Last Wednesday I saw Gipsy.cz at the U-Klub in Olomouc, in a double concert with the more traditonal Gypsy band Terné Chave, from Hradec Králové. I like both bands, but they're quite different and lots of people either left after the first or didn't arrive until the second band was about to begin.
I think the highlight of the night was Radoslav Banga explaining why he sings so high; when he was young his idols were Bruce Lee and Michael Jackson-his mother was always telling him not to squeal and scream so much all the time or he'd be stuck with that voice forever, and you can guess how the story ends...
He then went on to beatbox Billie Jean. I'd be sharing that clip with you if I'd taken my camera, but Romano Hip Hop is their most popular song. So far.
You hear that sentence a lot around here when racism comes up in conversation.
And come up it does, because racism has been in the Czech news a lot lately. The planned march of far right wing extremists through Prague’s Jewish quarter to “show the rabbis the flags after 60years” ended as a bit of a fiasco, but their demonstration the following week protesting the death of free speech carried more weight in the wider community.
Then, three elite Special Forces soldiers were suspended pending expulsion from the Czech army due their involvement with shadowy neo-Nazi organizations and fears that they could be intending to train extremist paramilitaries. And in the same week that students from the Liberec art college won a Europe-wide anti-discrimination design competition, students across town at the Liberec technical college were being investigated by police for posing behind a Nazi flag.
A survey of almost 1700 teenage students published this week by the People in Need organization showed that 75 % of respondents had a negative attitude towards Romanies and thought their problems were caused by their ‘failure to adapt’. A third of respondents said they would like to expel Gypsies from the CzechRepublic!
Not so surprising perhaps, but read further and you’ll find that 80% of respondents have a positive attitude towards Africans and 60% towards eastern Europeans, Vietnamese people and Muslims. The Czech Vietnamese community is the most visible after Romanies, and I was a bit surprised that there was so much of a difference in the figures.
I asked friends about it and they weren’t surprised at all. Their explanation was that Vietnamese people were perceived as much more hardworking than Romanies, and that was the difference. That’s fair enough I guess, but the problem comes when an entire group of people is judged by the actions of a few (or even many), and leads to racism or discrimination. I asked the same people about right-wing extremists and racist organizations and they explained that everybody they knew thought the skinheads were a bunch of ****ing idiots. If we acknowledge that it is human nature to an extent to judge a whole group of people by the actions of those you come into contact with, it’s at least reassuring that it’s applied to the outspoken racists as well as to those they march against.
For my part, I’ve quite enjoyed the limited and admittedly arm’s length interaction I’ve had with Romanies and their culture. There’s a particular bar that’s run by a Romani family that I really like to go to, and I had a great time at the Gypsy music festival at Rožnov pod Radhoštem and the Khamoro festival parade in Prague. Iva Bittova and Terné Čhave are two Romani acts that are amazing to see live and last new years’ eve Kale played live on the main square of the town I live in. Awesome!
An in-depth analysis of Romanies' place in Czech society is beyond the scope both of this blog and my abilities, but if you’d like to explore more, you might be interested in these links...
Sometimes the journey is more interesting than the destination, but this is not one of those times. It’s also possibly the shortest journey that I’ll ever write about, because all I did was walk down to the end of the next block to see the new(ish) Czech film ROMing. ROMing stars Marian Labuda and Viteslav Holub as a Romany father and son. The third main character is played by Bolek Polivka and is the centre of most of the comic moments in the film.
The film jumps outright into myths and stereotypes of Romanies in the Czech lands and begins with the story of the sad king of the Gypsies, Somali. Somali is sad because he’s had to do what no gypsy king ever before had to resort to, an honest day’s work. Somali manages to conceal his horrible secret by leaving his caravan each morning in a flashy white suit, dapper hat and with kilograms of gold around his neck. His chauffeur driven Mercedes leaves the gypsy settlement and carries him through more clichés of crowds of street urchins and a pair of Rom kids lifting manhole covers onto their cart to be sold for scrap.
The Merc pulls up at a storefront in a run-down part of town. Somali enters by the front door in all his finery, but leaves by the back door in workman’s clothes and jumps on a bicycle to make it to the factory in time to clock on for his shift.
But as the narrator points out, you can fool people for a while, but no lie lasts forever. When Somali is spied by some gypsy kids up to more stereotypical mischief, they report back to the gypsy settlement with his factory timecard as proof. Somali’s wife has to see for herself but having grown so fat and not having left the caravan for so long, an extra wide door has to be cut with a hand saw. Somali is confronted, exposed and banished from the gypsy settlement. The canary that represents the spirit of the gypsies and sat constantly on his head (under his hat) deserts him at this moment and the rest of the film is spent with Somali on a long journey with an empty cage and facing all manner of demons to try to win back the feathered embodiment of the Romany spirit.
It all sounds a bit farfetched doesn’t it? That’s what I thought too, until at this point it became clear that Somali is the main character of a story being written by Marian Labuda’s Roman. Roman explains to his son Juro that all the great nations have their fables and epics; the Germans have the Ring of the Nibelung, the English have the Tales of King Arthur and even Finland has the Kalevala. Only the Roma are without an epic and the story of Sad Gypsy King Somali, who knows neither how to steal or dance, is his solution.
Juro is home from University studies in Prague for the weekend and his father wants to take him on a trip to meet a gypsy girl named Anetka. Juro already has a girlfriend (whose short role consists mostly of presenting her ample bosom to the camera) and reluctantly agrees to go along to appease his father.They’re joined at this point by drunken, swearing, ghostly-grey but charismatic Stano (a better role for Bolek Polivka is difficult to imagine and if you want to know how to really swear in Czech, he is the perfect tutor). In Stano’s truck the three adventurers set off on their trip to Anetka’s home village, wringing laughs from a few more old stereotypes on the way.
Juro sets up a tent but the others insist on sleeping under the stars, until there’s a torrential downpour. Stano steals a chicken for breakfast but Juro can’t bring himself to slit its neck, tough guy Stano has a bit of trouble with it too. Stano insists on stealing a fish for dinner, even though Juro has the money to buy one. Of course they get caught and loaded up with a couple of barrels of buckshot.
There are a lot of jokes like that, but the film also touches on some real issues faced by the Roma and even suggests some possible solutions, like when the truck picks up a gypsy band and they get stopped by the police and hauled over the coals about all sorts of ridiculous details like whether the scissors in their auto first aid kit are stainless steel or not. University-educated Juro manages to get them out of this, maintaining dignity and earning a bit of respect from Stano on the way.
Now I’m not going to give away much more than that. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone nor do I want to give anyone an excuse not to go and see the film for themselves. I thought it was great and I’d like to go and see it again. I might even have a look around and see if the soundtrack is for sale. If it includes some of Stano’s P-word monologues, I’ll be buying it for sure. My swearing could do with some polishing up and hockey season is just around the corner after all…
May must be the month of processions in the Czech Republic. Little over a week since the big Ride of the Kings at Vlčnov, there was a procession of Gypsy musicians through the streets of Prague’s Old town to mark the end of the Khamoro Romany cultural festival.
The procession started at the Můstek end of Wenceslas Square. There were five or six groups of musicians milling around and loads of people trying to squeeze in to photograph them. There were also marshals fighting to get the whole thing organized and dozens of friends and friends of friends. It was chaotic but not nearly as much as you might expect either from five groups of musicians or five groups of gypsies. Considering it was five or six groups of Gypsy musicians the whole thing was positively efficient.
(I understand that in some circles the word Gypsy is considered pejorative, but by using it I intend no disrespect to anybody. There are accounts of many Roms who happily refer to themselves as Gypsy. Hip-hop musician Gipsy.cz is one high-profile example and recently there was also the lady who guided me through the Museum of Romany culture in Brno. The fact that the nationalities Romany and Romanian are sometimes confused is another reason to stick with the word ‘Gypsy’ Anyway, no offence, back to the parade…)
At a little after the appointed time the procession started down Na Příkopě, led by the Romany flag. The flag has two horizontal fields, of blue and green, with a red chakra (something like a wagon wheel) in the centre. Behind followed the flags of Israel and the European countries with sizable Romani populations. The first group of musicians marched behind the Ukrainian flag and following them were the groups from Slovenia, Hungary, Czech, Rajasthan and Macedonia. The only ones playing at the beginning were the band from Macedonia, which was fine by me, because it was these fat brass sounds from the Balkans that got me hooked on Gypsy music in the first place.
Up near the corner of Havířská the procession paused and the other groups of musicians cleared spaces for themselves to play and dance. The dark flowery costumes and headscarves of the Ukrainians are what I remember of childhood impressions of gypsies in film and fiction and it was them that I watched dance. Or tried to watch, before the professional (read ‘rude’) photographers got in on the act and forced their way in front of everybody else. Rather than the brass instruments favoured in the Balkans the Ukrainians played violin and piano accordion. Only a clarinet could have made it more typically Central European. The Rajasthani Gypsies played percussion, so it was only the flamenco guitars of French and Spanish Gypsies (ala The Gypsy Kings) that were underrepresented.
The highlight of the dancing was contributed by the brightly dressed girl with the group from Rajasthan. At the last stop before the old town square she danced for several minutes in a tight circle of spectators before slipping the two big gold rings off her fingers and presenting them to the crowd. She laid them jewel-side down on the ground, with the ring itself pointing up into the air. More dancing in a circle, a faster tempo and then she stopped, stretched over backwards with her belly to the sky and picked up the rings. Between her eyelids! Stretching over backwards far enough to put your forehead on the ground is impressive enough, doing it with enough control to pick up something made of metal between your eyelids without having your eye out is quite amazing and the whole thing in a street surrounded by a jostling crowd of strangers was a feat worthy of the most courageous daredevil!
The procession continued like this, the Macedonians playing on the move and then a halt while the other groups and their dancers had a turn, until it reached the Old Town Square. On the square the musicians followed the flags in a rough sort of loop before everybody split and found their own space to play. After half an hour or so some of the groups packed up, the flags had all been rolled away and others drifted off to try their luck at busking for the 85Kč-beer drinking onlookers in the outdoor cafes. "Te den, cha, te maren, denaš!" (If they're giving, take, if they're angry, run!)
A fittingly imprecise and natural end to a parade celebrating the culture of Europe’s greatest undefined and undefinable nation. Long may they live, prosper, and keep pumping out that fantastic music…
