corruption – Romania Without Dracula

Romania Without Dracula

Category: corruption

Limpede

Omu Gnom, Limpede (In a Clear Mind)

We are the descendants of a holy People from this land

From a culture that you would not discover too soon

Whith glowing lies they want to replace your past

But in vain you wear thick clothing if you are empty inside

An easy confusion like faded music of old times

Each of them should be dismissed like Russos

Like debris carried away

From a building site for good

And to the government we apply a reshuffled code of good things

It’s about a supreme awakening, a soul with love and peace

Not with a gun under your pillow

So that want us to be slaves in our land, that’s clear

But in the end everything returns to where it all began

Yes, just like Magellan

The present bring us the past for the future

Romania is like a human being, to know himself he needs to look inside his soul

They forged our history with great abjection

And of course it is just shit if they are made up

I want to bring you a little sunshine,

I don’t want to lie to you now because I will be force to lie to you all the time

Research, study, represent yourself

In these cloudy times we need clear thinking

Here we have a high-level family business

with orders coming from Mother Russia and Uncle Sam

we witness a world parada

where money/ice disappears due to global warming

It is a treasure hunt and you are caught-in without knowing how

And I can tell you when there is cheese even sandwiches are better

Yes, as stingy as you may be, don’t venerate money too much

Because of that you may risk to be left like Bugs Bunny with a carrot in your mouth

There are also other important values to pursue

and don’t be stupid just because that is the easiest way to learn

Each of us is endowed with infinite powers

Yes, you know this is a paradoxical time

when it is difficult to be simple

I studied I am informed and prepared for the cause

It’s amazing how much you can find if you know what to search for

Really, stay tuned as we represent resistance in our country and national self-confidence grows

Translated by Lucia Massacesi

Original Lyrics:

Suntem urmasii unui popor sfant de pe acest pamant

Al unei culturi pe care vor sa n-o descoperi prea curand

Cu minciuni stralucitoare vor sa-ti inlocuiasca trecutul

Dar degeaba te imbraci gros daca esti gol pe dinauntru

Confuzie usoara ca muzica de odinioara, apusa

Ar trebui fiecare dintre ei sa fie demis ca Rusos

Si-asa cara moloz

Sa-i ducem pe bune pe santier

Si guvernului sa-i aplicam codului bunelor remanieri

E vorba despre trezirea suprema, cu dragoste-n suflet si pace

Nu cu pistolul sub perna

Ca ne vor sclavi pe pamantul nostru asta e clar

Insa la final totul se intoarce de unde a plecat

Da’ altfel ca Magelan

Prezentul ne readuce trecutul pentru viitor

Romania e ca un om sa se cunoasca tre’ sa priveasca in interior

Ne-au falsificat istoria cu mizerie multa

Si logic ca sunt doar c******i daca ei le scot din burta

Vreau sa-ti aduc putin soare,

Nu vreau sa te mint ca voi fi fortat sa te mint in continuare

Cerceteaza, studiaza, reprezinta-te

In aceste vremuri tulburi tre sa gandim limpede

Aici e o afacere de familie de rang inalt

cu ordine de la mama rusie si unchiul sam

suntem martorii unei parade mondiale

unde banii gheata dispar din cauza incalzirii globale

e o vanatoare de hartii si esti prins fara sa stii cum

si recunosc cand ai cascaval, si sandvich-u-i mai bun

da oricat de avar ai fi nu venera mereu banii

ca risti pt ei sa stai cu morcovu in gura ca bugs bunny

sunt si alte valori mai importante de urmat

si nu fi prost doar pt ca-i drumul cel mai usor de invatat

fiecare dintre noi e inzestrat cu infinite puteri

da stii tu e paradoxal timpu

si e complicat sa fie simplu

am studiat sunt informat pregatit pt cauza

e uimitor cate poti sa gasesti daca stii ce cauti

zau, mereu la curent ramai panou cand in tara

reprezentam rezistenta cand sare siguranta nationala

February 12, 2017
In a Clear Mind – Meeting Omu Gnom
New Album out on December 24 2018

Hrana out on March 22 2017

I met Omu Gnom for an interview at Fabrica, Bucharest, just before Christmas and a week ago I went back there to attend his concert. You could tell that he is a charismatic and thoughtful chap from his very energetic yet unhurried young audience. While I could not but feel like an ideal bunica (grandma) to them all, I enjoyed their quiet mounting number, many of them flocking in straight from Piata Victoriei, where together with other hundred-thousands Romanians of all ages, they had been protesting in front of the Government building. Back home, my teenager sons dismissed it all as a clumsy raid into a world apart from mine, ideally sympathising with my unfortunate interviewee. Who, in fact, relying on his clear mind, did prove their perception completely mistaken.

Why Omu Gnom? Is there any ironic intention in this word combination?

It’s a combination between two names, om, which means human being, and gnom, which is a gnome, a mythical creature that lives in the underground and keeps the wealth and the richness of the earth. Basically, when I was little I liked this word gnom very much and then after a while – about ten years afterwards -, when I began to write, I found that omu gnom sounded even better with their combined syllables, also because “to be a man” in Romania is like something important: sa fi un om! meaning you have to be someone good, with some standards, to try to do good with everybody. In fact, this is one of my targets in writing: I write stuff that uplift people that listen. And yes, I am an optimistic person, also with the pessimistic writing I always want to give at the end a little reason for being optimistic. As for the combination, I like playing with words: in the word gnom you find also the word om, so I play with the idea that a gnom is little as opposed to om, someone much taller. So, it basically has it all, started from a little spark. Any other meaning comes afterwards and that is the beauty of dealing with words: you know where you start but never know where you are going to end up.

Why they call you Domnul Profesor (Mr. Professor)?

At the ARTA (Atitudine, Răbdare, Tehnică, Ambiție) I have different kinds of students, some just want to write lyrics and have their creativity pushed forward, so I help them with their word playing and everything that has connection to music, others are more interested in rhythm, how to put your words into the rhythm and how to make everything be packed, put in a good package. Yes, I have been doing this for two years, I have two classes and all my students are ok, actually you cannot save them all but when you can save more than half of them that is really great. By the way, how do you know they call me “Domnul Profesor”?

[I found it out in an online interview :)] In fact, you appear as a true educator, literally: helping to take things out from within

Yes, I want to help people with a better understanding of life, the world order and society. I don’t know if I succeed but I try to do my best to do that. Practically, my opinion of writing is that if you have a skill and you can make other people listen to your words, you must go for it. Maybe you are here for that reason as well…

What would you have been, hadn’t you been a singer?

Ok, this is the question every journalist puts you! Each time I give a different answer, so… today I answer to you: probably an investigative journalist.

Getting to your music, How do you manage your work, I understand that you create all your music…

Yes I sample the sounds I like, I make all the bits, I am a butcher. Say, I like an Italian song, maybe from the Sixties, I chop it up and add it with something else and I make music. This is Hip Hop. From my point of view, Hip Hop – or at least a part of it – is the possibility to create a movie with different characters from other movies. Which is what I basically do.

Which are your channels to sell your CDs?

It’s not a label, it has been a crew for seven years now (Ateliere de creatie) and I have a website, omugnom.com, for three years. We are independent, we do not have a formal distribution and we rely on support: you can free download our stuff and if you want the original you donate, also if you want to support us you can donate. I am my own manager, my own PR, everything… It’s ok. I am still at that level. It is growing but we shall see.

Practically, my opinion of writing is that if you have a skill and you can make other people listen to your words, you must go for it. Maybe you are here for that reason as well…

Coming to the hip hop Romanian scene. I read Vice 2010 about it. What’s your opinion?

Actually I know people that are considering writing a book about the Romanian hip hop. To give you a brief idea, it all started back in the first Ninties, when some radio shows began to broadcast American stuff, after that some local bands appeared. R.A.C.L.A. (an abbreviation of Rime Alese Care Lovesc Adânc – “Handpicked Rhymes with a Deeper Meaning”, Ed.) issued the first hip hop album. Then came the B.U.G. Mafia (Bucharest Underground Mafia) and many more. What the Romanians did after the 90s? They went, say, East Side, that is more lyrical, like RACLA, Getto Daci, and West side in a more gangster style – so called gangsta rap – like BUG Mafia (Bucharest Underground Mafia), La Familia. At present these different styles are merging together: a combination of toughness – because also on the streets in Romania you have gangs and mafia – with some lyrical contents. Personally, I don’t follow gangster rap, I am more of a spiritual guy, but there are very good street rappers among them.

Which are the singers who inspire you most?

In Romania I like Methadon 3000, Norzeatic [he is now in Tokyo to study Japanese] and Deceneu. So these are my main influences.

About your song Limpede: what is the story behind this song?

It means “in a clear mind” I started working on this song during the Roșia Montana protest (a successful protest against a mining project in 2013, Ed.). I talked to people and observed the events: I was starting to wake up and watch what was happening in the world, what was happening in Romania. So I made the song with the idea that you should have a clear mind to focus if you want to deal with something. This should be normal for a human and this is what I also say to my students. This attitude also regards your opinion: you need to have a clear mind, even if your opinion is a collage of different opinions, it still becomes something yours and original, reflecting just you, who collect it all.

In Printe cuvinte you say ai grija sa n-ai griji (“be careful not to be careless”) and “read, open your mind”: quite beyond simple singing life’s ups and downs and the fatalistic mood so recurring in Hip Hop…

I am a kind of conscious writer. This is where my style is taking me to. And frankly speaking, I would like to earn some money in things that I believe in. I will never leave rap, though. I like that my message reaches more people. I am sure that an open-minded person would be interested in it. For instance, on December 11th (General Election Day, Ed.) I took part in an event called Conteaza Voteaza (“It counts if you vote”) at Expirat, a new Bucharest club in Halele Carol, where you could join in only if you brought along your voting stamp. And it was a good show in a whole new environment for me: I had a very good reception. I made my freestyle on politics and people enjoyed it and wondered who I was. That made me think that I should let my music go to places where it had not gone until now, because there are people that would appreciate it.

What I basically do, I try to make things that will help you develop. I write things for me, as well to improve myself. I like saying to myself: “it will be ok, try to be better, come on!”, “here are these politicians that are robbing you, don’t be stupid, think! Think! And it will be ok!”. I don’t know if this happens everywhere but the people in Romania must be constantly reminded that they are in control of their lives and that if they think critically then everything is going to be ok. Maybe it is a general human problem… More, now we have too much information and you feel lost: we have Google and everything is there for you but we don’t know what to search anymore and we are tired of all this. I don’t know if I have the right to give advice but I am trying to play my part in this. And I am doing it for myself, first of all.

Now we have Google and everything is there for you but we don’t know what to search anymore and we are tired of all this.

Comparing your mood to that I can grasp in the current Italian rap scene- some names: Salmo, Jay Ax, Marracash, Sfera Ebbasta, Guè Pequeno -, I find yours inspirational while theirs, allow me a risky generalisation – full of spleen and nihilism. Does it make any sense to you?

I don’t know the music of these artists so I cannot relate to the description. What I can do, though, is to talk about my music, my message.
I don’t want that the people that listen to me thinks it all sucks and there is nothing to do about it. As a proverb says, in every situation there are at least two solutions. Of course you have to say things as they are, but that is not enough. Obviously there is room for everybody in hip hop: others deal with fatalism, nihilism, drugs, whores… This is my style. I have parents that are fans. At a concert in Sibiu a sixteen-year-old guy came up and asked me to take a picture saying “I am here because my father sent me, he told me, you’ll like that guy!”. These are kids that have a good relation with their parents. Me and my parents did not relate to music in that way. We are in 2017 and more open-minded persons have become parents: we are starting to change. But what this era in which everything needs to be fast is doing for us, is that we also want fast results in everything. But there are not fast results to do things: it comes in time. You cannot jump the stairs from floor one to five.

Getting to the youngest generation, I observe that they are very responsive to change and open-minded, they have ambitions, speak many languages, more than I can see in our young people in Italy.

You are right, but a major problem here in Romania is the education system which dates way back. Everything depends on the lack of inspiration. The world has changed but school subjects are still taught with old boring methods. You see, to be a doctor or a teacher requires vocation. This is the basic thing: you have to be prepared on that, meditate much, be ready to be a model for them. So, you realize one of the reason they want to be there (at school) is YOU. The problem comes when teachers start to hate their job and apply strict rules, which, in fact, should not be necessary at all. As a consequence, they do not let students have their own opinions, which would help them so much! The school should prepare students for life, it should help them to express themselves but no, the school wants everybody speak the same, dress the same, think the same, learn the same. It’s an unending subject anyway…

As an Italian observer, when I first arrived in Bucharest, all your quarters of dehumanising communist blocs deeply shocked me, “how can individuals survive in there?” kept on asking myself… In an interview you said that you were born “printre blocuri nu dupa blocuri” (through the blocks, not in their mentality). What did you exactly mean by it?

True, it is a nice wordplay…That is one of our major problems, that we had fifty years of communism and it affected the people’s mentality. For that injury to heal requires time, so right now we are still on the healing process: we are not ready to do something because the wound is not healed yet. It may seems but if you look around the wound is not healed yet. I mean also the young people – not only the fifty or forty-year-old, but also the twenty years old, they have wounds as a reflection because what the children see is what the children do: they follow pattern behaviors, consciously or unconsciously. I can see things that I do myself, without my knowledge, because I saw them at my parents. So, basically patterns of thinking and patterns of choices. It is also a matter of vocabulary… We have then to work out this communist thing in a way to manage its fucking impact on us.

Still, anything to save out of the communist heritage?

That’s a good point. The best thing in communism was that you had housing, a job and some money, you had nothing to buy but you had money, now you have many things you would like to buy but you don’t have the money: welcome to capitalism! Communism and Capitalism are the two sides of the same coin: we were so hungry of everything that we wanted it all, and now we have got all that crap from capitalism. The American model sit perfectly on us; these people here had stayed for fifty years with everything portioned, the money, the food, they were not allowed to leave the country; now they want it all. Yes, the Romanians have this incredible need to do shopping and they want to be sure that everything is there at their disposal. It sounds silly but it is understandable and to cure this will take time, generations. In fact, the youngest are starting to realize that and are developing a different mentality: when I speak with eighteen-year old, we understand each other.

What this era when everything needs to be fast is doing for us, is that we want fast results in everything. But there are not fast results to good things: they come in time. You cannot jump the stairs from floor zero to floor five.

How do you explain the results of December’s General Elections?

That kind of result was highly expected. You cannot change everything like that. People are not ready for that yet, because they don’t know what they actually want. Imagine, that result does not reflect the actual will of our population and of our society. Let’s do this exercise of imagination for the sake of argument. Imagine this: 10 people are ALL the people who have the right to vote. So the people who have the right to vote are ten but only four of them actually went to vote. So now, the attention of everybody is on these four people because from everybody’s perception, those four people represent ALL the people. So now, these four people become ALL people, and from these four people who have become ten people, five voted this party (PSD, Ed). In fact, considering the ten initial potential voters, they are just two! So basically, what we should do is to focus on why didn’t six people go to vote? What do they want? The first answer is that “because they are sick of this shit, and it is a shit and nobody wants to deal with this shit”! Most prefer not to get involved at all. A smart person or party should focus on why these are not going to vote and learn something. No! The real problem is that they prefer saying “we are so good; we did ten, twenty per cent…” Still, if you consider the eighteen millions that are entitled to vote, you have gained nothing! In fact, I have my theory – and probably at a certain point I will create my ONG and try to propose things – is that you should not have an election which is validated without fifty percent of the people coming to vote. This is not normal, this is not a majority, why is this legal?! All in all, I think the strategy of the main parties is to keep those six people out of ten from voting: they do not want them to use their vote; they want them to feel sick about it. The real point is that to get diamonds from the mud you have to get dirty and those six do not want to get dirty.

Coming to the present, with hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets as a reaction to the latest political developments, how should we read that in a clear mind?

Here in Romania we have a constant displeasure regarding politics and politicians. They have been robbing the country since the communism fell and somehow many people seemed to have got accustomed to their lying and their habits and lived their everyday life not wanting to think about it. I was saying in the previous question that a large part of the people who have the right to vote didn’t vote, that is a lot, around 60%.
What is going out now? The party that won the elections was trying to give themselves and their partners in crime a law that would help them avoid jail time. That was the last drop for many, so they are starting to protest. The emotional state was in such a way that the protest became a snow ball with the maximum of half a million Romanians on the streets in a Sunday evening.
I think we are witnessing history in the making. The majority of “I don’t care” just started to get involved and are starting to make a statement against corruption.

Next concerts or oncoming projects?

I am almost finished with my project with Dj Undoo. We have an album that will become available shortly. We have been working at this for quite a while and I am really looking forward to make it public. It is a personal, classic one.
We will be present with a concert in most of the major cities in Romania so come see us live this spring.

Bio Info:
Songwriter and beatmaker for seventeen years now, Omu Gnom produced his first solo album Ai grija sa n-ai griji in 2011 obtaining a very excelent reception. Nu uita sa nu uiti came out shortly after, in collaboration with Norzeatic and other underground artists and Djs. In 2013-14 he focussed on another project, Atentie la neatentie, with a strong social message, with the song Limpede obtaining a warm reception in most of the Romanian cultural media.
Performing at Fabrica on February 3 2017 photo by opisicaneagra.ro

Sunday February 5 2017, mass protest in Piaţa Victioriei photo by Fabiana Papastefani
February 8, 2017
As I Read Philip Ó Ceallaigh
When I picked up Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006), a collection of short stories by a Bucharest-based Irish writer, I was thrilled at the chance of finding unexpected insights on the city life, if not on Romania as a whole. I was wrong: by the time I had finished reading Notes and immediately afterwards The Pleasant Light of Day (2009), his second collection, my perception of Romania had remained basically unaltered. All I gathered, when it came to my old quest for a sufletul romanesc, was that yes, Romania may prove an inspirational scene for a writer-to-be, if only for its cheap cost of living. So, welcome into Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s geography, where specific places and objects provide the scenery for staging universal characters and destinies.

“All around him were men who had given up. Everywhere he saw defeated faces. These men had lost more than love, or the spirit of love, they had lost the fight.”

Ó Ceallaigh knows the trick: short stories, when crafted with the right few strokes, conjure up whole worlds. In both books, people are seen in their daily struggle to make sense out of their marginal lives. They are closely observed and never judged: categories like winners or losers do not apply to this gallery of human beings. Thoughtful readers may end up empathising with them.

The point is that the uneasiness experienced by the residents of the suburban block of Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse echoes our very contemporary discomfort and quest for meaning. Alas, most of the men and women we meet there have given up and are seen drifting along, elements of a superfluous humanity: “Cavemen that did not hunt or gather, but sat around getting fat and sick and bitter, who could shit and flush it away, and were thrown into confusion and fits of grunting if the pipe blocked or broke. An aggregation of superfluous humanity, herded into concrete cubicles on the rim of a city.“

A major challenge is to make sense of infinite repetitions and not to be annihilated by them. Only few characters realise that clearly enough, like Alex who “thought of how things and people became each other. Imagine a pair of boots that had been worn a year, or a hat”, or Dorin, the painter who endlessly draws sketches of the very same view with a zen-like approach, reckoning that “there is a moment when – and being able to catch that moment is far from easy – the view from the tenth is good no more: a change is needed, so that you do not become like the thing itself and keep your healthy distance from things and do not allow things to absorb your very being! It is an heroic struggling, only few are able to do it.”

Ó Ceallaigh is a true democrat and the chance to reach that healthy distance is granted to anyone: “Yes, the crazy and the sane, each had to find something to settle them, some activity. Some cultivated their gardens, some played backgammon, some wrote bad verse.”

“If you practised you could have the power to say things, even if nobody else heard them.”

Artists belong to their biographies and Ó Ceallaigh is no exception. Soon after taking his degree in philosophy at Dublin University, he started leading a nomadic life, till his instinct made him stop somewhere and he decided that Bucharest was the place: a return, in fact, having already stationed there in the late Nineties. In his one-room apartment at the tenth floor of a block on the city outskirts, he spent his first few years facing the threats of nihilism; time and again he had been tempted to give it all up, dubious as to where his passion for writing might finally take him. He did stick to it and something happened: his words germinated and Notes was published in 2006. Skip Forward. Eleven years afterwards Ó Ceallaigh is an unassuming reserved guy as well as an established writer, both appreciated by a globalised – if niche – readership and cherished by a chorus of enthusiastic reviewers. He is still a Bucharest resident, living at the eighth floor of a just more central block. He rejects the invasive use of smartphones and the modern slavery of internet connectivity, preferring to focus on real faces and places as they unroll before his quick blue eyes.

“When people were together, always some of those people would be speaking on their phones to people who were not there. Nobody was ever completely where they were now that it was possible to speak to everybody all of the time.”

His writing style is not only compelling but also endowed with clairvoyance. Compare the discomfort expressed by one of his characters in Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse to the feelings that are taking so many Romanians to the streets these days. They are protesting against the ruling party’s overnight adoption of an emergency ordinance to change the Penal Code, decriminalising or/and reducing the criminal punishments for corruption offences such as abuse of office, conflict of interest and negligence at work: “George felt disgust. He knew the type. Usually they were in government offices, heads of faculties. People sure of their power. People with the necessary skills for rising in a dictatorship, people with no ideas beyond smiling unctuously to the man above and being merciless to the man below. Then the dictator was gone and they were members of the ruling party, as smug and sure of themselves as ever, because they were on the inside, with their friends, running the show, and everybody else was on the outside.”

“Abraham sat there on his stone throne, alone, through the small hours, contemplating liberty, and sacrifice, and the other things that make America great.”

Another cluster of stories in Notes is set in the USA and provides us with similarly penetrating visions of America in the age of Trump: “They bought the land, they put up the houses, and then they got in commando teams of illegals to landscape it to look pretty and civilized, and to maintain it thereafter. Then they sold the units and went off and bought more land and did it again.”

Some reviewers tend to associate Ó Ceallaigh’s writing to a cynic or pessimistic bite. I dismiss that reading and rather find that Hope – or elaboration of its loss – acts as the most powerful agent in his stories. The stories in The Pleasant Light of Day show that even more clearly. I wish you a great reading.
February 2, 2017
The View from the Tenth – Meeting Philip Ó Ceallaigh
“The world was full of monkeys that had learned lots of words. It was so easy to get words wrong. When words came out right, the right ones and the right amount, you didn’t notice the words so much as the effect they had. The magic essence departed from the substance, the music played.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

I met Philip Ó Ceallaigh in mid December at Senecanticafe, one of the varied co-working spaces springing up in Bucharest. Native of County Waterford, Ireland, Philip has lived in a number of countries and experienced a range of jobs before stopping in Bucharest and focussing on writing full time. In fact, the following conversation does not report on that first meeting but on a later written exchange, after I had completed reading his short stories in Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (Penguin, 2006) and The Pleasant Light of Day (Penguin, 2009).

How much of the Philip living at the tenth floor of a Bucharest suburban block is still You today? Is there anything belonging to that period that you happen to miss now?

Now I live on the eighth floor, similar block, another part of town. So I don’t need to be nostagic.

Which were your reading back then? How crucial was and is poetry for you?

Then I was reading the writers who became important to me when I was first developing a style, seeing how experience could be rendered – Hemingway, Miller, Bukowski, Celine, Hamsun, Carver. I wrote poetry for a while and was very interested in how language could be heightened and focused, but when I took the lessons and brought them to prose I saw no reason to go back to poetry.

Your choice to deal with words, searching ways to empower them, reaching back to their roots, while living at the tenth floor of a Bucharest block suggests the attitude of an ascetic monk. How much of this impression holds true?

Many fun-loving degenerates have lived on the tenth floor.

You have lived in Ireland, Spain, Russia, the United States, Kosovo and Georgia, then picked up Romania as your place for focusing on writing. Does Romania prove a convenient place for that kind of exercise?

I do think most of our existences consist of noise and agitation. With a little sense and detachment we tend to say less. Bucharest then is a nice big manifestation of the human condition – it’s particularly noisy and senseless, an accumulation of badly fitting parts, failed intentions, everybody rushing around with their desires and ambitions, colliding with each other, getting frustrated and angry and disspirited. I never planned to settle in Bucharest permanently, and I never planned to write about Bucharest. I have nothing to say about Romania in my fiction; it is not my chosen subject. But I do set my stories in a real physical space. I mean, as I write, as I imagine action, I generally see it taking place in streets I know, in apartments where I see the layout of the rooms. In this sense I’m very located in Bucharest. Notice I say Bucharest, not Romania. But it’s very much my Bucharest, the proccupations and sensibility are mine, I’m projecting my own sense of what life is on those specific pictures of life which I draw using the material I have before me.

Your cynicism reconnects to ancient roots: it literally explains your vagabond lifestyle. The effect on your readers is powerful, they trust your words and empathise with your quest. Any role a writer can play in our society today? Do you feel lonely or belonging to a community? Which?

I was very moved by Kerouac when I was still a teenager, and later I began to read about that community of writers that later became known as the Beat Generation, and I liked to imagine how it was with Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs and others all in one room in New York, all young and curious and enthusiastic about their work and the idea of writing. How they were friends and helped each other and got drunk together. I like the idea of that kind of society between artists. But I’ve never felt that kind of thing in my own life. Never sought it, perhaps because I’ve never felt its attainability. I have a few friends who are writers, but we’re spread thin across the globe. I have two friends in Bucharest who are writers. One is well known, the other is not and has never shown anybody what he writes. I have very little sense of my role as a writer. What attention other people will pay to what I write or what sense they make of it seems accidental to me, outside my control. I just make the stuff.

The view from the tenth floor also triggers considerations on the power of money or, alternatively, on the effects of its lack. In fact, how much can we actually afford not to care about money?

Money is like sex. When you don’t have any, or are excluded from getting any, it is a dominating anxiety. Money has its own eros. More so in society like Romania, where there is a desperate insecurity about social standing that has everyone trying to stomp on everyone else. It infects me more the longer I stay here. I’d like to say it affects me, but it’s uglier than that. It infects me. Because if your common, public space never provides you with enjoyment and security you feel compelled to secure these things privately, so you can have control over your life.

Your stories generally feature solitary men with women playing marginal or sometimes literally instrumental roles. Are you also interested in writing about female characters or you consider them like novels, i.e. not your bread?

It’s not male or female characters that interest me in their maleness or femaleness. It’s the interaction between them. And that interests me very much.

Sex is a recurring element in your stories and often described as a tricky language: temporarily healing but complicating things in the long run. Many of your characters – who are mostly male – seem to experience that dissatisfaction. Is that all or would you add something on the subject?

We are combined of the animal and the rational, as that Greek guy pointed out a long time ago. So life will continue to be tricky. Woof-woof. Or as the dogs say in Romanian, ham-ham.

You are a keen observer of Western societies, especially so in The Pleasant Light of Day. You observe issues and hypocrisies and don’t fail to describe how creepy Western imported models have provoked extra damages to social peace and stability here in Romania. How much longer do you think it will take for the Romanian society to get rid of corruption ?

I can’t tell. I couldn’t have predicted the things that happened in 2016. We were all very optimistic at the end of the 20th century. I don’t know that things are falling apart, but they seem to be fraying at the edges. We can’t take anything for granted, least of all the idea that Romania will become a less corrupt country. Romania was corrupt even before the communist period. But younger Romanians are certainly less scared, less passive, less sneaky than the generation that came before. The people born in 1990 are very different to those born in 1960. They’ve seen another world.

Accelerating new technologies, social networking, globalised consumer models, all seem to produce growing unhappiness and frustration. We grow more and more passive users, to the point that our mindsets follow standard patterns instead of actively searching our own ways. Are we still in time to steer clear of all this and free ourselves from those invisible chains?

I do what I can do. I see most of the people on the metro are playing electronic games on their phones. There are a few people reading books. What we need is everybody with a smartphone and everybody on medication for depression, anxiety, general sadness and apathy. Then we won’t need stories or novels. Just better designed computer simulated realities. And then the barbarians will come over the border – people with real lives and appetites, who make babies by accident due to real fornication – and we’ll start anew. They’ll sing songs as they roast pigs – or us – over their fires. Somebody later will come along and make lyric poetry from these lusty songs. And so it goes, art will be saved.

Both Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) and The Pleasant Light of Day (2009) were contemporarily available in their Romanian translation, whereas on last October Racconti Edizioni translated into Italian Appunti da un bordello turco (2016). Reception of your books has proved enthusiastic, you also won prestigious prizes. What kind of feedback do you receive from common readers? Can you detect any major difference in the reception of your work among English, Romanian or Italian readers or, on the contrary, any recurring pattern?

Romanians tended to see my work as descriptive of a social reality, journalistic. English speakers as imaginative, exaggerated, fantastic. I’m talking mostly now about the first book, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. Irish reviewers tended to be troubled by the immorality, misogyny of some of the characters, and by extension the cynicism of the author. Ireland is the only place where I’ve had really bad reviews. As someone who doesn’t have a clear idea of who my reader is, I’ve been pleased by the reception of the book in Italy. Firstly I’ve had a lot of luck in that the publisher is a publisher only of short stories, so the work is targeted at those who appreciate the form. Not having an idea who I’m writing for, I just imagine I’m writing for human beings, and that the stories work as stories no matter where you are from, and that they’ll still be stories years from now.

Your attraction for the past leads to a kind of continuum between your fiction and non-fiction work. You wrote long compelling essays on whole disappeared Bucharest quarters, particularly about the Jewish area in Unirii. Which are your current fields of study, amid fiction, non-fiction and narrative journalism, where do you feel more drawn at the moment?

I’m interested in history, or rather how the past is erased and replaced with fictional versions of the past. You would think a reckoning of the past is what is most needed in a society that has experienced genocide and totalitarianism and destructive nationalism – but these traumas make the reckoning even. Each generation moves forward in a fog of forgetfulness and denial. I’ve just finished writing a book in which I use the lives and the writings of a number of authors of fiction in eastern Europe to try to evoke this lost, buried past. In the case of Romania, I focus on Mihail Sebastian, who I’ve also translated into English – For Two Thousand Years was published in English in 2016. I don’t know when my own book will be published. It might not be.
Writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh

“There is a little boy of three or four at the stop. His mother hunkers down and rearranges his hat and scarf, though they do not need to be rearranged, and kisses his cheeks.” all quotes from “Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse”

“Our own journey is entirely imaginary … It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.”

“But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.”

“All around him were men who had given up. Everywhere he saw defeated faces. These men had lost more than love, or the spirit of love, they had lost the fight.”
January 25, 2017
Interview – Mike Ormsby

After having enjoyed reading Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania, I wanted to know more about the author Mike Ormsby and his subject matter. A British writer and former BBC journalist, World Service trainer and musician, Mike welcomed my questions with the same enthusiasm and passion I had found in his writing. With his wife Angela Nicoara, also journalist and writer, he has chosen Magura, Transylvania as his main place of residence.

What kind of reactions has your book received in the course of time? Can you detect any difference in its reception between Romanian and English readers?

Since 2008, when the book was published, the majority of my readers seem to have enjoyed it. Most of them find it amusing, direct, and accurate; I’m glad about that. My first publisher was a bit worried and said, “Romania is not ready for your book – it’s too honest.” I replied, “But if not now, then when?” As it turned out, Romania’s literary critics gave the book a very positive reception and several described me as “our British Caragiale”. Most readers on Amazon, GoodReads, and so on, have been very supportive too, and I’ve made new friends this way. Of course, some people do not enjoy the book and post negative reviews, but that’s life and I don’t mind unless they misrepresent or tell lies about my work, as some do, because that’s not fair.

To answer the second part of your question, many Romanians seemed surprised that a foreigner could observe, understand, and write about their country in a way that ’opened their eyes’. For example, a Romanian Army general told me that he thought his wife was crazy for looking after street dogs, until he read my book. Now, he sees them differently and even helps her.

As regards nationalities, I have not sensed differences between the reactions of Romanian and Anglophone readers. On the contrary, I see similarities. For example, many Anglophones and Romanians see this country clearly and are honest about its pros and cons. In my experience, when such people read ‘Never Mind’ they tend to share my own outlook and find the book to be fair and realistic. However, the opposite applies: some foreigners (often tourists) and some Romanians (often nationalists) wish to ‘defend’ the country from perceived attacks and do not share my outlook.

You wrote the book eight years ago and I have read the book now finding its tales still very topical. Do you think that anything has actually changed since then, if so, how?

Most drivers are more courteous and less aggressive, now. There is less smoking in public places and people seem more interested in healthy living. On the one hand, I hope Romania continues to change in such positive ways. On the other hand, I hope some things will not change: Romanians’ hospitality, their generosity, quick wit, fatalistic sense of humour, their remarkable ability to improvise with tools, and their ability to make fun of the bad times – haz de necaz. Those aspects I will always respect and cherish.

Many young characters in your tales show personal ambitions, various degrees of cynicism and little interest in getting involved in community issues. Can you see now a change in the general trend, with young generations more politically and socially active, see Rosia Montana and Colective movements, or do you consider them niche phenomenons of major cities?

It is several years since I’ve lived in a Romanian city, so I can only answer based on my experience of life in our mountain village. Here, young people seem keen on community issues. For example, for the last two years, my wife Angela Nicoara and I have been picking up litter from local roads and forests. A dozen local children got involved and we’ve since gathered almost two tonnes of litter. I’ll tell you more about this later.

The gap between the richest and the poorest in the country has widened further, with the middle class caught up in a quagmire and in search of a new political representation. What should we be expecting at the oncoming political elections due on December 11? Anything new under the sun?

As a politician might say, I’m glad you asked me this, although, actually, I’m not glad, because I have no idea what to expect. Put it this way, if Trump can get to the White House (as I expected), and if the UK can exit the EU (as I did not expect), then anything is possible in Romania. I hope for the best, but fear the worst.

Many of your characters experience at least a period abroad, which always help them observe the country more lucidly. These diaspora people, some leave for good, some finally chose to come back. Is there a role diaspora people can play in the present/future of this country?

Politically, ex-pats can help by voting in Romania’s elections. Financially, they can help by sending cash home, and many do. Culturally, they can help by making sure that their children are raised as bi-lingual speakers, this is very important. Personally, they can help by being decent people – as so many are – in order to help counter balance any negative stereotypes of ‘Romanians’. In my experience, travel changes us all, sometimes for the better. So, there’s hope for us all, and my suggestions could apply equally to Brits; we are no angels.

Among the many pending issues facing the Romanian society, lack of a basic environmental education and total absence of a recycling and waste management policy represent major ones. Tell us about your video about picking up litter, and about the idea behind it.

Angela and I decided to make the video after a villager yelled an ironic comment while we were picking litter. Before I tell you what that person yelled, a little context might help, as follows.

Despite our many invitations to them, no local adults help us to collect litter in Magura. Instead, they offer excuses, e.g. I’m too busy. Some parents even tried to forbid their kids from helping us to tidy up because they think it’s undignified, dirty, and ‘not our problem’, even though many of them own guest houses and thus benefit from a cleaner village for tourists to enjoy. Naturally, we are disappointed, especially as our work takes only a couple of hours every month or so. Anyway, moving on …

We were with local kids collecting litter from a mountain lane, when a local yelled, “Hah! Vino Mama, sa ma vezi cum lucrez la spatii verzi!” Angela told me that this was a sarcastic reference to a communist-era work slogan: “Mum, come and see, I’m working in the green spaces!”

We’d been thinking for a while about making a music video with some of the village kids who attend my ukulele class, but we had not chosen a song from our repertoire. So, we decided to use that communist-era slogan for a new song about collecting litter, a song urging local parents to help us. We were sitting in a pizza place at the time and we heard ‘Every Breath You Take’ in the background. We realised we could adapt Sting’s nice tune but add our own lyrics about litter in Magura. Angela found an experienced cameraman to help shoot and edit the film, and a neighbour choreographed traditional dance steps for the kids. We added a comic touch – dancing with bags full of rubbish – and paid homage to Bob Dylan with our flash cards listing the sorts of things we find in the village. You name it, we find it!

The video shoot took several days and was very hard work in hot weather. It can be tricky coordinating a dozen kids, for shot after shot, but they were very cooperative. When they got tired, we told them, “This is how it feels to be a movie star, it’s a lot of work!” That made them feel a bit famous and they’d brighten up.

So far, our video has had around 30,000 hits on the Internet and dozens of supportive comments. Lucian Mandruta from DigiFM posted it on his Facebook page, which helped. If you wish to watch, here is the link: ‘Amazing Romania!’ Please share, every thumb helps. But will local adults? We’ll see.

For all its shortcomings and chronic problems, Romania is the place you have decided to call home. What is it that attracts you most here?

When I first came to Romania in 1994 as a BBC reporter, it felt very different to other countries and attracted me in a way I could not resist. I had never visited a former communist state in eastern Europe and found this one fascinating; most of all, I liked the people. A few months later, I came back to teach at Scoala BBC in Bucharest and stayed a couple of years. I met Angela and then we moved to Bosnia, the first of seventeen different countries that we would live in during the twenty years that followed. Our life was very nomadic and we had no chance or wish to settle, but, eventually, we took a break and bought a house here in the mountains of Transylvania. We like the clean air and quiet atmosphere, after years living in big cities such as Jakarta, Khartoum, and Baku. We like pets but were never able to own any, since we moved too often, so this village is ideal for those we adopted recently – three dogs and five cats.

Last summer, a Romanian friend told us that he has no desire to live anywhere else because, ‘This country has just enough rules’. That made us smile and I know what he means. For all its problems, as you say, Romania has a special something that you won’t find elsewhere. When I’m away, say, in England for a few weeks, I miss that special something, whatever it is. However, Angela and I do get restless after too long in one place. Once a nomad, always a nomad, perhaps? Our feet are starting to itch, I fear!

If a ‘sufletul romanesc’ exists, what would you think it consists in? What role plays irony in it?

What’s in a Romanian soul? Great question! Certainly an affinity with the land – Romanians seem to enjoy a deep and lasting link to the countryside and the pleasures it affords. Every Romanian seems to know where to procure good fruit and vegetables, or the best tuica that money cannot buy, and so on. I think such links keep one’s feet on the ground, literally and metaphorically, although it took me a while to appreciate that, perhaps because most people in the UK no longer have those connections. What else? Hmm, perhaps an ability to get around the rules – or such rules as exist – to survive. Certainly a morbid fear of death by draughts, an allergy to seat belts (especially in an aircraft), and a chronic inability to wait in an orderly queue. Irony, yes, definitely. It’s the ace of the cards that life deals you, here.

Any other project coming soon?

I’m working on a collection of short stories set in Transylvania.

Cover photo by Cosmin Bumbuț

December 9, 2016
Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania

Mike Ormsby, Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania

Kindle Edition, 2, 211 pages

Published June 28th 2012 by Mike Ormsby (first published January 1st 2008)

Admittedly, it has taken me some time to discover Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania, first published in 2008, yet here I am now, eager to fill that awkward gap.

In this collection of fifty-seven short stories, Mike Ormsby, a writer and former BBC journalist/World Service trainer, chronicles various moments of his experiences in Romania between 1994 and 2006, when Romania became his home.

Published simultaneously in Romanian as Grand Bazar Romania (translated by Vlad A. Arghir), Ormsby’s book received a range of reactions – from sheer enthusiasm to harsh criticism – mostly depending on readers’ personal visions, expectations, and sometimes, on their nationality.

Personally, I could not help getting absorbed in tales that so vividly evoke situations and characters almost identical to those I have come across, eight years later.

Irony – and, even more valuable, self-deprecating irony – seems to me the X-factor which makes you enjoy reading this book, to the point that some local critics have dubbed Ormsby ‘our British Caragiale’, after the 19th century playwright and satirist. Alas, I wish I knew more about Caragiale – just another one of the huge gaps I still need to fill – to fully appreciate that comment, surely enough, though, the author’s funny and bittersweet tone works as an antidote to his keen empathy with Romanians and their unique land, providing him with a safe distance from which to observe the scene.

Indeed, Never Mind the Balkans is not the only book about contemporary Romania under “modern foreign eyes”, so to say, and I will be dealing with at least a couple of others soon enough: Philip O’Ceallaigh’s Notes From a Turkish Whorehouse (Insemnari dintr-un bordel turcesc, translated by Ana-Maria Lisman), and Voyage en Roumanie by Alain Kerjean; each contribute in their own way to unveil some of the deep mechanisms at work inside contemporary Romanian society.

Back to Ormsby’s book, it strikes me for having succeeded in assembling such a vivid gallery of characters, so powerfully close to the “real thing”: you cannot but feel grateful for that. In each story, the author blends into his surrounding and allows characters to speak for themselves. His voice is never invasive nor in the least sounding like the usual “wise guy from the West”. Rather, quite often he limits himself to acting as litmus paper within his environment, letting people and situations speak for themselves. Like in Why Not, where his artistic projects with his friend Adrian finally cannot but crash when faced with the dumb indifference of an incompetent journalist, whereas in Nice Sofa, Ormsby lucidly stops aside to actually wonder, “Was it my fault? Was I some wise guy from the West, with big ideas?” So, as I went on reading – always with valuable help from my Urban Dictionary – I enjoyed descriptions conjuring up, in a bunch of words, whole human landscapes and situations.

More. Many tales leave you with a surreal aftertaste, not an infrequent impression in Romania. Take Labyrinth, where characters successfully incarnate one mainstream approach to life here: “Live by the rules and don’t get stressed.” Others – with generous help from serendipity – focus on the past or dig into local history to finally present you with little treasures, like Buried, where, en passant, Mihai Eminescu is described as that chap “with the rock-star looks”. The tale sheds light on the little known, tragic biography of a promising young translator, Corneliu Popescu, whom Ormsby discovers by chance while searching in the public library for English translations of Romanian authors. As a teenager, Popescu translated Eminescu, and brilliantly so, but died alongside his mother in the 1977 earthquake.

Another kind of sadness takes you when reading tales like Șpaga, depicting the use of bribes as the mainstream strategy to solve any practical problem or life issue, applicable at every possible social level.

The good thing about these tales is that they are not Bucharest-centred: Ormsby travels the whole country and encounters very different human habitats. In The Wrong Place, we end up in a small village, Tușnad, with poor Tanti Dorina who is caught in her damp bed between past and future, whereas in Too Good To Be True, a hiking trip takes us up into the Carpathian Mountains, dangerously close to angry sheepdogs. But it is definitely in tales like Faith, Hope, and Chablis that I most appreciate Ormsby’s voice. Here, two worlds – West and East Europe (allow me to generalise) appear to get extremely close one another, yet something goes wrong and it does smack of us-and-them – indeed a chasm – unless prejudice and self assurance are not won by good will and a sincere wish to understand “the other”. I won’t say more, because I do invite you to pick up this book and enjoy your reading.

Overall, I am grateful to Ormsby and will steal a quote from John Lennon, one which the author passes on to his friend George, a character we meet in several tales: “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.”

December 2, 2016