ROMEDIA
FOUNDATION
IN
ALL TOIL THERE IS PROFIT
December 27, 2013
As the immigration of Roma to
Western European states continues to cause media panic, Damian Le Bas considers
the history of Romani trades and the astonishing variety of jobs that Europe and
Asia have relied on their “Gypsies” to do.
Picture: dental forceps, picture ©
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. To find out the significance of this picture,
please read on…
I’M a writer and a filmmaker: I
write and make films for a living, and writing and films are what put food on
my table. That might not strike some people as particularly surprising, but to
me, it still is.
When I was younger I tried to think
of myself as a writer, but it was hard to really believe it. It was a vague
aspiration, not a sensible ambition. And the most sensible ambition I could
have had wasn’t really an “ambition” anyway: it was to do what everyone else
did, the work that had put food on the table for years.
When I was a kid, “what everyone
else did” meant either selling flowers or doing building and roofing work.
These were the sensible options, and even people in my family who had
aspirations still had to do the sensible stuff.
My mother and father were
artists, but art didn’t pay the bills. They still sold flowers to make ends
meet. So I guessed that once I grew up I’d sell flowers or do some kind of
building. There were other options that seemed a bit more exotic but were still
pretty close to home: selling horses, fixing motors, or buying and selling
scrap; but the idea of selling words I’d actually written myself, or films I’d
actually made, would have sounded about as realistic as thinking I could go and
open a flower shop in outer space.
In Romani culture, the idea that you
should do ‘our kind of work’, ‘Gypsy work’ or ‘Romani buki’ or whatever you
happen to call it, is a powerful one. Why shouldn’t it be? We might think of
how common it is in all cultures to establish a ‘family business’, a trade you
and your vitsa are known and trusted for: fine. But setting up shop in a job
that plays to your strengths is not the same thing as playing a role in the
world of work because other people just expect you to, or because you don’t
believe you can do anything different.
Outside Romani culture, the idea of
‘Gypsy jobs’ is probably even more powerful. So what jobs do we do? They could
be classified in different ways I suppose. There are the jobs that are jobs,
and are useful to society; the jobs that are jobs, and aren’t useful to
society; and the jobs that aren’t actually jobs, but crimes. So, as examples,
in the first group we have agricultural labour (farm work); in the second
group, fortune telling; and in the third group, stealing. There’s one
hypothetical, externally generated tri-partite paradigmatic prism for viewing
Romani labour. Or- in English- an outsider’s way of looking at Romani work.
Why do views like this continue to
prevail, when they clearly have a detrimental effect on Romani people’s view of
themselves and their potential (as they would have on anyone’s) and also
clearly fail to describe the variety of jobs we are doing and, also, the
variety of jobs we have always done? Yes, you read that correctly: the variety
of jobs we have always done.
In the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford
University, my mother came across the pair of dental forceps shown in the
picture above. The card attached reads:
“Dental forceps made by local
GYPSIES. Made of iron, with long, slender, curved handle: the small pincer jaws
end in two teeth on each side. Length c.17cm. People:
Albanian Gypsies. Locality: Scutari,
Albania. Collected by Miss M.E
Durham, 1911. How acquired:
presented by her, 1933.”
This information is significant, but
not as significant as what Professor Thomas Acton later unfolded about these
forceps. The Romani people (“Albanian Gypsies”) who made them would not only
have been blacksmiths talented enough to make medical instruments, but they
were also doing the dentistry. This is at least 80 years ago, and these
“Gypsies” were dentists.
This is but one example of the
variety I mentioned above, but it’s a didactic example at least. I can’t fully
explain why this discovery made me smile so much, but I’ll try to explain it in
part.
I smiled- as I did when I first read about Helios Gomez, the artist and
political thinker who was also Gitano- because it made me realise that, coming
from a Romani family and feeling that I have a good grasp of my cultural
heritage, there is still so much I do not know, that most of us do not know,
about the range of things our people have done to survive. Historical textbooks
are at pains to point out that one reason why Roma people in the Islamic world
were doing trades like dentistry is because they were considered unclean by
others: this information is of secondary significance to me.
The main thing is
that the resourcefulness and skill of these Roma led them to take up this
trade, and this history of flexibility, and of skill, is not being made enough
of in the current political discourse around Romani immigration.
Above: the Gitano artist
and leftist political thinker, Helios Gomez.
There is one other caveat to all
this discussion, which thrives on the presumption of laziness and fecklessness
among Romani people. Let’s keep it simple: in plenty of corners generally
hidden from the selective eyes of well-known history, Europe has gotten rich by
breaking the backs of Romani people who worked and worked for centuries, the
problem being that they were neither paid, nor respected as humans. Vast,
successful corporations (you know who you are) have been seeded in this way and
continue to thrive from these roots, and the very least we can ask is that this
be noted and respected as part of the history of our continent.
“In all toil there is profit, but
mere talk tends only to poverty:” so we are told by the biblical book of
Proverbs. It’s a nice quotation with a bold simplicity to it, and you might
even find yourself nodding along. I did. Then I thought about reality, and one
reality in particular: slavery. It’s unlikely that the author (or compiler) of
the book of Proverbs was a slave: literate slaves were few and far between in
the ancient Near East. Anyway, in the toil of slavery there is indeed profit,
it’s just that the profit doesn’t happen to go to the one who is toiling.
By Damian Le Bas
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