Being Bulgarian yet having grown up in Western Europe, there has always been something incomprehensible or ineffable to me when it comes to the Romani people, their cultural identity, and the issues they face. Putting on my Western, human-rights-goggles, I could never understand the grounds on which Roma people are so harshly discriminated and oppressed in many Eastern European countries, including mine. As a child, I used to think: surely they are the same as me and my family in so many ways, surely they have the same basic needs, desires, hopes, and aspirations. Then, on the other hand, I found the romanticisation of Roma culture present in Western media baffling and slightly repulsive. Did these people not know, I wondered, that Roma people are often amongst the poorest layers in society in Eastern European countries, that they are structurally disadvantaged in matters of employment, healthcare, housing, etc.?
It was with this stark political background in mind that I joined my group in exploring “As the pelicans”, a poem by the Hungarian Roma poet Béla Osztojkán, on the second day of the UCL Global Citizenship Programme. The poem deals with challenges to togetherness, and delves into how hard times can make a previously tight-knit community start to turn on each other. It was a new and challenging experience for all of us, I think, to work through what the poem meant to us through the visual medium of collage: certainly, this isn’t an approach regularly pursued in academia. Conceptualising our collage in terms of the emotions the poem evoked in us was a compelling exercise, and I look forward to similar ones throughout the rest of the GC Programme.
Dora Dimitrova
European London 