T is for Terminology which can be tricky to make Transparent when we talk about gender. Transgender is when someone desires the characteristics of masculinity or femininity so much they wish to cross over from one identity to another and change their dress, behaviour, expression and/or their physical characteristics to match their perception of a chosen gender.Transsexual is a specific term under transgender, where the person undergoes medical procedures to change physical sexual characteristics. Meeing the son of a Transgender in the 1970’s inspired me to write the novel Michel-Michelle forty years later. In between T for Traveller taught me to look beyond the labels. One label does not provide a strong sense of self.
Inspiration
A strange set of coincidences prompted by a BBC documentary on Irish Travellers led me to work with Rom/Traveller families for Save the Children in the UK in 1980. Among the many Travellers/Rom who inspired me was Anisa Vrankx. She was at the time General Secretary of the Romani Union, recognised by the United Nations in 1979 but also invisible to the media as she didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. Encounters with Anisa in Birmingham, Granada, Brussels/Gent, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Krakow, Udaipur, Béziers, Alicante, Granada were lived experience of identity and place. Anisa reinforced my belief that deep exchange between cultures is important in the struggle against the binary opposition of US versus THEM.
Silk Road
According to National Geographic the term Silk Road refers to “a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.” Anisa’s story took me through Sanskrit to the roots of Roma in the Banjara in India. She infused stony reality with the magic of Samarkand along the Silk Road. Movement of people followed the reality of sunlight and firelight, spices and oils, the heat of animal excrement and goods traded. The Silk Road is not a romantic story as the tents blew in the wind and the route was either too hot or too cold but it is a reminder that movement, trade and migration are part of our shared history. It is a reminder to question thee strange acceleration of pressure in the last one hundred years. The use of fossil fuels create patterns of consumption which combine with gross inequalities in the use and distribution of the earth’s resources to bring us to the point of collapse.
As I take a coffee break with the Guardian weekly, my imagination sits with a family crouching over a fire in a refugee camp to prepare coffee for a journalist who will write about them to remind us of the 100 million refugees, half of them children, who travel the world and are stuck in camps with stories to tell. Nomadic history is a good reminder of the stories of human migration through the centuries which cross and recross familiar and unfamiliar landscape and cityscape. The Silk Route is symbolic of the history of diverse cultures, traditions and rituals whose common roots are modified as we pass through time. To-day’s forms of trade and accumulation of power bring climate change, war and migration.
Save the Children in the West Midlands
Anisa was born French and her father jumped off a transport to Auschwitz and family survived the Second World War in hiding. Anisa married a Rom but her free spirt was not made for marriage. Her tale of separation conjurs up an image of a campaigning woman in the flowing robes of a princess locked in a Greek villa – another version of 60’s feminism and independence which took Anisa later to India to research the roots of Romani peoples. When Anisa summarises her research of Romani belief systems in a booklet published in 1997, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s reference to the sun as representing love when she claims “Romai religious feelings had different roots” from the Christianised Europe they encountered. Their beliefs centre on the importance of the Sun and the solstice which celebrate the “values of love, tolerance and generosity”. We are usually unaware of the close links between to-day’s belief systems or rituals and pre-Christian rituals. The effect of the sun on our mood even in citylife is still apparent and the solstice on 21 December celebrating the Sun God was easily transferred to Christmas.
From the West Midlands to Granada
Anisa invited some of the young women she met in England’s West Midlands to a conference organised by Rom Women in Granada. We travelled to Alicante where we bunked down in Anisa’s apartment before taking a bus to Granada. In preparation for the event, Traveller women made a banner with the Romani wheel symbol which was unfurled behind them on the platform, when the group from the West Midlands spoke. Among the hundreds of Rom from all over Spain, there were academics, teachers, lawyers – a revelation to the young Traveller women as role models of Rom/Travellers who had completed third level education in England were rare. Resistance, freedom, history and connection infused the air we breathed. The Irish Traveller and English Rom young women travelled in typical English skimpy summer clothes and I wondered if they would change for the evening celebration to mark the end of the conference.
Anisa introduced Margaret (colleague and the other chaperone) and me to a Cuba Libre (rum and coke) in the square while the young women dressed for the evening celebration on the hill above the Alhambra. When they emerged transformed by flowing flounces and jewellery with accounts of the help they had secured from the hotel staff, Anisa was not as surprised as we were at the communication skills of these first timers in Spain. Entry to the private celebration opened a new world through a wooden gate in the wall and onto a path uphill above the Alhambra palace. White dresses reflected the warm shadowy light of the stars and moon. Outdoor flamenco with the full courtship ritual, the post conference buzz and our transformation into a timeless place where we could celebrate equality with the joy and sorrow of survival. I knew then this was a one-off to hold in my memory. I treasure the privilege of watching the flamenco with the ritual drama of fans and handkerchiefs performed by one of the speakers at the conference as a celebration of a culture and not as a set piece for tourists. This space will never again be accessible to me as a visitor in Granada and sometimes I pinch myself again and email my friend and ex-colleague Margaret was it so or did I dream it? I wonder if the group treasure memories of this time too.
Anisa moved to France health reasons but lived for a good part of the year in Udaipur, Rajasthan to carry on her research on the Banjara roots of Rom. She recruited me to help her briefly with one of her projects but she made sure we had time to explore Udaipur. Anisa’s office and her local networking was framed by the palaces and lakes of Udaipur and the ease with which she introduced me to the silky white beauty of the city. She also persuaded one of the three-wheel taxis to take us to the nearest of the hill forts surrounding the city for a gasp at the history around us. When the monsoon times came every year she retreated to Béziers for health reasons. I visited her there only once and then I lost touch with her. I have only ever met one other to equal her spirit of resistance.
It is tempting to take out the rose-coloured spectacles and make exceptions of people like Anisa but there is nothing romantic about the persecution of those with a history of a nomadic way of life. Living in disconnection we lose contact with history and with wilderness but we still hanker after connection with nature and migration. We are drawn towards travel to visit scattered family or to temporary accommodation in tents, caravans, hotels or holiday homes to experience other places.
Anisa paid a high prices for her spirit of resistance. Her activism denied her a life amongst her family and community. Memories of travelling with her instil a yearning for something beyond the binary battles of everyday polarisation where the grubbiness of daily life makes poverty intolerable. In the lived exchange between cultures there is a place of story, knowledge and music bringing out the love, solidarity and compassion buried in our human nature. The shadows of the past can meet the challenges of the present with the help of magic and mystery.
In Ireland we are a long way in time and space from the Silk Routes where the Banjara travelled from India centuries ago. Or are we? In the 21st century we use the whole planet as a place to exploit for the benefit of a minority of its inhabitants or a place to experience “otherness” and exotica as distinct from “real” life and the home place. Meeting Anisa helped me challenge stereotypical labels of Us and Them in Ireland Traveller women who graduated as mature students in Irish Universities share Anisa’s spirit of resistance. Brave spirits like Mike addressing Gay Pride 2022 remind us how discrimination can cross cultures. Oein de Bhairduin’s retelling of stories told to him by his father is testament to the importance of oral traditions in Why the moon travels. Podcasts renew the oral tradition of story-skills. Rosaleen Mc Donagh’s multiple skills as academic, social worker, feminist, member of Aosdana, Traveller, playwright, disability activist and author present a simultaneous challenge to many stereotypes.
Refugees, nomads and migrants can help us dissolve the aggressive territorial nationalism and xenophobia which has followed the path of former empires. The impact of radical changes in economic and financial trade on the planet in our lifetime is clear. The shift of the East-West economic axis in the 21st century weaves space, place and time into fresh challenges.. In A Global Sense of Place, Doreen Massey traced how local spaces merge with global. In Return of the Native, Vron Ware peels back the layers of a corner of Gloucestshire to expose a place where we can where we can connect to past and present. Will the conflicts and wars in the world to-day combined with climate change bring an economic revolution even more radical than the Silk Routes and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Empires which followed?
Banjararoma.org
Margo Gorman 