"Remembering Dominic" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 13 June 2012)

 “Hi, I’m Dominic,” he had said, but I hoped he was not.

I still remember when we first met. The year was 1990 and I was a teenager auditioning to join The Mustard Seed Art Company in Panjim. I had heard of someone named Dominic who had been in the news a lot in the last year. Indeed, all of Goa had heard about that Dominic. But when I met the lead actor of the theatrical group for the first time, the Dominic I met was charismatic and had a certain gravitas about him. I was soon to find that he could just as easily be a goofball. One of my most enduring memories of Dominic is that he loved yellow socks, which were a clue to his cheeriness in the face of adversity. He became a friend. When you are a teenager experiencing every adolescent anguish imaginable – from how no one gets your sense of style to the damnation that is your love life - an older friend who is willing to lend a ear, as if all those issues had equal weight, is someone to be held in high esteem. So, to me, my friend could certainly not have been that Dominic... or so I convinced myself. For as long as I remained unclear about the facts, I could keep my parents in the dark lest they ask me to leave the theatre group. But in a small place like Goa, it was not going to be long before they discovered the truth. Having been curious about who this Dominic was, my parents soon had their suspicions confirmed. All I heard as they upbraided me was that one word: “AIDS.” It was the one thing I had hoped not to have been true about my friend. 

In 1989, Dominic D’Souza, a frequent blood donor, found out he had contracted HIV upon being detained by the authorities. He was humiliatingly arrested and sequestered in a tuberculosis ward where he was the sole inmate – His disease was equated with criminality. He was the first person in Goa to have been diagnosed with HIV. To Dominic, how he had become infected was unimportant; rather, he was concerned about what he was going to do to change social perceptions about the disease. Dominic founded a non-profit called Positive People – It was the first organization of its kind in Goa, and it continues to exist. Despite the way he had been treated, Dominic loved Goa and saw himself as part of it. He wanted that no one else should have to go through what he did. At the same time, his advocacy efforts took him around the world as a voice for those who faced HIV-related discrimination.

Dominic, I did not get to say goodbye to you twenty years ago in May 1992 when you breathed your last in a hospital in Bombay. Not a day goes by without me thinking of you. I had hoped you were not that Dominic, because it would mean losing you. But the world is a better place because you were in it. You will always be remembered, my friend.  

An online version of this piece can be found here.

"Shippies" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 14 April 2012)

RMS Titanic

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912, yet the event continues to haunt. This is not least because, in its time, Titanic was a testament to technology – a wondrous accomplishment that something of its size could travel so speedily. In its sinking, however, it also revealed the vulnerability of humanity despite scientific progress. While the ship was meant to be a luxury liner whose primary purpose was the transport of well-heeled travellers, it also profited from others taking the maiden journey. Passengers ranged in class, and this was true of the crew as well. These economic distinctions are notably captured in James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, which has been re-released this year. In it, star-crossed lovers - an aristocratic lady and a stowaway - deal with societal differences and the wrecking of their vessel. Though the film reveals that people of various means travelled in the days when ships were a primary mode of long haul transport, it does little to foreground the racial diversity of those who made the often perilous journeys. For Goans, those travels have been part of our lore and familial legacies for centuries.

MV Dara

Journeys by sea have played a major part in Goa’s history. The start of the region’s colonization by the Portuguese was effected by Vasco da Gama’s 1498 landing on Calicut’s coast and, then, Afonso de Albuquerque’s naval conquest of Goa in 1510. In the colonial era, the once familiar waters that Goans as a coastal people had known so well and relied upon for subsistence would be left behind for the shores of the European empires in Africa and other parts of Asia. If the ocean is an archive, then the stories of tarvotti, men of the sea from Goa, have often been submerged in favour of a grander narrative of diaspora – projects that align the foreign-travelling Goan with the ethos of colonial exploration and “discovery.” No doubt, even the working class Goan seafarer has contributed to the perpetuation of colonial projects, but might these other perspectives offer nuance or even rupture to how a Goan history of oceanic travel is understood as not being a monolithic experience?

Gregory Fernandes

The tarvotti of yore may appear to be hidden in the mists of time, but the sea continues to employ Goans. In January this year, Goan crewmen aboard the Costa Concordia escaped the cruise liner which capsized in Italy. The phenomenon of Goans being employed aboard ships is so commonplace that these seamen have been given their own cultural designation – the term “shippies” renders them as present-day tarvotti. Unlike Concordia’s survivors, stories of shippies have not always been ones of luck. In April 1961, the M. V. Dara saw the largest loss of life after Titanic. A bomb blast aboard the ship, docked in Dubai, took the lives of over 200 people, many Goans included. In 2007, Goan sailor Gregory Fernandes was killed in a racist attack. He was on leave in Southampton, which was the port from where Titanic’s one and only journey began. This April, as that journey is recalled, it is also occasion to surface the economic and racial diversity inherent to maritime history.

An online version of the print article appears here.

"The Other Madonna" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 17 March 2012)

This Lenten season, an exhibit titled “The Passion and Glory” showcases Angelo da Fonseca’s art at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research. It ensues from “The Christmas Story” exhibition of the Goan artist’s work, which I had the pleasure of viewing at the same venue a few months prior. Apart from da Fonseca’s unique South Asian styling of Christian themes, what struck me is the centrality of the Madonna in much of his work.

The Pietà at St. Peter's Basilica

Of course, da Fonseca is not alone in portraying Mary as a central figure in artistic composition. At the risk of correlating the Goan artist’s images to Western iconography, my purpose in comparing da Fonseca’s renditions to Michelangelo’s Pietà will be revealed to be more about female representation than about similarities in Christian art. In 1972, Laszlo Toth infamously struck Michelangelo’s creation at St. Peter’s Basilica with a hammer, declaring that he was Jesus Christ. Despite Toth’s messianic pronouncement, it was not the figure of Jesus in the sculpture that he chose to efface, but that of Mary. The repaired statue now finds protection behind glass, still drawing attention to Michelangelo’s artistic focus on the Madonna. The dead Christ lies on her lap, almost out of view. His body is seen upon following the trajectory of the Mother’s downcast eyes. Mary, here, is not so much an icon of divinity, but a mother in mourning. Though Toth’s actions could be psychoanalyzed as an oedipal expression of repressed feelings towards a mother figure, did he exact his vengeance on the Madonna because of the gendered representation of her humanity?

Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967)

Compare this to the reception of da Fonseca’s work, produced mostly during the twilight years of colonization in British and Portuguese India. In her evocatively titled essay, “Painting the Madonna Brown,” Savia Viegas, curator of the XCHR exhibits, says of elite Catholic Goan society that they perceived da Fonseca’s Indian-coloured woman as a threat, because “the classical Mary was a source of identity that connected [them] with ‘white society’...” Like Michelangelo, da Fonseca had created a Madonna who was human. But, this time, Mary’s lack of divinity was in the colour of her skin, which also invited attack.

In noting the racialized caste-bias of the Goan artist’s audience, Viegas reveals the subversive element in da Fonseca’s work. In a similar vein, theologian Felix Wilfred indentifies how “the dalits’ encounter with manifold social oppression led to a re-reading of the gospel,” causing the development of South Asian liberation theology – “an analysis of society [that takes] into account the caste structure, directing its critique against Brahminical hegemony.” 

Visitation (1954)

So also, the brown Madonna offers a potential counterpoint to patriarchy in general. For example, when da Fonseca depicts Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, no visible male figures frame their contact. Here, being a woman is not equated with motherhood. The Madonna, then, is posited in da Fonseca’s oeuvre as a woman whose gender and race brings awareness to marginality. Her humanity is in being the revolutionary other.


A version of this piece appears in print and can be found online.

"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.

"Time and Place" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 21 January 2012)

I crane my neck for a last glimpse long after the aircraft lifts off the red earth. Already there is longing.

After a month in Goa during the Golden Jubilee year of its decolonization, I left feeling the weight of the past tethering me to the land of my origins. Goa’s historic tryst with the world and a preoccupation with futurity were palpable in events like the Goa: 1961 and Beyond conference held at Goa University, but also in online fora, in conversations, and in the press. Right alongside these was the artistic, as with the second Goa Arts and Literary Festival. Predicated on commemorating 19 December, 1961, such affairs indicate Goa’s potential to inspire further creativity and scholarship. There is a desire for an acknowledgment of Goa’s legacy and what it is to be Goan. Here is a moment and momentum. What would it look like to translate this into a field called Goan Studies? How might we consider the world from Goan perspectives? I will not dwell on the unoriginality of this idea, often proposed yet unfulfilled. Instead, I will stress its necessity. The Jubilee events are a step in the right direction, and it is important now that a destination be arrived. 

It is ironic for a transnational writer to advocate a permanent location to ground epistemology and creativity. Indeed, I understand my own “Goanity” as having emerged from my family’s history outside Goa. But the palimpsests of Goa and its diaspora crossover. In Goa: A Daughter’s Story, Maria Couto points to the “cultures from across the ghats and beyond the seas [that] have clearly contributed to ... a [Goan] society that is cosmopolitan in its rootedness.” Even so, Couto’s articulation of a historic multiculturality cannot be conflated with similar contemporaneous migrations. 

At the Arts and Literary Festival, writer Amitav Ghosh reflected on migratory trends in Goa that he is a sometimes-resident of. He noted the presence of “the Russian mafia, ... vendors from Karnataka and Maharashtra, ... workers ... from Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and the North-East...” and their influence on Goa where he can now “listen to coconut sellers from Siolim bargaining in the language of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.” In this poetic enjambment, all history and differences of identity are collapsed when dead Russian authors, migrant workers, and traditional labourers occupy a fantastic togetherness. “All of this is new. I am not afraid of it,” Ghosh proclaims of our antique land, finally speaking for Goans themselves. 

Ghosh’s eschewing of historicity echoes in João da Veiga Coutinho’s A Kind of Absence when he claims that for Goans “roots have been replaced by horizons.” A replacement though is not the equivalent of an erasure. Too quick to privilege horizons, Coutinho can still not deny the persistence of roots. At a time when the continual reiteration of the loss of Goan identity in the wake of globalization reaches a deafening cacophony, it is not proclamations of authenticity that are useful. Alternatively, we require multivalent discourses on how we belong to the red earth rather than the other way around. I see Goan Studies greatly contributing to this end.

An online version of the print article can be viewed here.

"After Midnight" - O HERALDO: The Transient (Goa - 24 December 2011)

“Already 50 years...” my father mused, reading the morning’s papers on the Golden Jubilee day of Goa’s decolonization. He had been a teenager then, yet his recollection of the events of 1961 are vivid: Planes overhead; the radio news; and the vacant home of a Portuguese acquaintance who had so hastily departed that his cup of tea, half-consumed, was left behind like a disowned memory. My father’s nostalgic tone did not invite me to share in his recollection; rather, it cast me as a co-witness who must already know what it had been like at that life-defining moment.

Perhaps I did already know. So too my mother and my sister, none of us born in Goa. This remembrance of an event that the rest of us had not been present at, would shape our existence, just as it had shaped Goa away from one country and into another. This recollection of events from 50 years prior, does not belong to my family alone. It exists precisely in its re-memberance: shared by many and often reiterated. It is a memory that spreads across generations. She will know too...

“At the stroke of the midnight hour,” when the rest of India was free, Goa was still asleep. Both of my parents, born in different locations – Goa and Kenya - came belatedly to freedom in comparison to the country they would become nationals of. And while my sister and I were born passport-holders of postcolonial India, it was only because Kuwait, the country of our birth, would not allow us its citizenship.
Midnight’s Children, a novel about children born at the moment of India’s independence from the British on 15 August, 1947, serves as a metaphor for the nation that itself has just been born. These children share a connection; they are able to communicate with one another telepathically, thoughts shared as if it were the nation’s itself. In Mirrorwork, a book Salman Rusdie edited to mark 50 years of Indian writing as a celebration of India’s Golden Jubilee, the author reflects on the originality of his work. He reveals, “that the idea of a long saga-novel about a child born at the exact moment of independence ... 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 ... in Goa.” With this disclosure, Rushdie pairs the imagined and imaginative community of his book with the actual community it represents. If in the first instance it is an allegorical India, linked through children born so closely in time that they are mentally tethered, then in the latter, the parallel community, an India that includes Goa, is linked through its writers that represent the nation. The common element is a mutual fate and faith in freedom.

What became of the Goan midnight child? Did the poet abandon the book because Goa was yet to be free? Unlike my parents, my sister, and I, whose births were mismatched with independence and citizenship, she has a different story. This historic year, we welcome a child born after midnight: my niece. She is the first in our family to have been born in independent Goa. In time, my father will tell her the story of 19 December, 1961. She will vaguely recall having heard it before.

Originally appeared 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.