SUNDAY, AUGUST 05, 2001
EURO VISION / Rashmee Z Ahmed Gypsies, tramps and thieves in pro-rights Europe
RASHMEE Z AHMED
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Gypsies, tramps and thieves, sang the even-now magically unlined Cher 30 years ago, and they are still repeating the rousing chorus in a new Europe that is supposedly uniting from Prague to Paris under the banner of human rights. In the latest outrage against the Romanies, dirt-poor, unlettered and unloved by all but their own, the gypsy is being turned back from Czech airports as he seeks to make his way into Britain.
Czech president Vaclav Havel is outraged, despite heading a government that quiescently assisted in British plans to control potential illegal asylum seekers by imposing ad hoc immigration checks on departing Czech citizens who ordinarily require nothing but their passports to take the flight into Heathrow.
Havel's outrage is eloquently expressed, as befits a philosopher-president who helped set up the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Oppressed in the former Czechoslovakia in the unquiet years after the Prague Spring, and fought the thought police with works such as The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. But it does not ring true.
Ten centuries after they spread across central and eastern Europe in a thin chain of several million people, the Roma remain the continent's dispossessed. They are still common nowhere folk, condemned by the wanderlust that took them thousands of miles from Punjab to hovels in Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, right through to Turkey, on the edge of Europe.
They spread in waves, lapping the margins of unwelcoming host communities, exerting the queer gypsy magic of myth and misconception, "doing whatever they could, selling bottles of doctor good", as the song goes.
They have got nowhere, but there is a profound stirring in the heart of the 21st century Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's deformed gypsy youth cowering in the bell tower of Notre Dame cathedral. There are signs the roar for change is being heard. Last year, the UN published a landmark indictment of Europe's treatment of its unsought Roma minority. Late last year too, the Roma held their first international conference of elected parliamentarians and representatives, a pitifully thin turnout for a notoriously populous people.
Hungary now has its first Gypsy Radio station. The Czech Republic has a TV and radio programme dedicated to Romanies, alongside a life-size puppet called Pindralko who teaches "integration" to gypsy children. Meanwhile, a Roma renaissance of sorts is underway in Hungary and Poland, where gypsy music is becoming fashionably decadent, always a sure sign of mainstream acceptance.
In truth, the Roma wagon is hitched to a larger utility vehicle for many of the 12 countries waiting to join the European Union. A recent European Commission report was scathing about racial torment and neglect that is the gypsy lot in the candidate-countries. The Roma, it seems, can drag down those unable or stubbornly unwilling to cross their palms with faux-silver euros.
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V S Naipaul, Sir Vidia to you and me, sells words. He has never done anything else, from the time he left Oxford to edit the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme and become a novelist who regularly won every prize in the book. The salesman was eventually promoted to what he once described as "the manager of narrative", latterly only by means of curmudgeonly comment to eager interviewers.
The latest controversy stems from more fulminations in the same vein -a seemingly senile sounding-off on John Maynard Keynes, E M Forster, his licentious homosexual liasion with Indian "garden boys" and the complete inanity of any literary passage to India made by anyone other than Sir Vidia. He also confessed to finding Ulysses incomprehensible because "Joyce was going blind and I can't follow the work of a blind writer".
The British press is transfixed. Naipaul makes good copy, his own or that of someone else, in this case interviewer Farrukh Dhondy. As a squire in gentle Wiltshire in the English countryside, Naipaul can afford to please himself and ensure a good press to the high-minded Literary Review magazine. The publicity will also do him no harm now that Picador publishers are reprinting all his works and his new novel, Half a Life, is due out next month.
At nearly 70, Naipaul, who once won the Somerset Maugham award for one of his early books, would probably relate to Maugham's trenchant aside on the life of the ageing writer. Unless he stays in the news, said Maugham, his obituary would probably prompt surprise: "I thought he had died years ago".
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