In all the Roma houses I’ve visited in the villages around Gracanica, I don’t believe I saw any level surface that wasn’t draped with a handmade piece of embroidery, crocheting or beadwork. Artwork, craftwork is everywhere. But it is difficult to find a Roma woman who classifies herself as an “artist.” For most, their crafts are a part of ordinary life, something they fit in in their spare time to embellish their houses, and sell if they have an opportunity. Creating “high art” is a different story. If making a living as an artist is difficult in the most cosmopolitan cities, it’s next to impossible for Roma in Kosovo’s towns and villages, especially for those who have no resources to get fine arts training, supplies, or transportation to places they can sell their works. In Kosovo, Roma with artistic tendencies seem to keep their talents focused on household decoration.

Gjemilja in Gracanica made this example of tentene, a type of crocheting popular among Roma women and others in Kosovo.

Gjemilja in Gracanica made this example of tentene, a type of crocheting popular among Roma women and others in Kosovo.

Fatima displaying a tentene tablecloth she made by hand using a pattern in a magazine.

Fatima displaying a tentene tablecloth she made by hand using a pattern in a magazine.

Arsida's beadwork - it will be a decoration for a table

Arsida's beadwork - it will be a decoration for a table

According to Der Spiegel, we’re in the midst of a renaissance in Roma art. I don’t know about the high art world, but from what I can tell, Roma art exists, has existed, has been flourishing as a tradition. This “renaissance” is happening mainly because people outside Roma society have started acknowledging Roma art as more than an ethnographic curiosity. Whether it’s undergoing a rebirth, an awakening or just outside recognition, Farija Mehmeti and her brother Bajram are representing Kosovo in the Roma art movement.

[I should perhaps note now that I am no art critic, so fear not: there will be no talk of simulacra, post-structuralism or semiotics here.]

When I first got rolling on this quilt production process, I searched for any Roma, Ashkali or Egyptian women artists who could help with the designs, or at least advise if we ran into trouble turning ideas into pictures. Before the end of my first week in Kosovo, I happened on an online slideshow of bright, vibrant portraits of Roma women. The portraits were sensitive and striking, showing women of different ages, different skin tones, some with flowing hair, others with brightly-colored headscarves, all boldly looking the viewer in the eye. The portraits had recently been exhibited in Kosovo…and had been done by a Kosovar Roma woman artist! She was even, according to the exhibition coverage, the first Roma woman artist to be exhibited in Kosovo. She was exactly who I had been looking for, and I was ready to beg to get her involved with the quilt project. The problem was, I had no way to get in touch with her. Nobody would respond to my messages. Nobody I talked to knew any other Roma artists who would be suitable for the project. I was disappointed, but what to do with the project clock ticking? I didn’t want to bring any more non-RAE voices into the project than necessary (mine was more than enough), so I decided if I couldn’t find an artist of Roma, Ashkali or Egyptian ethnicity, we’d go without to make sure that the images on the quilt would come directly from the communities it was representing.

So we went ahead forming quilting groups, and after a few weeks had passed and the groups were finishing the designs for their squares, I was glad to see that there had been no need to search for any artist other than the talented women who volunteered to work on the project. One of the women in the Gracanica group, however, was especially helpful with the designs – almost everyone else deferred to her to sketch out their squares. Farija worked quietly during our meetings to outline beautiful pictures of Roma women baking bread in traditional outdoor ovens, washing their babies and sweeping their yards.

Arsida (L) and Farija cooperating on a sketch for a quilt square

Arsida (L) and Farija cooperating on a sketch for a quilt square

I was so impressed by these scenes of village life – where did she learn to draw? She told me that she liked to paint, had learned how from her older brother, and that she would like to make a living as an artist. By this point, I’d written off and forgotten about the Roma painter I’d learned about online. It wasn’t until I was invited to her home in the small village of Lapina and saw the watercolor portraits of Roma women hanging on her living room wall that I put it together – soft-voiced, modest Farija was the same woman I’d seen proudly showing her portraits in the online slideshow – of course!

Click on the portrait to see my own slideshow of Farija’s work – portraits and scenes of traditional Roma women’s lives:

I learned Farija has been painting Kosovar Roma women for around ten years, beginning after she watched her brother Bajram discover a love for painting Roma life and developing quite a talent for it. Bajram Mehmeti gained notice partly by his work for Paul Polansky’s books – he provided the illustrations for “Gypsy Taxi.” Between the two of them, they must have hundreds of works stored in the cardboard portfolios they brought out to show me; they devote all the time they can afford to their art.

The pictures are, quite simply, fantastic. These aren’t scenes you usually see of Roma – ones of beggars sitting on the streets or children with dirt-smudged faces sifting through garbage piles to find scraps of food. Brother and sister both depict Roma history and tradition with brightly-colored scenes of idealized villages, people, work and celebrations. Bajram told me, “I want to show Roma life as it really is, as well as express myself.” These are a couple of Bajram’s pastoral scenes:

For Farija, it’s important to show Roma women as they are today and as they lived in the past. Farija has said she is “inspired by women’s strength because they carry the burdens of the past, present and future.” Her designs for the quilt draw on that same inspiration.

Farija is interested in traditional life, showing the beautiful dress and quiet life that used to be common to Roma women. The portraits of village life honor Roma women with their vibrancy. They show the strength of women devoting their days to work and caring for their families – washing, cooking, cleaning, serving guests, caring for children. They show how Roma women try to beautify the mundane – how Roma houses are kept very clean and (like many Roma women themselves) are covered with decoration – flowers, bright colors. They venerate tradition even as they points out the hardship of everyday Roma life.

While the designs are beautifully done, they clearly depict the poverty in which many Roma are living as well. Farija wanted to show how poverty continues to make the lives of Roma women difficult. She points out that small things, like having to wash all the family’s clothes by hand, help keep Roma women tied to the domestic sphere. The amount of housework they have to do provides an argument for why there is no need for them to be educated or to seek outside employment – they have plenty of work to complete inside the home. Farija hopes her designs will encourage those outside her community to think about the way in which Roma are living, and how they can help improve these lives. Her designs suggest that small improvements (like getting washing machines) could have a big impact on daily life. She especially wants this message to travel outside Kosovo. Her ultimate goal is to help raise the position of Roma women in Kosovo.

Farija with a scene of a Roma woman sweeping her yard

Farija with a scene of a Roma woman sweeping her yard

Like her portraits, the quilt squares suggest that the interaction between tradition and modern life is not always easy. Is the traditional way of life bound up with poverty? Farija’s pictures in particular bring up a question that “Jemail” raised in one of the Paul Polansky poems I included in my last post – What aspects of Roma culture and tradition make Roma people distinctly Roma? How can these traditions be protected and honored, and should they all be?  How to reconcile traditions that are at odds with modern life in the majority society?

Farija herself has had to negotiate between tradition and modern ideas, especially ideas of women’s rights. She loves the beauty of Roma tradition, but she rejects tradition when it costs Roma women their freedom. Farija made a stand, refusing several attempts by her parents to arrange a marriage for her. She maintained that she would only marry a man who respected her, whom she loved. Eventually, she said, her parents stopped trying to force her into marriage. Her younger sister took up the same tactic and was able to resist marriage at a young age.

Still living in a community bound by the tradition of young marriage, Farija’s decision has had consequences for her. At 32, she lives at home with her parents, brother and sisters. Due to the mentality prevalent in the village, it’s likely that because of her age, only widowers and divorcés would consider marrying her; she would need to find a fellow iconoclast if she wanted to be with someone who would respect her views on marriage. But she seems to be happy with her choice to keep her freedom and follow her own path as an artist. She dreams of becoming a clothing designer; although in our conversations there was always the unspoken acknowledgment that affording to achieve this dream will be very difficult.

George Soros (whose Open Society Institute initiated the Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale)  and others have made a point of featuring Roma artists to gather attention and momentum for Roma empowerment. They hope to convince the rest of us that the Roma deserve better than the discrimination and persecution that has historically been Europe’s comment on Roma existence. But what about Roma art and craft that doesn’t fit the conventions of contemporary art? It’s worthwhile to look at the artwork of those who haven’t been trained or make their living off gallery shows (at least not yet) – and I think the Kosovo quilts will say this loud and clear. And hopefully, seeing Farija’s designs will encourage more people to support her talent.

Farija has shown her work in Pristina and Gracanica; Bajram has exhibited in Kosovo as well as in Switzerland and Austria. It’s not easy to gain exposure to their work when they are a couple borders and cultures away from the mainstream European art scene, but it seems that little by little outsiders are starting to take notice. As I was finishing my visit, an artist from Pristina drove up unannounced to meet with Bajram about the possibility of exhibiting; a couple artists from Italy have also taken interest in supporting the siblings. I don’t know what the result will be, but I hope to hear about an exhibition of Farija and Bajram’s work in the Biennale before too long.

Paul Polansky is a solid, beefy guy, an ex-boxer, who I’d even go so far as to describe as a bit Hemingway-esque. He’s a former journalist who skipped America in protest of Vietnam and has been an expat ever since. Hisen heard he was in town for the day and took me to meet him at a gas station pizzeria off the highway.

This was the American author I’d been hearing about since the day I met Hisen, the one who had hired him during the war to travel Kosovo and help document the situation, and then the stories of the then-region’s Roma. The one who had told Hisen’s own story and others’ in Not a Refugee and Gypsy Taxi; who had marched with Hisen and hundreds of other Roma from the camps in Mitrovica to Macedonia during the war and lived in Hisen’s village for close to a decade. He has been, and still is, one of the strongest international advocates for Roma, and especially Kosovo’s Roma. Although his advocacy takes many forms, he is a writer first, and the images of Roma life and struggle in his his free-form poetry pulling from experiences over his years living and working with Roma in Kosovo and the Czech Republic are impossible to dismiss.

Originally hired by UNHCR to investigate the possibility of Roma hoarding weapons in the Mitrovica camps set up for Roma IDPs and returnees, Paul was far more interested in the living conditions of the Roma, and began his ongoing campaign to bring the horrific conditions in the camps to light and make UNHCR accountable for the situation the Roma there were trapped in. Paul doesn’t try to put a tactful face on what he has seen as a betrayal of Kosovo’s Roma by the international community, namely the UN. Nowhere in Kosovo has that betrayal been clearer than in the lead-contaminated camps (which have now all been closed, although 10-20 families remain in Osterode because they fear for their safety in the Albanian side of Mitrovica). Paul described, a he put it, the loss of an entire generation of Roma children in the poisoned camps in this report from 2009.

He remains skeptical about gadzo-led efforts to help/integrate/save the Roma, talking bitterly about Roma empowerment programs led by international organizations that pour money into translators, expat salaries, transportation, security, while in the meantime Roma families could use a tiny fraction of that money to invest in their own businesses. He says it is still hard to get UNHCR to hire Roma.

Even after hearing his background, I wasn’t sufficiently prepared for Paul’s overwhelming knowledge of Kosovo’s Roma. Within a few minutes after Hisen and I’d joined him at his table, he was boasting that he had taught Roma people their own history. They usually can’t trace their ancestry or traditions back past their great-grandparents. Paul, on the other hand, has it down pat all the way back to India. He pointed at Hisen. “Classic Lohari – blacksmith,” he said, explaining Hisen’s roots in an Indian blacksmith caste.

He has collected hundreds of Wikipedia pages worth of cultural memes and historical footprints of the Roma, and says he has been able to trace European Roma all the way back to their origins in India, going back one village at a time. In some cases, he has found specific cultural practices Roma hold today that match ones that only exist in specific places along their route from India. He gave me an example: when he was living in Preoce, one night Hisen asked Paul to take him and his young daughter to a local healer because the daughter had an ear infection. Over Paul’s protests to take the girl to a “real” doctor, Hisen insisted that this healer had an excellent reputation and would cure his daughter more surely than a doctor in Pristina. So off they went to the local healer, who examined the girl, left the room and came back with a straw. She stuck it in Hisen’s daughter’s ear and proceeded to suck out the white worms that were “causing” the daughter’s earache. The trick actually worked – the earache was gone. Paul, thinking this was interesting, investigated the practice of healers curing earaches by pretending to suck worms out of peoples’ ears, and tracked it to a very specific region in India. He says has done the same with several other practices whose origins Roma people themselves couldn’t explain. He’s made several trips to India to complete the tracking, and says he has multiple books worth of information yet to be published.

Paul has become very close with the Roma communities he’s worked with over the years, and has a perspective on Roma life unique to most outsiders. He’s the godparent of two of Hisen’s children, and Hisen says he’s so close to Paul that he knows “how the man is breathing.” So Paul’s poems go beyond showing the Roma as flat stereotypes, naïve innocents trapped by suffering.  He tries to depict Roma and their culture “warts and all,” as he says in the introduction to Gypsy Taxi.

His poems point out that in some cases, Roma culture (or, at least, the culture in and around Preoce, where Paul was based) does not fit with the typical human rights agenda or even with the norms of other cultures around them. The difficulty in changing this, as Roma in Paul’s poems point out time and again, is that culture and tradition are the things that are keeping the Roma from assimilating, from disappearing – after being persecuted, ignored, forced out, poisoned and made to live out the stereotypes of garbage pickers, their culture is all they have left. How should Roma and the different groups working to change their situation reconcile this? It’s a very important question for people trying to bring different communities up to “modern” standards of living that include certain norms and beliefs.

His examples also highlight the differences between Roma in different parts of Kosovo, and definitely between Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians today. Roma from Prizren would not recognize many of the traditions and habits Paul documents in his poems about Roma in Preoce; based on what I’ve heard from Ashkali and Egyptian friends, the people described in the book would seem very foreign to them, even if they do actually share a common heritage if you go back far enough. What then does that say about the push to treat the “RAE community” as one group, and use a common strategy for addressing their common problems? Even if the symptoms are the same, problems might have different causes stemming from different cultures, situations, histories, etc. – and therefore require more carefully tailored solutions. Solutions that start with the Roma themselves, not internationals. At this point, since so much of the data on the problems faced by Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians treat them as one group (and there’s so little well-collected and comprehensive data on them to begin with), it’s really difficult to say whether the common solutions being devised apply.

Here are a couple of my favorite poems of Paul’s:

THE WELL

They caught me in the marketplace where my people used to sell clothes, where Albanians now sell contraband.
Four men threw me into the back seat of a blue Lada, yelling, “We told you, no more Gypsies in Prishtina.”

As I was pushed down on the floor,
I felt the gun barrel in my left ear. It was so cold
I jerked just as someone pulled the trigger.
Blood splattered the side of my face
from the wound in my shoulder.
I collapsed, pretending to be dead.

I prayed to my dear, deceased mother, to all mulos, that these men wouldn’t see from where the blood was oozing. When we arrived, they dragged me out by my feet. My head crashed on the ground, bouncing over several stones.

They threw me head-first into a well.
I never reached the water.
There were too many bodies.
I lay crumpled up, almost unconscious
until the smell and sting of wet lime
brought me back to my senses.

AFTER THE WAR*

after Hasan got a chance
to negotiate the purchase
of his new girlfriend
he asked me to help him
finalize the price

took Jemail with us
he was a respected as a good broker
when two parties couldn’t agree

we all sat on the floor in a circle
the father said he’d finally agreed
to sell his daughter
if his price was met
wanted 1,000 for himself
didn’t care about the traditional clothes and gold
for his daughter

Hasan said he was a refugee
the Albanians had burned down his home
had no place to live
very little money
did have a job
but couldn’t pay 1,000 euro

negotiations lasted for two hours
father wouldn’t compromise
finally we called a break
I went outside with Hasan and Jemail
to discuss the situation

Hasan said he wouldn’t pay
he wasn’t buying a cow
Jemail said he had to follow tradition
it was the only thing
Roma had left

after the war.

*from Gypsy Taxi, by Paul Polansky

Five of the women who are working on the Gracanica quilt are from the village of Preoce. Every week they come to the Voice of Roma center in Gracanica, we chat as best we can about the work, maybe a bit about the family, any news. But I live in Pristina – do I have any idea what their lives look like in wherever Preoce is? Not really. So Hisen, a program coordinator from Voice of Roma, invited me out to see the village last weekend. I discovered that Preoce is a small half-Roma, half-Serb village that’s less than 10 minutes by car from Pristina but seems to be totally unknown to Pristina Albanians (even cab drivers need very detailed instructions on how to find the place, although it’s not far off the road to the airport). It’s so unusual to see Albanians in the village that when Hisen’s wife saw him talking to my Pristina cab driver, for a minute she mistook Hisen for an Albanian as well.

Passing a Serb house on the road into Preoce

Passing a Serb house on the road into Preoce

The nicer houses in the village, in general, belong to the Serbs, although I don’t think anyone who lives there is well-off. Today things are peaceful, Roma kids and Serbian kids go to the same village school, and according to Hisen Serbs and Roma are good neighbors, but they don’t live in mixed neighborhoods – there is a “last” Serb house, and then the Roma houses begin. Hisen’s house is the last on the paved street going through the main Roma neighborhood. Branching off the paved road are dirt paths leading to fenced-in dirt yards and squat brick and white plaster houses where during the day people who aren’t out tending fields or doing other work sit in the entryways, chatting and trying to beat the midday heat. Burly chickens and geese go visiting as well – I have no idea how people keep track of which ones belong to which house when it’s feast time.

There are always a couple of houses standing empty, abandoned by families who were able to leave Kosovo for places they hoped would provide better opportunities. Those who are forced back most often try to leave again as soon as they can – better to try their luck as illegal immigrants in western Europe rather than add to the ranks of the unemployed in the village.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube DirektRoma (non)Returnees in Preoce

Voice of Roma is visible all over the village. There’s the 2-room learning center where the local kids have English classes when VoR can find a volunteer teacher, the streetlamps VoR installed (and which Kosovo’s electricity provider has shut off because, as they told Hisen, they can’t figure out how to measure how much power the lamps use…). Some of the sheep running around gardens and the power cultivators roaring into the fields are VoR grants to help the villagers at least subsist off the land, and maybe even do better. Seeing all that was an interesting complement to the theoretical work I’m surrounded by most days in the office – here, “development” means finding solutions to the physical hardships of everyday life, whereas the work I’m involved with deals with mainly intangibles like attitudes, data, and policy. Now, Hisen is planning to open a small boutique hotel in Gracanica (sometime next year, depending on the size of the bribe he and his partners will have to pay to get the building permit). Once the hotel is built, though, and word of his tour guide skills gets around, it should be a huge success. He had a fully stocked program ready for me on Sunday – 14 hours of activities, to be exact (although some of them were a surprise for both of us). We started out at the education center, and then stopped to meet with a group of women who were interested in the quilting project but hadn’t been able to go to our meetings. We moved on to the house of the shy, extremely talented painter who has designed most of the quilt panels (more on her in a later post). I got to sit in their cool, shaded living rooms and drink cup after cup of Fanta offered to me in little painted glasses; to meet babies, sons, daughters, nephews, grandmothers. I watched them work on the beaded flower and star decorations that it seems all the Roma women I’ve met were born knowing how to make.

But really, the person I learned most about was Hisen – especially once the day took a sudden turn and we ended up on a 4-hour roadtrip that had us climbing to a hilltop 13^th century fortress in Novo Brdo, peering in an unlocked 16^th century tomb and then walking around recently unearthed Roman graves(!). Hisen has been a lifeline for me on the quilting project. As busy as he is, he immediately took interest in the project and has since been a translator, driver, personal shopper and, of course, tour guide almost whenever I’ve needed it. He takes his work seriously but usually has a joke ready, and swears zealously in English. He even gave me the shirt off his back to cover my bare shoulders so that the nuns would let me inside Gracanica’s famous 13^th century Orthodox church. (My camera had run out of batteries by then, so there’s (un)fortunately no documentation of this to get Hisen in trouble. But I assure you it was kosher).

By all accounts of his biography, Hisen is a man whose back should have been broken years ago. I don’t know much of his history before the war, but the years since 1998 have been a struggle to keep moving forward despite huge odds. At one point he had a chance to escape the hardships of Kosovo and stay in Germany – while he was a refugee there during the war, a German doctor became convinced they were soulmates and should get married – but to Hisen it didn’t feel right; he needed to be home. He went back to Kosovo, lived in the lead-contaminated camps in Plementina until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and then was one of hundreds of Kosovar Roma who marched from the camps to Gracanica and Preoce. When the Serbs living there refused to let the Roma return to their houses, the Roma continued to the Macedonian border to seek asylum.

Hisen continued to get more and more active in supporting the Roma people. He was hired by American writer Paul Polansky at 10 deutch marks a day (about 7 bucks then) to help Polansky document the trauma the Roma were experiencing. At a time when it was dangerous for Kosovo’s Roma to show their faces in their own villages, he was traveling around the country documenting and delivering supplies and assistance.

There were kidnapping attempts. Death threats. So many close escapes. One day he was trying to get food home to his family in Fushe Kosove. Walking along the train tracks leading him home, he spotted two bodies lying next to the tracks, and two Serb police, guns in hand, approaching him. They met next to the bodies. They began questioning him threateningly, asking who he was, why he was out, if he knew the dead men. Finally Hisen told them, “If you’re going to shoot me, just shoot me.” The game had gone on long enough. My first thought when he told me that was, how many days of constant fear for your life do you have to live through to be able to say that and mean it? He made it through those dangerous times, started a family, and (fingers crossed) will be a successful hotelier soon. Today he faces the constant pressure of being the breadwinner for his wife, four young children and extended family – an amazing feat for anyone in Kosovo these days, not to mention Roma. As he’s driving me back to Pristina around midnight, the jokes fall away and he starts to talk about the difficulty of having this on his head. His brother’s family may have to return from Macedonia and have nowhere to go other than Hisen’s house; other members of the family are taking advantage of Hisen’s success. He’s tired and worries that it may be too much for him.

Hisen surfs the edge of the Novo Brdo fortress.

Hisen surfs the edge of the Novo Brdo fortress.

Still he offers his time gladly whenever I need a bit of translation or help with an errand. He goes out of his way to help not just because he’s friendly, which he is, and because it gives him a break from the usual everyday stresses, which it does, but also because he trusts me as someone who’s here to work honestly for better conditions for himself, his family and the rest of the Roma in Kosovo. And so out of respect for my intentions, he will do his best to help me succeed and make my time here worthwhile. I felt honored to hear him explain it this way, one of the times that he, as usual, refused to accept my “thank you” for something helpful he had done. But what a responsibility as well. The responsibility to the communities I’m working with is something I’ve felt very strongly since I got the fellowship and began to plan my work. I think about it every day. But his statement really underscored it for me – particularly the trust that I have to build/hopefully am building for this work to be meaningful. It’s wonderful to know that Hisen is willing to grant me that trust.

(Note: These last 2 weeks have been monstrously busy – the usual quilting drama, field visits, proposal deadlines, 13th century monuments, 2 bouts of food poisoning, AP visitors, Albanian lessons, ….too many different activities to count each day before I collapse into bed and wait for exhaustion to overcome the sticky nighttime mugginess. And naturally, the blog has suffered. So I’m jumping back in with a cultural experience, for a little change of pace…)

Whew. With fewer than three weeks to go before I trade Pristina road dust for L.A. smog, I finally got to check eating flia, the quintessential Kosovar/Albanian summertime food, off my must-do list. And not only did I get to eat it fresh off the coals, I got to help make it. Ferdane, my friend from Balkan Sunflowers, invited me to a flia-making party at her house in Fushe Kosove. So Friday afternoon perpetual Peace Fellow Kerry McBroom, who came out to Kosovo to help me through the quilting process last week, and I went out to Ferdane’s mahalla to learn the fine art of flia-making.

Ferdane's house in an Ashkali section of Fushe Kosova.

Ferdane's house in an Ashkali section of Fushe Kosova.

(Ironically, when we walked into Ferdane’s living room, her two younger sisters were sitting around with Joanna, a Balkan Sunflowers coordinator from the States, discussing whether they identify as Roma, Ashkali or Egyptian. You might remember in the last post that featured Ferdane, she said she was Ashkali. On flia day she identified herself as Egyptian. She said that’s how similar she considered them – she could easily be one or the other in a given conversation. So that’s one more note on the complexity of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian identity here in Kosovo…)

After a bit more identity talk we got down to the business of making flia. Flia, for the uninitiated, consists of layer upon layer of baked dough greased up with a film of kefir-sour cream-oil mixture in between each layer. The trick that makes it good is that each layer is baked individually, and, if it’s authentic (like ours was, of course) it’s baked outside with a fire-heated metal lid weighted down with ash broiling the dough golden.

Kerry, as the oldest in the group, had the honor of wearing a white headscarf that apparently made her head flia-maker. She took the job seriously.

Kerry getting into the role of lead cook

Kerry getting into the role of lead cook

The batter’s just flour and water (a tub of flour and “enough” water, to be exact); the filling is a bottle of kefir, a couple containers of sour cream, oil and salt. Which is good – the cooking part is so involved that the recipe should be a snap. We mixed up the batter and the filling, then headed outside to where Ferdane and her mom had built a fire in the yard and were prepping the baking lid.

Ferdane ashing the flia lid so it would hold in more heat

Ferdane ashing the flia lid so it would hold in more heat

The baking process is where flia-making becomes a two-hour communal activity. You can’t just put the batter in an oven and be done with it (or you can, but it’s apparently not as good). The batter goes into the pan in strips, and once there are enough strips to make the pan look like a cart wheel, it’s time to set the 20+ pound lid on the top of the pan to bake the layer.

Ferdane showed us how to make perfect flia batter strips. Ours weren't always so pretty.

Ferdane showed us how to make perfect flia batter strips. Ours weren't always so pretty.

Tiny Ferdane, naturally, whipped the thing around like it was a pillow, while all my grunts and sensible knee bending didn’t stop me from almost dropping the entire ash pile into the growing flia each time I had to maneuver the lid.

Once the layer is cooked, it’s time to spread the filling on, and then top it with another layer of batter, ladling it in the spaces not covered by the last layer.

Ferdane wielded the giant lid like a pro.

Ferdane wielded the giant lid like a pro.

Kerry and I took turns on filling/batter layering duty.

Kerry and I took turns on filling/batter layering duty.

Put the lid back on and repeat the cycle 30 or 40 times. After a couple rounds we reached an unspoken agreement that the three American girls would do the batter-ladling and filling-spreading, and Ferdane would do the heavy lifting. She was nice enough not to call us out for being weaklings!
It’s not so wonderful to be standing or squatting around a hot fire when it’s already 90+ degrees outside, but we had plenty of time to rehash the week’s work gossip, discuss ailments, chat with interested neighbors, watch the sunset, fill up on watermelon – not a bad way to unwind after a busy week. And at the end of it all, there was enough bubbling, steaming flia to feed a family of seven for three days!

The finished product - hot, bubbly flia.

The finished product - hot, bubbly flia.

And the verdict? Crispy, chewy, oily doughy things are almost always worth eating, so no surprises there. I don’t know if I’ll be investing in a custom flia oven for my New York apartment, but I definitely wouldn’t turn down another invitation to a Fushe Kosove flia party.

Without fail, each time I return to Pristina from a visit to Prizren, I take my seat on the bus feeling relaxed, happy and energized. It’s not just that Prizren is a nice place to visit (although it is – it’s a lovely town with lots of historic charm set among lush green hills; it’s often referred to as “the jewel of Kosovo”). But more than being happy to have a little break from “the big city,” I’m consistently delighted and impressed by the group of fifteen women and girls who are creating Prizren’s contribution to the Kosovo Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian advocacy quilt that we’ll complete before the end of my fellowship.

They are all members of the Iniciativa 6 center that seeks to empower Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians (primarily children and youth) through education, health and vocational training programs.

Last week was my third visit to Iniciativa’s home base, located out of the city center in one of Prizren’s several Roma mahallas (neighborhoods). The place, a repurposed family home situated between two vacant lots, radiates positive energy – it’s full of laughing children playing and smiling teenagers and adults happily working on painting the attic, cleaning the kitchens or doing some craft project. At first glance, it could easily pass as Kosovo’s answer to 19 Kids and Counting. (Although that could just be me going through TLC withdrawal…)

When my new Albanian translator, Odeta, and I arrived this last time, a Turkish KFOR unit was distributing a shipment of school notebooks to a crowd of little Iniciativa members. The kids, pumped up from the combination of foreigners, free books and probably some candy to go with it, mobbed us. They pulled at our clothes, demanded autographs, threatened to rip apart the bags of snacks we’d brought for the meeting. Odeta looked like she was worried about making it out of the crowd alive. But I’ve learned that even though it might appear chaotic at first, the people at Iniciativa always have a plan. Sure enough, within seconds we were plucked out of the mob by the older girls to head to the meeting room upstairs and get down to business.

One little girl really wanted a shot of me and her friend, but couldn't get the hang of the zoom.

Sure, this was just the start of a two-hour odyssey through the avenues and back streets of Prizren to pick up the rest of the materials, but she knew exactly what she needed and how to get it at the best price. Thriftiness is another quality I admire, so I was happy to go along for the ride while the girls – literally – danced and sang their way through town.

Heading toward the bazaar

Admiring fancy celebration clothes

During my meetings with them I get treated to enthusiastic smiles from the girls, lots of giggles, warm hugs from the program director Drita. But the amazing thing isn’t their good natures, but how well they work together, and with such a sense of purpose. Those who know me know that I’m a fan of structure; these girls have me beat. The girls’ group, “Oaza” (oasis), made up of 15-20 girls and women representing 2 or 3 generations and a wide range of educational and family backgrounds, has been working together on various projects for about 6 months, and cooperates seamlessly. With all their cheeriness, the word I hear most is “serious” – they are serious about their projects, education, their futures, helping others in their community. Drita and the group are always eager to get to work and excited about making it meaningful. Seeing their energy, it’s hard not to be completely optimistic about the future of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women in Kosovo.

I always feel like I’m in very good company in Prizren. I need to come up with an excuse to go see them more than once a week!

Finishing the first meeting with the Iniciativa 6 group in Prizren

Last week the group of women I’m working with in Gracanica and I had our first real brainstorming day to start building up the story they want their part of the quilt to tell. I left it quite open-ended when it was time to start making preliminary drawings – it’s up to them to decide what aspect of their lives they want to present – and it was interesting to see how each woman interpreted our opening discussion about what sets Roma (these women are all Roma) women apart from others in Kosovo, the persistent problems they face from outside and within their community, what they want from their lives.

Women from our Gracanica group spent a morning working on their quilt square designs in the Voice of Roma office.

Women from our Gracanica group spent a morning working on their quilt square designs in the Voice of Roma office.

Two of the group chose to show Roma women as they were. A woman who makes embroidery panels of traditional scenes of Roma life drew a woman in traditional Roma dress (covered head, apron over a long skirt) making flija, a traditional Albanian dough and meat layered pie that in the old days (and in the drawing) would be made outdoors in a pan over a fire. I unfortunately have yet to taste the real thing; her drawing looked delicious.

A woman from a nearby village who makes a small living as an artist drew a portrait of an idealized Roma woman, with flowered headscarf, earrings, long eyelashes. These two drawings showed a domesticity that was simple, beautiful.

The youngest member of the group thought toward her future. She dreams of being an architect, and drew the house she would like to build for herself someday. This doesn’t sound so revolutionary, until you consider her circumstances. As a Roma girl about to finish high school, she is already exceptional. Attending university would put her in a tiny minority of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women who have the education to potentially join the professional middle class. Her next hurdle is to win a scholarship so she can afford to study in Pristina.

The boldest of the group, an activist from a small village outside of Gracanica, wanted to directly address a troubling issue that bears heavily on the lives of many women and girls from the three communities: the cultural mandate that new brides be virgins when they are married. This tradition holds in Roma communities across the region. RROGRAEK Director Shpresa (who was translating) told me that in eastern Kosovo (including Gracanica), a new couple must still hang their wedding night bedsheet out of their window the morning after their first night together, displaying it for the entire town. If there is no blood stain on the sheet to prove that the new bride had been a virgin, the groom’s family can reject the girl, sending her back to her own family, and she will be permanently, publicly, shamed, as well as probably beaten, or worse. She will probably then be married off to an older man, perhaps a widower, because no young man’s family will accept her. While this practice is apparently receding in western Kosovo, even in those more progressive areas the family of the groom may want to see the sheet privately to be sure their son has married a worthy woman.

This tradition isn’t limited to the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities – it’s an old Albanian custom as well – but most Albanian families don’t use the virginity test as final proof of the bride’s worth.

A few of the other women in the group joined in the conversation, agreeing that the virginity issue is one of the most important for Roma women because the consequences of not being a virgin can be so dire. They were all from towns and villages where this is their reality. It underscores how little choice many women from these communities have in the major events of their lives: ruled over by powerful patriarchal traditions, girls are shuttled from cage to cage.

The group said that the younger generations may be starting to see virginity as less of a requirement and more of a desirable quality; this study done in the region (not including Kosovo) is a bit less conclusive. For now, anyway, “dishonorable” Roma brides continue to be pilloried, unless they’re able to scrape together enough money to renew their virginity.

Taken together, I think that the group’s ideas represent very well the intersection that Roma women find themselves at – they are proud of their traditions, but are also aware that some of them hold them back from being independent, maybe even from being happy. Some have strong ideas for their futures but know that economic and social realities may make those dreams impossible. There are so many competing forces shaping how Roma women see themselves and their futures. How to navigate the crossroads is the challenge. I’m excited to see where the project takes us next…

Today’s demonstration, “Kundër Hajnisë” (“Against the Thieves” in Kosovo dialect) went off without a hitch. I, being the good, rule-respecting Fellow I am, stayed out of the action, but luckily my office building is 100 feet or so from the where the stage was set up, and I had a good view from the balcony. A bit after noon, a throng of protesters and members of the Vetevendosjë! (“Self-determination!”) party carrying banners and flags, and blasting deafening whistles, marched down the pedestrian Mother Teresa Street in central Pristina, stopped across from the government building, and cheered and booed accordingly to the words of a couple of guys standing up on a grandstand with bullhorns. Police had set up barricades and were standing by, but no rubber bullets were fired, no tear gas was thrown, and the ambulance drivers there at the ready could have gotten an afternoon nap. After the rally everyone went back to work (or back to their usual café, basically the same thing).

Why does this merit a blog post, then, if nothing was remarkable? Because in Kosovo public political demonstrations are virtually taboo, which I think is disappointing in a country with such visible government corruption. I can’t comment on Vetevendosjë!’s platform (it was a bit disconcerting to see nothing but Albanian flags when the party, as I understand it, is supposed to be about Kosovo’s, not just Albanians’, self-determination), but there’s no doubt that a public statement against graft is necessary in a place where corrupt institutions are holding back the hopes and talents of Kosovo’s young generation. So I thought it was great to see a peaceful public action that addressed a legitimate public issue.

But that doesn’t seem to be the mainstream sentiment. All week, signs announcing the rally had been going up around town, and I heard people talking a bit nervously about it. Vetevendosjë! has held a reputation as a trouble-maker since its massive 2007 rally got out of control and resulted in the death of two demonstrators.

It’s easy to see why people who have been through Kosovo’s history of the last two decades would be wary of anything that could spark public violence. But peaceful public assembly should be a favorite instrument in an activist’s toolbox, and it seems like it’s time more politically-minded people in Kosovo cultivated it. I’m of the opinion that rallies, protests, peaceful civil disobedience, etc, can be galvanizing, inspiring, and most of all useful, tools to keep institutions in step with the public’s wishes. So it was especially disappointing to hear that, apparently, one of the main voices responsible for discouraging public demonstrations is American: U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell, who as the representative of the U.S. government is very influential (or “like the voice of God” as one activist I talked to put it) has apparently spoken out against such rallies. (I couldn’t find any direct statements backing this up in a quick Google search, so admittedly this is hearsay…)

When I first arrived in Kosovo and was trying to decide how we could get the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian advocacy quilt I’m helping to produce have the most impact, the first thing that I thought of was to stage a rally (or several rallies in multiple towns) and use the quilt as a powerful visual statement to go with a speech or two by Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women leaders. A Roma journalist I went to for advice suggested that we make the quilt’s creation into a public action – to have women spend half a day sitting and stitching in a central square, forcing residents to notice their presence and their message. Both these ideas were quickly squelched. I was told that Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women wouldn’t understand the point of such an action, wouldn’t want to make such a public statement. The director of the NGO Voice of Roma even said that he would fear for the safety of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women demonstrating in Pristina. Given what I know of the Kosovo Women’s Network’s demonstrations on controversial women’s rights issues, I hope that those fears would be unfounded, but I’m really not sure.

As an outsider, I felt that it wasn’t my place to push the issue, especially if a demonstration would be in any way dangerous, but it’s hard to accept that these communities don’t seem to be ready to make a visible public stand for their rights. I can respect a culture of non-confrontation, but culture shouldn’t be an excuse for being voiceless. Without greater visibility of women from these communities, there’s zero chance of their acceptance. It may certainly be true that I don’t have a nuanced enough understanding of the situation to see why public action is a bad idea – it could be the case that these communities aren’t ready to back up such an action with a real campaign; that the cultural exhibitions that have been becoming more frequent are the best way to start; that working through the usual political channels will be effective. And public demonstrations of course aren’t the end-all solution to powerlessness. But it seems like women actually getting out into the streets and speaking out for themselves would be a great way to gain some momentum – and why leave out a potentially useful tactic? I’m interested to see if my view has changed by the time I finish my internship. For now, I can’t help thinking about how fabulous it would be to see a group of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women marching down Mother Teresa Street in front of shocked café patrons taking their afternoon coffees…

(I know I said the last post was supposed to be more about the situation of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women in Kosovo, but I got sidetracked by Flurije’s story! So now I’m moving along…)

This week I finally started my field visits (not counting a quick meeting in Gracanica, a town about 20 minutes outside of Pristina, to speak with Voice of Roma last Friday). I was very happy to be out exploring. Although I’m happy to spend my days picking up Albanian slang from the staff at the Kosovo Gender Studies Center while I’m editing grant proposals and having fabulous 1-euro byrek me spinaq lunches from the shop down the street, I didn’t come here to spend 40 hours a week in an office!

The goal of these visits has been to find partners for the project I’m doing with RROGRAEK – working with women from these communities to create an advocacy quilt that expresses their hopes for Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women’s empowerment – and for me, it’s been a chance to start getting more than a textbook idea of what being a woman in these communities looks like in different parts of the country.

My first visit, to observe a literacy program for Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women in the town of Fushe Kosova, helped to put me in touch with one of the most basic and most poignant struggles most women from these communities face – getting an education.

As educated, literate NGO workers, RROGRAEK’s staff, Shpresa (who is Roma) and Diana (who is Egyptian) don’t represent the average women from their communities. According to UNICEF, only 13% of Kosovar Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians (boys and girls) between the ages of 16 and 19 are in school; only about 1% attends university. Kosovar Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women are among the least literate in the region. 69% in the 25-34 age group are literate, and the numbers are actually worse for the younger generation – only 56% of women in the 15-24 age group are literate. (I would think because of the upheaval during the war – I don’t know if this will be part of a longer-lasting trend). With a profile like this, it’s easy to see how Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian women remain trapped by poverty and powerlessness. I was excited to have the chance to visit a community-run program that’s trying to change these numbers.

Ferdane (second from left) with her Balkan Sunflowers literacy group

Ferdane (second from left) with her Balkan Sunflowers literacy group

The program is run out of the Balkan Sunflowers learning center in Fushe Kosova, just a few kilometers outside Pristina, where 370 children, mainly from Roma and Ashkali communities, get free pre-kindergarten classes, homework help, and summer camp. Ferdane, the 25-year-old Ashkali woman who runs the program, took me to the compound’s backyard and introduced me to the day’s group. Eight girls between 12 and 16, who were sitting around a plastic play table under the cherry trees, smiled at me shyly and then went back to their workbook exercises. Once they finished their work, they were excited to show me some of the complicated beadwork they’d also done at the center (Balkan Sunflowers gives them materials to make handicrafts as a motivation to stick with the literacy course when it gets difficult).

A literacy group member shows off a beaded wedding belt and table ornament the group made

A literacy group member shows off a beaded wedding belt and table ornament the group made

I learned that some had had a bit of primary school, others none at all. Ferdane proudly told me how at first she had had to actually hold the hand of one girl so she could form letters, and that now that girl was filling out crossword puzzles and diligently working her way through the course that would bring her up to a fifth-grade reading level.

Ferdane said that in the winter the class was full of women of all ages; in the summer, they have too much work to do at home, families come visit from abroad, and schoolwork lapses. Her experience, she says, confirms the reasons often reported for women’s lack of education: “The big problem for many is family… Always women here need to care for the house, for younger sisters, brothers… family is always the problem…. They only motivate the boys to go to school.”

In these communities, cultural norms and all the immediate necessities of daily life can drown out messages from the government and NGOs that girls have a right to go to school and become educated women. Ferdane says that, at least, the women she’s been working with over the past two years have learned that education is important, and that they look to college-educated Ferdane not as an outsider – as they did when Ferdane first started teaching – but as a role model.

I met with a potential Albanian teacher, Flurije, today after work. It may be a little ridiculous to try to pick up a new language for a two-month stay, but I’m excited to learn what I can. It was a beautiful breezy afternoon, and we were sitting in a sidewalk cafe on the pedestrian Mother Theresa street, sipping Kosovo macchiatos and making small talk. She was delighted I was American, a common reaction in Pristina. She gave me a warm, twinkly smile – she didn’t have to tell me she’d been a primary school teacher for 25 years after I saw that smile! – and reminded me that it was the holiday commemorating Liberation Day (June 12, 1999, the day that NATO troops entered Kosovo to take control as Serb forces withdrew). Americans were extra-popular today. If I were smarter I could probably get a lot of bar tabs paid by keeping my passport not-so-subtly sticking out of my purse.

I mentioned that I hadn’t seen much in the way of celebration – just a few strings of NATO country flags suspended over streets in the center of town. Flurije laughed, “Yes, I suppose it’s not such a big deal after twelve years!”

Today I heard Flurije's story

Today I heard Flurije's story

But then she turned to look down the street we were sitting on – consequently the street that dead-ends with the Kosovo Women’s Network building at the end of the block. “That building there, the beautiful one,” she motioned to a nicely painted apartment building maybe fifty feet away, “that is where I spent the entire war. With my husband, our three daughters, my father-in-law and mother-in-law, together.” I was surprised – I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone (knowingly) who lived in the capital during the entire war. “We tried to leave,” she continued. “We went to the border. We spent seven days and six nights next to the border. With no food, no water… finally, they turned us back.” She paused, still smiling a bit apologetically. “It was horrible… We would see the Serb paramilitaries out walking. There were one or two food stores, and when I went, I took all three of my daughters with me.” She held two clenched fists down in memory of clinging to her small children. “I was too scared to go alone. I couldn’t let my husband go alone. So we all went together.”

“We were happy when we heard the bombs,” she said. “Those were our….” “Rescuers,” I supplied. “Yes,” she nodded.

She shared a few more memories from the war, and then I steered the conversation toward Kosovo’s present when I sensed it was time to move on. And then there we were, chatting about Pristina’s ubiquitous street construction, sipping macchiatos and enjoying the breeze.

I’ve had this feeling plenty of times traveling throughout the former Yugoslavia – I’m sure everyone who’s been here has – of unintentionally trying to superimpose some idea of what it actually felt like to be trapped in a war-ravaged city on top of whatever lovely, peaceful, happy central square I’m looking over. It never feels less horrible, less surreal to imagine.

I always find myself trying to understand how differently time would move under those conditions. To think, there was one day, one seemingly random day, when shooting started, and everything fell apart. For Flurije, there were seven days and six nights frozen on the Kosovo-Macedonia border, living on fear alone. And then there was one day when the shooting stopped. I end up wondering, “How long does it take for your own street to stop feeling like a warzone? When does it become your city once again? How long is it before you can trust a stranger again?”

Working with Roma in Kosovo, I have some new thoughts about Liberation Day. It was the day that a kind of new campaign began against Pristina’s Roma. In the days after displaced Albanians began flooding back into the city, Roma, who were considered to be Serb sympathizers, began to flee first out of fear, and then because of threats and actual mass violence. Along with murders, there were several documented instances of KLA members raping Roma women. The same expulsions and violence happened throughout the country, as “liberated” Kosovo became a renewed hell for the Roma. I wonder how/if that history figures into how they think about this day now? How has it changed the time it’s taken – and is still taking – to heal their wounds from the war?

The response to “Who are these people?” depends on who you ask – and I definitely don’t have a solid answer. But the story of these groups’ existence in Kosovo is one of divergence, convergence, and political machinations and persecution that’s quite confusing to outsiders, if not to those who are living it. It’s been extremely interesting to learn about these identities, picking up bits here and there. I’ll be adding to this as I learn more, but here’s my basic version, two weeks in:

The Roma: Roma in Kosovo are members of a people who migrated from India to Europe over a thousand years ago, and have been in Kosovo for at least 700 years. They speak the Romani language, usually in addition to either Serbian or Albanian – although more often Serb. Because of their perceived support of the Serbs, they were the victims of a violent backlash when Albanians returned to Kosovo at the end of the 1999 conflict (even though they also faced persecution by the Serbs in some areas as well). There are different subgroups among Kosovo Roma, but they all identify as Roma or Gypsy. They live in different enclaves around the country – in Prizren, Gračanica, Mitrovica, Gjilan, and others. Since the end of the war, there are very few in Pristina.

The Ashkali: Non-Roma became aware of this group as distinct from Roma during the 1999 war, when Ashkalis declared themselves separate from the often Serbian-speaking Roma to avoid persecution from the majority Albanians. (Of course, there’s no clear line of loyalty here – some Ashkalis supported the Serbs as well.) Ashkalis trace their origins from Iran, saying that when they arrived in the Balkans in the 4^th century they picked up the language of the Illyrians living there, which is why they speak Albanian as their first language today. They live primarily in the center of Kosovo and in the east.

The Egyptians: They emerged as a self-declared group in fits and starts from the 1970s through the 90s, claiming Egyptian heritage that separates them from Roma and Ashkalis. Albanian is the first language for most. Their enclaves are mainly in the west of Kosovo.

Before 1999, there were 150,000 – 200,000 members of these three groups in Kosovo – a sizeable percentage of Kosovo’s population of around two million. The overwhelming majority fled for their lives during the conflict, and few have returned (even fewer voluntarily) since. Now there are between 35,000 and 40,000 members of these communities in Kosovo; I haven’t found a reliable figure for each group.

Map of Kosovo's ethnic minorities, 2002. Author: Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal. Sources: UNMIK; Ninth assessment of the situation of ethnic minorities in Kosovo (2002), OSCE-UNHCR; Kosovo Humanitarian Community Information Center, Kosovo road Atlas.

Map of Kosovo's ethnic minorities, 2002. Author: Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal. Sources: UNMIK; Ninth assessment of the situation of ethnic minorities in Kosovo (2002), OSCE-UNHCR; Kosovo Humanitarian Community Information Center, Kosovo road Atlas.

Together, they are “among the most marginalized groups in Kosovo” (this is their constant label – more on this later). As a group, they face exclusion in almost every sphere of life in Kosovo – most live in poverty, 98-100% are officially unemployed, they lack access to basic services like healthcare, education, and resources to claim their rights.

Because they face similar issues of exclusion and supposedly have similar heritage, the three communities have been grouped together by the international community and the government under a convenient acronym – RAE – so that aid programs are sure to address the needs of all three groups. You rarely see a program just addressed at Roma; I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ashkali or Egyptians mentioned without at least one of the other groups.  So while they’re nominally considered separate, the international community is signaling that these are all basically the same people, with the same problems, same needs.

What’s the real story?
The members of these communities who I’ve talked to have very different opinions on where the lines separating these identities should be drawn.

Some have told me that the division between the three groups is falsely accentuated. A trio of Roma journalists working for a national Romani-language radio program I spoke with each told me that the differences weren’t substantial. “We are all gypises,” one of them, Daut Qulangjiu, said with a smile. His colleague, Avdi Misini, told me that the labels of Ashkali and Egyptian were inventions of Milosevic, who in the 1980s and 90s wanted to divide the Roma for political reasons. (Apparently, the total number of Roma (including Ashkali and Egyptians) in Yugoslavian Kosovo outnumbered the Serbs in the region. So, rather than accept that Serbs were a minority among the minorities, Milosevic created/played up an emerging division in the Roma to put the Serbs in the dominant minority position.) This timeframe coincides with Egyptian and Ashkali appearance as accepted minorities, but the Egyptians, at least, had petitioned to become a recognized ethnic group earlier.

He went on to say that self-identified Ashkali and Egyptians have their history wrong. This is in line with those who say that Ashkalis are Roma who simply “lost” the Romani language and so speak Albanian, and that the legend of any Egyptian origins is just a legend – that that group is made up of Albanized Roma as well.

Both Misini and Qulangjiu emphasized that the three groups intermarry because none labels the other two as “gadje” (“other”), and that they’re so mixed that they’re functionally one community – a Rom may have Ashkali cousins and an Egyptian wife, and even within the same family people might self identify differently – an Egyptian might have one Ashkali brother and a Roma sister. The message I got from this: it’s important to maintain solidarity among these three groups – emphasizing the differences just makes them weaker and easier to manipulate. A very legitimate point considering the basically nonexistent position of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians in Kosovo politics!

An Ashkali NGO director (whose name I didn’t get permission to use) had very different feelings. He prickled at the labeling of the three groups the “RAE community.” According to him, it’s rightfully the “Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communitIES.” He told me that his niece, also an NGO worker and an Ashkali, refuses to participate in interviews about the “RAE” people, insisting that her identity as Ashkali be recognized separately. He said that the idea that all three came to Europe from India is ignorant – an easy way to categorize Balkan people with darker skin. Generalizing them into RAE denies them of their heritage and their right to have their identity recognized and respected.

I’ve started to pick up on a resentment about this melding of three peoples into one group from other representatives of these communities as well. Some have mentioned that it’s now impossible to get funding for projects that only address the needs of one of these communities, that it’s implied to be discriminatory to not include all. It sounds like it’s worthwhile to ask, Could this attempt by international organizations to be inclusive be sowing resentment between the three groups? In treating these groups as one, are we missing the complexity that each group may be facing different challenges that need different solutions?

My initial take on it
My stance is that self-identification matters. I know that the international community loves convenient acronyms, but labels should be used with care. Maybe it’s time to reexamine why this one came about, and how it’s affecting these communities.

One last thought on the question of who the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians of Kosovo are. We can say that what defines them is partly blood, partly culture, heritage, maybe language, and self-identification.

What are things that don’t define the Roma, Ashkali or Egyptian people? Poverty, lack of education, silence, powerlessness. It may sound ridiculously obvious, but I think that this is an important point to make. It’s easy to accept the common picture many have of Roma across Europe, reinforced by countless reports on the terrible situations they face – to picture people who are illiterate, desperately poor, probably unkempt and living in squalid conditions, powerless, foreign to every country. Google images for “Kosovo Roma” and see what you find: how often are we challenged to think of Roma (and, now that we’re aware, Ashkali and Egyptians) that don’t meet these stereotypes? These might be the conditions of many Roma – but they don’t constitute a definition.

I’ve spent the last two weeks meeting Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians who defy these common perceptions – among them Shpresa and Diana of RROGRAEK and all the young Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian students who came to RROGRAEK’s last training. These individuals, and their work, should challenge the majority to include Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians as more than a static stereotype and a permanent “other” in its picture of Kosovo’s present and future.

Next post: moving on from identity to the current situation of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians in Kosovo.

Also, for a vivid peek at Roma culture in Kosovo, check out the excellent Balkanproject.org – it has dozens of fantastic interviews with Roma from around Kosovo, often with audio and video recordings, plus a large collection of articles on different facets of Roma life and culture up to 2004.