tellers can choose other modes of representation. In the following section I explicate hypothetical narratives (that tell about events that did not happen), and habitual narratives (that tell of events that happen over and over again without reaching a climax) in the Bódvalenke Gypsy community as different from the

above-described dominant narrative model. These narratives do not answer the question

“and then what happened?” or do not necessarily follow linear temporal development with a clear beginning, middle, and end (they often relay series of events, chains of stories without a climax). After discussing hypothetical and habitual narratives, I provide examples of encounters with the past, which, indeed, answer the question “and then what happened?” At the end of this section, I introduce the relationship between storytelling and traditions and argue that Riessman’s concept of narrativity, although it provides many useful concepts for my research, needs to be extended to the situated and embodied practice of storytelling.

Hypothetical Narrative

As already noted, these narrate an event that never happened. Yet the teller(s) experience the situation as real. As Thomas and Thomas (1928) point out, “If [people] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (p. 367). Hypothetical narratives often appear also as mergers of the real with the teller’s desire for something that they wish was real. Showing up in a narrative chain, hypothetical narrative is often inserted between real stories to turn the end of real stories for dramatic or comic effect.

Since many people tell hypothetical narratives, by listening and analyzing them, we can come to understand the community’s collective life and their desires.

The first day when I stepped out of my room, Márta is in the office already and says that there were already two women who wanted to talk with me. She conspiratorially adds “I told them you are busy.” “I am not busy now” I say, upset that I lost the opportunity to speak with my self-appointed first visitors. I ask the women’s names and

decide to visit them right away that morning. But before I can do this, a new visitor arrives, a tall, thin, graying middle-aged man with a sunburned face. This time the social worker lets him enter directly into my room without warning me of the arrival of my visitor. An alarm-bell rings in my mind. How will I keep my independence as long I live in the office? But I put these thoughts aside and focus on the man in my room. My friends, who are familiar with the Roma in Hungary, warned me to be cautious talking with Roma men privately because it is not a custom among Roma to talk across gender boundaries. But now I have no choice. I welcome my visitor. He is confused to be in the room that is my bedroom but does make an effort to set an “official tone.” He says he must speak with me. I offer him a chair next to the table in the middle of the room. I pull another chair to the other side of the table. I feel that he wants to say first what he came for. I take out my recorder. I tell him who I am and summarize the information he needs to know and agree with, to grant an oral consent. He takes it easy. He says he doesn’t care. He introduces himself as István. Then I begin:

M: May I ask your age? I: I am fifty. M: Since when do you live in Bódvalenke? I: I was born here. My father and mother came here when they were young. M: What do you do? I: I am the cantor of the Reformed church. You should come Sunday to hear me to sing.

He is seemingly disappointed with something. “So you might want to tell me something very important,” I say.

I: Yes. I want to tell you about what is going on here. That the Project Leader dismantled the old Roma houses.

I remember the Project Leader telling me how the local government along with the FVP had to demolish four Gypsy houses out of seven on the Gypsy row because they had become endangered by the rising water level on the wetland, and how they had moved those families from the gypsy row into vacant peasant houses in the village. She had described how the contract permits only immediate family members to move into houses rented by the mayor’s office and the FVP, and penalizes those who let their extended family live with them for more than three weeks.

M: You live in a new house? I: Yes. And my own child can’t come to my house because the local government made a contract that forbids it. I have three daughters. If one of them wants to come to my house, I don’t want the local government to tell me if my child can come to me. There are a lot of families where the kids move out and then they come back. Now my daughter is here with me for 5-6 days. But when the Project Leader comes, she says “I’m getting out of here before they catch me.” And she leaves. There were several film people here but they all hid the real story. I have had enough of this. M: So let’s go back to the old housing. What has changed since the houses were painted? Why are these paintings here? I: The Project Leader did it to be famous. M: Is it good for the villagers? I: The people come here with buses, then they leave. That’s how I see it. (István)

We sit in silence. I remember the stereotype that Hungarians repeatedly tell when Roma do not appreciate their ways of “helping”; that we cannot help the Roma because they don’t appreciate it. Then I imagine the old house which, as the Project Leader told the story, collapsed right after the Roma family moved out. I thought, there might be something more than the quality of housing that makes their old house lovable for this man. I ask, “So how was life before you moved?” “It was hard and good,” he replies.

“Everyone could make decisions. Now, if someone wants to do something, the mayor intervenes and says that’s forbidden.” I understand that making their own decisions is a 90

fundamental need for the Roma villagers. The fact that they are most often not the decision makers regarding their own lives doesn’t stop them from imagining situations when they are.

For example, shortly after he leaves the office, I learn from Márta that István lives in a house that his mother purchased and not in one of the houses leased by the mayor’s office or the FVP. I find everything else “true,” the rules, the penalty, and the fear of being reported when family members move back home, except that it was not his fear.

This afternoon Gergely tells a similar story to what I heard from István:

Earlier we lived down there [in the Gypsy row]. The problem is that we were unwise. We couldn’t read or write [when he signed the new house’s leasing]. We lived there. I had a new house there with seven rooms. But there was a problem there that we couldn’t make a latria. Because if we dug even just a little, the water came up. We couldn’t do anything but we made behind us and then threw the dirt away. What can I say? Then the Project Leader bought the [peasant] houses here. I live in this one. I lived not by myself, we lived there seven of us, the family. And others from the family who always came. It was ours. But this house is not ours. You see, one of my daughters is here now and the police frequently come. How would I send my own daughter away? We don’t know who calls the police, but they call them not even once. And then they penalize us by 10 000 Ft. My daughter stayed here for three-four months then she left. But now my younger daughter came. It is sad [that we have to worry]. Earlier it was not like this. I loved the other house better. It was better for me.

I recognize the similarity between the two, István and Gergely’s accounts. I was wondering where this similarity came from. I found the answer only later. Next day

István knocks on the door before 9 a.m. when the office is not open yet. I open the main entrance. He wears his church-clothes, white shirt, red necktie, and a worn dark blue suit.

As he stands in the door he signals that he is not willing to come in but will wait for me outside. He offers to be my “tourist guide” and show me the frescoes. He guides me to the old Gypsy row and he repeats the story about his alleged rented house: 91

You see, there was a beautiful Gypsy row. This is what the Project Leader dismantled. They were such beautiful houses as this one, here. “Cs” houses. She bought the other houses and demolished this one. For ten years my child is not allowed to put her feet in it [the new house]. My child cannot live there because it is the local government that owns it. I have a house. My two daughters live there. What would I do if I lived there [in one of the leased houses]? They were such beautiful houses. My brother-in-laws still live here. We received this house after 2-3 kids. People received the money [to build these houses] for free.

At this point I figure out that István does not lie. In his hypothetical narrative he says “I,” when he talks in the name of “we.” While he speaks in the first person, he identifies with others in his extended family. The sentence “What if I lived there” highlights his empathy with others. However, it also highlights István’s unique storytelling style in which hypothetical events are told as real. He tells stories that are fiction-like, when it is hard to figure out whether they really happened or were just imagined. For example, István tells the story when, during Communism, he started working with his father who was a violinist but “officially” he worked as a power-saw operator in the agricultural co-operative. When the cooperative fall apart, it was hard for him to figure out what to do.

When I was discharged from the army and came home, my father said: “Son, sign up to be a police officer! I have good connections in Bodvaszilas.” I said: “Dad, I won’t be a policeman. What would I do if I catch somebody?” “Say Good Day to them!”

We laugh at his story. I never know if this was a real happening or just a joke.

On the other hand, I realize that István tells real events as hypothetical. He tells a story about the Project Leader as “Bódvalenke Queen.” He states that “On the Internet, they

[politicians] call the Project Leader the ‘Bódvalenke Queen.’” This seems to me an imaginary story. According to him, when he heard this, he went to the Project Leader and

told her “You won’t be a queen here!” “Do the Gypsies have a king or queen?” – I ask just to end this topic. “No. They don’t,”–he answers confidently.

At this point I remember Roma tales that I read before my travel to the village. In all of them the king had a bad character. For example, there is the tale in Bari’s (1990) collection:

Long ago also the Gypsies had a king. This king was called Fárahovo and had a great power. He was not afraid even of the Holy God who lives in the blue sky. Fárahovo did not like people from other nations who resided in his empire. He constantly persecuted them and thereated them ill, he beat them and oppressed them all. One day the Holy God accosted him: “My Brother, King of Gypsies, why do you whack and torture the aliens who came from far away? Why do you want to kill poor people?” Fárahovo haughtily answered: “Why not, if I feel like it! I am not afraid of anyone in the world!” But Farahovo didn’t listen to God. He continued to threaten the newcomers badly until the Holy God took away his power, and made the Gypsies a people without a king, without a country, and let foreign kings to rule over them until the world exists. (pp. 29-33)

I understand that the label “queen” has negative connotations in this context.

After István told me this story I heard many others in the village call the Project Leader a

“queen” when they mock her. A little girl has the nickname “the Project Leader” because she has curly hair similar to the Project Leader’s; parallel with this, she is also called

“queen.” Months after this conversation with István, Márta told me that she heard in political circles that the Project Leader was called “Bódvalenke’s queen.” So István’s story seemed hypothetical, but it was real.

When telling hypothetical narratives, my informants also show themselves as waggish heroes who outsmart their non-Roma surroundings. As long as István talks down the Project Leader by addressing her as a queen, he shows himself at a higher rank than a

regular guy. As if he could talk with ministers and leading politicians in the European

Union (EU) whenever he wanted.

The Project Leader brought here a karate instructor. But for what? The kids ever since are hitting each other. What kind of law do we have around here? I’ll speak to Zoli Balog [Zoltán Balog, Hungarian Minister of Human Resources] in the Bureau. Bringing karate masters into a village like this? (István)

He not only addresses the Hungarian Minister with his nickname, proposing a possible meeting with him as an everyday event, but also suggests that he wants to go to Brussels to talk with the “boss” there. How to get there or which language to use are not even questions for István.

Though, these “heroes” are not selected ad hoc. Minister Balog visited

Bódvalenke when the “Sure Start Children’s Center” that the villagers call “baby- mummy house” opened in the village. “Sure Start” programs (originally a UK

Government initiative to provide advice, education, and health support for disadvantaged communities) in Hungary open mostly in Roma-populated neighborhoods, where they function not only as a social support but also serve assimilatory purposes. The “baby- mummy house” in the village is independent from the FVP, but starting in September,

2015, it will be supervised by the Reformed Church’s charity service. But since the village is known as Roma Fresco Village, every new program is linked to the Project

Leader (and not to the mayor) as the leader of the village (New Sure Start Children’s

Centre, 2014). The program is an exceptional nursery where mothers and toddlers go to play together. Here well-skilled early education teachers teach them how to take care of their children, make household chores, cook, cultivate their garden, and deal with money.

In a personal conversation the Project Leader said to me that it is very important that in 94

the house a daily bath/shower must be provided for everybody, and washing opportunity with automated washing machines. Eight million Ft (about 29,000 USD) was financed from the budget of Minister Zoltan Balog for the construction, and the H. Stepic CC

Charity provided 26,000 Euros (29.2184 USD). Furthermore, the Hungarian government ensures 530,000 Ft (1,899.34 UDS) per month, and Dr. Stepic, former CEO of the

Raiffeisen group, promised 30,000 Euros (33.7363 USD) through 3 years for the project

(Personal communication, January 18, 2015). On the other hand, Brussels came into the villagers’ vocabulary when in 2013 the Project Leader took ten women to sing and dance there while she delivered her speech about the FVP in the European Parliament’s

ASP5G-2 Conference. Politicians in Brussels and Minister Balog are placed in the role of the “righteous leader” who could save Roma in Bódvalenke from what they experience as unrighteousness.

The same phenomenon comes back in another discussion with a 33-year-old woman, Gyöngyi. She calls me into her house and says that she needs advice because she has financial problems and is afraid that she and her husband will end up in jail. When I ask her whether she knows a minority leader in the nearby cities to ask for advice she says “no.” She has a better idea. She asks:

Do you know to whom I want to go? That man who is next to Orban Viktor [Hungarian prime minister]. The one who was here in the village. A man with gray hairs. He just was on TV: here was Orban’s picture and this man’s picture under it. He is the substitute for him, I think. So I wanted to contact this man. Zoltán Balog. I thought, I send him a letter but I cannot because I am afraid. I would even set up a meeting with him. I would travel to Budapest if I would receive my money once. I would tell him that this and this happened to me, please help. Because I have a big problem. And do you know where else I wanted to write? Not in Hungary. To Strasburg. But I do not dare to write there either. I don’t even know how to write. 95

Although this hypothetical narrative ends with a realistic self-reflection that she is illiterate, while telling the story, the woman plays with the agency of “what if.”

In addition, while telling chains of stories, villagers often insert a hypothetical narrative between real stories to change an unfavorable outcome into a fabled alternative which the teller fashions for dramatic effect. In their stories my interviewees are free- spoken and brave, something that they rarely can be in real life. I was in a company of three Roma women when 42 year-old Irma reports that after many years of unemployment she finally has a job. She describes the hiring process this way:

They just told me there will be a job. They didn’t tell me anything. I go there and tell them what I am looking for. They say, let’s go to the conference room. He says also the colleagues will come. They came five or six of them and started questioning me. So already the first day was not sympathetic to me. What I did, what was my schooling, they asked me from here and there. I say, “Man, ask only one question at a time!” “Yay, such an animated woman you are!” They took me in: “Now make yourself a bank account, buy a travel card, since you have to come here for one month.” They started to tell me that “This is an old photograph, your hair looks different.” Naa, I gave them. “Look, I am too old to be a clown, I am 42.” When I said this, they right away started to make the picture.

This story shows Irma in a better light than she probably appeared in real life, similarly to

Riessman’s (1993) interviewee, Cindy, who inserted an “imaginary dialogue” in her story to juxtapose her real difficulties with a “dream segment,” a dialogue with a person whom she wishes would help her (p. 47). Irma’s “dream segment” shows her as the boss in a workplace where she just enters as the only Roma, where she dreams to be on the highest level compared to the non-Roma. She knits together several stories and themes into a long account which culminates in her claim to prove that she conquers her environment at a level that she cannot master in real life.

After realizing that the others are much slower than her, that they plan everything instead of being spontaneous like her, she adds more and more proof that her non-Roma peers are on a lower level than she is. She continues:

I don’t like to eat at the table. We are used to it, for us it feels better. Not with fork and knife. I eat as I like. Not with fork and knife. I don’t mess up my meal with a knife. I say, I am a gypsy but I would not do what they do. There is buffet. They eat the whole day. Where is the space for so much cola and soda in them? I said to them, a gypsy would never do this. And they are educated people!

At the end, Irma turns to a hypothetical narrative to make a heroic outcome. Knowing that Irma never attended a job-training after she stopped at the third grade in elementary school, and knowing the social distance between her and her bosses, I realized that this end is solely to entertain her audience.

The bosses, they are so aristocratic. One day I made fun of them. They asked for spicy paprika and ground pepper. And next time I took some with me and gave it to them. I said, “You must rub it before you eat.” Their faces were red at the first bite. They almost choked.

Like a good audience, the other two women start laughing, and Irma laughs with them.

This common laughter spiced with clapping and “Yuyy” and “Yeee” voicings close the chain of stories, and they switch to another topic. Irma’s chain of stories started with a real story about her new job, and ended with an imaginary story creating a hypothetical narrative where the narrator wishes to be a hero in a world where she is, in fact, a victim.

Irma’s storytelling reminds me of Kríza’s experiences with the Romungro woman storyteller, who told fictive stories as if they were vice versa. I observed this with many other storytellers in the village.

Similarly to István and Irma, Tamás is a great speaker. Tamás is a 52-year-old man who spent three-and-a-half-years in jail after he seriously wounded three people in a drunken fray. He explains how he “tricked” two Hungarian policemen:

There was the village day last year. Four policemen were sitting here. They brought two liters of wine. I drank the wine here, and the policemen were selling my baskets for me on the street.

This story describes an event that never happened. In fact, to legally sell his baskets he would need a permit that he does not have, so the policemen would have ticketed him and not sold his baskets. Apparently, this story was tailored to me, the “outsider” audience to show himself more waggish than non-Roma.

Another man, András, who also was in jail, tells that one relative who was an uncle to him just died. He is a master in telling the same story as many times as he wants and always differently. This time he told me abut his uncle’s death:

My uncle, Laci, just died. He had a big funeral. But I couldn’t go because then I had a close relative dead . . .

At this point his teenage daughter interrupts him: “You didn’t go because you were in jail at that time!” András changes the storyline as if nothing has happened:

No . . . yes, all right, well, we dug the grave (he takes a long breath) his last wish was this, he always teased me that “Didi, I don’t want you to dig my grave if I die!” but there was nobody else to dig, I had to do it. I went to dig the grave, we came out, the relatives brought us food, we eat breakfast, around one or three the grave was ready. We covered it. The Next day I started dressing up, shaving myself, I don’t want to put this story in [the story] but it was on the same day. They took me away on the day of the funeral (during this sentence his voice is getting breathy, he shows that he is emotional). I had a bicycle ticket. I couldn’t pay the money so they put me in jail. The essence is not this. When they took me away, it was like a star fell down in front of me. I said to them “Hey, listen, can’t you show some humanity? Can’t you wait until we bury him?” They didn’t care, I should get into the car. I left with them. Then my wife told me how the funeral went. I wanted to tell this story. 98

András started telling me about the funeral from his point of view. He was interrupted, he took a detour in the story but still ended up with an imaginary story: I heard from PB–one of the artists who painted in the village– that András stole her photo camera and this was the real reason why he was in jail. It seems that he “wished away” the real happening by telling a hypothetical version of it.

Women tell hypothetical narratives when they go to “kéregetni” [panhandle] from non-Roma. Though it is their daily routine, they never tell stories when they ask for something from each other in the village. Hajni is a young woman whom I see a large part of the day walking with her two babies from one end of the village to the other.

Hajni lost her third baby recently to hunger. I have never seen starving babies but as their thin skin adheres to their face I suddenly recognize hunger. The kids used to cry for a while but then they stop crying when they got tired and dizzy from the long walk. Hajni tells every day a new story to touch my heart:

My mom died. Tomorrow will be her funeral. I couldn’t go even to my dad’s funeral. I would need money to this. At least 2,000 Ft to go there and come back. . . . Yesterday somebody robbed me. It wouldn’t be a problem but they took the money that I put aside in an envelope for the baby’s medication. He inherited my dad’s bad heart. Can you give me 2,000 Ft?

Böbe (39) is another woman who constantly panhandles. She knocks on my door every morning before the social worker opens the office, and afternoons after the office closes. She comes with series of stories that she performs after one another without a break.

B: I want to cook letcho today. Do you have paprika? M: No I don’t. I don’t cook here. I cannot use the kitchen. B: Do you have tomato then? M: I don’t have. 99

B: Not even an onion? M: Look, to cook letcho you need these three, paprika, tomato and onion. If you have none of these why do you want to cook letcho and not something else? [Without answering, she switches to her next performance] B: I feel dizzy. M: What happened? B: I didn’t drink coffee. Do you have some? M: OK. I make you one. B: But I want the package. If you give me the whole package, I don’t come tomorrow to ask you again.

After feeling ill, or saying that the doctor told them to eat something, the most

“popular” stories are about family members’ illnesses. Gyöngyi describes: “My daughter is sick. She has ear infection. I have no money for her medication.” Anna says: “I was in the hospital with the baby. I just came back and I have no milk for him.” Finally Réka argues: “G. is sick. The best medication that would help her costs 2000 Ft. Can you give some money to her?” These women are more successful in panhandling when they are better storytellers. It does not necessarily mean that their stories are the most believable or the most heartbreaking. Sometimes it is enough to have the ability to tell chains of stories, where their “audience” recognizes them as talented storytellers and gives them food.

This is how I explored the role and need of the hypothetical narrative among

Roma people in Bódvalenke. However, I also realized that well-established habits, the assumption that what “used to happen” will happen again and again–another significant narrative genre– plays an important role in the villagers’ life. Habitual narratives connect past and present and point toward the future as one continuous reality by constantly recreating the reality of the narrative they tell. In the section that follows, I explore the narrative of the habitual. 100

Habitual Narrative

Habitual narratives are connected to events, customs and experiences that happen over and over repeatedly—thus blurring the boundaries of past, present and future.

Riessman (1993) defines habitual narratives as “when events happen over and over and consequently there is no peak in the action” (p. 18). I recognized that habits create a narrative after I was invited to a family during my second visit to Bódvalenke in

December 2015. Since my first visit, there had been many changes. The first Roma mayor candidate lost the election; three babies were born; and the leader of the baby- mummy house quit after one month of employment. But none of these seemed to interrupt the order of the villagers’ everyday life. Only one news item stirred up the village: Ervin, who lives with his wife and five children along with his brother and his family in one of the first houses of the village, moves to the center of the village. This story interrupted an existing habitual narrative people shared in the center, which is different from those at the skirt of the village. Ervin and his brothers “used to” live at the edge of the village and this defined his and the community’s life. In what follows, I explain the nature of this habitual narrative.

Ervin and his family used to separate themselves from the village’s social life, they were hardly seen to communicate with others than their immediate family, separating themselves from the peasants and forbidding the tourists to photograph their house or their family. For a long time I had the impression that they are poorer than the other villagers–their kids were wearing old clothes and they were often dirty–until Ervin started talking with me.

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Before our first conversation, when I walked close to their house with my camera in hand he always yelled at me, “What are you doing? You cannot take pictures here! I’ll kick the camera out of your hand.” Also the kids “welcomed” me, yelling from afar:

“You cannot take pictures here. Uncle Ervin will chase you away!” One day I decided to leave every technical instrument at “home” and walked towards Ervin’s house at the entrance of the village. He sat on a stone alongside the road with another young couple. I stopped and exchanged a few words with the couple, whom I knew. When they left, I stayed alone with Ervin. I could observe the tall, sporty young man with dark hair; most importantly I recognized a deep anger in his eyes.

M: How are you? E: Not well. M: ? E: I have a house, almost ready. But I am unemployed again. I wanted to finish it before the winter. M: What is missing? E: Cement for the floor and the doors. But now I don’t even have the mood to work on it.

Now Ervin moves into his new the house because he has a job; he is accompanying the schoolchildren to the neighboring village and the school started using him also as a teaching assistant to help with the most handicapped Roma children. Ervin, who used to live at the edge of the village, now moves into the center. For the villagers both are true: “People like Ervin used to live at the edge of the village,” and “Ervin grew up at the edge of the village along with his brothers, Ervin used to live at the edge of the village.” Geographical places have their own habitual narratives about who used to live there and how they usually live, where people exchange stories that they, as a collective,

“remember well” (Tauber, 2008). 102

But now “Ervin moves to the center. Nothing will be the same,” said the couple who invited me. I remembered that moving Roma families from the Gypsy row into the village resulted in similar emotions, where the villagers recognized that, in leaving the geographical space where they had usually lived for generations, “nothing will be the same.” Shared geographical place created a habitual narrative in and about shared experiences at the place. Hence, Ervin brings “edge of village” habits into the center of the village, where different habits rule.

Which family grew up in which house and neighborhood has a long history in the village. Tamara, who moved back with her four children after her husband died, talks about her mother and the first family members who came to Bódvalenke:

They used to live all together. Here was a “pacsit house” built for all Roma. It was made of twigs and leaves. They only made baskets, weaved bottles, they were herdsmen, and swineherds… and cowherds.

Her mother identified this togetherness as “a beautiful gypsy life” that she loves very much. Jolán néni describes their life when I ask about the Gypsy row:

We used to talk. We had more neighbors here. But now only we are here. I used to tell the people “Come in. Sit down.” There were those younger kids, if I made bread for this one, I made one for the other as well. Well, we cut it, we poured oil on it, it trickled down. And then we gave it to the kids. How would we not give it to them? They love it. There used to be seven houses here. We became old together. But why. But why?

Accordingly, shared social and economic circumstances create a habitual narrative. What they used to do, rests on the community as an unspoken rule. The habits that they worked out not only for themselves, but what they shared, connects them also through the habitual narrative.

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Olivia néni is an elderly woman who lives with her son and her grandchildren in a

100-year-old peasant house. According to the younger generations, she used to tell stories about Roma life in the past; her story strengthens the picture that Jolán néni painted.

My mother . . . we were seven . . . my mother used to bind brooms, she picked flowers and she sold them, so we lived.

She walks me through her regular activities like this:

We had nothing. And then I went to “kéregetni” [panhandle] for the little ones. Who gave a piece of bread, who gave two potatoes in my apron . . . I cooked so for them. . . . When we had a piece of bread, I cooked mushroom soup, sliced it in and we eat.

In this encounter, panhandling is shown as a daily activity along with collecting mushrooms and searching for resources around them, and, in this, panhandling is work that is equal to other work activities that support the family. I often heard these kinds of stories. Common need, activities and tradition create habitual narrative. For example,

Bódvalenke people proudly tell that they worked either in the agricultural cooperative

(TSZ) or other factories during Communism along with their husband, wife, mother and father. What work they and their father did during Communism is still part of their identities. Marika néni recalls:

My husband was 13 when he started working with electric saw. He worked in the TSZ. He had 30 years in job. It was good. Also women could work there. They planted trees, washed, cleaned. There were goose, chicken, pigs and they could eat and drink. We had a weaving factory in Bódvaszilas, half of the village’s women went there. So did I.

All men aged 50 or 60 tell similar stories about how they started working as teenagers with their father as woodcutters or horsemen in the TSZ. Women and men all believed

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they worked hard in those early years. This shows that common occupation and workplace also bring about habitual narrative.

The experiences of shared geographical place, similar social condition, occupation, workplace, and life style that also connect the villagers with their parents and grandparents’ habits, create a resilient narrative in the village. I found that working – panhandling, mushroom collecting, wood-cutting and working on construction, in factories and/or in the TSZ–is part of the habitual narrative in Bódvalenke. This is contrary to the stereotype held by the majority society that “Roma don’t like to work.”

Meanwhile, the Roma people are not the only ones whose lives are led by habits; habits also govern those who intend to help them. Non-Roma also have their own habitual narratives. Ervin’s relocation changes not only his geographical space but also his social/economic status. Since he has a steady job, according to more informants,

Ervin became an illegal money lender (usurer) himself. And with relocating his family into the center of the village he is closer to the immediate resources. Tamás, who lives at the end of the village, complains:

When donation comes, they usually stop in the middle of the village, at the bus stop. So who is there earlier, gets the most. Those who live close to the center, they take everything. Donations also come to the project office; they share it between three or four women who work there. We never see any of them.

Changes that cannot be connected to the individual’s character or agency, only to their white beneficiaries, are new phenomena in this dead-end village. According to the villagers’ accounts (see Vali and Mara’s statements), these changes cause frustration and fear because they threaten the stability of the habitual.

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In summary, hypothetical and habitual narratives do not answer the question “and then what happened?” (Riessman, 1993, p. 17). Because of this, they have different relationships with the past, present, and future than traditional narratives. They tell about lifestyle, culture, common sense, communal practices and represent collective world view, showing the event true for many people as a unite.

Encounters with the Past

“Encounter with the past” is a genre that continually deals with the past (and what happened in past time) in the present through stories and performances. Unlike hypothetical and habitual narratives, encounters with the past answer the question “and then what happened?” (Riessman, 1993, p. 17). In their encounters with the past, the villagers provide explanations about their identity in contrast with non-Roma, the peasants, the non-locals, or other Roma. Narrators constantly evaluate, re-evaluate their encounter with the past with additional stories (Braid, 1997). Finally, encounters with the past include narratives that re-tell events in which non-Roma evaluate the identity of the

Roma. Stories about the villagers’ conflicts with what the FVP constantly reports about past events where non-Roma evaluate “Roma identity.” These modes of encounters with the past gradually coincide with Braid’s (1997) “reported speech and action” in which the narrator recalls past speeches and actions; “evaluations of narrated actions” in which the narrator recenters the past interactions within the narrative event by either constrasting the narrator’s identity with the audience or emphasizing the unity between them; and

“Reported evaluations” in which narrators re-tell narrated events in which their identity is evaluated by the other (pp. 48-53).

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After I ask Móni whether she can remember a story or tale that her parents or grandparents told her, she is visibly upset that she doesn’t know any “Gypsy tales.” “We don’t know how to speak the Gypsy language,” she says. But one day she reached her eureka moment, “My grandmother used to tell stories about what happened in the war.

But those are real stories!” She continues:

When these old folks were still alive they told many stories about wars. My grandmother – I don’t know how many years ago . . . she was 84 years old when she died –she lived during the war. Her husband was a war hero. He wasn’t my grandfather because she had also another husband. She said that her husband was a soldier and he escaped from the Lager. He received a medal for this.

Móni remembers that her grandfather helped someone to escape; he [grandfather] was caught and put in jail. He was there for a long time and was liberated by the

Russians. The end of the story was “Then he was free and he went home to his family.”

She adds a coda to the story, “He was honored and awarded in Hungary and he received compensation. He was József H. in Meszes. He was taken from there.”

I heard many war-stories from those old folks to whom Móni referred, but these stories were not uniquely different from what others–even non-Roma–experienced. What is unique in these stories for me is the additional difficulties that they must overcome because they are Gypsies. For example, these stories always report about large families where the oldest among the children takes responsibility to raise her siblings. Old Andrea néni begins her story when her father died.

I didn’t know my father at all, he fall at the Don. My mother died very early. We were six brothers and sisters, I remained like this [she shows her pointing finger] all alone. I served the rich in the village; I went with the cows, sheep, I did whatever they told me, who commanded me. The kulaks. They looked down on me. They look down on us even now.

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Olivia néni also begins her story at her father’s death; this was the point when, as a child herself, her adult life began:

When the Russians and the Romanians came in, my father died. Our mother died shortly after; we remained seven of us. If one of those soldiers brought us bread, we ate it. They took nobody away from us. We hid. Only the infants stayed in the house. We were afraid. We had a little hut, we lived there. I was the oldest . . . . I went to panhandle . . . . And when they were little kids, we used to get out around this time to collect some wheat ears. I cut the wheat, an old neighbor had a small mill, I took them home, hit them out, sieved them. And then we went to grind them.

After telling the story of “and then what happened?” she arrives back to the habitual narrative. Although WWII was a peak in the narrative of Western history, the space where people “went back” to continue their lives was their habitual environment, which, for the Gypsies meant surviving poverty, taking care of their large families, and being excluded from the majority society.

For younger women, elderly women are the sources of information about the past.

Móni remembers that these old people in the village used to talk about their lives, their houses –the “pacsit house” where people dig a hole in the ground and cover it with branches, leaves, and mud, and adobe houses–and their regular activities in the past: making baskets, brooms, weaving bottles, looking after the cows, swine, and sheep. The herdsmen’s house was originally Leo’s house in the village. “When we come together,

Olivia néni and Andrea néni, they tell stories that we listen to open-mouthed. Only they

[know these stories], nobody else,” Móni says. Interestingly, I have a different experience; I heard these stories also from elderly men in the village. Móni’s remarks that only women tell these stories highlights the tradition that younger women don’t talk with elderly men about their life experiences. Though these stories are “available” for the 108

children as they grow up, Móni, who did not have a grandfather, couldn’t hear them. And since the role of the professional storytellers who were called to vigils went out of custom in Bódvalenke, young women have no access to hearing stories from elderly men.

Men and women are well-informed about the period of Communism, and they tell stories about it often; this period was basically the childhood for the adult generation that they consider the most successful period. Men who used to work in their neighborhood or distant cities, lived in workers’ hostels and traveled back by the Black Trains to visit their families. The Communist era is present in their stories in constant comparison. For instance, András says:

This country goes in the wrong direction. Though in Pest [Budapest] life is better since you can find some jobs there, here the mayor gives jobs only for five to ten men. He doesn’t take me, though, I am with family. I have no schooling. The problem is that I cannot adapt to this reality. Since this world is not the same as it was before, during János Kádár [the Socialist era].

When someone hears András politicizing skillfully about the Communist and post-

Communist era, nobody thinks that he is illiterate and worked as an unskilled worker before the Regime change.

However, people are less informed about the present than the past. They usually don’t know recent happenings in the country and about larger politics. Many of them do not know whether or not Gypsies are discriminated against in the country, they tell stories of discrimination as personal experience that happened in kindergarten, school, the neighbor village, or even in the FVP office. A handful of the villagers recall who was arrested in the near past in different Hungarian cities and how the police mistreated them as Gypsies, and they sympathize with maltreated Gypsies as one of their own. Many of

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them know the story of the Roma murders but don’t know the larger social/political background or the existence of the extreme right wing party in Hungary. But I talked with many people who had never heard of the Roma Murders.

Most Bódvalenke people like to tell stories about their personal lives, but they draw the line at which issues they share with outsiders. Who counts as an outsider depends on the nature of the information; there are things that are discussed only by the couple, some others are shared with relatives living in the same house, a broader circle of relatives, friends, or the villagers. Although I heard many personal stories from both men and women, they rarely talked about intimate/private family issues; if they needed to tell something like “I am divorced” or “we are not in a good relationship,” they only referred to the fact and skipped the details. I met a young man who stopped me from conducting an interview with his wife with these words:

Not because you are not sympathetic for me, but the issue of my family and her family are the concerns of those people involved, only. Those memories are a bit painful. If someone goes to a family and looks around, and it hurts what they see, then it is not a good memory. She or he better keep it to himself or herself, instead. Then it wouldn’t get out. It wouldn’t go around, it won’t become a topic. What hurts, should better stay inside. (Junior András)

As long as I was in the village, I never heard someone sharing intimate/private issues regarding parents, life mates, brothers and sisters, although from many fragments I suspected the presence of abuse. These episodes never came out. Couples keep their problems to themselves even when everybody knows their problems by observing them.

“We know everything because we see it,” says Melinda. But she means definitely not knowing from hearing or talking about such private matters.

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Encounters with the Past with Tradition-saving Stories

I consider tradition-saving stories as a special kind of encounter with the past. In this, stories are placed next to other stories told in the community to “fit” in this pool of stories. Tradition-saving stories are encounters with the past that answer the question

“What happened?”, where the goal is to pass identity and culture (practical knowledge, beliefs, and common sense) to the next generation. These stories tell about the past as evolution or devolution. In Western terms, stories that report about the past are called history. Tradition-saving stories have the same function in oral cultures. Through these, people articulate their sense of who they are and their experiences in their social world

(Riessman, 1993; Gubrium & Holstein, 2009) suggest that tradition-saving stories highlight the situated, embodied storyteller by evoking the direct connection of storytelling and ritual, and, through this, constantly remind us that narratives are also performances. Thus, tradition-saving stories often tell chains of stories that pass identity and culture to the next generation and build community and cultural pride.

Móni’s foster father died a few months before I visited Bódvalenke. I heard from the village women that they cannot listen to music and they cannot sing for a while because of their relative’s death. Here everybody is a relative; one person’s death requires everyone to mourn. In connection with this event I had many conversations about their traditional funeral and their beliefs. People in their 50s mentioned that in their childhood, families used to call a professional storyteller for the vigil. These men went from house to house and from village to village. Móni’s mother, Marika néni, the widowed woman in her 50s, comments, “My mother told me that in her times it was customary to call people

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who told stories and prayed. Now we don’t call people. But earlier they had to.” During the vigil they came together and the family told stories of the deceased for two or three days. Aranka recalls, “When someone is buried, the elders say that he wanders for about one week until he comes to peace. But for two or three months we cannot accept that he is not with us anymore.” This is the reason why they have to feed him, pour drink on the ground for him and tell stories to each other about the deceased, and discuss what happened also with the person who died.

I recognized traditional family events, where storytelling has certain rules. I realized that when people come together they offer drink or food, sit in a configuration where they see each other well (mostly in a circle), and tell each other what happened in the family, though they avoid talking about their wage-work, or other “official” source of livelihood. To understand this I recall Stewart’s (1997) notion that in a Gypsy community, “Earning from wage-work, although more important economically, are ideologically devalued as being fit only for private accumulation in the household.” On the other hand, “The money the Gypsies ‘win’ in (traditional) trading, provides a basis, ideologically at least, for cycles of feastingand celebration” in which the community and

“brotherhood” is ritually created and strengthened (p. 92). So they share stories about what happened with one another, with friends, enemies, or other relatives. For example, I was with Irma when she summarized the latest news for someone whom she did not meet for about a year:

D. married to Szendrőlád. A. is in jail because of stealing copper. Not just him but his brother also helped. As long as A. is in jail, D. lives with someone else. Lately, I had a quarrel with her man. Dirty, filthy, nasty. I will get him, don’t worry! 112

When families come together, they don’t talk about what they do in their wage-work.

Jolán néni explains that family events are special storytelling events:

When relatives come, they come by car, they bring something and we talk: “How are you? What happened?” And we tell each other what happened. But I don’t know what they do [for a living], we don’t talk about work. No, no.

Even so, as long they don’t speak about the work they do in the jobs they are paid for, people talk about the work they do for themselves such as collecting mushrooms, weaving baskets, or building, altering or decorating their homes. These are discussed with the goal of dispersing practical knowledge and building a community.

Spreading practical knowledge has always been connected to tradition-saving stories that inform the younger generation about survival tactics. Since most people are fully or semi-illiterate, members of the community have access to such knowledge only through the stories told in the families. While I was there, Tamás told his son many times how he learned basket weaving from his father:

We had to learn how to make brooms and baskets. We had to know everything. My father used to make baskets and he used to make me sit and watch. And if I made it wrong, he hit on my hand. You need to do something for a living.

When Tamás teaches his youngest son now, he uses the same method to justify the importance of learning basket making. In another case, I heard his wife, Ica telling her young daughter-in-law who originates from another village, “Put the bedding out when it is sunny. This is a custom from our mother and grandmother that it should dry from the moisture and the sweat. These are clear examples of tradition-saving stories.

Customs are talked about less directly in conversational settings. Réka used to invite me to such conversations when we just “sit and talk” while her three-year-old

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daughter sleeps on her lap. Then female family members come and go, occasionally joining the conversation. Yet, she also loves being questioned about her life. I heard her giving interviews when media people came to the village, she was the first to talk about herself. But once she is sitting on the steps she is different; there the thick adobe walls protect us from the heat of the sun, and she doesn’t have to worry about the kids because they are all around her. There she has time to revisit the scene she is talking about, the emotions, and the stream of pictures and sounds. Sitting on the steps of her house Réka tells different stories because then she speaks not only to strangers but also to her family.

I remember that it was almost impossible to use the soundtrack of the interviews I made with Réka for my documentary film, because while she answered my questions, she also paid attention to her kids, husband, older son’s children and her teenage daughter. Yet, even after most family members left the house, she still had half of her family sit on the steps with her. Réka explains that the most meaningful events are these, when her daughters visit home, when they sit and talk about their lives, problems and their sadness.

“Then I say, ‘My child try this, try that.’” Then they share practical knowledge about rearing children, cooking, or solving life problems, or just about their houses. She recounts:

I love dark colors around me, I love to cook there, I love to rest there, I love to listen to music or to sing there, or to put the baby to sleep, or to play with K. or to comfort J. if he has a bit messier day or week. The dark room calms me down. I cannot leave my window without curtain or without some blanket with roses.

When they discuss issues “sitting” on the steps, they share common sense. Though, her oldest daughters already begin to realize that common sense in this village is not

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necessarily common sense elsewhere. This is the reason why Lilla sits with us on the steps; she moved back home after an unsuccessful attempt to leave the community.

Finally, encounters with the past involve “missing tradition-saving stories.” I heard about this first from Aranka, Vali and Móni. After the Project Leader extended her role to become a self-appointed ambassador representing the Bódvalenke Roma people on various EU forums, at one point it became important to perform their Roma identity.

The Project Leader asked the village women to prepare a cultural performance while she introduced the FV Project. For the Bódvalenke women suddenly it became clear that there are traditions they are “supposed to know,” such as Roma folklore, Roma music,

Roma songs, and traditional Roma clothes, but they do not know these traditions.

Romungros don’t speak any of the Gypsy languages, they don’t know Gypsy folktales and Gypsy folk songs, they don’t wear specific Gypsy clothes, and as a result of Maria

Theresa’s drastic anti-Gypsy laws from the middle of the 18th century, they have almost totally lost their Gypsy culture. Not so for the Vlah Gypsies, who arrived in Hungary in the second half of the 19th century, who still speak their language, and who saved their music, dance and other cultural traditions very well. So when the Project Leader wanted a

“Gypsy show,” Aranka started searching for Hungarian folk songs and Gypsy songs on

TV. Aranka remembers:

The Project Leader called us and asked us to sing. And then she told us “OK, you can sing.” Then we learned some songs from the TV. Gypsy songs and Hungarian songs. We learned everything in one week.

Gypsy folklore is a large part of the missing stories. Because they also had to dress up like Gypsies, they just bought some “Gypsy clothes” for the performance.

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Uniquely, the FVP imported Gypsy tales into the village. For example, when I ask Móni whether she knows a tale, the only tale she remembers is a short one: “Long time ago a dragon lived in the wetlands who helped the poor people.” She learned this when one of the artists painted a fresco with this topic, and the Project Leader renamed the customary village day “Dragon Festival,” and promoted the village for potential tourists and visitors.

Before the FVP, nobody in the village could recite a so-called “Gypsy tale.” They do not know even today more Gypsy tales than what they learned with the mediation of the FVP through the frescoes.

Meanwhile, the “missing story” became part of their new identity: they are not

OK if they don’t know “Gypsy culture” that they are “supposed” to know since they are

Gypsies. Hall (1994) critiques this as a colonialist attitude, which is Othering not only in

Said’s “Orientalist” sense, where the other is “constructed within the categories of knowledge of the West,” but where the colonialist has the power to make the colonized

“see and experience themselves as ‘Other.’” With this self-othering, as Hall suggests, cultural identitity “cripples and deforms” (p. 395), although, in this case, the women were cunning enough to fill the gap of the missing story. Which Gypsy group they belong to, which Gypsy culture, which Gypsy tradition they are supposed to represent in this EU event, nobody ever bothered to explain or define. They became “One-size-fits-all”

Roma42 for the day. Through this event I realized that there is such a thing as “One-size- fits-all Roma culture,” and it perfectly fits certain occasions that do not care about distinguishing the unique experiences of people. Meanwhile, facing the “missing

42 See Rövid’s (2009) article on the concept. 116

tradition-saving stories” compelled the realization that they are “short of something,” and, as they are, they are not complete enough or unique enough to fit into the world’s expectations of the Gypsy.

In conclusion, encounters with the past in the village include stories that recall events of the first and second world wars; they are considered “real” stories. Yet, this genre consists of many other stories that report about everyday events, discussions and actions. Unlike hypothetical and habitual narratives, encounters with the past answer the question “What happened?” These stories are linear with a clear beginning, middle and ending, and most often imply that Roma understand history as regression, that they have more difficulties recently than they had in earlier historical times. In this section I shared stories about happenings in the extended family, issues between the FVP and the villagers, and events in the Socialism in which narrators recollect events of the past.

Finally, I identified tradition-saving stories as a special kind of encounter with the past, where similar stories are added to a pool of existing stories that “fit together” and

(re)build tradition, cultural identity, community and cultural pride. Tradition- saving stories save history through which people articulate their sense of who they are and tell about their experiences in their social world (Riessman, 1993). Gubrium and Holstein

(2009) suggest that tradition-saving stories evoke the direct connection of storytelling and ritual, and, through this, constantly remind us that narratives are also performances. Thus, tradition-saving stories are often chains of stories.

With this, I end this section on the oral narrative genres in the Fresco Village that

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covered hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, encounters with the past (including tradition-saving stories). The significance of different genres is highlighted in their different relationships to time, their various roles and different things they accomplish

(their “doing”) in the community. I provided examples of hypothetical narratives that either never happened, or mix reality and fantasy, revealing what the narrator wishes were true. Also, I illustrated stories of habitual events that “used to happen,” which blur the boundaries between past, present, and future. Hypothetical and habitual narratives reveal a community’s desires and constraints. Individuals and groups of individuals often turn to hypothetical narratives to tell what never happened, but what they wish had happened; they stretch the boundaries drawn by their own habits, or trespass the limitations set by coercions they face. Additionally, I analyzed encounters with the past

(that include tradition-saving stories). These genres frequently appeared in my informants’ storytelling.

Since hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives and encounters with the past often mix, stories cannot be divided between true and untrue. As Porter (2002) suggests, from the ethics of the narrative studies it follows that there is not one single truth available in the text. From a communication perspective, these narratives and stories all accomplish various things. They are rooted in reality, are part of reality and have the capacity to create new realities. After discussing issues of genre, in the following section

I turn to the core narratives.

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Core Narratives

Narrative of Need

I next examine the major core narratives: Need, pride, separated worlds and mobility-stability. Material and non-material needs, such as talks of survival, need for equality and need for independence are the major constituens of narrative of need. As it will be demonstrated, motherhood and family, cleanness, and pride of suffering constitute narrative of pride. Stories of a safe place, being locked in the geographical place, Gypsy world, the pre-constructed social space of the “gypsy,” differences between Roma-non-

Roma, strangers-locals, Gypsy-Gypsy and males and females build the narrative of separated worlds. Finally, stories about moving, the role of extended family, the flexible

Roma home, and customs of peddling, sharing, panhendling and exchanging consist the narrative “mobility-stability,” in which the two concepts are in dialectical relationship.

Talk of Survival

“Need” in Bódvalenke is a life style that creates a heroic aura and a community.

During my presence in the village the most powerful narrative is the narrative of need. It is also the most unique experience for me, similar to nothing I have ever experienced, seen or heard before. In general, in Western societies, if we say the word “need” we picture homeless individuals, underdeveloped children, the so-called “least developed countries” or the “Global South.” In all these cases “need” is studied, analyzed and strategies are made to fill needs. But in this village people constantly talk about the need in passing, yet it always remains undisclosed.

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I was prepared to see hunger in the village. The Project Leader told me on the way to Bódvalenke that large numbers of Gypsy families do not have food after the second week of each month. But now when I see the villagers with large bodies and chubby children, I start relativizing the meaning of hunger. I see only a few children with underdeveloped bodies, with faces ridiculously small compared to their peers. I learn only later that the large body runs in the family along with a predisposition to diabetes.

The FVP office where I live is open from 9 a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m. Between 8 a.m. and after Márta leaves, I experience a unique stream of visitors: village women constantly come and knock on my door to ask for something. They rarely name it “food,” they ask for specific items. “Marika néni, could you give me some milk?” “Could you give me a little oil? “Do you have dry soup?” Or simply they say, “I need bread.” I try to share whatever I have. However, on the first Friday when I stay alone with the villagers for the whole weekend, the pilgrimage to my door escalates. In a short time I give out everything

I bought for the whole weekend. This is the day when I start starving with the villagers. I suddenly realize that I am unable to feed the whole village, and there is no way to hide if

I eat, or if I have something. Frank (2012) suggests, “Dialogue begins in bodies before it is expressed in symbols, and it returns to bodies once those symbols are expressed” (p.

40). He refers to Wacquant’s (2004) account that narrative analysts must come to the point where they “get close enough to grasp it [what they study] with one’s body” (p. 7; original emphasis). I arrive at this point this day. Even after the villagers realized this change, they often came back to check my environment. These visits fulfilled the

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communicative function of begging, to map the good or bad Gadjé and narrate their experiences to their peers.

First comes Böbe. I know her way of knocking: strong and persistent. I do not let everybody into the building because the FVP asked me not to do so; I usually go out to my vistors and rarely call someone in when I am alone in the building. I also figured out that talking outdoors is more natural for the villagers; for many, the office means something similar to the colonizer’s house among the colonized. (The difference is that they either see me as good Gadjé or bad Gadjé.) I want to avoid a “common platform” with the colonizers. The big exception is Böbe, a woman in her 30s. I always invite her inside and let her eat some of the food inside because I see that she is pregnant.

Böbe stands at the door. “I go to see the kids. Do you want to send a message to them?”

Though, she never told me about her kids, I say:

M: Say hello to them for me. B: Don’t you want to send them some apple? M: Those are the Project Leader’s apples. I have none. B: Do you have a bagel? I would take it with me. M: I have bread. Come in.

When she is inside, I realize that she came well-prepared. She pulls out two photographs, a bit torn but otherwise well-preserved. She gives me the photos wishpering: “I brought you photographs. These are my children. They are with their foster parents. I brought this to you.” I look at the photograph: two young boys about seven and nine years old dressed in white shirts, around them fancy furniture, artistic paintings on the walls. They smile.

The black and white photograph sharpens the contrast between the two worlds, Böbe’s world and the picture’s. It seems that their foster parents provide them with a “better

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life.” I do not know what to say. I understand why it is that during her visits she hardly speaks. Women usually talk about their children even if they go “kéreget” [to beg]. But

Böbe’s children are not hers any more.

I know from the villagers that Böbe had seven children and they were taken into foster care two years ago, when Szilárd, her husband, went to jail for stealing wood. It was winter. Böbe did go to steal wood up the hill, but as the neighbors say, “she lost her ability to think.” The winter was bitter. The kids were left alone. The youngest kids were already blue when the neighbors opened the door on them. And now, she is pregnant with her eighth child but she denies it. Even now, her husband, Szilárd, often hits her. Now

Böbe is in my room and she changes the topic. She starts her regular performance of begging.

The way Böbe is begging has some charm. She always asks me first about my family. She knows that I have a husband, a daughter and a son. She never forgets to ask me how they are. She talks with me as if I have known her for a long time. Böbe usually begs for coffee, milk, bread, butter, or oil. One at a time. But today she comes with a bigger dream:

B: I saw meat in front of me. You won’t believe this. I was dreaming with meat! M: What kind of meat? B: Chicken rump-back. M: When did you eat last? B: A very long time ago.

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In fact, most people in the village could not even dream about meat. They dream of having at least some bread. Or a little flour, soda and oil to make vakaró43 sometimes for ten people, sometimes even more. So, after Böbe, came the others.

Hajni looks very young. She has dark hair, dark brown eyes; a beautiful Madonna face. She rarely changes her clothes and when people from her street tell her to change her clothes then she loudly answers, “I will be f . . . ed anyway!” I heard that she was famous for her beauty, and her husband sent her to prostitution in the nearby city. And when she finally came back she was vulnerable, she never makes fire in the fireplace, the mashina as she calls it, to cook for her two-year-old and six-month-old children. “What do you give the kids to eat?” I ask Hajni:

H: Nothing. They eat only at 4 in the afternoon. M: Do you give them drink? H: I would give them tea if I had sugar. M: Are they used to not having food? Don’t they cry the whole day? H: No. I walk with them. I have no milk to breastfeed them. They stayed in the hospital for a long time and I didn’t go to them. [She points at her son.] He is ill with his heart—inherited from my father. [She looks at her daughter.] And she, she is ill with her legs. One is shorter than the other. The first I brought home after one month; the second after two months. They got formula then. After that not even formula because she threw it up. She eats now what we eat. Potato, mushrooms. But now I have nothing. Why should I lie? They did not drink, either. ’Cause they do not drink water only sugared water. This is what I used to give them. I used to warm it up on the mashina.

I am wondering why she takes this so naturally, as if I talked about running out of coffee.

This is the nature of habits, that we don’t recognize them any more as exceptional. They

43 Also called “Gypsy bread.” Made of sodium bicarbonate, flour and salt, baked on the hot surface of a fireplace. 123

“used to” not eat. They “used to” not drink. But they “used to” walk to forget how they feel. And they “used to be” like this, where they save their self-confidence even in need.

I remember old Jolán néni told me many things about the Roma past. She said, “If there was no food, it was very bad. Then also the kids only gazed in front of them. When we were young, I used to steal food from my husband and put it in the window for the poor.” But when Jolán néni said this, she talked about 40 years ago. It seems to me that hunger didn’t change for many of them. Hunger became their habitual narrative.

There are “magic” numbers mentioned regarding starving. The fourteenth and fifteenth are the days in each month when the real hunger begins. When they run out of money and their resources then people say, “it starts,” or they say, “I am in it.” They go out to the main street and walk with their many children all day long from one side of the village to the other side. When “it starts” then people go to each other to ask for something and they know exactly to whom it is not worth going to because she has nothing. For example, Mara with her five children is among the first to run out of food:

I bought stuff for 60 thousand [Forint] this month. Come, I’ll show it. It’s this, there was fast soup, pasta, spices, oil, been, lentil, green sweet peas, potatoes, I have had everything. But by the middle of the month everything has gone. It is the 15th today.

The poor people accept anything that others can give. The peasant villagers sometimes help but they cannot always give to so many people. For example, Réka, who has ten children, says:

It is the 20th today and we have no food, no money. We just discussed it with my husband “how will this one and a half weeks be solved?” We have nothing. He went to Rakacca today and he bought 2 packages of flour. But it is only two packages of flour. His sister gave it. Because it is too early to take things out of the garden for a dinner. There is nothing there. Sometimes I give them vakaró, 124

bread with fat, or some soup. As I can. It is many times that we don’t have anything. In the last two weeks [in each month] we know that there is nothing in the pot; there is nothing to put on the table. This every family solves as they can. We used to do this: The man goes for wood in the forest, and we sell the wood for a little flour, fat, potato, spices, a little sugar in the tea. If we cannot have [food] then we sit here and gaze like a calf at a new gate. We, seven, cry more than we eat. And then I blame myself –I should blame the world, not myself—that we have so little income and we cannot keep the family alive and have food, drink and clothing. I can imagine only that for some wonder an angel flew on my house and said: “Look, I cannot provide too much to you but I can cover one month’s food costs.” I would then thank God. This would be good.

In this socially created reality the “angel of the Gypsies” (“or is he a Gypsy angel?”) must admit that “Look, I cannot provide too much.” To stress her suffering, Réka adds a closing statement to her story:

About myself I would add that I would thank God every day if my family wouldn’t experience poverty. That they wouldn’t see that there is no bread on the table. If I could have one wish, my wish would be that He [God] wouldn’t try the human body with this poverty that we experience each day that we don’t have anything to eat and to drink. Because it is one thing that I experience it, but my children . . . I cannot tell them that there isn’t anything to eat. And then we just sit, gaze in front of us, and cry.

I feel lucky that Réka and the other women are honest with me. Some of their peers who collect mushrooms blame the most deprived families for not being resourceful enough. For example, Ica says:

There are women here who don’t go after food. They don’t know what to give to their kids to eat. They are not like me who wakes up at 7 a.m., if I had nothing I go to Ardo, so then when this little boy wakes up I am at home already. I go for wood into the forest, I bring wood in a big sheet, I start a fire to cook something. Only gulya-soup, only egg-soup, it is also good. But I can give some food to my child. I cook beans, egg-soup, flour-soup, potato-soup, I knead vakaró if I have no bread.

Because starving is an intimate issue, it is very rare that men and women talk honestly about the true reasons.

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When women realized that I wanted to know more about their starving, they started changing their stories. In the upcoming passages I will illustrate how they “edit” their own reality when speaking about starving. Then, suddenly, the initial thought, “our children eat nothing” is changed for “our children eat no bread” and “our children eat no meat.” Sometimes they make this double statement of having nothing to eat and having no bread/meat in the same long sentence, right after each other. I remember Márta in the

FVP office telling me about a freshly graduated journalist who came to Bódvalenke to learn what Gypsies eat. She asked them every day for a month what their children ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I remember Márta laughing out loud at the end of her story that the mothers said they gave milk, bananas, sandwiches for breakfast, meat with potato, cabbage and vegetables for lunch, and more meat and desserts for dinner–or some similar nourishing foods, foods they would like to provide for their family. The

Hungarian journalist assumed that they lied. However, I believe that they were dreaming, that they were playing, and they were afraid to tell the truth that their children were starving because they feared that the child protection agencies would take their children into foster care. Most importantly, I think they were afraid that their usurious lenders– who are part of the extended family and who take away their every income–would harm them if they talked about the real reasons for their pennilessness.

Even though the stories about poverty we hear now are very similar to poverty in the past, there are major dissimilarities between the two. The oldest villagers tell their life stories and their poverty in a historical time frame, after the war period, when social networks that supported the neediest did not exist. Then, among the Gypsies there were

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many semi-nomads. Under Socialism, however, it was mandatory to work and it was enforced by the government; almost everyone among the Roma had a decent salary and good social benefits. In the postsocialist era, many people, not only Roma people, lost their jobs and living conditions became worse.

Yet, today there is still a social support system in Hungary. The government pays about 25,500 Ft for each child until the age of 3; there is a 13,000 –17,000 Ft family allowance per child, which increases by the number of children. The FVP web page reports an average 12,000 per capita in 2011. According to this, large families shouldn’t starve as much as they do. For example, Mara says “If we get unemployment money, I get 105 thousands… I receive 96 thousands because I have some debt at the bank and they deduct it. For the children clothes, diapers, medication, baby formula.” It is true that they live in rented houses and pay 800 Ft/month (about $4 dollars/month), and they have utility bills, mortgages, school and travel expenses. It is true that they have difficulties traveling to Edelény to receive unemployment benefits; if they don’t show up they lose their money. It is also true that they lose their social benefits if their children do not attend school. But still, this level of starving on this large scale is not understandable if we consider pennilessness based on income.

Starving is a sensitive issue because it is not only the sign of poverty, but also a sign that the family is ruled by one of the many usurious lenders in the village who take their money away the day after they receive their income. These go hand-in-hand in deprived Roma communities. And since this activity is illegal, the lenders threaten them not to talk about their situation. And since they are in need, their usurious debt

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exponentially grows. “Who has the last word in this village?” I ask an elderly person, who answers: “The loan sharks that appeared with the fall of Socialism. Now there are many on multiple levels. They take the last penny away from the families.” As a young woman explains: “We didn’t have a childhood. We didn’t know what playing was. We couldn’t have a life. We had nothing (Anonymous 1.).44 This is a young women’s testimony about what it means to grow up in a family caught in the web of usurers.

Usury takes a toll on the generation born in the Postsocialist era. Usurious lending

–and the blackmailing and bullying that come with it –was unknown in Socialism, but since then it has became the number one “business” practice among the villagers. There are different levels of lenders; some of them lend food and cigarettes, adding one- hundred percent interest.

Anonymous 2: Usurers take apart the whole family. They ruin the whole family. Something has to be done. M: Who are the usurer here? Anonymous: Oooo here, I can tell you it is almost all. M: Everyone lends to someone? Anonymous: [Sighs] . . . the kids are pushed into such misery that I cannot condone it. One hundred fifty thousand Forint, puff, they take it. If not, they beat the people up. M: They are beaten if they cannot give it back? Anonymous: For example, they set the house on fire. Or they make people let go, leave the village. If they're not home, they go into the house. They chase them away, they threaten them. As they can. They take off the roof . . . the socks from your feet. You know what I mean? They take everything. M: Are they men or women? Anonymous: Men and women. Look at her, she also takes three families’ money. Until they have not even 10 pennies. (Anonymous 2.)

44 I am using “Anonymous 1.” and “Anonymous 2.” and “Anonymous 3.” to give extra protection to respondents who provided information about the loan sharks in the village. I do not provide their age for the same reason. 128

The problem with usury is mentioned by every villager, except a few more wealthy families. With this I do not want to suggest that those who have permanent income are necessarily all usurious lenders, though many of them are involved in it. I also know a few people who do not have permanent income but manage to start usurious lending.

As the narrative of hunger is present throughout generations, so is the need for shelter and to satisfy other basic needs. The generation who are in their 60s tells about raising their children in homes where they slept twenty of them in one room, with straw on the floor, covering themselves with clothes. So the narrative of hunger is always intertwined with the narrative of other basic needs. Ica, Tamás’ wife recalls:

Listen, I sold brooms and baskets, Jolán néni looked after the children for me. I went…my husband was in prison for hitting someone, he did not steal, he beat up someone. He was taken. I raised my children by selling brooms and baskets. After he came out of jail, he didn’t recognize them. . . . I raised ten of them. We had a bed where we slept on the iron. We were so poor that we didn’t even have a sheet. [When I had my babies] the doctor gave them formula, [since] I had no food, no milk. They were those huge formulas–not like these small ones now— they gave us five and six boxes. We warmed up the water—the nurse showed us how. We put it in the bottles, they ate it, so we went. We had no diapers, not like today. At that time there were cotton diapers but we couldn’t buy them. We had no money. We reused the sheets and rags, we were so poor also then. We put those under them. I came home from selling the brooms and cried over the field. What should I give to the kids. They took away my husband, he got two years and nine months. I raised the kids. Other women would put them in foster care. But I had no heart to let them go. If my children are ill, I cry along with them.

Families in Bódvalenke have bedding today, but many homes still have no other furniture than beds. The divide between the poor and “rich” is whether they have furniture other than beds. For average families the biggest concerns are still how to heat the room in

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which the whole family gathers during the winter, what to wear when it is cold, and how to feed the children.

When I enter Mara’s house on my second trip, I see that the fireplace that was in the kitchen during summer, is taken out from the kitchen and put in the big room where the whole family, seven of them, sleeps together during the winter. She feeds the fire with paper, cartons, some wood and old clothes, burning up everything possible to keep the house warm. Her five children along with the neighbors’ children sit on the bed and watch TV –she buys the electricity on a pre-paid card and uses it only for the TV. When she calls me in the house the kids watch some lip-synchronized American soap opera that always provides new names for the newborns in the village. The two youngest children are without clothes. The room is nicely warmed. Mara just finished hand washing their clothes; she will dry them in the room when the kids go to sleep. She complains about not having warm clothes for this winter. She just bought jackets for her older kids because the school sent letters to the Gypsy parents requesting them to dress their children more warmly. But the youngest two can stay in the house as long as there is winter; they do not need many clothes, she says. She can walk the babies in sweaters to her mother-in-law’s at the end of the street. And they never go farther.

There is some heroism in the way Mara manages her family’s daily life while keeping the kids happy. The way she tries not to accept that poverty necessarily comes with suffering. And while I think about how hunger is one of the master narratives in

Roma/Gypsy life, I wonder how a tale like this Gypsy folk tale can incorporate all the elements my informants still experience in their daily lives:

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At the very end of a small village in a small hut lived a young, beautiful gypsy woman who raised five children alone. Her husband was in jail. The Holy God knocked on the young Gypsy woman’s door: “Oh, beautiful daughter, let me in! I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, there is nowhere to sleep, the rain falls on me and the cold wind blows on me!” The young woman felt sorrow and she let him in: “Come on, old father, sit down and eat! There is a small piece of bread, half is yours, there is a little musty parlor, take half of it!” […] And then the Holy God saw that the little children sleep on straw scattered ground. He felt pity for them and told the poor gypsy woman: “Listen to me, my daughter, I'll help you! But you cannot tell anybody that I am the one who helped you. Because I am the Holy God. I will keep coming to your house and I will bring you food to eat! […] Oh, the gypsy woman was very happy because the children were thin and hungry a lot! Her heart always broke when the little people asked to eat and she could not give them bread! And how, oh how, people started to envy her! The gypsies noticed that someone would frequently visit this woman. She never went out to the village to ask people to eat, or begging in the village, and still she had fine clothes, and her children were beautiful as angels! Their skin was brown and they were dressed in white by Holy God. The woman’s husband had been freed from the jail and soon heard what the gypsies were saying. He asked his wife what happened and started to hit her. She told her husband their fortune but the man did not believe it. She was crying, she was crying and began to confess. And he beat his wife even harder. The Holy God saw everything. He felt sorrow for the Gypsy woman. After a while, the Roma was returned to the prison again, […] the gypsy woman was praying in vain then, again. But the Holy God did not help. He said unto her: “I do not help you anymore, because you betrayed me by telling your husband our secret!” This is the reason why the gypsies are so poor and have nothing, because the Holy God turned away from them then. (Bari, 1990, pp. 112-15)

Gypsies have many explanations for why they are so extremely poor. It is easy for them to tell a new story every day about their poverty while they go begging, when they answer their children’s questions, and when they face outsiders. In contrast, they don’t share stories about their hunger, because they don’t share their intimate affairs with

“strangers.” Hunger is an intimate affair. It needs to remain undisclosed. People constantly talk about it in hidden codes because intimate affairs are shared only with the insiders who understand it without words.

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The way need is communicated in-group among Roma people totally contrasts with the interest of the non-Roma who “want to help.” According to the “helper’s” logic, more publicity for poverty helps to gather more money to overcome poverty. This, however is not what Gypsies think. If their starving is “advertised,” it insults their pride, lowers their self-esteem, violates their privacy, and might hurt their family if their need attracts the child protection agencies’ attention. Statistical data show that the rate of

Roma children in foster care in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplém County (where Bódvalenke is located) was eighty-three percent in 2010, and since then has constantly risen. Many villagers compare the Project Leader’s asking money for the Roma by playing up their full-scale needs, to a badly executed begging. In begging, Gypsies do not subordinate themselves to the Gadjé (Tauber, 2008). They customize their communication to the

Gadjé to get what they want. But they never share intimate information about themselves and their children that would place them at risk. According to the Roma people, when the

Project Leader or other non-Roma “helpers” publicize their needs, they degrade and demoralize them by denying their capacity to fulfill their role as Gypsy women. Vali says this about the unwanted publicity:

The Project Leader says every bad thing about the village on the Internet. That we always starve [Her husband comments: “She talks down the village!”]. That the children are starving. She does this not because she wants to hurt us. But it hurts that [she says] we starve. Because it is one thing that we don’t have, but we go until we find something and then the kids have something. But she does this because then she gets support. But it is not everything that she gets, because we don’t get anything from it. And she puts us on the Internet and she gets support. I want to say that we don’t have a share from it. For example if she brings a food package, I cannot remember since how many months she brought food here. Though we would need it. Since we are in that situation.

Starving is an intimate/private issue and fully shared only among insiders. 132

Others, who think that the Project Leader knows about usury in the village, think that she wants to have good relations with usurer lenders to secure and strengthen her position. From this point of view, speaking about the misery of the people is complicity.

Would it be different if one of the villagers revealed this information instead? Would this person want to mention their struggle with the usurious lenders? The question is difficult.

Because even after Péter Hoppál, spokesman of the FIDESZ, the leading Hungarian political party, said to the media that “for today, it is the end of the era when authorities turn a blind eye toward some areas, typically in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Borsod-

Abaúj-Zemplén counties where loan sharks are looting,” they turn blind eyes towards what happens in Gypsy villages (“Fidesz: A szegények,” 2014, p.1). In Bódvalenke usurious lenders still have power over people in need. And while many villagers are hardly able to satisfy their basic needs, usurious lending places them in ever-growing need. Yet both villagers and their “helpers” avoid talking about this. Marushiakova and

Popov (2011) call attention to the fact that history, at least in Roma inclusion, shows no development but a circular loop:

One well-known international study focusing on poverty and identity in Central and Eastern Europe conducted under the leadership of representatives of the Hungarian sociological school contains the recurring ideas and conclusions of the school that we have come to know in the 1970s. The Gypsies are described [again] as a special “underclass” and bearers not of their specific ethnic culture but of the “culture of poverty.” These lead to a new classification of the Roma/Gypsies as ethno-class. (p. 58)

According to Marushiakova and Popov (2011), this leads back to Judith Okely’s anthropology that rejects the Gypsies’ Indian origin and connects them to “an agglomerate of various marginal sections of the European population . . . who were cast

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out of society during the industrial revolution” (p. 58). Marushiakova and Popov (2011) suggest that we arrived at the condition where, as in the Socialist era, “the denial of the ethnic dimensions of the Gypsies, a point that was meant as a first step towards assimilation of Gypsies into the mainstream culture” became dominant again (p. 58).

However, if we listen to the villagers, their stories reveal experiences on a wide scale that surpass the narrow category of the “culture of poverty.” At the beginning of this section, I suggested that it is difficult to study “need” in Bódvalenke because it is, at least partially, intended always to remain undisclosed to “strangers.” Yet, since narratives have their own power to “do” something, I let narratives themselves fill the inescapable gaps in my analysis. In the following section, I analyze need for equality as I identified it in the villager’s stories.

Need for Equality

When using the word, “equality,” it is necessary to start with a terminological specification. The Oxford Dictionary defines the word “equality” as the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. Equality in rank encompasses a lack of subjugation and hierarchy. To further clarify the cultural connotations of the word, I turn to Stewart’s concept of kinship, the basic form of Roma/Gypsy communal organization, and Tauber’s remarks regarding rules for dividing goods obtained by begging, which further explicate the state I call “equality.” First, Stewart (1994b) describes Gypsy social structure as a metaphoric “tribalism,” a world view “which attaches little importance to the age, generation, parent-child relationships and the concept of successive generations” where “even the concept of childhood is downplayed,

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because the purpose of rearing a child is to expose young Gypsies to independence as soon as possible” (p. 1). Stewart’s “tribalism” concept represents “equality” as lack of subjugation and hierarchy. Second, in her article about panhandling, Tauber says “The fear of being the object of gossip, which the Sinti call ‘eating oneself on someone,’ has a fundamental symbolic efficacy in the social control of dividing goods obtained through beggary” (Tauber, 2000, p. 1). In this, Tauber reveals that each individual is under the community’s control that reinforces the possible highest level of equality. So “equality” is not an individualistic but a communal concept, and is rooted in the social structure of kinship and secured by the force of gossip.

During my first days in Bódvalenke I face a surprising obstacle: wherever I go, whoever I talk to, people speak only about the FVP; they are either with the Project

Leader or against her. People are conditioned to talk about the FVP and the Project

Leader and they act in accordance with their conditioning. When I realize this on the second day, I decide to take a break and withdraw from my interviews until people open up to tell their own stories instead of the FVP’s stories. I understand that reporters and journalists who come into the village act as if the village didn’t exist before, and as if

Roma people could not have a life of any kind without the FVP, so my interest is new and unusual for them. István confirms this by stating, “Nobody wants us to contribute.

Nobody wants to hear our voice.” My new strategy is that I am silently present among the people all day long. I do nothing but listen for one whole week. I start realizing changes after the first week. “This is a real story” begins Réka when I pass her on the street. As

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usual, she starts complaining. But this time she goes further and reveals her personal struggle and the existing power-line between the villagers and the FVP office:

You know, there is Márta from Komjáti. She used to come sometimes [to me]. As long as I didn’t chase her away. I don’t like to be rude with anyone, but now I had to tell her. She came here one morning. Sometimes when I wake up late the house is messy. And then she came with some alibi, some pretentious reason. And then she looks around and criticizes. Others say “If we come to you, Réka, and we know you have 10 kids, you are sugar clean considering that you have 10 children!” But you should go where there is only one or two children and look around there. Because I don’t raise my kids in dirt. If I can clean after them only later it is because of this. That I woke up late. And she looked around and said that we don’t deserve this house. She felt sorry for this house. Because we lived down in the wetlands. I loved more that house in the wetlands.

Márta’s notion “you don’t deserve this house” puts Réka in the child’s position in a parent-child relationship. Also, when Márta says she feels sorry for the house, she is the

“civilized” other who puts Réka in the “savage” role as a person who is unable to live in a

“real house” other than the “Gypsy house” on Gypsy row. Again, I understand why life on the Gypsy row was better for Réka: there they were equal among themselves. There nobody “observed” them and criticized them from a “higher position” within their own house.

Enikő tells me a similar story. When I go back to the village the second time, it is winter. Enikő, Ervin’s wife, knocks on my door after the office worker leaves. She does not want to come in. She walks to the window and waits for me to open it so we can talk:

I'll tell you honestly, I am afraid to come down here. You cannot talk with them [the FVP]. You cannot find the words with them. They always come with the baby-mummy house because I don’t go there. I have four children. I don’t have time to go there. They say, I could wash there, but I wash by rubbing the clothes by hand. Last time the Project Leader said that I keep my children in prison. That I keep my children in darkness. That I don’t let them out. But they go to school and kindergarten every morning. And then they come back in the afternoon. And when they come back they go to Daniella néni to learn. . . . I don’t like this. I am 136

not a child, I know how to raise my children. If Márta is in a bad mood she is screaming and yelling at us. They cannot do this, what they do. She doesn’t like gypsies. I cannot help that I was born a Gypsy!

In all of these situations Enikő is put in the child’s position, presupposing the need of the

FVP’s constant advice and supervision. She is criticized because she does not want to go into the baby-mummy house with her children, and because she washes their clothes at home etc. The sentence, “I am not a child,” unveils that she rejects the uneven power distribution. Similar to Enikő, Réka also complains that the FVP creates inequality among the villagers and subjugates them. She says that she feels excluded also from the clothes distribution as well because those few villagers who work in the FVP office take the clothes for themselves and “those who are in the biggest need, we receive nothing.”

Réka realizes that those who moved into the village to “help” harm their traditional communal life–one that is based on equality.

The Roma hold each other equal in the village. For instance, in connection to the upcoming mayoral election I ask people whether or not they respect some more than others among themselves. To the question, “Who has authority among you?” a few people say “the loan sharks.” But the majority of villagers answer that “There isn’t anybody. Everybody is a relative here.” When I ask Jolán néni who would be best in leading the people in the village, she answers, “My husband. He is the best dancer.”

“Leading” one another in the village is such a strange idea that she does not fully understand the question. When I continue to ask “Have Roma people ever had any leaders here?” Orsi néni answers, “Never. Haaa, some of them never worked.” She

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interpreted “leading the village” as leading them as a work leader. They see each other at the same level as members of an extended family.

Roma people imagine the village as a community of equals. Some of them think that village dwellers help each other, others complain that nobody cares. But they never doubt that they are equals, and nobody should direct others. “No…no…no. It is not customary here. That you are rich and you don’t talk to me? One Roma doesn’t do it to the other” (Jolán néni). The fact that in the village everybody is related comes with this consequence.

Things are different in other villages, though. My young interviewee, Levente, explains the difference between Bódvalenke and the neighboring village:

In Tornanádaska there are three clans, Cs, T, and F. There is a big bustle there. The peasants moved out. Also the mayor is gypsy. So we could say that it is a real gypsy village. The mayor there solves everything, there are lots of jobs there. Maybe it is because the mayor there is gypsy. But it can also be because he is not from the village. Since if the mayor would be a gypsy from the village, then he would favor his family and relatives and would exclude others. This is why I think that a mayor should be from outside. I think so. To put power in people’s hands is a big deal.

But in Bódvalenke everybody is a member of the one extended family. Also, the role of the mayor is not as clear as in those neighboring villages because Bódvalenke’s mayors must share authority with the Project Leader. Because after the Project Leader agreed with the former mayor and persuaded the people that the wall-painting would benefit them, she started representing the Bódvalenke Roma people at different Hungarian and international forums. She opened an office in the village and actively participates in initiating changes, starting new programs, bringing entrepreneurs into Bódvalenke who usually stay for a short time and leave. Lately the Project Leader took five employees to 138

clean, to cut wood and heat the office and the baby-mummy house, so now the FVP, through the Reformed Charity Service, is also an employer. Therefore, there is a strong competition between the mayor and the Project Leader. But it is an unequal competition: although the mayor must be elected frequently, the Project Leader is always in a leadership position without asking the people. The Project Leader is the only leader in the village who was not elected, therefore she can never be unelected, and Márta is the only employee who would not be dismissed even if the villagers complain against her because it is the Project Leader’s sole choice of who she works with and what she does.

István tells the story of the latest village day when the Project Leader spent lots of money to pay for the musicians. This caused disappointment among the Roma. People felt that it is a waste of money to pay musicians if the villagers have unfulfilled basic needs. They think, if there is money available they should spend it wisely. “Who does she help? Who does she help? She helps her pals and the rest should get lost,” says

István. Many of the village people shared this opinion; they expect the FVP to spend money appropriately for things they really need.

The idea of equal sharing often came up regarding donations. Tamás tells the fate of the latest donation, and the way he would share it differently:

They received a donation again. Where did the Project Leader put it? Her friend took the whole thing. They picked and took it. I didn’t get anything, not even a T- shirt. Those who work for her, they wear new sandals and shoes. The Project Leader is lying, because she says everybody takes it. They should do like this. They brought donation by car? By bus? Then “here is, my friend, one for you, one for you.” Then it is not picked over. “Here is your bag, it is yours whatever is in it.” They should do like this. Not that they let 6 gypsy women in and the rest receive nothing.

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Tamás sticks to the ideal of equality because they are all family members. They stick to equality even in their everyday practices. Vali says:

Even though the big girl is not with us—though she comes home—I think also about her the same way. The girl comes home. With the boy. We need a bed. I saw on the Internet an adjustable canopy for 10,000 Ft. It is not expensive. If I can, I will buy it for her as I did it for the other children. But if I can’t, I buy neither of them. I usually don’t make exception.

The villagers want to be equals even though they know about the differences in their economic status; they say that they must treat each other as equals, and be treated by others as equals. The following Gypsy folk tale shows a similar philosophy of equality:

A poor woman had 17 children. Once the Holy God visited her and said to her: “Show me your children, I want to bless them!” The poor woman was ashamed that she had so many children, and showed God only ten; she hid the rest. God blessed the ten children, these became the rich. The seven children whom their mother hid from God could never be rich. From these seven descend the Roma. (Bari, 1985, p. 29)

The lesson of the tale is that the woman is not supposed to hide her seven children from

God’s blessing, but treat them equally.

However, not everybody in the village shares the ideal of equality. Many of those who have continuous employment–the only workplace is the community service, where the mayor decides whom he employs–began usurious lending to the less lucky family members. Also, according to István, “there are about six or seven brothers who right away jump if you say something.” Many villagers say that these men supported Zeno, the first Roma mayor candidate, and ensured their family members that if he is elected they will “make order” among them and “teach them how to work.”

People complain against the previous mayor that he did not understand them; they want a Roma mayor who can empathize with them. András says about Zeno: 140

He sees our everyday struggles. Well, the present mayor also sees, but he understands suffering not like us, simple people, who say, “Look, I walk up to that hill because I just want to sell it (the stolen wood) . . . but what if I will be caught by the police?

With his “tough brothers” around him who flaunted their power, Zeno lost the election to the non-Gypsy candidate in a 220-member village, where there are only about 20 non-

Roma villagers.

Aranka says that in one of the surrounding villages the mayor is a Gypsy women and she is a popular mayor for the past eight years. Also, in another village a Gypsy man was elected a second time. But in a third village where two candidates were running for the mayor’s office a non-Gypsy won the election and his Roma opponent “visited” him with his brothers and threatened that his family would be killed if he accepted his position. According to an anonymous witness:

Many Gypsies went too far in Bódvalenke as well. They told us before the election that “now all of you will suck. You will all crawl in front of us.” Not Zeno [the Roma mayor candidate] but his brothers. They were terrorizing the others. So, people didn’t elect him. (Anonymous 3)

Villagers also disliked that Zeno “drank” ahead of his victory. He invited the whole village to a party the night before the election. But this signified for the villagers that he is a “crazy gypsy” who is not cautious with his money, and who would lead the village into debt.

Zeno evaluates the happenings differently. He says he lost the election because his opponent paid the Roma people. Not everybody, only those whom he couldn’t influence in other ways. He continues, “Well, what kind of people are the Bódvalenke people? Poor. They needed money. I couldn’t give them. He had money, gave them and

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won.” When I asked Zeno, the Roma mayor candidate, “If you had won, what would you do differently?” he answered:

Well, he [the previous and recent mayor] shouldn’t handle the workers as he handles them. I guess, you saw the road up the Gypsy row how it looks. Those houses stand in water on both sides. It is because the workers, do whatever they want, if they want to work they work, if they don’t want they don’t work. He [the previous and recent mayor] won because of this. Everybody goes where they want. There is no boss. There is no discipline among them. They don’t work eight hours only two. For them it is good so. There is no discipline. They get the money the same way [as if they worked].

According to this, Zeno does not show empathy towards the villagers. Marika néni vehemently argues against having a Roma mayor in the village:

Marika néni: God forbid! They shouldn’t elect a Roma mayor here! M: Why? Marika néni: Because. M: What would happen then? Marika néni: I don’t want to talk about it. But this we musn’t do. To elect a Roma mayor. Here everybody is a brother. It would be worse. We would have good [candidates] but they don’t run. They don’t run.

Though she starts with an objection to the idea of having a Roma mayor at all, she then changes her mind and leaves open the possibility in the future. She has objections only against the person, not the Gypsy. Ultimately Mara’s one-sentence answer summarizes the villagers’ decision: “We cannot let one of us rule over us.” Their devotion to the ideal of equality is bigger than their fears, as well as overcoming the logical and emotional argument that they need a Gypsy mayor to represent them.

For the Bódvalenke Roma people, equality is a significant need because they experience unequal treatment in their daily lives. They are often handled as children, as uncivilized people with little knowledge about the world. They seek to be treated as people with equal rank, status, rights, and opportunities without subordinating 142

themselves. The need for equality is closely connected to the need for independence discussed in the following section.

Need for Independence

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word “independent” as free from outside control; not depending on another’s authority. Someone who is independent is capable of thinking or acting for oneself; not connected with another; and not depending on something or someone else for strength or effectiveness. When I use the word “independence” for the state of being independent, I draw upon all these meanings.

In Roma communities, independence is a complex concept. Culturally determined are both what counts as a tolerable level of dependency upon outsiders (for example, the surface relationship with the “good Gadjé” who gives them food or regularly buys their brooms or baskets), and what counts as unwanted dependency (entering the hierarchy of labor structures and/or market capitalism, or into a dependent relationship with the Gadjé with no easy exit from the relationship). On the other hand, avoiding dependency upon outsiders is juxtaposed with interdependency with insiders in their community. In this section I focus on narratives that reveal the Romas’ need for independence.

First, Roma people don’t like being helped by the FVP office. Vali explains:

When people came here and took photos of us and the kids, and they brought something, it felt much better when they gave things to the people themselves, and not to the project. I even told the guys that this is exactly the way things have to be done, and if they bring something next time, they shouldn’t give it to the project but to the people whom they see are the most needy.

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According to Vali’s account, people do not mind being helped by individual donors to

“get things” (this counts as tolerable dependency because it does not build a hierarchical relationship), but they do not want to be dependent on the FVP (which counts as an unwanted dependency because it builds a hierarchical relationship). The main difference between the two is, first, that the relationship with an individual donor is a one-to-many relationship because in this, one Roma receives from many Gadjé either nothing or what is left over for the Gadjé (Piasere, 2000; Tauber, 2008). Second, the relationship with the individual donor stops at a superficial level; therefore, it is easy for the Roma to exit from the relationship whenever they want. Individual donors do not impose persistent dependency upon them. On the other hand, the relationship with the FVP is a one-to-one relationship where a person is required frequently to contact the same person (Márta or the Project Leader), and where there is no easy exit from the relationship. Their relationship with the FVP thrusts them into a stable hierarchy where Roma are fixed in dependency, in subordinate positions. Therefore, as Vali says, they want to be independent of the FV Project:

In my opinion it was better when the project was not here. Since even when they were not here, the gypsies were OK. Everybody was talking with everybody. But now that the Project office [FVP] opened, one-two people, three-four people were getting in, they cooked their soup, and there was always the big quarrel. Even though we were brothers or sisters, we were angry with each other.

From the FVP’s point of view, Bódvalenke Roma people were not well off until the project arrived. This is stated in the program’s agenda: they went to the village to

“help” Roma in need. Yet, as is clear from Vali’s comment, she apparently believes that the FVP destroyed the brotherly and sisterly relationships that helped each other. Lever

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(2012), a UK-based sociologist, calls this the Roma need for self-help. He observes a similar aversion in migrant Roma communities toward agencies that want to “help” them.

Lever notices, “[Roma] can be extremely suspicious of the intentions and actions of non-

Roma. Self-help is thus a key feature of Roma culture and many Roma migrants are extremely reluctant to engage with support agencies when they arrive in England” (p. 3).

Similarly, Vali notices that “help” that comes from the FVP works against the community by making them dependent on the FVP.

Vali misses Roma involvement in what is going on in the village. She doesn’t like that everything is mediated by the FVP to build stable dependency; she wants direct connections with many who help a little. Vali dislikes that the Project Leader does not make space for them to do things independently. They are only called on to assist the

Leader and to serve her when she needs them. Vali states, “It would be better if the

Project Leader was explaining how to do things; Máté [her husband] could do things as well. Or there are a few others who could speak with the people better.”

Meanwhile, villagers show independence from both the Project Leader and the mayor, but they do not unify to represent this common belief. Kristóf, an engaging, smart young man, even has a remarkable counter-argument about why representation is difficult:

K: Is it good for us that the Project Leader and the mayor lead the village? I would say, it is good for them [the Project Leader and the mayor]. And the Gypsies tolerate them.But I would never want to lead them. Because where there are more than 10 Gypsies, there are 100 demons. One shouldn’t put power in the hand of a gypsy. He cannot live with it. M: Where did you hear this? K: This is my feeling.

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Here we see the internalized negative stereotype of the majority society manifested in a story about the “demons” of the gypsy.

I finish my analysis of the narrative of need–which consists of needs for food, clothes, shelter, equality, and independence–in noting the clash of two conflicting narratives in the above review: one that shows the agency of the villagers who are able to manage their lives independently (though sometimes they need to learn new skills); and the other narrative, which reports the “demons of the gypsy” and withholds or denies their agency. In the following section I examine the narrative of pride that I found among the villagers, and explore the relationship between narratives of need and pride.

Narrative of Pride

When identifying the phenomenon of “pride,” I also have to clarify the concept of

“dignity,” which is often associated with “pride.” However, in the village pride is not synonymous with dignity. We might recall Leo’s lamentation that the letter “G” [standing for Gypsy] is always on the Gypsies’ back, and “They could be improved only with more jobs, more money and more honor [becsület].” The connotation of the Hungarian world,

“becsület” [honor] includes also “emberi méltóság” [human dignity]. Accordingly, dignity is relational: one is honored by others. Dignity includes mutual recognition.

Dignity can be harmed and can be “improved” or “restored” in relation with others. Pride, on the other hand, is honoring the self. When I asked people who the best leader was among them, they answered “Nobody, everybody is a family here.” This also connotes that “everybody has the same dignity among us.” Roma people can lose their pride but never lose their dignity among themselves. I am using the word “pride” to describe the

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mixture of self-respect and satisfaction over the achievements and quality of a person and a community.

Roma are proud people who voice their pride in various ways. The major narratives are pride of family and motherhood, pride that Roma couples are loyal to each other, pride in cleanliness, and pride in enduring suffering. I will discuss these in the following sections.

Motherhood and Family

The first issue I recognized while listening to the villagers was that there is a great similarity between the different generations’ personal narratives regarding starting a family. It seems that it is usual in this community that partners meet rapidly when most girls are only at the liminal threshold of childhood and puberty, and then girls give birth to their first baby that in most cases is followed by another. If the family is not declaring the father unknown at birth, then the father, in a short time, goes to jail for sexual conduct with a minor. But most often the families cover the case. In this situation the young mother’s mother takes custody of the newborn and receives all social benefits for the child, while the young mother starts her adult life with her partner and they, the young couple, take care of the baby. In many cases, authorities “overlook” underage pregnancy if Gypsies are involved.

Underage motherhood, which in Hungary means under 18, is not judged negatively in the community. Asking what her mother said when she became pregnant at

14, Lilla says “My mother was happy. She had already been worried that I could not become pregnant.” We cannot separate Lilla’s personal story from the life stories of other

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women in her family. Both her aunt and her mother were 13, her sister 14, all her cousins were about the same age when they bore their first child. I do not mean to suggest that early motherhood is an essential part of Gypsy culture, because in the village many girls marry older than 18. Though, as Romero and Stewart (1995) say, “Motherhood narratives are especially potent cultural forms. . . . In the most popular account, every woman is a potential mother waiting to fulfill this role. How to become a mother and how to ‘do’ mothering is culturally prescribed” (pp. xvi-xvii). As I found, early motherhood is something that families regard as “normal” and perhaps even an important part of the social fabric.

In the community, mothers always carry their children on their left arm—then the child hears the mother’s heartbeat–and they do everything while holding their child.

Mothers cling to their children, calling them “my love” and “my life.” Marika néni says

“My son is 19 but if it was needed I still would pick him up in my lap.” Vali adores her children. She says “For me the biggest happiness is my children. I offered my whole life for them. I am for them so that they have everything” (Vali). These women talk about their children as the meaning of their life; so do the underage mothers.

During my stay in the village I interviewed only grownup women who often tell the story of their underage pregnancy. I did not interview mothers who are still underage because I respected their vulnerability in such a private issue. But while I was interviewing Ica and she reached the point where she gave birth at the age of 13, her 15- year-old daughter-in-law joined us in conversation, adding that she was 15 when she gave birth, “still underage.” She says that her baby died. He died in her “belly.” “There are

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many babies dying now,” she says. In these few sentences she made clear that it was not because of her young age or her clumsiness during the birth that her baby died, but recently “there are many babies dying.” These young girls drop into adult life unexpectedly, but they often see their lives as more meaningful than they would be without taking this path. In Hungary, the official upper age limit for obligatory education is sixteen (Nemzeti Erőforrás, 2011).45 But at the age of sixteen boys and girls cannot work, only from the age of eighteen. So there is a two-year gap between the school age and adult age.

From Bódvalenke only a few children are able to go to vocational school (and move to the nearest city, Miskolc); one of them was Lilla. But she became pregnant in the first half of the school year, was expelled from school, and now lives at home with her three children. Still, even after this ordeal, she is proud to be a mother, and it is also important to her that by becoming a mother she ensured a minimal income (child aid and family supplement) that grows with each child. Early motherhood, however, is a direct consequence of the way relationships are formed.

When talking about herself and her daughters, Réka, described meeting life partners as “hip-hop” relationships:

Lilla became pregnant at 14. My other daughter was 16 when she went to a graduation and didn’t come home. Since then she lives with her partner. We have these kinds of relationships. Such sudden relationships. From a flare, from a secret relationship, or just from a friendship.

Here is Réka’s own story:

45 See also Ritók (2014).

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I was 12 when my parents kicked me out of our home. Then I came here to my aunt, Ica. At that time it was a strict rule that kids went to sleep after the TV bedtime story at 7 p.m. Then we went to sleep. There was a drummer in the village who came around at 8 when “the time arrived to go to rest.” My husband came every day with the train at 9 pm and always knocked on my window. I signaled him through the window that I cannot get out. So we started to live together. He came in and we slept together. He was 27, I was 12.

Accordingly, relationships often “just happen.” In the villagers’ stories, fathers are usually much older, though I figured out that there are significant differences between the age women give for their partners and what the men say about themselves. Women often made their partners older in their stories. For example, according to Ica, Tamás was 21 years old when they met, but Tamás says he was 17 years old.

The role of mothers and mothers-in-law. We cannot understand the situation of the young mothers without knowing the cultural role of their mothers and mothers-in- law. According to Roma custom in Bódvalenke and the neighboring villages, if a couple decides to live together they move to the boy’s family, where the mother-in-law receives the new female as her own daughter. She teaches the new “wife” how to clean and cook according to the customs of the given family. The family, even if they have 17 to 20 family members, ensures a separate room for the new couple. I observed that although there are doors that separate these rooms, families take out the windows from these doors and cover them with fabric to let warm air move between the rooms: there is always usually only one heated room in the house. Most firstborn children in the village were born in the mother-in-law’s house. The couple lives there until they move to another relative, usually after another family member takes over the room and starts a new

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family. Young couples live at different relatives where they contribute to the household costs as they can, until they move into their own house if they can.

When young people establish a relationship, they acquire adult rights in the family. When a young mother gives birth, she has the same rights and responsibilities as other females in the extended family; she becomes “somebody” and crosses the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. The same is true for boys. Once they have a partner, they became full adult members of their own and the girls’ families. The only problem with moving to the mother-in-law’s is that, if that family dislikes the girl, they can torment her and tear the couple apart. Most arguments occur over money. The boy’s family can easily say that the underage mother has no income since the money goes to the legal guardian, the girl’s mother, who most often doesn’t give the money to the young couple who actually raise the child. According to a few older women, it is because with this they blackmail the boy not to leave the young mother. Ica’s story fits the first type:

When I came here I was 12 years old, I didn’t even know what a vakaró [Gypsy bread] was. I still was a child. My mother-in-law said: “Ica, make some vakaró!” “Mother-in-law, what is the vakaró?” Naaa, I was a child. They loved me very much, as if I was their own child. I had no hair on my body yet. Haaa, in the hospital they laughed at me. “My lady, you don’t even have hairs [on your genitals], how will you give birth to this child? I said, “well.” But they looked after me very much, you know, I was still under-aged. They were afraid that I would die during the birth.

Unfortunately Ica’s mother-in-law died and she lost this support.

Meanwhile, not every young mother goes to the boy’s family. For example

Levente moved to the girl’s parents’ house when his partner was 13. In this case the girl stays close to her family where her child’s subsidy goes, while her status rises after she becomes a mother. Though, this version still carries the possibility that, even after the 151

young mother reaches adult age (18 in Hungary), her mother will keep the money that she receives as the official guardian. However, it is never wise to claim fatherhood, even later, for children born to a minor, because the father is still punishable for having sex with a minor. Though, as Levente says, “in some places nobody cares.”

Most men expect to have a boy first. Lilla explains:

Among us this is a superstition that the firstborn must be a boy. The brothers of my husband, they got first a boy. So they always chivvied me, harassed me because I had no boy. Because we have this gigolo thing that the first child must be a boy. But I had first a daughter and second another daughter. And when for the third I had a boy, I decided already that I don’t stay with him.

I heard about this expectation from István and Máté as well, but I saw the serious consequences of not having a first-born boy only in Lilla’s life. Still, like Vali, Ica, and

Réka, who clearly stated that they are proud of their children and this pride grows with the rising number of children, Lilla closes the interview by stating that nothing gives such a happiness as a child:

Everybody think on the children as they are the fruit of their happiness. If somebody doesn’t have a child, men start drinking. Although he wants his happiness that is a child, he doesn’t dare to turn to someone else because he loves his wife. In this case he stays with his wife but he will not have happiness. (Lilla)

In this, men and women, young and old, share a common standpoint.

Early motherhood is one point where non-profit organizations (NGOs) representing neoliberal interests start “safeguarding” Roma communities and justifying the “need” for their intervention and continuous presence. For example, Scullion and

Brown (2013) in their “Policy Cooperation and Innovation Roma Multilateral project” identify teenage pregnancy as a possible new point of interest where the NGO that financed the research could “safeguard” Roma communities. They conclude: 152

While the interviews focused primarily – but not exclusively – on engagement with education, a number of additional issues were raised which are also important to highlight as they provide additional insights into the complexity of the barriers facing Roma communities and those providing support. (p. 40)

Among the barriers facing Roma communities, teenage pregnancy is mentioned as the most significant cultural issue that needs to be “mediated” by the NGO’s “Lifelong

Learning Program.”46 This approach evaluates early motherhood as “abnormal,” that is, imposing a hegemonic value rather than seeing early childbearing as one version of the

Gypsy “normal.”

Considering the pride of motherhood, the women’s role in the extended family, the complex network of young mothers, their mothers, and mothers-in-law, the agenda of the baby-mummy house which was built in the village as a result of the FVP’s presence in the village but from separate founding, is totally foreign. The program is a nursery where mothers and toddlers are invited to go and play together with their babies, where well-skilled early education teachers teach them how to care for their children, make household chores, cook, garden, and deal with money. The pure existence of this program humiliates generations of Roma women, whose fundamental role is to take care of their children and provide food for their families, although multi-tasking and handling their children as a natural part of the family without making their children the center of the family as the majorities do.

Roma couples stay together. Many villagers proudly say that Roma couples stay together no matter what. For example, Móni recalls that her father and mother were 14-

46 The research was financed by the European Commission’s Education’s Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). 153

year-olds when she was born, and they gave her to her grandmother because “they didn’t need a child at this young age yet.” She adds, “But this is very rare. Because the custom here is that no matter if they are 12 or 13 years old, if they ‘marry’ another Gypsy, they stay together no matter what.” And this is true; in the village there are three widowed young women and only two young women who moved back home leaving their partner

(one of them is Lilla). There are also two men who have a first child with someone other than their current partner; their children live in other villages. In the village there is only one divorced man, István, but he proudly says “I am divorced. It is difficult for the

Gypsies to leave each other. I am not living with my wife for 12 years but she lives there

[in the same house] with the girls.” And later he adds, “I’m like, I’m alone for 12 years but we, the Roma, we are always together.”

For those who stay together, the family always grows. The “kinship” stays together through even more generations. As a result, the extended family creates a powerful social unit that they call a clan. In Bódvalenke the largest clan is the “R’s,” a smaller clan is the “H’s,” and the “K’s” have the smallest clan: however, both the “H’s” and “K’s” are relatives with the “R’s” on their mother’s side. The villagers do not marry relatives. Yet, I realized that they don’t count individuals in the nearby village with the

“R” family name as a relative, though it is clear that they are second, third and fourth cousins. Jolán néni, who is the mother or the foster-mother for 12 grown-up people in the village (because she took in her brothers and sisters) comments on this:

Everybody is a relative here. These are all cousins here. Here is my daughter, widowed. But there is no such thing in the “R” band that we would marry each other when we are relatives. . . . I lived my whole entire life but this never happened. That we would marry cousins. This wouldn’t be nice. 154

So they don’t count second, third and fourth cousins as relatives; they call them “other

R’s.” And since couples stay together, the “R’s” grew for an extended family that fills a village where they have known each other for generations.

Proud to Be Clean

The villagers are proud of their cleanliness. One summer afternoon when I joined

Aranka, Marika néni, and Mara in their “doing nothing but sitting out,” Marika néni suddenly remembered one of their collective trips to Slovakia. Here is the conversation between Aranka and Marika néni:

M: We have been to Slovakia. You know, Anka, they took us, I don’t remember with which car. And the gypsies lived in ruin houses. The windows were made out of nylon. Compared to this Lenke47 is new. Where was it? A: Oh yeah. In Torna. They are like us. Hungarian Gypsies. M: Haaa, they live in plywood. And they alter it as they want. A: Of course. It makes a difference if you got a beautiful house and amortize it and you don’t do anything, If you do nothing but break, crush cut, and then you have no windows nor doors; on one side you have the garbage, on the other side you go to sleep, and as you lie there the rats run around you. A house needs to be taken care of it, fixed, neatly painted, because it goes not like this.

They were teasing their Slovakian “relatives” because they are dirty and careless.

Bódvalenke families are different; they like to paint their houses in bright colors, to paint roses in the corners by using a template, to paste colorful strips atop the wall. They use specific colors – yellow, green, red and blue. They keep their houses as clean as they can, wear clean clothes even if ragged. If the clothes are worn, they burn them in the fireplace.

Even Tamás, who, according to the closest relatives, belongs to one of the less clean families, mentions their cleanliness proudly:

47 Lenke is the shorthand for Bódvalenke. 155

You see? Which woman can do this? Ica [his wife] came home by foot from Komjáti. So. She never goes dirty to the village. Also now that she went to Komjáti, look, she dressed up nicely. She goes nowhere dirty. They praise her also in Ardo, everywhere.

Tamás ascribes merits to himself, saying that he would never permit Ica to leave the house dirty.

Cleanliness is a sensitive issue for Romungro people for an additional reason.

Gypsies are always labeled as unclean by the non-Roma; the idiom of “smelly gypsy” is still in everyday use. One afternoon as we sit on her house steps surrounded by her two youngest kids and her grandchildren, Réka told me about cleanliness as a divide between old-time Gypsies and modern Gypsies. Réka says:

Some of the families have rules how to be clean and how to cook. But others don’t have. There are no dirty people here. There aren’t. Because even those are clean who started in “pacsit houses” —sometime they were smelly women. [But also they] had carpets on the walls clean and beautifully embroidered, on the windows beautiful dark rose blankets, every kind of laced clothes. But, as I said, since then the world has changed… or only we feel like this.

Everybody who sees them can easily tell that they consider themselves modern based on their New York T-shirts, neon green and vivid pink tops, and the few selected items they are able to get from one of the Red Cross donations. Self-identifying themselves as moderns is also important because this is what distinguishes Romungros from the Vlah gypsies, whose life style is more traditional as they still wear their traditional long skirts and kerchiefs. Vali tells me that Vlah Gypsies wear long skirts even now. They are

“higher” because “They still keep the customs. The Roma customs. For them it is not fashionable to wear pants, warmers; they only wear nice long skirts.” But, as Vali sees it,

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the Romungros are more modern compared to the Vlah and other Gypsies and the peasants as well:

In Gesztely the Roma came along with the Hungarians very well, because they called them (the Roma) for work: hoeing. In school, we were mixed. The peasants were even worse than the Gypsies. The Gypsies dressed better than the Hungarians; they [the Gypsies] buy much faster modern things. Because peasants hold themselves back. They will have those things in time, but the Gypsy is like “I go and buy it.”

So cleanness is a sensitive issue, first, because they want to get rid of the stigma of the

“smelly gypsy” and, second, because it is part of their identity that –compared both to other Gypsies and peasants –they are modern. In this context we can understand how

Réka feels when the ambulance took her daughter-in-law with her infant son to the hospital, and in the hospital she was told that she is dirty and smelly. Réka’s daughter-in- law was in the clinic for two days when the hospital called Márta in the FVP office to say that somebody should come to visit her, bring her soap and a bath towel and something to eat, because she did not eat or drink for two days. The hospital did not feed the nursing

Roma mother for two days and there was nobody else to give her food. Réka tells the story as follows:

Now R. is in the hospital. The baby got a sudden stroke here at home. . . . He suddenly became black and blue. We called the ambulance in 10 minutes. The emergency car came fast but without a doctor. The closest place is Hidvegardo where there is a doctor. For us it is the same to reach a doctor as to give life. My daughter-in-law went with the baby and she was not well received. The head doctor said that she went in dirty. What does it mean that she was dirty? To save a life does it matter that she is dirty or clean? Isn’t it all the same? They criticized both the baby and the mother. They asked when she took a bath last time. Because she went to the hospital as she was at home. She didn’t have time to change, I said to the head doctor. She couldn’t take anything with her. The ambulance came fast. The baby was ill. We had to pack in very fast and we had nothing. I cannot tell this without crying. We are not ashamed because we saved the baby’s life. I especially don’t feel ashamed because of his opinion. 157

Even from this story it is clear that the “smelly gypsy” label is still a common stereotype in the majority community that Roma compensate for with pride.

Though many families wish they had a bathroom, not everybody wants a bathroom in their house. Mara says she lived down in the Gypsy row where the Project

Leader demolished the houses. And when they moved into the peasant row,

I did have a bathroom in this house—because the government subsidy was for a house with full comfort. But we were afraid of the boiler that it might electrocute the kids. And then I took everything out. I was afraid. I had the bathroom over there. There was the bath, hand washer, and the toilet, boiler, and bathtub. And a kid also fell out of it. It was the kind of boiler that we had to plug into the electricity, and my kids often sprayed the water—they used to play in the water— and the water went all the way up to the ceiling and everywhere, and I was afraid that the electricity would kill them in the water. We threw them out. Better the bowl. And that’s it. And since the baby-mummy house opened, the three girls wash themselves there. (Mara)

Even though Mara admittedly profits from the baby-mummy house’s shower, she is hurt by the idea of “cleaning the Gypsies.” When Mara heard the Project Leader critiquing a person whom she loves, she attacks the Project Leader in front of media people. (At least this is the way she tells the story that rhymes with the hypothetical narrative Irma told about her non-Roma bosses who almost choked on paprika.) Now, Mara stands up for the village and openly attacks the Project Leader and the leader of the Sure Start program for building a bathroom for the Roma to clean themselves:

I made fun of her, the Project Leader, in front of her guests. I yelled at her that “So you want to steal more? You want to f . . k more? You get rich from us by posting us on the Internet! You spoke down about us in Edelény – this is why O. M.48 gave us a bathroom –that the Bódvalenke children are dirty and smelly! Also you smell, you should rot yourself!” She didn’t say a word. I wanted to give her a punch but I did not hurt her. I did not give her a punch because there were too many people. That’s why. But if nobody was there, I would give her two

48 President of the Sure Start program. 158

punches that she would fall. If somebody is good to me, I am good to her. But…I don’t want to encourage anybody: here nothing has changed.

In Mara’s narrative we can recognize the effort to “maintain the communities’ equilibrium” without the outsiders’ attempt to influence or change them. As Dumont

(1966/1970) suggested, it is not enough to focus on the structure of the society at large and Roma within it, but we need to understand them, as Roma who see themselves as different. On the other hand, Mara’s performance is also a reference to historical events.

Who remembers the reoccurring hygienic programs ordered by various governments? For example, during Socialism, health authorities forced Gypsy men and women to wash themselves in public (Armstrong, 1993, Majtényi & Majtényi, 2012). Who remembers the 19th century Western medical model called the “missionary model,” in which “Health was among the values to be brought to the primitives who were often at first presumed to lack the very concept of it” (Acton at al., 1997, p. 166)? Finally, who remembers that the concept of “cleanness,” itself, is historically and socially constructed and marks boundaries of identities and ideologies, as Armstrong (1993) among others realized?

Probably none of the eyewitnesses [assuming that the story ever happened] remembers this. But Roma still carry the stigma of the “dirty gypsy.” In the village many Roma women are upset because of the agenda of the baby-mummy house to ensure cleansing opportunities for the “gypsy.”

Though society reinforces exactly those characteristics that they want Gypsies to change, many villagers feel that, the cleaner they are, the more handicapped they are when it comes to the donation distribution, or when it comes to visitors. For example,

Vali complains, “If we are cleaner and more well-dressed, they think we deserve nothing 159

since we advance, they think.” Those who distribute donations and the rare visitors themselves are led by the prejudice that the cleaner Roma are wealthier and the less clean are poor, so they help the dirty more and help the clean less.

As is clear from the above, pride in cleanliness is rooted in historical and cultural experiences and has great significance in the Roma’s desire to shed the stigma of “dirty gypsy” and in the Romungro cultural identity that they are more modern than the oldtime

“smelly gypsies.” In the subsequent section, I discuss Roma pride to endure suffering, which is similarly rich in historical and cultural context.

Pride to Endure Suffering

Mara is from one of the visibly neediest families. Because of this, she attracts the most tourists. She fulfills every expectation of what tourists think a “true Gypsy” looks like and lives, except that she wears “normal” clothes, not “gypsy” clothes. She has many children, and she lives in a house where she broke down the bathroom walls, took out the boiler, bathtub, sink, and the toilet and threw them out. Now her house is full of beds, no furniture, only visible signs of poverty. Though there is one point where Mara is

“inconsistent”: she cannot stand it when people think her children are starving. Even though she is one of the first who runs out of food, she vehemently denies this to keep her reputation high before the outsiders.

There was a photographer girl, some folks came from Miskolc. This woman brought a big bag of candies, chocolates, I don’t know what was in it. She comes to me and asks if she can take pictures of my children. I say, she can. After that, there comes a dwarf in white clothes saying that he brought candies to the Bódvalenke children because the kids here are starving. I couldn’t spit, swell, or talk. I said to him: Listen to me, why are these children starving? Just because the Project Leader puts this on the Internet? Or because she says so

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to you? Because she wants to put more money in her pocket? We see nothing out of it! She makes her wealth out of us, the poor. If we run out of food, we go begging. And we go to work for somebody. We help for a little meat or potatoes. We help for pasta, if there is nothing, then for a piece of potato. For everything that we need. This is the truth. For example, when I went to you and you gave me margarine, soup, bread, what you had. We close the door; it is nice and warm inside. (Mara)

To keep her status high, Mara refers to the custom of “kéregetés” [begging] to prove that children in this village do not starve. So suffering at one point becomes the source of pride because Roma women can solve it.

While there are no jobs in the village or in a reachable distance for the Roma men, women go from house to house seeking food; if need be, they walk to the next village to knock on peasant doors and ask for food. As I discussed earlier, starving is an intimate/private thing; but they are proud that they can endure it. After I thought that the women were being honest with me, I recognized that my interviewees started to twist information they had said earlier. For example, Vali, who told me just a few minutes before that they often run out of food, now assures me that such a thing as starving doesn’t exist in this village:

In my opinion people don’t starve here because they go, borrow and anything, and [when we run out of food] then we seek food--not for other stuff, shoes or clothes. Whatever we have we wash them–be it whatever but clean—and then we seek only food. Since we cannot survive a day with a skillet of food. This cannot be so in any of the houses because everywhere they cook two-three times because the family is big. It is one thing that we don’t have for one-two days. But it is not like there is nothing for the whole day and I just hum the whole day in this (given situation). If we have flour, we knead the dough for vakaró. I used to use powder (sodium bicarbonate). We wash the top of the stove. If there is no bread at all, we need 2 kg of flour for sure for one day for four children. And then it happens that only they eat because for us it is enough one little slice and that’s it. If there is some liver cream or something. Or we eat it with a little potato with paprika. Or

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we grill a little meat, or a little liver. I roast it in onion and fat, and then I knead dough for vakaróvakaró. And if we utterly don’t have, then we still eat—the other day we were there because I did not ask for money, because we got only a little money, we paid the bills and everything, we owed and gave it back–and were there that we found only a little flour, we had some oil at home, we took the stem of the onion and ate it. But even then, they ate something. I don’t know what it means that “they starve.”

As long as Vali argues that they don’t starve, we have to keep in mind that in her house, apart from her and her husband, there are seven children, all adolescents and teenagers, to whom the account she mentions is almost nothing. Furthermore, in Vera’s explanation we can observe a point when she starts putting some “spice” in the boring menu. As we can imagine, if she goes to “kéregetni” [beg], it is very unlikely that she comes back with liver, this is likely the imaginary part of her description. She frequently describes a situation that the outsider interprets as need, while she denies that it is need.

Meanwhile, I learned from her that the meaning of starving is subjective, related to our standard of “normal,” and used as a rhetorical tool in every surface conversation.

Starving in Roma communities has never been an “entertainment” to the outside world as it is now. Since the FVP extended its activity with creating jobs and applying for funds and grants, and since another non-Roma person moved to the village providing “tutoring services,” Bódvalenke people are constantly shown on the Internet, in reports, and in documentaries. Unfortunately, this documentation of their poverty did not ease their needs. But they unknowingly and unwilling enter into a larger performance that surprises and confuses the villagers. As Vali notes:

Before that, there was nowhere on the Internet that Bódvalenke was starving. This is only since the [FVP] project has been here. Because also we can watch and see what is there, what they write about us and what is up there. But if there are such 162

things on the Internet about us, at least we should receive something from them, since they support us from many places. We are not stupid. So we see that from many places they support Bódvalenke. The TV shows it. Now also the baby-house. They came even from the parliament. Also from the Reifensen Bank, from everywhere. They support the village. If we would receive at least once a food package! I can’t remember how many months ago we got one –even though we received so much money. In my opinion, help continuously comes. But where is it?

Before the FV Project was in the village, the only comparison was the local peasant and the Roma. But now their visibility makes many more comparisons possible. Still, Roma people don’t want to be pitied or made to feel subordinate. In the following excerpt, Lilla contrasts the Roma villagers’ situation with “others’” situations, in which the “other” signifies the whites, the Hungarians, the peasants, the rich–in short everybody who never experienced life in a deprived Roma community:

We are better than others in that we are able to survive each day. For example, bread. There are weeks, at the end of the month, around the middle of the four weeks, the third and fourth weeks, that the kids don’t eat enough bread. Or they don’t eat meat because we do not have it. But we cannot afford it. There are days when we knead vakaró or something else. From this, our kids are better than, for example, other kids. Because the others, they know what a candy is, vitamins, good medicines. They can clean themselves, make friends just like them. But they don’t know what our kids experience. Our kids, if there is nothing, they suffer. And the truth is that there are rich people here but they don’t pay attention to the others. No matter that in Lenke everybody is family, they don’t care for the others. Whoever has more, looks down on the one who has less. They look down on each other. That’s it.

Lilla’s passionate apologia in which she justifies Roma pride shows the same shifting between the narrative of pride and the narrative of need. In her narrative we can observe that she avoids saying that the kids have nothing to eat. So she feels the need to switch to stronger arguments to prove the value of suffering. She concludes by giving a speech:

I hold my child at the same level, and every child here in Lenke, as those in Pest or Miskolc. But our kids are better. Because our kids experience what others do 163

not experience, not even once in their lives. Because our kids cannot see the color of bread, or the color of meat, vitamins, medicines, like them. Our kids live like this. Because our reality is that we don’t have things. And we cannot tell them that we don’t have them. We must figure out what to eat. Then our men have go for a piece of wood, they need to go and sell it. So we could give something to the children. They have to beg them [others] to make them buy it. They have to beg very much. Very-very much. The others don’t know this. They don’t feel the heaviness of need that we have here. What does cowardice mean–or I don’t know why it is that we are afraid to leave the village–and such things. Because we simply don’t know what is where. The big world is a big unknown here. . . . But they are not better than us, by no chance. They are not. We can feel what they can’t. Because they cannot feel it. They say, we cannot cook. They say, we cannot clean ourselves. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. (Lilla)

While she speaks uninterruptedly, Lilla is sitting on the steps of her mother’s house. Her mother sits one step behind her with her own youngest children ranging from three to six years. The next step is occupied by her teenage daughter. Behind her, on the top step, her oldest son’s wife rocks her baby. Lilla holds her baby son who was born after two girls and for whom she had been waiting so long. Occasionally, she lifts up her top and breastfeeds the baby. From the steps, we can see her hut, a small stall-like building where she lives since moving home. We watch as the door opens, and her two younger girls play throwing out the clothes from the house. Lilla jumps up to catch them but the movement that started as disciplining becomes a hug. This is the end of her performance.

She is performing pride on a daily basis by washing baby clothes until they are ragged, carrying her children for a walk, and facing the critique that she was wrong to stop studying to give birth early. Pride is the only emotion with which she can smooth the controversies.

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Summary

In this chapter, in sharing, analyzing and classifying narratives and stories, I have identified three oral narrative genres: hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, and encounters with the past. These genres are important not only because they show various forms of narrative but also because they stem from different needs, they are performed differently, and they fulfill diverse roles, so to say, they “do” different things in the community. Also, these narrative genres enable me to compare and contrast the narrative body of the villagers with that of the artists’, and determine whether or not the visual narratives add to the networks of oral narratives. Hypothetical narratives call attention to the missing “real” that cannot happen, and therefore, cannot be told as a “real” story, but where “cannot” is presented as an urgency which needs to be done, if not in other ways, at least as a narrative performance. As noted earlier, hypothetical narratives do not answer the question “and then what happened?” as Western traditional narratives do

(Riessman, 1993, p. 17). Habitual narratives, on the other hand, call attention to the fixed content and the blurred boundaries between past, present and future. They do not answer the question “and then what happened?” because the happening is ongoing. Habitual narratives do not follow linear development as do traditional Western narratives. Finally, encounters with the past call attention to everyday events, discussions and actions in the past that narrators recall in their narrative performance. Finally, encounters with the past re-tell events in which non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma (Braid, 1997). During this, narrators provide explanations about their identity, constantly (re)evaluate the past events and the contexts, and re-tell the event adjusting their stories to a new audience.

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Tradition-saving stories are special kind of encounters. They are told with the aim to (re)build tradition, cultural identity, and community while saving history. Tradition- saving stories evoke the direct connection of storytelling and ritual. Thus, tradition- saving stories are often chains of stories.

Furthermore, the villagers encountered core narratives of need and pride by either telling hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, or by telling stories about “what happened,” placing the narrated events in no time, imagined or wished time in an

“extended” today, or showing the linear stories as a progress or regress compared to other stories (that make up history). Narratives of need in the village involve talk of survival, the need for equality and for independence. I identified talks of survival as the strongest narrative among these. However, I concluded that the villagers’ stories reveal experiences that exceed the narrow category of the “culture of poverty.” Even talks of survival are determined by many cultural elements; for example, the villagers’ need (hunger) always remains undisclosed to outsiders.

I have found that the needs for equality and for independence have unique, culturally defined meanings. Roma people imagine the village as a community of equals, believing that nobody should direct others and that they should equally share. Also culturally determined is what counts as a tolerable level of dependency upon outsiders

(for example, the surface relationship with the “good Gadjé”) and what counts as unwanted dependency (entering into hierarchical, dependent relationship with the Gadjé).

They secure their independence from non-Roma through the one-to-many relationship.

On the other hand, avoiding dependence upon outsiders is juxtaposed against

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interdependence with insiders in the community. I have found two conflicting narratives: one that shows the agency of the villagers who are able to manage their lives independently (though sometimes they need to learn new skills), and the other that withholds or denies this agency. Most villagers said that their life before the FVP’s presence was “hard and good,” because, as István states, “Everyone could make decisions.” Zalán adds that now the village is divided so much that “it doesn’t [even] exist.” This is to suggest that the village they inhabited as their home for generations fell apart as a result of the intrusion of the FVP and other neoliberal programs. Zalán states, while earlier he went to his brothers to solve problems, now he must go to the FVP, which represents a higher authority and a new colonizer in the village.

Narrative of pride consists of pride of motherhood and family, pride of cleanliness and pride of enduring suffering. This rich ethnographic finding shows Roma to be strong, proud people, the opposite of the majority society’s impression that they are weak, lost, and unable to hande their affairs. This chapter also provides emic insight (a perspective within the social/ethnic group) into teen pregnancy and hygiene (cleanliness) that are targeted by the neoliberal NGOs as matters where Roma need “patronage” from outside. I conclude that stories of life and culture not only report, but also continuously re-create the villagers’ culture. In the Fifth Chapter I discuss stories of separated worlds.

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CHAPTER 5: IDENTITY AND BELONGING

While the previous chapter focused on the overall genres and introduced more specific core narratives, this chapter will extend the analysis into a discussion of how the

Roma see themselves as both a part of and separate from the larger society. Their sense of who they are as Roma and as Hungarians invokes stories of identity and a sense of belonging/not belonging. In addition, their stories also revolved around issues of mobility and stability–both of which impacted their sense of self and their connection to each other.

Sense of Self, Connecting with Others, and Balancing the Community

Narratives of Separated Worlds

There are many different worlds that surround, exclude, include, and sometimes even lock in Roma people in Bódvalenke. These worlds are more or less separated from each other. Out of the many worlds of the Bódvalenke Roma/Gypsies, I begin with the place they experience as a safe place.

Safe Place

The “R” family has lived in this area for three generations. People from the older generation often mention that “our ancestors lived here. Many of them only lived here”

(István). Although their ancestors were wanderers who moved from one village to another, the key element in this account is respect towards their ancestors who lived in this area, through which the village became “their territory.” As Tauber (2008) highlights, respect of ancestors is an organizing power that “regulates, structures and gives sense” to people’s lives on the given territory as Gypsies. Their “own dead”

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relatives and their “collective dead” relatives are in this particular area (Tauber, 2008, p.

158). They practiced similar economic activities, experienced historical changes, followed traditions in this village as an extended family. I see the cohesive power of respect –which Tauber (2008) argues is an invisible tie that holds Gypsy communities together –in the recognition of the Gypsy way of life in each other’s practice, and the respect for their ancestors who lived here.

Many family members have never left the area they live in; most of them only took the bus to some administrative offices such as the unemployment office in Edelény, to the bank, or the doctor. There are people who have yet to visit the nearest city,

Miskolc. I talked with Teri, the mother of the first two girls who succeeded in finishing bakery school and left Bódvalenke; now the girls live in Miskolc in a rented apartment, but Teri has never left the village since moving there. Borbála says “I usually go nowhere. I don’t leave the kids alone. I love this village. I don’t leave even for two days.”

When I ask Tamás whether he has ever been to any fair to sell his baskets and brooms he answers, “No. Never. I would get lost.” “Here they find safety,” says Marika néni, “It would be great to have jobs here. This could be a Paradise.” I met only one woman (she married into the “R” family) who would want to permanently move from the village back to her relatives’ but she is unable to leave; as she says: “We cannot even get out of here because we have no money.” I heard from some women that one of the wealthier Roma families wanted to travel to the United Kingdom for temporary work. They were supposed to leave in September; in December they were still at home in the village.

However, in 2015 February, the first young man, on borrowed money, managed to go to

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Germany and to find work in the manufacturing industry (Neuberger, 2015). Also, there are people who cannot move physically, but want to move out of their given surroundings symbolically.

Being Locked In

After listening to my interviewee’s stories I identified three different versions of this experience: being locked in the geographical space, the dead-end village, where the only way to travel is a bus that comes four times a day; locked in the “Gypsy world” after the once-minority Roma became majorities in the village; and locked in the pre- constructed social space created for the Roma/Gypsies.

Locked in the geographical space. Levente explains the realistic reasons why the villagers feel isolated and locked in the village:

It is very difficult to witness that people here live in deep poverty. And the problem is that Bódvalenke is very much hidden. I don’t know another village that is so bad, only Tornanádaska, but not even that because 150 people work there. It is bad that when people ask where you live, and right away they also ask where this is. Because nobody knows this village. People know Bódvaszilas, but not farther than this.

I heard many similar statements that people are unable to move because they have no money to travel and there is no transportation to nearby cities. They are unable to visit their relatives, to find a job, or to get used to other places. Levente notes it was not always like this. Under Socialism, men worked in the nearby settlements or farther-off cities and traveled by bus and train, which frequently ran at that time. Today the buses and trains rarely run and the men rarely have jobs. To exemplify the narrative fed by this experience I chose Lilla’s epigrammatic statement:

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I feel locked. There is nothing here. We can mow the mountain. We can do this and that. And to do work for those who got money. This village is locked from the outside world. This place doesn’t belong to the outside world. This is not a village. This is not a small settlement. This is a jungle.

What is important to know about Levente and Lilla is that they both moved to a school in Miskolc a few years ago. Levente finished his secondary school, and right afterward he impregnated a 13-year-old girl who has become his life partner. Lilla moved back home alone with her newborn baby girl at the age of 15, then she moved back to her partner in the city, and finally, three years later, she permanently moved back to her parents with three children. These stories are the context for their quotes. They both experienced a wider world than their extended family but were not ready to leave the life they grew up in. But it seems that they have no tools to survive in a new world.

Considering the large number of young people in the village, the number of those who wanted to leave in the last couple of years is minimal. Because:

What can a child do who grows up here? Nothing. Here, nothing. Here we hardly have life. If children are accepted to Miskolc, Szentpéter, Edelény, in the big cities, what can they do? Nothing. They know nobody and nothing. A child grows up, everything he or she knows is a habit. It is good here, we’re used to things here. (Mara)

Though most villagers stay, many of them consider themselves non-Gypsies. But since they live with their extended family, this is just a matter of naming; here, they don’t need the non-Roma world’s approval, whether or not they are Gypsies

Locked in the “Gypsy world.” Many villagers feel symbolically locked in the

“Gypsy world” as distinguished from the “non-Gypsy world.” They want to “come out” of “Gypsiness.” For example, Jolán néni’s daughter, Tamara, who moved back to her mother’s after she lost her husband, says: 171

T: Considering that I am a Gypsy, I do everything to survive. That we don’t go downward but we go outward (from Gypsiness). That it could be better for our kids. That if they go to study, they shouldn’t expect that “this is gypsy, he/she should behave like a Gypsy.” But they should expect them as a little normal. There are Gypsies also in this village who started at the very bottom. And they got higher. They brought up their children so that they behave differently from the gypsies. We have here few people like this. M: These people whom you refer to, do they call themselves a non-Gypsy? T: Yes. Then they already came out of it [Gypsiness]. They are happy to be released.

Gabi néni, who lives in a nice peasant house and has a huge garden in which she grows fruits and vegetables that she saves for winter, whose house looks inside and outside like a Hungarian peasant house, pities her relatives who live in poverty. When they show up at her gate she gives them cigarettes and some food. Not for all of them, only for the closest relatives. When Gabi néni hears that I want to learn about the experiences of the Gypsy people, she says “I am not a Gypsy. If you want to talk with gypsies, go to the Gypsy row.” Gabi néni’s brothers, sisters, aunts, nephews, nieces all live in the village and many of them are on the Gypsy row. According to the general use of the word, she is a Roma/Gypsy. But the word “gypsy” means something else for her that she doesn’t want to identify with. From Zalán (51) I learn the connotation of the word when he says “our mayor, you know, he is like . . . as if he would be a gypsy, he cheats and steals.” Meanwhile, the rest of the villagers call themselves Gypsy (Hungarian

Gypsy) and not Roma. When I occasionally used the word Roma, most of them corrected me. Although I respected their self-identification and used the word, “cigány” (Gypsy) when I talked with the villagers, in my analysis I often use “Roma,” which is not only the politically correct umbrella term, but also a name to address Romanichal kinship to which

Romungros belong as distinguished from the Vlah Gypsies. So Gypsy (capitalized), 172

Roma, and Roma/Gypsy connote the same group of the Bódvlenke villagers, and each is a correct word either as their self-identifier, their kinship, and/or the umbrella term that substitutes the pejorative “gypsy” and considers that not every Gypsy identifies with the

“Roma” as umbrella term.

In Rozi néni’s view the word “gypsy” means lifestyle, though later in her storytelling she uses the word as cultural identity:

I never lived like these [people here]. I am neither a Gypsy nor a peasant. I worked since I am 13. I didn’t sit at home. . . . But my kids identify themselves as Gypsies. Though my kids are, Yay, also the girl, she is like a dream! Blondes, blue-eyed just like their father. But once—I tell you fast because I let the door open and they get in and steal something—one afternoon Zsuzsi [her daughter] worked in the surgery. She works next to a doctor. And the ambulance took a woman from the street who was pregnant. You can imagine how she looked like. I don’t know much, but it is enough, when they finished with this woman, they went to the nurses’ room, sat around and the doctor started to talk down to this woman. Then Zsuzsi couldn’t hold out longer. She stood up. She told the doctor everything, and she said “Why do you say these things? I am also a Gypsy!” Since then the doctor is afraid to say a thing.

But as she understands the word, a lifestyle characterized by laziness and poverty, neither she nor her children are gypsies. It is interesting how deeply Roma have internalized the majority society’s negative stereotypes, and how fast they apply them to the deprived

Roma.

Gyöngyi (33) has only four children –which is unique given her age of 33; she identifies herself as Gypsy, though she grew up in a wealthy miner family. She often talks about the culture shock she faced after moving to the village, and, according to

Roma custom, she lived with her mother-in-law. There were twenty people in a two-room house. When they made food, they made it for twenty. They were poor, with different

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customs than her family. Gyöngyi says she never fully reconciled with the poverty of this place. One cannot comprehend Roma life if one misses the core experience of poverty in Gypsy life, she says:

The Project Leader doesn’t understand the language of the Gypsies. She hears what we say but she doesn’t understand us. She will never understand the language we speak. She didn’t grow up poor. She doesn’t know what “we don’t have” means. Because she grew up having everything. A Roma speaks differently. We do things differently from her. (Gyöngyi)

Although the village is ninety-five percent Roma, they have a non-Roma mayor. Ica says they have communication difficulties with the mayor just as with the Project Leader:

Here nobody talks. If they come from the mayor’s office or if the Project Leader talks about the Gypsies, it doesn’t matter, they don’t understand. If the Project Leader organizes meetings, they don’t understand. She has never been in [situations] we have been in. The Project Leader can live anywhere. But this is a village where one cannot steal or break in; because then they take women, children, grownups, everybody to jail. (Ica)

As these statements make clear, while the Project Leader and the mayor do not understand the Roma, the Gypsies do not understand her or the mayor. There is basic miscommunication between them.

Irma, who finally finished her job training and now works in the baby-mummy house, is one of those who moves “outward from Gypsiness.” She has no male partner, no children, and she lives with her close relatives; these facts might seem important to those who recommended her for the job. I insert here one of my journal entries because it makes Irma’s behavior more understandable. I recorded the following event in my journal:

Tamás walked into the office and he wants to tell me something. I heard this from others after I came back from the village. So I walked to their house. He was angry because, as he said, everybody got baby bottles from the baby-mummy 174

house but not his grandchildren, and—additionally to this—he heard back that the reason was that they are dirty. “No, it cannot be…” I said. Yes, he knows, he repeated. I walked over to the baby house. The two employees were busy with the tourist group that the Project Leader tour guided today. Irma, the only Romany employee, pulled me over to speak. She whispered: I: Is it true I was impolite yesterday? Márta [employee of the FVP office] complained that I was loud and rude. I just went over with the money they sent. M: I don’t remember you being rude. Indeed, I was happy you finally came over and you were so talkative. I: Well, my boss was unhappy because of this complaint. M: Sorry to hear this. Are you guys angry with Tamás? I: No, we love him. But they block those children from changing. M: They have the right to do so, don’t they? I: No. They should not live like one hundred years ago. They have to change. They have to learn that a baby cannot be so dirty. (Now I understand what Tamás said. These words really mean that they are dirty. This is the most harmful word for him. He loves saying that his wife is clean. His grandchildren are clean. It means a lot to him, and it hurts him when Irma says that they are dirty. Irma is his youngest sister. They grew up together sleeping on straw on the floor. How can she say that to him?)

This story shows Irma struggling among the non-Roma on whom she is dependent; she wants the job. But she feels attacked, so she is insecure. She understands that the purpose of the baby-mummy house is to help Roma integration. So she starts by proving that she is above other Gypsies.

There are many stories circulating among family members about how Irma used to “cover” her brothers’ mischiefs. She wrote their homework and stood up for them when others said something wrong behind their backs. And now she starts speaking the talk of the majority society. Irma’s story–and many other stories regarding “coming outers”–is also part of the problem: who the winners are when they (the Gypsies) come out of “Gypsiness.” Those who “come out,” most often grow far from their extended families, which were the foundation for their individual identities.

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Locked in the pre-constructed social space. Finally, people feel locked in the pre- constructed social space that the majority society labels “gypsy.” Leo knows more about

Gypsy life because he is the oldest man in the village, so he feels locked in the prejudice connected to being “gypsy”:

I was born into the Gypsiness. I will stay in it. I don’t let it go. I will not change. Because I won’t be a Hungarian anyway. I will not get out of Gypsiness, out of this name. We will remain Gypsies until we die. Even if we dress in golden clothes, even then, we will be called gypsy. As there are Chinese, Japanese, Rumanian, so there are Gypsies [Cigányok]. The letter “G”[C] is on their back. They could be improved only with more jobs, more money and more honor.

It is worth thinking about the difference between what Irma and Leo represent. Irma still hopes that there is a way to become Hungarian. She might even imagine being a cosmopolitan in the midst of a dead-end village in Eastern Hungary, infused with 10

Million Ft from the Reyffensen Bank for the frescoes, 8 million from the Edelény subregion and from Balog minister for operating the baby-mummy house, 26 000 Euros from the H. Stepic CC Charity for three years, and where still futher possibilities for governmental support and EU grants exist. The experience of cosmopolitanism is not getting out of their closed village, but seeing programs come into their village that represent either the old assimilative practices (though today it is termed “inclusion”) with ideas foreign to them, or by investing so much money that villagers are shocked to hear about it. In the baby-mummy house only a few women appear, mainly to receive food; others do not go there even if food is offered. Roma still have no jobs, no money and no honor. Leo’s realization shows a wise man’s attitude: If he “won’t be a Hungarian anyway” it is not worthwhile to “get out of Gypsiness.” The name is important for him:

“How do they call me?” Can any external or internal changes surpass the “difference” 176

that he is a Gypsy? Instead, he commends other changes that would guarantee jobs, more money and more honor to the Gypsy.

Worlds of the Gypsy and non-Gypsy

According to a Gypsy folk tale, God created the white man in his impatience: he opened his fireplace early, before the clay was well baked. He created the black man while he was playing with the white man and he over-baked the clay. And when he baked the Gypsy, God sang songs with the black man; this time he baked the clay just fine, beautiful brown like the bread crumb. God made the Gypsies in his joyfulness, therefore he gave them joy and singing as a gift. (Daróczi, 2009, p.1). This tale is a perfect example of how Roma people see themselves when they are not compared to others–they are “just fine.” The tale also shows the three men’s equal relationship with God, and the different moods–impatience, playfulness and joyfulness–when God made them. But I find the most remarkable in this tale is that the three kinds of men have no relationships with each other.

Conversations and stories show that the Bódvalenke people distinguish “their world” from “other worlds”: whites, Hungarians, peasants, the wealthy, and other kinds of Gypsies, such as the Vlahs. Additionally, there is a well-recognized divide between the worlds of men and women. In the following section I look into these divides and boundaries, as the villagers experience them.

Bódvalenke is a dead-end settlement where there has been very little information exchange with the outside world since about 1990, when after the Regime change,

Gypsies were discharged on a mass scale from the end of heavy industry, the stone quarry

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in Bódvaszilas, the forestry industry, the Agricultural Cooperatives, and from the state- owned construction companies. Men moved back to the village and have since rarely left.

The latest ideology that shaped their knowledge is Socialism, which was an international movement that considered various races as non-important differences just like God in the above folk tale (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004). With this I suggest that, according to their recent stories, they do not recognize race differences. They don’t use binaries such as “Gypsies” and “Whites.” For census purposes Roma people identify themselves either as Hungarians or Roma, but these two rubrics do not suggest identifiable differences other than the dissimilar treatment they know from their life experiences.

Under Socialism, the discriminatory treatment of the Roma was punishable. After the fall of Socialism, negative discrimination grew and race differences were emphasized in Hungarian public discourse through more and more frequent hate speech against Jews and Gypsies (Bárány, 2002). In this respect there is a positive effect of the village’s isolation and lack of information, since they did not hear these discourses. Mara, for example, explains her Gypsiness as follows:

M: What does it meant to be Roma? Mara: We are Gypsies. M: And what does that mean? Mara: I don’t know much about it. M: For you, personally… Mara: Yaaa, for us! There is a saying that there are peasants and there are Gypsies. And then for peasants the saying is that since you are that, we are this. I accept that I am a Gypsy. That’s all. They handle us differently than the peasants.

In the lexicon of the villagers “whiteness” is never used to signify race, only to indicate the lightness of skin-color: for example, as Levente narrates his relational choices, “I had both whiter and browner girlfriends; for me it wasn’t a factor of choice” 178

(Levente). Mara uses the word in the same way; “Out of the six girls two are brown, the rest are white. We two are brown. I don’t mind, brother is brother, sister is sister” (Mara).

Also Marika néni describes the skin tone of her daughter like this, “My father was

Hungarian. M.S. was my father. He was Hungarian, he wasn’t Roma. And my daughter resembles him. I have two other daughters, they are also whites. You couldn’t tell about them that they are Gypsies.”

Levente, born into a mixed family (his father is white), is one of the three persons who mention the word “race difference” in the village:

I couldn’t figure out why people label a person with words such as “Gypsy” and “Roma.” It will never be that we just see the human being. It would be good not to discriminate against each other based on the color of the skin. The problem is that this is why they don’t get jobs, because they are othered. Here race differences matter very much. And also in the neighboring cities. And they don’t give jobs to the gypsies. And this is not good. Since among the gypsy people there are many who learn. Many of them know a lot, they have their high school degree, vocational school, and still cannot find a job because they look like where they came from and to where they go. In the college they asked me what I consider myself. But even though I consider myself a Gypsy, they see me not as a Gypsy. So I came out well with everybody.

According to his account, race differences are judged based on skin color. If somebody is as light-skinned as Levente, his social environment does not consider him a Gypsy even if he identifies as one. Why would one claim himself Gypsy if his environment refuses to see him as Gypsy? The reasons might be, first, the cohesion of the dead-end village; second, the need to be included into his partner’s family, who are dark-skinned Roma; and third, the social benefits, to gain which even some deprived white families claim to be Gypsy. Levente explains, “Honestly, if I went somewhere they did not see me as a

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gypsy. They never told me that I am a gypsy. On the contrary, when I came here they told me that I am not gypsy since I looked not gypsy.”

The interesting turn in the process of inclusion or exclusion is that sometimes it is not easy to figure out the terms of inclusion and exclusion. For example, the villagers discriminated against Levente because his light skin surpasses their limits. Additionally, although he is a close relative, he grew up in a different place, a large city, and moved back to the village only six years ago. Moreover, since I never heard that villagers excluded females as “too white,” I suspect some genderized difference in this limit. Vali says “My children, they don’t look gypsy. The big girl is for me blonde, white, blue- eyed; the boy also, the younger one, so among us there are no blacks. But we keep contact with the family. If there is a graduation.” As Vali mentions her “blonde, blue- eyed” daughter with pride, she projects the possibility that they will further loosen the relationship with the brown-skinned relatives even if they still communicate around graduations. Though, if we know that they live in the same village, this signifies a less than close relationship.

Instead of calling the “other” white, villagers use the word “peasant” to designate the non-Roma. This makes sense since they grew up either in this village or in the neighborhood where whites are peasants, or former peasants. So when Levente wants to describe his family lines more precisely he says “We are Gypsies but my grandfather was a peasant. This happened earlier but now it happens more often” (Levente).

In the village, in case of mixed marriages, the non-Roma adopts his/her partner’s lifestyle. There are many mixed marriages. Indeed, Orsi néni recalls:

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But I am thinking a lot that I have never ever been able to kiss gypsy boys. I never had a gypsy boy. Never. I should stick here if I had a gypsy boy. I still worked then. B. [her husband] is not a Gypsy. He was a policeman. We met there at the Gomori. I run over the train tracks. We worked there on the railroad. He wanted to ticket me, haaa, for 30 Ft because I run over the train tracks. I said, “go f . . k yourself.” And he left. He came again the next day. We were there at the Gomori, on the railroad, we worked on the way station. Yes, he came, came, came, and we became friends so much that we stayed together.

Whites who marry Roma join their Roma partner in Romungro customs but they rarely admit it, since for many of them “gypsy” means a lifestyle with negative connotations.

Everybody takes it differently: somebody it might impress that he or she is Hungarian or Gypsy if they are asked what they are. In my opinion . . . I was not rejected yet . . . I figure it out myself. I can speak with everybody, either by phone or in person; I don’t curse, and don’t speak as I look down on somebody, so they don’t reject me. (Vera)

In Vera’s account, Gypsiness means lack of skill in communicating with

Hungarians, bad language, an attitude that not only provokes negative discrimination, but if someone behaves like this, then the Hungarians’ negative discrimination is “justified.”

There is also a strategic use of Gypsy or Hungarian identities: it might impress one that one calls oneself Hungarian; but in this word usage Hungarian is used in a cultural, not nationalistic, understanding. In a similar manner, if a person identifies herself as Gypsy, the Hungarian-Gypsy binary used in this encounter suggests Roma cultural identity.

How can this cultural identity be identified? What does it mean? Marika néni says “Many Hungarians think that Gypsies are not Hungarians. But we also must be

Hungarians because we cannot even speak Roma here. Not even the Gypsy language. We know nothing, only the same as the Hungarians.” In this negative definition of the

Romungro cultural identity we see the lost cultural content.

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Even though my interviewees cannot clearly identify what being a Gypsy means in cultural terms, many of them encountered it in everyday experiences. For example

Móni recalls the latest scandal:

Móni: There is a village car that takes the kids from here to school and to kindergarden and brings them back in the afternoon. And they wanted to hire a woman who goes with them there and comes back with them. But who was the one they hired? They gave the job to the mayor’s wife. And when my sister-in- law went to them and asked them why they hired her and not somebody else who needed a job more, they said, a gypsy cannot go with the children. M: How many gypsy children were there? Móni: Eighteen. M: And how many non-gypsies? Móni: One. The mayor’s child. So the major gave the job to his wife.

Here is another story from Móni as she sees Hungarian and Roma discrimination:

We went to the mother’s day celebration, and the children from Lenke were seated aside, together. There were about 10 children. They were not included in the celebration, only the others. Then I stood up nicely, and my brother-in-law and my cousin, Zsuzsi, I led the children out and then I asked the kindergarden teacher why she made them sit aside. She didn’t even sit with them or anybody else from Ardo, they only sat alone there. Then I got them!

Mara has a similar story:

Mara: Tomi just graduated. They handled us differently than the peasants. They told us that it would be a “closed event.” We bought flowers, bonbons–so we prepared—and we couldn’t get in. The peasants were in but we, from Bódvalenke, we were not allowed to enter. M: They didn’t let you get into your son’s graduation? Mara: No. They said, it was a closed event. But for those from Szendre and Jakab, it was not a closed event. For people from Bódvalanke, it was. M: You stayed outside waiting? Mara: No. We did not stay outside either.

I heard many similar stories. Overt discrimination against the Gypsies, however, does not always characterize the Roma-Hungarian relationship.

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When the generation who are in their 50s and 60s tell about their experiences with the Hungarians, they distinguish two historical times, “during Socialism” and “after

Socialism,” as fundamentally different. For instance, István recalls that “The Hungarians and the Gypsies loved each other. I can’t tell how it went awry. Many people here turn to me with the same question . . . but I don’t have the answer.” Tamás says “If the peasant promises something he doesn’t keep his word, but the Roma keeps his word.” Other than this, they don’t see a problem: “Gypsies and non-Gypsies, we don’t hurt each other. If they give respect.”

In 2011 ten village women went with the Project Leader to the European

Parliament’s ASP5G-2 Conference in Brussels. This gave them a totally new experience.

Here is the story in Aranka’s encounter:

A: They always differentiate the Hungarian and the Roma person. For example one Roma goes to a company. They will tell him that you cannot work here. But if a Hungarian goes there he can work. This is so already all around the world. In Hungary. Not everywhere. Because we were in Brussels with the Project Leader and there they received us as if we were, who knows, such big men. M: How was it? A: It was very good. We dressed up nicely, we were up to the Parliament and sang there. So it was very good. We sang Gypsy songs. M: Where did you learn them? A: From TV. By ourselves, for a week. M: Whose idea was it? A: The Project Leader. She was listening us and she said “Good, you can sing.” M: Why did you go to Brussels? A: Because they invited us into the Parliament. M: Why? A: To sing. M: Why did they choose the Bódvalenke women? A: Because it was up on the Internet and, I think, they saw it and then they told the Project Leader that she should take us there. But we were there. M: Did you talk with someone there? A: I don’t know the name. M: Hungarians? 183

A: Of course, with Hungarians. There were non-Hungarians there but they spoke no Hungarian.

Here is a rare situation when Hungarian politicians valued Roma/Gypsy women from

Bódvalenke. These women had to travel to Brussels to be celebrated by their fellow

Hungarians.

After I first came to Bódvalenke, because of my conditioning, I used the word

“whites” to identify the non-Roma villagers. Then I realized that it sounds strange in this environment. When people hear the word, they usually don’t repeat it in their answers, they use “peasants” instead. So when Mara comes over to the office after Márta’s work has ended I decided to resolve my confusion and asked her “How do you call non-

Gypsies?” “For us they are peasants,” she says. This was an important change; when I started using the word “peasants,” I became their ally.

Until 198949 stories of Roma-peasant relationships show the same division as the

Roma-Hungarian relationship. I learn of their relationship before Socialism from Iván, a tall skinny white man, who was born in the village. He lives in a large peasant house with his mother. He is the only white person who actually wanted to be interviewed when he saw me wandering from house to house, group to group, and person to person. He remembers that in this village, before Socialism, there was only one Gypsy family toward

Komjáti, and “they were allowed to come into the village to ask this and that only if villagers allowed them.” All the others came after them. But now, when the once- homogeneous peasant village became a Roma village, some poor peasants claim

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themselves to be Roma. I heard this from Piroska, leader of the three-member minority self-governance committee who was proud that some peasants claim themselves as

Roma: “You either declare yourself Roma or not. You decide it. Roma are who declare themselves Roma. Here everybody declares themselves Roma. Even the peasants.”

I recognize that during the years they’ve shared this space, certain peasants have built close relationships with some Gypsy men who regularly work for them in their fields. These farmers consider the Roma people as part of their farm; they care for them in many ways. For example, Gergely tells me about a peasant for whom he used to hoe:

He used to take me to the hospital. Now he gave me 170,000 Ft for my legs. I haven’t thought that there was such a good man. Now. Also last week, I was in the hospital three times. He takes me there and brings me back. Good man. I know him for a long time. Marika néni just died. I went there to hoe, plant potatoes and upload. There is my garden as well. One can watch it.

In this interview Gergely also says that the Project Leader promised to lend him the money he needed to pay the doctor, but she didn’t give him any money. Then the farmer helped him out, and now he pays the man back by working more. In this type of memory

Roma and peasant are distinguished by their different divisions of labor and different economic status.

Leo uses “Hungarian” and “peasant” interchangeably, distinguishing them based on their relationship to the land, family, and the different division of work between genders:

L: Well, if we see a gypsy and a Hungarian coming together, a man says “There comes a gypsy with a Hungarian. Or [a man says] “There comes a Hungarian with a gypsy.” We cannot equal the peasants and the gypsies. M: Why? L: Because the Hungarian was a peasant for his whole entire life, and he remains that [peasant]. Just like the gypsy. The peasant cares for everything better. For 185

example fields, he keeps this and that, hoes, everything. Because the gypsy doesn’t do this. Many [Gypsy] women can’t even hoe or know what working in the field is. I had a field in the time of the Agricultural Cooperative, I cultivated it. Not my wife. She doesn’t know how even today. Jolán néni [his wife]: He didn’t take me. I had little kids, breast-fed them, cooked for them, cleaned the house, in a clean house I gave him good food, then how should I go to hoe when all of them were so young? I brought up also mom’s children. All.

We learn more from Mara about the divide between peasant life and Gypsy life, and the different handling of food in the two types of households:

Peasants have always been higher than the Gypsies. They, for example cook today, and put away for tomorrow. They don’t eat up everything at once. Since what they cook today, they eat also tomorrow. But this is not customary for us that we would put the leftovers in the cooler, or eat it tomorrow for breakfast or dinner. We give it to the dog. We give it to the dog as dog-food. If there is something left over, for example if we don’t eat the soup they give us in the mayor’s office, the dog will eat it. We give it to the dog. If there is some leftover from our food, we also give this to the dog. Since we don’t eat the food the next day. If we receive food, if there is meat with rice, or different meats with potato, fruit soup, these we eat. But such things as vegetable soup, lentil soup, I don’t know what the heck, they give dry bread to put in the soup, these are for the dog. Not because they are unfamiliar. They cut some bread, put it in the oven, I guess, and they give us the dry bread and they say “Eat it!” And me, I take it home and give it to the puppy. The peasants can plan meals. The peasants can plan everything. But for us it is difficult to plan because here we have five hungry kids. They need food three or four times a day. I cook in that huge pot. Two meals and it has gone. As for today, I cooked the beans–this takes time. The kids are hungry. Since there is no bread or anything else. They wait for me to cook, so I cook. The peasant is herself. Even when she has 2-3 kids, they are told that you got food now but you will not eat until four or five in the afternoon. But our kids, they don’t know such a thing that you don’t eat until four or five. We have to feed them when they are hungry even if it is made from nothing.

It is clear that the first difference Mara encounters is the different family model. She also makes clear a distinction between “their food” (that during summer the local government gives out to the schoolchildren) and “our food” (that they cook for themselves). There is a discernible fragment when Mara does not finish her sentence talking about the croutons. 186

“Not because it is unfamiliar for us” but because “they give us the dry bread and they say

‘Eat it!’” She points out the humiliation when “they” give the Roma “dry bread.” Her repeated sentence of “We give it to the dog” is her rebellion against the pity of the non-

Roma (to dispel the idea that everything is good for the “hungry gypsy”). Her view is that she is still on a higher level than the non-Roma because she has rules of her own based on her customs, her possibilities, and her different family model. This, however, remains a short narrative segment instead of developing into a “larger-arching” narrative

(Riessman, 1993). Also, Mara refers to the dissimilar sense of time: while the peasants have a strict schedule for mealtime (I remember Irma, who teased Hungarians for scheduling even sex), Gypsy families eat when they are hungry (if they have food).

I talked about household and lifestyle issues with women because it is their field.

While speaking about their daily routine, they often end up comparing peasant and Gypsy life, and they always prove that Gypsy life is on a higher level than peasant life. Réka compares peasants and Roma on a wider scale. She organizes her speech around three main ideas, Gypsy life, Gypsy speech, and Gypsy style:

I quote my mother-in-law: the gypsy kneads the bread on a piece of bed sheet but not a peasant. The gypsy pitches tents but not a peasant. The gypsy puts her pot into an adobe pit but not a peasant. From this aspect our life is more wide- ranging. They don’t know what the gypsy speech, gypsy style and gypsy life are. Well, they cannot know these. Our style is that we are free-mouthed, we quickly tell in a few words what the peasant won’t [tell]. They don’t want to be called gypsy, looked at as gypsy or stigmatized as gypsy kind because they utter gypsy words. We swear, quarrel, shout, and curse if things don’t go the way I would want or if I wake up so. The gypsy curse each other but he is not the one who judges, only the [one] aloft. Our style is that we rise to dance faster than the peasants, and we faster decide the ways of entertainment. We love to live, we love to have fun. We love to sing evenings next to the fire . . . fire from torch and fire from rubber. To sit out 187

with families to talk . . . to be there where you can be, to help each other if there is trouble, and if the connection between families is so then I say “I have so much, I will share it with the other.” If for example the other says she doesn’t have, she comes to me and I give to her. Or if I don’t have and I go to her then also she gives to me. Mutually. (Réka)

While Réka describes their life, speech, and style as different from the peasants, Aranka chooses to describe the peasants to explain the dissimilarities:

First of all, they [peasants] were born as not gypsies. Their parents were rich and they inherited. They work a lot. They work on their property for long years, since their childhood. Many of them separate us and say “Look how nasty this gypsy is!” And still, there are gypsies who behave better than the non-gypsies. Respect to the exception. They cook differently than us, they behave differently and they regularly go to the church, to the field, and then they . . . I don’t go to church. (Her husband laughs and adds: “I go everyday next to it. Juli néni asks me every day “Zalán, do you go to the church?” “Sure. I pass it every day.”)

Finally, there is one point where, according to Réka, there is no difference between the peasants and the Roma: they both protect their children as a mother. “So there is neither smoother love between them nor rougher to the way of life that others say: ‘They certainly do not raise their children as we do!’ We feed them, clothe them, bathe them and take them to the doctor the same way as them.” Interestingly, they are most often accused of neglecting the children.

Roma people in the village don’t consider themselves religious. They believe in

God and they always baptize their children so “they be not Jew” and they may see “God’s face,” as András explains. Sometimes in the same family half of the children are Roman

Catholic and the other half are Calvinists. Only István and his mother, Olivia néni, are regular church-goers. István visits the Reformed Church and says he is a cantor there.

Olivia néni goes to the Roman Catholic Church. The neighboring village’s pastor comes every Sunday to the Reformed Church–the elderly Hungarians belong to this church. But 188

the Catholic Church is open only once a month. I often see Olivia néni in the Reformed

Church pouring her pennies into the money box and sitting on the side where nobody sits.

Despite the fact that they are not church-goers, I often hear other villagers criticizing the

Project Leader because “she believes in nothing.”

Since they had a positive experience in Brussels with other Hungarians, I expected that this brought the Project Leader closer to the women. I ask Aranka:

M: In Brussels, did they give you something? A: No. They thanked us and that’s it. When we came home the Project Leader gave us 7 euros to buy something for the kids. We went to the Tesco in Miskolc [the closest Hungarian city to Bódvalenke] and bought chocolate and cakes for the children. M: In Brussels, did you visit any stores? A: No. M: The Project Leader told me she lost her money. A: This is not true. She told this story to us as well but we don’t believe it. We don’t take it, the others don’t take it because they are not such people. It might be that she lost it and she said that it was stolen. But it is not true. It was a very bad feeling. She is so erratic, she acts in a hustle everywhere, and, in my opinion, she lost it somewhere. In the restaurant or somewhere else.

It seems that their divided worlds did not overlap during the trip. When Gyöngyi calls me into her house she explains “There are lots of people who decide about your life, you have no voice. I feel as if the world overturned. Since the Project Leader is here, the whole village turned upside down.” Vali shares Gyöngyi’s opinion:

In my opinion, it was better when the Project Leader wasn’t here. Because when she wasn’t here, the Gypsies managed their lives somehow. Everybody talked with everybody. But as she opened the project office, only one, two or three people could get close to things; they stirred the soup and there was the big quarrel. No matter we were sisters and brothers, we were angry at each other. From this we have no profit, but she has. Because when we receive donations we don’t see anything of them. And if once [in the future] there will be no project office here, we might achieve something.

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When I revisited the village in December, I see a huge fence around Móni’s house. From the street neither her house nor the fresco painted on the wall are visible. I see the first sign of rebellion. I knock on the door to inquire about the fence. Móni tells me this story:

Móni: I am not in the minority government this year. My sister, Zs., she was elected this year. The Project Leader got 110 Santa Claus packages from a benefactor and told Márta to entrust the minority leaders with organizing a Santa Claus day for the children. But they [the minority leaders] didn’t want to make it an event. Then the Project Leader came and told me that she will not take the packages out of her car if I don’t organize the event. She threatened me that she’ll give them to the neighbor village’s children. I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Project Leader, I am not in the minority leadership anymore. Why do you ask me to do this?” But she insisted that no kid will receive any gift if I reject organizing the event. Because it was at the last minute. I thought, every mother will be angry with me if I say “no.” And all the children will be very upset. So I arranged the Santa Claus day and they gave out the packages. But I have finished with the Project Leader. She blackmailed me. She cannot do this. Just because she wanted to add one more thing to her “this is what I did for the village” list she blackmailed me. Those packages were sent from a donor, the Project Leader and Márta should not set conditions. Especially not in this style. M: I see you built a high fence in front of your house. Móni: Yes. I don’t want people to see everything I do. It also covers the fresco. I want to make sure I am not intruded on. This is my property. The Project Leader came to me and said “your fence is too high.” And I replied “I know. I want it this way.” I don’t want her to tell me what I’m supposed to do. Neither of them.

With Móni’s fence at least one division became visible: the division between some villagers and the FVP.

Strangers and the Bódvalenke People

Since Bódvalenke is a very isolated community that consists of one extended family, they are suspicious of strangers. (I use here the Western measurement according to which cousins are family, though the “R’s” distinguish three clans in the village based on different family names, “R,” “H” and “K”) When the Project Leader first came to the

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village, she was a stranger. And so she needed a mediator. Móni (40) recalls the story of the Project Leader’s first visit:

We moved back to Bódvalenke six years ago, it was then that the project [FVP] started. A man came here from Szalonna with the Project Leader. We knew the man from Szalonna because he is in every committee, my brother knew him. He came with the Project Leader. We didn’t speak with her, we thought, “What does this stranger want here?” And then they called us together and told us about the project [FVP]. We didn’t want it. We thought, it would make this poor little village ugly. But as the painters came, we had no problem with them.

Accordingly, the Project Leader was received as a stranger but the painters were not. In other accounts villagers referred to the painters as “good friends,” “my in-law,” “my best girl friend,” and they thought that the painters loved them very much. But I heard that the

“R’s” excluded other Gypsies who moved into the village. “We sometimes had strangers who came here and they needed to go because they weren’t included,” says Marika néni.

The general distrust toward strangers in the Project Leader’s case increased after the villagers caught one of the “helpers” deceiving them, putting their children on the

Internet, asking for donations, and not giving them the money. To the initial mistrust of the stranger a new fear was added, the fear that they would be ridiculed or used only to profit the strangers. After the FVP opened the village, Lilla sees the village as even more closed. She realizes that not only do villagers distrust strangers, but also strangers distrust the villagers.

Even if people come to the village to “help,” it benefits them more. They take pictures, they put all kinds of information on the Internet . . . that the children starve, etcetera, etcetera. For example they catch when the boys don’t wear t- shirts and this and that. Because this is customary for us. This doesn’t mean that our kids have no clothes. We wash them–look, we wash them until they are ragged. Because the kids need them. But this doesn’t mean that our kids have leprosy. Or that our children are deadly or they carry infections. Because many people come here, stare at them, and everything is fine. But when the kids go to 191

them, they are scared, they keep their distance. People take the attitude of Gypsy- peasant. Nobody is better than the other. They are superior to us in that they eat better food, they live better because they are richer. We are not wealthy, we get only 12 000 forint for family support, some receive GED or GYES,50 but we have to spread this out for the entire month. Men have no jobs. They just get unemployment. They are allowed to work only two or three times every year for 3 or 4 months. No more. And they wonder why we cannot live as others. For us, there is no money for vacation, as it is shown on the TV, and then they come and talk about this vacation and that vacation. If they could only feel the same that we feel; that we can do nothing if our kids are ill. We cannot relate to anybody. We cannot go to anyone for help. Because we depend only on each other. (Lilla)

While their stories testify to the Hungarians’, peasants’, teachers’ and even the FVP office’s overt discrimination, as Rozi néni, Vali and Gyöngyi’s stories revealed, they also struggle with similarly strong divides between Gypsy and Gypsy.

Gypsy and Gypsy Divide

Bódvalenke people can depend only on their immediate family and not in general on other Roma. Kristóf recalls:

Here they don’t discriminate based on race. But if you get out of here, for example if you go to Hidvegardó, there is discrimination. There people discriminate very much. So much that if we get into the pub, they look at us saying “Why do these gypsies come here?” Then we usually leave; we don’t want to get into trouble. Though they are exactly the same kind of gypsies as me, but this doesn’t matter. So the neighborhoods matter where you live. I count as gypsy in another village even when the other is also gypsy. And this is an insult. Though, it doesn’t hurt if someone says you are gypsy if you are in the family.

Accordingly, the people by whom they feel accepted are limited to a narrow group. This is because not only are they discriminated against in other villages, they are looked down upon by the handful of Roma families who are relatively better off. Some of these families are better off because they have continuous permanent employment; they

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attribute their being in this situation because “they better fit” the other world, being two- faced.

Uneven access to regular income has produced a split in the community (family), which is divided between the extremely poor and the others, and where the “rich” look down on the others. “They hang lots of gold on themselves that everybody could see, in their ears, neck, hands; they buy stuff–cars . . . for example here is my brother who is rich,” Móni explains. Her brother’s family “sells” everything. They bring food to the village and sell it at a profit; they bring cheap clothes and sell them at high prices, “and many crazy Gypsies buy them and go in debt.” People tell how these wealthy Roma become as boastful as the wealthy peasants and separate themselves from the rest. Even so, not everybody in the village wants to be rich. Katalin says she is in a bad relationship with the “wealthy Roma” in the village because they are not on her level. “We are satisfied with what we have. We don’t like to be forced [to reach for more]. The poor can have better lives than the rich.”

Elderly people are upset to see this division between rich and poor emerge. They remember when the family and the village was more homogeneous. Compared to the old times, Lenke is divided, Zalán says. Earlier, the “R’s,” “K’s” and “H’s” were able to solve everyday problems, but now things have become rearranged and the desire for wealth, greed, and jealousy divides the extended family:

One pulls here, the other pulls there. One is more jealous than the other. They would kill each other. Two gypsies, I mean, as if we were brother and sister and you pulled that way and I pulled this way. They even push each other in quarrels, there are such people in Lenke. Here, if one carries himself better than the other, if one has more money and everything, he could drown the other in one spoon of water. The rich have pigs, chickens, then they are so giza [uppish] that they are 193

not even human. Here everything goes like this. They kill each other in a spoon of water. There are peasants here, they also kill each other. Before it was different. Now Lenke is pulled out so much, how can I say for you, as if it doesn’t exist. Things in the past were more valuable than now. We lived better. I went to my brothers and everything was made. But now it is not like this. Now they kill each other. (Zalán)

András adds this to Zalán’s sentiment: “Who has money, he lives in another world.

Everybody belongs to another world who thinks differently from the simple people.”

Gender Divide

Gypsy folktales portray a specific division of labor among men and women in which men decide about major issues that affect their families and the whole group, and women are the providers of food and caretakers of the family. They also portray a community in which men and women separate while they perform different gender roles.

For example, a Gypsy folktale from Bács-Kiskun County, Hungary, describes the male- female division as follows:

That tree still stands there at the border of Üszöd. Once the gypsies sat under it because it had a large canopy and made a big shadow. The caravans used to stop there with their horse-pulled wagons, they stayed there and cooked there and ate there. During the day the gypsy women went after bread, they walked into the village, said good luck to the folks, and the gypsy men stayed with the horses. When the women came back with their bundles, then they started to cook, everybody cooked what they got in the village. Then the night came, the gypsies sat around the fire. They sat together, talked, they exchanged words from this and that. Then suddenly, from the trunk of the tree came out a huge green flame. Suddenly, with terrible force reached the sky, then, as the abyss was about to absorb it, it disappeared. My father said to the others, “Gypsies, throw there a white sheet because it is there where the secret gold coin is.” (Bari, 1990, p. 49)

According to this tale the women’s role is to go into the village, to wish good luck to the villagers while begging for food [bundle], to cook what they got from the villagers, and then discuss their experiences. The men’s role was to take care of the horses, cultivate

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“brotherhood,” and initiate things that affect the entire group’s “good luck” or well-being.

Throughout the day, men and women work, gather, communicate separately as two different bodies of the same community.

A similar division among men and women is observable among the Bódvalenke people. The men decide more serious issues of what is allowed in the family, and women’s main role is to care for the children, the husband, the household, and bring food to the table even if there is no money. The women’s prominent role in feeding the family shows in the custom of begging, so I will discuss this custom in this chapter from a new aspect. Even if women don’t go begging, it is their virtue to feed their family even from nothing and it is their pride if they succeed in it. After listening to many life stories and discussions with women I concluded that most of them take sole responsibility for providing food for the family, cleaning, washing, and keeping contact with school and other institutions. Conversely, men collect mushrooms, work in the peasants’ gardens, work on the black market, and steal wood and sell it. Both men and women work in the community work program but mostly in separate female and male brigades that rarely mix.

At this point I will make a short detour to reflect the baby-mummy house’s agenda that Roma women must be taught how to cook and how to play with their children. If we know the women’s role in Roma communities, we understand Réka’s reaction to this idea:

In our lifestyle it is exactly the opposite [to what we need]. Our kids can play in our yards. Because I either sit with them or tell them “Go play on the yard!” And then they play nicely. They say, they will teach us how to cook. They don’t have to teach us because I always will cook as I learned. I will not throw away my 23 195

years of experiences and cook as they want me to cook. This is their side—this is our side. Because no matter that she cooks a paprika potato as she wants if I don’t benefit from it. For us that food is good which we make. And for our families the good food is what we do—not what they give us. They say, “do this with cinnamon.” But my child wouldn’t eat it. We do our food. And for our family the good food is what we give them. What they say that I should prepare with cinnamon or whatever, my child will not eat.

Réka’s comment shows Roma women’s resistance to giving up their cultural practices, just as older women in the village resisted earlier assimilatory practices. Regarding recent efforts that target Roma women, Marushiakova and Popov (2011) underline:

Of course, there is a major difference in terms of ideological reasoning and phraseology, but apart from that, we see to a large extent identical or at least remarkably similar activities meant to resolve specific problems in the fields of employment, housing, schooling, and education, health, including the problems of Roma women (which are also one of the recent “hits”). Thus, the activities planned and put into practice nowadays as well as the projects directed to the overcoming of Roma problems (including the new European programmes and projects) are well known from the recent past and that is why their outcomes can easily be anticipated. (p. 56)

The agenda that Roma women must be taught how to play with their children and how to cook denies exactly those experiences and values that Roma women are deservedly proud of.

Separated worlds of males and females is balanced by sex; this gives sexuality an important role in the community. However, after I had formed a closer relationship with the women, I recognized that many do not think of preventing pregnancy. Also, although schools teach younger girls about sexuality, there are just too many of them who become pregnant and do not know how to prevent pregnancy. There are two methods Roma women in the village know, surgical sterilization, which they can request after they are twenty-five-years old, and birth control injection, which everybody has access to.

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Theoretically, young girls and women can choose a quarterly injection that they receive in the village from a gynecologist who visits the village regularly. However, in many cases they don’t choose prevention. When I talk with mothers, their younger daughters join the conversation and openly say that they want to become pregnant. Among the reasons, other than the complicated transition between childhood and adulthood, and the important (and mostly appreciated) role that women play in families, I see early pregnancy as a potentially conscious step to create joy. As Katalin puts it,” I am happy with my children. I miss love. This is what I rarely receive. But from my kids I get love and this is what matters.”

Roma children start imitating gender roles and sexual behaviors observed at home at an early age. According to Irma, who worked as a school janitor for years, boys and girls start their sexual games when they are 8 to10 years old, then suddenly the girls become pregnant when they start to menstruate. Mara confirms this when she says she has problems with her daughter who is currently seven years old.

M: I have to watch her but I cannot be everywhere. I told her I’ll step on her stomach if I hear that she is having a boyfriend. Girls have boyfriends at the age of 8, 9, and 10. And they push each other in bad things. I told her I wasn’t like this. I told her, even if everybody does it, she cannot do it. “I am not doing anything,” she said. Then I said, “I believe you don’t do it, but I don’t want you to be with these boys and girls.” But I don’t know whether she is with them or not because all the Gypsy kids from the neighboring villages go into this school. There are 200 children there. And nobody watches them. The older kids hit the younger ones and the teachers can’t save them. How could then they save them from more serious things?

When underage girls become pregnant, their mothers take guardianship of their children.

For example, after Réka’s daughter, Lilla, met her partner at 14, she later left her partner and moved home permanently with her three children. Réka says: 197

Unfortunately, Lilla came back. She has 3 children. When she had the first child we didn’t know that man very much as we were supposed to know him, and then in the meantime the other two [children] were born. But when she came back after the first, I told already her “My daughter, don’t go back because I cannot see life out of this; you will not come out well. But then my daughter said, “I love him.” And then I said, “My child, you will not fill your stomach out of love!” And she was stupid because she threw her school away. Now she would have her profession in her hands.

According to Réka’s account, mothers do not have much say in their daughters’ decisions; still, if they can, they help without blaming them once they are back.

Sexuality has central importance; as Jolán néni tells, couples have sexual intercourse every day, and they would rather enjoy sex than think of prevention. The arrival of a child is always welcomed. Based on my interviews, those women who do not want to have more than five or six children use contraceptive injection. However, because not all husbands allow their wives to use contraceptive methods, preventing pregnancy is not something that every woman can discuss in their families.

Another field where the gender divide is visible in the village is communication.

Men and women communicate separately and they gather to discuss things in separated gender groups. Generations are not as strictly separated as genders. Couples never hold each other’s hands when they walk – not even married couples. They rarely even walk together. Only twice did I see teenagers kissing in public–and those couples were from another village. Marika néni confirms my observation: “Women don’t walk together with men, this is true. Men do their job and women the same way. We love to sit outside and talk with each other–men the same way. Here women don’t go after their men; not even the young.”

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Men walk with men, women with women. They separate themselves even when they work in the community work program. The only exception was when I saw Tamás working with his wife, Ica, and another woman from the village. While Tamás cleared the forest and built a fire to burn the weeds, the women just stood and watched. When I stopped next to them Tamás explained: “I don’t let my wife work once I am here. I work also for them.” This generosity is the opposite of what many young Roma women say about Roma men, which is that they are authoritarian.

However, Ica with her daughter-in-law says “Here in Lenke, men dictate to the women. For example, if he says ‘this has to be this way’ you must obey. If not, you will get hit for it. You will be bitten and that is it. My man would never hit me. I say that we cook this, and he eats it.” Ica’s daughter-in-law also says that she expects a man to dominate because it means that he is “man on his feet.”

I: If a man says something it has to be done. M: How do women tolerate this? I: They do.

Not every woman agrees that a man has to be aggressive to look masculine. Although in most of the families the men rule, based on my interviews, about 4 Roma women out of

25 report they have equal say in their families.

Although I initiated individual interviews, my interviewees occasionally were joined during our conversations by family members, husbands, wives, in-laws, and their grown children. During these I could observe the power-lines in many families. The day junior András’s wife came home from the hospital where she was called dirty, I walked to the house where Réka and András live with their ten children; out of them, two already

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live with their partners. I find junior András’ wife sitting on the porch with their baby in the baby carriage. She tells me the story of the hospital in detail and she enjoys speaking about the events that ruffled some feathers in the village in the last couple of days. But when I ask her to tell something about her family, junior András appears in the door; it seems that he followed our discussion from the inside. He says:

Jr. A: She will not give an interview about our family. M: I am asking about her family. Jr. A: She will not talk about hers, either. M: May I ask you, why? Jr. A: Just because I don’t want her to give an interview about her family because we know what is going on with her family and for us that is enough. M: Excuse me, I did not have a chance to introduce myself and… Jr. A: I know who you are but she doesn’t give interviews. For us it is enough, as much as we have to deal with. The topic of her family is our business, only. M: I would appreciate if … Jr. A: I know what you need. So I don’t want her to give an interview and I don’t want to give one, either.

After he stole the spotlight from his wife, I stay with them and we speak about one hour of his experiences in his job training without my recording the discussion. He even shows me his “diploma” proving that he finished a nursing course. But he doesn’t let his wife speak with me as long as I am in the village. I saw the young woman sitting alone even when I conducted a long interview with senior András, with Réka, and with Lilla on the same porch. She sits on the porch alone with her baby and listens to us, but she is not allowed to join us. I have to add that other family interviews showed a more democratic family atmosphere; family members usually enjoyed listening to each others’ stories, occasionally they added a few things to the topic and then left, or they were just sitting around as a good audience to the stories told by my interviewees.

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Authoritative men keep “order” in their family by abusing their wives and separating them from other women. It is well-known that there are a few husbands who hit their wives; the women deny this, but everybody knows it. For example, Lill says:

There are a few men who hit their family. And they starve, they don’t let their wife get out of the house. They don’t let their wife talk with other women. Because they think there are “educated women” who always discuss everything, and who, if they talk with other men, they are provocative. So these husbands don’t let their wives contact and talk with other women.

These men don’t even have to have a serious reason: they hit their wives for minor disobedience –for example talking with someone, or not being able to cook what they

“ordered.”

Etelka is a young woman whom I always see depressed, carrying her few-months- old baby; according to the village women, her husband forbids her to come out of the house and speak with other women. During my first days I accidentally walked into another battered wive’s home, who lives in the same house where Etelka lives. The L- shaped peasant house is shared by two brothers and their families; each family occupies one large room and a kitchen. I knew already from the villagers that her husband doesn’t let her out of the house. I asked the young woman to give me an interview. She agreed.

But after a few sentences I realized that this young woman in her twenties had started shaking. At one point of the interview the woman whispered: “Don’t tell him [her husband] that I talked with you. Because he is angry with these kinds of things . . . about the family.” I promise not to tell him and leave the house very cautiously so as not to be seen by her man. I decided against using the interview she gave me because I realized the dichotomy between her willingness to speak with me and the rule that her huband had set

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for her. Elderly women, who know everything by observing things, say there are two women in the village extremely dominated by their husbands, and one of them is this young woman: “It is very likely that they will be the next Böbes in the village.”

Böbe was my daily visitor during summer; she came to “kéregetni” [beg] every day. Four months later, when I returned to the village, she did not knock on my door as she had usually done before. But I saw her through my window walking up and down; I see by her behavior that she knows I am back in the village. She was six and-a-half- months pregnant then, but she denied it: “I am not pregnant. I am just gaining weight.” I find this ridiculous because she had seven pregnancies before (her seven children are in foster care) and she should know that she is pregnant. But she denied her pregnancy.

Böbe gave birth to a healthy baby boy on an early September morning. During the summer her oldest son escaped from foster care along with his pregnant underage girlfriend; they live now with Böbe. But neither they, nor her husband, helped Böbe when she went into labor; the neighbors called the ambulance. Böbe took nothing with her, not even her healthcare card; she was totally unprepared. The newborn, a beautiful 4 kg baby boy, was taken away from her right after the birth and Böbe was sent home. She had “bad records.” Böbe is the only woman in the village whose seven children were taken into foster care two years ago, and now the eighth has also been taken from her. She finally knocks on the door when everybody has left and comes directly into my room after I open the main entrance. She sits down, avoiding eye contact.

M: How is your baby? Are you allowed to see him? B: No. He was taken in by Vlah Gypsies. I cannot see him. M: Are you allowed to see your other children?

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B: I used to see them in Miskolc. There is a big building there just like this (office), where there is a huge beautiful Christmas tree each year. I used to see them there. M: Do they recognize you? Are they happy to see you? B: No. They don’t call me mother. They say, “Who are you?” M: What do you say then? B: I say, “These are we. We are here.” [While she stresses “we,” she visibly re- experiences the pain she felt then.] But they don’t remember. But it is better like this. M: Why did they take your children away? B: Szilárd was in jail. For the wood. And we had no warmth. And then the notary and the mayor arrived with the police. They came with a bus full of clothes and food for the children. They took all of them. All seven. M: But why? B: Because Szilárd used to hit them. When he was drunk, he hit them. I think, it is better like this. M: What do the kids look like? B: (She smiles.) Oh, they are like diamonds. They are like diamonds. (Böbe)

While she remembers her children she leaves my room smiling. I rarely saw her smile before.

Parallel with Böbe’s story, I need to tell something about Szilárd, her husband.

Szilárd was 15 when his father died, and he just turned 18 when his mother passed away.

Since he had reached adult age, he was allowed to take guardianship for his seven siblings and bring them up as their guardian alone, for years. And now he lost his own children; the same number: exactly seven. When he drinks, he is angry; then nobody can stop him.

In many cases women return to their parents’ house temporarily when they quarrel with their husbands. In this situation men are expected to go after their wives and take them home peacefully. In Lilla’s case the same situation led to three children. After she moved back to her parents and her husband came after her, she went back to him

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twice, until she decided to end the relationship and live with another, less aggressive partner.

In cases when a woman cannot stay at her parents’ house, or when she becomes a widow, she receives help from the mother-in-law or moves to another female relative.

For example, Bibi says:

My husband died. I left five children in Szalonna with my mother-in-law. She raises them. I have my parents here. They live in a rented house. I cannot stay there. We are five sisters, now we live all of us here in this house. This is Katalin’s house. Here life is better. We come out very well, we cook, we wash and grow the kids together. Katalin is for me just like a mother. Though she is younger than me. She is 30 and I am 32.

Katalin, who took Bibi in, was a person who missed this help in her whole entire life. She says “If I had problem I couldn’t go anywhere; they took me in then threw me out, they took me in then threw me out.” If nobody helps, women are there to help each other. But even then, five or six brothers who “keep order” in the village can discipline them. How vulnerable this group of women is I learn only when I return in December. When I return into the village I hear that Katalin and her five children were shown on TV. Their house was set afire by an unknown perpetrator. I knew that she was in a bad relationship with some of the rich Roma and she often borrowed money from one particular man who kept her in fear. I knew she always was in need. After the fire, Katalin had no clothes, furniture or food. That is why she was shown on TV.

As I discussed in the Introduction, Roma separation from the Gadjé world is considered to be the most important cultural element. In analyzing the villagers’ multiple separated worlds it became clear that although Roma-non-Roma separation is significant, it is not the only separation they have to deal with, and, based on a given situation, other 204

separations can be equally important. It is situational with respect to which separated worlds are more important than the others. These worlds are more or less separated from each other but never fully separated because Roma people live in their wider societies while they are Roma; so separated worlds as physical, emotional, and symbolic places are often in dialectical tension. The same geographical place is “felt” as both safe place and locked place; the Gypsy world as something homely and undesirable; and the pre- constructed social space as changeable and unchangeable at the same time. Ultimately, worlds of the Roma and non-Roma are further divided into Hungarian-Roma, peasant-

Roma, strangers, locals, Gypsy-Gypsy, and male and female. As the folktale beginning this section illustrates, women provide food for their families by begging, peddling, sharing, and exchanging. I will discuss these in the following section.

The Dialectics of Mobility and Stability

In this section I examine the role of mobility in light of the narratives of the

Bódvalenke people. I am aware that both mobility and stability are sensitive concepts in connection with the Roma/Gypsies. As former nomadic people they are still stigmatized as unstable and unfit in Westernized societies. On the other hand, stability is also a problematic concept; the word signifies fixedness in poverty and immobility on social scales. Examining mobility is a debated issue also because Romungros are sedentary people and have largely assimilated since the 18th century.

Yet, mobility that appears as instability to outsiders fulfills the function of maintaining equilibrium for the Roma community. Mobility that creates stability, and stability that is possible only through mobility, are inseparable elements of Roma life in

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Bódvalenke. During my research I found that the customs of begging, sharing and exchanging, moving from one family member to another family member, and opening their homes to their extended family–serve as representative forms of mobility that create balance and stability in the community. In the following I discuss these as major themes.

Begging, Peddling, Sharing, and Exchanging

Begging (“kéregetni”), peddling (“házalni”), sharing (“osztozni”) and exchanging

(“cserélni”) are the most visible forms of mobility in the village. First, what they call begging is an activity when Roma women ask for food and money from the peasant villagers. They often walk to neighboring villages to beg. Begging is often connected with selling brooms or mushrooms, but even in this case the economic activity is not as important as the regular contact with “good Gadjé” who will give them food even if they have nothing to sell. For example, Ica says that in the neighboring village the peasants give her food even if she goes with “empty hands.” Second, when Roma women run out of food and basic resources, they go to each other and ask for food ingredients. Third, as a regular economic activity, men steal wood from the surrounding forests and sell or exchange it for food. In what follows, I illustrate these customs of mobility.

When I arrive at the village, the first weekend I learn the choreography and the role of begging and peddling. Friday, when I remain alone with the 20 peasant and 200

Gypsy villagers, starting at 4 p.m. when the office worker leaves for the neighboring village where she lives, Roma women start “kéregetni” [begging]. One by one they knock on my door and ask for something. I remember Ica saying one day:

If the kids are hungry, we go “kéregetni” [begging]. But I don’t do that here. Here they don’t give even an egg. I go to Ardo. I used to go there with brooms and 206

baskets so they give even if I go with empty hands. I walk by foot. It is ten minutes from here. I go to places where they know me, they pack me things. Eeee, I bring everything.

“Kéregenti” [begging] and “házalni” [peddling] are activities that have been customary in this Roma community for generations. Although mainly the poor families practice it, for them, it is the primary source of food for their family.

For three days in a row, 12 hours each day, one woman every fifteen minutes knocks on my door. When I experience the first mass-pilgrimage of women to my house,

I sense that begging is more than asking for something they could eat or use, it is more than mere economic activity. I am new. When they come to my house they map my circumstances, my personality, and figure out the best possible outcome they can gain from their surface relationships with me.

For the question, “What do you usually do?” most women answer: “We think what to cook.” Without knowing the background, this statement seems superficial.

Knowing the detailed circumstances, it becomes clear that “thinking” is very much an active looking for a solution, going from house-to-house begging (asking for food) or peddling (selling baskets and brooms), stealing wood and selling the stolen wood, or exchanging whatever they have for food. Earlier, Réka’s family had a TV that they exchanged for two kilograms of flour.

The number-one activity of the poor Gypsy women is to provide food for the family by begging, peddling, sharing and exchanging. This has been a custom for generations, every Gypsy woman practiced ensuring the stability of the family and the stability of the separated world of the Gypsies through begging. So while they walk,

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while they move their bodies, they connect with each other as Gypsies, and they reconnect with their foremothers who performed the same activity (Tauber, 2000).51

I observe that while they are begging, the women do not show themselves inferior to the non-Roma they ask from; indeed, they give them an opportunity to practice charity.

They use regular interactional tones and show pride while they are begging. Godbout

(1992), Piasere (2000), and Tauber (2008) have similar observations about begging; they say that Roma begging is contrary to the modern attitude towards asking, which is associated with shame. Tauber refers to Piasere (2000) concluding that since Gadjé either gives nothing or they give leftovers, the Gypsy’s “asking/begging creates a one-to-many relation” with the Gadjé where “one person is asking a little or nothing from many”

(Tauber, 2008, p. 172). Since in begging one gives little or nothing to another person without any expectation of being paid back, it is easy for the Roma to exit from the relationship. As I discussed in the “Need for Independence” section, the most important characteristic of this relationship is the lock of the hierarchy that characterizesg market- capitalism; there, either the value of the things or the value of relationships makes it difficult to exit from the relationship (Godbout, 1992). The beggar keeps her independence and pride intact because she never enters into any hierarchy involving non-

Roma (labor structures or the hierarchy of a market). So when Gypsy women go begging,

51 Tauber (2000) says: “To go ‘asking’ is exclusively a women’s activity among the Estraicaria Sinti; it is the women who are faced with the reality of non-Gypsies on a daily basis and who guarantee the survival of ‘their Sinti.’” Tauber continues: “‘Asking’ (‘mangapen’)–that is, the activity of begging and peddling–is not simply a marginal economic strategy, but rather implies a symbolic system which involves ties of kinship, gender relations, and the ideal of a shared life” (p.1). 208

they don’t subordinate themselves, they preserve their non-relation with the Gadjé, while providing for their families without sacrificing family for work.

As Tauber (2008) points out, begging is not only an economic activity, it is also a narrative experience. After begging, women come together and share their begging experiences:

The connection and interlinkage of past and present stories turn them into a continuous event. The content seems to be immobile. The narration transforms the past and present into a non-time or, better, it transform it into today. . . . I tell you a story which we remember well. (p. 165)

Since begging has been practiced for many generations, these women’s stories, as habitual narratives, blur the boundaries between past and present Roma. But as they add their stories to layers of stories that accumulated for hundreds of years, they also mark the boundaries between Roma and non-Roma. Roma women also ask food from each other; this is not begging but sharing (“osztozás”).

When Roma women run out of food, they walk to each other and ask. Although this custom involves the risk that poorer families constantly ask and rarely give, women keep helping each other and share what they have. Gyöngyi says “I don’t give to everybody, only who are close to me.” Or Gabi néni says “I give only to the ‘K’s.’” Since her family name is “K,” this means that she gives only for her closest immediate relatives. Everybody has their circles: where to go to ask and with whom they share.

They also sell or exchange (“cserél”) necessary things, most importantly, they

“sell” wood that men regularly steal from the surrounding forests. Considering that the forest was everybody’s property and became private property only after the Regime change, it is a quite new constraint that men frequently go to jail for stealing wood. This 209

role of men is awarded on a daily basis: they are the first who are given food. Second are the smaller children, then the school-children, finally the mothers, who get less. Men need to be fed more because they perform the most important task: they bring wood to keep the family warm and to cook. Men not only obtain wood, they also go from house to house among them to sell or exchange it for food. Since this activity is illegal, they do not sell wood to the peasants. The men also visit relatives in further villages that women cannot reach to ask for food when they do not have any for their families.

Moving and the Extended Family

The extended family takes responsibility for raising young relatives. Older siblings, uncles and aunts raise their brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces when their parents die or are unable to raise them. As a consequence, it is almost impossible to distinguish among brothers, cousins, nephews and uncles in the village, since all identify each other as brothers and sisters and, even if many tensions exist between them, they are there for each other.

Jolán néni, from the second-generation villagers, had seven children of her own when she “adopted” her four siblings after their parents died. Tamás, Irma, and Zalán were raised by Jolán néni though they are brothers and sisters. She said, “My parents died. I would better divorce from the old man [her husband] than not take them in.”

Réka’s younger sister, Mara was in foster care but her oldest sister took her home every weekend. Gergely was raised by his uncle. Katalin was brought up by her brother. Szilárd started raising his seven brothers when he was only 18 years old. Ica took in her 12-year- old niece, Réka, whom her family couldn’t keep any longer because they had 12 children

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and three more were born. When Ica adopted her niece, she (Ica) had ten children of her own. As she notes:

Haaa. I am older, I am her aunt. Haaa, her mom and dad put her out. She brought nothing, she came by herself [empty handed]. Haaa, I gave her a place. At that time I had ten kids. I felt sorry for her.

Ica’s decision to take in her cousin can be connected to her own experiences: she was about the same age when she lost her home and moved to her mother-in-law’s who took in Ica as her own daughter. This is Ica’s story:

I don’t have a father or mother. They died. Yaaa, when I was a child. When I came here, I was very young when I came here, 12 years old. I was a child. My husband he is from here, I am from Szendro. I had nobody, so I stayed with him. He was 22 and I was 12. I was a child yet. Haaa, I had to leave because I had no space [at home]. I lived with my mother-in-law [from that time].

Thus, since Ica knew what it meant to stay alone as a child, she took in her niece, Réka.

We can follow this trend through three generations in the village.

On the other hand, research shows that Roma who leave their countries move with families and prepare the path for other family members. Roma do not generally move as individuals, and family separation is often only temporary (Grill, 2012). This is partly the result of a traditional way of life, which favors communal living, but also due to a history of persecution in which communities represent a safety net (Sime & Fassetta, 2014, p. 8).

This phenomenon is interconnected with the specific role of a Gypsy home, which is always open to newcomers and where the number of the family members constantly changes. In the next section I will discuss the flexibility of the Gypsy home.

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The Role of the Flexible Gypsy Home

Gypsy homes where family members always move in and out creates stability for the extended family. In Bódvalenke this moving in and out accompanies moving in and out of the village. In the 1960s, when Roma families received government subsidies in

Hungary, Bódvalenke’s local government built a Gypsy row at the end of the village on plots that were useless to the peasant villagers (Csalog, 2006). As noted earlier, in 2009 the local government relocated five Roma families from the Gypsy row into the village’s vacated peasant houses that had become local government property. Families pay 800 Ft rent for living in these houses or move to peasant houses that are extremely cheap in the village. Yet, even though the quality of their housing improved, people were upset because they felt they had lost their close connections.

According to Jolán néni, on the Gypsy row, women watched each others’ children and shared food. However, after the local government and the FVP relocated people, they lost their stability. As a counter-action, Roma people, such as Aranka and Zalán, started selling their new houses and buying others where they had a neighbor whom they are close to. With this mobility, people re-created stability in their long-term relationships.

Gypsy homes are open to family members who often come and go. Kristóf tells me that his sister, when she had a quarrel with her husband “used to come home. They live not in this village. Then her husband comes after her but here he cannot hurt her.” I hear a similar story from Böbe when she comes to say goodbye to me. Her body is covered by blue spots and her olive-green long skirt is torn. She says, “Look, my husband

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hit me. I am leaving now. I go to Abony, to my sister.” Even Böbe, whom the village dwellers look down upon for losing her children, has some place to go.

Just in four months between my two visits to Bódvalenke there was much moving and changing in the village: István’s daughter moved back home to live with her parents.

Katalin left for the neighboring village with her five children for months and returned to discover that her house was set on fire. Bibi moved back to her parents from Katalin’s house. Tamás’ daughter Erna, who lived in Martony, moved back to Bódvalenke because the local government there wanted to make the village a tourist center and the Gypsy family didn’t fit into the project. So the government in Martony purchased a house for

Erna in Bódvalenke and relocated them. But since then Erna moved somewhere else. Erin bought the house and moved in with his family. Lasso who sold their house to the baby- mummy house, and moved into a new house, bought another house for one of their relatives who moved in with eight children. This demonstrates the villagers’ mobile life.

At the same time, it demonstrates also the limits of this mobility.

However, the local government perceives the Roma’s frequent moving as negative and “transgressive” behavior; in an effort to stop it, they have started penalizing it. For example, the village notary added to the Roma people’s lease contract that only their immediate family members can stay in the house who moved into the house with them when the lease started. Other family members can stay no longer than 3 weeks.

These families refuse to observe this ordinance; they take in family members and frequently go to jail. This is an extreme example of mobility that supports stability in the extended family.

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Thinking about the role of mobility and stability in the Roma community PG, a

Roma painter, says:

Let us approach the issue of mobility and stability from here: What is “security” for the Gypsy people? Not the place. People can force you to leave any place with laws and pressure, with many things. But [security] is family. My child, my wife, my family, my father and mother provide security. If I am with them, every safety I need is there. . . . If a Gypsy family is settled somewhere and people start besetting them, they “take their tent” and leave. But their family, their children, their loved ones will be around them. I approach the question from here. Wandering is still present because people don’t handle/receive the Gypsies well. There are coercions. They must leave certain places. But life figures out the solution. Life always forces out the solution. And the victims of many oppressions always figure out what the best solution is for them.

Being with family are ways to create stability through mobility. A third way to foster stability is their customary begging, sharing and exchanging.

Ultimately, I conclude that women and men practice activities that require constant movement. Beggig, sharing and exchanging, moving from one family member to another family member in the kinship, and opening their home to the extended family, are practices that create stability through mobility. “Help” from outside the Roma community often targets actions, such as frequent moving to and with extended family, opening the Roma home to family members, and begging, as undesirable activities. Roma understand this pressure as a threat to the stability of their community, as something that upsets the equilibrium of their system, as forced assimilation that could result in the further disappearance of their culture.

While the mobility and stability dialectic balances the extended family, it also helps to mediate between “separated words,” so these separated worlds are never fully separated. Marushiakova and Popov (2012) highlight that an analysis of Gypsies that

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considers Roma “an isolated community without taking into account the societal context” leads to exoticizing Roma communities. They say Gypsies are and always have been an intrinsic part of their societies in Eastern Europe: “In fact their whole way of life requires social symbiosis as they make their living through filling certain social economic niches and naturally cannot be isolated from the general social and cultural context” (p. 61). This is especially valid for the Romungros, the most assimilated Roma/Gypsies. Though, as the Bódvalenke Romungros’ narratives disclose, they still keep their Roma identity while they are in continuous contact with their non-Roma surrounding. Marushiakova and

Popov suggest:

Gypsies who have lived for centuries in Eastern Europe have achieved a much higher degree of social integration than their counterparts from Western Europe and the New World and cannot fit the exotic paradigm of Western scholars. Therefore, the most common impression of researchers from the West about Gypsies in these regions is that “these are not true Gypsies,” they [Gypsies in Eastern Europe] are “assimilated.” (p. 61)

For this reason I finish by pointing out two misconceptions I tried to avoid in this chapter; first, the view that Gypsies only “take in” their surrounding culture without adding their own, and second, the idea that they are fully isolated from the non-Roma world, the

“exotic other,” who can be characterized first as “not like us.” I also wanted to avoid the perception that Romungros are simply characterized by a culture of poverty.

These narratives and stories show that the Bódvalenke Roma people are active and creative people who intrinsically build culture based on their human agency. They tell their stories every day about their embodied experiences to their different audiences, their fellow Roma, the peasant villagers, the FVP personnel, the visitors, journalists and to researchers, among them myself. 215

Summary

In this chapter I discussed narratives of separated worlds that comprised of stories of a safe space, of being locked in, stories of the Roma and non-Roma worlds, stories of strangers and the Gypsies, stories of the Gypsy and Gypsy divide, and stories of a gender divide. Réka compares peasants and Roma on a wider scale and distinguishes Gypsy speech, Gypsy style and Gypsy life versus that of the peasants. Mara adds to these the dissimilar meaning of time, contrasting the peasants’ strict scheduling with their unscheduled time where time is measured by doing one’s job and reacting to necessities.

However, these separated worlds are not fully separated because the Bódvalenke

Roma people, as Hungarian Roma, not only save their Roma culture but also save their

Hungarian culture. Moreover, they constantly produce new culture in their forced common life with the FVP, where they recognize that they are expected to perform

“Gypsiness.” I recognize that they have less problem with this than might be imagined; they learned a few Hungarian and Roma folk songs from TV, put on the “Gypsy” clothes that the Project Leader purchased for them and they were ready to perform “Gypsiness.”

They pretended to know their history and folklore while their audience did not get a sense that they were pretending to know. In this, Roma people took the romanticized Gypsies’ role.

The final part of this chapter discussed the dialectics of mobility and stability contains stories of moving in and with the extended family to create stability, stories about the flexible Gypsy home, and stories of begging, sharing and exchanging. This section highlighted how different worldviews result in different stories. Mobility and

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stability, contraries for the non-Roma, are dialectical concepts in the Gypsy community, where mobility creates stability and stability is attainable through mobility. These narratives and performances justify my project to identify culturally determined experiences in performed narratives. Finally, I concluded that the villagers experience cosmopolitanism not by getting out of their closed village but by seeing programs coming into their village, which represent either old assimilative practices or funds spent on programs they don’t need. After they are visited by ministers, NGO’s, and EU politicians, as Leo commented, the Bódvalenke Roma still have no jobs, no money, and no honor.

In Chapters Four and Five I analyzed the villager’s stories to answer my first research question, “What do stories and performances in Bódvalenke tell us about the experiences of Roma/Gypsy?” In the Sixth Chapter I turn to analyzing the murals. The

Seventh Chapter concludes the results of my study and fully answers my two research questions.

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CHAPTER 6: VISUAL NARRATIVES

In this chapter I analyze the artists’, the villagers’, and occasionally the Project

Leader’s oral narratives and the frescoes in order to answer the second research question:

“How do the frescoes mediate Roma identity?”

To answer this question, I performed three major steps: (1) I analyzed the artists’ oral narratives to identify the core narratives and genres based on Riessman’s (1993)

Narrative Analysis, (2) then I analyzed the murals starting with identifying the genres and core narratives based on Riessman’s Narrative Analysis, continuing with a visual analysis based on Rose’s (2012) Visual Methodologies. Finally, (3) I brought the artists,’ the murals,’ and the audiences/viewers’ narratives into dialogue based on Riessman’s (2008)

Dialogic/Performance Analysis (DPA). While I was doing this, I brought the artists’, the visuals, and the audience in dialogue with the context.

This process culminated in naming four genres: hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, encounters with the past, and counter/emancipatory narratives and four major core narratives: narratives of need, pride, separated worlds, and stability/mobility in the both the first and second steps. I have found that, because visuals can “tell” more stories in parallel, most frescoes represent multiple core narratives and genres simultaneously.

Although, in case of multiple core narratives and genres it was often impossible to identify one core narrative that was more dominant than the others, I was able to identify in each case a dominant genre based on the number of the stories told in a particular genre or the main story suggested by the title.

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Thus, this chapter is divided into the following parts: Foreword, Hypothetical

Narratives, Habitual Narratives, Encounters with the Past (including tradition-saving stories), and Counter/Emancipatory Narratives. I must mention here that many frescoes represent not only multiple core genres but also multiple narratives simultaneously.

Foreword to Chapter Six

Before examining the murals and the kinds of identities they mediate, I will summarize some basic information about the artists, murals, and aspects of Rose’s (2012) visual methodology that structures my visual analysis. There are 32 murals in the FVP created by 16 artists and two school groups led by their art teachers. Among the artists, eight identify as Romungros, one Beas, one Vlah, and one Bergitka Roma; five artists identify themselves entirely as Roma. Each artist was recruited as a “Roma painter” by the European Workshop Foundation until 2009, and later by the Project Leader affiliated with the Hungarian Reformed Church Aid Foundation. Currently, the artists live in several European nations: one is from Scotland, one from Germany, one from Spain, one from Serbia, and 12 painters are from Hungary. Two groups of students were used in creating two frescoes: students of the Otto Herman Public School, Miskolc, identified as

“non-Roma”; and students from the Igazgyöngy art school, Berettyóújfalu, identified as

“Roma students.” Both schools are located in eastern Hungary.

To explain what is included and what is not included in this chapter, the following review outlines the strategies I follow in the mural analysis. As I discussed in Chapter

Three, I use Rose’s (2012) three “sites” (production, image, and audiencing) and her three modalities (technological, compositional and social) to bring different contexts in

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dialogue. Technological modality on the “production” site consists of issues related to the creation of the murals; I discussed the role of the FVP and the relationships between the

FVP, the artists and the villagers in detail in Chapter Three. Next, compositional modality on the “production” site requires identifying the genre. Regarding this, Rose’s (2012) concept of visual analysis overlaps Riessman’s (1993) Narrative Analysis: both include identifying the genre. So before starting the visual analysis, I know already the result of the thematic and structural analysis, among them the genres. Finally, social modality analysis focuses on issues of social, cultural and political identities and power-relations.

Technological modality on the “image” site is comprised of the visual effects of the frescoes. Compositional modality on the “image” site includes aspects of their composition while social modality on this site includes their visual meanings.

Lastly, with respect to “audiencing,” technological modality concerns the murals as parts of a “Roma” outdoor gallery in a “Roma” village, and that they are supposed to tell a different “Roma story” than other stories told about them in Hungary and Europe.

In Chapter Three, I discussed the FVP’s agenda and organizational setting, and the technology used to create the murals. Compositional modality on the “audiencing” site includes the position from which viewers are permitted to see the murals that I discussed in Chapter One. Finally, the analysis of social modality on this site includes how the murals are interpreted by the audience. Overall, these are the key concepts that will frame the ensuing analysis. As will be also be seen, I integrate the ‘core narratives’ from the oral narrative analysis as they may apply (as well as new core narratives) be expressed

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either within the mural, and by the artist and villagers as each reflects on the identity the murals appear to express.

Narrative Genres of the Frescoes

As discussed in the foregoing section and in Chapter Three, my structural analysis of the artists’ oral narratives and visual ended with four genres: hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, encounters with the past (including tradition saving stories), and counter/emancipatory narratives. These genres coincide with the villagers’ oral narrative genres with the exception of counter/emancipatory narratives.. I also discussed my method of selection as I narrowed the 32 murals into the following six:

1. “Sitters on the Stone,” hypothetical narrative 2. “Bódvalenke’s Everydays,” habitual narrative 3. “Bódvalenke’s Ballad,” habitual narrative, counter/emancipatory narrative 4. “Fleeing Angels,” encounters with the past 5. “Dance, Tarot, Spring,” encounters with the past (tradition-saving story) 6. “Family,” counter/emancipatory narrative

I begin my close analysis with “Sitters on the Stone,” a hypothetical narrative.

Hypothetical Narrative (Visual)

Hypothetical narratives are placed in “imagined time”; they depict events that did not happen. However, they often substitute real happenings that in reality cannot happen; they are available only as narrative performances. Riessman (1993) calls these “dream narratives,” Hughes (2009) “wished to be real” realities. Ainsworth-Vaughn (1998) highlights the agency of the question “What if?” that hypothetical narratives answer.

These concepts direct my analysis.

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Telling Stories to Figure Out Who We Are

Painter A’s (PA) oral narrative revolves around the themes of “Roma identity as artificial identity,” “limitedness/lack of freedom,” and the need for an “emotionally involved listening.” As I explicate, these themes can be “reduced” to the core narrative of need and separated worlds. While PA tells about his life, his involvement in the FVP, his meeting with the villagers, he provides explanations about his identity in contrast with other identities, evaluates past events, and encounters how non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma (Braid, 1997). These fit into the genre of “encounter with the past.”

During this analysis, topics of social, cultural and political identities and power-relations emerge on the “production site” (Rose, 2012).

Throughout my stay in Hungary, PA seemed to me a “mysterious man”; nobody in the FVP office knew his place of residence or contact information. Finally, I got his cellphone number from another artist and was able to reach him in the last hours before my departure to the United States. He was happy that I want to hear “his story.” The first theme I identify in the interview with him is “identity,” which ultimately is specified as

“Roma identity.”

He tells me that he does not have a strong Roma identity. “What is Roma identity, anyway?” Roma identity is an artificial identity, he says. It is an answer to various coercions: to the compulsion to classify people (which is easiest to do based on origin), and to the experience of rejection, which drives people to claim identities to counterbalance the discriminatory experiences of their environment. He softly adds: “But we should not categorize people, because then we limit their potential instead of

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accepting them as many various kinds of humans.” PA pinpoints the tragic element in identifying oneself as a Roma with a doctor’s precision locating his patient's pulse: “If people realize themselves as Roma, they immediately produce feud, because they stress exactly those things they feel troublesome. And this is wrong.”

I know PA is a “big name” among Roma artists, so I feel I must check my understanding that “Roma identity” is really unimportant to him: “Can you tell me a little more about the Roma identity that, as you said before, you don’t have?” There is a long pause. Then he begins describing identity as an onion, where “origin is not the inner part of the onion, it is a surface layer.” The core of one’s identity is searching for the Creator, figuring out who we are and what our task is in the world. Accordingly, he associates

Roma identity with “limitedness/lack of freedom” that becomes the second major theme in his narrative of need.

“Limitedness/lack of freedom” is connected to the idea that Roma/Gypsy communities are imagined communities (Anderson, 1991). It makes things even more difficult that, as Marushiakova and Popov (2011) point out, Roma have “been ‘imagined’ not by its own members but by the rest of the population that has been living alongside for centuries” (p. 53). This is why, even though not having a strong Roma identity, PA searches “to work out himself, overcome lies and find justice.”

However, a culture of freedom–“the sort of thinking which says that you are an individual and you are free”–is missing from the Hungarian public sphere, so the search for identity is difficult because those who live in unfreedom unavoidably behave differently from those who live in freedom. PA elaborates:

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[T]his made an eye-catching difference between those who lived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The very thing that forced people to live in different worlds has changed their behavior. That happens to us here now. . . . There are no free discussions any longer. If your whole life was about facing repression then you faced injustice and not with yourself.

“Limitedness/lack of freedom” includes repression, constraints, rules and standards from outside with which a Roma is unable to comply; fear and injustices are parts of PA’s personal story that often clashes with the official story. For example, he says the FVP could not pay his salary when he finished the mural. Not being able to pay his rent, he had been kicked out of his sublet. He recalls, “I found a brochure on the project office’s table at the same time which said: ‘the Reformed Church Charity Service supports people suffering eviction.’” But he did not receive his salary from the Reformed Church Charity

Service and was facing imminent eviction. However, scarcity is not the main theme of his story; the main message is that what we say, we must back up with actions, and the two must be in harmony. This moral maxim is present throughout our interview. After PA talks about “Roma identity” and the major obstacles of the culture of freedom, he “zooms in” on the village.

“Limitedness/lack of freedom” characterizes the villagers as well. PA says “help” should not distract the villagers’ way of life, behavior, and views because culture of freedom starts with accepting the other:

When I went down to Bódvalenke I asked myself “Where is the place of these people?” And I have come to the realization that we cannot force our ideas onto those people. If we enter their life territory we should first listen to them, deal with them. We should first wash up the dishes and set the table later. I am sure the villagers are not irritated [only] by the big sums of money flowing by and not being shared with them; they are irritated by the attitude those people show towards them. They want to be accepted. But this is not happening there. 224

In the light of PA’s philosophy, those who go to a village like Bódvalenke to demonstrate that “Gypsies need help,” must keep in mind that they are guests. Symbolically, they are guests at the villagers’ table. So they must build a good relationship first, and sit at the table as equals. (The parable is symbolic because, in most houses, for example in the house where PA painted, people eat sitting on the floor. There are no chairs. They don’t sit around a table.) By “washing the dishes,” people set the preconditions for the meal. It is a complex process: one goes to the forest to cut wood, lays a fire in the fireplace, goes to the well, brings water in a bucket, warms the water, clears the pots and plates and gives the leftovers to the dog, takes the dish-washer bowl, pours in the warm water and washes the dishes. This is exactly how people in Bódvalenke wash their dishes.

Yet, PA realizes that the FVP has a different attitude toward the village: they show themselves as superior to the Roma and they set the rules of the “common meal.”

Painters invited into this setting draw attention to something that is not worth viewing:

I think painters should come only after those who want to help have managed to maintain healthy and good relations with the people. In this case painters would come to draw the world’s attention to what they have built in the background for years, with much love and patience. Then painters can direct attention to things that are worth viewing.

PA recognizes that the FVP’s moving into the village was not preceded by careful and benevolent work. With this, he switches to a third core narrative “the need for an emotionally involved listing” that echoes Riessman’s (2008) similar concept in DPA.

Without this, the paintings direct attention to something frightening: that people give

“pretentious help” to draw attention to themselves without loving those who live in the village. PA went to the village with the opposite attitude. He says:

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I want to be seen in situations where I have peace in my heart. I say this because before I went down to the village, the leaders of the project [FVP] took me to a radio broadcast where I commented and talked according to my initial understanding of what they wanted to do. And then I went down to the village and realized what is really going on there– people come up to me, they kept asking me and kept talking about their things. I was shocked by the experience [there].

After only a brief “emotionally involved listening” he realizes that what the villagers identify as “limitedness” or “lack of freedom,” is narrated by the FVP as a story of the

“Roma empowerment.” PA tells me that he didn’t know much about the village project but he “badly needed” money, so he took the job. But he feels he took his painting somewhere wanting to suggest something positive, but the context suggests the opposite.

There is lamentation in his voice: “This is embarrassing.”

“Artificial identity,” the concept PA applied to the “Roma identity”–an answer to injuries, traumas and constraints–re-appears here as the identity of the “pretentious helper”:

People forgive you if you make mistakes but you are honest. But if you show an artificial ego with your acquaintances in the background, if you cynically laugh at those whom you keep cheating – this makes a different case. This system of application is like you apply for something while referring to specific people to whom, after winning, you should give a certain share; but many people never give the full sum that they are supposed to give. Still the system survives because they give something to the people referred to, so they can give confirmation to those who gave the money. But on the way something goes astray . . . we never reach the place we should have reached. This village is here now.

Accordingly, “artificial identity” of the “helper” is a constituent of the Roma’s

“limitedness/lack of freedom.” PA critiques a system that makes this kind of “help” a norm that runs a “Gypsy industry,” and that “subsists on the basis of stating Roma problems and which by implication does nothing towards solving these problems, because it would lose its source of income” (Marushiakova & Popov, 2011, p. 55). In this 226

“Gypsies” create jobs for the neoliberal economy and keep it moving. In turn, the very same economy does not create jobs for the Gypsies because this would eliminate their dependence. PA says this is morally wrong:

We are a country of pretentious help. This is even more terrifying than if we did not give anything, because we don’t teach people to respect each other – honest help is based on respecting the other – but we teach them to cheat the other. People believe in that, and start using the other person and they don’t respect each other any longer but keep them in fear in order to stop them thinking. This spoils people; those people will get on top that are skillful in sorcery.

According to PA, the Roma’s “limitedness/lack of freedom” is connected to a new

“Gypsy industry” that “makes use of people,” and creates fear in order to stop them thinking. But since this attitude is part of a larger trend, it is accepted as “normal.”

I remember István talking about their own “limitedness/lack of freedom” saying that the usurious lenders (who appeared with the fall of Socialism and beginning of

Capitalism) “seduce” the poor, Zalán complaining that the good relationship between brothers has been exchanged for an endless dependency on the FVP and the loan sharks.

Then I identified these as belonging to the “need” core narrative. And now PA observes that when government gave up taking care of their poor, a new trend of “help” appeared:

Most people say, “I’m busy.” So embittered people give [money] to those who are in need– not only for Roma people but for immigrants, too –to fill the gap. They give some money because they want to write off “help”: they are not willing to deal with the thing, they just want to get over it. If they really wanted to help, they would select people with expertise who would look after where money flows. Then they would include the people themselves. However, as long as the business is made on paper, they can lie. They do everything superficially to soothe their consciences. There are one or two people who honestly want to do something for the [Roma] cause, those do it with love. They make people flourish around them. They are true people. The rest care just for power. They perform it for position to get on top.

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In addition to the lack of expertise and accountability in the leadership, PA critiques here the lack of inclusion of the locals’ limitedness. I recognize themes in PA’s interview as constituents of the core narratives of need, and separated worlds.

I have nothing to say. I went to the village to see a positive example of “Roma empowering,” and now I witness an artist’s lamentation about the moral and social consequences of the “wrong help.” The fact is that Roma intellectuals and civil rights leaders do not support the FVP, they observe the village from afar. When I asked one of the top civil rights activists why it is like this, she simply said, “I don’t go there. Why would I go there? What could I do there? It is her [the Project Leader’s] zoo.” Now

PA’s narrative about the two “artificial identities” the Roma’s and their “helpers,” reveals much tension rooted in the “helper’s” attitude that show themselves superior to the Roma and set the rules of the “common meal.” So the good intentions to “help” is trapped in the web of dependencies.

But PA introduces the story-telling situation as a personal need. He describes his mural, “Sitters on the Stone,” as follows:

I have a daughter who has drifted apart a bit when she saw that disappointment had made me bitter. Somehow, I had the desire not to have this distance between us. This picture shows how I tell her the story of my journey. . . . There I tell her the story of my life and I would like her to listen to me until the end of the story. I wish for an audience who would hear me, though, and accept me.

The need for an audience with an “emotionally involved listening,” as Riessman (2008) calls attentive listening, is shown by PA as a basic human need.

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Figure 1. “Sitters on the Stone”52

Indeed, PA’s major themes in “Sitters on the Stone” are “Roma identity as artificial identity,” “limitedness/lack of freedom,” the “helper’s” artificial identity, and the need for an “emotionally involved listening” fit in two core narratives, “narrative of need” and “separated worlds.” I identified the genre as “encounter with the past.” PA reports about past events, identities, and the contexts that surrounds them; these incude issues of power. After discussing questions of the “production site”–I start analyzing the mural (Rose, 2012).

“Pouring out our heart to each other.” This subtitle is borrowed from Zita who remembered the first artists with nostalgia, recalling how good it was when they just sat

52 All photographs of the frescoes in this dissertation are my photos. 229

with the people and talked about many things. I quoted it because the “Stone Sitters” depicts this kind of storytelling situation. However, before I turn to the story of the mural,

I introduce the three inquiries that Rose (2012) endorses when interpreting a visual image: “What are the visual effects?”; “What is the composition?”; and “What are the visual meanings?” (p. 21). These questions cover issues of the three modalities

(technological, compositional, and social) of the “image site.” While I answer them, I also bring the artist’s, the villagers’, and the (social and cultural) context into dialogue.

From the direction of Komjáti on the left side of the road, PA’s painting is the first on the right side, and this is also the point where houses start appearing on both sides of the road. It is an important location; both the village’s only mailbox and one of the four pump-wells of the village is here. Ervin and his brother, Kálmán, live in the house with their wives and many children. At the end of the house stands the “rabbit house,” a wire-net covered box where the children keep their “living toy.” They also have a chicken and a duck, a few weeks old with fluffy plumes, unable to fly away from the childrens’ often too-tight embrace. The wives rarely come out of this house.

The huge blue surface of “Sitters on the Stone” stretches the blue sky to the ground. On the left side of the painting a couple–a male in black and a female in white–face each other, sitting on two huge oval stones. On the right there is a third stone that is empty.

The gesture of the male shows inwardness: he lowers his head, folds his feet and hands.

The female shows her back to the viewer, only the man in the image can see her face: in her white linen clothes she is an ageless angel-like figure. Only her long, black, curly hair is visible to the audience. The distance between the two figures is larger than the space

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their reach can span. The “natural” setting fixes the stone-sitters’ separation in a certain distance as a perfect illustration of separated worlds. Accordingly, PA depicted a visual story that includes two themes from his oral narrative: limitedness/lack of freedom, and the need to have an audience engaged in an emotionally involved listening. These fit in

“narrative of need” and “separated worlds” core narratives.

PA reminisces about disappointments and hostilities that have made him vindictive and vengeful, happenings that made him “a man full of anger.” However, he wants get rid of this feeling and come to healing, to make healing happen. “If two people can talk with each other and make the one understand the other that is terrific.” I don’t want to interrupt him. I wait silently until he continues about the third stone, where his wife is supposed to sit. “If I showed only the daughter and her father, you won’t feel so much that there is trouble with the third [person]. But with this, you can feel it.” So the third stone signifies trouble and the hiatus resulting from it:

I remembered the situation of storytelling when the elder one talks about his life to the younger one. We, people, cannot actually let out the problems from our heart and tell what is really happening to us. People need this sort of healing very much. In a talk, you always let out things from your heart that make the heart sorrowful. This painting tells about this hunger for understanding and acceptance. . . . I have painted the picture in black and white, too. You can see the girl there in white linens, there she has become an angel – I am telling an angel the secrets we cannot see through.

The father’s personal story becomes a universal story: we, people, need to tell our stories and have an attentive audience; elders must tell their lives to the younger generation.

The main figure, the artist himself, is characterized by his blackness. In reality,

PA is light-skinned. Though, as he said in the interview, he is sad, vindictive, vengeful and angry, not by nature, but because disappointments and hostilities have made him 231

vengeful. “Blackness” is his socially constructed reality. PA’s self-narrative reveals that he is not talking in racial categories. One should be able to tell one’s story as both a human and a cultural being.

PA assigns storytelling a special role: it helps the narrator to get free. Telling one’s story to an “emotionally involved listener” has the potential to bridge the gap between people who are far from each other. “It is remarkable that the villagers experience neither a generation gap nor their close families falling apart,” I think. If loneliness, broken families, a generation gap, and inability to communicate are

“civilization problems,” then the villagers are lucky to not be fully involved in civilization or to experience alienation in their immediate family, as PA does. But, as we learned from their stories, the villagers face difficulties to bridge another gap, when communicating with people they see as colonizers.

To summarize the visual narrative, the major themes are limitedness/lack of freedom, and the need to have an emotionally involved listener. These fit in the core narratives of need and separated worlds. As I previously said, genre is a dialogical concept; it is part of both the narrators’ meaning-making and performance in which they render their experiences and persuade their audience at the same time. So various audiences can perceive the same story as a different genre. To PA’s experiences hypothetical narrative is a suitable genre. In “Sitters on the Stone” PA is telling a story about something that never happened, but what he wishes was real. He desires to come closer to his daughter and wife and to discuss issues they could never talk about in real life. Given the physical circumstances, it is clear that the two figures cannot come closer

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to one another. The stone (and the story) of the missing wife lifts the story to the symbolic sphere, it represents many other storytellings that never happened. The genre adds to the painting the hiatus (the deficit), which is stressed in this story.

I am curious how the villagers understand this situation of storytelling. Rose

(2012) states that the viewers have both the power to create their own understanding, and their own determination to see visuals as they are conditioned and allowed to see. In short, as audience, they have freedom and constraints.

With the fact that the murals were “brought” into the village by the Project Leader who still manages and promotes the open air gallery exclusively, issues of circulation and display (that consist of the technological modality of the “audiencing site”) are totally out of reach for the villagers; they are not invited to participate in these. The viewing position offered to them is that of the colonized: the villagers became a necessary “object” of the scene (Rose, 2012). However, the villagers do not identify with the subaltern position offered to them.

There are two different interpretations among the villagers, first, that the depicted situation is a family event, second, that it is a community event. István recognizes the painting as a discussion between a husband and wife where “there is a problem between them.” He has had many similar conversations, he says. But then he stands in silence while he recalls those discussions–he is the only divorced man in the village.

Zita and Lilla, however, associate the painting with the missing discourse among the villagers. Zita, whom I paraphrased in the beginning of this section, says:

We don’t speak with each other. Not like two years ago, when we went out and just had lots of talks. And when the painters were here. They played music, and 233

then we sit, we listened, we talked about many things. . . . How good it was to pour out our heart to each other.

On a collective level, the artists’ storytelling has become the past for now, an event that is missed, a story. It seems that the villagers experienced the “spiritual” power of collective storytelling that both PA and Bari (1990) recall, and which Vekerdi (1975a) labels

“Gypsy” cultural characteristics. But after the painter left, collective storytelling is not practices in the village any more.

Lilla also misses this kind of collective practices but she “genderizes” the need as collective storytelling for women:

In our village we cannot tell each other new things any more. If somebody comes from somewhere else and says something, the gossip spreads in the village and everybody talks about it. Here we miss a little relaxation, for example that women sit together at sundown, or to visit each other with one child or two, or to ask something from each other. That’s it.

Zita and Lilla understand that telling their stories is a significant need and that they “need an audience to make it happen” (Langellier & Peterson, 2006, p.2). Both of them stretch the storytelling situation to the community. Bruner (2002) attributes to storytelling a significant role, saying that through storytelling we build our identities and our cultural belonging. From this perspective, not telling our stories signifies a crisis of identity and culture, and this is exactly what the villagers started to complain about: they say, with the presence of the FVP, family relationships are getting weaker, while competition and dependencies stronger. Accordingly, the villagers resonated on the two most impotant themes: “limitedness/lack of freedom” and “emotionally involved listening.” In the villagers’ interpretation issues of identity are totally missing; this shows that identity and

Romaness/Gypsiness is not a central issue for them. 234

PA “reports” a storytelling event that both the artist and the villagers wish were real: this we know after identifying it as a hypothetical (visual) narrative. So while PA’s oral stories are “encounters with the past,” the visual story’s genre is a hypothetical narrative. Because of the agency of the genre, “Sitters on the Stone” poses questions like

“What if the narrator told his story? What is the story about?” Although the struggle for identity, “figuring out who we are and what our task is in the world,” is not a specific

Roma struggle but a universal one, there are specific burdens in the struggle for people of

Roma origin: they need to heal, get rid of wounds caused by their “Roma experiences,” and they need to be accepted as “Other.” Ultimately, the question, “What if I told my story?” has agency: It allows a person to tell never-told stories at least to the self, and when mind and heart put the words together, one needs only to find a voice to tell the story for others. To examine visual examples of “habitual narratives,” I turn to the next mural, Bódvalenke’s Everydays.

Habitual Narrative (Visual)

As previously discussed, habitual narratives have no clear beginning, middle and end because the events they describe happen repeatedly over a long period of time, so there is no peak in the action. The narrator reports about enduring, repeated, progressive, and unspecific conditions that allow a narrator’s experiences to unfold over time and to extend into the present. These events “used to happen” and “would happen” routinely.

Since habitual narratives cease to exist if they reach a peak, habitual narratives involve tension, strains, and distress originating from the lack of a firm resolution (Riessman,

1993). As I discussed, Gounder (2011) observes that habitual narrative implies a

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communal worldview instead of an individual view, where gender and number remain unmarked. Hughes (2009) implies that series of habitual narratives can describe a lifestyle that, as Riessman (2008) concludes, means the narrator’s “own and other people’s” habits and conventions that have a repetitive character. While paying attention to habitualnarratives, I extend the scrutiny to explore cultural elements. Although in visual narratives, habitual narratives often mix with other genres, they always add these specific meanings to the multi-layered story.

The Life of the Gypsy

Painter B’s (PB) oral narrative includes five major themes, “Gypsy culture”

“naming/stigmatizing,” “everyday tragedies,” “strong Gypsy mother,” and “Gypsy life.”

These major themes can be condensed to need and pride core narratives, and narrative of separated worlds. When I first heard the title “Bódvalenke’s Everydays,” and saw the mural, I had the impression that this painting cannot be finished: the artist must return daily to add a new piece to the puzzle to construct one story –until the village exists. So I felt that this is not “regular” storytelling because it is, at the same time, one and many.

PB tells about experiences that repeatedly happened in Bódvalenke and in other

Roma/Gypsy communities in the past, happen in the present, and are expected to happen in the future. These fit in the genre of “habitual narrative.” On the other hand, her oral narrative builds on “encounter with the past” while reports about events in the past that have a clear beginning, middle and ending. During these, she unveils identities, power- relations, and the social, cultural and political contexts on the “production site” (Rose,

2012).

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Figure 2. “Bódvalenke’s Everydays”

I meet PB in Budapest’s eighth district in a former glove factory, now a culture center, where the district’s predominantly Roma population meets. She works in a summer camp teaching arts for children; she also teaches a group of young urban planners who design the poor neighborhood according to her plans. PB invites me to sit on the couch where she can keep an eye on her students.

PB is the first Romungro I interviewed who comes from a relatively wealthy family with a famous musician father. She begins with introducing “Gypsy culture.”

She grew up during Socialism, sharing a pride in Gypsy musicians as ambassadors of

Hungarian national music. Though I know that Socialism was not guiltless in “othering”

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poor Gypsies,53 “Gypsy musicians” were considered high-ranking Gypsies and were especially well-respected. So when PB recalls her childhood as happy, safe, and wealthy,

I conclude that Romungro culture cannot be identified wholly with the culture of poverty.

But what else does being a Roma mean? PB started explaining “Gypsy culture,” which I identify as the first emerging theme.

PB says everything in her painting reflects stories she experienced, saw or heard in Bódvalenke, stories that people tell from morning to evening without being able to tell them the same way twice. This is because no stories are fixed, they are rooted in life, which constantly changes:

M: Is this something that characterizes Gypsy tales? PB: There is no such thing as a Gypsy tale. There is no Gypsy fine arts. If Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians, Ukrainians, put their paintings together, nobody could choose which one is whose. The same is with tales. How creative you are? How smart you are? How much your story is like the rest?

PB tells me that stories added to the “rest of the stories” become Gypsy stories only by talking about similar experiences. Such as “Pain, locked in stone, don’t harm my throat.”

This is also a story. It tells a tragedy or a tale. And we can call it a Gypsy tale because it talks about the Gypsy experience. She continues:

For example, when I was about six or seven years old, I had to pray when I went to bed and when I woke up. One day I said to my grandma: “Granny, I don’t pray.” Then she said to me: “The good God heard this and saw this.” Then I said, “I will hide behind you.” She said, “Don’t hide because he still sees you.” This taught me for life “don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t commit sin because God sees you whatever you do”; this also was a tale.

53 See Majtényi & Majtényi (2012). 238

In the literature review I touched upon the long debate where ethnographers argued whether there is or isn’t such a thing as a “Gypsy tale,” whether Gypsies saved their own tales as a distinct cultural artifact (which would prove that they have their own culture) or borrowed their tales from surrounding cultures (which would prove that they have no culture, but only imitate their cultural surroundings). Now PB tells me that people of

Gypsy origin tell stories about their life and memories just as other people do. So if there are similarities between tales, it is because of similar life experiences and memories. In this understanding, BP’s mural is a Gypsy story:

I paint everything from my soul. And my soul is full of memories. My life was very chaotic but full of love and friendships. We were nine brothers and sisters. I was about ten years old – because there was one year between us ten children – when before Christmas, my mother went to the shoemaker to have her boots repaired. And then she left the eight children with me and my one-year-older sister. But they were very young. And then, sadly, a tragedy happened. Because mom didn’t come for three or four hours. We started to be bored, the lake was frozen, and we went out to slide. And we left the children alone. We had a fireplace and it was empty. But a glass of petroleum was next to it on the floor. When we, the oldest went to slide, my little brother who was four-and-a-half- years-old, poured the petroleum on the cinder; it went also on his clothes. When he poured the petroleum, he caught fire. We were away about a half hour and when we went back, the ambulance was there already. The little boy died. So when I was ten years old, an irreversible guilt started in me. After forty or fifty years I could draw it out, until now I couldn’t.

Just as PA holds that we must tell our secrets to heal, for PB, “painting out the stories” fulfills the same healing experience.

PB notes that Gypsies are storytellers who are creative and who know many stories told by others in their community. So when they creatively tell their stories about similar constraints and shared memories, they want to make their stories fit “to the rest” of the stories. As PB states, the stories told in this social environment give agency (if

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their story fits) or paralyze people (if their story does not fit). And if identities are stories, they also must fit:

So my identity is what life brings. All the same. I don’t know. For us it isn’t important. And for the villagers [in Bódvalenke] this was never a theme. Because they try to live as if they were Hungarians but there are also blacks and whites among them. The Hungarians stigmatize cruelly those who live in poverty. So they [the villagers] have Roma culture, Roma identity as much they have Roma life experiences.

The second theme, that “Hungarians stigmatize,” is familiar to the Roma as their dominant experience. It is also a constituent of their cultural identity that non-Roma stigmatizes them. This leads to a certain kind of “Roma identity” and a certain kind of

“Roma culture.” Yet, PB states, nobody knows exactly what Roma culture is:

I have an acquaintance in Tokyo. And when she visited me she said, “Roma culture is like this: everybody wants to touch it but nobody knows where the beginning, the middle and the end of it are. So everybody is tired, nobody knows where it came from. Just like the creation of life. Where did it come from? How did it take form? Nobody knows. Because also this is a tale, an imagination, a legend. It is good to believe in something. The same goes for the Roma culture, you cannot grab it, and you cannot see it. Why are you named a Gypsy? Why are others Jews? Why others Hungarian? History, the story of the world’s story, does not tell about this. Because it doesn’t know. Because it just clicked on “this be Jewish kind, this Gypsy kind, this Hungarian kind.” So. Just like when we say “this be black, this be white.” So the names stick to things.

She paraphrases the story of creation where God said: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:1).

Discrimination has no logical reason, but it still has real consequences. Naming and categorizing (what PA calls a compulsion) comes with real material consequences.

As PB states, during Socialism, nobody called her “Gypsy” because such categorizing was forbidden. The main categories then were capitalist and worker,

Communist Party member and out-of-party. But now “Gypsy” has reappeared in the

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public discourse as a negatively charged category, contrary to the non-Gypsy. PB’s mural was inspired by her experiences in the village based on this antagonism.

It seems that everyday tragedies, PB’s third theme, is a common content in

Roma/Gypsy communities. PB’s brother’s tragic story is not painted in “Bódvalenke’s

Everydays.” Yet, this tragedy connects PB to others in the village, who experience many

“everyday tragedies”; tragedies “used to happen.” Telling the villagers’ story connects all stories to her story. Indeed, this is the dialectic of culture; as Bruner (2002) states, we always find stories in the stock of old stories to define ourselves in a way that meets the situation we live in. These are chracteristics of the habitual narratives. Bruner says, while we tell stories, we put fragmentary pieces of our experiences together that connect us with others, and at the same time, we build our unique identities. This applies to collective, cultural identities.

I understand that PB’s feelings are informed by the embodied Roma/Gypsy experience. But I would like to know how conscious this connection is for her, so I ask:

“In your painting, are those memories Gypsy memories or just simple memories that everybody shares?”

No, these are precisely Gypsy memories. These are Gypsy memories because when the Project Leader asked me to paint, she said that I am the only one who can paint the mayor’s house. In this small village, Bódvalenke, it was a precondition - the mayor checked my paintings on the Internet - that only I can paint the mayor's house. And I had to show what I want to paint. But painting is freedom, right? When I painted “Bódvalenke’s Everydays,” I looked, very much listened, and very much questioned everybody and everything. I didn’t say a thing, but then my picture was already born in me.

PB heard Tamara’s story about losing her husband young and now lives with her four children and wheelchair-bound mother. PB says, “There is a sad young woman in 241

the mural hugging her four children with her head tilted, and above her a tall woman with a large body.” PB tells me that in this she added her part to Tamara’s story, transforming the young widow’s mother for a huge, strong, powerful woman, as her own mother in her memories. So PB’s painted story is different from the real story that she recalls as follows:

When I walked in the village, I saw a twenty-something-year-old young Gypsy woman, Tamara, standing there in black. It was hot, thirty degree Celsius, and I walked there because they sat outside in the gate. And I said to them “Why are you in black, Tamara?” And [she had] a two-month-old baby in her arms. “I buried my husband two months ago,” she answered. “What? Two months ago?” So I included her in the picture. Her mother lost one leg and she sat in a wheelchair. In the huge strong woman next to the young woman you can see her. Tamara’s mother-in-law chased her home with her children.

The difference between reality and the visual story is remarkable. PB juxtaposed the mourning with the mother figure. The tall woman stands next to the sad young woman and her four children like “I am here, a Giant, don’t be afraid!” Tamara’s ill mother became the symbol of all Roma mothers who stand firmly behind their family. Here a fourth theme emerges, the strong Gypsy mother. Although this also romanticizes Gypsy life, this “beautification” is from inside the Gypsy community; the symbol is powerful as the strong mother fulfills significant role also in the villagers’ narratives.

PB reveals many “secrets” about the villagers’ life. These are based on similar themes of the Gypsy life, that, as Riessman (1993) suggests, need to be analyzed as stories, without breaking them into fragments. For example, PB says, she hid a loaf of bread in her painting “that nobody could find” because “there is a bread shortage in the village.” But loan sharks take advantage of this shortage. PB narrates the tension among the people as follows: 242

There are two families in the village who hate each other very much. One had something to eat, the other didn’t. The rich didn’t give to the poor. For example the rich bought bread at half price because they can drive to the factory, and sold it at three times the normal price to the poor, on credit. Or the rich went here and there and wanted to make money from everything from the poor. And they gave money and 10,000 Ft became 20,000 debt. There is a mother with ten children who cannot get out of debt even today because her usury debt always grows. They are poor. . . . When I became very ill and the ambulance took me to the hospital, one of the families who have many children broke in, and they took all the food and my camera. So they are so deprived that they stole my food.

This story illustrates the transforming relationships in the village based on equality and sharing.

There are other secrets that nobody knows without PB’s narratives:

Sometimes things went wrong –this is my story –my things went wrong. The Project Leader placed me in a woman’s house who was in love with her sister-in- law. But I didn’t know this and I went there thinking that “we will be such a good girl friends” etcetera. But when I talked with her, her sister-in-law always sat there. She was jealous so much that at the end the woman told me, “wouldn’t it be better if you moved to the office?” And then I moved. But I painted the house sloped on the side to show my mistake.

These are her personal stories that become public stories when painted in the mural. As

Riessman (2008) states, individual narratives “remember, argue, justify, persuade, engage, entertain, and even mislead an audience,” while group narratives “foster a sense of belonging” (p. 8). In PB’s mural, personal and collective narratives are mutually dependent:

As you see, the whole wall is full of small pieces. The life of the Gypsy falls apart. It never will be a full. Never. They collect this much and it falls apart and falls down, they re-collect some, it falls apart and, again, it falls down. They re- recollect it and drop it, again. And suddenly they lose interest. They are like a woman carrying a tree stump, the secret is in the movement. In the movement there is everything –not in the words.

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So one common theme is “Gypsy life” that PB portrays literally and symbolically.

For PB, the movement is stronger than the verbal communication: “there are secrets in the movement.” Therefore, she describes Gypsy life by a gesture and makes it a symbol.

PB says Gypsy life is like a woman carrying a tree stump; her bowing down, her stoop, her physical and emotional exertion is expressed by her movement. The gesture of the

“Gypsy’s bowing down” is repeated in different versions. We can visualize as the

Gypsies bow down, and bow down, again, to pick up the pieces of their own lives until they “suddenly lose interest.” The story is inscribed in the gestures of the body. The embodied performance not only means that narrators perform their stories to a specific audience in certain circumstances. It also means that stories, even unspoken, transform the human being, carving themselves into the body as permanent records if they are perpetuated. This is part of the “doing” of the story. Because habitual narratives repeat over an extended time, stories become inscribed in the body. Therefore, bodies

“carrying” similar habitual narratives move, look, function similarly.

After PB talks about the young widow, her children and her strong mother, the shortage of bread in the village, the slipped house, the imprisoned and the enslaved, and the “tense” atmosphere among the villagers, she reconsiders once more whether the outdoor gallery has changed the Roma’s life for the better:

People there don’t value [the murals] because they don’t know the value they received on their house. From the Project Leader . . . mmm . . . mmm . . . this was not a bad idea. Not as bad an idea but I would have to think a bit more over it. For example I don’t sell my paintings to those who don’t want them. . . . Well, the Project Leader wanted to lift up the Roma culture. This is not a bad intention. But, in my opinion . . . I don’t know. Think of it: If you would have asked a Hungarian artist to paint on a Gypsy house, it is very much possible that he or she would not paint on it. Understand? He would say, “I don’t lower myself to this.” The Project 244

Leader wouldn’t even ask a Hungarian if he/she would paint on a Gypsy house. Because for a Hungarian it is a low status. Take me for example. How often I boasted, I told you at least five times that “it was my privilege that I was selected to paint the mayor’s house.” And I told about this as a “good sign,” a “rank of dignity,” a “step forward” for me. That a Hungarian allowed a Gypsy to paint his house. That’s it. Things work like this. Well, the Project Leader figured out things and this story is hers.

This comment reveals a much bigger tension than that of the villagers’; here

Roma and non-Roma face each other in a colonial setting. Locked in colonial power- distribution, PB concludes, the story told by the FVP remained the “the Project Leader’s story” that she “figured out for herself.”

In conclusion, PB’s oral narrative includes themes of Gypsy culture, naming/stigmatizing, everyday tragedies, the strong Gypsy mother, of the Gypsies, and

Gypsy life, that is placed in a colonial setting. These themes can be applied to the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. PB’s oral narrative is built on the genre of

“encounter with the past.” However, since PB suggests that things happen over and over again, her oral narrative also fits in the habitual narrative genre. After analyzing identities mobilized in the making, stories about the making of the mural, and the genres, I end the analysis of the “production site” (Rose, 2012).

The (Neo)Colonial setting. To interpret the mural, in my visual analysis I follow

Rose’s (2012) questions: “What are the visual effects?”; “What is the composition?”; and

“What are the visual meanings?” Rose suggests these questions to cover issues of the three modalities (technological, compositional, and social). While I answer them, I also bring PA, the villagers, and the (social and cultural) context in dialogue (Riessman,

2008).

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“Bódvalenke’s Everydays” covers the Bódvalenke mayor’s back wall, the longest wall (longer than 30 meters) in the village. This is the only stone house, the others are adobe. The mayor never befriended the FVP, but after searching the Internet for “the most famous Roma painter” he selected PB to paint his wall. (Even so, this did not change his troublesome relationship with the FVP.)

As PB stated, the mural portrays her and others’ personal stories as “puzzle pieces” that build up the collective story. I counted 55 pieces but many of them can be further divided for smaller parts. In the following section I analize here two out of these.

I point at one of the puzzle pieces: “There is a one-eyed woman behind window-bars.

What does it mean?” PB answers with a short story:

The woman behind the window bars symbolizes Gypsy life. The life of the Gypsy. I always wanted to make this part of the painting smaller because it is still the mayor’s house and I don’t like polemic pictures. I often make them nicer with colors or make them more abstract –so only I know. The woman behind the bars with her one eye is also symbolizing the Roma women juxtaposed to the dominant men there. But as I said, the other meaning is the Gypsy’s life. That the Gypsy can see only from behind the bars, and if somebody pities her she gets what she wants if others help her. If not, then she cannot get them.

PB reveals a world where Roma men and women are dependent on the pity and help of

Others. But this is not “by nature” but because of the prison bars that block them from acting on their own. PB identifies two kinds of confinements in one cell: the Gypsy life is the whole cell and the Gypsy woman’s life is one corner of it. If separated worlds are included in one story, stories are inherently tensional. PB connects one’s power to the other’s subversion; she attaches “help” to “pity.” The figure behind the bars can get what she/he wants only by coming out of the cell, but she has only one eye. Her body and her

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“vision” –which affect her perspective and the angle of her sight– is already tailored to the story. Soon, PB reveals the “master” of the imprisoned: the non-Roma.

Although PB described the colonial power distribution, so far she had not clearly named the setting “colonial.” But in one puzzle piece I recognize the colonialist iconography. Close to the one-eyed prisoner is a piece of the puzzle with four black shadow-like woman figures watched by a well-dressed woman wearing a hat and a blue dress, similar to the costume of colonial times. “It seems that PB steps further in the mural than in her oral narrative,” I say to myself. I point at the puzzle piece: “Who are those figures?”

PB rises from the couch where we sit. She looks around the steadily noisy room full of Budapest’s eighth district’s poor children, mostly Roma, to whom she teaches drawing in a summer camp. She signals for me to pick up my equipment and move somewhere else. I follow her into the gray cement yard of the former glove factory in heavy rain. We pass through windowless chambers. She opens one door after another as symbolic cells of separated worlds. She leads me into a small, quiet classroom where she takes out pieces of her leftover sandwich. After this, she begins answering the question:

PB: The three black figures and the one woman opposite them symbolize the Gypsies and the Hungarians. There are the Gypsies. The woman who turns her head disdainfully away M: Can we call them the colonizer and the colonized? PB: Well, you are correct.

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Figure 3. Detail from “Bódvalenke’s Everydays”

Adding the subordinate position of the Roma amplifies the narrative of need and separated worlds. The black figures in the distance are “watched” by the blue female figure of the colonizer. The colonial setting stresses the situatedness of these bodies, the constraints among storytellers and audiences, and their different participation in their shared realities. In this “puzzle piece” the major theme is Gypsy life in colonial setting.

There are multiple layers, “systems of relations,” as Langellier and Peterson

(2006) refer to it: the black figures’ stories from the time when the colonizer was not

(painted) there yet, and the story of their shared reality. The distance between the colonized and colonizer, the imprisoned one-eyed figure and the prison bars affect every other story because it places them into a system of power relations.

Since PB in her oral encounters describes many parts of the mural, her oral and visual narratives greatly overlap. The core narrative of need, pride, and separated worlds that I identified in PB’s oral narrative, in her visual storytelling are united in the two

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antagonistic worlds: colonizer and colonized. Irreconcilable, both narratives are inherently full of tension.

Accordingly, PB depicted a story that includes four out of five main themes of her oral narrative directly: naming/stigmatizing, everyday tragedies, the strong Gypsy mother, and Gypsy life as struggle in a colonial setting. However, the major story,

“Bódvalenke’s Everydays” intrinsically includes “Gypsy cuture” as part of the everyday happenings. The visual story’s significant addition is the colonialist iconography that shows Roma in a subordinate position in a colonial frame.

Although PB’s oral narrative shared two genres, the visual narrative fully fits in the habitual narrative genre, which is justified also by the title. As habitual narrative,

“Bódvalenke’s Everydays” shows events and conditions wherein people continuously re- experience their previous experiences: things fall apart, they recollect the fragments, the fragments fall down again and they recollect them again. Missing bread, young widows, young men dying from medical negligence, slipped houses and sad streets, battered wives, strong mothers, and literally and symbolically imprisoned Roma could have been photographed at any time in history –this is what the genre adds to the meaning. Habitual narratives make us pay less attention to the situation; they perpetuate the likelihood, even the expectation, that the situation will happen again (Riessman, 1993). As Tauber (2008) suggests, in “no time,” in “continuous today,” the content becomes immobile. According to PB, one element of this immobile content is the Roma’s subordinate social position that appears even in “help.”

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While PB rejects the colonial setting, she “colors” it to “look nicer” and paints it smaller as she originally planned to “avoid confrontation,” elevating disharmony to an aesthetic experience (Vekerdi, 1974). This phenomenon appears also in PJ’s “harmonious resistance” concept.

This was the “image site.” Next, I answer questions: “What are issues of the display?”; “How does this mural relates to other murals?”; “How is it interpreted by whom?”; and “Why is it interpreted that way?” These are questions examine the technological, compositional, and social modalities of the “audiencing site” (Riessman,

2012).

“Tell me something about PB’s mural,” I ask the villagers each time I walk by the mayor’s house. However, the villagers won’t talk with me about PB’s painting. They either say, “Well, this is the mayor’s house,” or start telling stories about PB’s illness during the painting, how the emergency car took her into the hospital, how her camera was stolen and found. Aranka and Borbála remember that PB was picky, she didn’t want to eat the villagers’ food (indeed, she was not allowed to eat certain food because of her illness). The villagers’ comments demonstrate that PB is right: Roma tales are stories that

Roma people tell about their experiences, and events happening to them.

Since the painting directly touches the colonialist setting between the villagers and the FVP, the Project Leader’s comment on the picture is relevant. So I ask the Project

Leader to take me around the village and tell me about the frescoes as she usually tour- guides the occasional tourists. One afternoon when she drives a young man from

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Budapest to the village (who volunteered to reorganize the computers in the office), she takes the two of us for a tour. She stops at PB’s mural, saying:

Here you can see the woman who holds four little children. In her hand and next to her there stands a dark figure representing Death. The story is that a 23-year- old young man died of pneumonia. In the 21st century you shouldn’t die of pneumonia but the doctor here prescribes Sumetrolim to everybody; every bacteria are resistant to it. So it was late when he finally was taken to the hospital. They couldn’t help. There are four children after him, the youngest was two- months old. Otherwise, find me! I am also in the picture.

We try to locate her in the picture, but we cannot find her. Finally she points at the blue figure in the colonial setting, “I am the large blue figure with the hat, because I am so ladylike. She [PB] told me that I am there. This is such a lovely picture.” It is clear, based on their different positioning in the power structure, the Project Leader and PB attribute different meanings to the same image. However, she also misinterpreted the

“huge, strong, powerful mother” figure, transforming it to Death.

So the villagers fully understand the narrative of the “separated worlds,” thus they refuse to comment on the mayor’s house. These experiences connect the villagers and the artist. On the other hand the Project Leader’s interpretation that PB’s mural is a “nice picture” of her, is a total misunderstanding. She recognized herself as a “lady-like” figure that, as she figured out, shows her high qualities versus the simple villagers. The artist, on the other hand, identified her as the colonizer wearing a Victorian dress.

To summarize, the visual story consists of many themes: Gypsy culture, everyday tragedies, naming/stigmatizing, the strong Gypsy mother, and Gypsy life in colonial setting. These create the core narratives of narrative of need and separated worlds. The

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genre of the visual is habitual narrative that is emphasized by the puzzle pieces that include similar stories told multiple times.

PB depicted many habitual things that happen in the village; her mural is a literal and symbolic representation of Gypsy life. She identified the one-eyed prisoner, the old woman who carries a trunk, and the colonized in antagonism with the colonizer as symbols of Gypsy life, experiences that carve permanent marks on the body. The prisoner’s story is inscribed in her face and makes her one-eyed; she constantly looks out her prison waiting for others to “pity” her and give her what she needs. This is a powerful portrayal of the colonial power-distribution and its consequences from an insiders’ perspective. Separated worlds, as the non-Roma dominate above the subjugated Roma, became a western habitual narrative. As PA stated, those who live in unfreedom unavoidably behave differently from those who live in freedom. Here PB adds that in the absence of freedom repeated stories became inscribed not only in the identity but also in the body. In the following section I discuss another habitual narrative in “Bódvalenke’s

Ballad.”

A Very Sad Story

Painter D’s (PD) oral narrative circles around themes of the “Roma’s supposed inferiority in the eyes of non-Roma,” “colonial setting,”“Roma needs to stand up for themselves,” “the strong Gypsy woman,” “Roma identity,” and “another [kind of] civilization.” These lead to need, pride, and separated worlds core narratives. PD’s oral stories fit into the genres of habitual narratives, encounter with the past and counter/emancipatory narrative. While PD tells about his life and experiences in the FVP,

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he defines his identity in contrast with other identities, evaluates past events, and encounters how non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma (Braid, 1997). During this, he reveals social, cultural and political identities and power-relations on the “production site” (Rose, 2012). I begin this section with how the mural was made, further issues of the genre, and who made the mural for whom and why –inquiries of the “production site’s” technological, compositional, and social modalities (Rose, 2012).

PD is the second painter I interviewed by phone from my Hungarian Motel room where I lived in the final days before my return to the USA. I knew from the media that he worked closely with PG, who was the artistic director until the Project Leader separated from him, who insisted that community building must be part of the project

(Biczó, 2009). He talks about his arrival to the village:

When I went there, it was the Project Leader who took me, and we got there late at night. I was burning with curiosity, with the desire to paint something monumental. I was eager to meet the villagers, to see what I could come up with. And I thought, this community, and this desire I felt, it was obvious that the two should come together. In other words, what I was going to put on that wall could not be independent of the people who lived there. My head was buzzing with ideas and there was this huge curiosity as to what that expanse of wall and that community was going to bring out of me. And that night, after that very long journey, I asked where the wall was. We were still standing at the bus-stop (laughs) and I was petrified, thinking, “Dear God, we’ve come to the other end of the world.”

PD went into the village with an ethnographer’s curiosity to explore the place of the

“Other,” who becomes an exotic being by living at the “other end of the world.” His initial impression shows “extraordinary” people in odd circumstances. At this point he is the outsider observer:

In the morning, when I woke up, I saw people heading off to work, well, when I say work, put the word in parenthesis, it’s ridiculous, window-dressing, that’s all 253

it is, people going out in those yellow visibility jackets, raking rubbish or what seemed to be rubbish, but were really just twigs and leaves and things, bits of nature, which to me seems a completely futile occupation. There were a lot of people doing this, about 20-25 people. So then I started talking with them. And I didn’t do anything for three or four days except talk to the people. And I let those feelings and experiences affect me and go through me and I began to make sketches.

When PD starts talking with the people this changes his perspective from etic

(outsider) to emic (insider). He finds that people are “hungry to talk about themselves,” and he decides to listen to them; he suspects that they can’t discuss their problems among themselves “because hardship and indigence has destroyed their relationships, which is inhuman.” This echoes the need that PA “talks about” in the “Sitters on the Stone.” But by lending his ear to the villagers’ stories, PD makes storytelling a performance to happen. Indeed, the title, “Bódvalenke’s Ballad,” came to his mind during this intensive listening.

What the villagers told him, he knows personally, since he shares the same identity and experience. The emerging first major theme, the Roma’s supposed inferiority in the non-Roma world, signifies the artist’s and villagers’ common experience. “But what do we want?” I hear him asking. He pauses. He repeats the question: “But what do we want? In Ferguson, Missouri, Black people are rioting over the killing of a Black boy who was shot by a white police officer, so ‘What do we want?’ Everyone has good and bad sides, but the Blacks and the Roma are viewed as if they had only a bad side,” he says, sighing heavily. “When I see this I always think about how fragile the story of democracy is.” I understand that the Gypsy’s supposed inferiority is one of his most determining experiences. He tells me that the Roma issue will never be solved because

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there is no such thing as “good Roma.” Non-Roma either lift up somebody and then say,

“this is such a great guy that he is not even a Gypsy [any more],” or “This is such a great artist that he is not even a Gypsy [he had never been],” or they put somebody very deep down as “gypsy.” They cannot accept that Gypsies can be just as intelligent as non-

Gypsies. PD concludes: Roma should learn to stand up for themselves. But the cohesive forces that once held Roma communities together do not exist any more, except that

Roma are still “cautious” with non-Roma, and this holds them together:

That is how things stand in Hungary right now . . . for example, there’s this music channel on TV and a lot of Roma people appear on those shows and it turns out that there are a lot of talented Roma youngsters who can sing. And it is not the Hungarian boy who goes on to the next round but the Roma boy, and then the comments start coming. You can’t imagine the kind of pure malice, the spite that exists in Hungarian society against us, against the Roma people. How can a Roma person trust a Hungarian when we are always talked down to, always told what to do and how to do it? I am speaking from my own experience here.

The Roma’s supposed inferior status leads to the “Gypsy experience” that the world is unbridgeably divided between Roma and non-Roma. Here is his personal story:

When I was twenty I was ashamed of having this desire, this compulsion to draw. Because I spent a lot of time drawing instead of going to work. I wasn’t an active member of society. But there’s this widely accepted belief that we Roma can’t know what the rest of society knows. So it works both ways, the prejudice is there in Roma and non-Roma alike. I don’t believe this will ever change.

Although the distrust is mutual between Roma and non-Roma, as we see in PD’s encounter, this is put in a frame of incommensurable power difference, where the non-

Roma overpowers the Roma. PD’s description outlines a colonial setting: “How can a

Roma person trust a Hungarian when we are always talked down to, always told what to do and how to do it?” This “always” reveals a habitual narrative. However, PD’s story does not fully fit into a narrative of “continuous today,” as habitual narratives usually do. 255

He actually calls for breaking with this continuity. He wants Roma to stand up, to rise up against this continuity:

One thing’s for sure, we don’t stand up for ourselves. And we should stand up for ourselves in some way. Every single time. Like this Bódvalenke story, it could mean some kind of standing up for ourselves. For example, whenever I go to some other part of the country to exhibit my work, I am inevitably representing a culture, Roma culture. And I am standing there, one person, in my own right, doing my very best, no party or organization behind me, just a man, a Roma man. We should all be standing there, in our own right. Not backed by the MSZP54 or the FIDESZ55 or any party, because there are Roma politicians in Hungary today who have been incorporated into a party and are practically no more than pawns. This goes for every single Roma representative in Hungary today. Every single campaign fails because of money. As soon as money is involved, it all comes to nothing. We have no Gandhis, that’s the trouble.

In this passage a new theme emerges that Roma must stand up for themselves. PD refers to an argument that divided the artists in Bódvalenke: whether it is fair for the FVP to promote them as “Roma artists” instead of “artists.” In the former, Romaness is an essential part of a person’s identity; in the latter it is non-essential. Artists with Roma ethnic origins are not purely “Roma artists”; they are also friends, citizens, human beings, and they might consider the label “Roma artists” to be diminishing and discriminatory.

When PD rejects the majority’s prejudice that Roma are less capable, intelligent, and talented than non-Roma and he declares the need to stand up “as a Roma man, who inevitably represents a culture,” he takes a side in this dispute. He states that Romaness is an inescapable part of one’s identity if one fights against anti-Roma prejudice. So both excellence and Romaness must be emphasized. Yet, he says, “Bódvalenke story” could be an opportunity to the Roma to stand up for themselves. PD uses the conditional tense.

54 Hungarian Socialist Party 55 Young Democratic Alliance 256

It is connected to certain moral conditions: the “Bódvalenke story” will become an opportunity if greed for money does not highjack the representation of the Roma. He continues:

PD: Earlier, Roma joined together even in poverty. For example, when there was a pig-killing, the family invited other families to a meal. But this wasn’t a Roma custom. This kind of thing existed also in non-Roma communities. But now, even we, Roma, are slowly progressing towards a more inhuman existence. Towards a more brutal way of living. So we are no better than our oppressors, the non-Roma. No better than the racists. We can be racists, too, unfortunately. So I don’t believe in all this bridging the gap stuff. But let’s hope I’m wrong. Miracles can happen. M: You say that Bódvalenke could mean some kind of standing up for the Roma. Why is it framed in the conditional tense? PD: To be honest, there were some among us, who painted in a way “the white man gave the paintbrushes and the paint color.” I wasn’t one of them. I think there is enough fire and strength and toughness in me that I am a painter of truth. So they can’t blind me. But there were a couple. . . . But a large part of it is honesty, I think. Honest pictures. And that was why we painted them, so people would pay attention to us, to the Hungarian Roma.

PD begins openly using the post-colonialist vocabulary. He stresses the word

“oppressors,” and laments that few artists “sold themselves” to the oppressors. With this he starts a new theme that was also PB’s significant theme, the colonial setting between

Roma and non-Roma. PD argues that questions like “Who can help?” and “How can one help?” and “Why is it necessary to help?” are difficult questions. If helpers build only upon the need for assistance, it is not help. Indeed, “It is humiliating. It only reinforces their weakness,” he emphasizes.

I start understanding the ethos behind the title; I ask: “So, how would you break down the details of stories that make up the “Ballad of Bódvalenke?”

Well, I have a ballad, a very sad story. When I was there for the second time, there was a young boy who always helped me. He would hand me my brushes, mix my paint, and look after the painting in progress, so we formed a strong bond during those ten days. This little boy kept asking me where I lived in K. I told him 257

I had a beautiful yard, all green grass, and that I cut the grass twice a week; that I have a beautiful dog–a German Shepherd–and that I like to play with my dog; that there is a fine bathing place near where I live, and that I go there to swim. And he formed a beautiful picture in his mind of the way I live. Despite the fact that I am not a rich man. The point I am coming to is, one day this little boy comes up to me and says, “Uncle, will you take me to your house one day?” “Well, lad, I’ll talk to your mother, ask her permission and then we can go.” And he asks, “When will you finish up, Uncle?” And I say, “On Wednesday.” I am standing at the bus- stop, and the lad vanishes. Then he comes back, and I can see that he’s washed, he’s all sparkly clean, wearing clean clothes, he’s had his hair combed, with a side parting, and he has a rucksack on his shoulder. And that was when I realized that this child really did want to come with me. So I said, “What’s up, lad?” And he says, “I’m coming with you.” And I say, “Have you asked your parents?” “Of course. They said I can go with you anytime.” So I go to see his parents, and I ask, “What’s going on?” And they say, “Of course he can go with you, take him for the whole summer. We can’t feed him anyway.”

I always pondered what makes the difference between stories and ballads. After I heard this story I started to understand the differences. In stories, happiness and tragedies are involved as everyday events. In ballads, the story’s extraordinary tragic character is emphasized even if they happen daily. He talks about his own boundaries to break out from the vicious circle of everyday ballads:

I was so ashamed of myself, for saying God knows what to this child, when I only had enough money on me to get home myself – I hadn’t been paid that day. I had to get home, and I had to ask Marta to lend me enough money to get home. So I didn’t have enough money for his fare. And I wasn’t really prepared to have him visit. I was so ashamed, I had a guilty conscience all the way home.

These kinds of stories are built into the ballad, he adds. “These boys ended up in foster care. But situations like this aren’t typical of Roma families only: The husband drinks, beats the children, the children go hungry, and they get taken into care. It happens with non-Roma families too.” But people say this happens because they are Gypsies, this is how they stereotype the Gypsies. With the word use “these kinds of stories” PD suggests that he identifies these similar stories as habitual narratives that he depicts in his mural. 258

Figure 4. “Bódvalenke’s Ballad”

As I discussed earlier, habitual narratives involve tension, role strains and distress originating from lack of firm resolution, while events repeatedly and routinely happen over a long period of time and continue to happen in the present (Riessman, 1993).

Habitual narratives include much tension.

I understand that the stories that inspired the “ballad” are “human stories” and not typically “Gypsy stories.” They are not particular but universal. I am prepared to hear more “human stories” when PD continues:

There was a girl, I never spoke to her, I was just told that that’s the girl who is a prostitute. And there was another, someone who never spoke a word. Always came over on a bicycle. Whatever I said, whatever I asked, that girl would never

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speak to me. Just stopped on the pebble road, on the bicycle, at a distance from me, just stood there watching me, for hours. Like someone turned to stone, unmovable, petrified. And I painted that person also into the picture, painted a stone head, made it silver. Then the gossip started - everybody started gossiping. They told me everything. But they kept adding, “Don’t pass it on, I didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything and don’t even talk about it.”

Yet, among the “human stories” the distinction of Roma and non-Roma suddenly surfaces in form of the “archetypical” Gypsy woman: “There was Gabi néni, who cooked for us all, she’s one of those old-fashioned Gypsy women who were born to this Earth to feed her children, in the strictest sense of the word,” he remembers. The ideal Roma woman “was born on earth to feed her children.” This is what mothers in Bódvalenke do.

They know how to feed their family from nothing. Similar to the villagers and PB, PD emphasizes the strength of Gypsy woman as his major theme.

Along with this, PD introduces a new divide between the ways Roma and non-

Roma understand what “Gypsy identity” means. With this he switches from the strong

Gypsy woman to the theme of Gypsy identity. Neither Gabi néni nor PD want to identify with the majority society’s “gypsy.” For the majorities, “gypsy” is subordinate. For the

Gypsies, “Gypsy” is equal with everybody else. This becomes clear in the following story:

[T]he first time I went willingly for token payment and she paid 20,000 or 250,000 Ft [about 700 or 950 USD]. Imagine, she paid the artists by the square meter! When I was getting ready to go there, I spoke to the other artists by phone and told them, “Don’t let them take advantage of you. What is that about, paying for art by the square meter? If you go there, for a fraction of what you deserve and they still pay you by the square meter?” When I got there, there was an art historian there, and an art director of sorts, PG. And PG says, “Listen, you defend your painting, and don’t stop talking when the art historian comes, defend your painting, that’s how you get paid right. “Man, what are you talking about? I don’t want the art historian talking about my painting. I’m not going to say a word, but if you start measuring my art in centimeters I’m going to break the wall down – 260

and the house, with all of you in it.” There was always trouble with payment, that’s the truth.

Measuring artwork by the square meter is unique in the art world. It is also exceptional that the artists submitted themselves to this process. Since the FVP was uniquely tailored for “Roma artists,” this poor “special treatment” was inherent in the setting; the majorities make “gypsy” a subordinate category.

At this point the theoretical debate, whether or not Roma should have special treatment, comes to mind. Rövid (2013) identifies autonomy, special rights, and formal political equality as three main approaches to Roma participation and representation. The first and third argue for the non-special treatment of Roma and recall that discrimination

(positive or negative) is inherent in every “special” treatment. Those who argue for special treatment refer to the marginalization of the Romani population throughout the centuries and the specific problems resulting from this. In the case of the FVP, the positive side of this “special treatment” is that more grants and support were available to fund the project. The negative side is that applying “special treatment” allowed them to use different standards, such as measuring the artists’ art work by square meter, paying a symbolic amount for the job, and often paying artists late or in installments contrary to their previous agreement. For example, PD says:

The last day, when we’d all finished work, everyone disappeared, from the art historian to the Project Leader. They’d all gone. Like I said, I didn’t have the money for my fare home. So Marta gave me some money. And I came away with a bad taste in my mouth.

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The FVP project seems to have a double life. First, it provides publicity and more funding at the international level. Second, at the local level, as PD notes, it does not work because it does not help. PD summarizes his conclusion as follows,

I don’t know what’s happening in Bódvalenke right now, but, even though there have been a lot of interviews made abroad and God knows where, it still isn’t working. It hasn’t become a place of pilgrimage. The Project Leader thought that people would be coming in droves. That there would be buses and everything. That there would be buildings where the people coming to see the frescoes could stay, could be catered for, they would cook for them, they would put them up for the night, they would provide entertainment – I don’t think any of those plans materialized.

It is remarkable that what started to be a Roma issue for him, became an imagined place for pilgrimage, what “the Project Leader thought” would be a center of the world’s attention. Here PD realizes that the FVP is not representing the Roma’s standing up for themselves. Since the artists waived their ownership rights, most of them observe the fate of the project from afar. PD is one of them.

But the ballad is one long story of a people who, as PD says, are at the mercy of the “civilized” world.

Well, what I see in these people – and I am included in that category –is that (just like them) I don’t believe in this world we are living in. I mean that universally, in this universal world. I don’t believe in America, I don’t believe in the East, I don’t believe in Europe, I don’t believe in this type of civilization. I think . . . these people in Bódvalenke, they are stuck, and they are at the mercy of this civilization.

This is a dense, complex statement befitting a ballad. When the Bódvalenke Gypsies are described as at the mercy of this civilization, this shows a tragic local event.

What does “civilization” mean in this context? If not in this (dominant) civilization, what other civilization does PD believe in? How can one civilization be at

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the mercy of another civilization? First, PD talks about “civilization” as it is lived universally in the East, in America, in Europe etc.; he calls these the “universal world.”

However, this “universal civilization” considers Roma unfit within “universal civilization.” “Traditional” societies are thought by this universal culture to be

“uncivilized.” As PD asserts, the people in Bódvalenke are at the mercy of this universal civilization because they are not considered civilized. But PD continues: “These people are pure in spirit, these people do not wear masks. If they are unhappy, they are unhappy; if they’re happy, they are happy. There is no play-acting. Like society today demands everyone to ‘behave.’” So while PD does not believe in the “universal culture,” he believes in the Roma’s “civilization.” Though while the villagers do not wear masks, they exist in a world where status depends on wearing masks, maintaining face, and performing rituals (Goffman, 1967).

Humans need different things to become social persons in different communities, situations and times. Marushiakova and Popov (2011) connect these different needs to the different kinds of communities, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. 56 Roma live in the wider society and in their narrower community; these communities require two different social games. For PD, being simple and honest is at a higher level:

If there was someone who could make the people of Bódvalenke aware of the positives of their situation, like not being exposed to the filth of the world, then I think they would join their hands together in thankful prayer. It is not the people of Bódvalenke who are in the direst straits, it is the world that compares unfavorably to Bódvalenke. If the people of Bódvalenke were to take a good hard look at themselves and got up and said, right, let’s plough the fields or whatever, make plots and grow everything we need, vegetables and so on, and keep pigs and

56 Originally Tonnies’ distinction. See Tonnies, F. (1887/2002). Marushiakova and Popov use the two terms without the original hierarchy based on a supposed “development” of societies. 263

chickens, then they could be the happiest people on earth. But they believe the kind of reality the world offers them. So the people of Bódvalenke should wake up to the fact that their advantages outweigh their drawbacks. What is needed here, above all, are teachers who turn toward these people with affection.

After I met PD, I felt that he holds himself to be a “teacher.” He fully recognizes the respect and acceptance of the villagers, which is the precondition to becoming a teacher of the people. I sense the affection that motivated him to come to the village, to go from house to house and to spend time with the villagers.

In summary, the “Roma’s supposed inferiority in the eyes of the non-Roma,” “the colonial setting,” that “Roma need to stand up for themselves,” “the strong Gypsy woman,” “Gypsy identity” and “civilization” are the major themes in PD’s oral narrative.

Stories built on these themes can be reduced to three core narratives need, pride and separated worlds. PJ’s oral narratives fit in the genre of “encounters with the past,” in which actions and stories in the past, and stories about Roma identity told by the Roma and the non-Roma are re-created. However, since PD emphasizes that many of these narratives do not change and repeat over a long period of time, they become habitual narratives in his visual storytelling. “Standing up for the Roma” signifies the interruption of this habitual narratives. However, since with standing up, Roma proves the opposite that the master narrative states (that the Roma is unable to handle their affairs, lacks talent, intelligence and strength) the visual narrative fits also in the genre of counter/emancipatory” narrative. After discussing the making of the mural, the genre and who, when, for whom, and why created the mural–questions of the “production site–I turn to the visual analysis (Rose, 2012).

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“They are at the mercy of this civilization.” In this section I examine the visual effects, the composition, and the meanings of the mural that are issues of the technological, compositional and social modalities of the “image site” (Rose, 2008).

PD’s mural is close to the village’s end. Once the wall faced Bernát’s house. But Bernát exchanged his house with Katalin, and the mural is now “Katalin’s painting.” The mural consists of one main figure in the foreground, with many faces and figures in the background. Thus, the background consists of villagers’ habitual narratives broken into mosaic-like fragments.

In the left upper corner, we can find the painter’s self-portrait with a paintbrush in his hand; behind him a baby is born. From left to right we can see the silver face, the painter’s silent daily visitor. Around her are the usurious lenders. Big and smaller faces line up in the background–each resembling somebody the villagers know. Máté’s donkey is right above the window. And on the right side of the mural, around the main figure’s arm, three people appear, imitating the gestures of the three wise monkeys: “speak no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil” (Delahunty & Dignen, 2010, p. 356). Accordingly, the artist “reports” about things that he cannot see, hear and tell even if he saw, heard and said. This tension justifies the fragmented structure. However, we can identify fragmentation also as repetition, a signifier that these things happen over and over again for many generations. This meaning echoes PB’s statement about the Gypsies’ fragmented life.

My method–going from house to house and talking with people–was compared to

PD’s by many people in the village. Since I was in Bódvalenke six years after him, there

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are many stories I learned only from PD’s mural. For example, that Máté had donkeys; they became “immortalized” in PD’s mural.

So a great many stories appear in the picture, but none of them is told in its entirety. PD’s storytelling differs from PB’s, who tells an individual linear story in each puzzle with a clear beginning, middle and end (such as the story of the young widow) but the parts belong together as one long non-linear narrative (Bódvalenke’s Everydays). In

PD’s fresco the individual stories have only beginnings, but no middle and end. There are identifiable characters, but no stories are “told” about them. Only the painter knows their stories; the viewer sees only the “first frame.” For example, the painter knows “this is

Gyöngyi, who was arrested for prostitution, which she entered in order to feed her children after she was involved in a dubious real-estate business with the local government and the FVP,” and so on, and so on. Also, “this is Máté’s donkey who used to carry wood from the forest, which brought home Ica when she gave birth to her triplets on the snowy field. But the babies died.” Máté also remembers:

I had two donkeys. Since then I don’t have them. My neighbors kept bees and they were stung by the bees. One donkey died. I sold the other. They were one month old when I bought them. I grew them; I gave them milk, everything. They belonged to the family very much.

Mate’s story might be different from what PB’s about the donkey but both are full stories whith a beginning, middle and ending, not like the mosaics painted in the mural that show only the beginnings of each story. Here also the fragments are habitual narratives: it is not necessary to tell the story, everybody can finish it after hearing the first sentence.

They are familiar stories that repeat endlessly. The characters appear on the “scene,” then they are frozen without any action. We see their faces, not their gestures. The faces make 266

up a kaleidoscopic background. They represent themselves, their father, mother, sister, brother, and many generations before them, since everybody in the village recognizes these familiar faces.

But at the center, the main figure stands before the people who line up behind him. His dark skin signifies his Otherness. He is thin but strong: his body is muscular. He is wearing a linen cloth wrapped around his body, similar to the Indian dhoti. He looks straight into the viewers’ eyes with determined face and glowing eyes. Since, as PD says, every Roma man must to stand up for himself, it does not matter if we call him Bernát; he can be everybody who stands up for the Roma. The dark-skinned main figure neither asks

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nor orders, he merely presents himself and the villagers. His open arms not only welcome others, but separate and save the villagers behind him.

M: That figure in the center of “Bódvalenke’s Ballad,” who is that? K: That could be Bernát (laughs), he lives in the house opposite (laughs), it could be me, it could be a Gypsy God standing there with his arms spread wide. The arms spread wide, that’s symbolic, it means that he is not a closed, introverted sort of person. My message there was that here we are, arms spread wide in welcome, we welcome everyone gladly. Though I’ve never lived there, it’s symbolic, it is the way I live. I get up every morning and spread my arms wide and rid myself of all my preconceptions and prejudices even if I got a couple of slaps in the face the day before, because I am a Gypsy by birth. Yes, you do get slaps in the face, and of course you feel them, but I can’t live like that, closing myself off, being suspicious. So I have to strive to remain open, to face the world with my arms spread wide. That’s what it stands for, that figure with its arms spread wide.

This encounter shows an individual and a collective struggle. We must distinguish between two messages here. First, “I/we welcome everyone,” and second, “Although non-Roma regularly slap me, I force myself to welcome everyone.” While the former is free of struggle, the second is full of struggle. To welcome someone who slaps me is a

Jesus-like or Gandhi-like gesture. This is what we need to know about the identities mobilized in the making of the mural (Rose, 2012).

After describing the mural, PD adds a coda to summarize his opinion about the whole project:

I don’t think that this type of support, patronage through art, is going to work. I don’t think it is going to bring enough money for the people of Bódvalenke, enough for them to make a good living. So, in short, that is my story about Bódvalenke.

The dialogical aspect is emphasized here: PD told his “story about Bódvalenke” twice: first, through his visual, second, through his oral narrative.

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Accordingly, PD depicted a story that included all themes appearing in his oral narrative: the “Roma’s supposed inferiority in the eyes of the non-Roma,” “the colonial setting,” that “Roma need to stand up for themselves,” the “strong Gypsy woman,”

“Gypsy identity,” and an the “other kind of civilization.” These themes can be “reduced” to need, pride and separated worlds core narratives. We can see two synchronous narrative genres also in the visual. The background tells a habitual narrative while the main figure stories a counter/emancipatory narrative to overwrite the master narrative

(and the habitual narrative of the background) that Roma have less value than non-Roma, and to stand up for the Roma values and liberate the Roma. PD stands up for the legitimacy of “another kind of civilization”– a simple and honest one based on a self- sustaining community that the dominant civilization must not see as an anomaly. With

PD’s views of what the mural contains and intends as meaning, I turn next to issues of display, viewing position offered, and the viewer’s interpretation–the three modalities of the “audiencing site” (Riessman, 2012).

Mate recalled the memory that PB was listening to their stories before painting the mural. He points at the left right corner: “You see that baby? This is P [his son].

Before he painted it, PD came to us and asked how P looked like as a baby.” I ask him if he has a photo of his son. “No, I don’t have. I just told him,” he replied. Máté is proud that his son–along with his donkey–is painted in the mural. Also Bernát is proud that he is in the mural. Although he never let photographing himself, he let me take a picture of him after I greeted him on the main street: “Oh, you are the man painted in PD’s mural, right?” But he did not engage in further discussion about the mural.

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Even though the mural is dedicated to young Bernát, it is Katalin’s picture now.

Katalin and Bernát exchanged their houses since the mural was created. I saw Katalin and

Bibi’s little girls playing in the shadow of the mural all day long. But Katalin and Bibi admit that they feel it frightening:

This image is just like the Pharaoh who reigns over everybody. This is the Black Bernát [laughing]. Next to him there is a bird; or what is it next to him? Here he looks like an emperor. But this would be a scary man if he would live. This would be brutal. If they paint him like this, present him like this, how would he be in life? I don’t know a similar person. Ayy, I know! Only Bernát who lived here. Sure, it tells about him. He has this brown skin here in Lenke. I know him because he is a relative to my father. But we do not really care about him. (Bibi)

They sense the power of this figure. So they conclude, this is not really Bernát but somebody who resembles him. But “power” is added to his image.

Ultimately, the villagers resonated on the most significant message that the

Roma is strong. From the villagers’ interpretation other themes that PD included in his mural is totally missing. This shows that identity and Romaness/Gypsiness is not a central issue for them. These, however, have major importance for PD.

To conclude, the visual, PD’s work is a powerful picture with a prevailing story of a dark-skinned man who stands up to save his people in the background. He has the qualities of a “half-God,” “Gandhi” or “Jesus.” PD rejects the Roma’s supposed inferiority, critiques the colonial setting, and portrays Gypsy identity as Gypsies are strong and able to stand up for themselves. The core narratives of need, pride and separated worlds emphasize that need cannot be separated from pride, and that there is a gap between Roma and non-Roma. PD reports about events that habitually happen in the village, and wants to interrupt and change these habits by a counter/emancipatory

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narrative. So while PD’s oral stories are “encounters with the past,” the visual story’s genre is habitual narrative and counter/emancipatory narrative. Having considered PD’s mural as habitual and counter/emancipatory narratives, in the following section I discuss an encounter with the past.

Encounters with the Past and Tradition-saving Stories (Visual)

As discussed previously, encounters with the past have a clear beginning, middle and end, and they answer the question “then what happened?” (Riessman, 1993). I also noted that narratives may have sequential and temporal ordering that reveals the specific temporal experience of particular groups (Ricoeur, 1984). Accordingly, Roma, who experience time not necessarily as progress, might encounter the past differently from those who see history as the story of human development. First, I analyze PG’s fresco.

“There is Nowhere to Go”

Painer G’s (PG) oral narrative is built on three major themes: non-Roma’s patronage of the Roma,” “commemorate the Roma refugees,” and “unbridgeable gap between Roma and non-Roma.” These can be reduced to the core narratives of need and separated worlds. PA’s stories fit into the genre of “encounter with the past.” While PA tells about his life, his involvement in the FVP, his meeting with the villagers, he provides explanations about his identity in contrast with other identities, evaluates past events, and encounters how non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma (Braid, 1997).

During this, themes of social, cultural and political identities and power-relations emerge on the “production site” (Rose, 2012).

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As a practicing social worker and an autodidact painter, PG joined the FVP with the belief that establishing good connections with the villagers, revitalizing the collective and remembering common roots are just as important as the wall-paintings. “Sometimes we worked with 10-15 children on the scaffoldings. It was very important for all of us,” he says. After sundown they played the guitar, sang songs, and talked with the villagers.

As I noted earlier, I am not examining the reasons why this concept of establishing good connections was dropped from the FVP’s agenda after the Project

Leader separated from the others who started the program with her, but for PG this is a personal issue since he was previously the art manager. As PG indicates:

The story later was only about money. It was not about building a community or about art. It was about rushing through something and picking up money. I hold Bódvalenke higher than this. The project lost the salt, the flavor of the whole thing. I think something got lost. Now people say, “the Project Leader has arrived from Budapest, let’s run because she is going to bring us something.” This is terrifying. She degrades people and humiliates them. You must not do that.

So PG’s first emerging theme is the non-Roma’s “patronage” of the Roma. While he is speaking, I remember the tomato seedling and apple distribution on the first day of my visit, when villagers lined up in the yard of the FVP building. I remember seeing the

Project Leader in the role of the mother/grandmother of all the children, the benevolent helper of the Gypsies, and the civilized advisor of those with “little” knowledge. PG distinguishes two approaches here–presenting Roma as either “anomic” communities who need the continuous patronage of non-Roma, or “normal” communities. These types are highlighted by Marushiakova and Popov (2011):

The leading concept of this approach [that Roma need the constant patronage of non-Roma] is that Gypsies should not be treated as a ‘normal community’ with its own identity and ethnic culture, but as a strongly marginalized and to a great 272

extent anomic community that needs constant special care and social patronage. This approach . . . was rather the base of almost all state policies for ‘integration’ of Gypsy communities worldwide. These policies are characterized almost entirely by a lack of any positive results. (p. 91)

This approach today recalls the structure of the so-called “Gypsy industry”: stating Roma problems, and then securing the extended need of their patronage.

Contrary to this, Marushiakova and Popov (2011) urge us to handle Gypsies consistently with other nations, cultures and ethnicities and to apply the same methods and criteria used for others. They ask:

Is it true that Gypsies do not understand their interests and need “good white brothers” to decide in their stead what is good and bad for them as a whole? Only if we affirm this assumption does it make sense that the diversity and ethnic uniqueness of the Gypsies is best protected if they are separated in reservations where non-Gypsy people have the opportunity to observe the extraordinary and unique Gypsy ethnic culture and then would go home satisfied, feeling they have done their best to preserve the Roma identity and culture. (p. 101)

PG observes this exoticizing paradigm of the FVP and expresses his aversion to it. His paintings (neither the mural covered here nor his other murals in the village) do not conform to this expectation.

PG admits that the leitmotif is to commemorate Roma refugees who had lived in

Mohács, a city in south Hungary, and fled to Canada in 2006-2012. So the second theme is commemorating the victims who died. While PG chooses the genre of encounter with the past, he recalls a specific historical event. This event is a memento to the Roma’s search for possible “better” places, where those turn out to be “no places” for them. The core narrative is “separated worlds.”

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Figure 5. “Fleeing Angels”

Mohács, a city in Baranya County, South Hungary, with 17,800 inhabitants, became known through the mass-migration of its Roma, who fled to Canada, the United

Kingdom and Sweden (“Hungarian Census,” 2012, p. 21). Most of them went to Canada.

Prior to their migration, Roma made up seventeen percent of the city’s total population and were ninety percent unemployed at that time. They became literally living targets for the growing number of paramilitary ultra-nationalist groups in that region. The flight of the Roma reached its peak in 2011, when in one year more than 4,000 Roma requested asylum in Canada, many of them from Mohács (Ayed & Ou, 2012). “Fleeing Angels” commemorates these refugees. PG’s comment is relevant:

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Do you remember when the Roma’s first group from Mohács left for Canada? And things happened there. Many of them committed suicide, others were sent back home, and further others stayed. In “Fleeing Angels” there is a man who shows which way to go, everything breaks away, legs are growing out and everything starts fleeing. Roots of trees are coming up, leaves grow legs, and dwarfs put bags on their back and are moving from the left to the right. Even the angel is going. Look, a pregnant she-angel is also moving and carrying her baby on her back. This is my secret. Everything is moving toward a direction from the left to the right.

So the fleeing Roma follow a direction indicator that seems to be wrong. When the Roma left Mohács, where they were constant targets of violence and hate speech, the

Canadian media suspected an organized crime scheme, believing that the Gypsies were lying about their persecution in Hungary, and that they were participating in welfare fraud57 (Beaudoin, Danch & Rehaag, 2015). PG removes the blame and stigma from these Roma, who were demonized even in their flight, and transforms them into angels.

With this the whole worldview changes: situations where angels have to flee must be not only terrible, but also morally wrong. I need to spend more time with this “escape.”

Accordingly, the non-Roma’s “patronage,” “commemoratimg the Roma’s flight” and the “unbridgeable gap between Roma and non-Roma,” are the themes of PG’s oral narrative. These can be reducesed to the “narrative of need” and “separated worlds.”

Since PG in his oral narrative reports about a past event and evaluates this event, the genre is “encounter with the past.” While examining these issues, PG unveiled much of the social, cultural and political contexts, power-relations and identities on the

57 Beaudoin, Danch & Rehaag (2015) state: “between 2008 and 2012, over 11,000 Hungarians made refugee claims in Canada, primarily on the basis that they feared persecution on account of their Romani ethnicity. While hundreds succeeded with their refugee claims, most did not. Instead, they encountered racist rhetoric that drew on stereotypes about Roma being fraudsters, beggars, and criminals, and which presented Hungarian Romani refugee claimants as ‘bogus’” (p. 57). 275

“production site” (Rose, 2012). After discussing the making of the mural, the genre and who, when, for whom, and why created it, I turn to the mural (Rose, 2012).

“Gypsies want to escape from here.” Rose (2012) suggests to ask three questions when interpreting a visual’s “image site”: “What are the visual effects?”; “What is the composition?”; and “What are the visual meanings?” These questions cover issues of the three modalities (technological, compositional, and social) modalities. While I answer these questions, I also bring PG, the villagers, and the context in dialogue.

“Fleeing Angels” is on the back wall of Hajni’s and her husband’s house, but

Tamás and Ica are the primary audiences. They are family: Hajni is Tamás’ and Ica’s daughter-in-law. It is the second mural from the end of the village. The model for the pregnant angel was Réka; she was pregnant with her tenth child when the painter was in the village. Pregnancy is so naturally part of the Roma life that even the main figure, the bodiless she-angel, carries her baby and is pregnant with her next child. As it is obvious from the villagers’ and PG’s narrative, family occupies a significant part of Roma/Gypsy identity. “Family” that organically connected to “motherhood” is PG’s first theme. The mural shows a group of Roma on the move. Although they are depicted as angels, their

Romaness is identifiable. This is not an idyllic wandering: trees, leaves, everything around them moves along with the fleeing figures, making their movement an illusion:

Wherever they move, they carry their surroundings with them. Even the tree that supposedly represents immobility and stability, moves with them. The group’s “collective arrangement” is fixed, for their bodies’ relationship to everything else in their

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environment never changes; the environment moves with them (Bogue, 1989, p. 138).

They cannot change their circumstances. PG says:

They move from left to right. But from the right to the left, they seem to make swimming movements, crawling movements. . . . There they are coming back already. A horse above, they are coming from that direction.

The horse connects this moving group of “Mohácsians” to memories of moving caravans, where women carried their children and men figured out where to move, just as in this image. But here, the going and coming figures unite in a circular motion:

Here they are going, there they are coming back. Where to go then? Where to push down a people? Will they take them to the ends of the earth and push them down into darkness? No, you mustn’t do that. Flying Angels. This is a story that says: we are escaping from one place to another place, but from there we are coming back already. There is nowhere to go. That has happened to the people of Mohács.

Wherever they migrate, they are rejected and must return to the place they fled from. In this painting, mobility is unable to create stability: the perpetual wandering exaggerates instability, not only in the group but in their environment. This is a perfect depiction of the recent Roma mass migration. After family/motherhood, PG’s introduces his second theme, “flight.”

Although we can understand the horse as a reference to the nomadic past, nothing else in the painting shows similarity to the time of nomadic wandering. Deleuze and

Guattari’s (1987/2000) phrase comes to my mind: “Don’t confuse nomads and migrants”

(p. 557). They suggest that nomads are determined by the nomos, the law of the outside and the outsiders, therefore the nomadic relation to the earth is de-territorialized. This mural shows the opposite: that the movement causes suffering to the movers, it uproots a people with strong attachment to the land where they lived. Deleuze and Guattari also 277

propose that the places where nomadic people live are filled with multiple lines of flights.

This image of flight shows the opposite: there is not even one direction to go; the movement becomes a loop of leaving and coming back. There is nowhere to go. There are no open trajectories. And there is nowhere to stay. PG’s third theme is the disappearance of open trajecties. Accordingly, these angels are not nomads, but migrants and refugees without refuge. I have chosen to use the term “refugee” to emphasize that they have been forced to leave their country in order to escape persecution, and to look for a condition of safety and shelter.

Thus, PG depicted a story that include the themes of “flight,”

“family/motherhood,” and the “disappearance of open trajectories.” None of these exactly covers his oral narratives. However, the Roma family/motherhood juxtaposes the “non-

Roma’s patronage,” because it shows the group as self-sustainig and coherent; “flee” is a direct consequence of what PG is commemorizing (hate crime against the Roma), and the

“disappearance of open tragectories is a “tragic event” for the Gypsies, though it is not a local event but global. So all three themes of PG’s oral narrative are represented in the mural by their opposites. The core narratives are need, pride, and separated worlds. I identify the genre as encounter with the past. The Roma’s supposed “transnational identity” and non-territorial characteristics are illustrated here as a source of tragedy on both personal and communal levels.

As Marushiakova and Popov (2005) emphasize, after the claim of non-territorial

European minority status of the Roma, it is unclear who is legitimate to represent them as transnational minorities. There are no legitimate leaders to give direction to the Roma

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community. The man who points in the direction of moving is just inches away from the point where they must turn back. Non-territoriality, as depicted here, becomes a performance from a new perspective, where Roma are refugees with no place to flee.

The mural mediates confusion regarding identity, and wandering, where traditional direction-indicators and directing men do not function well. The painting shows fatigue, that the wanderers cannot see the end of their endless wandering; they still move when there is no way to go. With this, PG seemingly repeats the “Roma as perpetual wanderer” image that is critiqued by Roma activists (Junghaus, 2014).

However, PG portrays the fleeing Roma as hopeless victims whom non-Roma would send to the “end of the world.” This is the opposite of the perpetual wanderer Roma, and a lamentation over the vanishing trajectories.

There are two different interpretations among the villagers regarding the mural.

The first understand flee as a communal, the second as a personal event. Tamás represents the first version. When Tamás and Ica took in Réka when she was 12, they did not imagine that 26 years later they would live with Rita’s image on their wall. When I ask Tamás whether or not he likes the picture he avers:

Well, a Gypsy made this. I tell you honestly. PG, he was my buddy, his name is written here [in the corner of the mural]. We used to drink beer together when he was here. For me it is good. How should I say, it is like the Gypsies. It tells the story when the Gypsies wanted to go away from here. They leave the village—it is about this. Because the Gypsies want to escape from here, from Lenke, that man shows with his finger that they ought to go that way. Well, if they had [money], they would leave. Those who have no opportunity to work.

This is a perfect “translation” of the global story into a local one. Roma living in Mohács and Roma living in Bódvalenke share the experience of having no opportunity to work.

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“It is like the Gypsies,” Tamás says. The story is not individual but communal, therefore it repeats itself. They experience the same constraints here and elsewhere.

István makes a similar association. When he guides me to the “Fleeing Angels,” he deciphers this story from the painting:

This picture is about that God should give the Gypsies freedom. All of them join together to escape. Three or four of them worry for the child: they pray, “Let the child be born for her.” Nowadays Gypsies do not stick together. Who has more money he wouldn’t care about the others. They seduce the others. This is the usury, the eighty percent. I had to leave my career because of them.

His description perfectly covers the Mohacsian’s story: They need freedom, they join together, and they worry for the children in their flight. For István, this is still a positive condition compared to the situation of no escape from the loan sharks. He captures the meaning, then associates it with his own desired escape.

Representing the second version, Moni says she wouldn’t allow this picture to be painted on the wall because “no one in the village likes it.” Indeed, as the village women often criticized Réka, they dislike that she is always in the center when visitors come, because her many children and deep poverty are attractive to the tourists. Here she is

“fixed” in her tourist attractiveness. So, for Moni, the mural is not about a group’s flight but about Réka. While István understands the story as collective, Moni understands it as individual narrative. Both are similar to the painter’s understanding in that Roma are locked in a situation from where there is no escape. Although the artist’s story is complex, ultimately, the villagers resonated all three themes. However, the villagers understand the mural as habitual narrative, as “flight” that they experience multiple ways.

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To conclude the visual, PE tells the story of a formal nomadic people who, after they forcefully settled down, developed deep connection with the land as their homeland.

The main themes are flight, family/motherhood, and disappearance of open trajectories that can be reduced to narratives of pride and separated worlds. I identify the genre as encounter with the past.

The following section introduces a tradition-saving story. I must mention here that the artist titled this mural “Gypsy Colony,” which the Project leader changed for a more

“romantic” title, “Dance, Tarot, Spring.” As I previously mentioned, tradition-saving stories are a type of encounters with the past that answer the question “What happened?”, where the goal is to pass identity and culture (practical knowledge, beliefs, and common sense) to the next generation. These stories tell about the past as evolution or devolution.

Tradition-saving stories build cultural pride.

“We Were Not Saddened or Displaced”

Painter H’s (PH) oral narrative revolves around “Gypsy identity,” “the difficult role of the Gypsy mother,” “happiness in Roma community,” and “the role of the storytelling in tradition-saving.” These themes can be applied to the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. PH tells about her life experiences, the FVP and her interactions with the villagers; he provides explanations about her identity in contrast with other identities; evaluates past events; and encounters how non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma (Braid, 1997). So his stories fit into the genre of “encounter with the past.” During this, she reveals social, political and cultural identities and the power- relations between them on the “production site” (Rose, 2012).

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PH begins with the theme of Gypsy identity. However, Gypsy identity is organically rooted in the Gypsy community. So they are twin concepts for PH. She identifies herself as a Beas58 Gypsy. She says, she was born into a mining family in

Komló, the Kossuth mine. Her husband is a Kolompár59 Gypsy but her husband’s mother was a Hungarian Gypsy. All of these facts are important to prove that her five children belong to all or none of these Gypsies. But, to prove that this is not a simple issue, she demonstrates that, for her, Gypsy identity is a source of quarrels:

I honestly tell you that the Gypsies despise me. They say, “This woman is not one of us! Because she has a diploma.” So the Gypsies exclude me. But I don’t fit to Hungarians either because it is noticeable that I am a Gypsy. Then what could I say [about identity]? Am I neither Gypsy nor Hungarian? Am I between the two chairs? I fell between two chairs. My own kind do not accept me because I am educated, the Hungarians do not accept me because they just look at me and see that I am a Gypsy.

Like PH, many artists recall “Gypsy” as an identity that needs continuous balancing. As

PA argued, it is because Gypsies (counter)balance their life experiences.

PH’s life story fits into the category of “creating stability” that I devised for the oral stories. She emphasizes the difficult role of the Gypsy mother that she experiences as absence, as her second theme. Like many villagers, she raised her four brothers and sisters since she was eight years old because her mother left the family. She reminisces:

I missed my mother very much; she couldn’t come home because my dad–he did not steal–he fought a lot. My mother left me with my brothers and sisters. I had to substitute for my mother: to set fire, watch the fire, prepare food for my siblings, and to feed and diaper my youngest sister. Since my mother wasn’t at home, they

58 Three major groups of Gypsies live in Hungary: Romungros, Vlah (Oláh) Gypsies and Beas. Beas are the smallest Gypsy group in Hungary where they were the last group who arrived from Romania and settled. Beas speak an Archaic Romanian dialect. Based on occupation they are woodworkers. See Ambrus, L. (2015). 59 One sub-group of the Vlah Gypsies, based on occupation. Kolompárs were tinsmiths. 282

were reliant on me. . . . I think, without this experience I would have become a worse person than I am. So I thank my father and mother that I went so far.

No one can call into question her positive attitude; she is determined to recognize the positive side of Gypsy life. She has decided to show the villagers “all the happiness” she went through, “so they see that not only do they suffer and lack things, since we also suffered.” Even though, she tries to give back what she went through “since all those things were a joy” for her.

This brings us to the third theme, the happy Roma life. She speaks about happiness and suffering as if they are organically intertwined; she starts from here to find common ground with the villagers. To explain Roma happiness, PH adds:

I grew up in a Gypsy colony, and I painted what I saw and experienced in the colony. I show the Gypsies that we didn’t live better at that time and we had such a good life. And we weren’t saddened or displaced. We all who lived there found our places. I wanted to give back what I saw, for example, you can see down there the fortunetellers who told the future, mushroom pickers who picked mushrooms and sold them and lived from everything that they found in the forest, since they lived by selling mushrooms, herbals and every kind of healing practices. And they went into the city to tell the future so they could make money.

She describes the mural in detail, the fireplace where they bake bread; the violinist who shows his grandchild how to play the violin, which was the way to pass along traditions in practice, songs and dance. “It was many times that they showed how their ancestors lived, what kinds of difficulties they were able to live with, on Gypsy places where there was no electricity, water, and we were able to survive and still, we were happy.

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Figure 6. “Dance, Tarot, Spring”

However, in the village she encounters discrimination based on a strong gender division. She alludes to the first day, when she was “only” a woman and nobody expected that she could paint a wall. Only much later was she accepted as a painter. She remembers this transition this way:

When I went there it was night, very late. Two Gypsies, an old woman and her daughter, came to me and the women who took me there introduced me to them. . . . And when I went to see the wall, how big it was and how it was prepared, all the Gypsies congregated there. Well, I was a stranger to them and they wanted to know me. They were not afraid of me. They were curious, “what will this Gypsy woman do with this huge wall?”

Then the villagers became curious about her life and wanted to befriend her. And when she was finished with the wall-painting the villagers rebelled: they were angry that she 284

didn’t paint their walls but somebody else’s. This was the way they let her know that they liked her painting. This is in synchrony with her “strong mother” theme; only here she is a “strong Roma woman.”

While she passionately talks about the happiness of her Gypsy colony, I consider the wagons and the horses hidden in the left upper corner, in miniature:

M: I see the caravan. Why is it important to put the caravan it your painting? PH: The caravan is important because we shouldn’t forget that we wandered into Hungary’s territory. That we remember where we came from. The whole people, the Gypsies, have always been on the way and they couldn’t really settle down anywhere. They went from city to city. This is the first reason why I painted it. The second, that there are horse chanters just like midwives, wood carvers, pise- brick makers, and musicians. I wanted to show that these are Gypsy crafts. We shouldn’t forget these because our elders lived like this.

It is not one specific historical event that she recalls, but stocks of stories that report the community’s life across generations. She also reveals that the community told stories all day in every situation. So the role of the storytelling in tradition-saving is her next theme.

According to Benjamin (2006), storytellers call on both personal and collective memory, recall the stories that comprise tradition, and refresh the story by adding their own personality and creativity to the old story. Benjamin highlights that the role of

“refreshing old memories” is exactly to mediate the past to the present. For PH, the role of senses has great significance in mediating traditions:

My grandfather . . . played the violin a lot and told many tales. [He] spoke to me only on Gypsy, only in his language; I also speak the Gypsy language. And he used to perform things that happened before. Because he survived the First World War and the Second World War. And then he told us that once he went to play the violin and next day, when he brought home a big hat full of money, he had to throw it out because it was worth nothing. Because the money he earned the previous day was valueless the following day. [Due to the astronomical inflation in Weimar Germany.] Papa told lots of stories about the Germans, the war, life, and many things. The Gypsy tales that he used to tell is a good experience. 285

Imagine that we are there, a great many grandchildren, the fire crackles, and grandpa begins to tell stories to us. Only I know this because I experienced it.

She mentions that Gypsies told stories primarily about their lives and how they survived.

They were teaching the next generation how to be happy and bear hardships. And these stories were not simply told, but performed.

In PH’s oral stories “Gypsy identity,” “the difficult role of the Gypsy mother,”

“happiness in Roma community,” and “the role of the storytelling in tradition-saving” are the major themes. These can be applied to the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. PH’s oral narrative genre is “encounter with the past.” After discussing the making of the mural, the genre and who, when, for whom, and why created it, I begin analyzing the mural (Rose, 2012).

The happy life of the Gypsy colony. Before I turn to the visual story of the mural, I recall the aspects Rose (2012) provides for interpreting visuals: visual effects, composition, and the meanings of the visual. These conceptions cover issues of the three modalities (technological, compositional, and social). While I discuss these, I bring the artist, the villagers, and their social and cultural context in dialogue.

Thematically, the mural aligns Gypsy occupations: horse traders, fortune tellers, tinsmiths, mushroom pickers, natural healers and musicians as performances. At the center, a woman prepares Gypsy bread [vakaró] on an open fire while the children sit close by. This is similar to the way women in the village perform their chores. The same setting is seen between the tinsmith man and the boy next to him, as if he had taught the young boy through story-telling. PH depicts different generations in the community living as parts of one unit. This is similar to what I experienced in the village. Yellow and 286

red colors, shiny sequins (that reflect the sun when glued into the mural) signify happiness in the Gypsy colony. The mural shows Beas Gypsy customs: clothes, long skirts, kerchiefs, jewelry, tools that are limited to tarot cards, pot, cauldron over fire, guitar and violin–all markers of Gypsiness. The first theme is “Gypsiness.”

Accordingly, the mural exemplifies what Baker (2011) calls “Gypsy visuality.” In the upper left corner we see the caravan with horses. In juxtaposition to the caravan, in the upper right corner a city’s gray houses appear in the distance. On the right side in front, a young boy stands with his pants down; his naked body does not hold him back from dancing among the grownups. We see young and old couples, a man-boy, and more woman-woman groups in different Gypsy occupations. Only the musicians form a man- man group. It is summer, the lawn is green and the sky is blue, an idyllic day in the Roma settlement. There is no visible object to reveal the historical time of the settlement, only the city afar suggests that we are not in the distant past. As Baker (2011) asserts, Gypsy visual storytelling includes “glamour, flashiness, allure, enchantment, ornament, diversion, discordance, contingency, functionality, performance, community/family, home, traditional skills, wildlife, countryside and gender” (p. 15). These stylistic elements are all visible in PH’s mural. It seems that this romantic, idealized version of

Gypsiness can be equated with the Project leader’s concept. However, this is not the case.

Rather, this illustrates Poueyto’s (2008) statement that sometimes “we witness a shared exotic imagination for Gypsies and Gadjé” (p. 403). Yet, as I discussed in Chapter Three, while the non-Roma’s romanticizing is a result of the narrator’s exoticizing (othering and colonizing) gaze, the Gypsy’s own romantic images strengthen identity and cohesion of

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the Gypsy community, and unite different Gypsy groups with the same semantic cues. So based on the Gypsy and non-Gypsy narrator’s unequal perspective and goal, these narratives fit in two opposing narratives.

Next, with the second theme PH introduces is “freedom.” This mixes nomadic freedom and freedom of the semi-sedentaries as she experienced it. “Dance, Tarot,

Spring” demonstrates that nomadic wandering is only one aspect of the past. Picturing

Gypsy occupations and traditions are additional emblems that connect villagers and artists to their imagined and real history, and to a Roma identity that is equated with life style and certain professions, such as wood carving, pot repairing, and horse dealing, etc.

The idea that objective cultural differences do exist between Gypsy and non-Gypsy is part of this trend. Even though Romungros do not fit into this life style, PH “teaches them” happiness that lies in saving the community’s culture. “Dance, Tarot, Spring” portrays the Gypsy colony in a remote area far from the city. But unlike many idyllic representations of Roma life analyzed earlier (where the artist avoids any signs of

“civilization”), PH places the colony in a visible distance from the city. Since I suspect that this juxtaposition of two lives–the natural life of Roma and the urban life–also involves the element of exclusion, I ask PH, “Do you suggest that the Gypsies are excluded from the city?”

No. I wanted to show that we went to school in the city. You can see the city far from the colony. For a short time we went to school in the colony. We went there until third grade. Then we had to travel into the city school where we started the fourth grade. We went there until the eighth grade. So we could go to school leaving the Gypsy colony by bus or on foot. I wanted to express the difference between the city and the Gypsy colony –you can see the city as a cold place where people are boxed and there is not the kind of joy and freedom that is in the colony, in a building where there was everything, water, electricity, and everything. But in 288

the colony we didn’t have these because we went to the well to get water, and if we wanted to wash ourselves we had to warm up the water. So I wanted to show people that no matter that in the city there was everything and we didn’t get everything in the other place, it was a joy to live there and we welcomed everybody with a warm heart.

PH emphasizes “happiness” as the next theme. From her story I understand that the people living in the Gypsy colony did not feel excluded from the non-Gypsy community, because they never wanted to fully fit into it. Thus, the core narrative is pride. PH illustrates that, even though life was simpler and more difficult in the Gypsy colony, the city was a worse place–colder, less joyous and less free. Indeed, it seems that people in the colony looked down on the city dwellers:

Not everybody has this kind of childhood memories what we have. I wanted to express the coldness and warmness. I couldn’t speak Hungarian, I started kindergarten so that I spoke only the Gypsy language. I learned Hungarian there, in the kindergarten. It was odd to switch to Hungarian but at the end we learned it. This was the difficulty in school. Not all teachers were good to us, some of them were two-faced. But some of them could put themselves into our position. I painted this, this more-story house.

By evoking the dichotomy of Gesellshaft and Gemeinshaft, she demonstrates that Roma in the colony have better experiences than non-Gypsies in the technically more advanced but “colder” city. In the “Other World,” by contrast to the colony, she encounters education with teachers who rarely could empathize with the Gypsy’s position. However, for the “Other [non-Roma] World” the “Gypsy colony” does not have the connotation of a warm and happy place, as the mural illustrates. Neither Roma community looks like a warm, self-supporting, strong community, which has something that modern western cultures lack. It becomes a warm, happy place only through the lenses of cultural pride.

With this, PH finishes her last theme, “community.”

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Accordingly, PH in her visual story depicted the following themes: “Gypsiness,”

“freedom,” “happiness,” and “community.” These are themes that can be reduced to narratives of pride and separated worlds. The genre is encountering the past (tradition saving story). These themes are exactly what are widely criticized by the emancipatory artists and Roma identity researchers, as communicating romanticized images of the

Gypsies. But here they mediate Roma identity and cultutral characteristics, activities, history of the Roma community. Although this is a Beas Gypsy colony, it is not its difference from other Gypsies, but its similarity that is emphasized in terms of freedom, happiness and community. So the mural mediates a Gypsy image with which everybody in the village can identify. The shared semantics also explains that the mural is commonly popular in the village, among the visitors and widely publicized by the Project

Leader. To illustrate this, in the following section I examine the audience’s understanding of PH’s mural.

“Dance, Tarot, Spring” is Aranka’s and Zalán’s picture, they are the primary audiences. Zalán guides me through his yard while his wife cooks food for their grandchildren:

I can tell you what these are: On this picture you can see everything because it is about the Gypsies. Here, they play the cards. [It is written on the cards: mail, money and loyalty; he cannot read. He is surprised to hear this.] I have never played cards. I haven’t seen anybody play. Never, never. But once the Gypsies played like this. Here there is also the horse, here. And the wagon and the horse. Because once they were wandering, that is why it is painted in the picture. Here they carve the carapace. This is about the Gypsies that is why they put in here. This one I can’t tell how it works. I don’t know this [He points at the figure of an older woman in the middle of the painting]. And here, they play music. There was a time when I played the guitar, but I can’t play anymore.

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For Zalán, the mural shows his family and her community’s history and tradition. He remembers most of these traditions demonstrated by the mural. He remembers also the making of the mural as part of this history. He tells me the name of the painter, and remembers that she didn’t use a “map,” just drew freely, that she became so close to them that she even recognized them years later. Although Zalán and Aranka identify their family members in the painting, PH denies using models from the village.

M: The villagers identify Ági Daróczi60 in the picture and others from Zalán and Aranka’s family. PH: No, no [she laughs]. Not Ági Daróczi. Maybe Jancsi Balogh, the guitarist, he is an excellent musician. . . . I tried to paint him. I also used to paint violinists after my father. But while I painted they were trying to figure out whom the character resembles. And I let them.

Zalán and Aranka are proud of their mural. They believe it is the most beautiful painting in the village. Zalán used to speak with visitors; sometimes he invites them into his yard to show his mural:

This is a beautiful picture. Many people came here to see it. There was a man, he couldn’t speak Hungarian, he asked, “Do you have big poverty here?” It was translated to me. I didn’t know how to answer. I just mimicked but he couldn’t understand. Than a lady translated it for him, “Yes, we have a big poverty here.” I asked everything, how is life there where he lives. He said, also their life is not full of roses. When I asked the man from Poland, he said, life is not full of roses there either. When there is lots of money, he showed with his hand, something like this—I told him here we don’t have a big life, either (Where there is lots of money, there is more needed).

While Zalán leads me through his yard, Aranka finishes the potato paprikash and gives it to the children. Her four grandchildren pull the hot plates onto their laps while they sit on the steps, giving time to Aranka to join us. Zalán continues: “My son is in the

60 Roma civil rights leader in Hungary. 291

picture. Here is my son. Here is my mother-in-law and my father-in-law and here is the old kind of house we lived in. I remember these.” He recognizes each figure by name, he even identifies his old house in the picture: “I bought that house over there.”

The role of these tradition-saving stories is to build personal attachment to every element of the Roma community’s life–to remember details, colors, shapes, feelings, and sounds that evoke the sense of belonging, to set rules, build common sense and identity through all these particulars. “We weren’t saddened or displaced,” says PH. So if people follow this old path they won’t be saddened and displaced, either.

Ultimately, out of the themes of the visual–Gypsy identity, freedom, happiness,

Gesellschaft-like community, and cultural pride– the villagers resonated on the following themes: “Gypsiness,” “freedom,” “happiness,” and “Gypsy community,” and cultural pride. These themes can be reduced to the core narratives of pride and separated worlds.

The murals’ genre is encounter with the past, where stories are told and recalled with the aim to save (and re-build) cultural identity, cultural traditions, and history. Although the mural portrays many storytellings, and, most importantly, it fulfills the role of the

“tradition-saving story.” In the following I examine PJ’s counter/emancipatory narrative.

Counter/Emancipatory Narratives (Visual)

Counter and emancipatory narratives are similar in their role to change an unequal power distribution. Counter narratives attempt to overwrite another narrative to contradict. Emancipatory narratives want to set free from some restraint. Accordingly,

Counter/emancipatory narrative unite these two characteristics. In the village, counter/emancipatory artists want to liberate Roma (and themselves) from institutional

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discrimination, paternalistic assimilatory politics, and from the neo-colonial subaltern position.

“The Equilibrium that Determines our Existence”

Painter J (PJ) builds his oral narrative on themes of “Gypsy identity,” “Gypsy spirituality,” “need for mutual understanding,” “multicultural identity,” “Roma presence,” “resistance,” and the “Roma’s liberation.” These themes can be reduced to the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. PJ’s oral stories fit in the genre of counter/emancipatory narrative and “encounter with the past.” While PJ tells about his life, his relationship with the FVP and the villagers, he narrates his identity in contrast with other identities, evaluates past events, and encounters how non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma/Gypsy (Braid, 1997). While he narrates these, he also discusses social and cultural identities and power-relations of the “production site” (Rose, 2012).

PJ is a German artist who lives and works in Berlin, I called him from my

Hungarian Motel room right after I returned to Budapest from the village. Born to a

German father and a Hungarian Beas Gypsy mother, his identity has been shaped by multiple cultures. He studied sculpture in Germany and graduated from the University of

Fine Art in Hungary. After understanding the nature of my research, PJ begins with the theme of Gypsy identity. Considering multiple identities, PJ suggests, some identities are easy while others are difficult to “practice”; for example, in PJ’s account it becomes clear that the performance of Roma identity is especially vulnerable at many points. PJ states:

The absolute insistence on being either a Gypsy or a Hungarian is a mistaken view. . . . [I]f the given area, region, or village is lucky enough, then there will be a coming together of people who can develop culture in an intelligent way and this will bring with it a new approach to values, a new system of values which 293

will look upon everyone there as a developing community, something in the making. [In this kind of “culture,”] a person may regard another person a Gypsy, but not the kind of generally conceived or imagined Gypsy in people’s heads.

With this, he introduces a new approach to culture and cultural identity. While PJ narrates his Roma self, he tells three stories in a row about the experience of living as a Roma.

But before I describe this, I must outline the discursive environment in which he tells these stories.

When I lived in the village, I realized that very few people are religious in the sense of regularly visiting church, or knowing the rituals, scriptures, or dogmas. Most villagers do not do this. However, the deeper I understood their performed experiences, the stronger my feeling grew that there is some spiritual or religious character underscoring the Gypsy way of life. But even as I felt this, I could not put my finger on what it was that these people believed in. When PJ begins to analyze Roma identity, he refers to this earlier conversation:

I have thought about this, not about the kind of spirituality in Bódvalenke, but about this feeling that is hard to describe. Which can be spiritual, but could also be religious . . . a way of living life, an everyday way of living.

To explain Gypsy “spirituality” as a new theme, he reminisces about Hungarian folk songs that recall the peasant’s similar life experiences. To work on the fields, the peasant carried nothing in his satchel except an onion. “So there is a kind of sadness there, and a kind of intimacy, and if I had to decode this in the case of many families, then this spiritual existence does originate in part from this,” he adds, while he also recalls the possibility that this experience is forgettable. I understand that it is not “the culture of poverty” that he describes but “sadness and intimacy” that bring people together in any

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struggle. “I’ve tried to overwrite this spirituality, but I will try to uphold it as well,” PJ utters. Here is another dialectic that reminds me of the villagers’ starving, but not telling.

He immerses himself in the topic:

If a European person, or a person living in the world is in possession of the necessary social sensitivity, then this can take him in several directions. He may become sensitive to the misery of others, will learn to put himself in their place, can actively project himself into their situation. If I ask my neighbor to lend me money, or potatoes, I will give them the money, or the potatoes back the following week, and there we’re speaking about the culture of poverty. But we can also criticize the way of life, the life I’m living here in Berlin. That I don’t know my neighbor, who lives opposite me; that when we moved in, no one brought us bread and salt to welcome us, as a way of saying: “We are so pleased to have you here.” There is a spirituality to this, or rather, this is what one loses. This is the equilibrium that determines our existence.

As I understand, PJ’s Roma self is striving to uphold the balance of the Gesellschaft-like community of people, and this involves a kind of spirituality that is difficult to verbalize: the need to remain a community because this is the only way to survive, and the need to stick together to save “who they are,” their cultural identity as the base of community. To illustrate this, PJ continues:

One of my [Hungarian] professors once said that it was only in England that he understood what it meant to have a culture. He understood it in England because it was there that he began to sing Hungarian folksongs to his children, he sang Hungarian songs and it was important to him that he, isolated as a Hungarian, should remember things. For me this is more spiritual than nationalistic. This man was happy because he could share his experiences, his acquired knowledge with others. But man needs help to become such a spiritual being, so as not to become nationalist, and extremist, someone who hates others or feels himself to be in danger. We have to pay attention, we have to take care and pay attention to each other, to live and let live, to use a banal expression.

The ending of this passage extends the “need for equilibrium” for the relationships between Roma and non-Roma as well. “Spirituality” and “morality” lead to mutual understanding. With this, PJ switches to a new theme, the need for mutual understanding. 295

PJ demonstrates that Roma identity is not striving for separation and isolation, but for equilibrium within their social/cultural environment. Yet, if their environment situates

Roma in the lowest position of the social hierarchy, there is no negotiation for the Roma to maintain equilibrium with the wider (hegemonic) society.

PJ recalls that cultural and visual anthropology still make mistakes when interpreting a work of art created by artists of Gypsy origin by presuming that they simply, plainly want to portray Roma culture. “This is not true,” says PJ, “Roma living in

Hungary are profoundly influenced by Hungarian culture and European culture. He argues, Hungarian Roma have multicultural identity, therefore, they paint not only Roma life but draw from a larger social environment.” He explicates the theme of multicultural identity with an emphasis. According to PJ, people must first follow the identity of a

“moral” or “spiritual” human being, and only later identify with certain cultural and national identities. If we adapt Stuart Hall’s (1997) idea that identity is a “practice of narration,” a persuasive, consistent biographical “story” about personhood and origin, we can conclude that Roma identity is different from German, Hungarian, and European identities exactly because Roma identity is narrated on many contradictory levels. As his new theme, PJ introduces another key concept that he calls “Roma presence”:

Here I must just mention something that I understood through Toni Morrison, that there exists a “presence,” Toni Morrison calls this “African presence.” We can call it in the present instance “Roma presence.” If this presence is imagined and interpreted in various spheres in a way that differs from the way it actually takes place, then quite different connotations will be attached to the subject, the man, the person. Other stories will be born. If the other side, in the present instance the Roma, can only very rarely contribute to the story, then there will be no diversity to the “Roma presence. “I am like this, you are like that, and you are like so,” so the general image will remain.

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Morrison’s (1992) “Africanism” or “African presence” signifies the manner in which White people imagine Black people and represent them in literature (and the media). Morrison uses the metaphor that Africanism is a “disabling virus” that allows the demonizing of Black people, “contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear,” while “historicizing and rendering timelessness” with Black people (p. 7). In short, PJ recognizes “African presence” as the White habitual narrative of “uncivilized” and

“criminal” Black identities. PJ appropriates the concept and applies it to the

Roma/Gypsy. Accordingly, “Roma presence” is the White habitual narrative of the

“uncivilized” and “criminal” Roma.

However, Blackness or Romaness are not only consequences of performances, they can become points of contention with other identity performances. Johnson (2006) reminds us “Performance must also provide a space for meaningful resistance of oppressive systems” (p. 447). So PJ’s declaration that “artists of Gypsy or Roma origin should not be viewed as Romas, but as artists in their own right” is not only resistance (to resist forced folklorization of the identity) but also emancipation to get rid of, to liberate from, and leave behind this kind of Roma/Gypsy identity. As PJ engages with the theme of resistance, he calls this act “Anti-gypsyism” or “Anti-Romaism,” saying, “This is the path I am trying to follow, not only as regards anti-Romaism and anti-Gypsyism –I am also trying to find those hybrid areas where all this no longer counts.” PJ brings in the concept of hybridity at the last minute of his account of resistance, a cultural scene that

Bhabha theorizes.

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Bhabha (1994) suggests that cultural hybridity results from various forms of colonization that lead to cultural collisions and interchanges between the colonizer and colonized. During this process, “the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different – a mutation, a hybrid” (p. 111). This hybrid trace destroys both the hegemonic/dominant culture’s attempt to “fix” and control indigenous cultures, and the local culture’s illusion of cultural purity. PJ is looking for hybrid areas where Romaness no longer counts. Thus, we are in a post-colonial stage according to the

Roma chronology. During their “colonialization,” Hungarian Roma gave up the illusion of saving their cultural purity. However, the dominant other culture refuses to give up their attempt to “fix” and control Roma. Thus, a hybrid place of refuge cannot emerge.

Consequently, all Roma people and Roma artists must continually pass through emancipation to liberate themselves from the dominant culture and majority society’s negative image of Roma. With this, a new theme emerges, that Roma must liberate themselves. He defines the process of emancipation as a de-exoticizing process, when

Roma/Gypsies free themselves from “compulsory folklorization.” Part of this

“compulsory folklorization” is the label of “Gypsy artist” in the universal fine arts, principally limited to illustrating the essentialized (therefore falsified) Roma identity.

First, for PJ, resistance means that he avoids painting so-called Roma topics that would immediately connect the viewer to his Romaness. Second, he participates in an emancipatory movement that fights against romanticizing both Roma artists and the villagers. PJ is in complete opposition with the FVP’s main project “to create something that our Roma peers could be proud of, and that would give them the majority’s

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unconditional appreciation” and to “help” the Roma villagers by arranging around them a

Roma outdoor gallery (Gábor, 2011, p. 2). Indeed, PJ concludes, the FVP creates a neo- colonial setting, promotes artists as “ethno-species” while fixing the separation between artists of Roma and non-Roma origin. The project shows that Roma are appreciated only through “compulsory folklorization,” where an art work, painted by an artist with Roma roots, necessarily counts as an expression of the Gypsy Volksgeist.61 PJ understands the

FVP project as the “ghettoization” of art and the community, where artists and villagers are limited to their Romaness and confined within the walls of the hegemonic majority’s image of their culture.

In conclusion, PJ builds his oral narrative on the following themes: “Gypsy identity,” “Gypsy spirituality,” “mutual understanding,” “multicultural identity,” “Roma presence,” “resistance,” and the “Roma’s liberation.” These themes reflect his social and cultural consciousness and his political engagement in the grassroots Roma liberation movement. These themes can be reduced to narratives of need, pide, and separated worlds. PJ’s oral stories fit in the genre of “encounter with the past” and

“counter/emancipatory narrative.” After discussing the making of the mural, the genre and who, when, for whom, and why created it, I turn to PJ’s fresco (Rose, 2012).

“Portraying resistance in a harmonious way.” While I cover issues of the technological, compositional, and social modalities, I ask inquires regarding visual effects, composition, and the visual meanings and bring the different contexts and identities in dialogue (Rose, 2012). PJ’s visual narrative incudes themes of “wellness,”

61 German word meaning “the spirit of the people.” 299

“family,” “harmony,” and “need for a righteous leader.” These can be applied to the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. The visual genre PJ applies is counter/emancipatory narrative.

Figure 7. “Family”

PJ’s fresco is located at the center of the village where Réka’s family and Lilla are the primary audiences. The image presents intertwining human figures, a man and a pregnant woman figure on the ground. Around them many children in all shades of brown are bounded by curved lines. Juxtaposed with the family, drawn with straight lines

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and left uncolored, two chairs and a table stand beside the figures. Above the chairs is an unlit bulb. PJ describes his fresco as follows:

My fresco is essentially a drawing, it starts out from a drawing. I consider these drawings an honest, straightforward, direct sort of thing, I never intended to take them into the artistic world, not ever. The people in the drawings are not Roma. They do not represent an ethnic group. For me, they are always human beings who are watching us. Childhood-men living, doing, making decisions. They look out from the picture, look at us, and try to appeal to our better selves, our feelings. They start families, live in families, but somehow remain outside the whole stress thing, the burn-out.

He says Bódvalenke is a socio-cultural and political environment that is not an easy terrain for the artist and for the people who live here. So, for him, it is important what painting goes up on the wall because the villagers have to face it every day. Therefore, he chose to paint an “art of wellness.”

He spends quite a long time to explain his first theme, “wellness.” Wellness for PJ means that if viewers look at the art work it calms them down, it gives them a sense of peace. So the mural is designed to enter into symbiosis with its surroundings. Instead of being bombastic, it strengthens and simplifies. This is what he found to be authentic for

Bódvalenke. PJ describes this as follows:

That is what my painting is like. I could perhaps compare it to Etruscan statues, the terracotta statues where a man and a woman are lying together – this type of conception of a grave, of a memorial, as the Etruscans portrayed themselves in the afterlife – where the family was together, the woman and man together, and that was their coffin, their sarcophagus. In the case of a work of art where the grave is in a way a continuation of life, the signature is of secondary importance, it is not so important [so he did not sign the mural]. But there is a political sphere connected to this [approach].

Here PJ reveals the story behind the title, “Family.” Since family is the most important theme, PJ explains the family’s role emphatically. His description of family as the grave

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of the man and woman revives what the villagers told me about loyalty, that Roma couples don’t leave each other. Even István, the only man who declares himself divorced, states that Gypsy couples always stay together. But PJ’s goal is not to discuss the man and woman, but to confront the viewer with the conditions of the family.

We spoke in the beginning about oppression, emancipation, cultural representation, etc., even racism. We have to put symbols into the picture, symbols that satisfy the artist’s sensitivity, soul and approach. This means that we don’t portray only beautiful things, that everything is fine, everything is going well, but we somehow have to find a way to insert the symbols that contradict these, in other words we must portray resistance, too, but in a harmonious way. Or perhaps I had better call them mementoes, exclamation marks, eye-openers, a calling attention to certain things. Why is that table empty? Where are the guests? Why isn’t it the family sitting there? Why didn’t the family sit up at the table? Weren’t they allowed to? Were they unable to? What is put into that painting is in fact a critique of society. Everyone can think what they like about it.

“Harmony” becomes the third important theme in PJ’s oral narrative. He says, his endeavor is to create harmony while highlighting that there is no harmony. I remember

PB “coloring” and “making more abstract” her counter narrative just like PJ, to make it more “harmonious.” And now PJ wants to “portray resistance in a harmonious way.” PJ’s comment makes me remember PB, who wanted to make the image of the colonizer and colonized smaller and more colorful because she does not like to confront openly.

Finding how to resist in a harmonious way means transforming conflict into a new aesthetics (“post-colonialist aesthetics,” as PJ labels it). In PJ’s fresco, the exclamation marks are the two uncolored empty chairs positioned at the center, the empty family table at the right end, and the unlit bulb above it. The multi-member family lies on the ground without using the table, the chair, and the electricity. This is PJ’s response when I ask him to tell me more about the exclamation mark in the case of the chair:

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My personal opinion about the chair is that it can stand for a lot of things, starting with a throne, where the king might sit (the decision-maker, the power) or it could mean the seats in parliament, or we could go right back to the chairs in a family home, kitchen chairs. The chair is the same, you sit on any chair in exactly the same way. There is only one difference. In certain African cultures, there used to be a hollow in the headrest of the chair, and that hollow meant that if the ruler was not for the people, if he behaved wrongly, if he changed, then his head was forced back into that hollow and it worked like a guillotine: he was beheaded. In other words, the ruler always sat in a chair that symbolized both his power and his death. Because one must not forget that the chair always stands for a position. Someone who sits on a chair in a certain situation is at home on that chair. Those who are not sitting on chairs are servants, either laying the table (for example, think of the situation of slaves, in the case of Black people) and so on. So the symbolic meanings of the chair are practically infinite.

This figure of the chair is particularly poignant in the context of Bódvalenke, where a righteous leader is quite obviously missing. With this, he arrives at his fourth theme, “the need for a righteous leader.” In one sense this could be interpreted as an invitation to someone among the Gypsies to occupy this position. To do this, Gypsy identity must detach itself from its historically marginalized social position. The uncolored chairs posed another source of conflict, because they made the Project Leader consider the painting unfinished. In a quarrel, PJ insisted she call an independent art historian to determine whether or not the fresco was “ready.” In the end, the artist left the village with negative feelings, and the Project Leader was still unsatisfied with this mural in her collection. This fresco destabilizes the entire project of the open air gallery. It accomplishes a critique by drawing attention to the fact that the collection is not homogeneous.

Parenthood, family, close-to-nature life, which, according to PJ “will make

Europe sit up in wonder, with the message that we should re-civilize ourselves,” is shown as the model for humanity on how to survive. PJ explains: 303

While Western civilization burns out, marginalized groups don’t go through the crisis of the average European. There is a Western concept of how we should be living. What do we have to do to achieve this? We have to go to school, eight years of elementary school, high school, college, university, which means there is no way for a child to avoid the system, the rat-race.

PJ juxtaposes this kind of Western civilization with those living on the other side, living on the periphery of society, the poor families, or those Roma families who also live in poverty, and so cannot partake of the Western concept of living because they are left out.

But their handicap turns out to be their advantage when Western civilization falls apart.

“The Roma’s aesthetic life” emerges as the next theme in PJ’s oral narrative. PJ highlights the border between what is hegemonic culture and a culture that is left out of this. This is a new divide on a global scale that overcomes all other previous separated worlds.

PJ demonstrates that Roma possess this “aesthetic life,” also represented by the

Etruscan art, which contrasts with the so-called “civilized life” that invented the chair, the table, the light bulb, which are not in use, but remain as signifiers of the isolation of the

Roma and their way of life. He suggests that Roma people were able to retain the values that Europe has lost. While this message was also part of PB’s tradition-saving narrative that depicted the Roma/Gypsy community as a warm, self-sustaining community where everybody finds their place (Gemeinschaft), in PJ’s counter/emancipatory narrative this warm community acquires political weight: it becomes a common platform that can unify different Roma/Gypsy communities. Westerners live in the rat-race of studying; children spend their lives in institutions from nursery to university, which means that there is no way for them to stay close to their family and community. Only poor families, or those

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Roma families, escape such institutionalized living. In their families a child remains an organic part of the family’s everyday life, and accepts responsibility within the family.

For PJ this means a higher level of responsibility than school requires.62 He calls attention to humans as biological beings who have lost their balance, which can be reversed by cultures who don’t share in the crises of the Western world. PJ arrives at a similar conclusion to that of PD: The Roma should pity the world, and not the world the

Roma.

On the other hand, PJ’s oral and visual narratives call attention to the global imbalance of the marginalized and mainstream societies, and the colonized and the colonizer. He shows a macroscopic (global) degree of the Roma/non-Roma divide. PJ recognizes Roma as the “new immigrants” of Europe. This echoes PG’s critique that the earlier discriminative “perpetual wanderer” image has changed to an even more disadvantaged condition of “immigrants and refugees,” whom nobody wants to accept. PJ suggests, across the world, Roma are relegated to “ghettoes” conceptualized by other names, such as “help for Roma” and “Roma empowering.” Roma end up more disadvantaged than ever.

PJ’s visual narrative incudes “wellness,” “family,” “harmony,” and “need for a righteous leader,” “the Roma’s aesthetic life,” “the Roma are locked in ghetto” that can be applied as the core narratives of need, pride, and separated worlds. Separated worlds disappear when one accepts that Roma are Europeans just like Germans and Hungarians.

62 In light of this, relatively early family formation is understandable.

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With this acceptance, stability-mobility dialectic also would be repaired. PJ says this represents the moral “live and let live the other.”

These fully fit in the genre of counter/emancipatory narrative. Interestingly, the themes, the core narratives and the genre prove the opposite of the “wellness.” This fits in his method to demonstrating that “not everything is beautiful.” To figure out the villagers’ understanding, I move to the audiencing site.

At the personal level, PJ’s philosophy is well-accepted; his mural became an organic part of Réka and Lilla’s family yard. About ten children play in the yard without ever harming the mural. They like the smiling faces, they say. Since the mural represents the counter/emancipatory narrative genre, I find it important to add here the Project

Leader’s comment during one of her regular guided tours of the murals. The Project

Leader says:

This is PJ’s fresco. This was painted during one weekend with the help of the two brothers He said, he needs them because they want to make a big project: they want to document the Bódvalenke people’s family experiences and such things. Compare to this . . . . he put this up here. Well, . . . hmmm. He received the highest honorarium. M: Why? PL: Because on one hand he is a painter with a good name. This is, again, a painting that doesn’t suit the painter’s name. M: Do you know the meaning of the chair? PL: I know nothing. Imagine in it what you want. With this fresco I was, so to say, angry. This is also a story of stealing my [money]. Let's be honest. He didn’t sign it. And when I told him “Sorry, you guys used to acknowledge the paintings by signing them” he said that everybody recognizes a PJ painting, he doesn’t have to sign it. They were the only people who didn’t like being here. They lived in the project office. In the office there was a pack of beer. I used to keep it there for the men who cut the grass, so I could thank them. Well, they [PJ and companions] drunk them. Such trivial things.

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Ultimately, the Project Leader demonstrated a “need for a righteous leader.” She resonated none of PH’s themes. The Project Leader’s unhappiness with the counter/emancipatory painter brings Bourdieu’s (1987) notion to mind: taste is not

“innocent.” Indeed, taste can become the basic social judgment about what to exclude and include.

When the Project Leader dislikes the emancipatory painters’ artwork and tells this to the visitors, she demonstrates a different taste and practices exclusion. In the Postscript of the Distinction, Bourdieu argues that the aesthetics of “pure taste” is based on the rejection of “impure taste.” He says taste is grounded in the “opposition between the

‘pure’ and ‘impure’ or ‘barbarous’” which leads back to the opposition of “the cultivated and the uncultivated” or “the dominant and dominated” (pp. 24 -25). PJ critiques the

Project Leader for never asking the artists themselves about the meaning of their frescoes.

Further, their frescoes are not introduced either on the Fresco Village’s website or in the guided tour. Her taste is hegemonic. The artists still depend upon the Project Leader because she decides which art works receive more publicity and which are excluded.

Since the Project Leader and the emancipatory artists disagree about many things and encounter one another as enemies, the separate worlds of colonizer and colonized remain irreconcilable. This is demonstrated by the family lying on the ground, while the chairs and the family table are empty (and colorless). The Roma core narrative of a dialectic of stability and mobility is disrupted. The artist is looking for hybrid places that do not exist, because to create a hybrid place, the colonizer must first give up his/her attempt to change the (formerly) colonized.

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PJ recognized that, as an open air gallery, Bódvalenke is not simply a Roma village but a complex socio-cultural and political environment that is a field of struggle for the artists and for the villagers. His counter/emancipatory narrative included rejection of the essentialized Roma identity that makes artists and villagers more marketable, and the establishment of a “Roma brand” that satisfies the colonizing gaze to capitalize upon

Roma art. PJ’s fresco denied the image of Roma as “exotic living creatures” essentially different from other humans.

This finishes my discussion of counter/emancipatory narrative. I revealed new ways the Roma imagine for themselves, as well as analysis of all the murals I selected for close analysis. Now let me summarize my discussion of the frescoes.

Summary

The preceding review of the murals served to delineate how the genres outlined in the oral narrative analysis functioned to illustrate the same kinds of stories as told by the

Roma villagers. In addition, the review identified that the most significant Roma experience is separated worlds, then need, pride, unsatisfied (non-material) need, and lastly stability-mobility. As I concluded, both the artists’ oral narratives and the murals contained more than one core narrative. Many of them included also more genres. I summarize these Genres and Core Narratives of the artists’ and murals in the following tables:

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Table 1. Genres and Core Narratives of the Artists’ Oral Narratives

Painter Genres Artists’ Oral Core Narratives PA Encounter with the past Narrative of need (non-material) and Separated worlds (Gypsy identity as “artificial identity,” limitedness/lack of freedom, the “helper’s” artificial identity, the need for an emotionally involved listener) PB Encounter with the past, habitual Narrative of need (material & non-material), narrative Narrative of pride, Separated worlds (Gypsy culture, everyday tragedies, strong Roma mother, naming/stigmatizing, Gypsy life as struggle PD Encounter with the past, Narrative of need (non-material). Narrative of Counter/emancipatory narrative pride, Separated worlds (“Roma’s supposed inferiority in the eyes of non- Roma,” “Colonial setting,” “Roma needs to stand up for themselves,” “the strong Gypsy woman,” “Roma identity,” and “another [kind of] civilization.”) PG Encounter with the past Narrative of need (non-material) and Separated worlds (Non-Roma’s patronage, “flee,” disappearance of open trajectories) PH Encounter with the past Narrative of pride/Separated worlds (Gypsy identity, the difficult role of the Gypsy mother, the role of the storytelling in tradition- saving, happy, warm and self -supporting community. They have something that the modern western cultures don’t have) PJ Encounter with the past and Narrative of need (non-material), Pride, Counter/Emancipatory narrative Separated worlds, and Counter/emancipatory narrative. (Gypsy identity, Gypsy spirituality, need for mutual understanding, multicultural identity, Roma presence, resistance, and the Roma’s liberation)

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Table 2. Genres and Core Narratives of the Murals

Painter Genre Artists’ Visual Core Narrative PA Hypothetical narrative Narrative of need (non-material), Separated worlds (Limitedness/lack of freedom, and the need to have an audience engaged in an emotionally involved listener) PB Habitual narrative Narrative of need (material & non-material), Separated worlds (Gypsy culture, everyday tragedies, strong Roma mother, naming/stigmatizing, the gypsy’s subordinate position, and colonial setting) PD Habitual narrative and Narrative of need (non-material). Narrative of Counter/Emancipatory narrative pride, Separated worlds (Roma’s supposed inferiority in the eyes of non- Roma, colonial setting, Roma needs to stand up for themselves, the strong Gypsy woman, Roma identity, and another [kind of] civilization) PG Encounter with the past Narrative of need (non-material), Pride, Separated worlds (Family/motherhood, commemorate the Roma’s flee, disappearance of the open tragectories, disruption between stability and mobility. Roma are refugees without refuge. Unbridgeable gap between the colonizer and colonized. “No place” for the Roma) PH Encounter with the past (Tradition- Narrative of pride/Separated worlds saving stores) (Gypsy identity, freedom, happiness, Gesellschaft- like community, and cultural pride) PJ Counter/Emancipatory narrative Narrative of need (non-material), and Pride (Wellness, family, harmony, need for a righteous leader, the Roma’s aesthetic life, the Roma are locked in “ghetto,” Colonizer-colonized dichotomy)

As it is noticeable, among the visuals there is greater variants of the genres. Since the artists used the interview to comment on their respective identity and mural, to explain the circumstances of the making of the mural, and comment how others comment on Roma identity, all artists used “encountering with the past” in their oral narratives. For the same reason the artists’ oral and visual narratives overlap to a great degree. In both the artists oral and visual narratives material “need” is represented only once (by PB). 310

“Pride” is limited to Roma pride and to the positive meaning of their difference;

“separated worlds” has been reduced to one binary of the colonizer and the colonized, which, unlike other separated worlds (where the larger included the smaller worlds), the two antagonistic words are fully separated, there is no trespassing between them. The

“dialectic of mobility and stability” is disrupted by the image of Roma refugees without refuge. The most remarkable new element in the visual stories are the broken dialectics in two culturally important phenomena: separated worlds and mobility/stability. This reveals far more polarized binaries and that Roma experience far less tolerance of

“differences.”

Next, as a result of my structural analysis, I have identified four narrative genres in this chapter: hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, encounters with the past

(including tradition-saving stories) and counter/emancipatory narratives that are connected to different experiences and narrative performances. Like oral genre narratives, visual genres add meaning to the core narrative or modify the meaning by using different sequences and senses of time (imaginary time, repeated time, history as progression or regression).

I recognize the only hypothetical narrative among the visuals (PA) as passive resistance. Even though the artist chose to place “speaking out” in a no-time (or imagined time), this artist called attention to the fact that the narrator is engaged in struggle while silenced. While PA’s hypothetical narrative calls attention to the dialogical storytelling as the missing “real” in his individual life, he suggested that also the villagers miss

“storytelling” as collective life experience.

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As new genre, two artists used counter/emancipatory narratives, which shows that they realized the social and political significance of their role, and understood the unbalanced power distribution in a colonialist setting between Roma and non-Roma in the village project, in their nation state and globally. The emancipatory painters redirected the focus from Roma-ness to human-ness, and to the Roma’s natural (intrinsic) belonging to both their nation states and Europe. PD rejects that Roma are less talented, less intelligent and less capable to handle their own lives as non-Roma. He encourages

Roma to stand up for themselves. PJ rejects the “ghettoization” of the Roma, and fights to emancipate them from “compulsory folklorization” as an artist, a citizen, a nationality, and a human being. He transfers the marginal place of the Roma to the center, where they could potentially teach the world a more simple but more humane life that respects nature.

I found that all the artists communicated struggle and tension among their various identities. While the official rhetoric declares Roma inclusion in the village and at large,

Roma/Gypsy narratives reveal the Roma’s subaltern position in a new wave of cultural/ethnic colonization. European Roma identity surfaced as artistic identity, which denotes the Roma’s belonging to a wider European culture. However, Roma are as absent from “official” European culture as from the culture of their own nation-state, Hungary.

After analyzing the murals, the narratives of the artists and their audiences, in Chapter

Six, I turn in Chapter Seven to compare and contrast the actions of the oral and visual narratives based on dialogic performance analysis, summarize the study results, and answer the research questions.

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CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSIONS

My research examined Roma/Gypsy villagers’ and artists’ narratives in the Roma

Fresco Village. I brought narrators with different Roma/Gypsy identities, backgrounds, and experiences into conversation with each other. My purpose was to better understand the Roma identity and way of life as revealed through their own stories; how the way they see themselves relates to the way the paintings depict them and to the FVP’s

“Roma empowering” narrative.

Chapter Seven concludes the study, answering the research questions, discussing how the oral and visual narratives affect one another, and summarizing the study’s theoretical consequences and implications in the light of existing literature. I also summarize the strengths and limitations of the study, and discuss opportunities for future research. Finally, the Appendix contains the interview protocol and the IRB certification letter authorizing the research.

The Results of the Study

Oral and Visual Genres and Core Narratives

I summarized the oral narratives among the villagers in the Fourth and Fifth

Chapters and the narratives of the frescoes in the Sixth Chapter. Through an application of Riessman’s narrative analysis and DPA, I described the different genres, core narratives of the artists’ oral narratives, the visuals, and different performances to which the frescoes are connected. I summarize the oral and visual narrative genres and core narratives in the following table

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Table 3: Oral and Visual Narratives

ORAL NARRATIVE GENRES OF THE VILLAGERS: Hypothetical narrative (Calls attention to the missing “real”; Focuses on imagined, and wished time) Habitual narrative (Calls attention to the fixed content. Time is presented as “extended” today) Encounter with past events (Calls attention to the linear story of history as progress or regress)

CORE ORAL NARRATIVES OF THE VILLAGERS: Narrative of need (Basic needs, needs for equality, needs for independence) Narrative of pride (Motherhood and family, cleanliness, enduring suffering) Separated worlds (Safe/locked places, Roma/non-Roma, strangers/locals, Gypsy/Gypsy, genders) Mobility-stability dialectic (Moving in/with the family, flexible home, begging-sharing-exchanging)

ORAL NARRATIVE GENRES OF THE ARTISTS:

Habitual narrative (Encountering events that repeatedly happen over an extended time perion) Encounter with the past (Recalling past events, evaluating narrated actions, reported evaluations) Counter/Emancipatory narrative (Overwriting existing the master narrative and liberating Roma

CORE ORAL NARRATIVES OF THE ARTISTS: Narrative of need (Material needs and non-material needs) Narrative of pride (Pride of being Roma, strong, multicultural identity) Narrative of separated worlds (Colonialist-Colonized) Mobiliy-Stability dialectic is disrupted (Global rejection of the Roma)

VISUAL NARRATIVE GENRES: Hypothetical narratives (Calls attention to the missing “real.” Focus on place: no place, empty space) Habitual narratives (Calls attention to fixed content, repetition and fragmentation) Encounters with the past events /traditions (Cultural identity, history as progress or regress) Counter/emancipatory narrative (Overwrite grand narratives, resistance, Post-colonial aesthetics)

CORE VISUAL NARRATIVES: Narrative of need (Hunger, non-material needs, need to tell one’s story) Narrative of pride (Roma pride) Narratives of separated worlds (Colonizer-Colonized) Mobility-stability dialectic disrupted (Wanderers w/o multiple trajectories, refugees w/o refuge)

First, I have found that three genres are equally represented in the villagers’ and the artists’ visual narratives: hypothetical narratives, habitual narratives, and encounters with the past. This shows that both villagers and artists experience constraints that allow them to do certain acts only as a particular type of narrative performance in which they play with the agency of “What if”; to engage with some cultural and social/economic

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circumstances that frequently “used to happen” over a long period of time; and to recall past events and traditions. It is remarkable that PA’s oral narrative does not contain hypothetical narrative while his visual narrative fully fits into this genre; this signifies that he “speaks” for the villagers (and all Roma) in the storytelling plot. Another difference between the artists’ oral narrative and visual is that the oral narratives’ genre mostly engages “encounters with the past.” This demonstrates that their “main story” is their visual narrative (their mural); they used the interview situation only to explain their identities, and their experiences with the villagers’ and the FVP. As Braid (1997) proposes, the simplest form of recollecting past events “might be seen in terms of brief narratives that relate reported speech or reported actions” (p. 48). In their narratives they often provide explanations about their identity in contrast with non-Roma, evaluate the narrated actions, and re-tell narrated events in which non-Roma evaluate the identity of the Roma. Since all of these fit in in the genre “encounter of the past,” the artists’ oral narratives are excessively build on this.

A new genre emerged in the artists’ narrative that I named counter/emancipatory narrative because it unites characteristics of both counter and emancipatory narratives.

The artists’ ethnic and social/political struggle have led many artists to stand up to counter-narrate their recent experiences, and emancipate themselves and their peers in challenging existing power distributions. While the villagers only wish to tell their story and be heard as equal partners, the artists demand this.

With counter-narratives the artists attempt to overwrite the existing grand narrative of stigmatization and the idea that Roma/Gypsies are intrinsically inferior to

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non-Gypsies. I found the artists’ counter and emancipatory narratives especially significant since they are not given voice otherwise in everyday life to oppose Gypsy stereotypes and politics. Bamberg (2004) asserts that analyzing counter-narratives “brings narrative research closer to the field of practical application, and opens up the possibility of using narrative research in the service of a deliberating and emancipating agenda” (p.

354). Artists working in Bódvalenke took responsibility toward their fellow Roma, but they lacked the social/political power to enter into the politics of deliberation and emancipation by means other than art.

Second, visual core narratives differ from oral core narratives to some extent. In visuals, a narrative of separated worlds is always present next to other narratives. This suggests that the gap between Roma and their colonizers became the most urgent issue.

Aside from this, the new need to tell one’s story and have an attente audience who listens, shows communication between Roma and non-Roma to be a significant field of struggle.

Accordingly, the major narratives in the visuals are unsatisfied basic needs, need to tell one’s story, pride, the colonizer-colonized divide, and the disrupted mobility- stability dialectic, where mobility no longer creates stability. These themes uncover the artists’ critique of the majorities’ recent interpretation of European culture and history, which omits the Roma/Gypsies, the colonial setting they are forced into, and the seemingly open “global world” that is open for others but not for the Roma.

Answering the First Research Question

In response to my first research question, “What do narratives and performances in Bódvalenke tell us about the experiences of Roma/Gypsy?” I collected a considerable

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amount of new information about what it means to be a person with Roma ethnic roots in

2014 in the poorest part of Hungary, where a village has been turned into an open-air gallery to “help” the Roma villagers who inhabit the space.

I found that Dumont’s (1968/1975) and Williams’ (1993/2003) conception that Roma are a self-sustaining system was true for this village for two decades after 1989, the fall of Socialism. The extended family of the “R” clan, who became majorities in the village, had been isolated due to their remote location, lack of transportation and job opportunities, and because new people rarely moved into the village. However, in 2009, the FVP opened an office in the village, invited artists to paint large murals on the Gypsy villagers’ back-walls, and started a “Roma empowerment” program to “help” the villagers and diminish their “poverty.” My research demonstrated that the three main groups of social actors –the villagers, the artists and the FVP –tell three different “Roma stories” that strengthen, weaken or cancel out each other. In the following section I summarize need, pride, separated words, stability and mobility narratives–common core narratives in the villagers’ and artists’ stories–comparing and contrasting them.

This study reflected on “need” many times as the most powerful narrative.

Poverty is very much visible in the village. Yet, as I point out, “need” is only one of four major narratives: need, pride, separation and stability-mobility. Not realizing any other major narrative but “need” highlights the FVP’s lack of dialogue with the villagers and its perspective that equates “need” with material needs but denies non-material needs.

However, what counts as a “basic need” is socially and culturally constructed “between people in social and historical particularity” (Riessman, 2008, p. 107). Western

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consumerist culture habitually focuses on material needs, while the marginalized (such as the Roma/Gypsy), who cannot participate in this consumerist culture, pay close attention to non-material needs as well.

The villagers’ need narratives include basic needs, need for equality, and need for independence. These components refine the majorities’ reduced concept of “need.”

Obviously, the FVP considers only the villagers’ physical needs. However, exactly those needs that are not recognized by the non-Roma decide what is “acceptable help” and

“unacceptable help” for the Roma /Gypsies.

My first significant finding is that non-material needs in a community are just as important (in marginalized communities is often even more important) than material needs. When the Project Leader separated from her Roma helpers experienced in Roma issues, she failed to figure out who the “Roma” are, what their real “needs” are, and what would “empower” them. So she clung to the colonizing concept of “patronage.” This, however, contradicts the Bódvalenke people’s and the artists’ pride, their need for independence and equality, and their narrative of separated worlds. This is demonstrated by the villagers’ and artists’ constant complaints against the FVP, by one family who built a tall board fence to hide their yard and its fresco, and the hidden signs in the murals such as gallows trees that one of the artists whom I did not analize in this study (PE) placed in his “harmonious” landscape he called “wellness art.”

The visual narratives amplify this importance of non-material needs. Out of the six painters, only PB chose a narrative of material need: she hid a loaf of bread somewhere in her painting because “there is shortage of bread in the village.” Yet,

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besides that she hid the bread (just like the villagers hid their hunger), PB placed hunger in a colonial frame, suggesting that poverty results from the Gypsy’s systematic exclusion from their wider society. Other painters (among them PJ) hold poverty a human thing, not a specific Roma experience. Instead, they portrayed non-material needs such as the need to preserve their traditions and Gemeinschaft-like community; to tell their story and have somebody listen; to find their place in the global world; to escape their symbolic “prison” of segregation; and to free themselves from the “folklorized” romantic identity forced on them. The artists unison with the villagers reject that material needs are more important than non-material needs, and advise that a simple but honest life is of higher quality and would advance civilization more than the contemporary materialist and over-institutionalized culture.

Next to “need,” the second major narrative is narrative of “pride.” The villagers are proud of motherhood, family, cleanliness, and enduring suffering, which fit in the larger categories of cultural and spiritual pride. I consider enduring suffering “spiritual” because it has collective ritual and is endured collectively. The ritual starts with the utterance “I am in it” or “it started,” and continues with a mass-movement when poorer people visit other Gypsy families to ask for food, go to panhandle, and (if they cannot get food), walk the whole day up and down the village carrying their small children. As more days pass without food, they stop walking and sit together. As they bear hunger and keep their children calm by holding them, hugging them, kissing them, starving is transformed into an intimate, emphatic, “warm,” and “triumphant” experience.

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While the villagers express their cultural and spiritual pride through their bodily performances as mothers and members of their family with specific rules regarding food and cleanness, the artists depict and verbalize this pride, and many of them take it as their artistic and political philosophy. PJ, whom I identified as an “emancipatory painter,” describes the Roma way of life as more advanced living than Western society’s “rat- race,” and portrays them as Europeans, Hungarians and Roma at the same time–and proud to be all of these. As Roma/Gypsies took over many social and cultural practices in their nation state, they managed to save their own culture to some extent. This culture recognizes that humans are biological beings who ought not exploit nature, who must balance family and community, and value a simple life based on cultural and spiritual principles. Consequently, PJ’s visual narrative includes all things that the villagers are proud of with an “exclamation mark” added–that the world goes in the opposite direction.

PH adds to PJ’s story that earlier, in Gypsy colonies, “everybody has their place” and

“nobody was saddened or displaced.” This is to say that they will escape the crisis if they can save their heritage.

However, the Project Leader’s agenda advertises and capitalizes upon Roma poverty without considering their cultural and collective pride. This degrades “need” to simple shortages of material resources, to misery, which puts the Roma villages at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Consequently, my second finding is that need and pride narratives together balance individual and collective identities in the village. The villagers are very cautious of what and how they tell outsiders about their material needs, and they make sure to

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emphasize that they have wisdom and strength to deal with these needs. This places them above others in their needs, not below. Their cultural and collective pride “censures” or

“safeguards” the revealed information.

The visual narratives add significant new elements to pride narratives to counterbalance and overwrite the FVP’s grand narrative–what the villagers are unable to do–that “Roma need constant help.” For example, PB specifies both need and pride to the villagers as the black figures in her mural turn away from their colonizer, a despising gesture. Also, PH tailors her message to the villagers when portraying the “cold” city visibly distant from the “warm” Gypsy colony, signifying that non-Gypsies should be pitied, not Gypsies, because non-Roma lack deep human connections and the safety of a self-sustaining collective. On the other hand, PJ paints his characters in every shade of brown but leaves signifiers of the “dysfunctional Western civilization” (table, chair, electricity) uncolored, reflecting local circumstances. Finally, PG portrays the Gypsy refugees as angels, who represent the moral good in opposition to their global surroundings. As the visual narratives portray, the villagers recognize the Project Leader as a colonizer, they think the larger society is dysfunctional, and identify themselves as morally good. But, unlike the artists, they cannot transform these experiences into a similarly powerful narrative. So, even though the artists were controlled by the FVP’s agenda, they used their own agency to tell their story and balance the FVP’s dominant need narrative with a narrative of pride. So pride and need, both cultural and spiritual, always appeared as a second core narrative in the visuals.

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It would be unfair to deny that the Project Leader noticed the Roma need for collective pride, since the gallery’s purpose is to showcase Roma artists’ murals in order to make the Roma villagers and the larger Roma community proud. Supposing that in the deprived Roma village there is nothing to be proud of, the Project Leader “imported” from outside the reason to be proud. Consequently, the FVP’s need and pride narratives do not balance individual and collective identities, because two different imaginary narrators are speaking–the villagers about their need and the artists about their pride–and a third narrator, the Project Leader, edits their narratives as she wishes. So pride does not

“safeguard” the need narrative; instead, both pride and need narratives become tools in

“exoticizing” the Roma.

The third main narrative reports about separated worlds (safe and unsafe, locked and open spaces, Roma and non-Roma, villagers and strangers, peasants and Gypsies,

Gypsies and other Gypsies, and females and males). Of course, these worlds are not fully separated, since the larger worlds encompass the smaller ones. I underline that

Roma/non-Roma separation, represented as fundamental in the FVP’s agenda, is only one of many separated worlds experienced by the Roma. This is proven by many occasions when the villagers recognize their allies among the peasants and visitors, when they reveal their conflicts with other Roma, and express that they consider themselves

Hungarians.

The visual narratives do not display as many separated worlds as the villagers’ oral narratives, only the dichotomy of the colonizer and colonized, such as the one-eyed prisoner and the outside world; the colonized facing the colonizer (PB); refugees and

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their persecutors (PG); the warm Gypsy colony and the cold city (PH); and the family on the floor contrasted with the non-functional table where they are not allowed to sit. The artists demonstrate the colonizer and colonized as one irreconcilable, antagonistic divide.

While the villagers must deal with more separated worlds because they live in an isolated

Roma village, the artists are more involved in the majority society and look at the Roma issues from a global perspective. Remarkably, the experience of the colonizer/colonized divide is depicted in each mural. Regardless of their geographical location and educational, economic and social status, the painters recognize Roma’s segregation

(“ghettoization”) as a universal experience.

The fourth narrative is the mobility and stability dialectics that includes the flexibility of the Roma home. These narratives also unveil the FVP and the local government’s efforts to reduce the Roma way of life. Since the FVP and the mayor want to stop new family members from moving into the rented houses, they prohibited others than the immediate family from living in a house for more than three weeks, or they will be penalized. This opposes Roma cultural practices and limits the overall wellbeing of their extended family. The villagers must choose between abandoning their needy family members and going to jail. This is an extreme example of “mobility”–moving to jail to support the stability of the extended family.

The Roma home is also attacked more subtly when the FVP frequently interferes in family issues. Families have a history of whom they approach with problems and how they celebrate. Yet, the FVP takes control over the villagers in the guise of providing

“help,” and transforms celebrations from family events to public events while loosening

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family ties (for example, through unequal distribution of donations and job opportunities). Also, wives are told that they need to “improve.” For example, the Sure

Start program –not led, but widely promoted by the FVP –expects Roma women to learn how to cook, to restructure their family model, and to separate “play time” with their babies. This is unusual in Roma families where the woman adapts cooking habits to suit her husband’s family, where roles follow the extended family’s customs, and where babies are organically included in all activities.

My third significant finding is that the FVP confuses the meaning of “culture” as a network of overlapping discussions, collective beliefs, life styles, and value systems with donning dresses, dancing, singing, and painting in a style stereotyped as “intrinsic” to people of Roma origin. While the villagers are required to participate in stereotypical cultural performances, in exchange, they are expected to give up their genuine cultural performances. As Hall (1966) asserts, identities emerge “within the play of specific modalities of power” (p. 4). Power dynamics in the Fresco Village place Roma in a colonial setting and compel them to “assimilate” to an artificial identity of “Specimen

Gypsy.”63

Consequently, my fourth significant finding is that the narrative that was supposed to empower Roma, actually subordinates the villagers. The Project Leader, who knows little about the people but speaks instead of them, has access to funds for Roma, has power to make structural changes in the community while silencing and controlling

63 This word was used by many artists to signify the Gypsy individual who fulfills the stereotypical expectations of the non-Gypsy, therefore sets a “good” example for the other Gypsies. 324

the villagers. This situation was criticized by the villagers and by many visual narratives.

István, Tamás, Réka and Mara, among many others, told personal stories of how they are looked upon as dirty, hungry, lazy, and uneducated people with no knowledge and skills to solve their problems. I was surprised to hear that the interviewed artists had the same experience; they received insignificant compensation for their artworks, which were priced by the square meter, and were condescended to in attitude and communication, not treated as equals. Since the artists regard equality and independence as more important needs than material needs, they are more upset over inequality and occasional humiliation than over not being paid correctly.

So both artists and villagers in the Fresco Village experience total denial of who they really are. The FVP’s lack of knowledge about the “Roma” in general (that there are many different Gypsies with various life styles, values and systems) and about the culture of the villagers (that they are Romungros and what this means) is obvious. However, without considering these, the agenda of the FVP is superficial as both artistic and social programs. And since “Roma empowerment” funds require neither expertise in Roma issues nor the villagers’ feedback, as time passes, the FVP grows more powerful and the villagers more powerless. The Roma people face a non-Roma narrator who imagines herself an Honorary Member of the Roma community, and tells a “Roma story” with imaginary “folklorized” Roma actors. The FVP creates the illusion that Roma stand up for themselves with this program, when independence is exactly what the program blocks by creating constant dependency.

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The villagers complain that nobody wants to hear their opinions, and that the media only look for positive feedback, editing out the villagers’ critical comments. The growing body of positive testimonies in media, documentaries and the Internet, distort realities and celebrate “improvements” while the struggle for keeping their community in balance grows in the village (see Aiello & Pulido, 2013; Diez-Palomar and Santos

Pitanga & Cifuentes, 2013). Consequently, my research demonstrates that inquiries of who needs help, and how and when that “help” is needed, as well as how best to

“improve” the community’s life, are answered in opposite ways by the FVP and the villagers.

So the story told by the FVP is neither the villagers’ story nor the artists’. The

FVP leverages the villagers’ presence to embody “romanticized Gypsies,” promoting them as “exotic specialties.” The FVP uses the artists as tools in telling a “Roma story” according to the Project Leader’s conception. The Project Leader could hardly control how the villagers affect the artists. The painters came to the village, spent more or less time there, talked with the families or just observed the power relations among the FVP, the artists, and the villagers. They transformed these experiences into a visual storytelling performance. However, the Project Leader has the power to control how the artworks affect both villagers and visitors. For example, the call for emancipation would be a powerful message helping villagers understand their situation more profoundly, and to stand up for themselves. But the emancipatory message does not reach them; it is omitted and withheld from both villagers and visitors. This is how the FVP’s editing of information affects the villagers’ reality.

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Even though much information is omitted, as audiences, the villagers attribute similar meanings to the murals as do the artists; both artists’ and villagers’ interpretations are unlike the FVP’s. Likewise, the meanings the artists give to the villagers’ stories closely mirror the villagers’ understandings, far removed from the FVP’s understanding.

Both artists and villagers reject the FVP’s “Roma story.” Rose (2012) reminds us that

“audiencing” similarly can involve the struggle for agency, since dominant and non- dominant ways of seeing class, race, gender, sexuality etc. involve different performances, stories and social relations. The remarkable difference between the FVP’s, the artists’ and the villagers’ “reading” of each other’s narratives demonstrates this.

Contrary to the “imaginary Roma culture” that the FVP represents (and despite that the villagers are Romungros who do not speak any of the Roma languages and were largely assimilated in the 19th century), there is a well-defined “own culture” that families share.

This includes identifying as “Gypsy” or “non-peasant,” ways of mobility and stability, openness and flexibility of the family home, the family model, gender roles, customs relating food, discussing issues, solving problems and celebrating. These cultural elements are critiqued, however, as ways that Roma must change.

Ultimately, having developed a deeper understanding of the villagers’ lives, I conclude that the very idea of the open-air gallery and the FVP’s continuous presence and uninvited “governance” are unfit to this community; far from empowering it, the FVP weakens it. Both romanticizing and neo-colonizing tendencies are humiliating for the

Roma/Gypsy people. The villagers experience the Roma outdoor gallery as visual colonization, which brings other types of colonization into the village such as colonizing

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their life style (cooking, child rearing, communicating, relating, celebrating and representing themselves). This is the fundamental difference between Bódvalenke and the

Egyptian Nubian village, which, according to the Project Leader, was the original inspiration for the FVP.

In the Nubian village, the villagers themselves decorated their own houses as they chose, according to their heritage, taste, and freedom. It was a communal cultural performance built on their tradition. Nobody moved into their village from outside to manage the wall paintings, the community or the people’s lives from a “higher” position, as did the FVP. Therefore the two projects, the Nubian and the Bódvalenke project, lead to opposite results; one enables the villagers to flourish, the other compels them to struggle uncomfortably.

Shared space and time in Bódvalenke produced a shared history among the villagers. But their shared place is interrupted by the intrusion of the realities of the Roma artists, the political and monetary reality of the FVP, which “markets” their poverty, and by the reality of visitors, who photograph the villagers and share these images on the

Internet. The indefinite ownership and economic value of these images, and the fact that the FVP compensated the artists but not villagers who lent their houses to the paintings, are also intrusions. Whether this shared experience will work out a new shared reality in the future is questionable.

Answering the Second Research Question

To answer my second research question, “How do the frescoes mediate Roma identity?” I conclude that there are three major identity concepts represented in the

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gallery: (1) essentialized Roma, (2) deprived Roma, and (3) subaltern Roma, which converge the experiences of the villagers and the artists.

The Essentialized Roma

First, it is important to note that in the concepts of the “Roma gallery,” “Roma artist,” and “Roma fine art,” the word “Roma” is not used as the umbrella term or a kinship identifier, because these terms allow (even demand) self-identification. As the

FVP uses the term, there is no place for self-identification; here the conception is connected only to origin. If one was born Roma and is a painter, one is inevitably a

“Roma painter” painting in “Roma style” by nature. This is the essentialist application that considers race and ethnicity the essential part of identity. The villagers are unable to verbalize what is wrong with this concept, they just suspect a dishonesty, falsification, and corruption behind the FVP’s relationships that they did not feel in dealing with the peasant villagers. The artists, however, recognize the colonizing power behind the FVP, which not only imposes a uniform identity from the outside but makes this identity compulsory for both artists and villagers.

Nevertheless, the “essentialized Roma” signifies not only that a people are limited to their “Romaness,” denying them every other facet of identity. It also denotes that various stereotypes of the majority society are melded in one imaginary character. Yet, even though it is imaginary, the “essentialist Roma” creates social reality when applied to real persons. With FVP’s promotion of the artists and villagers as the exotic “Other,” they become fixed in their Romaness, which denies their Hungarian-ness, their European-ness, and ultimately, because it is an artificial identity, denies their human-ness.

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As the artists point out, there are more weak points in the FVP’s labeling. PB and

PJ assert, culturally, that a “Roma gallery” is nonsensical, since decorative arts have no cultural or historical roots in Roma communities. The concept of “Roma art” presupposes that Roma people always illustrated their life experiences in some supposed Roma style.

This is not true. They self-identify as Roma, Hungarian (according to their nation-state),

European, and also as human beings. PJ humorously illustrates the nonsense of the essentialist Roma by saying that nobody asks him at the airport “Sir, are you Roma?”

There is a problem with the “born Gypsy” and “Roma artist” because it is not only essentialist but, covertly, emphasizes that “Romaness” is biologically defined. One remains Roma even if he or she identifies differently. Therefore, in her gallery, the

Project Leader is unwilling to give up the central importance of the artists’ “Romaness” even after many artists have rejected this label. This leads me to conclude that, although many artists talked about their “Roma experiences” in the village, they cannot be limited exclusively to their Roma identity and their so-called Roma experiences (PA, PB, and

PJ). They are more than this. The artists always report about human experiences.

So the good intention of the Project Leader to change negative prejudice in

Hungarian society by counter-balancing “criminal gypsy” with “romanticized Gypsy” turns out to be a bad idea, since both concepts revert to the same folkloristic, romantic tradition of the 18th-19th century. While the “criminal gypsy” was based upon the uncivilized, antisocial “savage” image, the romanticized version visualized Gypsies as

“loyal” to their nomadic freedom by not complying with their sedentary surroundings.

Accordingly, they become two ends of the same continuum, different names that signify

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the same artificial identity created by the majority society to define the Roma/Gypsy as the “Other.” The romanticizing perspective invented the “demonized Gypsy,” who exhibits extraordinary talent “by nature” in music and dance (Brown, 1985). Amplified by the location of the gallery in a Roma village, the same characteristic is assigned to the painters by the FVP program.

Accordingly, while the FVP is believed to tell a new and different “Roma story,” it painfully repeats old practices that were proven unsuccessful in promoting Gypsy inclusion. Despite the large body of research that followed the early folklorists, the same

“one-way cultural influence” framework that was critiqued widely in the 1980s returns.

This framework locates Gypsies in a passive, subordinate position, only receiving and never giving (Görög, 1988/1994 and Kríza, 1993).

The FVP’s success in various Hungarian and European forums proves that the theory of “two-way” influence, which accepts Gypsy communities as active, creative people who intrinsically build culture based on their human agency, is still a contested view. It is still believed that, unless they are given a Gypsy identity, the villagers lack cultural identity and represent only a culture of poverty. It is still not scandalous to identify art as the only source of Roma pride. It is still not evident that they are

Hungarians and Europeans, and equal human beings.

The difference between the romanticized Roma image painted by some painters

(such as PH) and the FVP is exactly this, a (neo)colonialist, Eurocentric gaze that sees

Roma as either “savages” or the “Oriental Other.” Artists reach back to the Gypsies’ nomadic past with a different goal: to revitalize memories of a common past and common

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roots, symbols, objects and events that are “markers of Gypsiness” (Poueyto, 2008). The

“romantic” Gypsy image connects the villagers and the artists to their common root –a

Gesellschaft-like community that they miss in their present majority society. They recall images of freedom when experiencing unfreedom, being forced into subaltern position

(PJ). The artists take the teacher’s, the storyteller’s and the responsible leader’s role while they depict these images. They acted in harmony with what Baker (2011b) says that visuality is: a field where we can grasp important characteristics of Gypsy cultural identity. For example, with the romantic Gypsy image PH created a community between the artists (Vlah, Beas or Romungro Gypsies) and the villagers (Romungros), making available to them a representation wider than one that is solely kinship-based.

However, most artists’ narratives portray struggle for an inner-defined, multi-layered, flexible identity where Roma, Hungarian, European identities are not separated. They strive for a dialogical relationship where they are equal partners, and where, as a

Gesellschaft-like community, they are not seen as an anomaly. In the artists’ interpretation, Roma identity is something that naturally connects them with each other and with the villagers, and “strategically” connects them to the FVP. But when identity is imposed on them from outside it hurts their dignity. So both “Gypsy” and “Roma” have different meanings as self-identifiers or as impositions on them by outsiders.

Different naming creates different social realities. So the murals amplify the villagers’ identity narratives, lend a high vocabulary to it, and represent these narratives in a wider public sphere. These narratives include pride of their Roma, Hungarian and

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European identities. Their different identities become more important in various situations; with this, they stay in total contrast with the essentialist Roma identity.

The Deprived Roma

Since the art gallery wants to call attention to the villagers’ poor living conditions and bring help, the second identity represented in the concept of the Roma gallery is the

“deprived Roma.” In terms of social marginalization, Roma culture, especially Romungro culture,64 is equated with a culture of poverty. However, the villagers deny that poverty is the most important characteristic of their community. Instead, they emphasize their ability to solve difficult problems and to balance their families and community as against their unsatisfied needs (among them need for equality, independence, and basic material needs). Even though they have much “need,” there are many things they can be proud of

(such as motherhood, family, loyalty, cleanliness, and a simple life that includes physical and psychological strength to endure suffering. The irony of the “deprived Roma” label is that even the usurious lenders –who break with the ideal of equality, independence and empathetic sharing–are viewed as “poor Roma” because poverty attaches to all Roma.

However, many artists (PA, PH, and PJ) refused to illustrate Roma poverty, though it was expected from them in order to “fit” the romanticized Gypsy image.

Indeed, PD and PJ claim, their simple life is an advantage of the Roma; it helps them to escape crisis that Western societies experience as a result of over-consumption waste, and

64 Since they are the most assimilated Gypsies, the general pre-supposition is that they have no Roma culture beyond the culture of poverty. 333

greed. To understand this concept, I briefly review the causes of the Roma’s deprived social/economic situation and how FVP conceives the solution.

The immediate cause is the fall of Socialism, which had not only provided full employment but also enforced it, while also giving people the feeling of social equality.

So, in Hungary, the transition from Socialism to Capitalism was more difficult than elsewhere because it coincided with the end of a highly regulated economy and the beginning of free market capitalism. Roma lost their jobs in mining, heavy industry, state-funded construction and other activities. The surrounding forests became privatized.

Corruption grew in securing job opportunities, while drastic changes in the welfare system further reduced the handicapped population in the social scale. Together, all these changes comprised radical pauperization.

The way FVP imagines the solution is to capitalize upon and, in a way, to commodify Roma poverty.65 Roma poverty can be capitalized by building a “need” industry around them. After the FVP called attention to “Roma need,” nothing really changed in the village, except that in came more programs that provide jobs for the non-

Gypsies. Although many village women are certified in childcare, they were not offered jobs when there were job openings. Marushiakova and Popov (2011) call this the “Gypsy industry” that first states so-called “Roma problems” (according to non-Roma), then does nothing to solve these problems, because “if they solved, they would lose its source of income” (p. 55). Roma poverty also can be capitalized by building a “talent” industry,

65 The FVP not only “capitalizes upon” (makes money from) Roma poverty, it turns that poverty into a salable commodity to the tourist market (“commodify”). 334

which fits into the “extraordinary Other,” the “demonized” Gypsy image. The artists were underpaid, often paid late, and many of them were humiliated. The Project Leader could not give up the importance of their Roma origin, since this was fundamental in

Orientalizing the artists and making them part of a tourist attraction. So the FVP’s narrative is the same discriminatory narrative as the old narratives about the Gypsies in

Hungary and Europe. This leads to the third identity concept.

The Subaltern Roma

Finally, the third Roma identity suggested by the gallery is that Roma are incapable of managing their own lives and communities—so they cannot develop independently. However, the villagers recall that their families flourished and they did manage their lives during Socialism. But after economic, social and political changes handicapped them, they became lost. The villagers and the visuals commonly report that

Roma were forced into a subordinate position.

While poverty is stated as the main reason for intervention, this intervention fixes poverty in place because it is the pre-condition to its long existence. As this summary clarifies, for the villagers, “empowering” means the opposite of what they experience: they want to be able to manage their own lives without others dominating them. As I discussed earlier, the villagers dislike talking about poverty, being helped and forced into a hierarchical relationship. They are not ashamed of their “poverty,” but also want to avoid entering into continued dependency. They do not like that Roma are never allowed to have access to resources other than welfare, and that their relationships with non-Roma are governed by domination, hypocrisy and cynicism.

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On the other hand, for the artists, “empowering” signifies the Gypsies’ standing up for themselves, escaping their “prison,” breaking out of the colonial power distribution, telling their own story, having open trajectories and knowledgeable leaders, and being accepted as Hungarians and Europeans while also Roma. Limited to fake cultural performances and “services” for the FVP, villagers and artists “wish away” the

FVP, but they cannot “wish it away”; the Project Leader was not elected, therefore cannot be ousted or recalled by electoral means. The dichotomy between the Gemeinschaft and

Gesellschaft-like communities highlights the need for an “aesthetic life.” Although this echoes the early 20th-century life philosophy, which is also full of romantic ideas, it helps

Roma artists to reinterpret their marginalized position to their advantage and to their own

“empowering.”

PG asserts that what happens to the Roma is morally wrong: he shows the Roma as fleeing angels who must escape but have nowhere to go. So what appears as

“civilization” and “globalization” for others, “decivilizes” and globally excludes the

Roma. They are expected to leave something they have for a fictive thing. And what seems to “humanize” them, viz. assimilate them to the Western consumerist and institutionalized lifestyle, in reality “dehumanizes” them, because, during this process, societies push them to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The idea of an artificial “Roma identity” in which one is categorized by the non-

Roma, echoes Marushiakova and Popov’s (2011) conception that “Roma identity” is an imagined identity and Roma/Gypsy communities are imagined communities, which, however, have been “imagined” not by the Roma but by the majority population. The

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villagers imagine a solution with more equality and independence. The artists imagine a solution as living in a culture of freedom (PA & PJ). However, as long as Roma identity depends on naming, labeling, and Roma stories told by non-Roma, the Roma’s experience will be about their subordinate position, fragmented life and shared embodied experience of a community of refugees without refuge.

People with Roma roots have multiple identities, multi-layered and overlapping.

Different levels of identities emerge where various identities matter. Among these identities Roma identity is especially vulnerable because Roma identity is narrated on many contradictory levels (PJ). Therefore, as PJ represents, Gypsy identity must detach itself from both its historically situated marginalized social position inside their nation- state, and from the “compulsory folklorization” that seems to be the only “acceptable” domain for Roma/Gypsies in the EU, consequently in Roma empowerment politics.

Ultimately, the artists form their identity based on their experience of a shared public reality, shared European culture, homeland, and history, which lead to shared narratives and stories performed as imitation (mimesis), creation (poiesis), and struggle (kinesis).

Also, while they share public reality, culture, homeland, and history, they also preserve the culture of their ancestors and produce culture of their own as a community of people with agency.

Denying the Roma’s non-material needs, defining material needs from the perspective of western consumerist culture, and intervening in their lives with this “need” concept intrinsically leads to “unacceptable help” for the Roma /Gypsies. To hide this, and defining the Roma’s non-material needs (such as pride) from outside the Roma

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community based on an essentialized or romanticized (artificial) “Roma identity” is hypocrisy and cynicism. The result proves the intellectual, cultural and moral fallacies inherent in “helping” and “empowering” people without having a dialogical relationship with them, without listening to them, and in withholding leadership from Roma in their own affairs. This is not the same as transforming young Roma for neoliberal intellectuals; who have no contact with Roma settlements and communities but with the EU leadership, fulfilling the role of the “Specimen Gypsy.”

Ultimately, the story of the FVP is a hypothetical narrative: it tells a story of

“Roma empowerment” that never happened. However, FVP also relies on habitual narratives. They build on the habitual stereotype that non-Roma know better what Roma need than the Roma themselves. They also build on the idea that Roma are fundamentally different from any other ethnic group, which justifies their treatment as an “uncivilized” and “infantile” group that needs the constant tutelage and patronage of non-Roma. From the Roma point of view, this is nonsense.

Theoretical Consequences and Implications

My analysis ended with some new theoretical consequences and implications.

First, I discuss my use of Riessman’s narrative genres. Riessman (1980) identifies narrative genres based on a specific narrative coherence and sequence (including temporal order), which persuade differently, and which lead to distinctive styles, structures, and modes of representation that tellers choose in concert with the listeners’ expectations. In another place Riessman (2008) says stories are dialogically produced and performed, where “performance” means that narrators dramatize their experiences for an

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audience and both narrators and audiences adjust to certain conventions. This description suggests that genre is a dialogical concept, adjusted to the audience and the context.

When Langellier and Peterson (2006) say that the audience understands the storytellers best if they draw upon a shared language, history and culture, they repeat the same three factors that, for Riessman, make a narrative genre recognizable for others (and shareable with others), viz. linguistic cues, and historical and cultural contexts.

Though, in this setting genres characterize both the event (the “reality”) and the way the narrator perceives it and pre-suppose that the audience recognizes and communicates them similarly. Accordingly, audiences66 and narrators can interpret specific genres similarly or differently. For example, while PB uses the habitual narrative genre to tell the Project Leader and the villagers’ common story as the colonizer and colonized, without knowing the “linguistic clues” and the historical and cultural contexts, the Project Leader does not understand the genre (that this colonial setting is happening repeatedly and endlessly where Roma is kept in subaltern position); she understands only the story that she, as a the well-dressed “classy” woman “looks good” among the

“simple” villagers. Since genre is a dialogical concept, without the dialogue she misses the genre. She does not understand PG’s and PJ’s counter/emancipatory narratives, either.

The social and cultural “reality” that forced these artists to select the counter/emancipatory genre is invisible and insensible for her. On the other hand, the

Project Leader turns to the habitual narrative genre to tell that the Roma is (and always

66 Since I use here the narrative vocabulary, I use the world “audience.” Yet, in case of the visual narratives this includes viewers/spectators. 339

has been) poor, handicapped, unable to handle their affairs, therefore they need the non-

Roma’s continuous “patronage.” This is nonsensical for the Roma because they do not see these things happening repeatedly over and over (indeed, they see it never happening). Likewise, PA’s hypothetical narrative is misinterpreted by the Project Leader as solely an individual story, without recognizing that telling their stories is a need for the villagers that has never happened but they wish was real–what is suggested by the genre.

This, again, shows that Riessman’s genre is dialogical.

However, I also departed from Riessman’s genre conception. As it has become apparent, Riessman (1990, 1993) distinguishes three narrative genres hypothetical narrative, habitual narrative, and narrative of past events. Hypothetical and habitual genres are new compared to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967/1997) narrative concept that was the starting point for Riessman’s theory; Labov and Waletzky’s defined narratives as recounting past events, where the order of narrative clauses matches the order of events as they occurred. For them, narratives have a clear beginning, middle (climax), and an ending (resolution). Riessman’s hypothetical narrative does not answer the question

“What happened then?” and habitual narrative does not have a well-distinguishable beginning, middle and end. However, Riessman adopted her third narrative genre

“narrative of past event” from Labov and Waletzky, untouched.

I find this problematic. “Narrative of past event” fixes both the events of the past and the narratives about them; they seem to “sit” out there as part of a past. So while I adopted hypothetical and habitual narratives as Riessman labels them, I renamed the third narrative “encounter with the past” as it more accurately depicts the relationship as an

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“encounter”: they are not simply “narratives” that are part of a past, but intersect in the present with respect to their impact on a people’s future. “Encounter with the past” expresses that narrative and its encounters are in dialogue with their past and present contexts and audiences and they have agency to affect the future. “Encounters with the past” is a more accurate reflection of the narratives also in the Roma village, where narratives in the past (narratives of the past) are not fixed and finished “artifacts” but are constantly re-evaluated, placed in different contexts, and told for new audiences. Thus,

"encounter with the past" better expresses the meaning that this genre continually encounters the past, that is, deals with the past (and what happened or might have happened in past time) in the present through stories and performances.

Second, as I pointed out, grand narratives, such as History told by the non-Roma, is made of white habitual narratives. On the other hand, “unofficial” local history of the villagers consists of different habitual narratives. The villagers create, preserve, and transmit culture by continually retelling shared experiences of what it means to be a

Roma/Gypsy in social relations. History, which produces the “habitus” (individual and collective practices), keeps reproducing itself as schemes generated by history itself.

“Helpers” who are received by the villagers as “colonizers” ensure their domination by building and repeating their own habitual narratives of the history of a homogeneous white Europe. Consequently, I identified anti-Gypsism as a White habitual narrative, and recognized “identity” as not only a simple “practice of narration,” as Hall suggests, but a performance, where the narrator enters into a network of habitual narratives and one habitual narrative can interrupt another. For example, the stereotype that Roma are unable

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to take care of themselves, that non-Roma know better what the Roma need than the

Roma do, that Roma are fundamentally different than any other ethnic group, is built on

White habitual narratives, while Roma habitual narratives assert the opposite.

Third, without wanting to essentialize culture, I recognize certain elements that show similarities with Vekerdi’s (1974) description of “Roma narratives”: such as life as

“aesthetic experience” (see Réka and PJ’s comments on “aesthetic life”); the mixing of fictive and the real (see István); and the preservation of important traditions and rituals

(see Tamás). Regarding structure, Vekerdi (1974) points at episodic composition. I identified this as “chains of stories” told by both villagers and many artists that are common in habitual narratives. In visual narratives, the same phenomenon is present as a mixture of multiple core narratives and genres. Next, Vekerdi described the Roma hero outsmarting the non-Roma as a cultural element. I identified this phenomenon in many hypothetical narratives in the villagers’ stories. Next, Vekerdi (1074) and Bari (1990) state, Roma storytelling includes the audience’s participation as call-response, and to the storytelling spiritual power is attributed. This kind of storytelling was practiced by the first artists to arrive among the villagers. They painted their visual stories in communal form (with the villagers’ children) and the audience added to the story. They sat together after sundown and exchanged stories. An upset painter (PG) noted that the villagers were unable to “respond” with song and music to the artists’ singing and guitar playing, because they forgot their culture. But they were still able to tell their everyday stories.

With this I propose that habitual narratives, hypothetical narratives and tradition saving stories (that I consider a special type of “encounter with the past,”) were recognized very

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early in Roma narratives but not identified as such. Consequently, genres of habitual narratives, hypothetical narratives and encounters with the past are useful to analyze cultural narratives. On the other hand, counter/emancipatory narratives are useful to analyze cultural struggle of ethnic minorities, and the marginalized.

Finally, my conclusion demonstrates that in studying Gypsy narratives it is fundamental to examine narratives of need, pride, separated worlds, and mobility and stability narratives in dialectical relationship. We can recognize dominant (master) narratives based on their one-sidedness, focusing either on pride or on need, either on stability or mobility, and only on one of the many worlds (mostly of the majority’s world) without considering the dialectical counterparts of these. With this I finish the theoretical consequences and implications of this study. The following section summarizes the strengths and limitations of the study, and discusses opportunities for future research.

Strengths and Limitations of the Study

In the beginning of my research I set the goal of exploring the experiences of the

Roma by studying their narratives and performances. I took account of “both the substantive and the performative, drawing together diverse stories of selves and social worlds on the one hand, with the concerted work of storytelling on the other,” as

Gubrium and Holstein (2009) summarize what a narrative research out to accomplish (p.

17). Realities continuously shape and reshape stories and, at the same time, stories affect realities.

While engaged in informal conversation with the Bódvalenke people, I collected a large body of narratives and stories. My interest in listening to the people’s stories instead

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of the story of the FVP that visitors and media are always interested in, seemed to release extraordinary energy in people to tell their story. They were hungry to speak. I consider their stories the strength of this research.

My research contributes to existing Roma narrative scholarship, first, because there is very little Roma research focusing on Romungros. Second, by applying an interdisciplinary approach, I focused on both Hungarian and international oral and visual storytellers, helping me to explore new nuances and changes in the Roma discourse, in relationship with the FVP’s “Roma empowering” narrative. By analyzing both villagers and artists I contributed new insight into two distinct levels of Roma experience.

Examining the villagers’, the artists’, and the FVP’s narratives revealed the dialogue or lack of dialogue among them. As a result, many themes emerged during my study that had formerly been silent. Third, since my study focused not simply on oral and visual narratives, but also on the interaction between these narratives and performances, my research adds additional dimensions to the multilayered Roma discourse. Fourth, I extended Riessman’s narrative analysis and DPA to visual narratives. Although Riessman suggests that both are useful not only for oral narratives, I did not find any communications research that adopted this method for visual narratives. However, identifying visuals as narratives and defining their genres brought new layers into my visual analysis. Fifth, since the icon-village and its inhabitants have not yet been the subject of a communications study, exploring Roma experiences in Bódvalenke uniquely contributes to Roma narrative research. I consider narratives and performances in

Bódvaleke as important parts of contemporary Roma life that are doomed to remain

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unheard if we do not pay attention to them, if we fail to document and communicate them. And sixth, I believe my study is a valuable new source of information and thought about how best to make an integrated community whether of Roma and non-Roma, black and white, or any other mingling of peoples. It also is a new source of information about the top-to-down “integration” that, from an emic perspective, is experienced as

(neo)colonization. I proved this concept to be a communicational, logical and moral fallacy. In the light of recent events, this finding seems worthy of attention, since today,

European Roma politics have moved in the opposite direction by mandating a European

Roma Institute67 uniquely for Roma art and Roma artists, basically instituting on a large scale the very project –the “compulsory folklorization” to an essentialized “Roma culture” and “Roma identity”–that the people and artists reject in Bódvalenke.

One limitation of my research is that I am not an insider in the Romungro community. I was reflective in every step of this study and careful to avoid bias based on my non-Roma Hungarian origin by frequently asking interviewees if I did not fully understand something. This, however, could not entirely compensate for the fact that I was not an insider. I was dependent on the villagers’ words, advice and corrections to check my understanding of them.

And then, I had to translate their words from Hungarian into English, a painfully difficult process. I wanted to preserve their unique storytelling style and lexical choices as much as possible, but it was impossible exactly to translate their words and capture all their rich connotations in English. Bódvalenke people speak Hungarian with the

67 See Jovanovic, Z. & Rose, R. (2015). 345

vocabulary of the 1960s to 1970s. Their use of language is closer to poetry than to everyday language. This was most remarkable in the cases of the oldest generation and in the poorest families. They are the ones who have these performances which beg further research. They often seem to misuse the Hungarian language, but they break linguistic rules to express something more complex than correct syntax and grammar will allow them.68 They use sounds that do not form words, but have exact meanings, like “yay, yuuy, eee, huu, haa” which I try to preserve in the text. But I cannot recreate the aura, the feeling--what it means, for example, to witness Lilla’s speech: her authority, her energy, her emotions expressed with her large variety of inflections. In short, her narrative style.

An opportunity for future research would be to spend more time with these remarkably evocative narrative styles. In what follows, I summarize Chapter Seven.

Summary

This final chapter presented the results of my narrative analysis and dialogic/performance analysis. I summarized the relationship among the people, the artists and the murals’ stories and their performances. I discussed the results of the study, its theoretical consequences and implications in light of the theoretical literature. I answered the first and second research questions, summarized the conclusion, strengths and limitations of the study, and suggested fruitful opportunities for future research. The following section contains references.

68 This phenomenon is similar to the African Americans’ use of Black English Vernacular. 346

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APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

Introductory Protocol:

To facilitate my note-taking, I would like to audio tape our conversations today. For your information, only researchers on the project will be privy to the tapes which will be eventually destroyed after they are transcribed. Please give your oral statement that you understand that (1) all information will be held confidential, (2) your participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time if you feel uncomfortable, and (3) I do not intend to inflict any harm. Please give your consent to audio/video tape your answers. Thank you for your agreeing to participate.

I have planned this interview to last no longer than 30-40 minutes.

Introduction:

I would like to speak with you today because you live in Bodvalenke and most likely have a great deal to share about the experiences what it means to live here. I am interested in hearing your story as a person, a member of this village, and would like to ask you to tell me about the wall paintings in the village. I am trying to learn more about people living in Bódvalenke and about their stories.

Questions:

A. Demography

1. May I ask your age?

2. Since when do you live in Bodvalenke?

3. What do you do?

B. Individual life

1. Tell me something about yourself. What is your story? Tell me about your family.

2. How is life in Bódvalenke? How is life in Hungary?

3. Can you remember an event that was very important for you?

4. Tell me about your house. How was it to lend your house for the painting?

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6. What would you mention as your most vivid memories from the past?

What are the most important things for you today?

7. Could you walk me through your typical day?

8. When do you tell stories? How do you tell stories?

9. Can you tell me a story or tale that you think most of the villagers know or

tell. Why?

C. Community life

1. Do you remember any changes in the village? Do you remember any conflict in the community? A specific struggle?

2. How do you celebrate? How do you discuss when something goes wrong?

3. Tell about the making of the frescoes. Do you remember something about the artists/villagers?

Can you tell me something about the tourists?

D. Murals

1. What do the murals mean to you? Why?

2. What do the murals tell? Which one is your favorite? Why?

Which one you do not like? Why?

3. What is the role of the murals in the village? What is it for you?

E. Closure

1. Is there something else you would like to tell?

2. Do you have any question?

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Interview Protocol in Hungarian

Bemutatkozás:

Szeretnem felvenni a beszélgetésunket hogy jobban emlékezzek rá. Szeretnem hogy tudjad, hogy nem adom ki másnak ezeket a felvételeket. A hangfelvételt átirom szövegre, és megszüntetem. Amit használok a videóból megmutatom önnek mielőtt mások látják. Kérem mondja rá a hang vagy video felvételre hogy (1)érti mit csinalok, (2) tudja hogy bármikor megállhat ha kényelmetlenül érzi magát, és (3) hogy nem akarom hogy bántódása legyen, és megengedi hogy a hozzászólását felvegyem. Köszönöm hogy beszél velem. Körülbelül 30-40 percre tervezem ezt a beszélgetést.

Bevezetés:

Azért szeretnék beszélni önnel mert itt él Bódvalenkén és biztos sokat tud mesélni arról hogy milyen az élet itt. Érdekel hogy ön hogy él, a falu hogy él, és mit tud mondani az ikonokról. Érdekelnek az Bödvalenkei emberek és hogy miket mesélnek.

Kérdések:

A. Demográfia

1.Szabad kérdeznem hány éves?

2. Mióta él Bodvalenkén?

3.Mit csinál?

B. Szemelyes élet:

1. Mondana valamit magaról? Mondana valamit az élettörténéről? Mondana valamit a családjáról?

2. Milyen az élet Bódvalankén? Milyen az életMagyarországon?

3. Mesélne valamit a házáról? Elmesélné hogy történt a házfalak kifestése?

Tudna emliteni egy eleven eseményt ami fontos volt magának a múltból? Mik a legfontosabb dogok ma?

4. Elmondaná mi történik egy átlagos napon?

8. Mikor szokott meseket mondani? Hogy szokott meséket mondani? Kinek szokott meséket mondani? 371

9. Melyik az a történet amit mindenki tud a faluban? Milyert tudja ezt mindenki?

C. A falu élete:

1. Emlékszik fontos változásokra a faluban? Emlékszik valami összetűzésre? Emlékszik valami nehézségre?

2. Hogy szoktak ünnepelni? Hogy beszélik meg ha valami rossz törtánik?

3. Mondjon valamit az iconok készítéséről. Hogy emlékszik a művészekre? Ismerős az a történet amit a külföldi Roma festők festettek? ) Hogy emlékszik a falubeliekre? Mondjon valamit a murálokról. Mondjon valamit a turistákról.

D. Murálok:

1. Mit jelentenek a murálok maganak? Milyért?

2. Mit meselnek a murálok? Melyik a kedvence? Miért? Melyiket nem szereti? Miért?

3. Mia a murálok szerepe a faluban? Mi a murálok szerepe neked?

E. Befejezés:

1. Van valami más amit mondani szeretne?

2. Van valami kérdése?

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APPENDIX B: IRB APPROVAL

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