Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

of themselves as victims, and the hegemonic discourses that re-appropriate
and transform pieces of people’s experience. Despite this tension, however,
it is possible to quote some stories which resist construction of a collective
identity based on hatred and exclusion, and which create movement
in a picture that, it seems, the official discourses would prefer to keep
frozen. 3
The Romany and a sense of the past
Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
In the interviews held with Roma subjects, there emerged an interesting
relationship with history which seemed to contradict the “absence of a
sense of past” often attributed to Roma culture. I refer mainly to the work
of Isabel Fonseca who compared Gypsies and Jews in their approach to the
Holocaust:
The Jews have responded to persecution and dispersal with a monumental
industry of remembrance. The Gypsies – with their peculiar
mixture of fatalism and spirit, or wit, to seize the day – have made an art
of forgetting (Fonseca 1995: 276).
On a large scale, this statement rings true, but I believe Fonseca’s theory
to be specific, not only to the two cultures involved, but to the different
power positions of the two subjects, (Romany and Jews), in the international
public sphere. The Romany probably had a different and particular
sense of the past, shaped according to their conceptions of time and
space, nomadism and permanence. This cultural attitude, however, must
also be seen in connection with the other subjects and institutions active in
this particular “struggle about official reconstruction of the past”. If the
Romany do not have a “strong” memory, they have not been helped at all
by non-Roma people, who often “forget” them in the official memory of
the Holocaust.
In the interviews, some of the Romany referred to the Holocaust tragedy
in conversations about their present experiences. This is a meaningful connection,
which shows both a sense of the past and an attitude towards selfreflection
and awareness. As Tahir said:
I thought that life in Italy was different, I knew that because of the history
books I read… I could have gone to Germany, two brothers of mine
live there but I had an argument with them… and after I read about the
history of racism, of nazism in Germany… that it has existed there for
several years, for 100 years… I was too worried about staying in
Germany because of what I read about all their history I thought: it might
happen again… we are at the point that history is happening again and so
I didn’t want to stay in Germany…
207