Growing a New Skin:
The Life and Poetry of Papusza

by Gigi Thibodeau

I. Gypsy Fantasies and Realities

"I was born in the wagon of a traveling show," sang Cher on the 45 of Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves that I played again and again as a young girl during the early years of the 1970s. I remember belting out the chorus along with Cher, sitting cross-legged on the blue shag rug in my bedroom, dressed in a peasant blouse and patched bell-bottoms, the same watered-down hippie garb all the neighborhood girls wore. My mother's bracelets clicked reassuringly on my wrists as I practiced my fortune-telling skills with an old deck of my father's Bicycle brand poker cards. I imagined that I was an exotic, misunderstood Gypsy child who had been left on the doorstep of a small-town home economics teacher and her supermarket-manager husband. To be a Gypsy, I was sure, meant possessing a kind of freedom and power that existed somewhere far beyond the closely cropped hedges of our New England town, in a place outside of time where forests grew thick and dirt roads led to mist-shrouded fields in which fortune tellers, tinkers, and bear trainers sold their wares and skills beneath motley canvas tents.

This early fantasy of Gypsies -- which I fashioned from a pastiche of cultural images and representations as varied as the crones of fairy tales, the flamenco dancers of old Hollywood musicals, Gypsy Rose Lee, and the fortune teller costumes on store shelves each Halloween -- would persist and become even more elaborate in my teen years as I began to read such classic novels as Jane Eyre, Emma, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, and Dracula, in which Gypsies and Travelers were often stock fictional characters employed by authors to create a sense of lawlessness, a disregard for morality, or a link to the supernatural. They were usually anonymous, liminal figures who stood in stark contrast to the "good" protagonists of the novels and added a bit of gothic spice to even the most conventional plot.

Or to the most conventional pop song. During the early 1980s Cher was replaced by Stevie Nicks, swirling in diaphanous slow motion on MTV, crooning vaguely mysterious lyrics about Gypsies and witches. Designer jeans were the rage, among them a brand called Gitano, the Spanish term for Gypsy. And by the time I reached college in the late 80s, I was smoking packs of French Gitanes with my friends at bars. Images of Gypsies abounded, and I was enchanted. I wore my hair in braids, hung large silver hoops from the holes in my ears, and dressed in flowing skirts stitched with tiny bells that jingled when I walked.

I had never met a Gypsy, had never read any non-fiction accounts of Gypsy life, and knew nothing of the economic, political, and cultural realities of the approximately 12 million Gypsies living in diaspora all over the world. I was fortunate in that by the time I finally began actively reading about the Gypsies in the mid 1990s the internet was making available for the first time news reports, historical accounts, and scholarly research on Gypsies-or Roma, the Gypsies' own name for themselves-to a public beyond anthropologists, folklorists, linguists, and missionaries. At that same time, important work was being done by a number of scholars in Romany studies, a field that for decades had been hindered by several factors, chief among them being that the Roma exist on the margins of the cultures they inhabit, speaking both the language of the country or region where they live and Romani, a language with many dialects that until very recently existed only in oral form. To learn Romani, for a non-Gypsy, or gadjo, is difficult, not only because of the dialects and the lack of written texts, but because Gypsies themselves closely guard their language and culture. In her groundbreaking 1995 book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, Isabel Fonseca writes of an encounter with a Gypsy activist and teacher of Romani. "'You will never learn our language,'" he tells her:

Fonseca points out that while this man has spent his life battling the stereotypes and racism faced by Gypsies, he himself helps to perpetuate "one of the oldest slanders: that Romani is not a proper language, but thieves' cant" (13). Paradoxically, the stereotypes and terms that have often led to the persecution of Gypsies (such as "to be gypped" when one has been cheated), have also been their protection against assimilation into mainstream culture over the centuries. Indeed, the gadjo representations of Gypsies that intrigued me for so many years are among the fictions that have allowed the Roma to maintain a certain degree of autonomy within a world that has repeatedly pressured them to conform; thus, in many cases they have allowed such images to persist and have sometimes helped to reinforce them.

Complicating matters is the absence of a coherent recorded history of the Roma. Over time, the oral tales of their origins and travels have changed so much that most Gypsies today have no idea that their ancestors originally came from India, whence their migration into the Middle East and Europe began around 900 C.E. Gadjo linguists and historians have traced various migratory routes of the Roma by studying their language, which is composed of Hindi words, primarily, but also Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and bits and pieces of a number of European languages. But traditional Romany stories and songs refer in general terms to the latcho drom, the "long road" that the Gypsies have traveled, not to their point of origin. In fact, the very identity of the Roma seems inextricably linked to this lack of a place to call home, to a nostalgia for something that they have never truly had.

This nostalgia has been most deeply felt during the last seventy years as governments across Europe, seeing the Roma as a fundamental cause of a wide range of social ills, have stepped up their campaigns to put an end to the Gypsies' nomadic lifestyle once and for all. Through various pogroms and the establishment of government-sponsored housing estates, the Gypsies have been forced to settle in the hopes that they will become "legitimate" citizens. Repeatedly, the "Gypsy Question" has been raised, only to be answered by, at best, insufficient stop gap measures and, at worst, policies that have destroyed traditional Romany culture and arts, and left many families destitute.
The desire to halt the Romany caravans is nothing new. However, it was not until the twentieth century that sweeping changes in technology and transportation made the Gypsy Question more of a demand-one that found its most trenchant answer during the 1930s in Hitler's "final solution." The Holocaust, or porraimos, as it has come to be called by the Roma and which means "the devouring," included the murder of more than 500,000 Gypsies (between one- and two-thirds of the total European Gypsy population at that time). The devouring, to the Roma, meant not only the genocide of their people, but the continued denial of their suffering, the longstanding international amnesia extending back through several hundred years of the enslavement, persecution, and exile of these travelers.

However, if exile, suffering, and longing are essential elements of the Roma's culture, so too is resilience. It is from the ashes of the porraimos that some of the twentieth century's most beautiful and poignant Gypsy music and lyrics have arisen, as we see in the translation of a duet from the highland Gypsies of Poland:

In the first stanza of this song, the singer cries that he is orphaned, alone; he compares himself to a fallen tree, uprooted and therefore without connection to his past or his family. And it is his very loneliness that will keep him from growing, that will, indeed, kill him. The second stanza, sung by another person, is a typical Gypsy response in that it offers a kind of ironic comfort. It does not say, "But you are not quite alone," it says, "But that tree is not quite alone," extending the metaphor until the song's end so that we are left imagining not the person but the tree whose loneliness is assuaged by a cold wind. Cold comfort, yes, but it does offer solace to the individual, and more importantly, to the Gypsies as a whole, because it shows a deep understanding of loneliness and exile, an understanding born of experience. The tradition of singing songs about exile is precisely what has helped hold the Roma together generation after generation: we are alone, but we are alone together.

II. Papusza's Songs

Among the most powerful lyrics to emerge from the porraimos were those composed by a young Polish Gypsy named Bronislawa Wajs, who was known as Papusza, the Romani word for "doll." Born sometime between 1908 and 1910, she was part of a great kumpania, a band of families who traveled throughout Poland and Lithuania in horse-drawn caravans until the mid-1960s when the Polish government, like most others, put an end to their wandering life. The members of Papusza's family were harpists who, as Fonseca says, "hauled their great stringed instruments upright over the wagons like sails" (3). An unusual child, Papusza learned to read and write by stealing chickens in the villages where they stopped. She would bring the birds to the literate locals in exchange for lessons and books, which she kept well-hidden, for when Papusza was growing up during the 1920s literacy was forbidden among the Gypsies; it was a gadjo practice and therefore unclean (The Roma have strict purity laws-a rigid code of practices, rituals, and taboos that must be followed in order to maintain cleanliness. Gadje and their habits and possessions are considered especially unclean, mahrime, and therefore anyone associating with them for any reasons besides trade or other unavoidable dealings is by extension mahrime, and subject to expulsion by the group).

Whenever Papusza was caught reading she was beaten and her books were destroyed. But still she continued. She fell in love with "the blackest-eyed boy in the kumpania" (Fonseca 4), but her parents had other plans. She was married at fifteen to an old and gifted harpist named Dionizy Wajs. As Fonseca says, "It was a good marriage and she was very unhappy. She bore no children. She began to sing" (4). She also began to compose her own songs.

As we saw with the highland Gypsy duet, most Gypsy songs, because they have been passed down orally through the years, speak of a universal experience, possessed by no one author, and therefore no individual speaker, event, setting, or time (Ficowski 109). They could tell the story of nearly any Gypsy; like the Gypsies themselves, these songs exist outside of recorded time and history even as they serve as links to a long-forgotten past. Many of Papusza's own songs are rooted in this oral tradition. She improvised many of them while performing, and most of them were about her loneliness and her longing for the past. Some of them have the traditional generic timelessness and universality of Gypsy song, but others possess a kind of specificity and intimacy still rare in Romany poetry and song today. She sang about specific people or moments, as in this ballad called "Earrings of Leaves" :

In the summer of 1949, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski happened to hear Papusza performing her songs. Ficowski for many years had been studying the Polish Gypsies; he was an advisor to the government on the Gypsy Question and was writing a book that would eventually become the first in-depth published study of the Polish Gypsies. He immediately recognized Papusza's singular talent and upon discovering that she was literate, urged her to write her songs down so that he could publish them. He convinced her that by sharing her lyrics with non-Gypsies, she would be helping to create a better understanding of the Gypsies. The Nazis had killed all but 15,000 of the Polish Roma and the fate of those who survived was to a very large extent in the government's hands. Ficowski told Papusza that she could influence their decision in a way that would help her people. She began writing out her songs phonetically in Romani, using the Polish alphabet. Ficowski then translated them into Polish. Fonseca explains: "In October of 1950 several of Papusza's poems appeared in a magazine called Problemy, alongside an interview with Ficowski by the distinguished poet Julian Tuwim. There is talk of the ills of 'wandering,' and the piece ends with a Romani translation of the Communist 'Internationale'" (7).

Ficowski also discussed the "ills of 'wandering'" in the first edition of his book, The Gypsies in Poland, which was published in 1953. By that point the government was pressing for the forced settlement of the Gypsies; it had instituted a widespread program called the Great Halt. Ficowski endorsed the program, using Papusza herself as proof of the benefits of a settled life; induced by a state grant, she had settled in a Gypsy housing estate. Ficowski writes:

To represent the period around 1950 as her most productive is to privilege the written word over the spoken. Papusza had composed hundreds of songs in the years before she met Ficowski. The written recordings of poems cannot be equated with productivity, for it is impossible to say which of these poems were new and which were those she was simply copying from memory. As for Ficowski's portrayal of her as a "participant in and mouth-piece for these movments," we should keep this phrase in mind when we read excerpts from Papusza's song titled (as many of her songs were) "Gypsy Song Composed out of the Head of Papusza":

This deeply personal song, rather than speaking for any government, elegizes a lost way of life. Ficowski genuinely believed that settlement would improve the Gypsies' plight, that it would bring education, jobs, and a better life. But in trying to help the Gypsies, he also advocated a way to further alienate them, this time by ghettoizing them in government-controlled settlements. In a much later, revised edition of The Gypsies in Poland, published during the 1980s, Ficowski would write about the results of the Great Halt with much regret, saying that although it did increase literacy, most of the individuals who became educated left the Gypsy community, and most of the traditional crafts and customs of the Roma were dying out. "In some groups," he wrote, "after the loss of opportunities to practice traditional professions, the main source of livelihood became preying on the rest of society" (51).

Papusza's fate was no better. Her people viewed her as the government's accomplice in the destruction of the Gypsies' traditional way of life. A couple of months after her poems appeared in Problemy, a group of Gypsies visited her and threatened her with expulsion if she were to publish any more songs for the gadjo audience. But at that moment several of her poems were already being prepared for publication in Ficowski's book. She went to the Polish Writers Union in Warsaw to beg for their help; she wanted desperately to pull her poems from the book. When they gave her no help, she went to the publishing house itself, but the editors could not fathom a poet who did not want her poems published. Unsuccessful, she returned home, burned all of her poems-at least 300 of them-and wrote to Ficowski begging him to stop publication. "If you print these songs," she told him, "I shall be skinned alive . . . my people shall be naked against the elements. But who knows, maybe I will grow another skin, maybe one more beautiful" (Fonseca 9).

This passage reflects again that old Gypsy cold comfort. Papusza knew that she was too late and that it was not the publication of Gypsy poems in general that would leave her people "naked against the elements"-linguists and anthropologists had been recording Gypsy songs for several decades, and Gypsies had been performing songs for gadje for centuries. Rather, it was the publication of these particular poems in this particular context that was so dangerous. Traditionally, the Roma perform two sorts of songs-those for the gadje and those for themselves. The songs for gadje consumption are meant to present merely the façade, the image of the Gypsies that we've all come to expect. But true Gypsy song, "deep song," was kept for playing only among Gypsies. Papusza's songs exposed her own, and therefore the Gypsies', soul.
The poems were published and Papusza was brought to trial before the Baro Shero-"Big Head," or elder-the highest Polish Gypsy authority. She was declared mahrime and was expelled from the community. After that she was committed to a psychiatric hospital where she spent eight months. She then lived alone for the next 34 years until her death in 1987.

Papusza's expulsion might seem extreme, but it is important to keep in mind that this was the early 1950s and the Holocaust was still a vivid memory for the Gypsies. Many of the survivors had been interviewed and examined by Nazi ethnographers, who had managed to chart more than 30,000 Romany genealogies. In Auschwitz, Gypsy children had been favorite subjects of Doctor Joseph Mengle-virtually none of them survived. From the Gypsies' perspective, the gadje-all gadje-were dangerous.
Papusza herself had written songs about the devouring. One of them describes hiding from the Nazis in the forests during the winter. This excerpt from "Bloody Tears: What We Went Through Under the Germans in Volhynia in the Years '43 and '44" demonstrates the Gypsies' alliance with the Jews during the Holocaust:

This song, among several others, was published in the early 1950s by Ficowski in a book called Papusza's Songs. To my knowledge, an English translation of this volume has yet to be published, but an English review of it was printed in 1956 in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society . The reviewer, S. E. Mann, writes:

To state that Papusza breathes a fresher, more pure air than the rest of us is to relegate her and her art to the realm of fairytale, a realm where she is depicted as an innocent, a naïve, a noble savage who knows not what she is doing but is visited by some sort of ethereal inspiration-the realm of my own childhood imaginings. As a kaleidoscope's infinite designs are random, Mann is implying that Papusza's songs are less consciously composed creations than beautiful accidents. His response to Papusza's poems falls far short of the understanding that Ficowski had hoped to create by their publication.
Except for a very brief period in the 1960s, Papusza never wrote again after her settlement. When asked why, she replied simply, "Swimming fish taste best" (Mann 61).

III. The Water that Wanders

Papusza's life and poetry cannot be reduced to a mere representation of the fate of the Gypsies in the 20th century. However, when one looks closely, one sees within her life and works her culture's transition from orality to literacy. This is a transition that for most of the West took place over a period of several hundred years. But for the Gypsies it has been sped up by technology and sheer necessity to the span of one lifetime. While for many centuries it was the Gypsies' illiteracy that helped them to survive by keeping them self-sufficient and separate, today it is their literacy that will help them to survive, even as it destroys much of their traditional culture-the way of life Papusza longs for in another "Gypsy Song Composed out of the Head of Papusza":

What I love about this poem is how Papusza mourns the loss of the river, the forest, the traveling life, even as her words show that she is still inextricably connected to all of these things, if not literally, then spiritually. The river becomes a collective metaphor for the largely voiceless and powerless Gypsies. As in the traditional highland Gypsy song about the fallen tree, the human and the natural entity (tree, river) gradually become indistinguishable. Even more interesting is a metamorphosis that occurs when she shifts the pronoun for the river from "it" to "she." By switching to the feminine, Papusza is no longer speaking of the river or her people as something separate from herself-she is the river.

Today, decades after her expulsion from the Roma community, Papusza's importance as a poet and cultural figure is widely recognized by Gypsies and non-Gypsies alike. Through her, I myself am coming to understand not only the complex and often contradictory character of Gypsy life, but also the ways that reading and writing profoundly alter individual and collective modes of existence, fostering generational connection as well as disruption. Even as many older Polish Roma still consider Papusza to be a traitor to her people, she is celebrated by young Gypsy performers as one of their greatest influences. Her poems are being set to music, and plays are being written and performed about her life. As Adam Bartosz, the director of the Tarnów Ethnographic Museum in Poland, states, "Papusza is as important to the Gypsies as [Jan] Kochanowski was to the Poles and Shakespeare to Europe."

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Gigi Thibodeau is a poet and fiction writer who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has published poems and short stories in journals nationwide, including River Styx, Soundings East, The Larcom Review, and Louisiana Literature. When she's not writing she often can be found in her garden, contemplating the weeds.