Roma arts. Our Culture Blindness. Gypsies in Romantic Lit, and the NYT - Hans Christian Andersen

Roma in Arts and Culture.
Our Defensive Culture Blindness

Where it Leads the Willing Duped

Hans Christian Andersen, Odense, DK

1.  First question.  Who cares about minorities without clout.  No-one. Fantasy enables us to say, they are fine, they don't need us, they are on their own.

2. Even the New York Times ignores the most important factor in the well-being history of Roma - the forced halts to caravan migrations, movement in the nomadic, seasonal, sense.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/world/europe/17union.html?_r=1&ref=gypsies/.

To us, it appears that the well-being of the Roma culture to an important degree for many who were, indeed, Travelers, was the movement.  Any inconvenience to communities was mitigated because the newcomers, moved. In time.  Cultures accommodated each other.  Force migratory population into high-rises without income, without traditional occupations, trouble.

3. Origins of cultural blindness to real hardship.

See how the great storyteller, the originator -- not a mere re-teller -- of tales that enabled children to face their nameless fears through fantasy -- himself was deluded. Hans Christian Andersen.  Childhood's greatest unspoken fears, address them through lives imagined in others.  But not so for reality.

The accounts of Hans Christian Andersen as to Gypsy populations he found in northern Jutland, further the romantic notion that people are fine without a place to stay.

Gypsies in Jutland?  Denmark? Gypsies in 19th Century Jutland.  Seen but not seen. The 19th Century Jutland and Gypsies.  What?  Is Mitt Romney a Roma, Romani, Rom'nie by heritage?  Does background, if demonstrated, affect attitudes toward the downtrodden. Should it>

"I was approaching Viborg in a heavy downpour when, along a bumpy land, I came across a tinker family; the woman carried an infant on her back and had another child by the hand, the man had knapsacks slung over his shoulders, they wished me good day in a friendly fashion and went on their way, for there was nowhere for them to find shelter.  When my man told me who they were I grew quite blissful; this truly poetic people live in our Denmark; they have their own language, own customs, live the life of nomads and wed their own kind with their own ceremonies, without the interference of the clergy."

Fair use quote from Hans Christian Andersen, the Life of a Storyteller, Knopf 2001, by Jackie Wullschlager at page 94.