RONALD LEE WRITING THE GYPSY SELF
RONALD LEE WRITING THE GYPSY SELF

Summary/Abstract: The paper will analyse the hybrid identity of the protagonist-narrator, a gypsy adopted by a white Canadian family who sends him to school. Although he has done office work , he decides to re-ethnicize himself by changing his Anglo-Saxon name Ronald with a gypsy one, Yanko. He thus presents himself as the exponent of an ethnic community that is victimized by the dominant majority. In this way his individual life story (stressed by the subtitle, An Autobiographic novel) becomes a collective autobiography. The paper will then comment on his presentation of the dominat majority's stereotypes of gypsies and its refusal to recognise the gypsies as a distinct ethnic community with a right to survival. With the death of Demitro, the last patriarch of the Canadian gypsies, which symbolises the death of gypsy culture, Yanko decides to depart with his family for England, where he hopes to make his voice heard on behalf of this vilified ethnic Other.

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