SHEVCHENKO ANNIVERSARY: Bard revered by Roma (Gypsies) in Ukraine

by Adriana Helbig

In the past few years that I have been monitoring Roma (Gypsy) portrayals in the media in Ukraine, there has been a noted rise in positive attention towards the Roma and a movement away from portraying them as illiterate nomads. This is due in no small part to the efforts of Mykhailo Kozymyrenko, a well-known Roma poet who in 1996 first published his translations of selected poems from Taras Shevchenko's "Kobzar."

The 1,000 copies of his pocket-sized book titled "Dumy Moyi/Dumy Mire" in Ukrainian and in Romani, the language of Roma (Gypsies), turned heads among Ukrainian literary critics and the publication has done much to promote the image of Roma as educated citizens of Ukraine.

I met Mr. Kozymyrenko in Kyiv at a conference of Roma community leaders from various oblasts and had the opportunity to speak with the poet about his work. Mr. Kozymyrenko informed me that while there was hardly anything published in Romani at the time of the Soviet Union, the All-Russian Gypsy Union, established in 1925, oversaw early socialist initiatives to eliminate illiteracy among Gypsies. While most programs in Roma education lasted less than a decade and were liquidated entirely by 1938, the All-Russian Gypsy Union did establish a Romani alphabet and the late 1920s saw numerous publications by Roma in Romani in Moscow.

Stronger policies for Russification led to the closing of Romani schools, and presses for all minorities lacking a republic were shut down. The national presses that survived did so merely because they could be transferred from Moscow to a respective republic capital. Romani simply fell through the cracks, having neither republic nor capital.

Today Roma in Ukraine use the Cyrillic alphabet for written Romani, whose root language is Hindi, but the regional variations between dialects are so great that Roma living in various parts of Ukraine often have difficulty understanding each other. Mr. Kozymyrenko believes that the most important step in the Roma cultural renaissance in Ukraine today is to codify a Romani literary language, which he foresees to be a fusion of the various dialects spoken in Ukraine.

Because Romani was historically an oral language, it numbers between 4,000 and 6,000 words in comparison to approximately 140,000 words in the Ukrainian language. In his translations Mr. Kozymyrenko is often forced to incorporate Ukrainian words where an appropriate Romani substitute cannot be found.

The importance of translations such as the "Kobzar" cannot be underestimated for the Roma population in Ukraine, which according to Roma leaders, numbers close to 350,000. The past 10 years have borne witness to a Roma human rights and cultural revival movement in Ukraine. Cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Uzhhorod have become centers for Roma organizations that have begun to promote Roma culture, language, education, protection of human rights and positive media representation.

Unfortunately, the majority of both rural and urban Roma communities in Ukraine still are not integrated into Ukrainian society at large. Historical negative stereotypes that view Roma as thieves, child stealers, manipulators and lazy beggars continue to guide perceptions of "tsyhany" among the majority of Ukrainian citizens. This cycle of stereotypes actively continues to keep Roma at the bottom of the social ladder - a cycle that a growing number of Roma intellectuals are striving to break.

Mr. Kozymyrenko speaks of another reason that keeps him at his task of translating Shevchenko. He says that the social themes that address freedom and equality in Shevchenko's poems hit close to home among Roma. Roma identify with Shevchenko's pain and the worry about the fate of his people. The poem "Vidma" (Witch), for example, does not romanticize the lives of Gypsies which was often the case in 19th century Russian and European literature and reality is depicted in his artworks "Tsyhanka-Vorozhka" (Gypsy Fortuneteller, 1841, and "Tsyhan" (Gypsy, 1851).

Shevchenko is considered by Roma to be one of the most important links between Roma and Ukrainian culture because through Shevchenko's poetry and paintings, Roma have found their place in Ukrainian history and are striving to have their voice heard in Ukraine's future.

Adriana Helbig is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, where she teaches in the music humanities program. She was a 2001-2002 Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine, researching the role of musical culture in the Gypsy/Roma political movement.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 9, 2003, No. 10, Vol. LXXI

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