Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel FonsecaA Mini-Review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
A deeply moving and insightful account of one of the most "liminal" and persecuted groups of people in the world, the "Gypsies" or "Roma" (though neither term is apparently in wide currency among the people themselves). Few communities can have been so unassimilable, so resistant to modernity -- yet to frame things in that way suggests that the Roma constitute a "problem" (that's certainly how any number of nation states, old and new, have regarded them; and it isn't surprising, given that the Roma's "marginal" status, and the spectre of unstable borders their traditionally nomadic lifestyle suggests, combined with their cultural difference vis-a-vis "Europe", all make the group transgressive of the mindset for which nation-states are the political horizon par excellence) -- Fonseca, certainly addresses that "problem"; but equally valuable is her attempt to present people as they are (as opposed to as symbols pointing elsewhere)...
View all my reviews.
2 comments:
I should get my hands on this.
Also, so strange to read this when I was also following this story when I was in that beloved city...beloved despite the fact that the cosmopolitanism that once defined it is just dying away...
Thanks for that link szerelem -- the more things change...
Post a Comment