Supervivientes del Apocalipsis: un relato de ciencia ficción ‘gitano’
Abstract
In 1977 Monde Gitan, a French journal devoted to the so-called “Gypsy Question” published an article entitled “Les survivants de l’Apocalypse”. Its author was Jean Ortica, a member of a well-known “gypsy” family in France. It was a Science Fiction short story portraying a nuclear disaster. The narration stresses on how a surviving Roma family have to adapt and live starting from scratch, incapable of relying on the inherited history of centuries of civilization. The Roma are the people who thus play the main role in the new history of the humankind, feeling responsible for the birth of a new world.
This story can be read in several ways, from a dystopian science fiction story to a gypsy utopia narration; It could even be understood as an attempt at assimilationist indoctrination by the majority society, from a "civilizatory” vision. The article explores these multiple meanings in connection with the study of the situation of the Roma people in post-war France (and Europe), taking into account the social and cultural factors of the historical context - remarkably, the rise of nuclear fear in the Cold War- but also the situation of the Roma people after the Nazi Holocaust. This story represents and faces anti-gypsyism from the self-imagination of the Roma capacity for agency within a fictionalized extreme context.
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