Abstract
Learning to become a “real woman” (caci romni/gual) was the natural consequence of my flight marriage. Before my marriage I was the rakli, a young non-Gypsy woman, who can be a friend of the Sinti but not more. A rakli will never know about “real Sinti life”. If the rakli is at good terms with the Sinti she will be treated as a guest, a lover, a person who brings food, money or other help. When I was still a rakli I told my Sinti friends that I had come to learn about their life and write a book about them. The answer was: ‘There were many people like you here aiming at writing about the Sinti. They all failed. It is not good to write a book. You better change your idea!’ And my friend’s advice was wise, as I had to discover many years later. Becoming a real woman was a cultural process of social transformation from an unmarried to a married woman, from a non-Sinta to a Sinta. Over three years living in a caravan in my home region, giving birth to our first daughter, going begging and selling from door to door with my mother- and sisters-in-law had been a process as cognitively intense as emotionally painful. When nine years later I published my ethnographic work my Sinti family would not understand how I, a Sinta whom I had become, could make public about our life. My contribution moves from my personal experience of becoming a Sinti woman to the question of being Sinti in Central Europe, tackling issues of embodiment, cultural silence and cosmology.