BLOOD

I'm 1/8 Roma, but that has never been a bigger issue than material for stupid jokes about how my family 'can never settle down', as we indeed have done a lot of moving around over the years. Still, as this part of my heritage is quite 'exotic' (perhaps even more exotic than the 1/4 Tatar blood I have), I'm rather fascinated by it. Not least since traditional Roma society has taboos concerning menstruating women that can seem a bit crazy sometimes ...

In the traditional Roma society, an important foundation is the distinction between 'pure' (vujo) and 'polluted' (marimé). Marimé can mean both a state of 'pollution' or 'defilement', and the sentence of expulsion imposed for violation of purity rules or any behaviour that is unacceptable to the Roma community.

Marimé taboos vary from group to group, and, naturally, only the most traditional groups follow the rules to 100%. Nevertheless, these cleanliness rituals can be a quite important part of the Roma identity. One of the distinctions between Roma and Gadje (non-Roma) is that the Gadje don't follow the Romani cleanliness rituals, and are thus considered to be 'dirty'.

When the marimé concept is applied to personal hygiene, it mostly concerns itself with the body of a menstruating woman. Pre-pubescent girls and older women are placed in a different category from other women, because they don't menstruate. They have relatively much freedom, and are allowed to socially interact with men much more freely than a menstruating woman, who has to follow intricate rules of behaviour.

The body of a menstruating
woman is divided into two parts. Above the waist she is pure, and below the waist she is polluted. There is no shame connected with the upper part of the body, but the lower part is an 'object of shame' (baro lashav), because it is associated with menstruation.
Obviously, there must be
something seriously wrong when blood flows without injury, so it has to be a proof of bodily impurity.

During the menstrual cycle, a
woman is marimé and must not have any contact with others. With the onset of menstruation at puberty, a girl’s clothing cannot be washed together with the clothing of men, boys,
premenstrual girls, or old women.

This is the reason why the women in many Roma tribes wear long, wide skirts, and why the bottom of these skirts must not touch any other man than the woman's husband. Even when women usually don't wear this kind of skirts, they must cover their legs when they sit down, and an unmarried woman must keep her legs together when sitting in mixed company.

A woman in a house must not pass in front of a man, or even between two men, but she must go around them in order to avoid 'infecting' them. When serving meals to a man, women have to do this from the rear for the same reason. A woman cannot walk by a seated man, because her genitals would then be in the same height as his face. A man may not walk under a clothesline where women's clothes are hanging. Some Roma will not rent an apartment on a lower floor, fearing that a woman might walk around on the upper floor directly above them and 'pollute' them. Similarly, a woman may get out of the car if a man has to look under it because of mechanical trouble.

While all these rules are very constraining, some argue that the marimé concept also gives women a lot of power among Roma, since 'the threat of pollution is so great'. A very severe state of marimé befalls any man if a woman lifts up her skirts and exposes her genitals to him ('skirt-tossing') ...