Coloring book fills in Gypsy influences

By Ruth Milne, Journal staff

RAPID CITY — Bianca Boll believes people of all ages enjoy coloring books on some level.

“Maybe you don’t sit around and color anymore, but I think we all fondly remember our coloring days,” Boll said.

In a salute to scribblers of all ages, Boll recently published “Gypsy Doodles.”

Boll is director of the Gypsy, Black Hills Belly Dance troupe, and her interests were the source for the coloring book’s content.

“My doodling has heavily been influenced by my Middle Eastern dance and cultural studies,” Boll said, identifying henna art and belly dance influences as well as the Romany (Gypsy) language it teaches.

“The more I study about the Romany people, the more I know that we don’t know very much about them,” Boll said. “I’m kind of trying to help create some interest in their little world ... to maybe inspire people to do some of their own studies, about the Romany people or any world culture.”

“Gypsy Doodles” boasts a whimsical innocence and a childlike approach, giving the Romany word for everything from guitar to rainbow to fish, along with a quirky line drawing of each for children to color in.

The book is intended to appeal to amateur artists of all ages.

“There’s not monsters or trucks or superheroes, so I don’t know if older boys will be as interested, but younger boys and girls of all ages —from little bitty to grown-up women — I think would enjoy it,” Boll said.

The coloring book is the first book of any kind that Boll has written, and its creation was something of an accident.

“I have been doodling my whole life almost, as a way to stay out of trouble in class, and stay awake in lectures ... like most people, I can doodle when I’m a little bit bored,” she said.

After receiving compliments on her idle doodlings and hearing from several people that they would love to color her sketches, Boll realized homemade coloring books would make a nifty — and thrifty — Christmas gift for young relatives.

When she sat down to draw, the plan was to do five drawings to give to nieces and nephews for Christmas. After 17 pages, Boll ran out of paper — “or I probably would have kept on going,” she said with a laugh.

The completed book, which is self-published, features 20 colorable pages plus the front cover, which children can embellish as they please as well.

“Gypsy Doodles” is available at Global Market in Rapid City and Spearfish, Motions Dancewear, the Best Little Hairhouse in the Black Hills, Java Junction between Black Hawk and Piedmont, Valley Washhouse in Piedmont and Gypsy Rose Tattoo Studio.

It also will be for sale at upcoming book signings.

All proceeds from sales of “Gypsy Doodles” will be given to Camp Friendship, a summer camp in the Black Hills that caters to individuals age 8 and older who have physical and developmental disabilities.

The camp is staffed by a family of more than 150 volunteers that provide one-on-one care and assistance for each camper as well as creating all of the program activities.

“They work so hard, and it would benefit so many people to have just a little bit more money to work with,” Boll said.

Camp Friendship is a cause near and dear to Boll’s heart. Her own son, Joshua, to whom the book is dedicated, has enjoyed stays at Camp Friendship for the past three years.

Joshua, now 10, was diagnosed at an early age with a genetic abnormality that created delays in all areas of development.

“He inspires my husband and I both just to keep going every day. We get up and face the music, so to speak, and he’s really a driving factor for that. He’s just very special to us,” Boll said.

“He’s a special, sweet, amazing little kid; he touches everyone’s hearts.”

On the Web: Camp Friendship, www.campfriendship.org

Contact Ruth Milne at ruth.milne @ rapidcityjournal.com.

Destination: Gypsy Europe

Despite their historical distrust of the written word, Europe's Gypsies have a growing -- and captivating -- literary tradition.

By Colum McCann
Salon.com

The boy sat near the bridge, at the edge of the Gypsy camp, rolling a cigarette. The bridge was an elegant garbage heap. It was put together with planks, aluminum siding, rope, tree trunks, sodden cardboard, tires. The boy himself looked part of the bridge as he sat, cross-legged, carefully sprinkling the tobacco onto the paper. He had torn a page from a book in order to roll the cigarette. When he lit it, the paper flared a moment, and he smoked the tobacco in quick sharp bursts. When he was finished, he tore the remaining pages from the book and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans. He threw down the cover and it landed at the foot of the bridge. The cover was too stiff for rolling tobacco.

When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked -- a Slovak translation of the Romanian writer Emile Cioran. Nothing goes without saying. The boy had taken the page down into his lungs.
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If the Roma -- or the Gypsies -- are known for anything beyond the traditional clichés of lying, cheating, stealing, it is a historical distrust of the written word. As Europe's most consistently persecuted minority -- having suffered through centuries of slavery, the Holocaust, and an ongoing dose of government-sanctioned racism -- they are recognized primarily as an oral culture. There is no great Gypsy poet who has been acknowledged across boundaries. There are few writers who have given voice to the 12 million people of Romani heritage around the world (almost the same number as there are Jewish people). There is no overarching book, or myth, or written structure around which the Gypsies have gathered. In fact, apart from a few notable exceptions, there is very little literature about the Roma at all.

A good place to begin, though, is with Isabel Fonseca's "Bury Me Standing," a wonderfully complete nonfiction examination of the situation of Europe's Gypsies. Fonseca's book caused some scuffling among Romani scholars -- as any book written by an outsider probably will -- but at its core it is a very dignified and honest attempt to pull back a curtain and gaze through the window. Written with great style and verve, it is as if Fonseca puts a hot coin to the frosted glass and allows us to peep through. "Bury Me Standing" is possibly the most thorough popular account of the situation of the Roma in Europe.

For me, Fonseca's book reached into my rib cage and turned my heart a notch backward. I was hooked. The book was a launching pad into a world I had never expected to enter, but I ended up corralled by Fonseca's image of Papusza, the Polish-born Romani poet, and for the following four years I traveled, literally and figuratively, through the Gypsy world, most prominently in Slovakia.

For all my travels, though, I seldom saw a book in a Gypsy household. Some of these houses were among the poorest I have seen anywhere in the world -- mud and wattle huts in the eastern part of the country, tiny flats in the wasteland of Bratislava's Petržalka, cardboard shacks in a settlement known as the dog-eater's camp. On the other hand, there was music everywhere -- record players, violins, satellite dishes tuned to MTV, radios, and even one electronic piano in a makeshift brick hut. But no books.

"You can't eat books," a social worker said to me one afternoon. "When you're hungry you don't have time to write about it."

Fair enough, but the function of literature is to find dignity in the most common human trait of all -- storytelling. Stories are the vast human democracy. And if anyone has a story, it is the Roma, who are, of course, as internally diverse as any other culture. Where are the stories of the Gypsy doctors? Where are the tales of the Gypsy psychologists?

Given a rich language, and narrative abilities so easily apparent in song, it would seem that a literature by the Gypsies, or even one of the Gypsies, should be more prominent and varied than it is. But the Romani culture is not exactly an easy one to penetrate. Scholarly works are still thin on the ground. Great novels are few and far between. Poems are sporadic and untranslated. And there is another kind of silence too -- the Gypsy as cliché, clicking her fingers, throwing back her hair, jangling her bracelets, fingering your wallet, breaking the hearts of fearless men.

One of the most prominent scholars to break the mould is Ian Hancock, a British-born Roma who now heads up the Romani Archives in the University of Texas. Hancock is the sort of man who has to live with the sniggers when he is introduced as a "Gypsy intellectual" -- as if that sort of thing is an aberration. But he rides the current quite brilliantly. Hancock put together "The Roads of the Roma," a PEN anthology of Gypsy writers. In this volume, he has collected an impressive array of 43 poems and prose pieces, some of which are translated into English for the very first time. The book also chronicles an 800-year history of oppression that, in itself, reads like a poem.

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In a Gypsy poet's life, borders are painful

Zoli
By Colum McCann
RANDOM HOUSE; 333 Pages; $24.95

They call her Zoli, although her birth name is Marienka. She is a Gypsy, a poet and a singer.

Colum McCann's tale begins in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, when 6-year-old Zoli Novotna and her grandfather, members of a roving Gypsy (or Romany) family, escape from the violence of the pro-Nazi Hlinka guards in the days before World War II. Forced onto a frozen lake at gunpoint, her mother, siblings and cousins drown when the ice breaks.

When we first meet Zoli, she is writing to her as-yet unborn daughter, Francesca. She recalls how she and her grandfather ate whatever they could find in the woods: boiled leaves, pinecones, wild garlic grass as well as rabbit and hare and hedgehog -- anything to survive. But always the image of her now-lost family was seared into her mind. "My days were spent still staring backwards," she remembers, "for my dead family to catch up, though of course I knew then that they never would."

It was her grandfather who gave her the name of Zoli, a boy's name, after his first son. It was also her grandfather who taught her to read and write (he carries a dog-eared and tobacco-stained copy of Marx's "Das Kapital"). She learned at an early age that she had the touch of the poet within her, or, as she puts it, "the feel of a pencil between my fingers."

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