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As the red light glimmered in the pink of the evening haze,
a woman wearing long, flowing skirts canoodled up to my car
and drew a soapy heart onto the windscreen before me. Persistently,
but not aggressively, she was asking for money to clean my
car windows before the traffic light turned green. Staring
beyond her towards the dusty haze of Antibes and the
azure-blue of the Mediterranean Sea, I shrugged my
shoulders to show I had no money but resolved to return to
this spot and to talk to her people, the tziganes of
France.
The word tzigane, like the English word gypsy, has etymological
roots in the word Egyptian and evokes the sense of a bohemian
lifestyle. The three main groups of French tzigane are called
rom, manouches, and gitans and all travel around France in
caravans finding shelter in illegal locations and often causing
much unease in local communities. Like the swallows, they
arrive on the Cote d'Azur with the frost and then leave
as spring begins to warm the air. My time on the coast had
similarly been bird-like, as I had darted from place to place,
exploring and seeking understanding.
Perhaps for this reason, the next day as I drove back to
the same spot I remembered that once, as a child in the farming
land of Scotland, I'd rescued a baby swallow. In the warm
dust of that evening, I'd stood in the shadows of the feedbarn
and felt its large, purple heart beating through its gentle
pink body as other swallows and the odd bat flitted overhead.
The memory of that pulse rippled through my body as I left
my car and walked not towards the gypsy woman but two of her
male companions. As I walked, my heart beat quickly in tune
to the young boy who was now circling around me on his bike.
He taunted me with questions and challenged my nerves as I
began to explain in my halting French that I wanted to interview
them for a local English newspaper. By this point, I was so
nervous that my voice and my body were shaking and I needed
to stop to take additional breaths. Initially, they fed off
my fear and pushed off my need to understand their world.
The clear sense I had at this point was that I was too different
to them, and that the bridge to their culture was too fragile
for others to tread.
However, as I began to explain that I, too, was a traveler
- that I was Scottish but had been born in Africa and had
traveled through America and Europe - something magical began
to happen. The heart of the baby swallow that beat inside
me began to gain confidence and so my cautious pose became
more determined. In response, Micheal, the stocky dark-skinned
slightly aggressive one, began correcting my French and even
began speaking his own, hesitant form of English. Slowly our
similarities began to bridge across the warm, dusty air as
they began to smile at my beat-up car, whose windows still
needed washed. Then, they began to talk of their own accord.
As they voiced the difficulties of being gitans (gypsies),
they seemed wearied by their situation and ready to find land
to stop and build homes for their families. "What many
of us want is a place to build and so, as long as we are unable
to build - even on the land we buy ourselves - we will remain
displaced," Micheal explained this quietly as his eyes
followed a distant gull gliding along the rocky beach shore.
The sense of disappointment on their faces was obvious: "we
are accepted nowhere and so, as long as we are not accepted,
we will continue to travel to places where there is work."
Such dependence on seasonal work takes them not only around
France but also to Britain where they feel they meet many
of the same problems. Talking with them, I came to understand
that there are those who wish to travel for the sake of their
history but that equally there are those who are working hard
to accumulate their wages to better provide for their families
and their future.
As the meeting closed, they were quick to point out that
they preferred the term 'gens du voyage' (travelling folk)
to tziganes. Perhaps, like many of us, they prefer not to
be labeled en masse by stereotypes. Indeed, as I walked back
to my car and stared out to the birds flitting across the
sea, I knew the next time someone drew a soapy heart on my
windscreen, I'd try to look further than appearances. |
Travel Writers: Gypsy Hearts by Robyn Shaw
Cnockaert
