Madeline Potter needs no introduction to most English Literature students at Edinburgh. She is a scholar focussed on the 19th Century and has written books, and delivered talks on multiple radio shows and conferences.
Her latest work, The Roma: A Travelling History, is a very personal portrait of the Roma’s cultural background and history, packed to the brim with larger-than-life characters. We meet a Romani boxer who doused himself in flour to make fun of the Nazis, a Romani rights activist heralded as the ‘Martin Luther King of Sweden’, and we meet Maddy herself, in a candid tour of her own life.
The Tab sat down with her to get the full low-down on the book.
She says the response “has been great. The majority of responses have been really good. I’m very thankful. It’s been great to see it out there and for more people to learn about the Roma.
‘The story of the book came to me partly just from my experience. Growing up in Romania, everyone knew – for better or for worse (often for worse) – who the Roma were, but one thing I noticed in Britain was that a lot less was known about the Roma.
“The Roma were confused with Travellers and nomadism, and there were a lot of misconceptions, so I started speaking out a bit more about Romani issues! I started publishing some blog posts. I was being quite vocal on social media, and as it gained more momentum, my amazing literary agent Matt Turner suggested we might work this into a book.”
The Roma’s history begins in northern India, from which they emigrated probably 1500 years ago. Not in Egypt – the derivative of the term “gypsy’”
“The term ‘gypsy’,” Potter tells me, “is quite controversial. In North America, Romani communities consider it a slur. In the UK, some groups prefer it as a self-identifier. It comes from the term ‘Egyptian’ – which is an error, because they’re not Egyptian, but from Northern India.”
“The Spanish term – gitanos – has a similar etymology,” she points out, “and we have similar terms in Romania and Bulgaria. So you can’t say ‘everyone just mistook the Roma for Egyptians’ – that would be far too convenient a coincidence. We don’t know, because Romani history is such an oral history, but they themselves likely brought up Egypt. Egypt comes up a lot in Romani legend, but they also would have travelled through Egypt, and are quite likely to have spent time there, so that could be why.”
The book quotes an article from The Gazetteer that describes the Roma as “fortune tellers, impostors, bawds, whores, thieves, robbers, smugglers, murderers and plunderers at shipwrecks”. I asked why this group were subject to almost beyond-parody-levels of racism.
“A mix of reasons. Obviously, you get simple racism and suspicion in response to darker skin, non-European groups, and cultural traditions that don’t fit in. Nomadism is another reason. The safety of the home is threatened by people who are historically nomadic (with some exceptions). Where are they coming from? Where are they going? There’s a sense of not being able to pin them down.”
Stories are a key theme of the book, and these stories of individuals are what Maddy clearly most enjoyed telling me. “It’s hard to pick a favourite story in the book,” she said, “because I love them all, but Trollmann and Katarina Taikon [proclaimed the Martin Luther King of Sweden] are up there. Trollmann was a popular boxer in Germany, stripped of his titles by the Nazis for being Sinti (a Roma sub-group).
“So he decided to give them what they wanted – an Aryan fighter. He douses himself in flour and dyes his hair peroxide blonde. He is parodying racism and laughing at it, but also, think about what was at stake. That’s what leaves me in awe of him – having the guts to do it and put his life on the line.”
Whilst this is of course a book about racism, I asked her if she welcomed non-Roma readers taking solace in these stories for their more universal themes.
“Absolutely, 100 per cent. I’ve loved meeting or hearing from Roma and non-Roma readers who filter it through their own experience. It’s fascinating. I’ve had working-class British people who resonated with the Roma’s experience of generational poverty.
“I’ve had people from an African background resonate with the enslavement of the Romani people. And Mary Squires’s story has themes of trial by media, although it’s not social media.”
“The book is part history, but also part memoir. Were your personal experiences cathartic to write?” I asked.
“Very cathartic. I do go into some very vulnerable moments in my life, including my life being threatened. I wrote about my personal experiences not because this is all about me, but to show that history isn’t something that has happened. It’s something that continues to happen. We live in history, and individual lives don’t exist within a void.”
And – as Maddy is among the younger age range of memoir writers – I couldn’t resist my final question: Will we be getting a sequel?
“I hope there won’t be things as intense to write about. I do have ideas for more – maybe doing a travelogue to India and seeing what that’s like as a member of a diasporic south-Asian group. I may also write about how the Gothic particularly helps that healing process. Right now, it’s still very fresh off the press, so I’m taking some time off – and finishing up my academic monograph that’s coming out in January – but there may be another trade book coming!”
The Roma: A Travelling History is available from all major book retailers.
Featured image supplied by Madeline Potter.
