EDITING AN ANTHOLOGY OF GOAN LITERATURE
Peter Nazareth
Peter Nazareth
I seldom read papers at conferences. Instead I get the feel of the audience and then talk around the subject, reading
extracts where they are particularly significant.
I began my presentation by saying that I was born in Uganda of Goan parents: my father was born in Goa and had a Portuguese
name, my mother also had a Portuguese name though she was born in Kuala Lumpur.
Uganda was under British rule so I did not have a Portuguese name
or know the Portuguese language or know the Portuguese people, although
apparently I was a Portuguese citizen until the age of seven.
When I finished a draft of my novel, In a Brown Mantle,
Zenaides Morenas, working in for the Uganda government as I was, read it
and told me I knew a lot about politics in East Africa but did not know
anything about the history of oppression and
resistance in Goa so he loaned me The Discovery of Goa by Alfred Braganza.
I read it and revised the novel to include Goan history under the Portuguese.
The narrator, Deo D’Souza, telling his story in exile in London, goes into the past of Goa.
But he does this not to provide objective history. He really wants to
excuse his own moral failure: he says that Goans had
always been defeated, implying that he could not help himself because it
was not he who was to blame, it was Goan history.
It was after I agreed in 1977 to edit the issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature
on Goan literature that I got to know much more about Portuguese rule
in Goa from the material I received. The issue was published by Michigan
State University
in 1983.
It was brought out as a book in 2010 entitled
Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature.
I read what Lucio Rodrigues said in his essay about the origin and form of the
mando, a form created out of “the tension between the claims of
his [the Goan’s] ethos and the demands of an extraneous culture,” which I
quote on page lvii.
I did not include the whole essay from his Soil and Soul and Konkani Folk Tales because he said that the golden age of the
mando had passed in the early twentieth century whereas mando
is alive in the essays “Goans and Music” by Alfred Braganza, pages
213-222, and “Dances of Goa” by Manuel Rodrigues, pages 223-227.
I read out the poem “Luis de Camoens” by Santan Rodrigues (page 131).
Describing what happened to the statue of Camoens under the Goan sun, the poem is showing how Camoens became indigenized.
Camoens lived in Goa where he wrote part of the foundational poem of the Portuguese people,
The Lusiads--so there is a long-standing intertwining of the Portuguese and the Goans.
This was the focus of Carmo D’Souza’s second novel, Portugal: in Search of Identity, which I reviewed in
World Literature Today but only mentioned briefly in the introduction to the new edition of the anthology.
In this novel, Nisha from Cochin and Maria from Goa travel to Portugal to research Portugal’s identity.
The key chapter in the novel is dream-like: in a castle, there is
a dialogue with Camoens, Vasco da Gama, Albuquerque, Santa Inez, and
Salazar.
D’Souza is seeking a non-conceptualized identity of the once-colonized, but Portugal had
stretched all over the globe and assimilated humanness
into its culture so it must find its identity by meeting people from all
over the world.
The professor who approved the application by Nisha and Maria to
go to Portugal needs to go to Goa to search for aspects of Goan identity
that throw light on the Portuguese state of mind and national psyche.
To introduce such a complex exploration, I
talked first about D’Souza’ first novel, Angela’s Goan Identity, in which people who are not Goan help Angela discover her identity and realize that many people contributed to it.
She realizes that Goan identity is fluid, like the sea.
I next drew attention to the early Goan novel in Portuguese,
The Brahmans by Francisco Luis Gomes, an essay on which by C.W. Watson is in the anthology (pages 74-82).
Then I concentrated on a modern novel, O Signo da Ira by Orlando da Costa, which received the Ricardo Malheiros award in 1961.
Pat Williams Mason-Brown from the Spanish and Portuguese
Department at the University of Iowa provided a summary of the novel
chapter by chapter and translated one chapter in its entirety.
Since
my focus was the connection between the Portuguese and Goans, I drew
attention to the way Portuguese and Konkani
were connected as shown in essays by Alfred Braganza (“Goans and the
Portuguese Language”, pages 199-207) and Manohar Sardessai (“Portuguese
Influence on Konkani”, pages 208-212). Sardessai states that in 1684,
Viceroy Francisco de Tavora ordered that “The
natives of the country should abandon the use of their language and
speak only Portuguese within three years.”
Sixty years later, Archbishop Laurenco de Santa Maria made it
obligatory for all Christians to speak Portuguese (page 210). Sardessai
provides examples and analysis of how the languages and their syntaxes
affected each other.
Near the end, I showed how Tito in Savia Viegas’s novel
Let Me Tell You About Quinta (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011)talks to a
young family member about the family house, “a Portuguese house”, two
centuries old, explaining how history is spiritually contained in the
house.
Tito had run away from school, where he would have been brainwashed.
He had dropped out of the elite class, becoming a worker on the land and then an entrepreneur.
He has behaved differently from the landlord class in Orlando da Costa’s
O Signo da Ira. Tito educated himself and now wants to educate others.
The point of the novel, much appreciated by the listeners, is to
take the best of the past and build on it instead of rejecting the past
and selling the houses to the tourist industry for monetary gain. I also
mentioned that a shorter novel by Savia
Viegas, Tales From the Attic, was published before Quinta
and showed what could be discovered from looking within the room at the
top of the house and looking outside through a telescope.
I now named Frederick Noronha.
I said he was born in Brazil and came to Goa as a child. Maybe that was why he had a global awareness, I said.
He co-founded a publishing company in Goa called Goa 1556,
the year a Gutenberg type press first came to Asia, which has brought
out a lot of Goan books. It was Frederick Noronha who wrote to me for
permission to bring out the anthology as a book. It was Pivoting on the Point of Return.
I talked about the protagonists of Carmo D’Souza’s third novel,
Jose’s Dreams, lovers, Hindu and Catholic, and also—in the case of Jose--a descendant of the much-maligned Timoja
and his role in Albuquerque’s conquest of Goa. The novel suggests that history could be re-written.
I wanted to talk about
Jacob & Dulce: Sketches from Indo-Portuguese Life by GIP
(Francisco Joao da Costa), translated by Alvaro Noronha da Costa into
English, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2004, but I was running out of
time.
All I could do was mention the word “Malkriada ” from the
glossary and read that it was “An epithet whose meaning cannot be easily
translated from the Portuguese and which has been also absorbed into
Konkani.” And I mentioned “saudade” and its use in
Margaret Mascarenhas’s novel SKIN. But there was no time to talk about Braz Menezes’s novel,
Just Matata, in which the father of the narrator coming from Goa
to work in Mozambique jumps ship in Mombasa which is why the son grows
up in Kenya.
At
question time, I pointed out to a Portuguese scholar that A.K. Priolkar
said in his essay “Who is a Goan?” (pages
378-380) that it was only people in the city of Goa and not on the
mainland, acquired by the Portuguese later, who should have had the
right to be called Goans.
History is flexible, it seems.
During the presentation, I held up and read from
Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature. It has a beautiful, catchy cover of the land, the sea and me.
It was a house with many rooms.
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