FOREST, MY FATHER
Michael Alberry
When I ask Stefan, “Why do you like to change your house so often?” he replies, “Na zha nav; I don’t know, I love change! Change is very good.”
In this family home, bunches of plastic flowers migrate their way from room to room. Furniture is reshuffled and moved, comes and goes. Floral canvas prints, and glittery stickers are dotted across the living space. New wall paper, a new pattern, replaces patterns laid only weeks before. These are the homes of Slovak Roma families; houses that are in a constant state of flux and change; covered and re-covered, again and again, by effigies of the natural outdoors. Where centuries before, the Romany way of life was defined by mobility and rootlessness, today, relatively bound to the places they populate, living in flats and houses, there seems to still exist, perhaps subconsciously, an inherited, restless yearning for change.
O Lord, where should I go? What can I do? Where can I find Legends and songs? I do not go to the forest, I meet with no rivers. O forest, my father... The time of the wandering Gypsies Has long passed. But I see them, They are bright, Strong and clear like water. — Bronisława Wajs (Papusza)