"My Friend... Dominic" - TRIKONE (California - Summer 2012)

A man diagnosed with HIV is humiliatingly arrested and then sequestered in a tuberculosis ward where he is the sole inmate. This dramatic scene might as well be fiction, seeing as it repeatedly appears in such works as the novel The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay (2009) by Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi and the film My Brother... Nikhil (2005) by Onir. Neither mentions the person who actually lived through those events. The year was 1989; the place, Goa. Rather than being advised of his condition, a frequent blood donor finds out he has contracted HIV upon being detained by the authorities. His disease is equated with criminality. They knew him as Goa’s Patient Zero: the first reported case of HIV. To me, he was my friend Dominic D’souza.

I remember when we first met.

“Hi, I’m Dominic”, he had said, but I hoped he was not. The year was 1990 and I was being introduced to members of the Mustard Seed Art Company in Panjim, Goa. When I auditioned to join the Seeds as a teenager, I had heard of someone named Dominic who had been in the news. Indeed, all of Goa, if not India, knew about that Dominic. Surely, it was only a coincidence that the lead actor of the theatrical group had the same name as that other person. This Dominic was solemn, yet charismatic. I was to find that he could as easily be a goofball with a wicked sense of humour. His knack for giving ear to my adolescent woes without judgement made us fast friends. So, to me, my friend could certainly not have been that Dominic... or so I convinced myself. For as long as the facts remained unclear, I could keep myself and my parents in the dark. But in a small place like Goa, it was not long before they discovered the truth. Having been curious about who this Dominic was, when they had their suspicions confirmed, my parents confronted me. All I heard as they upbraided me were not full sentences, not even phrases – it was just that word: “AIDS”. It was the one thing I had hoped not to find out about my friend.

Looking back, I realise that most of what I learned about Dominic’s activism came from others because he was never one to seek plaudits. As a friend, Dominic was just that and never the public figure he was elsewhere. The disease had brought him notoriety, but rather than being concerned with how he had become infected, Dominic was more interested in how he could change social perceptions about HIV/AIDS. In the film My Brother... Nikhil, I recognise the activist, but I fail to see the Dominic I knew.

The movie’s title character is the son of the Kapoors, a couple in Goa who, with their daughter Anamika, relate the episodes of Nikhil’s life, in retrospect, between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the family’s ethnicity is not revealed, Anamika comments on how her mother is proud of her Portuguese heritage. The father is perhaps, as one might gather from the family name, of North Indian origin. The film is mainly in Hindi, with a smattering of songs in Konkani, one of Goa’s official languages. As the story develops, Nigel de Costa – Nikhil’s boyfriend – is introduced as a Goan from Dubai. Even as the movie fictionalises Dominic’s life, it appears to be uncertain about how to represent Goanness, in the midst of portraying gay identity in India, while also making a point about the ostracism faced by those with HIV/AIDS.

Though Goa was a Portuguese colony for 451 years, interraciality was rare. It is thus striking that the Kapoors are cast as a family whose Goanness is created by coupling characters that are of North Indian and Portuguese heritage. In their ability to speak Hindi and being, at least part, North Indian, the family is expected to appear more Indian than had they been distinctly Goan, an ethnicity often rendered as anomalous to mainstream Indic culture. Interestingly, the Kapoors’ religious persuasion is also left unclear, lest the prospect that they are Christian inhibit them from being seen as the average Indian family. What this negates is that while Christianity in Goa is syncretically Indian, the majority of Goa’s people are, in fact, Hindu. Delivering some of his reminiscences about his boyfriend against the backdrop of a Church, Nigel is meant to be seen as a Christian. Yet, as the foreign-returned Indian who challenges Nikhil for being in the closet, Nigel’s openness is associated with him having lived abroad. His liberal nature is also linked to his financial security, evidenced by his beachfront property. These ambivalent characterisations, then, partake of Dominic’s life story as a Goan person, but attempt to subsume Goanness within a general perception of Indianness. At the same time, the film aims to focus on the trauma of its gay Indian characters by making their struggles synonymous with a more global interpretation of gay rights, itself associated with being male and middle class. Relying on the “Indo-Portuguese” and diasporic identities of the lovers as multiculturality, the film attaches the travails of its characters to the plight of other gay men like them in the world beyond India.

While AIDS cannot be separated from the history of the gay rights movement in the decades since the disease’s advent, it has never been an affliction that only befalls homosexual men. In his review of We Were Here (2011), Andrew Pulver of The Guardian applauds David Weismann and Bill Weber’s documentary about “the ravages of the AIDS virus ... on early 1980s San Francisco, where thousands of gay men died ... before prevention education and community activism helped slow the devastation”. But Pulver notes that “the ongoing disaster in Africa gets barely a mention”. Indeed, this omission occurs because We Were Here spotlights the experiences of white gay men, which are meant to stand in for those of all HIV/AIDS victims in 1980s America. Among the film’s main interviewees, only one is an African American. Though gay men were at the forefront of AIDS activism in the 1980s, the film notes that lesbians also looked out for the community, but little is said about how the disease affected people of different socio-economic and racial backgrounds, many of whom participated in the movement too. That these AIDS-related issues in the United States are themselves connected to access to care across the globe is additionally occluded by the film’s myopia.

Similarly, My Brother... Nikhil, purportedly the first Indian film about homosexuality, “owns” AIDS as a gay disease – In it, the greater risk of contracting HIV through homosexuality becomes symbolic of the trauma of being a middle class, Indian, gay man. In the hateful Goa of the film, already having to deal with the incarceration of his HIV-infected lover, Nigel returns home one day to see the word “faggot” spray-painted on the walls of his house. Forgoing Hindi, which the film had to this moment used as its mode of expression, the slur in English communicates local knowledge of homophobia from the world beyond. Literally, the writing is on the wall as provincial Goa becomes no different than the rest of the planet in its treatment of gay men because of AIDS.

While the film does well to identify prejudice and the need to address it, in parlaying Dominic’s legacy into an insular form of activism, it denies the greater activist potential of the queer movement. In the movie, Nikhil establishes an organisation called People Positive, mirroring Dominic’s own work in creating a non-profit called Positive People which was the first Goan organisation of its kind and one that still exists. Despite the way he had been treated, Dominic loved Goa and saw himself as part of it. He wanted that no one else in Goa should have to go through what he did. Simultaneously, his advocacy efforts took him around the world where he became a voice for those discriminated against because of HIV/AIDS. This contrasts with My Brother... Nikhil where discrimination becomes the driving force for instituting a gay identity that separates itself from ethnicity while conjoining with more global iterations of gay rights that are largely male- and middle class-centric. At a moment where gay rights in several parts of the world has become so eminently concentrated on marriage equality, AIDS activism no longer occupies centre stage as it did historically. Due to advances in medicine, living with HIV is no more the death sentence it was, but this is not a global phenomenon and access to healthcare, even in countries like the United States, leaves much to be desired for communities of colour and those who are low income. Dominic’s brand of activism is a reminder that acceptance cannot be narrowly defined.

I remember the last time we spoke. It was the only occasion Dominic said anything about his activist work to me. He mentioned an impending conference abroad. Suddenly, he was not just a friend I knew from the theatre, who laughed at my jokes, and empathised with me. He was someone whose influence touched the lives of people on the world stage.

Dominic, I did not get to say goodbye to you twenty years ago in May 1992 when you breathed your last in a Bombay hospital. I had hoped you were not that other Dominic, because it would mean losing you. But the world is a better place because you were in it. Not a day goes by that you are not remembered, my friend. Rest in peace...

To purchase a copy of Trikone, visit their website. This article has also been reprinted in the Summer 2013 issue of Pink Pages. Another article on the film My Brother... Nikhil appears in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Creative Communications.

"The Taste of Vinegar" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 15 September 2012)

“Business is good,” he said in reflective response to the question, “but it’s difficult to get vinegar.” Continuing the conversation in Konkani, the historian commented, “But you were getting a regular supply from Tony, no?” The restaurateur’s visage grew pensive as he remarked, “Tony died a few months back.” Pondering this, the professor solemnly said, “I didn’t know...”

The deceased Goan man was unknown to me, but I shared in this moment of loss along with the other four present. The group comprised of a colleague who is a prominent writer on Goa, the owner of the restaurant who had joined us during the course of our lunch, the historian – an eminent scholar of Goa and a long-time friend of my father’s, and his spouse. It was my first Goan meal on this my first trip to Lisbon where I had attended a conference. Preceding the visit I had felt ill at ease, but this sombre moment had the paradoxical effect of providing me with a sense of calm. Perspective, even.

As I prepared to journey to Portugal, I had felt the weight of history. I was the first in my family to make this trip. Neither of my parents, nor their parents before them, had ever been. The irony of this is that they had all, with the exception of my mother, been born Portuguese citizens of Goa. My mother’s British citizenship had been of an odd variety – as with other residents of colonial East Africa, there was no pretence that her circumscribed rights were on par with those of Britons in the colonizing homeland. Living in Britain, any contemplation I had of a familial history that linked me to the land of my residence was ambivalent at best. As it were, there were plenty of other reasons to reflect critically upon the post-imperial and still imperious British nation. However, Portugal presented a whole other set of challenges – far more personal and now unavoidable.

The meal at the Goan restaurant, nestled on a cobblestone Lisbon street, had been the tastiest one I had had in Portugal. My only experience with Portuguese cuisine had been the dishes my father had learned to prepare. Little did I know that his interpretation had been severely Goanized: lots of pepper and other spices flavour his bacalhau, for instance. I was surprised to find that the “authentic” version of these dishes were bland in comparison. If the Portuguese had journeyed to Goa five centuries ago in search of spices that would preserve food and mask the taste of decay in a time before refrigeration – an effort that led to Goa’s colonization – then contemporary Lisbon had foregone this history in serving up its less than piquant fare. 

 

And, yet, here was this motley group of Goans I found myself amongst in the postcolonial city, lamenting the loss of an erstwhile traveller. Like Vasco da Gama and de Albuquerque before him the Goan man had also journeyed. Clandestinely, he had ferried the flavours of Goa to the once imperial centre. Those bottles of vinegar - an elixir, so potent and integral to a way of life – retain the flavour of colonial history and make it relevant far away from home, wherever it may be.    

An online version appears here.

"There's Always a Loser" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 18 August 2012)

We watched the Olympics with bated breath. As a sportsperson came within tasting distance of a World Record, we hoped that they were going to break it. Collectively, we partook of this uniting fantasy that as a human race, we could get faster, higher, stronger. And, yet, the games, ironically, are simultaneously about bringing nations together and having them compete against one another. The determination of athletes – a trait common to competitors regardless of their origin – is less of what the spectacle of the Olympics represents than it does the biopower of competing countries and the opportunity for the host nation to showboat. It is a chance for nation-states to put on display the standards they have reached in development and human prowess. In this, there is a connection between the modern games and their ancient counterpart. It is believed that the purpose of the original Olympics was to serve as a trucial event, bringing together various competitive sectors of the Greek world. However, even so, it was a time for each of those regions to show off the best of their male citizenry, testifying to the strength and training of the manpower at the disposal of the patriarchal state.  Even as peaceful events, the Olympics are not without their statist purpose – there is something to be said about the equivalence between economic power and the investment necessary to support the infrastructure required to train and groom athletes. With the games having been hosted by Britain this year, an added connection can be made with the politics of empire and its afterlife.

The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics which showcased Britain’s culture and its historical achievements was titled “Isles of Wonder,” as inspired by Caliban’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A rather strange choice given that Caliban was Prospero’s slave in a play about racialized difference and colonial enterprise. Are the wondrous isles, then, England or those faraway lands it conquered? The Danny Boyle-directed Olympic extravaganza highlighted labour and industry as inherent to England’s historical trajectory. However, English history and culture cannot be separated from its imperial heritage. For example, the very raw materials that led to British prosperity came from elsewhere and the labour that transformed those resources was not always of English stock or from within the isles. 

1968

Events like the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which was celebrated a few months prior, allow the nation to cling to the vestiges of its past while filtering out the unsavoury bits of that chequered history. Challenged by multiculturalism and globalization, themselves products of a colonial history and mired in it, the once colonizer’s racial homogeneity and political hegemony find themselves in question. But the playing field has yet to be levelled. As flags fly and anthems ring in commemoration of victory, they are reminders that nationalism is not a cause championed solely on the battlefield. It is equally heralded in the steps across a finish line and the medal tally after a fortnight of sport among international, but not equally-equipped, adversaries. 

An online version of this article appears here.

"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.