Károly Bari
To Be a Gypsy and a Poet
Reflections on Poetry, Prejudice and the Past
Our traditions preserve us. They do battle with time daily for our sake, they guide us through the ages, they teach us to be teachers. Knowingly or by instinct, we impart to our children the legacy of our forbears, the knowledge received from them - words and gestures, of celebration, of grief, things to help us find our way in the world.
So are past traditions preserved by us. We guard these traditions and do not let them fade away, for they define our being, our place in the community, empowering us to pass on knowledge of who we are.
But keeping traditions and customs alive in the ethnological sense is only one part of the story. There is also the all-important question: Must a poet shape his art and imagination according to the dictates of a traditional culture? The question is not just theoretical, for in this part of the world the problem of adherence to a set of cultural norms is present at the very earliest stage of a promising artistic career. In our region the "writer with a mission" remains a potent ideal; poets are still seen as leaders of people, with programmes to save an entire nation. Assuming this traditional role requires that the poet employ those themes and styles that the public acknowledges as being appropriately "poetic"; this is the only way his works can have any impact, the only way he himself can be regarded as the real thing.
Tradition marks out its own boundaries, it defines the dominant features of its terrain and assigns them meaning. A writer wishing to situate his work within the confines of this territory has at his disposal well-tested models, ready-made ingredients.
But is this usable property? The imagination never follows preconceiv-ed plans, unpredictability is its reason for being, allowing for the random flow of ideas, the ability to connect the real with what lies beyond reality.
Yet the basic forms of traditional culture cannot be abandoned, either, if only because they play a part in the way we think and create order in our world.
There is a recurrent motif in the decorative art of both African and arctic peoples: the depiction of animal prints left in sand or snow. These records, on shields, pottery and other household objects, are not realistic representations. The patterns of painted or carved footprint samples become symbolic images, abstract configurations, often reminding these people of the zoomorphic footprints of mythic ancestors.
As the imprint of beasts and birds remains in the sand or in snow, so do sights, feelings, happenings leave their mark on human consciousness. Poets create their images from just such traces, according to their artistic will and ability. They turn the most fleeting of perceptions and impressions - fog settling in for the night on stairs, a quiet whisper, a throbbing rush of blood, a pale dawn - into individualized symbols.
Only in such memory traces can our origins, our traditions be revealed, as part of a system of poetic signs. They cannot gain the upper hand, however, for then they may overwhelm other symbols and empty them of meaning. But if they assume their appropriate place in a poem, along with its other constituent elements, then the finished work doesn't merely echo an infinite past, but evokes the heartbeat of a real world that turns its back on that infinity.
I believe that a poet cannot allow himself to conform to the well-worn norms of tradition, although, morally, he is duty bound to acknowledge the essence of his communal heritage, especially if it acts not as an impediment, a barrier, but as a source of inspiration, an aid to the imagination. If the works born of this inspiration can testify to the poet's sense of liberation, his love of the unusual, his intimate knowledge of the world.
One may fully embrace the traditions of his community, in a strict ethnographic sense, or in the form of emotional, intellectual sympathy, though either way such commitment has its dangers - especially if these traditions are rooted in distant cultures. For the majority, the traditions may be unacceptably alien, and their practitioners may also seem annoyingly different. Societies from time to time expel from their midst minorities whose ways are unlike theirs; they consider them inferior, beyond the pale, expendable.
Are there people who in such circumstances are ready to protect and rescue the innocent victims? Are there people who will at least try?
The reason why there aren't is perhaps because humanity is like nature; things take their course and indifference reigns. Rocks do not protect trees when they are about to be chopped down. And trees do not prevent rocks from being toppled.
Except if there is a miracle. Yes, a miracle must occur for the unmoved and immovable to turn compassionately against destruction. Trees must shoot out their branches all the way to the sky to scare off intruders. And rocks must raise themselves into a mighty wall with which to surround and safeguard the trees.
We know of such miracles.
We know of people who, heeding the word from on high, risked their lives to help those in mortal danger. During the time of the Nazi Holocaust there were many who stood up to the madness of racial hatred. Religious institutions, diplomats in embassies, ordinary citizens were active in sheltering and saving people who suffered for being different. In the awesome partitura of a terrible age, compassion itself transcribed the secret notes of an inspiring melody, and they were sounded on the heartstrings of those who had the courage to decipher the notes. They were there to help conceal and save members of communities and nations persecuted by the Nazis.
But not the Gypsies.
Nobody hid them, nobody procured letters of safe-conduct for them, no one paid much attention to their annihilation. Even miracles were selective; no tree was made to sprout extra leaves, no stone walls were raised for their protection.
There is a type of prejudice that manifests itself in inaction. People who are cast out on account of their race are left to their fate mainly because the majority tacitly approves of the expulsion. They don't offer to help even when it's in their power to do so, and the reason is clear: the victims belong to a branded group. The problem is not cowardice but indifference, the kind that is brought on by a prejudice.
It is true that these people's aversions do not degenerate into brute force, yet the feelings lurking behind their inaction do resemble those that erupt in monstrous deeds. Even mild prejudices can fuel racial hatred, which has to be one of the cruelest of human emotions regardless of the form it assumes.
But what is it that calls such emotions into being? What is behind the hatred of the "other"? Why the age-old animosity toward Gypsies, for instance? What brought it on, what brings it on still? Their lifestyle? Their character? A set of external features? And how is it spread?
I've often thought that words of hate, as soon as they are spoken, come alive and turn into swarms of tiny creatures with rustling wings. And as they take to the air, they touch people one by one, each touch enabling these creatures to secretly penetrate a person's consciousness.
Or maybe it doesn't happen quite so fancifully. Perhaps it's the pull of reality that disfigures human attitudes.
The hostility toward Gypsies can be traced back to the image most people have of them - a distorted image that is nevertheless thought to be true to life. The mysterious, the unknowable and unpossessable invariably evokes fear. And this fear seeps deep into our thoughts and narrows our outlook. Gypsies, with their uniquely free lifestyle, their authentic traditions and folkways, their refusal to accept society's harness, always had an air of mystery about them. Their communities, closed and mistrustful because of constant persecution, remained completely unknown to the outside word.
For centuries, the image of the Gypsy was based on fantasy, superstition, vicious rumour, and official reports of criminal proceedings. The lives of ostracized and stigmatized Gypsies must have seemed so inferior and degraded, so utterly devoid of redeeming features, the general feeling probably was that they didn't deserve to be saved. Gypsy survivors of the Holocaust have told me that even in the concentration camps, when placed in the same barrack with members of other nationalities, they were sometimes assaulted by their inmates just for being Gypsies.
I am not sure if it's possible to find an explanation for this. It is hard to fathom that at that lowest level of human degradation and helplessness, where death lay in wait for every single prisoner, there were still some for whom the nearness of a fellow prisoner from a despised race was more unbearable - if only for a flashing instant - than being in the shadow of imminent death.
Perhaps the explanation lies in that mystifying process, after all: in the invasive, teeming force produced by hateful words come alive. For anti-Gypsy sentiments over the centuries have become so pervasive, so ingrained, no rational explanation can be offered for the indifference that greeted Gypsies being hauled off to the killing fields, or for the cases of abuse inside the camps.
In recent decades groups of Gypsy artists have become more self-aware and assertive. Some have entered the public arena and tried in more visible ways to dispel prejudices and myths that are still very much a part of the dominant culture. But because they were unfamiliar with the ground rules of public discourse, their searingly truthful, too-trenchant interventions did not help their cause.Their aggressive, brutally frank anti-establishment stance was born out of instinctive fear rather than boldness. They were afraid that state-sponsored assimilation would put an end to the traditions that had sustained them, and dispose of their language as well. And when that happens, when assimilation does away with language, surely the pinnacle of a people's cultural existence, the guarantee of their collective identity, then a people, as a people, ceases to exist. This fear-inspired frankness may be likened to the sting of a bee, which is delivered as a means of self-defense, even though the bee may die in the process. Predictably, the defensive action taken by Gypsy intellectuals evoked a punishingly hostile reaction and led to new forms of prejudice.
To be a Gypsy and a poet is a tall order; it means a solemn commitment to fight exclusion and hate. Yet a poet who wants to identify with his people need not wear the mantle of a visionary sage - especially if he is drawn by nature to aesthetic ideals which may be realized in language more universal than that expected from a poet with a sense of mission. In any case, I do not believe that modern poetry can be broken down into wholly disparate national variants. There are only two kinds of poetry - good and bad. At the same time, there are undeniable memory traces that point to one's origins. Like flash signals they elucidate a poem. In a bigoted environment, however, even these signals, which in reality are a poet's hallmarks, will be seen as negative racial attributes.
A poet who is the child of a scorned people can go in one of two directions: he can either aim for the heights or descend to the depths. I believe he must do the latter: work his way down to the very core of a reality that is made of both tangible and inapprehensible things. The lower he can plunge, the greater the force will be that will uplift him. The more profound his knowledge is of life's lower end, the higher his poetry will reach. And if his work is recognized by the world, this can be regarded as a victory over the prejudices directed at his ancestral community.
He must try to reach his goals even if he knows full well that a long time must pass before his own people will get to read what he wrote - for they must first overcome the burdensome legacy of centuries of backwardness and neglect. And this is so even though he knows, too, that words are like the human body, they become exhausted and age-worn with the passage of time; they falter, their meaning weakens, they can no longer carry the vital messages entrusted to them by their author.
Only by himself can a poet send off a poem packed with inexhaustible meaning, one that will stand up to boundless time. In it he strips to the bone and divides his presence among his words. It is his total honesty that ensures the invio-lability of the poem's core, its power source. He peels away appearances and confers on his words all the certainties of his being, the totality of his instinctual and intellectual self. This way the power and worth of his poetic statement will be enhanced, renewed by the response of succeeding ages. The passage of time will not diminish its meaning but lead to the discovery of newer and newer layers of meaning. Only such resonant words can carry the messages entrusted to them to the farthest reaches of time.
Tradition itself is preserved and transformed by the written word. A genuine work of art can indeed strengthen a people's identity; its life, its world finds expression in symbolic correspondences, coded messages in the sequence of images. For in order to convey a sense of reality, a poem need not be minutely realistic. Clearly, things of the real world become the stuff of poetry through creative transformation; deep-reaching experience, the lasting imprint of past and present are shaped by gifted hands, and metamorphosed into the language of symbol and metaphor.
A poem finding its reader is the poet's greatest reward. If he is lucky this encounter will occur while he is still alive. But it may happen that he will be long gone and the reader for whom the poem was made still has not been born.
It is like reaching out in the night. The sender of a letter is asleep, and so is the person to whom the letter is addressed. Yet the mail train will not be stopped, it cuts through the endless night, taking the letter from sleeping sender to sleeping recipient. The hope lives on that a streak of light will rend the darkness, and in that glorious flash the message will reach the one for whom it was committed to paper.
Translated by Ivan Sanders
Károly Bari
is a poet and painter, author of several volumes of poems and collections of Gypsy folk tales.
