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 | | Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca ISBN-10: 9780679737438 ISBN-10: 0-679-73743-X ISBN-13: 9780679737438 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-73743-8 Paperback 1996-10-29 Vintage Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Isabel Fonseca describes the four years she spent with Gypsies from Albania to Poland, listening to their stories, deciphering their taboos, and befriending their matriarchs, activists, and child prostitutes. A masterful work of personal reportage, this volume is also a vibrant portrait of a mysterious people and an essential document of a disappearing culture. 50 photos. | ||
Amazon.com Review They travel endlessly and seem to appear almost everywhere, yet they are the world's most mysterious people: Gypsies. Isabel Fonseca has done the impossible, entering into their world, living and traveling with Gypsies during several long trips to Eastern Europe, and she has brought back an insightful, highly personal, and very readable account of who the Gypsies are and how they live. The Gypsies have a legendary aversion to "gadje," or outsiders, but Fonseca has lifted the curtain and written gracefully about their lives on the edge of society. | ||
Reviews | ||
Made me a non-fiction reader Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey Before I read Bury Me Standing, I was devoted solely to fiction. My experience with non-fiction was limited to very dry histories that communicated NO sense of the people or circumstances involved. I don't know why I bought Bury Me Standing at the book shop of the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but I did, and it changed me in several regards. First, I gained a much broader understanding of what the Holocaust meant and means. The Roma/Gypsy population was, percentage-wise, as or more significantly decimated by the Nazis as the Europen Jewish population. Neither this book nor my review is about "who suffered more," but about acknowledging the full breadth of the impact of Hitler and his regime on generations of people in many locales. Before I read this book, my conception of the Holocaust was limited to its impact on Jews--I hadn't really thought about Gypsies, homosexuals or the mentally challenged. Second, this book explains Roma/Gypsy culture and history in a very accessible way. Whether or not you *think* you're interested, you will find that you are. Lastly, I *never* read non-fiction before I happened to pick up this book. My previous experience led me to see non-fiction as dry and dusty and entirely lacking in the elements I found most compelling in fiction. Bury Me Standing exploded all my preconceptions, and I have gone on to find equally compelling titles in a number of other subjects (granted, they are still few-and-far-between, but they exist in increasing numbers). I could not recommend this book more highly. | ||
"I've been on my knees all my life, so bury me standing." Upon a single reading, "Bury me Standing" seemed a well-deserved historical and literary triumph: a careful, if not an urgently honest, much needed and a beautifully unpretentious recording of Roma history. Out of a sense of pure urgency flowed a new voice: a window into a new, unfamiliar, hauntingly exotic, unimaginable world -- not unlike Arundati Roy's "The God of Small Things"-- in that it is written at the speed of ethnic life, with all the smells, the sounds, the pains and pathos, the music, the joys and the rhythms and cadence: the very psychology of gypsy existence. However, after three weeks of mental marinating and a second reading, it is clear that this book is a lot more than the sum of its literary and historical parts: It is also a sociological, theoretical and existential triumph. Coiled hidden in its subtext (easily missed on a single reading) is a new sociological theory of the origins of poverty that is at least as potent and as compelling as Oscar Lewis' own famous theory of the "Culture of Poverty." The underlying theme of Ms. Fonseca's theory is easily stated and is compelling: Wherever there are "violations of human rights," there must first have been "human wrongs." Thus the book beautifully begs the question: Why do we only study "the human rights of the victims" when clearly "it is the human wrongs of the perpetrators" that is the real problem? By posing this question from deep within the subtext (it is a meaning that lays in relief, in the silhouette of the chaotic Gestalt that is Roma History), Isabel Fonseca, has perhaps unwittingly, unraveled a whole new meaning to the phrase "culture of poverty." Her Story (In my words) The word "Gypsy" is a bastardization of the word "Egyptian" -- Egypt being where most of the world thought the Roma people came from. But this mistake, incorrectly ascribing Egyptian ethnicity to them, is only the first and only the beginning of a thousand years of misunderstanding and persecution of what was most assuredly a warrior caste that (language research and cultural habits prove) actually emanated from India. Left to drift on the Westward moving battlefields after the Crusades, the Gypsies had little incentive to return to their lowly status in India. They thus officially became one of the world's most notorious "stateless" people." As ex-warriors they had learned to survive on techniques and booty acquired in war. However, after the many wars and skirmishes, they became restless "ex-trained soldiers" operating from a base of insular cultural but extra-territorial enclaves as wanders bands of nomads on the outer periphery of civilization. They were in effect little pockets of tribes and clans committed only to themselves and to their own independence and survival. Understandably others often perceived them as petite-nations unto themselves; and thus as threats to the ruling petty fiefdoms and the cultural orthodoxies that sprung up and that were strung out all across the crumbling Byzantine Empire. As a result of their fragmentation, insularity and being perceived as genuine threats, the Roma people were repeatedly enslaved by the petty Feudal powers that "back-filled" the power vacuum left in the wake of the fall of the Byzantine Empire. From the ninth Century onwards the Roma people were either forced into slavery, or force to flee and survive on the "outskirts of civilization" on their wits, and on their cultural cohesion, on the crafts, musical talents or on the trades they had previously learned as warriors. But what defined their culture more than even the Roma people themselves are willing to remember or admit, were those periods of enslavement, most especially in Romania. Coupled with this were also their fierce need for independence and a yearning for a free unencumbered, and un-constricted cultural life: The post slavery Roma world produced a "home-grown" culture, a "home-grown" language and unimaginable cultural chaos, a culture constricted in its own insularity, that would prove maximally resistant to assimilation. As one would expect, this independence and insularity bred contempt and hatred from without; and more and more ignorance, poverty, and cultural chaos, from within. And like African Americans, the Roma people also had to contend with the negative effects of skin color, with their slave past, as well as with the negative effects of self-stigmatization: bred in a fierce determination to retain their culture (and cultural ignorance) intact and unmolested. As a result of these confounding variables the Roma tribes were forced to remain "in" but not "of" the cultures to which they were attached, inevitably becoming among the most feared and hated of the proverbial "other." The Embedded Theory What Ms. Foncesa's book shows more than any other theme is that "being perceived" as "the feared and hated other" is not at all an innocent sociological process, but is itself a singular defining systemic process -- both for the society in question and for its targeted minority groups. Since assimilation is a "zero-sum cultural identity game" in which "targeted groups" (at a minimum) are forced to justify their reasons for existing, their justifications must necessarily fit comfortably into the contours of the existing social order. Without this "entrance ticket," of comforting reasons for existing, competing cultures, especially those seen as "the other," are blocked from cultural validation and earning a seat at the national table. Without a seat, "the other" is "steered" directly toward a slow social death ending in social oblivion. Thus, I repeat at the risk of being redundant: being defined as "the other," is anything but an innocent social process. It is in fact one that is so systemically constricting and debilitating that in every way it fits the analogy of being the social equivalent of a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of its victim. For once a group is defined as "the other," each action it takes to extricate or defend itself is turned against it: simply tightening and hardening the pre-determined grip of negative views and attitudes held towards it. Being defined as the "other, thus creates a "run-away train, a virtual negative feedback loop" of hatred and self-hatred whose effect is that of making the targeted group's own counter-actions appear (both to itself and to others) as one of the primary causes of the group's own problems. Yet "being defined" as "the other," has nothing at all to do with the values of a targeted minority, but everything to do with the values and often corrupt norms of the majority. "The power to exclude," by defining others outside the group, is the ultimate global communal defense mechanism designed to protect the norms of the larger community against moral, social and genetic pollution and degradation. It is a reflexive action on the part of a "fear-driven" majority culture seeking to expand, extend, justify or consolidate its own norms. This societal Boa Constrictor is a potent force that can either squeeze the life out of an intended targeted minority group, or taken to its pathological conclusions, and as happened with Nazi Germany, boomerang back on the community itself. Ms. Fronseca's book proves that cultural and racial solidarity are not the only zero-sum games played in a civilized world. For our larger humanity is also a zero-sum game: Societies either have it or they do not. Focusing on the "human rights of a victim" cannot mask the "human wrongs" committed in the name of upholding majority community values and norms: Inhumanity cannot be used as a defense of humanity, no matter how well articulated or how carefully disguised or how well masked as being civilized. When group power becomes an end in itself, it is just corrupt humanity by another name (which is all that inhumanity is). It a broader sense, obsessive concerns with ones own group's power in the name of ethnic or cultural purity and hegemony can (and often does) transcend the group's own humanity, rendering it rules, its norms, its morals, its values, its ideals, and even its vaunted claims to purity (racial and otherwise), null and void. Fifty Stars | ||
Bury Me Standing Review I am gypsy. I have been severed from my heritage. This book gave me the reason behind my rhymes. The rituals of everyday life explained in this book are exactly the same as my own rituals, though I didn't know why I did them. I now know why, it's because I am gypsy and these are the gypsy ways. | ||
BURY ME STANDING~THE PLIGHT OF THE ROMA Great read for anyone truly interested in Roma studies or serious enough to get beyond the bias stereotypes of "Gypsy fortunetellers, beggers, tramps and thieves". This book goes way beyond scratching the surface of the socio-political and economic issues facing the Roma in Europe in the past and on a daily basis. Isabella Fonseca relates her close and personal experiences among the Roma in various countries such as Poland, Romania, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and some of the poorest countries of Europe. She also interviews many of the people she befriends and relates their experiences and treatment in the horrendous and unforgivable death camps of the Nazi's. No glamory here, the STARK truth. It will educate, shock and disturb you! | ||
Bravo! This book came highly recommended to me. Any book that aims at humanizing and demystifying the Roma people is a step in the right direction. I am a "white" American woman who has lived among the poorest of Gypsy people in the mountains of Romania. I can tell you from experience, these are a strong people, who have endured (and continue to endure) unimaginable hardships and prejudices. Many are unfairly shunned by society and go unrecognized by local governments. They are shoved to the side and forgotten. This book, "Bury Me Standing" is one of those books that everyone should read. You will be amazed at what you didn't know. You will be angry/sad/speechless as a result of what you find out. Read this book and then share it with others. It's a history that needs to be heard. | ||