People tend to get desensitized to death of fellow human beings whom they imagine to be inferior, and the Romani have been the target of racism for over 10 centuries. When a Roma person is killed by police, or by a doctor during birth, (to name a few recent examples from Eastern Europe,) mainstream society stays wilfully blind and silent. In an attempt to battle the casualness with which Romani lives are discarded by the “more civilized and sophisticated” culture, we wrote a short series of articles about Roma funeral rites, mourning customs, and processing grief. As a conclusion of this series, today we’re sharing an article originally published by Martina Petkova in the magazine An Injustice in September 2021, when she had befriended our Romani tribe but was still a few months away from marrying into it.
“You know how they beat you?”
“How?” I asked with dread. Nicky had just told me about how he was picked up by the police one time and held for the entire night, without any reason or formal arrest. “Beatings all night,” he’d said, “then they tied me to a pipe and opened the door. It was mid-winter. I had pneumonia in the morning.”
To me, this is the kind of trauma that will take a bottle of wine or a therapy session to open up about. He, on the other hand, was sharing it as any other fact about his life. Because things like this happen a lot in his life. Now he was telling me exactly how he was beaten up.
“They tie one of your arms up high to a wall or a cabinet. The other arm, they tie down, so you’re stretched and there’s no way to move or coil up. Then they beat you with a metal pipe.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Oh. A long time ago. Four years.”
“Four years is not that long ago.”
“It is to us,” he smiled.
By “us” he meant “us, the Romani.” Here in Europe, and especially here in Bulgaria, the Romani — more widely known in the West as “Gypsies” — are the most marginalized and persecuted minority. They haven’t had a break in over a millennium. They die in arrests, hospitals, streets, surrounded by coldness and hate.
Last year I befriended a Roma community. They have slowly started to accept and embrace me, calling me “sister,” “daughter,” “one of us,” and romka: the Bulgarian word for a female Romani. I love them like family. I feel most at home when I’m among them. And the more I learn about what they go through, the more I know I’ll never look at the world the same way again.
The white experience
White people, unless we’ve connected with a person of color in a truly human way, see racial violence as something that is “outside.” Outside of our homes, our lives, our memories, our worries, our hearts. Some of us are infuriated by it, crushed by it, angered by it, some of us deny it exists, and some of us think it’s “deserved.” Either way, it has to do with other people — people that are not “us.”
I never would have said that one year ago. I would have said I’m very educated on racial violence and that, even though I’m white, I feel it in my heart. And this was true and I did feel it in my heart.
But then my heart melted in with the hearts of my Roma friends.
The question that plagues me
Recently I wrote about how someone close to me said, in a moment of drunken despair over money troubles, “I could just kill a Gypsy and sell his organs.”
This was several years before I met my Roma friends and, also, I knew he was “just talking” and was never going to actually follow through. I was disturbed but knew this is “just one of those things people say” and “nothing more.”
But these days, the memory of what he said keeps whipping me. I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t stop wondering, “What if he had done it?”
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