The Sun Sets Already in the Morning

This collection of prose by Irena Eliášová, Jana Hejkrlíková, Iveta Kokyová and Eva Danišová, published in 2014, remains relevant today; it offers a critical, insider’s view of the Romani world through the eyes of perceptive and intelligent women. The leitmotif of most of the texts is the unequal status of Romani women in the patriarchal Romani community and their efforts to break free from these conservative patterns. The authors address topics unfamiliar from earlier Romani literature—written primarily by men—such as motherhood, partnership and eroticism. Furthermore, the arrangement of the texts creates a unique historical and thematic perspective.

Irena Eliášová’s title novella, “The Sun Sets Already in the Morning”, is set in a Slovak Romani settlement in the 1950s; Jana Hejkrlíková’s autobiographical narrative, “My Ink-Stained Years”, takes place in the 1960s in western Bohemia within a close-knit community of Romani immigrants from Slovakia; the fragments of family life in Iveta Kokyová’s 1970s short story cycle “There Is Only One Family” already discuss the trauma of uprooting, and Eva Danišová’s novella “Someone to Call My Own”, set entirely in the present day, features no explicitly Romani characters and touches on the universal topic of aging and the loneliness of women.

This significant title in the Romani literary canon was published in Romani and Czech by Václav Havel Library and edited by Lukáš Houdek and Karolína Ryvolová.