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Monday, 10 December 2007 |
In Search of Gypsies and their Music in the South of France
By Fernanda Eberstadt, Vintage Departures, 2007
242 pp. softcover, Village Voice €14, French News price €12
One of France’s remaining islands of
cultural apartness is the community of
some 5000 gypsies who live in and around
Perpignan. As an urban underclass they
suffer doubly: from anonymity and the
indifference – if not the hostility – of their
fellow French citizens, and from their own
lack of drive. A depressed, sedentary
community, they aren’t going anywhere and
they don’t have much to keep them going,
except for their own strain of evangelism
and their music. If the first brings to mind some parts of rural
America, the second is a unique blend of flamenco throatiness
and Afro-Caribbean rhythms.
It was this music, especially the songs of a locally famous
group called Tekameli, that caught the ear of Fernanda
Eberstadt, an American novelist and journalist who moved
from New York to a house in the country outside Perpignan in
1998. Whether it was her familiarity with urban grit, her
fondness for the groups like Nine Inch Nails and Death in
Vegas, or a natural sympathy for outcasts, she soon became an
unconditional fan of the distinctive sound – raucous, seductive,
wailing and beguiling – of Perpignan gypsy music. The music
led her in turn to the musicians and their families, and before
long she had succeeded in bridging the divide between the
gypsy world and that of non-gypsy paios.
‘Little Money Street’ (a strangely wooden translation of the
Rue de la Petite Monnaie in the gypsy quarter) is more than the
record of a discovery and a friendship with a gap-toothed,
chronically ill gypsy woman. It’s a stunning, deeply moving
tale of one human being reaching out across vast distances to a
group of people nobody wants living next door.
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