"Of All the Coffee Places in All the World" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - May 2013)

“Kya?”

“STAR-BUCKS,” my brother-in-law articulated into his mobile phone. 

The irony was delicious. We were having difficulty finding the newly opened Starbucks in Bombay, and now directory services seemed to be confused as well. In Southern California, one can’t go far before tripping over the ubiquity of Starbucks stores, where there are sometimes even three within the same city block. So, on this visit to India, why did I need to find the Bombay one so badly having never really been a fan of their beverages in the first place? I wanted to know if they sold chai. 

Yes, it was perverse. But haven’t you had a chuckle over the nomenclature employed across coffee shops in

the United States? What exactly is a chai tea latte, anyway, and do they not get that it is tautologous to say chai and tea? But I needed to find out firsthand what it would feel like to order chai at an American coffee shop in India. It was no different from the revulsion I had to overcome in taking my first yoga class ever in Los Angeles. Sweating it out Bikram-style reminds me of an episode from the erstwhile television show The Sopranos. In it, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri sounds a lament as he bears witness to the dilution of Italian culture during a visit to a coffee place that is meant to stand-in for Starbucks. Colourfully, the Italian American gangster expounds: “[expletive] espresso, cappuccino. We invented this [expletive] and all these other [expletive] are gettin’ rich off it.” Paulie becomes so impassioned that he makes off with an espresso machine as his vendetta against the culture vultures. To this day while I will grudgingly admit to loving how I can now contort my body in ways I would never have dreamed possible, I still refuse to say Namaste at the end of a much-deserved and blissful shavasana.

Of course, what Mr. Walnuts gets wrong is that though the Italians may have found ways to add chic to a cup of joe, it was the Ethiopians – once embroiled in Italy’s imperial designs – who originated the brewing of the drink. And just as one might guess that the inspiration for the coffee place being derided in The Sopranos was Starbucks, there is no mistaking the similar motivation behind the green and white colour scheme of the logo for Kaldi’s, an Ethiopian coffee chain. Named for the goatherd of native legend who is said to have noticed the energizing effect of coffee bean consumption on his animals, Kaldi’s is famed for its own versions of Starbucks’ favourites. If Starbucks can serve chai, then one supposes it is fair game for Kaldi’s to rip off a Caramel Macchiato. As much as I would like to think that Kaldi’s was reappropriating from Starbucks what was really theirs to begin with, on a recent visit to Addis Ababa and because it was my first time there, it seemed wrong to sample the Ethiopian elixir at any place other than a non-descript mom and pop shop. I felt as invigorated by the experience as after a rapid fire bout of Surya Namaskars.

Despite the backhanded homage paid to it, Starbucks is still to set up its own shops in Ethiopia. But that is not to say that the Seattle-based business has not had an impact on the country both culturally and

economically. Between 2005 and 2007, a storm brewed in, shall we say, a coffee mug when the Ethiopian government alleged intellectual copyright infringement in the trademarking of coffees sold at Starbucks under such regional names as Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo. The capability to uniquely brand affects pricing. By adopting names associated with Ethiopia’s coffee-growing regions, for the purposes of branding, Starbucks was in a position to undercut Ethiopia’s capacity to not only name but also price their own regional products. In turn, this threatened the livelihoods of subsistence-level farmers in one of the poorest nations in the world where coffee is a major cash crop. Up against a company known for its pricy lattes, the issue was resolved in 2007 most likely to avoid a public relations fiasco. Starbucks promised greater cooperation with the Ethiopian government, but changes on the ground are yet to manifest given the ability of the large corporation to control demand. 

Starbucks has continued to court controversy internationally. In 2012, it had come to light that the company had paid no corporate taxes in the United Kingdom for three years. In response to customer outrage, the coffee chain announced that it would make good on its unpaid dues to the tune of 20 million pounds over the course of two years. Despite these issues around the globe, there is no doubt that Starbucks has iconic status globally while serving as a symbol of globalization. 

Although having set up their first shop in mainland China in 1999, Starbucks’ was late to the coffee party in South Asia. The metro hubs in India were already familiar with Costa Coffee from the United Kingdom and even The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a business with a strong Southern Californian connection. These are in addition to such home grown chains as Cafe Coffee Day and Bru World Cafe. Nonetheless, when Starbucks finally did makes its debut as a Tata Alliance company in October 2012, its first Indian store in Bombay drew queues so long that a security guard had to effect crowd control. Since, Starbucks has gone on to open a few more shops in Bombay and Delhi, catering to the local palette with items like paneer wraps alongside muffins.

A couple of months after its Indian establishments joined the corporation’s worldwide constellation, my efforts to visit the first desi Starbucks in Elphinstone Building, a colonial era landmark, were met with failure. Finally able to make our intent understood to the directory services operator assisting us with our query, we discovered that our taxi had just overshot the location. It would take forever to manoeuvre through rush hour traffic. On this the end of my time in Bombay, the opportunity to order a chai in the land of its origins, but as translated by Starbucks, had passed me by. I could not help wondering if I had missed much while I, instead, settled for a cup of cutting tea at a local stall. 

To see the print version of this piece online, visit here. 

"Love in the Time of Colonization" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 18 February 2012)

Catherine of Braganza

In this the month that celebrates love, the events of the year 1662 comes to mind. That year, in a far from romantic episode, the Portuguese infanta Catherine of Braganza was married to Charles II of England. A custom thought of as so South Asian, their marriage had been arranged as a royal alliance between the colonial powers. Portugal included one of its Indian ports in the royal dowry. Perhaps they gave up that possession thinking it far less significant than the natural harbour of Goa, but the gift was to become a major factor in the establishment of British commerce in the East. That port was Bombay.

The bestowal of Bombay upon the English suggests Portugal’s acknowledgment of that empire’s overlordship in the seventeenth century. Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Souza Santos ruminates on “the relations of hierarchy among the different European colonialisms” and sees British colonialism as “the norm ... in relation to which the contours of Portuguese colonialism get defined as a subaltern colonialism.” He rightly conveys the historical dominance of England over Portugal in the Early Modern period. In so doing, however, Santos literally colonizes the politically loaded language of subaltern and postcolonial studies which all but leaves out the colonized themselves. Further, where de Souza Santos would categorize the dowry offering as proof of Portugal’s subaltern position below England, this would obfuscate how the bond extended the imperial reach of both colonizers. In other words, the “marriage” of convenience – as unequal as it was – still benefitted England and Portugal.

Seventeenth Century Bombay

Because of this “gift,” Bombay became the conduit between Portuguese and British India. It cemented their relations – a collusive effort that played out in perpetuating European dominance in several parts of the world. The link between the empires was also useful to Goans, who were able to expand their horizons beyond Goa’s limited opportunities. From British India, Goans found their way to different parts of the empire, East Africa included. There, Goans were designated apart from other South Asians because of their Portuguese colonial connection, and were often employed in administrative positions in the racially segregated society. Portugal, meanwhile, supported the idea that Goans in British East Africa were somehow different, because it upheld the distinction of Portuguese colonial power in the subcontinent. In this way, even the colonized in the British Empire were used to maintain Portugal’s imperial power.

Jer Mahal, Bombay Site of Goan Clubs

Interestingly, the channel that Bombay provided for Goans would prove to be part of the undoing of their colonization. Writer Victor Rangel-Ribeiro notes how “once Goans began to emigrate en masse to Bombay in search of a university education and well-paying jobs, we became exposed ... to India’s push to independence; the more deeply we breathed in the heady winds of freedom, the more tenuous became Portugal’s grip...” Ironically, Bombay – the interlude in the colonial affair between Portugal and Britain - led to Goa’s divorce from its colonizer. Apparently, some relationships are not meant to last...

An online version appears here.

"Looking for Goa at Midnight: The Cartography of Loss" - SEMANA DE CULTURA (Goa - 2011)

Passports and Maps - A Family History

I was born free.

It is true that neither of my passports is from the country in which I was born. And one of them is not in fact my passport anymore. But I was born free.

Both of my parents, as their parents before them, lived in colonies. My father was born in Goa two years before India won its independence from Britain and at which time Goa was still occupied by the Portuguese. Two months before the decolonization of India, my mother was born in Kenya, which was then and continued to be a British colony for almost as long as Goa remained under Portugal’s dominion. They were not among Midnight’s Children.

Having laid his wife to rest in the Goan section of a Mombasa cemetery in 1958, my grandfather, who by this time had gone blind, wished to return to Goa knowing he would die there. He took his youngest daughter, my mother, with him. The rest of her siblings and their progeny would, in time, scatter themselves across the world. Besides India and Kenya, they also live in Sweden, England, Canada, Australia, and the United States.
When my father found out his future wife was to enrol in typing school, he did the same. I believe it is what destined me to be a writer. My fingers took to the old manual typewriter my parents had far more easily than they did to a computer keyboard. The clack of metallic keys accompanied the conception of the first words I ever had printed in a newspaper as a teenager. And that was long before I formally learned how to type in community college in the United States. The early 1960s saw my parents, both the youngest in their families, take bicycle rides on the dusty red roads of Merces, Ilhas, which is where my mother’s family is from, and alongside the lush green paddy fields of Panarim, Bardez, where my father grew up.  

My father’s parents once lived in Portugal. It was before their little Goa briskly changed partners in a dance that whisked them around the world over two short days in December 1961. Though they never left Goa, they were citizens of two different nations in their lifetime. Three of their four children, including my father, worked in the Arabian Gulf. The Ferrão children of my generation were born in Kuwait, except the eldest. Following tradition, my oldest aunt wanted to have her first child in Goa with my grandmother in attendance. My only other cousin born in Goa was the daughter adopted by my uncle, who did not migrate to the Middle East. Today, in addition to India, my paternal cousins also reside in various parts of North America.

By some coincidence, my father shares his name with his mother-in-law, Felicidade, whom he had never met. Her name bears the same root as my father’s – the Latin felicitas. He was named for his father’s brother Felix, who mysteriously left Goa. Among my grandfather’s effects was found a letter he had written but never sent his brother. It was meant to be mailed to Italy. In the last reported sighting of my great uncle, he turned in recognition of his name being called out, a name that means happiness. He looked away and kept walking. It was in the Persian port of Abadan where the plague was running rampant. 

In Iran, perchance, there is a family that does not know where their father came from. My kin has been spread far and wide, but there is not much that separates my family from so many other middle class Goans or, indeed, other postcolonials who have dispersed beyond their homelands. I lay out my family’s travels not to provide a source of wonderment, but to consider the cartography of loss. What does it mean to be Goan without having been born in Goa or to no longer be resident upon its red earth? I do not use loss here to imply the sadness that arises from not having something anymore. Is it possible to miss something you never had to begin with? Indeed, melancholia informs what I attempt to explore here, something akin to the Portuguese word saudades. Yet it is not even the smouldering yearning that glows like embers at the edges of a burning map, singeing away time and places past. Can one be nostalgic for what they never possessed?

My once Portuguese father and British mother suddenly turned Indian in the postcolonial, freewheeling 1960s. Well, if it could happen to the “hippies” that went native, then why not my parents? As Europe and America’s flower children made their way east, my parents made their way to the Middle East. It was here that they became Indian, constantly reminded of this fact not only through the passports they now had, but also the special privileges afforded them: special schools for their children, special treatment under the law, and special words reserved only for their kind. But it was also here that they found community with hundreds of other expatriates like themselves. Their earnings, far more than they had ever made before, helped cushion all the specialness they felt in their non-home away from home. And when they did return to Goa decades later, it was unlike the place they had left. Like them, their homeland had also changed.

I belong to the first generation of Goan children born after the end of colonial rule. And unlike my parents and their parents before them, I was born an Indian citizen. But that is odd really, for I was not born in independent India. I hold the irony of my birth, marking me as one of a legendary cohort, so close to my heart that I could not give up my Indian passport when I reluctantly became an American citizen. When asked to relinquish proof of previous citizenship, I said I had lost it. Did I ever really have it to surrender anyway? I was born Indian because I was not allowed to be a citizen of Kuwait. I have a passport-shaped hole in my life; an ersatz citizenship mapped not by lands of residence but, instead, by their loss. The traces of this invisible geography are in the names passed down between generations like stories, in storied sightings of the lost, in lost letters to addresses unknown, in the unknown locations of distant graves, and in the distant birth of babies beneath unfamiliar stars.

I was born free. Free of any country.

***

The Other Midnight Child

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Jawaharlal Nehru’s words that announced the independence of India have always sounded like an incantation to me. Their magical quality is captured nowhere better than in Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie, himself born in 1947 and just a few days after my mother. In the novel, the newly liberated nation’s firstborns, brought forth from their mother’s wombs between the stroke of the midnight hour and 1 AM on 15 August, 1947, embody the fledgling country’s ambitions and aspirations; they possess an ethereal telepathic connection symbolizing their shared earthly trajectories. In the midst of this enchantment, however, is a desperately gnawing anxiety. It is the anxiety of separation. Two children are switched at birth in the novel, and are separated from their biological families. This cleaving is not only symbolically that of Britain and the erstwhile Indies, but also India and Pakistan – the tempering of the rampant joy of independence by loss. This torn postcolonial map is also haunted by other missing pieces. Like my father in Goa and my mother in Kenya, midnight’s other children were still asleep. And what was to say that they would want their freedom, once they awoke to it, to be cleaved to the new nation?

In Mirrorwork, a compilation of writing co-edited with Elizabeth West, published in 1997 to commemorate 50 years of Indian writing on the anniversary of India’s independence, Rushdie notes of his allegorical novel: 

After its publication ... I learned that the idea of a long saga-novel about a child born at the exact moment of independence – midnight, August 14-15, 1947 – had occurred to other writers, too. A Goan poet showed me the first chapter of an abandoned novel in which the “midnight child” was born not in Bombay, but in Goa. 

While Rushdie’s own “midnight child” could conceivably have been a Goan born in Bombay – indeed there is much evidence of such vibrant characters in both the book and life – the genesis of the novel’s protagonist, the very story, and hence the symbolization of India would be impossible if not for a Goan character. It is Mary Pereira, the nursemaid, who switches the children at birth – one from a well-off family and the other from a disadvantaged background - and changes their destinies in an attempt to effect social equality. At the moment of India’s birth, Goa was a component of the landmass of the new nation, but was not then constitutive of its polity. Nevertheless, Midnight’s Children implies the impossibility of thinking of India without Goans. 



Mary Pereira need not have been a Goan character, but there is particular significance in her so being. She re-emerges later on in the book as Mrs. Braganza, borrowing her name from Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese Infanta who was married to the English King, Charles II in 1662. The arranged marriage, a custom thought of as so quintessentially South Asian, was an alliance between the two colonial powers. Portugal acknowledged Britain’s pre-eminence by including one of its Indian ports in the royal dowry. Perhaps Portugal gave up that possession thinking it far less significant than the natural harbour of Goa, but the gift was to become a major factor in the establishment of British commerce in the East. That port was Bombay.

In having Mary Pereira/Braganza be Goan, the author brings into focus the significant role of his character’s native land in the European imperial history of South Asia. The Goan character draws to mind the ports sought out by the Europeans in their search for the fabled Indies and the harbours that were to become the centres of imperial power. Mary Pereira also evokes the figure of Goa as one of the earliest colonies and then the last foreign dominion in what was to become modern day India.

Though adopting the Braganza moniker, Mary Pereira arguably challenges heteropatriarchal constructions of nation, unlike her namesake. Catherine’s marriage to Charles II was to secure the bond between two colonial powers, but it was clear that it was to be an unequal coalition – the queen signifying the feminized position Portugal was expected to occupy. Mary, on the other hand, switches a rich child with a poor one in an attempt to impress Joseph, the man she loves, who is a communist radical. Rushdie’s use of the biblical names of the parents of the Christ child is deliberate; yet, where there should be an immaculate conception, there is anything but. Mary and Joseph of Midnight’s Children ultimately never have a relationship. Additionally, the switched children – of different economic and religious backgrounds – are raised by parents of other means and faiths. Through Mary, Rushdie destabilizes familial order consigned by biology, culture, and economics, and instead envisions a postcolonial independence where such constraints will bear no consequence to the new nation. Saleem, due to Mary’s intervention, is welcomed into a life of privilege and is chosen by a newspaper as the midnight child, born at the same moment as India’s independence. Nonetheless, Rushdie attempts to mitigate Mary’s maternal instincts gone awry by making her so consumed with guilt that she signs on to become a nanny to Saleem, the chosen male child of midnight.

At the same time as Mary Pereira had her hand in creating the midnight child of Rushdie’s book, what became of the other midnight child, the subject of an abandoned novel set in Goa? Is that child forever lost? The position of Goans in relation to the recently formed Indian union in 1947 was an ambivalent one – a part yet apart – somewhere between a child unseen because she or he had not been fully authored into existence and Mary Pereira who from the sidelines becomes involved in a moment that emblematically represents the new nation. In this regard, Goans of the homeland and the diaspora were similarly displaced, mapped onto other lands and still looking for their own Goa.

If Rushdie acknowledges the importance of Goan identity to the emerging India of Midnight’s Children, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro does the reverse. In his introductory foreword to Donna Young’s Mirror to Goa (2009), the diasporic writer argues

that despite Portugal’s long and determined attempts to impose a Portuguese culture on Goa, once Goans began to emigrate en masse to Bombay in search of a university education and well-paying jobs, we became exposed to liberal ideas and to India’s push to independence; the more deeply we breathed in the heady winds of freedom, the more tenuous became Portugal’s grip on our hearts and minds.

Rangel-Ribeiro’s observation of the burgeoning thoughts of liberation amongst the Goan diaspora in Bombay extends to Goans in other parts of the world; the quest for freedom would involve transnational influences from across the diaspora. 

Tristão de Bragança Cunha (1891-1958), often referred to as the father of Goan nationalism, and poet ManoharRai Sar Dessai (1925-2006), both French educated, could not help but feel the limits to their freedom and the desire for self-emancipation in the colonial context. Maria Aurora Couto chronicles Sar Dessai’s firm grasp of his identity when deemed alien upon his return to a country he thought of as his own. In Goa: A Daughter’s Story (2004), Couto writes of Sar Dessai’s experience that

... he was disqualified in the 1950s from the first job he applied for when he returned from his studies in France. It was a government job at the prestigious Elphinstone College in Bombay. [It was] because he was a foreign national, a condition over which he had no control. “I did not choose to become a Portuguese citizen,” he argued. “I am Indian. No one listened. We were perceived as foreigners within our own country ...”

As the movement for India’s independence intensified, the effects were felt in Goa where demonstrations led to a crackdown by the Portuguese army in 1946. Tristão de Bragança Cunha and other activists were taken to Portugal where they were imprisoned in Peniche. If the administration was repressive in Goa, then “Salazar’s regime was even more repressive at home,” Couto remarks. As a result, she goes on to say, de Bragança Cunha “[met] a quality of mind and spirit in Portuguese jails which made his life within bars far more enjoyable than when he was free but compelled to live in exile.”

Goa: A Daughter’s Story recounts such episodes of Goan deliberations over identity and emancipation to establish that aspirations for liberty came from Goa’s own people, even if the end of Portuguese rule was achieved with the Indian army’s use of force in 1961. Fourteen years after the rest of India awoke to freedom, Nehru gave the order that would bring to a close 451 years of Portuguese colonization in Goa. Even as Couto narrates episodes of self-determination, she observes that following Liberation “... there was both jubilation and consternation within Goa. Worry about change, hope for the future ... Change is seldom welcome; it is even less welcome when fraught with so many imponderables.”

I often wonder why the Goan author who began writing about the midnight child abandoned his novel. Did the writer believe that child could not be the herald of freedom if India was liberated but Goa was not? There is clearly more to the story of this child. I would like to think that it continues to look for Goa at midnight, seeking its many people, distributed across the globe like a fragmented map. There is so much for this child that is imponderable, as Couto muses. Among what is most imponderable is all that is yet to come, for freedom is ever-evolving. The magic of midnight is that one is never certain whether it is the end of an old day or the start of a new one.

***

Goa is Not Here

Europe was looking for Goa, even though they did not know it then. Six years after Columbus’ 1492 voyage for the Indies that would instead lead to the discovery of the “New World” and the decimation of its native peoples, Vasco da Gama found himself on the shores of Calicut. His voyage to Asia would not have been possible without the knowledge of navigators in Malindi on East Africa’s coast in present day Kenya. African familiarity with the sea routes to Asia came from trade between the two continents, evidencing contact between the locations well before European colonization. Following da Gama’s entree into South Asia, Affonso de Albuquerque won Goa for the Portuguese on 25 November, 1510.

What followed was a nearly half-millennium long colonial saga that would see the Inquisition, the bringing of African slaves to Goa, religious conversion, and the exodus of persecuted peoples. None of this happened without the participation of some Goans themselves, it must be stated, for the business of colonization requires collaborators. At some point in this history, as previously noted, Bombay became the gift that Portugal bestowed upon England. It also became a conduit for Goans between the two empires in India. From British India, many Goans found their way to other British colonies, East Africa included.

When she left Goa, did Felicidade know she would be laid to rest in another country, so far from her own native land? Or that her children and grandchildren would journey even farther afield? In 1993 her youngest daughter, my mother, emigrated to the United States along with her family, under an African quota. I was to enter the new country of my residence because of Kenya, a place I had never known. In 2008, it finally became untenable for me to continue to hold on to my Indian citizenship. That year, I voted in my first U.S. election, bringing to power a man of part-Kenyan origin, America’s first black president.

Just before the historic election, I had the opportunity to visit Kisumu, where the Obama family is from. The 44th U.S. President’s Kenyan origins had, until recently, been the reason why there was so much suspicion about his birthright to that office. I also visited the sites of my family’s own history in Kenya, including Felicidade’s last resting place in Mombasa. Since living in the United States, I have not been to Kuwait. My last time there was during a transit stop on our voyage as immigrants to California, which was to become our new domicile. Northern California and South London see most of my time currently, though I routinely visit my family who once again live in Goa. Given my past, to this day, and maybe forever, there is a question that will always confuse me: “Where are you from?” Is there solace in knowing that even the President of the United States has himself been repeatedly asked that question?

The question of origin places the diasporic of Goan origin at the moment of midnight, disorientalized and looking for Goa. In this quest, there is no map, only a fragmented cartography. There is an inherent paradox to maps: They orient a seeker, not unlike the colonial quest for Goa, promising a kind of knowledge of discovery; even so, what is a map if not a conglomeration of lacunae? The indeterminate can only be ascertained upon the actual journey and there is no guarantee against going astray, as Columbus’ excursion attests. The diasporic disoriental loses sense of direction, becoming Goan not through a sense of place but by its loss. For the diasporic Goan, being Goan is not about Goa. It is about Goa. Around it. Such a configuration does not preclude Goa; it additionally sets it beyond the apparent parameters. An example of this is the aforementioned transnational influence that informed the liberation of Goa.

Fundamentally, there still needs be a difference between the diasporic disoriental and the marauding colonial explorer. It is a difference that must go deeper than cosmetic multiculturalism. Selma Carvalho’s Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010) narrates the cultural history of the Goan diaspora. The author includes an anecdote about a group of postcolonially exiled, middle class Goan East Africans she was acquainted with. While on the one hand “[their] Africa belonged to colonial Britain,” there was no denying the African cultural influences they had imbibed, though they might be unlikely to acknowledge them. Among the various places in the diaspora Carvalho has found herself, East Africa is not one of them. This notwithstanding, in revealing the influence of that region upon the displaced Goan East Africans, she also reveals its influence in the formation of her sense of self as a diasporic Goan when she writes:

It was only when I grew up that I realised Malaika wasn’t a song about Goa, but an outpouring of [the exiles’] love for Africa. The Kenyan song, meaning angel in Swahili and Arabic, echoed the social struggles felt by native Africans at the time. Whether any East African Goan ever shed a tear for the social unrest, poverty and turmoil of indigenous Africans is difficult to say.

The histories of modern Africa and South Asia have run parallel and often intersected because of colonization, even when the colonized could not see the similarities they shared with other oppressed people.
Undoubtedly, Africa has influenced the formation of a Goan sense of self within and without Goa and even at the hour of Liberation. As Couto relates,

Nehru’s military action was the result of many compulsions, not least the pressure brought on him by freedom fighters in the African colonies. Furthermore, the action was crucial for the morale of African nationalists. Goa provided the precedent. It fuelled the intensity of their struggle for independence.

Freedom, it would seem, is a contagious thing. It cannot be constrained to the location of its birth, leaping forth to disorient and negate captivity elsewhere. All the same, disorientation cannot simply mean placelessness; it cannot preclude a sense of responsibility for the locations in which one finds themselves. In The Location of Culture (2008) Homi Bhabha critiques the “kind of global cosmopolitanism ... that configures the planet as a concentric world of national societies extending to global villages,” creating a veneer of multicultural harmony that involves diasporic subjects. These are the kinds of places, I would add, where “social unrest, poverty and turmoil” may exist, but for which no one “[sheds] a tear” because they see themselves, ironically, as residents who are conveniently extra-territorial and therefore not responsible for the plight of others. Liberation comes in many forms, but one cannot be free when witness to the captivity of others.

Goa is in the many places of the diaspora, just as the reverse is true. The broken topography that connects midnight’s other children connotes loss. But this is only because what is gained is often indiscernible - much like freedom itself, which can so easily be taken for granted. In my disorientation, I hear Goa in the African songs my mother sang to me as a child and in the names that were passed down from one generation to the next. I see it in the dust of my grandmothers’ graves, in Mombasa and Aldona. It is in the passports I was not allowed to have and in a novel that remains unwritten. It is waiting to be found at the midnight hour. 

These are my map to Goa where I was not born. For I was free before I was born.    
 




Semana de Cultura (2011) is currently only available in print.

"Quilted Together" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - August 2011)

On July 15, 2011, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, California, inaugurated the exhibit “Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India.” Curated by Dr. Henry J. Drewal, Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Sarah K. Khan, Director of The Tasting Cultures Foundation, New York, the exhibition displays 32 quilts, or kawandi, by members of Karnataka’s Siddi Women’s Quilting Cooperative, a non-profit. Siddi is a term used to describe various South Asian communities of African origin – Their presence is as widespread as Balochistan, Pakistan and Junagadh, Gujarat. The collection at MoAD, however, comes specifically from descendants of Africans enslaved by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and brought to Goa. Fleeing most notably during the Inquisition (1560-1812), the runaway slaves set up free communities in nearby Karnataka which still exist.

Dumgi Bastav (2004)

Kawandi visually embody the inter-raciality and syncretism that occurred over centuries between Africans and Indians in Goa and Karnataka. Pieced together from saris and other fabric, the quilts may bear crescent-shaped ornamentation to signify the maker as a Muslim woman while the works of Catholics incorporate cross motifs. Interestingly, Dumgi Bastav’s 2004 quilt, featured in the exhibition, bears both icons. What is common to all kawandi is that they are considered incomplete if not embellished at the corners with layered triangular pieces. These are called phula, which in Konkanni – a language spoken in Goa and Karnataka - means flowers. The incorporation of this arguably vestigial adornment, both linguistic and artistic, alongside other cultural signifiers, emblematically bears witness to historical hybridity and contemporary culture in the everyday use quilts provide in Siddi households.

“Soulful Stitching” bills itself as the first exhibition of quilts by Siddis outside India. However, this legacy is little known within India itself. Generally, the cultural imaginary associates India’s experience with Africa through the British colonial-era diasporic presence of primarily Punjabis, Goans, and Gujaratis in the now free nation-states of East Africa. It was also from Africa’s east coast, ironically, that the Portuguese trafficked slaves and where, too, an Afro-Asiatic commerce existed prior to European contact. MoAD’s exhibit here in the United States – a nation itself no stranger to the African slave trade - offers an opportunity to rethink Afro-Indian diasporic cultural heritage through the symbolic quilting together of these identities and their markers in the patchwork of kawandi. The exhibit runs through September 18, 2011.

Versions of this article appear in print and online at India Currents (California) and O Heraldo (Goa). An online version of a longer print article on the exhibit can be read at AwaaZ Magazine (Kenya).

"In More Than One Place: Goan Kenyans and the Crisis of Identity" - PARMAL (Goa - December 2008)

In a Mombasa cemetery overgrown with weeds and tall grass, we looked for a grave that

held the remains of my grandmother. My uncles, aunts, and cousins tried to make sense of the graveyard’s organization while its caretakers followed closely, their voices low as they informed us that they looked after this site and that perhaps they could assist us. We had, of course, been warned that any African who offered us assistance must want money for services they would be hard pushed to render in the first place. So, we ignored them until it became clearer after a while that we were getting nowhere in our attempts to find our matriarch’s resting place.

***

Euthimio de Souza

 In December 2006/January 2007, over forty of us had come to Kenya to celebrate a family reunion. We had arrived from different points on the globe, some of us in Kenya after many years (for my mother this had been the first trip in forty years) and many of us here for the first time ever. As we drew up our family tree, three generations of sons and daughters, grandchildren, and great grandchildren marvelled at how from two had come one hundred, my deceased grandparents the point of origination of this journey. We celebrated our happiness at having finally come together, yet mourned the loss of those we had known and loved. But the greatest loss of all grieved by this large family of Goans was that of Kenya itself. Particularly for those of us who had never been here before, the constant refrain heard was of how Kenya was no longer the place it once was; how once the Africans had regained their independence they had run the country into the ground; how Nairobi was no longer safe and overtaken by “too many Blacks” (a relative I pointed out the obvious to was not amused). Therein, though, lies the unseen pain of nostalgia – beguiling in memory but embittering in its post-dated influence. For the Goans of East Africa, particularly those of my mother’s generation and before, their edenic memories marked with the sweetness of childhood, young courtships, and sepia tinted photos, this millennium’s Africa is another place – one that changed forever when they left. While that is indisputable, the firm belief that it was their presence and the colonial era which made Kenya, and their departure with the end of colonization that led to its decay, bears scrutiny.

The provenance of Goans from East Africa throws up several questions about their postcolonial identities, not least of all to Asian East Africans themselves. In Kenya, this community would have held passports that nominally made them British citizens of Kenya. Because Kenya was considered a colonial protectorate, it meant that British passports held by Goans, others of Indian subcontinental origins, and Black Africans as well, rendered their ability to travel to England impossible. One need not dwell too long on the reasons why such an artifice was employed to come to the conclusion that it was simply to restrict the flow of labour within a specific, and secure, gamut. Many Goans either directly made their way to British East Africa or by way of British India, to which they travelled because of the few educational and economic opportunities in Estado da India Portuguesa. When Goans left Goa to provide service and to live in colonial Africa, they were indeed Portuguese citizens, but not in a majority of cases were they of mixed-race origins, which is a commonly held, but erroneous, view of the extraction of Goans. Unlike in Brazil, the colonizer and the colonized seldom mixed, both sides looking down upon the practice. This, of course, does not mean that there were not some intermarriages, rapes, affairs, and elopements. In early colonial times, interracial marriages were the product of strategic alliances between upper-caste Indians and their aristocratic Portuguese equivalents, meant to cement business and power relations. Evidently, the reason for such partnerships being to limit the exercise of power, their own numbers were limited and the practice did not filter down into the socio-religious ranks. While it might be true that there was little inter-raciality, there is no doubt that Goan culture in the process of 450 years of colonization had been Lusitanized, in much the same way that the cultures of the Philippines and parts of Latin America had been Hispanicized.

Fast-forward to the present era. In 1961, Goa received its independence from the Portuguese and was absorbed into the Indian union. It was a tumultuous time for Goans as identity politics took over and the little enclave faced losing autonomy with its potential assimilation into the adjoining state of Maharashtra. The event was marked with the use of religio-cultural and elitist caste politics to sway opinion towards the merger. Despite this, an ensuing referendum in 1967 made clear the view that Goans, of Hindu and Catholic faiths, wished to be Goans and that Goa should be its own political entity within the union of India. It thus became a Union Territory and then, later, a fully fledged state. Previous calls for Goa to be an independent country had by this time fizzled out and Goans themselves were not immediately given the option when the Indian government wrested it from its European colonizer. The loss of that prospect is interesting less for its nationalism, but more for providing yet another example of how hegemonic Indian politics function to reduce minority voices. How else would one account for the fact that Indian history books recall Goa’s liberation not as a struggle by Goans themselves, but as an Indian-orchestrated event? Undeniably, Goa had a lot to offer India, because of its tactical coastal location. For the same reasons that the Portuguese had made Goa the capital of their Asian empire, newly independent India saw the geopolitical necessity of removing the natural harbour from the hands of a foreign power. And so was rid the last European colonial power within the contiguous Indian land mass, only to have the Indian navy set up shop there instead.

Meanwhile, Goans in East Africa and other parts of the diaspora were in an interesting moment of historical suspension: While their homeland had during the two short days of the Goan liberation struggle gone from being Portuguese to Indian, they were in a kind of ethno-national limbo. They were “British” by supposed virtue of their colonial status, but were restricted in travelling to Britain; they were African because they resided on that continent, but were indigenously not so; but were they then Indian, or were they still Portuguese? This quandary was made possible by the fact that this community had left Goa while it was still Portuguese and their birth certificates would have laid testament to this fact even if their native land had now become part of India. Their relatives in the homeland might not have had a choice when India took over, but for Goans in East Africa, their divergent history still left their choices open. In time to come, this dilemma would prove very useful. To make things even more complicated, in 1963 Kenya threw off its own British colonial shackles.

It might be argued that colonization brought together various communities and that in the struggle for independence these heretofore disconnected groups bonded to oust their common oppressor. The problem with that analysis is that it belies the history of trade and cultural exchange that characterized the Indian subcontinent even before colonial times. More to the point, while ousting the British may have led to the creation of the modern nation states in South Asia, what was left behind was the legacy of divide and conquer commonly used by the departing Raj as a means of control. Just as this is the case in the sub-continent, so too has Africa continued to struggle with the cartographies of violence that have overlaid older tribal histories. Within this, the major Indian diasporic communities of Punjabis, Gujaratis, and Goans, displaced and generally little known to each other, given the circumstances of geographic distance and lack of cultural commonality in the Indian context, had little reason to commingle in East Africa. Over time, while community and religious ties may have kept individuals close to their respective groups, the employment of particularly the middle classes in colonial administration would have put them in a position to rub shoulders with each other and, to a limited extent, with their European employers. Social interactions between Asians and Blacks in the East African racialized political economy would have been restricted, as a result of deliberate and sometimes unconscious segregation. It is no surprise that Indians already educated in colonial ways in British India could avail themselves of various opportunities not afforded to Blacks in European Africa once imported there, leading to superiority complexes that further separated them from Blacks. They often conveniently fell into the hierarchical, racialized system of colonial subjugation of native Africans – a much more subtle yet refined form of divide and rule. With the departure of the British in East Africa, the Indian communities were left behind to live in countries soon to be led by their own indigenous sons and daughters. What was seen as collaboration with the former colonizer led, in some cases, to a high price to be paid by the immigrant communities, as in Uganda.

Where they could, several Goans and members of other Indian communities departed for Western shores. Some found that after years of service to Britain they were not seen as equals there and were barred entry. Several went to India, and in the case of Asian Ugandans were forced there and elsewhere as refugees. Yet, many others stayed back in East Africa, which was the only home they had known. As immigration laws changed in countries like England, the United States, and Australia, Asian East Africans made their way there, creating a doubly displaced diaspora. Portugal became a very attractive option for Goans both in Goa and the diaspora with the genesis of the European Union, causing a scramble to reclaim Portuguese identity vis a vis their colonial birthright (and certification) as explained earlier. Many successfully migrated using the historical anomaly to their advantage; others found that in their attempts to rehistoricize themselves, they were instead taken for a ride by shysters who promised them a Portuguese passport only to disappear, once paid, into thin air.

Clearly, these post-independence migrations from East Africa indicate the destabilization felt by diasporic Goan communities, but what was the source of these insecurities? More obviously, there was Idi Amin, the political and economic instability of these newly formed countries, and a general anxiety of having to deal with change. But within all of this was also the sense of fear that these communities felt at having lost what they saw as a colonial protector with the departure of the managing classes of Europeans who provided the divisions between Blacks and Asians. Class, colonial legacies, and history continue to impinge upon inter-raciality in Kenya. This is not to suggest that interracial relationships would necessarily be indicative of communal harmony, but their dearth is also suggestive in its own way. Given all this, what future do Goans and other South Asians in Kenya envision in what is largely viewed as a Black run country?

Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi

 The dramatic suggestion hovering here is that, postcolonially, Goans may feel they have no political future in Kenya because their agency was created and made manifest through the colonial structure and ended in its demise. This is simply not true. There is, if anything, an impressive legacy of the involvement of Goans in the nationalist anti-colonial movement. Take Fitz R. de Souza, a lawyer instrumental in defending Kenyans accused of Mau Mau activities and a parliamentarian in free Kenya, or Pio Gama Pinto, a freedom fighter who was assassinated post-independence in 1965, and not to forget Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi, Kenya’s second Vice President (1965-66), who was half Goan and half Maasai. Sadly, there is little to suggest that the legacy exemplified by these figures continues. Goans in Kenya recently celebrated the hundredth anniversary of a popular social club, but what marks their political history in that country seems to have stopped in the build-up to and then just after independence.

My younger cousins are proud to call themselves Goans and so I asked them what this meant to them. Often, their response was that this was a statement of their difference from “other Indians,” because they were “part Portuguese.” I pushed the question further to get at whether this was a product of wilful confusion, communally upheld in the desire to hang on to colonial legacies of difference and thus superiority, or unwitting ignorance. The answer I came closest to was that it was a combination of those and other factors.

Goan Catholics form 1/3 of the state’s population and while as a whole Goan identity crosses religious difference, it is also coloured by it. The Goan diaspora in Kenya is largely Catholic and in addition to the nostalgia for the Kenya that once was, there is also the prevalent idea that Goans are becoming a minority in their own state. While this might be an overstatement, Goans, regardless of religious affiliation, are a cultural minority, but are not recognized as such by the Indian nation. Goan Kenyans continue to have ties with their families in Goa and their identitarian feelings are perhaps an extension of the minoritization Goans of Catholic backgrounds feel in a state and a country that, while it is important to point out is secular, is predominantly Hindu in its population. This transposition is indicative of a cultural dialogue between homeland and diaspora which at once attempts to disrupt dominant and monolithic ideas of what it means to be Indian in both locations and also intensifies the existing feelings of displacement and identity crisis in diaspora communities. Goans in the diaspora thus seem to feel the loss of more than one “home” land.

Simultaneously, in the African context, feelings of minoritization take on an air of victimization at the hands of a state that is seen as having failed its constituents. While there might be corruption in Kenya, its victims are not just Goans and other immigrant communities, but also indigenous groups, and class privilege still affords advantages despite racial background. A year after my visit, Kenya experienced post-election violence in December 2007 and January 2008, which resulted in the deaths of many Kikuyu and Luo – the tribes most affected by the events due to political allegiances. The Western media summarily reported on these events as the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence, conflating tribalism with barbarism, rather than examining such causes as area-specific poverty, joblessness, and other endemic issues. A cousin emailed me from Nairobi in fear of her life following riots in the city. I met her husband and children who were vacationing in Goa at the time, and shared their concern for the family and over what was to become of the places we had not so long ago all enjoyed together. Soon to leave Goa, they expected to petition the British Embassy in Bombay to allow them refuge in England where they would meet the rest of their family from Kenya. They confirmed that several other Goan Kenyans sought to leave, even as reports in the Indian media made it clear that South Asians had largely been left unharmed. Some Indian shops, though, had not fared as well, falling victim to the looting that had ensued.  My younger cousins, the same ones who think of themselves as part Portuguese, commented that the recent events could only occur in a place like Kenya. Their father countered this, reminding them that despite other issues, the country had not seen political disruptions of this nature in a long time. Kenya’s recent violence parallels several global events where the politically and economically dispossessed have felt pushed beyond their limits. I was reminded of the so-called race riots in Los Angeles, following the 1992 acquittal of the white policemen involved in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, or the 2005 civil unrest in Paris sparked by the electrocution deaths of two teenagers from a working class commune who were chased into a power station by policemen. All this notwithstanding, my cousins’ views remind me that Goans in Kenya continue to see their lives as unfolding against a political backdrop that impacts them but does not involve them, for at any moment the choice to leave exists and political instability provides not only the opportunity but also the mechanism.

In writing this piece, I must point out some biases. Knowing that my own thoughts are underpinned by Western education, as well as Asian American and Asian British ideas of diversity, my limited knowledge of Asian African multiculturality leaves me with the hope that, despite what was visible, there exist positive interactions. It is not my intention to undermine the historical difficulties faced by Asian East Africans, particularly victims of political displacement. Yet, if Goan and other Asian East Africans really feel that the countries they call or called home are in crisis, then the onus is upon them to interrogate the causative forces, their collusion, and what they can do to affect change.

***

Felicidade de Souza

The African caretakers of the cemetery in Mombasa cleared patches of grass as we walked through the graveyard. They indicated where Goans were usually buried and politely asked us when my grandmother died. Without the help of these caretakers, we would never have found her last resting place. She had left Goa as a young woman, courted by my grandfather who brought her to Kenya. It was here that she died prematurely after bearing her children. I never knew her. To be able to pay my respects at her grave was to also do so to our history in the land that adopted my family.

Versions of this article appear in Parmal Magazine (Goa) and AwaaZ Magazine (Kenya).