Romani authors in the Czech Republic don't start from zero, they start from minus 10

The book Povídání u povidel [Chatting While the Fruit Stews], which has been issued by the KHER press, includes a chapter entitled “Khere pre Slovensko – At Home in Slovakia”, which reveals what the name of your press means. Here in the Czech Republic, is there a home for literature by Romani authors?

By now, yes. We’re experiencing rather a golden age today, we don’t have to explain anymore why there should be a place here for the literature produced by members of a minority which is quite large and has had its roots here for several hundred years. We see how the public, the media, and several cultural or social science institutions have grown used to the fact that within Czech literature there is also a certain segment of literature that is Romani and does not want to be left on the sidelines anymore. We have actually moved forward from the days of explaining and defending at least the subject of literature by Romani authors, although unfortunately that has yet to happen when it comes to many other topics associated with Romani people.

Twenty-somethings are returning to Romanes

How long has your press been publishing and how does it aid authors who are Romani?

This is the 11th year of the KHER press. Its original endeavor was to encourage the literary work of the Romani authors who were already writing openly here in the 1990s and who had been secretly writing even before then but who, for various reasons, were invisible, nobody was paying any attention in a systematic way to their work. There were a couple of brilliant presses here which included authors of Romani origin in their output from time to time, or who translated such authors from abroad, but those were rather isolated undertakings.

After Milena Hübschmannová passed away in 2005, things declined, with her death these authors of Romani origin lost the person who had been giving them self-confidence, who had been accompanying them on their literary way. At that time, my colleagues and I from Romani Studies dared to keep going with that role, and we established a press through which we originally wanted to publish only e-books. We knew that many Roma do not frequent booksellers, they are busy solving their other problems, but just about all of them had a computer at home as well as an Internet connection. However, in 2018 we realized that e-books were just a transition point and that it seems more natural, more worthwhile and also more fun, personally, for these books to be printed.

Your press publishes books that are in Czech and Romanes. How many people in this country are fluent in Romanes?

We don’t have exact numbers, but in any event it’s a declining trend. To put it in an oversimplified way, the oldest generation of those who actively and frequently still use the language is dying off or gradually leaving the field. During communism, officialdom strongly recommended that the language never be passed on to the next generation, who often grew up in a milieu where the elders spoke Romanes, but only among themselves, not to their children and grandchildren.

In Povídání u povidel the main protagonist describes how she only spoke Romanes as a child and how she did not slowly learn Czech until she went to school. Today they say it’s the reverse.

In the Czech Republic, Romani people fall into two groups. The group that all of our Romani authors come from is that of Roma originally from Slovakia who came to the Czech lands after the Second World War, which the author Květoslava Podhradská describes in her book. Then there is a smaller but still quite numerous group of Vlax Roma who are very insular, they take care to uphold their own cultural traditions, they protect their language, and at least in the Czech environment, their language is not customarily used in the domains which are now being permeated by Romanes as it is spoken in Slovakia, i.e., in books or in media which are printed. Among the Vlax Roma, the language is still actively passed on, so their children mostly speak a certain degree of Romanes. The children of Roma from Slovakia usually claim, at the different seminars we hold in the schools, that they are not at all fluent in Romanes, but ultimately they can understand an author who is fluent and of Romani origin, she can hold a dialogue with them, play games with them and so forth in Romanes. From my own experience, or from what I am seeing on social media, I have the feeling that the twenty-somethings are doing their best to return to the language and these little books can serve them quite well with that.

Is it possible to learn Romanes somewhere today, the way people usually learn English, German and other languages?

What is missing is the amount of material that is available in other languages. One needs dictionaries and textbooks – they may exist, but they aren’t accessible. Readers who would like to learn the language often ask us about that. There are courses given by various nonprofits and at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague, where Romani Studies is taught, there is instruction in the language, not just as part of those studies, but also as an elective for students from other departments. These are little islands of instruction, though, and the problem is how to naturally practice speaking Romanes. For gadje [non-Roma] it is more difficult to access a conversation with Romani people, so books are a good opportunity for them. There are also newspapers in Romanes, but those reach a minimum of people in the majority society.

This won’t end with the Lety memorial

Among the subjects from the history of the Roma that are insufficiently accented in the larger society is the Holocaust and its Romani victims. What other traumas could the wider public become more aware of by reading the books published by KHER?

During the history of the Roma there have been many traumas and the subject of the Second World War hasn’t been sufficiently mined yet. The stories of Romani survivors which we have an opportunity to read in the Czech literature and the Romanes literature are not coming from the Czech lands or Slovakia, with a few exceptions. In the case of the graphic novel Žofi, it is a Polish Romani woman’s story, from Austria we have Ceija Stojka, and Philomena Franz was a German Sintesa. However, we are still waiting for news from the Czech lands, about the Roma from here, that would move the public.

The cause of Lety u Písku has been won, and after many long years of negotiations with the state about buying out the industrial pig farm overlapping the site of the former camp for Romani people there, a memorial is being built. However, it remains a question to what degree the agreement reached by the politicians reflects consensus among the public about what happened there, who among the Czechs knows how to admit our contribution to the fate that befell Romani people in Lety. Once that kind of story becomes known, it may be accepted by the public over time as a story not about a minority from beyond our borders, but as our own country’s story. The destiny of one prisoner who was Romani, Josef Serinek, who escaped that camp and became a partisan, is one of a few such good examples.

Unfortunately, time is not on our side. It was through the camps for Romani people at Lety and at Hodonín u Kunštátu that most of the Romani people living in Bohemia and Moravia were murdered during the war. The few hundred who survived did not always manage to make their stories known or have yet to do so.

During communism there were other traumas, such as the removal of children from Romani families and the sterilization of Romani women. In the early 1990s, Ilona Ferková, a Romani author, wrote her book about that subject, Čorde čhave – Stolen Children, dedicated to the most painful parts of the assimilation regime during communism, about which there is not much known.

Does KHER also focus on contemporary issues of the Romani community?

I can reveal to you that we are currently working on a subject that we perceive to be a painful one which it would be good to gently raise through literature. This is the theme of LGBT people of Romani origin. Romani people of that sort encounter multiple discrimination in communities which are traditional. Next year a translation of a work by the author Kiba Lumberg will be published, from a community in Finland where she resisted their traditions, she came out as not heterosexual and was subsequently ostracized. Another subject is the position of women in Romani communities. We are putting together a book with the Romani author Iveta Kokyová, who since her youth has not followed her predetermined role as a mother and wife, she has gone her own way and she has also paid a price for that.

The starting point? Minus 10.

Why are contemporary Romani authors having a more difficult time breaking through than non-Romani ones?

Patrik Banga is a journalist who has won the Magnesia Litera prize, he is a Romani author who has demonstrated that this path can be a straightforward one, but if a Romani author who were less well known, or from a different professional background, had come forward with that same work, would the story have been the same? Other Romani authors aren’t able to prepare such a thing, they don’t have the contacts, the knowledge about how cultural and societal institutions operate, they don’t know what their rights are, what they could and should stand for. We, as a press, are doing our best to make sure authors who are Romani don’t start at minus 10, which is their starting position today, we want to bring them up to the “zero” starting point from which any other unknown author would normally take off.

We have to keep trying to find new talent. Every so often when we are putting together our anthologies, for example in the case of the books Samet blues [Velvet Blues] and Všude samá krása [Nothing But Beauty All Around] we issue an open call for submissions. A new name, somebody unknown to us, always does submit to our anthologies. New authors submit to us because, based on their experience with our press, they see that if their work wins, then it will actually be published. It won’t be an unnecessary waste of energy for them. Whoever wants to actually has a big chance of gradually building up an authorial career over time.

Don’t the Romani authors who put themselves forward have a problem with being excluded by their own community?

For now the sample is too small to say whether that is so. The communities are different, it depends whether you end up in Svitavy, the Žižkov quarter of Prague, or in the Most area. There are differences everywhere in what people have access to, the conditions or the degree of the exclusion or inclusion in which they live as Romani people. In some communities, a success in the outside world will just never be forgiven because they believe it weakens them somehow, there are concerns about whether the person who is successful outside will ever return to the community, sometimes they do not and they make their own way in life.

In the middle class among the Roma, those who have a high school diploma or a university education, of whom there are more and more today, we observe that their families are proud of their success, the entire family can draw on it, by the way, especially in terms of status. They have the certainty that their children will live good lives and it does not necessarily mean they will lose the regard of other Roma, or their solidarity with other Roma, or contact with them. There are many such people who evidently are continuing to serve as role models to other Roma in a positive sense, to younger people, to children, whom they support through their feeling of pride in being Romani, and they do their best to do whatever that can to aid them so that each Romani person gets the same opportunities as everybody else.