When she was a teenager, Alina Serban, a Roma, never told classmates that she lived in a shack and never imagined she would one day study in New York, perform Shakespeare or showcase her own play.
In her young eyes, even university studies seemed far out of reach.
“Why am I lying to myself? Go to university? This is nonsense!” she cries out in her one-woman show that has people talking even before it premieres Wednesday in one of Bucharest’s big jazz and theatre clubs, the Green Hours.
“The dirt in this courtyard has been devouring me for six years, how can I even dream of leaving this place?
“I will marry, have a lot of children and let my husband beat me until all my dreams fall out of my head,” she says in the play.
But 23-year-old Serban beat the odds — and wants to spread the message.
Her play, entitled I, undersigned Alina Serban, declare, tells her story, that of a determined girl who fought deprivation and serious discrimination against a minority still degraded in everyday Romanian expressions.
“‘Don’t do like the Gypsies do’, ‘If you don’t behave, I’ll give you to the Gypsies’: every time I heard such phrases in the street, I would bite my tongue and think: ‘I don’t care’,” Serban recalled.
A big part of her battle was embracing her Roma identity. “I had to hear non-Roma tell me being Roma is cool to accept who I am,” she confessed.
Romania is home to Europe’s biggest Roma minority. Officially, they number 530,000 but pressure groups put the figure as high as 2.5 million, saying most do not declare themselves, fearing discrimination. Many live in dire poverty, some without official IDs. Less than one per cent of Roma make it beyond secondary school.