Carmen: A Gypsy Geography by Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum (review)

Carmen—femme fatale, diva, bruja—the name alone evokes myriad images of the eternal, unconquerable female. Whether portrayed in opera, dance, or film, in black and white or slashed with red, the legend of Carmen is both satisfying and deeply unsettling. In Carmen: A Gypsy Biography, Ninotchka Bennahum provides a meticulously researched feminist reading of myth, history, music, and dance, and examines the timeless appeal of Carmen, the eternal feminine principle that cannot be ruled.

The story of Carmen can be understood as a loud meditation on one woman’s struggle to be free to live and love as she chooses. Or it can be read, as it is in Bennahum’s handsomely illustrated volume, as myth and metaphor—a sustaining and rebellious image that originates “after the long winter of Ice Age Europe” (7) and threads through Mozarabic (Christian, Sephardic, and Muslim) civilization to the present day. Bennahum allows the reader to travel with her through time and geography while she examines ancient roots and modern manifestations of the symbolic Carmen. With a firm grasp of historical detail and a wide lens, the author tracks her subject from the archetypal to the theatrical, illuminating the long path that led to Prosper Mérimée’s French Romantic novella, which in turn inspired Georges Bizet’s masterful opera. But this arrival is in many ways just a point of departure; Bennahum demonstrates how as the Carmen image gels into a stage character, she is further elaborated, projected upon, and re-examined by artists into the twenty-first century.

In creating this historiography, Bennahum foregrounds the Gypsy. This is more difficult than it might seem. The author asks, “Is it possible to hold in the bounds of human form the past, present, and future, to carry historical memory on your back as you walk or dance through space and time?” (94). In many ways, this is the central question of the book; in tracking multiple iterations of Carmen, the author follows a nomadic route. She suggests that a people can embody their history in ways that they can never document or explain. As Ann Cooper Albright puts it, “[Thus] to understand the ways the dancing body can signify within a culture, one must engage with a variety of discourses: kinesthetic, visual, somatic, and aesthetic, as well as intellectual” (Cooper Albright 1997, 5). In deciphering the Gypsy’s embodied past, Bennahum does just this, calling upon sense and sensation, and constructing a multidisciplinary arc that connects fact, feeling, and iconography.

Gypsy culture defies the grasp of the historian, acknowledging only the present. Bennahum cites an interview with Gypsy musician Pedro Cortés, who states, “Gypsies live only in the present moment, never in the past or the future. They have endured so much oppression, they can’t be sure of what’s next” (94). Gypsy culture, and Gypsy flamenco dance, are at the core of Carmen. The original 1904 Bizet opera contained “no less than one hour of flamenco dance in the second act” (152). Federico García Lorca gets closest to describing the essence of Gypsy flamenco in his seminal 1933 lecture, “Juego y teoria del duende” (“Play and Theory of the Duende”). But the artistic soul of flamenco, the duende, cannot be translated into English. This intangibility adds to flamenco’s allure, inspiring poets and painters, but evading scholars. The uncertainties of flamenco’s oral and embodied narratives inform the basis of Michelle Heffner Hayes’s Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance (2009), a book that embraces questions of historiography. Heffner Hayes and Bennahum are complementary but never redundant: their work bolsters the small cache of flamenco dance scholarship in English, providing aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural insight into this elusive form. By acknowledging the ahistorical nature of Gypsy existence, Bennahum is freed to alight and circle back to eras and locations that span millennia and continents. She weaves together ideas and imagery that might otherwise seem disparate...