Abstract
This essay examines Colum McCann’s engagement, in his novel Zoli (2006), with issues of external and internal borders and their relation to the consolidation of Romani, national and European identities. Drawing on the work of Malcolm Anderson, Gerard Delanty, Eberhard Bort and Mary Louise Pratt, the analysis underscores McCann’s fictional dramatisation of the roles which cultural, physical and psychological borders have played in intensifying the divide between the Roma’s historical presence in Europe and their (mis)constructed presence in the European imaginary. Reflecting the historical sweep of McCann’s text, the essay also reflects on the continuities and developments in the territorialisation of the continent from the days of the Iron Curtain to the current bordering of ‘Fortress Europe’.
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Notes
- 1.
Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Oxford: Polity, 1996), pp. 1–2. In his introduction, Anderson outlines the distinguishing traits of ‘frontier’, ‘boundary’ and ‘border’, but thereafter often uses the terms interchangeably, a practice followed in this essay (see ibid., pp. 9–10).
- 2.
Ibid., p. 189.
- 3.
See Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p. 61.
- 4.
Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 21.
- 5.
Anderson, Frontiers, p. 5. There is a tension between the term ‘Gypsy’ and the people known by it. ‘Roma’, ‘Rroma’ and ‘Romani’ (derived from ‘Rom’, meaning ‘man’ in Sanskrit) are the endonyms used by academics and activists, as well as by Roma and non-Roma sensitised to the community’s political and historical circumstances. The terms stand in stark contrast to ‘Gypsy’, the exonym which derives from the incorrect hypothesis that the Roma originated in Egypt and by which many European Roma continue to refer to themselves. At the same time, both terms are misleading in suggesting the existence of a cohesive ethnic and cultural identity. The Roma are probably the largest, most dispersed and most heterogeneous minority in Europe and many of its constituents identify themselves only by their group name (such as Căldărași, Cale, Ludar, Lovari, Romnichel or Sinti). Currently, there is an estimated population of 12,000,000 people in Europe who identify as ‘Gypsy’/Roma, though national statistics vary greatly, especially since many Roma do not register their children’s births, do not take part in a census and do not retain their official documents in order to reduce the possibility of deportation.
- 6.
Anderson, ‘The Frontiers of Europe’, in Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, Boundaries and Identities: The Eastern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute, University of Edinburgh, 1996), p. 21. See also Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 77–8; and Fredrik Barth, ‘Introduction’ to Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, new edn (1969; Long Grave: Waveland Press, 1998), pp. 10–37.
- 7.
Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p. 5.
- 8.
See, for example, Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), p. 26; David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), p. xii; and Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, ‘Historical and Ethnographic Background: Gypsies, Roma, Sinti’, in Will Guy, ed., Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 42–3.
- 9.
For example, Crowe’s research finds categorisations of ‘Gypsies as lazy, untrustworthy thieves’ and ‘outlandish claims of excessive Gypsy criminality’ (Crowe, History, pp. 236, 238).
- 10.
As Crowe points out, the communist regimes of eastern Europe were particularly nationalistic in their refusal to grant the Roma minority status and in their attempt to transform them, through forced integration, into ‘little Hungarians, Romanians, or Russians’ (ibid., p. 238).
- 11.
McCann, Zoli (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 83.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 125. For historical details about the Act, see Crowe, History, pp. 55–61. Despite restrictions followed by a ban on crossing national borders, the Roma managed to sustain a sense of collective identity as a trans-border, diasporic, travelling culture. McCann emphasises this through a reference to the grandfather’s five languages, through Zoli’s mention of ‘our Czech brothers, our Polish sisters, our Hungarian cousins’ and through Zoli’s comment that ‘what happened [during the Porrajmos] to the least of us happened to all of us’ (McCann, Zoli, pp. 34, 47–8, 48).
- 13.
Ibid., p. 128.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 298.
- 15.
In a conversation with McCann, Frank McCourt remarked that Zoli is in many ways McCann’s most ‘“foreign” character, a woman, a poet, a Rom, an exile, an Eastern European’, to which the novelist replied that this was ‘the biggest leap [he] had ever made’ and that the novel merges memories of anti-traveller prejudice he observed as a child in Dublin with his interest in ‘compassion and clarity and making new worlds available’ (McCourt and McCann, ‘A Conversation with Colum McCann and Frank McCourt’, in McCann, Zoli, pp. 338, 339, 339).
- 16.
See, for instance, Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831), Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (Carmen, 1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Vita Sackville-West’s Heritage (1919) and Challenge (1923), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), D.H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930), Ivo Andrić’s Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge over the Drina, 1945), Stefan Kanfer’s The Eighth Sin (1978) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat (1999). As an exception, Romani-Hungarian Menyhért Lakatos’s Füstös képek (The Color of Smoke, 1975) presents an insider’s view of Romani experience in Nazi-occupied Europe.
- 17.
McCann, Zoli, p. 73.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 19.
Zoli’s literacy breaks a significant taboo, as the oldest woman of her kumpanija, Barleyknife, makes clear when she slaps Zoli nine times and predicts that the girl will end up marrying ‘the butcher’s ugliest dogs’ (ibid., pp. 36–7).
- 20.
Ibid., pp. 39, 89.
- 21.
Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, Vol. 91 (1991), p. 33.
- 22.
McCann, Zoli, p. 83.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 106.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 26.
This recalls Donnan and Wilson’s remark that boundaries are always necessarily confrontational and that ethnic groups ‘are marked off and mark themselves off from other collectivities in a process of inclusion and exclusion which differentiates “us” from “them”’ (Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p. 22).
- 27.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. ‘Communities are distinguished’, he adds, ‘not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (ibid., p. 6).
- 28.
Lemon, ‘Roma (Gypsies) in the Soviet Union and the Moscow Teatr “Romen”’, in Diane Tong, ed., Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 155.
- 29.
McCann, Zoli, p. 231.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 184.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 186.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 198, 199. She traverses this unnatural border with the aid of the natural world, including a deer that distracts the guards, a cypress tree in which she ducks for shelter and soft earth into which she buries her face.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 273.
- 36.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), p. 7. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s reading of a borderland as an ‘interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorialization’ speaks to Zoli’s case as well, though the borderlands she crosses do not shape her, as the two scholars would argue, into a ‘hybridized subject’ (Gupta and Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1992), p. 18).
- 37.
As Julia Kristeva points out, abjection is a manifestation of our response to that which ‘disturbs identity, system, and order’ and that which ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (1980; New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4).
- 38.
McCann, Zoli, p. 154.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 193.
- 40.
Ibid., pp. 28, 151.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 197.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 200.
- 43.
Ibid., pp. 143, 236.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 236.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 231.
- 47.
Ibid., pp. 236, 237.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 237.
- 49.
Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, p. 34. Pratt defines contact zones as ‘the social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (ibid., p. 34).
- 50.
McCann, Zoli, p. 317.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 53.
Ibid., pp. 3, 3, 4.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 308.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 303.
- 57.
Anderson and Bort, Frontiers, pp. 1–2, 21.
- 58.
Hammond, ‘Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to the EU’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2006), p. 13.
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Moscaliuc, M. (2016). Borders, Borderlands and Romani Identity in Colum McCann’s Zoli . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_9
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