Introduction
I chose Terzimahalla as my original fieldsite on account of the linguistic repertoire of its inhabitants. Not only are several languages spoken in the town, but I was also told there are different dialects of Romani: the dialect spoken in Terzimahalla is influenced primarily by Serbian and Turkish, while other mahallas have more Albanian influences, and in some cases other differences too. I spent the summer of 2013 in Prishtina, hoping to learn some Albanian, before starting my fieldwork in September 2013. I was based in Prizren from then until March 2015. The majority of my participant observation of language took place in Terzimahalla, and at the NGO Durmish Aslano. I had planned to stay in Terzimahalla for the whole period, but this did not work out. When I had originally explained that I would like to live in a Romani area, such as Terzimahalla, Nexhip reacted positively and said he would help me find a ĆŸensko mesto (BCS: âa female placeâ). In my next visit he explained that I could either stay with a family with two unmarried daughters, but that they had no bathroom, or in an annex to his house where his cousin used to live. Thinking I would have my own space, and preferring the use of a bathroom, I opted for the latter. I only stayed there a short time, however. I was not aware at the time that an unmarried woman having her own space was looked upon with great suspicion in the mahalla. My lack of a clear position in a family structure was problematic, and I was not allowed to sleep in a room alone, but was always accompanied by one of Nexhipâs daughters.
Subsequently, I moved three times. First, I was moved next door into Nexhipâs family home. In addition to a downstairs kitchen and shower room, he had three rooms upstairs, and I shared one of them with his daughters. Along with his two teenage daughters, he had two teenage sons. His father also lived with them, as did two brothers with learning disabilities. His wife had a daughter from another marriage (this was her third marriage, a fact which was often commented on) who was married and lived with her in-laws. Nexhip had an elder brother who lived abroad, and a half-sister, also abroad, who he had only found out about in adulthood. The members of the household spoke to each other in Romani, and to me in both Romani and BCS, though the children, born after the war, did not speak BCS. All the children were attending school in Albanian except the eldest daughter, who had just finished school; Nexhip was hoping she would study pedagogy at the university. Turkish soap operas played constantly in the background.
Then I was moved into his sister Fatmiraâs house; despite my sharing a bedroom with girls, people continued to gossip about my place in the household. Fatmiraâs house was two rooms just outside the mahalla, where she lived with her husband, Taylor, and two teenage children. She worked cleaning the hospital, while he had no permanent employment. They spoke Romani at home, while many of their neighbours, also Roma or Ashkali, spoke only Albanian. In their street there were far more infrastructural problems, and most of the time we were without running water. During my stay at Fatmiraâs, the family were very careful to take care of me, which from my perspective often felt like I was restricted in my movements, and had little time to myself. People were not just suspicious of me wanting to be alone, but also expressed surprise that I had wanted to sleep in a room alone, saying they would be scared to do so. What seemed to me as an oppressive hierarchical family structure was far more commonly viewed as protective, especially for women.
While I was living with Fatmira, I would often speak to her in BCS. Her daughter, who didnât know (or want to know) the language, would tell her ma vakar gajikani (Ro: âdonât speak gajo languageâ). At first I assumed that she wanted us to speak in Romani, out of pride in the language, and so she could understand. Later I realised she wanted to avoid BCS. While in many other variants of Romani, gaje refers to all non-Roma, in Prizren it refers to Serbs. Gajikani then refers to BCS, also called either srbyuni or boshnyakuni. The younger generation were particularly concerned with distancing themselves from Serbs, in part due to the schools which displayed Albanian nationalist pictures. She therefore wanted to correct her mother, and prevent her from speaking BCS. Similarly, Nexhipâs son Fatmir would often tell us not to speak in BCS, so people didnât think he was a gajo, a Serb. While it would have been obvious from his appearance that Nexhip was not Serbian himself, he was concerned with appearing pro-Serb.
I was at Fatmiraâs until Christmas 2013, when I returned home briefly. As the same rumours and suspicions continued to cause problems for myself and my hosts, when I came back, I moved to private accommodation. This was the upper floor of the house of an Albanian family, away from the mahalla, and I had this space to myself. This was more comfortable, and made life easier for my key informants, but was a huge disadvantage in terms of my language immersion. I thus shifted my focus away from language use in Terzimahalla towards more institutional forms of language use, in particular the Romani used at the NGO Durmish Aslano and the other NGO I volunteered with briefly (Iniciativa 6), as well as the Romani language radio and Romani school classes. In Autumn 2014 a substantial number of Terzimahalla Roma, as well as other groups, began to leave Kosovo to seek asylum in the west. This was due to a combination of their ongoing frustrations with the political and economic situation in Kosovo, and a cheap smuggling route which opened up through the Balkans as a result of the war in Syria. To my knowledge they were not successful in seeking asylum and many were returned in the spring. I completed my fieldwork in March 2015 and therefore did not witness their return or hear about their experiences.
There was a variety of ethical problems during my fieldwork, the specifics of which I have decided not to write about in order to protect the privacy of those involved. While it would be unlikely for those who participated in my fieldwork to ever read my work, I have tried to write it as if they would read it. This does not mean that I have written it in order to please them â my attempts to deconstruct social hierarchies would not be popular if participants were to read it, and my views on gender and sexuality diverge so much from those of most of my participants that it would not be possible to write about these issues with integrity without displeasing them. However, I have made a conscious effort not to divulge anything which was told to me in secret, or anything which may cause shame or embarrassment. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, people were keen for me not to represent them in terms of the negative stereotype of âgypsies.â I have tried to comply with this wish, while at the same time not avoiding or masking certain contentious issues. As such I have tried to avoid either wholly positive or wholly negative representations of the group, without divulging information that may be damaging to individuals.
NGO Durmish Aslano
During my preliminary visits, I had been in contact with Durmish Aslano, the Romani NGO, and met the staff of their radio station. I had originally planned to volunteer there in exchange for access to Terzimahalla, and also so that I would have a role in my stay there, something to do and talk about on a day-to-day basis. Over time, the NGO became the central site of my fieldwork. When I first arrived, Nexhip was excited at the idea of me learning Romani, and was also glad to have someone who spoke both a local language (BCS) and English to help with project applications. All the staff spoke Romani, which was the main language used for interactions, both on and off air. The staff were all keen for me to learn Romani, but spoke to me in BCS when they wanted to clarify something, or just to chat. When non-Roma came to visit, they generally spoke to them in Albanian, unless they were Bosniac, in which case they would use BCS. If there were visits from internationals (such as people from other NGOs or KFOR troops), they brought their own Albanian translators.
For much of this time, I worked from Monday to Saturday as a volunteer at the NGO and radio. I continued to volunteer at the NGO until December 2014, but began working three days a week in the spring. At this point I also started to volunteer at Iniciativa 6, based in Jeta e Re. The director was Osman Osmani. I stopped volunteering for Iniciativa after a few months, as they had some management and legal problems â I was told they had previously been raided by the police due to an accusation of holding weapons in their house, and later, the owner of the house, now living abroad, decided he did not want them to use it any more. This was followed by a complicated dispute over rights of the board with regards to the NGO and its funds.
Durmish Aslano is a small NGO. While I was there, aside from Nexhip, the director, Saverd was the technician, and Moni and Vera worked as journalists. Their hours and wages varied greatly, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. Saverd, like Nexhip, was from Terzimahalla. He was the only one among his seven siblings that had stayed in the mahalla. His sisters had married, and most of his brothers had migrated, apart from one who had died, and the eldest brother Hysni, who had moved to another area but visited both the mahalla and the NGO fairly regularly. Saverd lived with his father, wife, three daughters and one young son. Like most members of the mahalla born before about 1990, he grew up speaking Romani, and also spoke BCS, Turkish and Albanian fluently. Moni was not from the mahalla and had grown up speaking Albanian. He had learnt Romani and BCS as an adult. He lived with his wife and two (later three) young children in Ortakoll, one of the ethnically mixed areas of town. He had close connections to Terzimahalla, and seemed to know all the gossip from the mahalla before its inhabitants. Vera also lived in a mixed Romani and Albanian area outside Terzimahalla, but had grown up speaking Romani in a mixed Romani and Serbian area. Like most women, she now lived with her husbandâs family, some of whom spoke Romani, while the younger family members generally only spoke Albanian. She had an adult son who worked with her husband at a supermarket, and two teenage daughters. She was one of the few Roma women of her generation to receive an education, which was in BCS (then called Serbo-Croat or simply Serbian), and she often spoke of the Serbian friends she had had at school.
There were several people who did not have formal roles at the NGO, but stopped by when they felt like it, a kind of secondary staff. These included Gjengiz, a young man who, despite speaking Romani, often called himself Ashkali rather than Roma. He had left Terzimahalla, as his wife did not get on with his family. Young women often struggle with the strict hierarchy of their in-lawsâ homes, as they are expected to be quiet and subservient. In most cases, their only option is to put up with this, or to leave their husband and return to their own family. In the case of Gjengizâs wife, however, her father had the means to build them a house elsewhere. She was the daughter of an Ashkali politician, hence Gjengiz identifying as Ashkali, and they spoke only Albanian at home. She was also a nurse, one of the few RAE (especially RAE women) to qualify as a medical professional.
Bajram Galushi (also GaljuĆĄ, GaljuĆĄi), a cousin of Veraâs, was a middle-aged man who had grown up in the mahalla but moved away due to lack of space in the family home. He (and his family) were relatively wealthy. He had previously been more involved in the NGO, but was having various health problems during my stay so was not always present. He had several sons, and they spoke Turkish at home. His youngest son, Ertan, also helped out, especially towards the end of my stay when Saverd had left. Three of his nephews, Erxhan, Edis and Denis Galushi also worked on various projects at various points and were generally involved in Romani activism. The Galushi family were well-respected, and many of them were well-educated and had good jobs.
Like Nexhip, Kujtim Paqaku was considered a local Roma intellectual. He was an in-law of Veraâs who was involved in the NGO only sporadically, but was often talked about, and, as such, features heavily in this book. He was from another Roma mahalla in Prizren, and spoke a different dialect of Romani, but he had been active in the international Romani movement and had spent some time at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, âNational Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizationsâ) in Paris. He wrote poetry in Romani. As such he had earned great respect and admiration, and I was repeatedly referred to him when I told people I was learning Romani. During my stay he also entered politics, and was made a Deputy in the Assembly.
There were two other Roma men who were locally considered to be Roma intellectuals. Ibrahim Elshani (known as âThe Professorâ) had translated works such as The Iliad and some Indian epics into Romani, had written a variety of other books and was editor of the local Romani magazine Yekhipe, âUnityâ (cf. Halwachs 2011). The connection to India was clearly important to him. He was very well-respected, and there were many copies of his books around, particularly at the radio station. By the time of my stay, he was elderly and unwell, so my main knowledge of him is second-hand. His daughter Indira lived with him, and was the only Roma person working for Caritas, another NGO working with Roma in the area. She did not speak Romani, and they did not live in a Romani mahalla.
Selahadin Kruezi (also Kryezi, Kryeziu), a Romani author/journalist from Prizren, who had lived in Denmark for a long period, was well known locally for some Romani childrenâs books he had written, as well as some other articles and pamphlets on Romani orthography and the Romani standard language. His most recent (self-published) work was a large book about Roma and Romani language in Romani and English (Kruezi 2014), in which he claimed Roma are really from Egypt, not India, which was met with outrage by many Roma in Prizren.
Women were less involved in the NGO because it was deemed a public space, and thus less suitable for women, as we will see below. Aside from me and Vera, the two women who visited regularly (and unaccompanied) were Fatka and Nehalla â both unusual within Romani society. Fatka was in her late thirties, and divorced, while Nehalla was unmarried and in her late twenties. I had met both in a cafĂ© with Nexhip and other men on one of my preliminary visits to Prizren, an encounter which had led me to believe that gender relations were less strict than they in fact were. Women in the public space are generally highly unrepresentative, and most women I knew were far more restricted in their movements.
Other people involved in the organisation would come and go, depending on whether there was...
