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April 27 - May 4,2003 |
Drama of Roma Racism
Playwright looks at Romani life in Romania and Canada
By Sarah B. Hood
Originally Published: 2003-04-13
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Playwright Florence Gibson
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In present-day North American society, where overt racism is theoretically considered unacceptable, there are still a few groups of people who bear the brunt of archaic prejudices. Notable among these are the Roma - the gypsies. For example, a recent influx into Toronto of European Roma immigrants was greeted with suspicion and chagrin approaching outright hostility.
Playwright Florence Gibson examines the situation of the Roma people of eastern Europe in Home is My Road, a drama about one Canadian woman who travels to Romania in 1991 in the urgent hope of adopting a baby, and another who goes looking for her birth mother. "They come upon a Roma family whose family has been completely fragmented by the persecution after the fall of communism," says Gibson.
"The international adoption doors were opened for about 15 months in Romania. The kids had AIDS and hepatitis; no one wanted those children. People went out in the country and bartered for children," she recounts. "Most of the children who were in those orphanages after the fall of communism under Ceausescu were not Romanian; they were Roma," she continues. "It was all very unofficial, and the more I kept looking at it, the more I found that people didn't want to talk about it."
Gibson spent some 15 years as a doctor, taking tours of duty in Inuvik, with the Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong, and in Kenya near the border with Uganda. Her political and social awareness is strongly focused on what she names 'female culture'.
She sees her current play as a continuation of her award-winning previous work, Belle, which was about a woman's view of African slavery in the U.S. "Slavery, international adoption: it's putting a price on somebody," she asserts. "The money never goes to the mother; if we look at the birth mother, the stories are not so nice."
Besides examining Roma life in Romania, Gibson also connected with the community here. "There are lots of Roma in Canada," she says. "There is an old Roma family here that's been here for 150 years, but they're completely underground. It's an amazing diaspora. There is something that connects them as Roma, but usually it's not language; it's custom."
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