I came across a quote that I haven’t been able to leave alone. its one of those that keeps swirling around in my head

It is from Isabel Fonseca, whose Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey was published in the mid-1990s.

She writes:

“The Gypsies have no heroes. There are no myths of origin, of a great liberation, of the founding of a ‘nation,’ of a promised land… They have no monuments, no anthem, no ruins, and no Book. Instead of a sense of a great historical past, they have a collective unease, and an instinctive cleaving to the tribe.”

It is an extraordinary paragraph.

And depending on how I read it, I can be moved by it, irritated by it, recognise myself in parts of it and completely reject other parts of it.

Which normally means something is worth thinking about properly.

Because what exactly was Fonseca saying?

Was she saying that Gypsies genuinely had no history to look back to?

Or was she describing what our history looked like from the outside — to somebody searching for the things settled nations use to prove that they have a past?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that she was doing a bit of both.

What Fonseca was actually arguing

Reading the quote on its own makes it sound quite brutal: a people with no heroes, no great story, no monuments and almost no historical consciousness.

But the paragraphs around it are more complicated.

Immediately before this passage, Fonseca describes Gypsy memories of people and events which survive because they have a continuing life in storytelling and imagination. She actually calls this “memory of a kind.”

Immediately afterwards, she writes about the Holocaust, slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia, and how many Gypsies she encountered had little detailed historical knowledge of those events. Yet she then makes another important observation: although the historical detail may not be consciously known, centuries of persecution still inform what she calls the “living memory” of Gypsies — particularly distrust of outsiders.

Elsewhere, she develops this into the idea that Gypsies had made an “art of forgetting” — forgetting, in her argument, being connected to survival rather than simple ignorance.

So no, I don’t think Fonseca was only saying:

“This is how outsiders negatively perceive Gypsies.”

She appears to have genuinely believed she was identifying something about Gypsy culture itself.

But she was also trying to explain why it might have developed.

Earlier in the same article she argues that, after centuries of persecution, secrecy had been a survival mechanism: keeping language, identity, customs and sometimes history away from outsiders could be protective.

That distinction matters.

There is a world of difference between saying:

“Gypsies don’t care about history.”

and saying:

“A persecuted people may develop very different relationships with recording, revealing and institutionalising their history.”

Fonseca gets closer to the second idea than the quotation alone suggests.

But I still think there is a problem.

What counts as having a history?

Look again at her list.

Heroes.

A founding myth.

A nation.

A promised land.

Monuments.

An anthem.

Ruins.

A Book.

What kind of history is she describing?

Mostly, it is the history of nations, empires and organised religions.

It is history made visible through buildings, borders, institutions, texts and national symbols.

And if those are the things we use to decide whether a people have a past, then Gypsies are already being examined using somebody else’s measuring stick.

That question had actually been raised academically before Fonseca wrote her book.

In 1992, Katie Trumpener published an important essay with the deliberately provocative title The Time of the Gypsies: A “People without History” in the Narratives of the West. Her argument explored the long tradition in Western writing of positioning Gypsies outside modern history — as wandering, timeless, pre-modern people existing somehow beyond the normal development of nations.

That changes the question.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t simply that Gypsies had no history.

Perhaps European society had a very particular idea about what history was supposed to look like.

And we didn’t fit it.

What if our monuments looked different?

This is where my own experience starts interfering with the academic argument.

Because tell an English Gypsy that Gypsies don’t remember families.

Go on.

I’ll wait.

We can sometimes tell you someone’s Granny, grandfather, mother’s people, father’s people, who married into whom, where somebody used to stop, what somebody traded, who had a particular horse, who somebody had a falling-out with and a story about something ridiculous their great-uncle did decades before.

Sometimes with remarkable accuracy.

Sometimes with absolutely questionable accuracy.

Because that’s families.

But memory is there.

Family names carry history.

Stories carry history.

Songs carry history.

Fairs carry history.

Stopping places carry history.

Trades carry history.

Graveyards carry history.

Relationships between families carry history.

Even the landscape carries it.

Interestingly, Historic England now explicitly acknowledges this. Its guidance says Gypsy, Roma and Traveller histories have traditionally been excluded from how English heritage is shaped and told. It points to things such as “Gypsy Lanes”, “Tinkers Woods” and former stopping places as examples of Romany Gypsy and Traveller heritage that exists within the landscape both tangibly and intangibly.

Historic England has even recognised that the heritage of Gypsy communities can appear less often in the built environment because a travelling way of life left fewer permanent structures — while wider society also historically failed to understand or value what remained.

That is quite an important change of lens.

Maybe you can’t look for the historical footprint of a mobile people in exactly the same way that you look for the historical footprint of a landed aristocracy.

A stately home survives because somebody owned the land underneath it.

A traditional stopping place can disappear because somebody else owned the land underneath that.

One ends up on a heritage register.

The other becomes a housing estate, road or supermarket car park, while a Granny says:

“We used to stop there.”

Which one counts as history?

Although — we actually do have monuments

There is another danger here.

In trying to defend oral history, we can accidentally romanticise ourselves into another stereotype.

We shouldn’t pretend there are literally no physical traces of Gypsy history.

There are.

Historic England, for example, has listed the nineteenth and early twentieth-century monuments of the Gypsy Joules family in the churchyard at Yatton in Somerset. Documentary records describe generations of the family, their occupations and their presence in the area.

Historic England has also recently listed surviving hop-pickers’ huts partly because they are physical evidence of the enormous role played by Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers in seasonal agricultural labour.

So perhaps the more accurate statement is not:

We left no monuments.

It is:

Our monuments were rarely recognised as belonging to the national story.

And those are two completely different things.

There is a painful irony in the archives

There is another part of Fonseca’s argument that I find particularly difficult.

She points out that Nazi racial researchers compiled tens of thousands of Gypsy genealogies.

Think about the obscenity of that for a moment.

A people supposedly without written history had their families meticulously written down by people preparing to persecute and murder them.

And this pattern — obviously in vastly different contexts and degrees of severity — appears again and again in our history.

Governments recorded us.

Police recorded us.

Courts recorded us.

Churches recorded baptisms, marriages and burials.

Poor-law authorities recorded us.

Officials counted caravans.

Politicians legislated about us.

Planning authorities decided whether we qualified as Gypsies.

Researchers came to study us.

Yet comparatively few institutions existed in which we controlled the record ourselves.

Britain’s official record tells us Romany Gypsies were here because a document mentions us in 1514 and Parliament legislated against “Egyptians” in 1530. That legislation sought to prevent further immigration and remove Gypsies already here.

Think about what that means.

One of the ways we can prove our historical presence in Britain is through the paperwork of people trying to get rid of us.

That is an archive.

But it isn’t necessarily our archive.

So did we forget — or were we prevented from remembering publicly?

This is where later academic work becomes really useful.

In 2004, anthropologist Michael Stewart published a paper with a title I love:

“Remembering Without Commemoration.”

Stewart challenged the idea that because Gypsy communities did not always build memorials or participate in formal Holocaust commemoration in the same way as other groups, this meant they had simply forgotten.

Instead, he explored what he calls implicit memory — memory embedded in relationships, attitudes and interactions with other people.

That offers a fascinating way of rereading Fonseca’s “collective unease”.

What if distrust itself can contain memory?

What if nobody sits a child down and teaches them:

“In 1530 Parliament passed this Act.”

But they nevertheless learn:

“Be careful what you tell Gorjas.”

What if nobody teaches the history of forced settlement, removal, policing or racial research as a chronological lesson…

but generations still pass down:

“Don’t trust officials.”

That isn’t the same as consciously remembering the event.

But neither is it historical emptiness.

Some people today might describe parts of that process using the language of inherited or intergenerational trauma. I think that can be useful, but we should also be cautious about diagnosing an entire people.

Perhaps inherited memory is sometimes the better phrase.

You might inherit the lesson without inheriting the explanation.

But we shouldn’t romanticise forgetting either

There is another side to this that I think we have to be brave enough to acknowledge.

Not having written, protected and community-controlled historical institutions has cost us something.

Stories disappear.

Knowledge becomes fragmented.

Different families remember events differently.

Important histories can vanish when the last person carrying them dies.

And sometimes people genuinely don’t know.

That matters.

Fonseca may have generalised far too broadly, but her observation that some of the Gypsies she met knew little of events such as enslavement or the Nazi genocide cannot simply be brushed aside by saying, “Ah, but oral history.”

Oral memory is powerful.

It is not magical.

Things get lost.

And when your historical records sit primarily in archives created by the very institutions that governed, criminalised, assimilated or studied you, recovering your own story becomes extraordinarily difficult.

This is perhaps why the growth of Gypsy-controlled and Gypsy-centred oral history work matters so much.

Jodie Matthews has written about a now dispersed archive of English and Welsh Romani oral histories held across museums, archives and online collections. Importantly, she asks what happens when authority moves away from the traditional non-Romani scholar and towards Romani voices themselves.

That’s not just recording history.

That’s changing who has the authority to interpret it.

And then there is Gelem, Gelem

There is one part of Fonseca’s quote that seems, at first sight, very easy to disprove.

She says Gypsies have “no anthem”.

Yet delegates at the First World Romani Congress in England in 1971 adopted or presented Gelem, Gelem as an international Romani anthem. It later became strongly associated with the international Romani political movement.

So Fonseca was simply wrong.

Right?

Well…

Not quite.

Because this is exactly where we can accidentally do the same thing she did.

The First World Romani Congress was significant.

Gelem, Gelem is significant to some people.

But an anthem selected through an international political and activist movement is not necessarily the same thing as a symbol organically recognised by every Gypsy people, family or nation.

RomArchive itself describes Gelem, Gelem as becoming institutionalised through the 1971 Congress and connects the anthem and flag with the development of Romani nationalism. It also notes that before this it was primarily known as a folk song among Roma in the Balkans.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

In the English Gypsy and Romanichal world I know, Gelem, Gelem is not necessarily something people would hear and immediately say:

“That’s our anthem.”

Some absolutely would.

Some wouldn’t.

Some would not recognise it at all.

And that isn’t a failure of Gypsyness.

It demonstrates the danger of trying to force enormous, diverse groups of people into a single national model.

Historic England’s own guidance now emphasises that Romany Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are distinct communities, not one homogeneous group.

So I don’t want to rebut Fonseca by shouting:

“Actually we DO have an anthem!”

Because then I would be doing precisely what I am criticising. (I also don’t consider it my anthem)

Taking one symbol created within one political movement and using it to define everybody.

There is not be one Gypsy story.

There are many.

This is where Huub van Baar’s criticism becomes important

Political scholar Huub van Baar revisited this whole academic debate and asked whether descriptions of Roma as people living in a “permanent present”, lacking elaborate social memory or practising an “art of forgetting” were themselves creating something artificial.

His concern is what academics call reification.

In plainer English: we observe something happening within particular communities, at a particular moment, under particular conditions — and turn it into an eternal cultural characteristic.

So:

Some people don’t publicly commemorate the past.

becomes:

Gypsies don’t commemorate.

Some families avoid discussing persecution.

becomes:

Gypsies forget.

A particular group doesn’t use national origin stories to explain its identity.

becomes:

Gypsies have no historical consciousness.

And suddenly something which might have emerged through persecution, poverty, mobility, exclusion, secrecy, geography or particular family traditions becomes presented as simply:

“This is what Gypsies are like.”

Van Baar argues that this obscures both the relationships between Romani peoples and the societies around them and the enormous internal differences between different groups.

And for me, this is where the argument finally lands.

Maybe the question isn’t whether Fonseca was right or wrong

I don’t think the answer is to throw Fonseca’s book away.

Actually, I think the contradiction inside that paragraph is what makes it useful.

She saw something.

She saw secrecy.

She saw the importance of family.

She saw a weaker relationship with formal monuments and written national histories among some of the people she encountered.

She saw people who did not always know the historical events that had shaped their circumstances.

She saw distrust passed between generations.

And importantly, she connected some of that to survival.

But I think she also looked at incredibly diverse Gypsy peoples through a framework which still expected a “people” to have the architecture of a nation.

That is where I think we need to push further.

Instead of asking:

Why didn’t Gypsies preserve history like everybody else?

perhaps we should ask:

What forms of memory were possible for people living under the historical conditions Gypsies lived and live under?

How do you build monuments when you are continually moved from land?

How do you build an archive when literacy and education have not been equally available to you?

How do you preserve places when you don’t own them?

How do you create a national history when you are not a territorial nation?

How much do you write down when information about who you are, where you live and who your relatives are has repeatedly been useful to authorities trying to control you?

And what happens to a people’s understanding of themselves when outsiders have spent centuries producing more written material about them than they have had the power to produce about themselves?

Those, for me, are much more interesting questions.

Which brings me, strangely enough, to Andy Burnham

This might seem like quite a leap.

But I don’t think it is.

The new Labour government is talking about moving power away from Westminster.

Andy Burnham has established No.10 North in Manchester and said that the days of power being “hoarded in SW1” are over. Government describes the project as putting more power into local communities and making decisions with local leaders rather than simply for them.

This week Burnham went further, describing plans to transfer responsibility for economic growth away from its traditional concentration in Whitehall as a “huge transfer of power.”

I want that to work.

And I have hope about what it could mean.

But I think those of us working in Gypsy and Traveller civil society should push that idea further.

Because power isn’t only about where the office is.

Power is also about:

Who gets invited into the room.

Whose evidence counts.

Who defines the problem.

Who is treated as an expert.

Who gets funded to produce knowledge.

Who gets asked after the decision has already been made.

And crucially:

Who gets to speak for whom.

There is no point moving political power from London to Manchester while continuing to assume that knowledge must always travel through the same national institutions before government considers it legitimate.

There is no point devolving government while reproducing centralisation inside civil society.

Northern Gypsies and Travellers cannot continually be an afterthought in national conversations about Gypsies and Travellers.

Grassroots organisations cannot be invited in once priorities have already been written.

And ethnic Romany Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy Travellers cannot continually disappear inside broad acronyms that make very different histories, experiences and forms of racism indistinguishable.

Real devolution must include epistemic devolution too.

That sounds terribly academic.

What I mean is actually very simple:

Move the power to decide what counts as knowledge.

Don’t just consult us on the answer. Let us help define the question.

This is where a book published thirty years ago suddenly feels incredibly current.

For generations, Gypsies have been described.

Categorised.

Counted.

Studied.

Photographed.

Policed.

Legislated for.

Planned for.

Educated.

Moved.

Settled.

Assimilated.

Romanticised.

Demonised.

And researched.

Sometimes by people who cared deeply about us.

Sometimes by people who absolutely did not.

But far too often the person holding the pen was somebody else.

Perhaps that is the thread running through all of this.

It isn’t that Gypsies had no story.

It is that having a story and having the institutional power to make that story part of History — with a capital H — are not the same thing.

That is why I am hopeful about a government talking about moving power.

Not because Labour deserves automatic trust.

No government does.

Hope is not endorsement.

Hope is an expectation.

If this government really wants to move power out of the centre, then don’t stop at moving civil servants north.

Come further.

Come into communities.

Come to the little organisations.

Talk to the people whose expertise does not always arrive in a university report.

Talk to families.

Talk to the people doing the work every day.

And don’t arrive once the policy has been written with a consultation form asking whether we agree.

Bring us in before you have even decided what the question is.

Because perhaps Fonseca was right about one thing.

For too long, we have had too few institutions through which to look back and see ourselves.

But that does not mean there was nothing there.

Our history was in families.

In memories.

In graves.

In stopping places.

In landscapes.

In songs.

In warnings.

In things deliberately kept from outsiders.

In things outsiders recorded without understanding.

And, sadly, in things that have been lost.

Now we have an opportunity to do something previous generations often couldn’t.

To preserve it.

To question it.

To disagree about it.

To discover that what one Gypsy family says is “our tradition” another family has never heard of in their life.

To acknowledge that Romanichal history is not identical to Roma history, that Scottish Gypsy Traveller history is not identical to English Gypsy history, and that there is no need to manufacture one neat story to make ourselves understandable to outsiders.

And most importantly:

to hold the pen ourselves.

Maybe the question was never:

“Why don’t Gypsies have a history?”

Maybe it should always have been:

“Who decided what history was supposed to look like?”

And perhaps the next question is the one that matters most:

Who gets to write it now?