Abstract
The present paper examines the cultural formation of the wanton Romani woman, most notably present in Georges Bizet’s Carmen, and its deconstruction in Dan Allum’s Carmen, the Gypsy, a contemporary adaptation of the original Prosper Mérimée novella. As an archetype for the seductive, overtly sexual, and immoral ‘Gypsy’ woman, Carmen was both an objection of the white heterosexual male gaze and a juxtaposition to the proper female behaviour in Europe during the 19th and the 20th centuries. While this representation fed the male sexual fantasy about the exotic ‘Gypsy’ woman, it allowed violence and sexual trafficking of Romani women. Depicting Carmen as a sexually independent woman whose desire is to break free of the masculine traditions of her Romani community, Dan Allum’s play provides a remarkable alternative to the antigypsy gaze. It not only captures the complexities and struggles of women within the Romani community but also breaks with the view that Romani women have no power over their own sexuality and life.
Introduction
The image of the exotic wandering ‘Gypsy’ 1 tribes have always fascinated white European cultures, with the Roma communities being associated with mystery, magic, danger, and eroticism (Hancock, 2008). For Western Christian societies in Europe, the Roma represented the enigmatic, evil character, impulsive and morally corrupted, possessing supernatural forces, and polluting society with crime and greed (Hancock, 2008). This ‘Gypsy myth’ had many consequences. As Ian Hancock (1985) argues, in mainstream European cultures, there was a long held fantasy about ‘a composite Gypsy, wearing flamenco dancer’s dress, travelling in an English Gypsy caravan, playing Hungarian Gypsy music’ (pp. 115–116). The view of the ‘Gypsy’ as uncivilised, immoral, and a bearer of evil forces, fed anti-gypsy sentiments and justified persecution of Romani communities for centuries.
Among numerous ‘Gypsy’ fantasies, the myth of the wanton Romani woman has been particularly widespread. The image of the hypersexualised, eccentric Romani woman in 19th and 20th-century literary works epitomised not merely an erotic obsession for European writers but also a desire to run away from the constraints of middle- and upper-class domesticity (Houghton-Walker 2014: 19). As Judith Oakley (1998) suggests, ‘[u]nmarriageable but endowed with sexual attraction, the Gypsy woman is also credited with strange, supernatural powers: for instance, her presumed ability to foresee the future and tell of the past by the ‘black’ art of fortune telling’ (p. 203). Consequently, the myth of the Romani woman whose free spirit and overbearing erotic impulses pose danger to the Western patriarchal social order supported constant stigmatisation, discrimination in the labour market and in access to education and healthcare, and all forms of physical assault and sexual trafficking.
This article discusses the stereotype of the hypersexualised image of the ‘Gypsy’ woman in white European male cultural fantasy, fuelled by Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen and Georges Bizet’s opera-adaptation, and its deconstruction in Dan Allum’s Carmen, the Gypsy, a contemporary re-working of Mérimée’s novella by a Romany Traveller and featuring original Gypsy music and songs. In the first section, I will discuss how the mysterious and dangerous Carmen in the works of Merimée and Bizet represented social deviance and a threat to ‘proper’ womanhood and endorsed anti-gypsy attitudes in Europe from the late 19th century to this day. In the second section, I will focus on how Allum’s contemporary revision of the original story deconstructs stereotypical representations of the seductive ‘Gypsy’ woman and grants authority to Romani women over their own stories.
The Carmen myth in Western imagination
The racialised representation of Romani women as mysterious, corrupt, and seductive beings is closely tied to the orientalist and colonialist fantasies of Western civilisation. These perceptions stem from centuries of stereotypical portrayals, often found in art, literature, and popular culture, which constructed the ‘Other’ as exotic, morally ambiguous, and dangerous. Such imagery parallels the depictions of women from colonised Eastern societies, who were similarly framed as both objects of desire and sources of cultural or moral threat. The fantasy about the ‘Gypsy’ tribes involved obsession and fear, whereby in literary works from the 19th century, such as Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) or George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Romani women were portrayed as instruments of moral and existential doom for white men (Epstein Nord, 2006: 13–15). In the earliest studies of the Romani communities, Heinrich Grellmann (1787) does not shy away from giving voice to his horrifyingly racist vision about the ‘unsettled wandering robbers’ (p. x), who ‘have more of the appearance of wild beasts’ dens, than the habitations of intelligent beings’ (p. 25). In the same writing, Grellmann (1787) spares no words on admiring the bodily qualities of the Roma people, saying that
[t]heir white teeth; their long black hair, on which they pride themselves very highly, and will not suffer to be cut off; their lively black rolling eyes; are, without dispute, properties which must be ranked among the list of beauties, even by the modern civilised European world. (p. 25)
These erotically charged statements by Grellmann (1787) had a lasting influence on subsequent racist theories about the ‘femme fatale’ Romani woman, which set the stage for the Carmen myth.
Prosper novella Carmen, the Gypsy and Georges Bizet’s (1875) opera adaptation are the most highly regarded works that reinforce the trope of the hypersexual Romani woman. Both works are written from the male coloniser’s point of view, with his fear of and obsession with ‘the Other’. As Lou Charnon-Deutsch (2004) argues, Mérimée’s and Bizet’s Carmen offer a romantic vision of this paranoia, whereby in European culture there was a long-standing stance that contact with ‘the real Gypsies’ weakens moral fibre (p. 61). Richard Langham Smith (2020) notes that there are several binaries in the Carmen story: ‘obedience to, or subversion of, the norms of the fast-emerging ‘modern Spain’ at first driven by the gradual rectification of financial inequalities’ (p. 221), the Christian values of domesticity versus sexual liberation, centralised state control versus criminality and bohemianism, all of which get dangerously close to one another through the clash of the European and the ‘Gypsy’ cultures (Langham Smith, 2020: 221).
In his novella, Mérimée uses two male narrators, the first being an outsider traveller and scholar, a quasi-alter ego of the writer, and the second being Carmen’s lover and murderer Don José. It is through this double male narration that Mérimée’s exoticizing vision of the ‘Gypsy’ woman materialises. In Mérimée’s sexist vision, the ‘Gypsy’ woman appears as a seductive, wild animal, who has ‘[g]ypsy’s eye, wolf’s eye’ (p. 15), ‘swaying her hips like some filly out of the Cordoba stud. In my part of the world, everyone would have crossed themselves at the sight of a woman like that’ (pp. 20–21). Carmen’s name derives from the Latin word, meaning song, poem, or magic, all of which were attributed to the enigmatic ‘Gypsy’ folks. Mérimée’s Carmen reflects the male gaze, using language as a tool for temptation. Carmen conceals her marriage to the one-eyed man, Garcia, from Don José, which plays a role in her manipulation. Eventually, she seduces Don José, leading him to murder her husband after Garcia joins the band. Female sexual freedom and independence, which Mérimée links to the free spirit of the Romani tribes, are seen as threats to Christian morals. Thus, Carmen’s death indicates a restoration of social order and a well-deserved punishment of the ‘Gypsy’ woman for her moral corruption. The final sentences of the third chapter reveal Mérimée’s racist views: ‘It is the gypsies who are to be blamed’ – for the whole story – ‘for bringing her up in this manner’ (p. 35).
Mérimée’s racist views regarding the Roma community are clearly expressed in his ethnographic discussion, which he added to the novella in 1847 as a fourth chapter. Here, Mérimée reinforces the contemporary racist theories of Grellmann and Borrow, combining them with his own experiences with the Romani language and customs in Spain. ‘Gypsies’ are described as uneducated folk, who are extremely hostile to their host country and completely indifferent to religion (pp. 335–337). Although, says Mérimée, ‘Gypsy’ women are extremely loyal to their husbands, they do an excellent job of fortune-telling and ‘the sale of charms and love potions. Not only do they sell toads’ feet to secure inconstant hearts, and powdered lodestone that will make even the most obdurate fall in love; but, if need be, they will utter powerful spells to oblige the Devil to come to their aid’ (p. 336). Consequently, this fourth chapter gives a clear picture of how the racist theories known in Mérimée’s time were maintained and woven into the Carmen myth.
While Mérimée’s novella scandalised its readership with its topic of male obsession, Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, the writers of the libretto, aimed to appeal to the conservative patriarchal values of their audience. One notable difference between the novella and its adaptation is the introduction of a new character, Micaëla, a counterpart to the morally depraved Carmen. What is at stake in Bizet’s opera is the moral choice of Don José between the Angel of the House – Micaëla – ‘the sexless, submissive ideal of the bourgeoisie’ (p. 57) and the ‘Gypsy’ woman, ‘the lowest common dominatrix’ (p. 59). Susan McClary (1991) suggests that Carmen is not only ‘very much aware of her body’ (p. 57) but also
sets a pattern that engages the lower body, demanding hip swings in response . . . She arouses desire; and because she apparently has the power to deliver or withhold gratification of the desires, she instils, she is immediately marked as a potential victimiser. (p. 57)
What binds these works is the racist view of ‘gypsies’ compounded by a gendered lens, framing Carmen not only as an outsider but also as a femme fatale whose sexuality threatens patriarchal order.
Carmen has been regularly criticised by feminist scholars such as Angéla Kóczé and Sardelic (2016), or Catherine Clément (1989), as a paranoid male fantasy, a portrayal of the evil woman, whose ‘murder matters less, certainly less than the turmoil and suffering of Don José when he kills her’ (López, 2022). Arguably, it is not Carmen’s character, but Don José’s obsession with the illusion of the femme fatale and the resulting tragedy that drives the story (López, 2022). Halévy and Meilhac carefully construct the mystery around Carmen. The audience is first introduced to Don José and his sweetheart, the gentle and virtuous Micaëla. True love is tested by the darkness of erotic passion, and as in a Gothic story, Carmen appears with rising smoke around her, singing and dancing about free love, ‘a rebellious bird that no one can tame . . . a gypsy child, he has never heard of law’. 2 Her charm is so effective that Don José cannot help wondering: ‘What looks! What brazen impudence! That flower had the effect of a bullet striking me! Its scent is strong and it’s a pretty flower! And the woman . . . If there really are witches, she’s certainly one’. 3 Feminine purity and well-mannered masculinity become vulnerable to Carmen’s monstrous sexuality.
As the clash between Carmen’s rebellious female sexuality and Don José’s desperate urge to reclaim his masculinity reaches its climax in the last scene, the audience identifies with Don José’s crisis to such an extent that it not only takes Carmen’s murder for granted but wishes for it (McClary, 1991: 62). That the scene is set at a bullfight clearly gives the impression that as the bullfighter triumphs over the raging bull, Don José’s killing the overpowering ‘Gypsy’ woman is also to be seen as a conquest.
It might be striking that both Mérimée’s novella and Bizet’s opera offer violence against women as a victory. Before 1975, crime of passion was a valid defence to charges of murder in France. The French Penal Code of 1810 stated that
in the case of adultery, provided for by article 336, murder committed upon the wife as well as upon her accomplice, at the moment when the husband shall have caught them in the fact, in the house where the husband-and-wife dwell, is excusable. (France: Penal Code of 1810, n.d.)
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Napoleonic Code had considerable influence on the legal systems on legal systems in many countries across regions of Europe, the United States, and the Arab nations. In Belgium and Luxembourg, a reduced sentence was granted in cases of violence committed in the context of blatant adultery’ (Violence entre Partenaires: Comment S’En Sortir? 2016). The code provided unprecedented control to men over their family, deprived women of any individual rights, and reinforced colonial slavery (HISTORY 2021; The Napoleon Series, 2000). The colonising gaze formed part of French sociocultural consciousness, enabling sexual abuse and maintaining the master and slave narrative, of which the primary targets were Black communities and also ‘nomads, Bohemians and vagabonds (Asséo, 2002; Filhol, 2011)’.
The Carmen myth perpetuated the anti-Romani gaze from the 19th century to the present. On one hand, the beautiful and enigmatic Spanish ‘Gypsy’ woman has embodied everything a white male heterosexual fantasy could have: danger, lust, and a defiance of the moral codes imposed by patriarchal societies. On the other hand, for some women writers such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, the imagined ‘Gypsy’ woman was a signifier of social alienation and unconventional femininity that enabled them to challenge patriarchal ideals of womanhood (Epstein Nord, 2006: 102). In either case, cultural representations of Romani women have historically deprived them of their agency, feeding into anti-Romani sentiments and justifying their exploitation through trafficking and prostitution. As Anca Pusca (2015) notes, the ‘modern gaze’ (p. 7) that would strive to represent the realities of Romani communities, and particularly Romani women, has not changed significantly since the 19th century. With the emergence of new media platforms, such as photography, film, television, and social media, the imagined ‘Gypsy’ continues to fascinate and repel Western minds. Modern portrayals of Romani communities, and especially Romani women, whether through reality TV, documentaries and feature films, or non-profit organisations, continue to reinforce old stereotypes, spotlighting extreme behaviours for entertainment or emphasising their victimhood, in either case creating and perpetuating knowledge with the intention and impact of radical Othering (Mladenova, 2022 [2021]: xi; Pusca, 2015: 7).
As Pastora Filigrana (2020: 113) argues, Roma women remain defined through their contrast with the dominant ideal, which perpetuates their marginalisation and positions them as the malicious ‘Other’ in a society that values homogenisation. In a strictly capitalist understanding, the Romani woman is the reproducer of the community, which exists outside of the white, heterosexual Catholic spectrum (p. 113). Consequently, the reimagining of the Romani woman in an antagonistic way serves as a defence mechanism to preserve societies built on discourses of whiteness. In patriarchal societies, where intersectional discrimination reinforces traditional gender roles both within and outside the Roma community, this discrimination not only endangers the reproductive lives of Romani women but also leads them to internalise these negative attitudes and discourages them from advocating for themselves (Petraki, 2020: 79–80; Schneeweis, 2015: 88).
Consequently, emerging voices in feminist Roma activism, including theorists of Roma cultural representations, historians, artists, and educators can facilitate empowerment and inclusion by addressing and breaking social barriers and encouraging the active social, political, economic, and cultural participation of the Roma both at a global and a local level. In this process, theatre education is key. Started in the mid-2010s, Roma European theatre projects aim to establish educational methodologies through the plays presented at diverse theatre festivals. This methodology is designed to encourage both Roma and non-Roma audiences to reflect on issues impacting Roma communities through the narratives of dramatic heroes. Participating theatre companies include the Giuvlipen (Romania), Rampa Prenestina (Italy), the Independent Theatre Hungary, and the Romany Theatre Company (United Kingdom), with themes as diverse as the histories of persecution, traditional patriarchal models, and arranged marriage within the Roman community, as well as institutionalised violence against Romani women. With their stage productions, interactive workshops, and educational methodology, the goal of these theatre companies is to teach the traditions of Roma theatre, raise awareness of the challenges faced by Roma communities, deconstruct existing stereotypical narratives of Romani people, and dismantle negative stereotypes by presenting Roma heroes as active and constructive members of society. By bringing the dramatic narratives of Romani women to the forefront, the stage serves as a platform that empowers marginalised Roma women to voice their experiences of intra- and inter-community patriarchal oppression, misogyny, violence, xenophobia, and racism (Roșu, 2020). Stage performances such as Dijana Pavlović’s Speak, My Life (2019), Mihaela Drăgan’s Tell Them About Me (2019), or Dan Allum’s William Shakespeare: Lear and His Daughters (2019), might be instrumental in deconstructing grand narratives about Roma people, and Roma women in particular, and encouraging discussion between Roma and non-Roma audiences.
Thus, there has been much need for Romani artists to dismantle white European heterosexist male fantasies about the lustful, dangerous ‘Gypsy’ woman and make it into a story of fight, resilience, and advocacy for freedom. In the following section, I will discuss how the image of the hypersexual Romani woman is deconstructed in Dan Allum’s contemporary adaptation of the Carmen story. I will approach Allum’s play as a remarkably fresh work that grants agency to Romani women, allowing them to be heroes rather than antagonists in their stories.
Changing the sexual script in Dan Allum’s Carmen
Before I expand on Dan Allum’s Carmen, I shall note some feminist reinterpretations of the Carmen story in contemporary theatre. An adaptation for the stage by the Vörösmarty Theatre (2017) from the play Carmen by the Hungarian playwright László Márton, is a version that places the original story in a militant military environment. It interprets the heroine as a feminist icon who has the choice of either becoming one of the masses of people in an Orwellian society with its suffocating rules, or consciously struggling against any constraint, system, or regulation at whatever cost (Márton, 2017). In the approach of director Csaba Horváth, both Carmen and Don José are victims in this system. While with her will to be free, Carmen is spat out by the social order of this militant world, Don José is dragged into the darkest corners of life by the vortex of romantic passion (Vörösmarty Színház). A more radical stage adaptation was Leo Muscato’s (2018) production in Florence, where the Italian audience was baffled by the play’s ending, when Carmen shoots Don José with his own pistol rather than die. Other stage adaptations, like Mathilde López’s (2022) refashioning of Mérimée’s novella, tend to present Don José as a psychotic perpetrator with a mother fixation, an archetype for Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, while Carmen is a free spirit with an immeasurable joie de vivre, whose clash with Don José is that of gender and class, ‘between a petit bourgeois officer and an outsider, a poor woman with nothing to lose’. 4 Although these versions aim to respond to the racist discursive practices found in the source works, they cannot rescue Carmen from her victimised position. In this respect, while these re-workings try hard to undo the ‘Gypsy’ stereotype, they often fall short of granting Romani women complete agency over their identities.
Dan Allum’s (2014) Carmen, the Gypsy is a musical play written by a Roma author and performed by Romani artists. As a member of a Roma traveller family, Allum is a public speaker, producer, and writer dedicated to developing a creative and learning environment that celebrates Romani identity and Romani cultural heritage. Drawing on his personal experiences and those of his Romani community, his goal is to foster a sense of pride, and to equip Romani and Traveller individuals with the skills needed to engage actively in the arts in the United Kingdom. Utilising theatre, television, and radio, Allum’s works chronicle the personal and collective history of Romani people in the UK (The Boy’s Grave 2000, Killimengro 2006, Our Big Land 2008), or reimagine classic works by esteemed figures in world literature and culture (William Shakespeare: Lear and His Daughters 2018, Carmen). With vivid imagery, of blood, forests, and cages, these works narrate the stories of Romani communities with exceptional virtuosity, incorporating elements of Roma music, dance, and visual arts to create a powerful dramatic effect.
Originally conceived as a five-part series for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC’s) Radio 4 in 2013, featuring traditional Romani music and original songs, Allum’s Carmen was later adapted for a UK tour. The setting was shifted from its original Spanish backdrop to a British Romani traveller camp. The production tackles significant issues such as forced marriage, rigid patriarchal traditions, and intersectional discrimination. By unfolding the plot from the Roma viewpoint, the play dismantles the stereotypical representations of the dangerously erotic ‘Gypsy’ woman in Mérimée’s novella and Bizet’s opera. Allum portrays Carmen as a hero rather than an antagonist, a fighter who believes she deserves a better life other than the one social practices sanctioned by her environment would predetermine her to have. To show the audience Carmen’s struggle between her family and her thirst for freedom, Allum brings Garcia, Carmen’s husband in Mérimée’s novella, back to the play, making him into a drug and illegal cage-fight dealer, and, not least, a mentally and physically abusive husband. Thus, Carmen goes from being a heartless manipulator with demonic sexuality to being a literary role model for Romani women, who are exposed to the abuse within their families and intersectional discrimination by the social majority.
The confines of patriarchy are represented as a claustrophobic and prison-like cage-fighting arena, where the male body stands for strength, dominance, and aggression, while the female body is in line with being weak and inferior. Amanda Roth and Susan A. Basow (2004: 249) argue that society not only persuades women that they are weaker than men, but it is a femininity ideology that constructs their weakness. Thus, presenting women as physically weaker impliesa societal fear of the strong woman who uses her power to undermine or emasculate men. The obsessive preservation of the dichotomy between masculinity and femininity is, therefore, inherently sexual, according to which male pleasure derives from the objectification and victimisation of the female body:
Thus, male and female sexualities are constructed according to women being able to be raped – in their being weak, fragile, and passive. For women to find a way to stop rape and to become powerful and assertive is to threaten male sexuality. If women stop being weak, the basis for the traditional definition of sexuality collapses. The possible benefits for women are a more woman-centered conception of sexuality and the ability to stop violence; the loss of privilege for men, then, is the loss of male-centered sexuality and the loss of the ability to do violence. (Allum, 2018: 249)
In Allum’s Carmen, we can find multiple instances of how masculinity and femininity are constructed and maintained. Carmen and Mariah both work for Garcia and carry out criminal activities for him, including stealing drugs. In Act 1 Scene 13, Don Jose learns from Carmen that belonging to the same ‘Kumpania’ and Gypsy tribes, she was promised to Garcia against her will: ‘Our people have close simensa, like . . . clan. Kin. Marriage makes this strong, keeps simensa powerful and safe’ (BBC Radio 4, 2014). Luring Don Jose into her net of seduction, Carmen uses the same logic that the male gaze imposed upon her by saying: ‘I am a woman in a cage. What harm can I do?’ (BBC Radio 4, 2014). After Carmen slaps her husband in the face during a fiery battle of the wills, Garcia beats her so badly that she falls to the ground, and he threatens her, saying: ‘You want to be careful’ (BBC Radio 4, 2014). Preventing Don José to interrupt the fight between Carmen and Garcia, Mariah tells him about her own violent relationship with her late husband and shows the scars she received from him, arguing:
If you are to live among us, you must know how we live. A Gypsy woman cannot pass in front of a man or walk between two men. She must go behind or say ‘bolde tut, kako’ it means ‘please turn away’. One day I forgot this . . . I wear the scar with pride. Women can be fickle and need beating now and then. It proves her man is strong and can take care of her. It shows love. And who would not choose blood over indifference? (BBC Radio 4, 2014)
By arguing that violence is an affirmation of a man’s strength, his ability to protect, and a demonstration of love, Mariah’s statement reflects the deeply entrenched systemic oppression internalised by Romani women, which leads them to rationalise and perpetuate their own subjugation.
Thus, Carmen’s rebellion demonstrates the potential for women to change traditional sexual scripts that prescribe female passivity and vulnerability versus male dominance and aggression, By challenging these gendered expectations, Carmen’s actions create space for a reconfiguration of power dynamics, in which self-defence and women’s physical agency could serve as catalysts for reshaping normative understandings of gender roles (Roth and Basow, 2004: 256). Such a catalyst for Carmen is the recognition that her free spirit is unable to adapt to the image of feminine ideals and that she possesses the ability to turn the table on masculine dominance. When talking about the character of Carmen, Candis Nergaard, who played her in the BBC Radio Drama North adaptation, describes her in the following way: ‘For her, compromising her nature is a fate worse than death, absolutely. In a world where women, especially Romani women, have no power at all, you could argue, not only does she gain power, but she really, really lives’ (BBC Radio 4, 2014). In the rehearsal script version of the play, during her argument with Carmen, Mariah rather sardonically says: ‘There’s fires in us all of us’ (Allum, 2018: 11) Carmen’s answer is: ‘Then let’em burn!’ (Allum, 2018: 11).
Mérimée’s concluding line in his novella, according to which ‘Gypsies’ should be blamed for bringing Carmen up into their ‘morally corrupt’ way of living, is highly altered in Allum’s play. Here, it is not the Romani community but the patriarchal traditions within the Roma community that are held accountable for Carmen’s doom. As Allum says,
I think [Carmen] is rock ‘n roll. Freedom is what drives her. She wants to be free outside the Romani community but also within the Romani community. I think she feels confined inside the community and outside the community and she fights against them. (BBC Radio 4, 2014)
Act 1 Scene 2 of the rehearsal draft opens with a heated argument between Carmen and Garcia in the cage before fighting starts:
A Romani tav weaves men ketane (A Romany thread weaves us together).
A kaulomengro zee kooroben forever (A common heart beats forever).
Sweti adrom (Worlds away).
Yet acoi ke atch (Yet here to stay).
A Romani tav weaves men ketane (A Romany thread weaves us together). (Allum, 2018: 2)
Here, the repeated lines, ‘A Romani tav weaves men ketone’ (A Romany thread weaves us together), spoken both by Carmen and Garcia, emphasise a deep attachment to their Romani community, challenged by their differing views on belonging and freedom. For Carmen, this attachment is primarily and exclusively based on a shared emotional bond, yet she also asserts her desire for freedom and individuality, both within and outside the Romani community. Garcia’s reply, ‘Sweti adrom’ (Worlds away), indicates a separation or a recognition of differences between them, especially in their perspectives on freedom and tradition. By saying that ‘Yet acoi ke atch’ (Yet here to stay), Carmen clearly expresses her stance of remaining true to her community but on her own terms.
In Act 1 Scene 3, Mariah meditates on the contradictory and fierce relationship between the patriarchal norms that Romani women are expected to live by, their general need to break free of these norms, and the loyalty to the values of their community they are unable to resist, saying:
A woman who lives by the standards of men shall only love he who defeats her. Yet a love born in the midst of war can only flourish on a battlefield. Danger lies where judgment is swayed by the heart. (Allum, 2018: 4)
In the last scene, Mariah attempts to lure Carmen, who is about to flee with Don José for murdering Garcia, back to her gypsy troupe, saying:
Blood’s the thing. Something you can see, smell and taste. That keeps you breathing. Alive! . . . If you ever cut yourself off from us, you won’t find your way back by crying tears of blood. You can’t live in the dark, Carmen. The voice of our people is calling you. Let yourself hear it. (Allum, 2018: 51)
Carmen’s dilemma at the end of the play stems from the fact that although she breaks out of the framework of marriage conventions with Garcia’s death, her only possible escape means binding herself to a different form of patriarchal order. Although Don José scorns the traditional patriarchal order of Roma society, according to which women must work and support the household, he comes from a world whose primary targets are the Roma communities and particularly Romani women. In the rehearsal version of the play, he says to Mariah:
Look I’m not opposed to gender-defined roles but . . . well I’d say there’s something’s not quite right going on here . . . Most of the women go to work . . . And they look after the children. And clean the home. If you ask me . . . you girls are holding the messy end of the stick. (Allum, 2018: 30)
Yet, even with all his well-intentioned approach to the inequalities within Roma society, Don José cannot break away from the white ideology that maintains institutionalised discrimination. Accordingly, Don José only reveals himself to Carmen after Garcia’s murder as a member of the police force, whose task was to spy on Carmen and Garcia’s gang suspected of illegal cage fighting, drugs, armed robbery, and extortion (Allum, 2018: 46).
We encounter here a typical example of intersectionality, which Kimberlé Crenshaw has analysed, using with the analogy of traffic and crossroads. Thus, discrimination can emerge from any direction and the potential risk of accident is high since cars can approach from any, if not all, directions sometimes simultaneously. Marginalised women are at the crossroads, therefore, if they suffer an accident, their wounds result from racial and sexual discrimination (Crenshaw, 1989: 149). In the end, Carmen must realise that her freedom can never be complete. While as Garcia’s wife, she is exposed to intra-group subordination, leaving her camp with Don José necessitates maintaining the white sexual fantasy about the exotic and mysterious ‘Gypsy’ woman. Her last words are: ‘I was born in a cage. But I won’t die in one’ (Allum, 2018: 54).
A significant moment in the rehearsal script version of the play, which has been omitted from the final performance, is Carmen’s metamorphosis. At the beginning of the plot, Carmen appears behind Mariah as a Sarangay, a Minotaur-like creature in 17th-century Philippine myths, in this case, a ‘half woman half beast’. Snorting loudly and swaying backwards and forwards, she transforms from a beast to a woman. As the play ends, Carmen returns to her Sarangay form and escapes the cage, leaving Don Jose and Mariah to the police roundup. Carmen’s transformation into an animal here indicates a way of expanding one’s living space. As Gilles Deleuze and Guattari (1986) argue,
To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. (p. 13)
As Deleuze and Parnet (1987: 60) puts it in Dialogues, the body is a disciplined physical existence, distinguished by its ability to perform, to exist together with and interrelated to other nonhuman bodies. Yet ‘becoming-animal’ is turned into a ‘becoming-dead’, since it ‘shows a way out, traces a line of escape, but is incapable of following it or making it its own’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 36). In Allum’s play, it is Carmen’s body that acts and is acted upon. For Garcia, her body signifies a territory that is subject to being slapped, sexually abused, kicked, and broken into tiny pieces. For Don Jose, Carmen’s body is a projection of his sexual fascination towards the exotic:
Your body is soft I can feel you. / I am captured, you hold me enthralled. / Spellbound, enchanted, lost in you. / Yet this blood on my hands speaks it all. / This blood on my hands tells it all. (Allum, 2018: 49)
Both Carmen’s yearning to be free and her inherent affection for her Roma heritage come to the fore during her argument with Miriam:
I don’t know who I am anymore.
Then listen to the voice of our people.
I listen to my heart.
And where is your heart buried?
In my body.
And from where was your body born?
My mother.
And your mother came from our people.
(explodes) Then how come I feel like a fucking river filled with bloody tears!? (Allum, 2018: 52)
What Carmen realises here is that the promise of freedom requires her to belong to another social caste, where her body exposes her to various forms of anti-gypsy attitudes. Carmen becoming an animal implies a return to a non-human mode of existence, ‘a line of escape’, which is a form of becoming dead. Since freedom is socially conditioned, for Carmen, it becomes attainable only when she exposes her body to the white patriarchal gaze. As a result, her only escape from this metaphorical cage is to revert to her final state by transforming back into an animal form.
Thus, Allum subverts the trope of the hypersexualised Romani woman by revealing the social realities to which Romani women are constantly exposed through their bodily visibility. Línda Martin Alcoff (2006) argues that ‘[v]isibility is both the means of segregating and oppressing human groups and the means of manifesting unity and resistance’ (p. 7). In this regard, the narrative brought to life by Mérimée and Bizet about the hypersexual Roma woman is moved to a point of view from which, not only the ‘othered’ body becomes visible, but also the male gaze that constructs and controls female subjectivity. Carmen represents those Romani women, who, in the words of bell hooks (2015), ‘resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story’ (p. 81). This process of self-empowerment for Romani women is grounded in their demand for freedom to express their worldviews, to reveal the intersections of racialised and sexualised oppression, and to find individual and collective ways to stand up against them.
Conclusion
By changing the sexual script, Carmen acquires the skills to challenge patriarchal and racialised oppression in a creative way, serving as a positive example for Romani women. Her virtuosity in manipulating the men around her to achieve freedom suggests to Romani women that their bodies are not just a surface for enduring intersectional discrimination, but an instrument for liberating themselves from the shackles of patriarchal structures. As opposed to Mérimée and Bizet’s hypersexualised monstrous creature, Carmen in Allum’s play represents the liberating force of sexuality, through which she completely subverts the dominant white ideology and the patriarchal system within Roma society.
However, Allun (2018) chooses Mariah to sing a song about freedom, which sums up the play:
My heart, my life has fallen in me . . . Leaves have fallen from the trees . . . Yet the wind finds its way of knowing . . . Just as Fate has spoken unto me . . . The flames of longing now behind me . . . A raging river flows into the sea . . . The earth it will no longer find me . . . But my spirit shall be forever free . . . Let me hold you for this moment. My darling for this moment, is all that we have to live. As long as heaven is above you. Know that I will love you. Give you all I have to give. Let your love wake me each morning. Be the promise and the warning. Let your laughter be the measure of each and every day. You’re every story I believe in. Every rhyme and every reason. My purpose and meaning, chase all my fears away. My heart my life has fallen in me . . . But my spirit shall be forever free . . . (p. 55)
One explanation for this choice could be that while Carmen fulfils a kind of saviour role with her ideal of freedom, Mariah represents those Romani women who secretly desire, yet never really dare, to break free of the social norms in which they live. As Angéla Kóczé (2009) argues, the multiple disadvantages experienced by Romani women stem from their systematic marginalisation, which manifests as a continuous silencing both within their own communities and in broader societal contexts, resulting in their internalisation of gender norms and their reluctance to challenge them (p. 23). The prevailing perception that acts of resistance by Romani women threaten the unity of the Roma movement in combating racism has created tension between the narratives of racism and sexism. Carmen Gheorghe (2016) highlights that Romani feminist voices addressing domestic violence have been systematically devalued by male activists, who often prioritise anti-racism efforts over gender equality to prevent fracturing the Roma movement. As a result, acts of resistance by Romani feminists have been perceived as disrespectful to Romani cultural traditions and even oppressive to Roma men (Asavei, 2022: 12; Oprea, 2004: 30). As Maria Asavei claims, these biased critical voices from male activists have rendered Romani feminism largely unfeasible. By downplaying the unique injustices faced by Romani women, such stances have treated Romani feminism with considerable suspicion, contributing to the reinforcement of white hegemonic discourses within Romani communities. (Asavei, 2022: 12). Dan Allum’s play dismantles the Carmen myth with highly innovative storytelling. For Mérimée and Bizet, Carmen is the evil ‘Gypsy’ woman, who uses her sexual energy to impose danger upon masculinity, and whose passion killing is completely justified by the legislation of the time. In stark contrast to this image, Allum’s heroine is a Romani woman who has full authority over her body, and whose choice not to die in the cage of patriarchy manifests that Romani women, even in the direst of circumstances, have the right to have unlimited control over their lives. In so doing, Allum opposes the anti-Gypsy view that feeds the Carmen myth and releases his heroine from those hypersexualised tropes into which the gaze of the cultural majority banishes her. Allum’s Carmen combats intersectional discrimination against Roma women. Furthermore, with her uncompromising and free-spirited character, Carmen provides a key for Romani women to recognise themselves as heroes rather than victims of their own stories.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
