romani

The Hollow Girl – Hillary Monahan

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Hillary Monahan, who is part-Romani and a sexual assault survivor, explores both topics in this wrenching but flawed novel. I really wanted to like it more than I did, but though I devoured it, I couldn’t give it more than three stars.

Bethan is a Welsh Romani girl who has been raised by a woman whom she believes to be unrelated to her. Her guardian is a witch in a world where magic is rare but real, and she wants Bethan to follow in her footsteps. Bethan is more concerned about dealing with her harasser, Silas, whose father is a leader who won’t accept that his son could do wrong. She’s also enjoying a budding friendship (or maybe something more) with diddicoy (part-Romani) farmboy Martyn, who is curious about her culture and helps her out at the market.

Things go seriously wrong when Silas attacks Martyn and Bethan, raping her and nearly killing her friend. Bethan turns to her grandmother’s arts to engage in a gruesome ritual to save Martyn and avenge herself on Silas and his accomplices. She deals with dissociation after the attack, and also has to consider whether or not she wants to continue along the path her grandmother set her on.

The ethics of the book are downright weird, with outright slavery in the form of a magical bond being condoned. The prose is also not at the level I hoped it would be. The setting is vague in terms of time–it seems to be in the past, but there aren’t a lot of clues as to when. Nevertheless, the characters sometimes use very modern language when discussing racism and other topics. And the grandmother character’s backstory somewhat unbalanced the book–I felt like it should have taken up either less space or more.

That said, it’s an interesting and readable book. Monahan brings her personal knowledge and experience to bear on two very important topics, and reading the book was certainly educational for me. But I feel like it had a lot of unrealized potential in terms of the writing.

American Gypsy – Oksana Marafioti

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This is a Soviet immigrant memoir with a twist– the author is half-Romani. The daughter of traveling professional musicians, she studies piano, is bullied at her Moscow school for her heritage, and hopes things will get better when her family moves to America. Right after a more-serious-than-usual teenage heartbreak– her boyfriend, who had traveled to Romania to fight for Romani rights, is murdered– her family finally gets the chance to move. Almost immediately on arrival, however, her parents split up, with her Armenian mom descending into alcoholism and her Romani father marrying a much younger woman and diving into the occult.

However, Oksana embraces the opportunities of her new country, learning English through romance novels and attending a performing arts magnet school. When she falls in love with a non-Romani boy, tensions with her father build to an unsustainable level.

This is a very funny memoir, with her stepmother’s occult antics providing much of the humor. One night, she forces Oksana to help her steal graveyard dirt for a spell, and they get stopped for speeding. The officer doesn’t believe them when they tell him the suspicious bag in the car is dirt!

There are the usual immigrant tensions between tradition and the new culture. Oksana’s stepmother is eager to marry her off, and her father views her as insufficiently free-spirited when she gets into the performing arts school (which he equates with the Soviet arts system), believing that she should learn from her family instead. The problem is that he doesn’t take her seriously enough as a musician to teach her, because she’s a girl. However, Oksana finds a balance between rebelling against sexist traditions and valuing her cultures.

You learn a lot reading this book without it being at all dry. The author offers a lot of detail about her cultures and her experience growing up in the USSR, though the book is mainly about what happened after they got to America. Some things I didn’t expect, such as the fact that though she and her family were discriminated against in the Soviet Union, they were also quite rich and connected. The author also indicates the diversity among the Romani themselves, explaining how Russian Romani were looked down on as sellouts by some Romani from other countries, and how her grandfather distrusted Hungarian Romani.

The only thing that bugged me was that at one point she talked about the negative stereotype of Ossetians in the USSR (as being gangsters), but then her only description of Ossetians in the book is of stereotypical gangsters complete with curved daggers.  This was understandable as the Ossetians were fighting with her father, but just seemed out of place in a book that was otherwise sensitive to these things.

Anyway, I both enjoyed and learned from this book.