‘A step towards understanding’
Academic and writer Madeline Potter’s new book, The Roma: A Travelling History, weaves together memoir and history to explore the reality of Romani life. Using her own experiences as an anchor, she moves across different parts of Europe – from Spain to France, Bulgaria to Sweden – and into the United States. Potter grew up Romani in 1990s post-Communist Romania, facing frequent racism. But while she is meticulous about recording the violence faced by Roma communities, she also foregrounds the rich culture, music and folklore they have managed to keep alive. She spoke to writer Taran N Khan about carrying the burden of discrimination, and writing as a way to find justice.
Tell us how the book came about and how you decided to approach it?
Around 2021, I had just started to find my own voice in terms of Romani rights advocacy. I spoke on the platforms available to me, which were essentially social media and some blog posts. That voice gained momentum and started reaching wider audiences. That’s when my amazing agent, Matt Turner, got in touch with me and said, ‘Have you thought about doing a book on the topic?’ To be honest, I had not.
But from the first conversations about the book I knew I wanted it to be many things. I wanted to include Romani history that has been excluded from mainstream history for so long. Sometimes people who’ve read the book say, ‘I didn’t know about all this history,’ and that’s completely fair because it’s not taught in schools or universities.
I also wanted it to be part memoir, because I wanted to show that this is happening to people. It’s not historical in an abstract sense. Sometimes I talk about anti-Roma racism and people will say, ‘That doesn’t happen to Roma who are integrated,’ or ‘It just happens to those who bring it upon themselves,’ that kind of classic racist rhetoric. And I say, no – it happens to everyone. I wanted to bring that lived experience of marginalisation and the weight of historical violence.
And finally I wanted to bring the rich and diverse Romani culture to light. I really wanted to lean into storytelling and folklore, to bring to light that sense of oral culture. There’s a bit of a paradox between writing and paying tribute to something oral, that I found fascinating.
I was interested to hear of the origins of Roma being from India. How did you address this question in your book, and how important is this ‘home’ for your identity now?
Since I’ve been living in Britain, I’ve been talking to friends from India and discovering linguistic links – it’s funny, sometimes we’ll say words and they’re exactly the same in Romani and Hindi. When I was growing up in Romania, there wasn’t much immigration, so we didn’t have those connections. Among Romani people, it’s widely known that we originated in India, and in the last 10 to 15 years, people have been cultivating those cultural relationships more and more.
For me, it’s not that India is ‘home’ exactly, because Romani identity was formed on the road, after we left India. Home is movement. But I find it comforting to see those cultural connections – like the story of Saint Sara e Kali, the patron saint of the Romani people, who may be an interpretation of the goddess Kali. There are also similarities in big, colourful weddings. It helps me understand where Romani cultural codes come from. So it offers a sense of a spiritual or cultural home.
I loved that you have used so many instances of legends and myths, to make a larger point about history and politics. Can you talk about how you decided to use these unusual sources as part of your work?
I was clear that these legends are ways of interpreting our position. For example, in the Spanish chapter, I told the story of a famous Romani dancer Maria Cabrera who had an affair with a Spanish nobleman. She was a historical person; we know that she did have this affair, and her story gained a kind of legendary status among Romani people in Spain. That story has probably been embellished over time.
Others, like Johann Trollmann, a boxer during Nazi-era Germany who was stripped of his title, are very well documented. But when it came to myth and legends and stories, what I wanted to make clear was that it’s part of oral history, part of how we understand ourselves. These stories aren’t real in the literal sense, but they’re real culturally.
‘The landscape, the road, the journey shape our sense of being. But I’m careful not to romanticise it’
I was interested to learn also about the diversity of the community, from occupations to faiths to location.
There is enormous diversity among Romani people. ‘Roma’ refers to all those who left India, but because different groups stopped in different places, there’s a lot of variation – subgroups, clans, and family lines. You have the Lovara who were horse traders, the Kalderash who were coppersmiths, the Cale in Spain, and the Romanichal in the UK.
Broadly speaking, Roma have tended to adopt the dominant religion of the country they live in – Anglican in the UK, Catholic in Spain, Muslim in Bulgaria, Orthodox in Romania. Roma is an ethnicity, not a religion. In addition, there are traces of older cultural norms that go back to India, almost like secularised versions of Hindu concepts. Some Romani people have even converted to Hinduism to reconnect with those roots. There’s a lot of diversity, from clothes to customs, varying from group to group.
Does belonging to this nomadic tradition make you see the idea of home and movement differently?
Even though I grew up settled, I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to grow up nomadic. I wasn’t tied to a particular place. Our folklore is full of movement – traveling through space, not rootedness. We don’t have a nation; there’s no such thing as Romani nationalism because it doesn’t make sense for us. The landscape, the road, the journey shape our sense of being. But I’m careful not to romanticise it – life on the road was difficult. Many wanted to settle because of the cold, danger, and exclusion. I think it shaped our worldview but wasn’t easy.
Your book is filled with stories of really inspiring, talented Romani women. Is recognising such figures relatively new? Can you share a few examples of your favourite characters from the book?
Romani culture has often been patriarchal, but now there’s growing space for Romani feminism and women’s voices. Historically, women had traditional roles, but that’s changing. I love the story of Katarina Taikon, often called the Martin Luther King of Sweden. She fought relentlessly for Romani rights, had a difficult childhood, and was married off young, but became an activist and children’s author, believing change begins with raising children without prejudice. She was tireless. I also love the story of Ceija Stojka, an artist and Roma Holocaust survivor who healed through her art. Her story moved me deeply.
Your book moves through different countries in Europe – from the UK to Spain, France and Sweden. So much of this movement is tracing the path of genocide and cultural erasure. How did you approach writing about this physical and discursive violence?
It was difficult emotionally because like so many others, my family had been affected by these acts of violence. It brought up anger but was also healing – it felt like an act of justice, paying tribute to those people and that history. I wanted the book not just to be about tragedy but resilience. The Roma still exist; our language, our culture still thrive. That survival is a kind of victory.
I also wanted to show how our music and art have contributed so much to European culture, yet often the Romani roots of such culture are erased. People dress up as ‘gypsies’ or romanticise the image without recognizing we are a real, racialized minority. Even the idea of ‘bohemianism’ comes from us – Romani people in France were called Bohemians, and that term became associated with free-spiritedness, stripped of its ethnic origin.
Many artists and musicians people admire – like Django Reinhardt or the creators of flamenco –were Roma, though that’s often forgotten. Flamenco emerged from many cultures, including Romani, Arab, and Jewish influences, but those roots were erased under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1950s. Romani music influenced the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, who was very open about how deeply he drew on this tradition. But now Liszt is celebrated as ‘high’ European culture, while Romani music is dismissed as ‘low’.
You travel to California, the western most point of Romani migration. What did you find that differed from accounts in Europe?
Romani migration to America has been obscured under ‘European’ migration, which isn’t accurate. Many were shipped there as enslaved or indentured people and became part of the fabric of America, though their contributions are hidden.
There is also the more recent horror of the black market in adoption of Romani babies in post-Soviet Union Russia, that was the subject of a New York Times article in 1991 by Kathleen Hunt called ‘The Romanian Baby Bazaar’. Many families were parted from their children, who were smuggled out as adoptees to American families by predatory agents.
For me it's so ironic how these stories stand in direct opposition to the stereotype of ‘gypsies stealing babies’. In reality, children have been stolen from us. Even recently, Romani families have had children removed by social services. There was the case of the little blonde Romani girl who was accused of being kidnapped simply because she looked white – until DNA proved she was Roma. It shows the racism that persists.
I felt that the missing piece in your book, in a way, is the story of Roma in India.
I want that to be its own book – by traveling there to explore those cultural connections in depth. It deserves more than a chapter, and I plan to trace the threads of my research and experiences back to communities like the Domar caste of traveling musicians and basket weavers.
Reading your book, I was struck by how similar the fear and prejudices that surround the Roma are to the dangerous rhetoric around immigration in the UK today.
It’s frightening. I’ve seen friends afraid to leave the house during protests and race riots. The hostility feels connected to the same fear of the ‘outsider’ that the Roma have faced for centuries. From the Egyptians Act of 1530 under Henry VIII, who expelled the newly arrived group of ‘Gypsies’ from the country, to similar decrees across Europe, the message was always the same: keep them out.
The antidote, I think, lies in communication and understanding. It’s not the only solution, but it’s a start. People need to know what Romani culture actually is. Prejudices are often based on ignorance and poverty born from systemic exclusion. When doors are shut, people are pushed to the margins. We need conversations about why things are the way they are. It’s easy to caricature minority cultures – it happens to many communities, not just Roma.
So, pushing against those caricatures, creating space for real understanding – that’s where change begins. When people experience the culture genuinely, it can shift something, even a little. It’s not everything, but it’s a step towards understanding.
Madeline Potter’s The Roma: A Travelling History is out now.
Taran N Khan is an award-winning writer and the author of Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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