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Author Carol Higgins Clark has made a fine career writing mysteries with one-word titles, such as Mobbed, Wrecked, Cursed, Zapped, Burned, etc. Her latest book, however, is titled with an ethnic slur: Gypped. “Gypped” is a racist slur derived from the word “Gypsies” (See below), itself a negative name used for the Romani people. It implies that all Roma are venal and dishonest. Protests are following the author around the countryside as she promotes the book.
I am Romani, and I take this matter seriously; I wish the publishing industry would do the same. And I am asking for your help in getting to that point.
We trace our ancestry to India. Our people have been in diaspora since wars and disease drove our ancestors from their homes in the eleventh century. We are not laughing, and we’re not entertained, by Carol Higgins Clark’s not-so-clever word play. Known commonly as Gypsies, a name given to us by Europeans, who thought our ancestors came from Egypt, we call ourselves Roma or Romanies, names from our own language. Roma, among the world’s poorest and most oppressed minorities, today face pogroms, deportations, and a rising level of violence, including murders, from neo-Nazi groups, who have lately been heard to chant “Gypsies to the gas chambers!” at demonstrations throughout Europe, terrifying people who remember the one to two million Roma who died in the Holocaust (called O Porrajmos in our language.)
The dangerous stereotyping of Roma/Gypsies as inherently criminal, wild, and violent, leads in the USA to Romani people being followed and harassed in stores and schools, bullied in school, and targeted in other ways by a society that uses the term “Gypsy” and its verb, “gypped,” only in a negative and harmful way.
When a popular author uses such a slur to sell her books, she singles out our people as targets. Recently, she apologized with these words:
“I am truly sorry for any offense caused by using the word ‘Gypped’ as the title of my book. It was a familiar word since childhood which no one I knew associated with its origin. Since this issue arose, I’ve asked many people who also had no idea of any negative connotation. Again, I apologize.”
That’s better than a spit in the eye, but not yet enough. I would think a famous author would check the dictionary on any word “familiar since childhood.” The list of offensive words no longer used since I was a child is very long, indeed. You can probably think of a few, thanks to the civil rights, women’s, and gay liberation movements.
An apology is one thing; repudiation is what is called for here. Rromani Zor, a civil rights group being organized for the Romani people, is calling for the publisher to recall and retitle this book, for bookstores and libraries to refuse to stock or shelve it until this happens, and for the author to support us in this effort. (Fair disclosure: I am on the board.) You can help, too. See below.
Read about some of the ways that Roma have been the targets of discrimination here:
http://www.errc.org/article/violence-against-roma-on-the-rise-errc-testifies/3968
http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_1787
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT GYPPED
Help us get this book pulled from libraries and bookstores, and retitled, at the very least, by its publisher, the venerable Simon and Shuster, who should know better!
Here’s how you can help:
1. Leave the author a comment on her web page at
http://carolhigginsclark.com/contact/
or on her Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/carolhigginsclark
2. If you can help with informational pickets to spread information about why the word “gypped” is an ethnic slur, please contact Rromani Zor at com.romanizor@gmail.com for materials that can be easily copied.
3. If you can’t make the event but would like to let the bookstore/library know how you feel, please use the contact information below each event.
April 24, 2012
Book Soup
EVENT DETAILS
Apr 24, 2012
7:00 pm
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
W. Hollywood, CA
Phone 310-659-3110
Leave a comment on the bookstore’s Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Book-Soup/20677614081
April 26, 2012
Mysterious Galaxy
EVENT DETAILS
Apr 26, 2012
7:00 pm
Mysterious Galaxy
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. Suite 302
San Diego, CA
Phone 858-268-4747
Leave a comment on the bookstore’s Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/MysteriousGalaxy?sk=wall
April 28, 2012
EVENT DETAILS
Apr 28, 2012
9:00 am
Wegman’s Market
2100 Marlton Pike W
Chery Hill, NJ
Phone: (856) 488-2700
Also April 28, 2012
Carol Higgins Clark will be the speaker at the annual Friends of Doylestown Library’s Luncheon at Warrington Country Club on 4/28/12. Tickets are $40 each and will be on sale at the library on April 2-7 for members of the Friends group & from April 9-23 for the general public.EVENT DETAILS
Apr 28, 2012
12:00 pm — 2:00 pm
150 South Pine Street
Doylestown, PENNSYLVANIA 18901
(215) 348-9081
Leave a copy on the library’s Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bucks-County-Free-Library/140988763365
You may also leave comments on the book’s Amazon page at
http://www.amazon.com/Gypped-ebook/dp/B005GG0MV0
4. Ask your local bookstore or library not to stock this book:
Product Details
Scribner, April 2012
Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1439170312
ISBN-13: 9781439170311
5. Ask the publisher, Simon and Shuster, to recall and retitle the work.
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Toll free: (866) 248-3049 |
Leave them a comment on their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Simonandschuster
Who is ripped off by Gypped?
1gyp noun \ˈjip\. . .Definition of GYP. . .2 a : cheat, swindler b : fraud, swindle
Origin of GYP
probably short for gypsy
First Known Use: 1750
2gyp verb gyppedgyp·ping Definition of GYP: cheat
Synonyms: beat, bilk, bleed, cheat, chisel. . .victimize. . . .
http://www.merriam-webster.com/
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A ripoff; something that is not worth what your are giving for it; referring to gypsies who make their living off of swindling others. this add a video |
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gyp |
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To be ripped off, or to get a bad deal. “I spent $500.00 more than I should have for that lemon…I got gypped!” share this add a video |
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A derogatory term insinuating that Gypsies steal. Man, you gyped me
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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gyp
Gypsy is the name given to Roma since they appeared in Europe in the thirteenth century, refugees from the widespread warfare that had overtaken their native India as part of the expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Europeans took these newcomers from the East for Egyptians (Egyptian, Egipcian, ‘gypcian, ‘gipcian, gipsy, gypsy) , and feared them because they were not Christians, they had no homeland, and their experiences with slavery and brutal oppression on their path westward had caused them to shun non-Romanies. Laws were passed forcing the Gypsies to move onward, at times penalizing them for their presence with death orders, and forbidding education and employment to the living. This unreasonable hatred culminated in the murder of more than one millions Gypsies/Roma by the Nazis. And the misconceptions and oppression have continued: Today the Roma are Europe’s poorest minority, and neo-Nazis are screaming in the streets of Eastern Europe, “Gypsies to the gas chamber!” In some countries, they are allowed to live only in undesirable areas such as refuse dumps, and they are forcibly deported when they try to find better homes.
To use the word “Gypped” is to feed the stereotypes and hatred!
For more information, contact:
Gypsies are NOT
- a lifestyle
- a set of behaviors
- a mythical people
- happy wanderers
We are
- an ethnic group of Asian Indian origin
- present on all continents since our diaspora began in the eleventh century
- organizing
- claiming our right to be free of racial stereotypes
HELP US END THE USE OF RACIAL SLURS!
Carol Higgins Clark can repudiate the word “Gypped”
and speak to her publisher about retitling it.
Simon and Shuster can recall and retitle this book.
Bookstores and libraries can refuse to stock or shelve this book
until its title is corrected.
You, the patron, can refuse to buy until it is retitled.
Everyone has the right to say what they want.
We have the right to be offended and outraged.
Our people who even today are facing pogroms,
neo-Nazi death squads, and more hatred
have the right to live and prosper in peace.
Help us!
What I can say about the Pulitzer Fiction Award controversy is this: Karen Russell’s Swamplandia is an original and worthy nominee. I have not read the other two finalists, chronicled in the article linked below, but I can see why a board comprised of journalists and academics might not be able to meet in the middle, whereas, I suspect, Corrigan, Cunningham, et al, probably could have done so. They did recommend three finalists, as requested, but the Board could not agree on one. A rule change doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Publishers, of course, have reason to rue the loss of post-award sales. Read Russell’s book, anyway. It’s worthwhile, like a lot of other books that have, over the years, been passed up for the final award. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/17/pulitzer-board-awards-no-fiction-prize-angering-jurors.html
Bette Lynch Husted is one of my favorite authors. I am truly excited to begin reading her latest nonfiction work, Lessons from the Borderlands. Below you will find a synopsis and blurbs from other noted authors. Bette’s work will also appear in the upcoming Jane’s Stories IV anthology, which I am co-editing. Expect a review soon. Meantime, consider putting this volume on your library’s wish list. Below you’ll find all the information to do that. Of course, you could just purchase the book from your favorite bookstore and we can have a discussion about it here on Women and Books.
Who’s your candidate to win? I’m betting on either the Syrian poet, Adonis, or the Algerian, Assia Djebar. One day, Margaret Atwood will get one; it’s hard to imagine what else she has to do. And, of course, it’s fun to think about Bob Dylan mumbling his way through a greeting in Sweden. However, I’m betting the Prize Committee won’t be able to resist a nod to the Arab Spring.
Join me on Friday, September 2, at 4:00 p.m. EST for an online reading and chat with Diana Abu-Jaber about her latest novel, Birds of Paradise, which comes out on September 1. You’ll be among the first to hear Diana read and discuss this latest of her four novels, an exquisitely-rendered family portrait of the Muirs, who have been decimated by the absence of their runaway daughter, Felice. Somehow, Abu-Jaber manages to merge her signature good humor and her detailed knowledge of cooking with this deeply affecting tale.
Go early to www.talkshoe.com to create your own ID so that you can ask Diana your own question via audio link, or just click on the link below and then on the link to the “scheduled episode” if you’d like to listen, only.
Here’s the link to the Jane Book Chat site where the reading/interview will take place:
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/80383
BIRDS OF PARADISE
Diana Abu-Jaber
W. W. Norton, New York
ISBN 978-0-393-06461-2
September 2011
$25.95 hardback ($30 Canada)
368 pages
Diana Abu-Jaber’s fourth novel charms with delectable prose, vividly unique characterizations, and an exquisitely-rendered Miami setting, even as it wrenches the reader through a plot involving a family damaged by the voluntary disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl. Our hearts and our appetites are stimulated by this extraordinary quest to the heart of family connections.
Abu Jaber’s Miami is a dazzling blend of Eden and the Mad Queen’s Wonderland, both graced with the natural bounty of fertile soil and teeming sea, and patrolled by human sharks with a taste for blood and excess. Her protagonists plot a course that brings us perilously close to all its edges. The financially successful and inventively gifted Avis and Brian Muir are enmeshed in a world of gourmet cuisine and predatory business law, respectively, while their teenaged daughter inhabits a world of skinhead-infested flop houses, wayward skate boarders, and electric nightclub lights, supporting herself with occasional modeling gigs while she hides from her parents. Her brother, Stanley, an entrepreneurial organic food purveyor, stands aside and watches the emotional mayhem.
Avis, an expert pastry chef who is always elbow-deep in crème fraiche, snowy mounds of lemon peel, and lavender-scented blueberries, is bewildered but faithful enough to take heart and gingembre en cristal in hand for every infrequent rendezvous arranged on her daughter’s terms. Brian, a real estate attorney working for developers whose plundering of the landscape and neighborhoods makes him cringe, despairs, also, but in a different way: he toys with the possibilities of infidelity and spiking the salacious deals that allow him to keep the facade of success. Stanley, rejected from his mother’s kitchen and squeezed from the spotlight by his beautiful younger sister, builds a life as far away from his parents’ as he can imagine. Felice, is an enigma: why would a daughter who is loved and treasured, who has the gifts of beauty and brains and a luxurious home, want to live on the streets?
“A cookie . . . is a soul, ” Avis says to her children when they are small. ” you think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite.”
Every member of this mangled family has a soul that shines light on what it means to love and cherish others. Abu-Jaber shows us not just her character’s thoughts, but also the ingredients that made them. She is at her best divining the myriad interconnections and split-second impressions that determine emotional choices, and, thus, fate. Avis, tried to a degree that the reader can hardly bear as she prepares for the meetings that Felice cannot be depended on to remember, numbly recalls all the ways she tried to avoid repeating the mistakes of her own neglectful mother. She will not allow that disconnect between herself and her own children. She will marzipan their world. Her two children respond in vastly different ways.
In her kitchen, Avis is in control. Perhaps too much so, as she drives Stanley away when he tries to give her the close bond she longs for with her daughter. But when a neighbor’s screeching exotic bird disturbs her carefully-constructed world of pâtés and crème Chantilly, Avis storms off to confront her, and finds in Solange a will more indomitable than her own, as well as a retreat that entices her away from ringing phones and delivery vans.
We divide our time as readers between Avis’ domestic kingdom and Felice’s skateboard and partying scene, with glimpses into Brian’s carefully controlled despair among cheating, lying denizens of his high rise office, and Stanley’s determined social responsibility. Food and flora create the paradise in which Avis comes to grips with her growing despair.
One of the pleasures of this novel is its toothsome complexity, as satisfying as one of Avis’ sugar-encrusted creations. None of the characters skates through a scene, not even Stanley’s overwhelming girlfriend or Brian’s conniving business associates: characters grapple, with each other, their dilemmas, their fates. Eventually, the family’s conflicts mount to a fever pitch as Felice’s eighteenth birthday and a hurricane approach in tandem. As her characters careen toward climactic encounters, Abu-Jaber shows us the imperfections in paradise and the hope that accompanies each step in its realization.
This may be the best work yet from the author of the critically acclaimed Arabian Jazz, Crescent, and the memoir, The Language of Baklava. Certainly, this novel belongs with the pantheon of authors–Connie May Fowler and Carl Hiaasen come to mind–who have used Florida’s bountiful setting as an element in their plumbing of the human soul. Writers will want to savor and deconstruct Abu-Jaber’s graceful prose. Foodies will be rapt by Abu-Jaber’s deft descriptions, and parents–present and potential–will find much to ponder here. Anyone who has ever wondered how young girls cope with the demands of a sex-obsessed society will want to put this one on their lists. And if you love South Florida, or any vision of paradise, come taste the sensations and swim with the sharks. Highly recommended.
Updates
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What I see from my window: http://t.co/RFCjorBA
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@emmabo OMG I thought it was spinach!7 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@DrTeresaCairns @pipogypopotamus Maybe the question is, are there any non-racist republicans?7 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Gypped? As a title? Really, Simon and Shuster? http://t.co/F0XR1pbX
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Bards Day http://t.co/zUNg0qSi
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No Pulitzer in Fiction? Don’t blame the judges! http://t.co/ronrJR8l
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Interesting how these things are covered: Poetry and Fiction Don’t Make WAPO Cover story http://t.co/FoQk8Nt1
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Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Arts and Letters http://t.co/jgR2cw3y
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Lessons from the Borderlands http://t.co/yJBpHBhS
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Help ensure all women have access to contraception – without co-pay, no matter where they work: #supportwomen http://t.co/pKd2MQn4
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http://t.co/mFG539ge Opinion: When campaign reform worked (from @cnn)
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Down and dirty: Great discussion right now on CNN about capitalism.
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Good upbringing http://t.co/NJsuhNJY
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News from Jane's Stories Press Foundation #constantcontact http://t.co/tkItfm67
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Loud TV commercials to leave quietly, thanks to FCC http://t.co/ogVqebVT via USA TODAY
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When I think of… http://t.co/AlMDVox1
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Middle Class Pays for Financiers’ Mistakes: Simon Johnson - Bloomberg http://t.co/pdUiwzcG via @BloombergView
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Letting Go http://t.co/R2SBbqqs
