Sherry Chandler » Gypsy Hypnosis?
Gypsy Hypnosis?
I am being mentored in this enterprise by Teresa Kanago out in Spokane. I first met Teresa at a Green River Writers retreat a few years ago, where she gave me a few quick lessons in belly dancing. I hope I prove a more apt pupil in journaling.
Over at her blog, I See Invisible People, Terry champions those peoples who are made invisible by the bigotry of the majority. Last week, she featured an article from the Spokane Spokesman Review headlined “Can Russian gypsies lull theft victims.” This rather bizarre item recounts the belief that handsome gypsy men can convince women to hand over large sums of money through the hypnotic power of their eyes. According to the article: “…detectives nodded knowingly. ‘Gypsy hypnosis,’ they said.”
This article might strike some as the sort of trivial filler newspapers sometimes use. But Terry sees it differently. Her comments on her blog and by e-mail (I’ve edited a bit for continuity):
At a conservative estimate, 250,000 Roma (gypsies) were murdered in the fascist death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The true number may be in excess of one million. Yet 60 years later their descendents face the same bigotry that took their lives. I’m saddened by the number of people I know who couldn’t understand why I was upset by this story. Ignorance like that is why my grandmother told people she was Italian, French, German, anything but Roma.
From the 14th century on, the Roma were slaves in almost all of Eastern and Southern Europe. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the last slaves were freed, in the Balkans, after the Franco-Prussian War. Large numbers of Roma came to this country during that war, escaping from northern Italy, southern France, and the mid Asia-minor states, mixing in with the general refugee population.
Most, like my great-grandmother, saw it as their chance to start over in a new country without the baggage attached to their ethnic heritage. Her grandparents left Luxembourg with a boat-load of locals when the Roma slaves were freed in the late 1850s and settled in Canada and Northern Minnesota among the “mixed blood” people. There no one blinked at their dark skin, black hair and black eyes, and odd religious rituals. It was just assumed they were part Chippewa like everyone else.
This whole sad story was in my mind when I read the following passage in Wendell Berry’s introduction to James Baker Hall’s photography collection Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2004):
Now…the work of families and neighbors has been almost entirely replaced by Mexican migrant workers. And so, once again, our fields are farmed by a racially denominated and subordinated class of menial laborers working without either a proprietary interest in the crop or equity in the land…This looks too much like the mistake we made before. There is something inherently unkind, unstable, and dangerous in the willingness of one race or class to depend upon the hard hand labor of another. The people who work the land should own it.
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1 Comment
1. Georgia replies at 9th February 2005, 8:18 am :
As much as I admire Wendell Berry, he does tend to romanticize farming. The truth (as I have observed it in my corner of Kentucky)is that landowners and operators have seldom been able to do all of the manual labor required to raise a tobacco crop. Throughout my memory (which is getting long) landowners such as my father and grandfather worked side by side in the fields with tenant farmers and/or hired day laborers such as young men not yet raising their own crops or older men who by some deficit or fluke did not have their own crop either. In recent years, these people have vanished from the countryside and taken jobs in town (or gone to operating meth labs perhaps?) Hence, farmers have turned to migrant workers to assist them. I don’t say the trend toward migrant workers is good - I’m just explaining why it has happened. Of course, Berry seems to view farming as only a subsistance exercise rather than a small business that might actually sustain a family economically, and allow folks to educate their children, yadayada. The truth is that many folks in his part of the woods (many of them related to us) have worked jobs in town by day, so that they could afford to keep and work the land on weekends. They, too, have needed the help of manual labor from time to time i.e. migrant workers. Furthermore, Berry discounts the issues facing aging landowners who can no longer physically work the soil themselves. My mother is as ardent a farmer as ever lived; a strident conservationist; a good steward of the soil. But at 84, she can’t physcially do the work. Would Berry have her sell the land to oh - a developer? - because she, herself must now rely on others to work her land? Indeed, Berry’s father,himself, apparently did precious little farming. The scenes that roll through his novels of his father driving across the land in his car “surveying” the work of others come vividly to mind. Throughout his novels, the assistance that tenant farmers provide the landowners is described in great detail. How different, really, was a tenant farmer than a migrant worker? Well, there are plenty, of course … a commonality usually of race and culture and the tenant lived year-round on the land and in the community. But a case could be made for the exploitation of the tenant farmer. Yet, as it worked in Owen County and most areas of Kentucky, it was not exploitation, but a way for honorable men to provide for their families, and to get a “foothold” or “a start” towards someday owning their own land — and they helped the landowner take care of the land and raise the crops. Perhaps today’s Mexican migrant worker does not yearn to own his own farm in America, as the tenant farmers of an earlier era usually did, but in his own way, he is reaching for the American Dream, and trying to better his and his family’s lot. And who is to say that he is not? Romanticizing “subsistance” is more likely to be done by the likes of Berry than by those who actually live in that place. Having said all this, let me reiterate that I LOVE Wendell Berry’s writing, and intend maybe to be him when I grow up.
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