Sun goes down in the morning Eva Danišová, Irena Eliášová, Jana Hejkrlíková, Iveta Kokyová

The Roma in the territory of today's Czech Republic have been expressing themselves through the written word since the end of the 1960s. The beginnings of their literature were motivated by the effort to prove their equivalence with to the surrounding society and were characterized by revival of  themes forming a common memory and awareness of the Roma community. In today's more mature phase, the authors are beginning to focus on the more general material, with which not only Roma readers can identify. The collection of prose texts by Irena Eliášová, Jana Hejkrlíková, Iveta Kokyová and Eva Danišová embodies this new trend and at the same time is exceptional in two respects.

Primarily, it is only Romani women speaking, who are significantly much more critical of their community than their counterparts and are able to reflect upon unusual topics for men, such as motherhood, partnership and eroticism, although still conceived prudently and genre-wise.

The leitmotif of most texts is the unequal position of women in the patriarchal Roma society.

In addition, the arrangement of the texts creates a unique historical and thematic perspective. Irena Eliášová's novella is located in a Slovak Roma settlement in the 1950s; Jana Hejkrlíková's autobiographical narrative takes place in the 1960s in western Bohemia in a cohesive community of Roma immigrants from Slovakia; The shards of family life in Iveta Kokyová's short story from the 1970s already tells of the trauma of uprooting, and Eva Danišová's short story, completely contemporary in its date, no longer has any admitted Romani heroes and touches on the universal theme of aging and women's loneliness.

We present the work of Irena Eliášová and Iveta Kokyová in a bilingual Czech-Romani version. In regards to the decline in Romani as the primary means of communication among the Czech Roma community, its prestige in this literary field is growing. Both authors leaned towards this version under the influence of older authors who boldly paved the way for Romani literature.