28 ROMANIAN ROMANI RESISTANCE TO GENOCIDE IN THE MATRIX OF THE !IGAN OTHER Shannon Woodcock La Trobe University This article is an exploration of Romanian that scholars pay attention to how people identify Romani resistance to the Holocaust in Romania and name themselves, and how they respond to the through Romani engagement with the field of their names enunciated by others Of course self- oppression – the matrix of the !igan other. Far identifying Romani individuals can also use the from being a simple case of negative stereotypes word !igan to refer to themselves and others, a exaggerated and applied in the form of a name, the reflection of the function of the term !igan as a name !igan has been used by elite and subaltern location for the interaction of historically ethnic Romanians since the 15th century to project developed identities. Choosing one name or a gamut of necessarily paradoxical stereotypical another is itself a political act, and in this paper I characteristics anxiously articulated as antithetical choose to not choose for others, but to trace how to Romanian ethnonational identity onto the bodies individuals have claimed their own names as a of Romani people in Romania. This paper traces vital survival strategy. the historical formation of the !igan other, and The enslavement of Romani how the !igan identity functioned not only to communities in Romania and the making of create, maintain and police an economically !igani valuable slave class, but a social class of Roma as !igani vital as the internal other against which Romani individuals in Romania exist in different Romanian social groups articulated their historical sources as the property of boiers own identities. (landowners), state administrators and the clergy, A discussion of historical sources of where they are called “!igani.” The first archival Romani resistance to slavery, social persecution evidence of Roma in the Romanian principality of and genocide in World War II, must therefore take Wallachia is the record of 40 s!la"e (families) place through the matrix of the persecution of given to Voivod Dan I in 1385 from Vladislav I, a 1 Romani individuals as !igani. Indeed, Serbian landowner. Until 1699 (when documentary evidence written by Roma in the Transylvania came under the administration of the genocide of 1942-45 showcases the relentless Hapsburg empire), all Roma who entered the discursive strategies that victims used to negotiate Romanian principalities of Transylvania, the gauntlet of stereotypes (of !igan identity) that Wallachia or Moldova were captured and made everyday Romanians wielded to justify the slaves of the state; and after 1699 this practice deportation and murder of Romani Romanians. continued in Wallachia and Moldova and was modified somewhat in Transylvania. The state The purpose of this essay is twofold: to could retain slaves for their own use, or sell them begin reading Romani resistance to Romanian to boiers or monasteries. Slaves were called sclavi, persecution in the Romanian archives, and to draw robi, or !igani.2 Other ethnic groups were also attention to the importance of the location of interpellation of Romani peoples as various kinds of others in societies and times. In this way, I 1 speak about Roma as an heterogeneous self- Documenta Romaniae Historica B, #ara identifying ethnic group, !igani as the dynamic Româneasc! I, Edited by P.P. Panaitescu and phantasmatic projection constituted by stereotypes Damaschin Mioc, Academia Republicii Socialiste of otherness to and of the modern Romanian România, Sec$ia de %tiin$e Istorice, Bucharest nation. The word Gypsy means radically different 1966 pp.19-22. 2 things in Australia, England and America, so to The word !igan (plural: !igani) derives from the translate Roma or !igan as Gypsy erases the word Tsiganoi which was widely used in the specific meaning of the text. Reading the matrix Byzantine period to name Romani populations that of the !igan other as the site for dynamic moved west with the Ottoman forces. Roma have reproduction, containment and resistance, requires consistently called themselves thus as an ethnic group, and are a heterogeneous dynamic Volume 25, No. 2 Page 28 29 slaves, such as a small percentage of Tartars, but justify violent enslavement. The pervasive these groups were freed by the end of the 15th institutional and social stereotyping of the !igan as century, and only Roma remained slaves.3 The the lowest social category and requiring term !igan came to conflate the legal and social enslavement, especially as they played a vital position of slaves with ethnic Roma. To be a slave economic role in society, functioned to create a was to be considered an ethnic !igan. There was common group within the social hierarchy against no such thing as a free !igan, or a free Rom. which all other social and ethnic groups in the Romanians did not recognize or interpellate Roma Romanian principalities, including the indentured as anything other than !igani, sclavi and robi. Romanian peasants, could articulate themselves as Romani slaves called !igani were vital to superior (as free, white, Christian and, later, the Romanian economy, in which they provided European). Landowners (when talking to the the trades of their traditional family groups. The peasants) and peasants (when talking of Fierari were metalsmiths, making tools and themselves) articulated themselves as moral, equipment for farming, Lautari musicians provided obedient, and attached to the land – in contrast to entertainment for village fairs and weddings (for the !igani who would supposedly roam the land those who could afford them), the Ursari and refuse to work at all if not for their (thus entertained with their tamed bears, and other rationalized) enslavement. The !igan as inferior !igani worked as horse trainers and traders, gold other used to work the land was a vital identity panners and goldsmiths (Aurari), traders of small against which the peasants could articulate items, domestic workers, agricultural laborers and themselves as of the land – a differentiation that cleaners. Though the archives of landowners, served not only the esteem of the peasant classes, clergy and administrators constantly record the but also their supervising land owners who actions of their chattel, the vast majority of benefited from the !igani as the group that all Romanian historiography fails to mention the Romanian classes could police to the periphery hundreds of thousands of Roma who existed in together. Romanian society as !igani. Henri Stahl’s famous As with the constructed stereotypical history and sociology of Romanian peasantry and “Sambo” identity in the nineteenth century North agriculture mentions only once that monasteries American South that Stanley Elkin describes, so “exploited … gypsy [sic] slaves,” while Keith too was the stereotypical !igan considered “docile Hitchins lists the varied roles and the “economic but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but burdens” that were expected of “gypsies [sic] chronically given to lying and stealing; his …belonging to” monasteries and landowners, but behavior was full of infantile silliness and his talk does not discuss the place of these “social outcasts inflated with childish exaggeration.”5 These … foreign in customs, mentality and appearance” necessarily contradictory stereotypes functioned as in relation to other Romanian social groups or links in a chain, discursively containing any beyond these few sentences.4 Romani individual's actions or physical 6 As with slavery elsewhere, !igani were signification of Romani culture. Romani not a pre-existing community of slaves, but were resistance to slavery was relentless, but as the created in a detailed legal and social system; projection of the !igan other is powered by Romanians constituted the !igan as slave within an entire system of racial and social stereotypes to 5 Stanley M. Elkins Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life community of groups within that umbrella ethnic University of Chicago Press, second edition, term. Chicago and London 1968; p.82. 3 Viorel Achim !iganii în istoria României Editura 6 In post-socialist Romania the argument that Enciclopedia, Bucharest 1998 p.33. Roma is a word !igani created to deliberately 4 Quotations taken from Henri H. Stahl Traditional associate their supposedly uncivilized ways with Romanian village communities: The transition the European civilization of Romania is a from the communal to the capitalist mode of containment of even the right of Romani production in the Danube region Translated Romanians to name themselves. See Woodcock Daniel Chirot and Holley Coulter Chirot, “Romania and Europe: Roma, Rroma and !igani Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980; as sites for the contestation of ethnonational p.142 and Keith Hitchins The Romanians 1774- identities” Patterns of Prejudice Issue 5, Vo.41 1866 Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996; p.72. November 2007. Volume 25, No. 2 Page 29 30 anxiety of the Romanian identity, such as anxiety schoolteachers in the nineteenth century, for concerning the ability and right of Romanians example, Romanian peasants presented !igan masters to maintain control of slaves, Romani protagonists in character sketches reconstructing resistance was met with an increased anxiety and everyday social hierarchies of clergy and an increase in control through a strengthening of landowners against the peasants. In these the stereotypes of the !igan. projections of the !igan other, the !igan Slave owners,