Vakeriben pal o mule on Three Borders: Revenant Stories Between Fiction and Reality, Information and Literature, and Folklore and Individual Creative Writing
Abstract
Vakeribena pal o mule is an important phenomenon in Romani spiritual world. The majority of Roms can tell specific stories about contacts between the living and the dead from their own or their relatives' experience.
These stories are on the one hand individual, on the other hand they have a lot of collective features. These stories can 135 be heard in everyday communication but they also represent the topic of creative writing (e.g.
Demeter 1992, Kher 2012, Ryvolová ed. 2019). The aim of this paper is to show revenant stories as a border phenomenon in three ways: 1) The first border is between fiction and non-fiction.
From outer, "Gadjo" perspective these stories may seem like fiction so the author will rather show them as non-fictional stories about the transcendental world, and contrast them against fantastic fairy-tales. Various theoretical approaches to these stories will be presented: For example, Kher, a publishing house which specializes in Romani literature, has presented these stories in different ways: from explicitly labelling them fairy-tales in 2012 to a more stuctured interpretation in 2019.
On the other hand, Milena Hübschmannová (2006) showed these stories in the context of Romani world. Nevertheless, she describes the Romani point of view as so radically different from the non-Romani rational one, that these stories (implicitly) are again in the same category as the fantastic fairy-tales. 2) The author will also consider the degree of literary composition in specific stories.
Hence, the second border will be shown between conventional "informative" stories and stories with real artificial composition. This border will also be shown as a dynamic one regarding mixing of particular features on both sides of this border.
The author will compare the narrative structure of diftferent revenant stories: the recordings from Romani settlements, texts written as a reaction to a public call (Ryvolová ed. 2019) and other texts published as author's literature. He will try to find the third border: the border between collective structures and individual innovations.
Also, the third border will be shown as a dynamic one regarding mixing of particular features on both sides of this border.