BELGRADE, Serbia — The members of Pretty Loud, possibly the
world’s first all-Roma female hip-hop group, do not write saccharine love
songs.
Their lyrics focus instead on the pains Roma women experience:
marrying and having children too young, feeling like second-class citizens and
not finishing high school.
اضافة اعلان
“Don’t force me, Dad, I’m too young for marriage,” the six
members, who hail from Serbia and are in their midteens to late 20s, sing in
one song. “Please understand me, or should I be quiet?” they rap in another.
“No one hears when I use my Roma girl’s voice.”
Persecuted for centuries, many Roma people in Europe — the
continent’s largest ethnic minority — live in segregated communities with
limited access to amenities and health care. Women and girls also face gender
expectations like being wives and mothers at a young age, which some say cause
stress and isolation.
“They are taught when they grow up that they will get married,
cook and raise kids, but we want to change this,” Silvia Sinani, 24, said of
Roma girls, adding that such expectations made it hard for women and girls to
finish their educations.
One of the band’s goals is to show there is another way. “We
want every girl to decide for herself,” Sinani said.
The women of Pretty Loud are hoping their music, authenticity
and visibility as performers — already rewriting social conventions in their
community in Belgrade, the Serbian capital — can help women and girls elsewhere
find their own voices. Formed in 2014, Pretty Loud has danced, sung and rapped
on stages across Europe.
“It is a different way of fighting,” Zivka Ferhatovic, 20, a
band member, said of her activism. “We fight through the music and songs.”
She added that the group wanted its fusion of traditional Roma
music and Balkan hip-hop to confront the everyday realities of many Roma women
— be it domestic abuse, sexism or racial discrimination. In one song, they
warned that marrying someone abusive would not bring happiness. In another,
they addressed their experiences of discrimination.
Music was an obvious medium for the band’s members to express
themselves and to continue celebrating the signature sound of Roma music.
“We grow up with music for when we feel bad and when we feel
happy,” said Zlata Ristic, 28. “I sleep with music. I can’t live my life
without music.”
When she is performing, Ristic said, “I feel like the strongest
woman in the world.”
Pretty Loud began as a project of GRUBB, an organization running
educational and artistic programs for Roma youth in Serbia. On a summer afternoon,
they rehearsed for a performance in front of the distorted mirrors at GRUBB’s
center in Zemun, a neighborhood in Belgrade where many of the city’s Roma
people reside.
Fearing social stigma, the band’s members were initially
reluctant to write songs and perform. But others involved with GRUBB helped
them to focus their writing and performance on personal experiences.
Now Pretty Loud’s songs signal a unified hope: to represent Roma
women in a modern world free of racism and sexism.
“The whole point of the music is to help them use their voice,
not to speak for them,” said Caroline Roboh, a founder of GRUBB. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in Pretty Loud’s own community, where members have
become role models, a point of pride for them.
“Little girls, they come to me and say, ‘Bravo, I want to be
like you one day,’” Sinani said.
Even outside their circles, they are amassing supporters who say
the group is sending a modern message that Serbia needs to get behind.
“Their energy breaks through the walls and spreads love,” said
Joana Knezevic, a Serbian actress who watched a recent Pretty Loud performance.
“They are women who have something to say.”
It is a message that Ristic, who brings a cheerful energy to the
group’s dynamic, learned early on. At 16, she got married and, soon after,
pregnant. When the union broke down and she confronted being a single mother,
Ristic became depressed. Raising her son, who is now 11, was like having a
“baby doll,” she said. “We grew up together.”
Now she wants to set an example for women who are unhappy in
their marriages, even if they fear raising children alone.
“I know when they are divorced, they think their lives stop,”
Ristic said of women. “But I want to show they can continue with their dreams.”
It is sometimes a difficult balancing act for members of Pretty
Loud, who are trying to live the messages they preach. Some work at GRUBB while
holding other jobs; others, like the group’s youngest members, Elma Dalipi and
Selma Dalipi, 15, are still finishing high school.
“We’ve had numerous offers for marriage, but we never accepted
any,” said Zivka Ferhatovic of her and her sister, Dijana Ferhatovic, 19. Their
determination to finish school is supported by their grandparents and has a
personal motivation: They believe their mother, who had her children young,
ultimately left the family, in part, because she married too early.
“We know the pain,” Zivka Ferhatovic said.
The coronavirus pandemic has slowed the band’s activity, and
existing inequalities left Roma people in Europe particularly vulnerable to it.
(Many of Pretty Loud’s members contracted COVID-19.)
Over the summer, as borders reopened in Europe, Pretty Loud
again took to stages: to cheers at a United Nations event celebrating refugees,
under blue lights in Slovenia, at an audition for a Croatian talent show. And
the bandmates have more dreams: of making a real demo for an album, performing
in Times Square, writing a book about their lives — perhaps even entering
politics.
Although not yet household names or able to make a living solely
from their music, the band is beginning to attract wider European attention.
Earlier this month, a video of their successful audition for that Croatian
talent show drew 120,000 views.
Ristic, now a dance teacher at GRUBB, wants to grow her
followings on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts Pretty Loud performances.
Although it has exposed her to racist and sexist comments, she will not stop
posting, she said.
“I don’t delete them because it’s not my shame,” she said. “This
is how people treat us. I want to show why we fight.”
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