"Ivy-Covered Canvas" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (17 October 2015)

When I heard of Ivy Muriel da Fonseca’s demise on 1 September, 2015, it struck me how little I knew of her. The Goan edition of The Times of India delivered notice of her passing with the introductory words that she was the “widow of the late Indian Christian Cultural Renaissance artiste Angelo da Fonseca…” (6 September 2015). The article then goes on to report how the artist “was virtually hounded out of Goa following severe criticism for painting Christian themes with Indian settings,” and most notably “the Virgin Mary with a kunbi sari.” It is only then that we are told of Ivy da Fonseca’s education and professional life as a teacher, before the piece ends just as it had begun by returning to her artist-husband in whom “there has been a renewed interest … with exhibitions both in India and abroad.” While it would be easy to underscore how the article does little to shed light on da Fonseca’s life outside of casting her as the mate of her more famous husband, it is more useful to consider how the obituary is actually quite indicative of the Goan relationship to art.

Writing about the recent record-breaking sales of paintings by Francisco Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde, an article by Arti Das in The Navhind Times (26 September 2015) notes how it is only external recognition that brings local awareness to art by Goans. And, yet, while tellingly titled “Valued the World Over, Forgotten at Home – Goa’s most Prized Bardezkars”, Das’ piece about the two deceased painters, who are worthy of all the attention they get, leaves out that other still living artist of Bardez, Lisbon, and Maputo, Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to meet with Navelcar at his home in Pomburpa. An octogenarian, the painter’s recall of the past is remarkable. I asked him about the details of his life as recorded in Anne Ketteringham’s biography Vamona Navelcar: An Artist of Three Continents (2013), and was told of his times in the geographies alluded to in the book’s title: Asia, Europe, and Africa. “I should have never come back to Goa”, Navelcar confided. “It was my biggest mistake…”

These stinging words stayed with me, and I shared them a few days later with the Aldona artist Conrad Pinto. “He would feel that way”, Pinto mused, alluding to the lack of infrastructure in Goa for art appreciation. This sentiment is echoed by the late journalist Joel D’Souza who, in an important Goa Today article titled “Goans’ Art Grandeur” (December 2012), traces contemporary Goan art history and the unique trajectories of Goan style, only to come to the conclusion that, in Goa, art is “the pleasure of the art lover’s alone” (p. 24). With this, D’Souza points to the lack of institutional support for Goan artists; even so, he also highlights the need for the enjoyment of art to be a community practice that is not solely in the purview of those classes that frequent galleries or have the monetary ability to own art that is displayed in the exclusive confines of their homes. 

And this is precisely where Ivy da Fonseca’s contribution is forgotten.

From my conversations with art historian, painter, and writer Savia Viegas, I learned of da Fonseca’s championing of her husband’s legacy. The one thing that the aforementioned TOI article does get right is that da Fonseca was formidable, “an iron lady” the piece calls her. Art critics note that it was after his wife that Angelo da Fonseca modelled his brown Madonna, to borrow Viegas’ term (Himal Southasian, August 2010), but had it not been for her sheer audacity in reclaiming her husband’s works, many of the canvases that are now available for public viewership in Goa might not have readily been part of the public domain. As much as she was “in” da Fonseca’s canvas – his inspiration – she was also the woman who continued to keep his work in the public eye long after he had passed away. 

The brilliance of da Fonseca’s work lies not just in his depiction of biblical themes in South Asian hues, but in bringing together the sacred with the ordinary in likening the Madonna to his earthly wife. It was because of his plebeian browning of the Madonna’s skin that da Fonseca courted ire. da Fonseca chose to represent his own community in his art, and so it is only fitting that his works be enjoyed in Goa for it is part of our heritage. Ivy da Fonseca’s role in making this happen should aid the recognition that she was not merely muse nor just the artist’s wife, but a purveyor of culture and an individual in her own right.    

From The Goan.

"Of Ghana and Goa" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (4 October 2015)

That East Africa figures quite commonly in literature from and about Goa is evidence of how the presence of the Goan diaspora in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now Tanzania) has influenced the socio-cultural imagination of a tiny region. In turn, this proves that its size notwithstanding, Goa has long been connected to many parts of the world. At the recently concluded conference “Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge”, organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies, a Netherlands-based entity, and hosted at the University of Ghana, Legon (24-26 September, 2015), I presented a paper on the place of Goa and Goans in the literary connections between the two continents. In so doing, I wished to draw attention to how the continent of Africa had played a role in the Portuguese coming to and, then, leaving Goa. It struck me during my time in Accra that though much can be said about the Goan-East African nexus, the case is less so for how one might think of Goa’s associations with other parts of the continent, and with West Africa in particular.

Although the first of its kind, the Africa-Asia academic conference no doubt harked back to the Bandung Conference of 1955, especially since this year marks the 60^th anniversary of the meeting that was the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Of the twenty-nine African and Asian nations that participated in the Indonesian conference, some were newly independent, including India. The major focus of the Bandung meeting were deliberations over the solidarity of Third World nations; how might they be champions of peace in the era of decolonization and also in relation to the beginnings of the Cold War period?  Though the spirit of Bandung began to dissipate by the 1960s, it was an important moment of South-South collaborations. 

 

In contrast, the academic conference I participated in seemed to focus more on economic prowess in today’s Afro-Asiatic relations, and notably China’s growing participation in various African industries, including construction and finance. Nonetheless, there were also presentations on the influence of multiculturality and globalization on cultural production and social relations. This was demonstrated in the research of scholars working on convergences between Indian and Nigerian filmmaking and film-viewership, but also by those studying South Asian diasporic communities in Ghana and elsewhere. Indeed, what was made apparent in following these various strands of the conference was how even the examination of South-South relationships are still haunted by contemporary Western influence or the colonial past. So, for instance, China’s current role in Africa is generally seen as being akin to US international involvement, while the afterlife of diasporic movement – particularly in South Asian-African contexts – is largely regarded within circuits once prescribed by British coloniality.

Perhaps Goa’s ties with Africa offer alternative lines of consideration. Not only was Goa a conduit between Portuguese and British India, but Goans also journeyed for work to both Portuguese and British Africa. But prior to such transit which became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Portuguese had already been deeply entrenched in the African slave trade, with both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans being employed for that purpose. As a result, African slaves were brought to Portuguese India, and their bloodlines and descendants continue to be part of our heritage, despite our penchant for racialized colourism and casteism. 

At the end of the colonial period, Africa also played a part in ending Portuguese colonization in Goa. In West Africa, Angola had begun agitating against the Portuguese in 1961, a year of much import to Goa. Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were soon to follow suit. It was also in 1961 that Nehru came to formally institute NAM, along with Kwame Nkrumah – independent Ghana’s first Prime Minister – along with leaders from other nations. Pressured by leaders of the anti-colonial movement in Africa who asked Nehru to take action against the Portuguese in Goa because it would abet the decolonization of Luso-Africa, India’s first Prime Minister launched an attack on the region in December 1961. While it had been the intention of African leadership to see the end of Portuguese colonization in Asia, Nehru’s military action not only delimited Goan self-determination, but also annexed Goa to the existing Indian nation-state. 

In these decades after the end of European colonization in Africa and Asia, and even as globalization brings in new forms of power hierarchies, perhaps it is time to rethink South-South relations along other axes of knowledge. While accounting for the importance of economics, trade, and politics, there is also a rich terrain of history, literature, culture, and community that deserves consideration. As the Goan example highlights, even a small place can reveal the complexities of intercontinental associations that run on multiple levels while offering perspectives on the past and direction for the future.

From The Goan.

"The Saint who Wasn't" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (20 September 2015)

While the controversy that had brewed earlier in the year has quieted down, there has already been a renewal of some of the disagreement in reaction to the Pope’s forthcoming canonization of Junípero Serra in the United States. The sainting of the eighteenth century missionary on 23^rd September at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. is in keeping with what Sylvia Poggioli, National Public Radio correspondent, describes as “an effort to restore the historical balance away from [the] ‘Anglo-centric’ interpretation of U.S. history to the importance of Catholic missions” (npr.org: 16 September, 2015). One might liken this to a rethinking of South Asian history that takes into consideration the colonial influence on the subcontinent by not only the British, but also the Portuguese. Similarly, the defining of the United States as a once British colony, heavily inclined towards Protestantism, has caused the Spanish and Catholic past of North America to be relegated to a historical footnote. 

Indeed, it is noteworthy that the Church’s first Latin American Pope is to give the United States its first Hispanic saint. This, even as it must be pointed out that the Pope’s ethnic origins are Italian, and that the term ‘Hispanic’ cannot be used interchangeably for ‘Latino’. The former is a term meant to refer to those of Spanish heritage, and is often erroneously deployed to label those of Latin American origins. What should be gleaned from this is that even as Serra’s canonization recalls the non-British past of the colonization of the United States, it continues to highlight the European figures of that past. Given the many radical changes the Pope has wrought in modernizing the Church, dramatically changing public perceptions of the institution, Serra is a peculiar choice for canonization. 

Serra, a Franciscan friar, came from Spain to California to evangelize, founding its first missions in the eighteenth century. Writing for the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), Jamie Manson notes that Serra “is credited by the Catholic church for proselytizing and baptizing the indigenous people”, but that “[his] story is laced with disturbing details…” (ncronline.org: 16 September, 2015). It is not Serra’s holiness – a prerequisite for sainthood – that Manson questions. Rather, in quoting the views of Elias Castillo, author of the book Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions (2015), as well as Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians, Manson states that “Serra was a religious zealot whose primary purpose was to save the souls of the indigenous, whom he saw as savages in desperate need of salvation…” Also writing for NCR, Vinnie Rotondaro chronicles how Native American objectors to Serra’s canonization “point to the rampant death that occurred inside the missions – where thousands perished, crammed into poor living quarters with disease running wild – and say that Serra was so blinded by his belief in his faith and his people’s superiority that he focused more on baptizing Indians than tending to their suffering” (15 September, 2015).

For Goans, it would be rather easy to see the parallels between Serra and fellow-Spaniard St. Francis Xavier. Yet, it would be a false equivalence to liken the conversion of Goans to the plight of indigenous Americans. The throngs at last year’s Exposition indicate the continuing relevance of Xavier to Goan Catholics. Certainly, like Serra, Xavier is remembered by history as having been involved in the subjugation of the indigenous through the nexus between Church and state. It is not their personal piety that is in doubt here, but their unwitting sponsorship of persecution. However, evolving scholarship must also be accounted for when it comes to Goa’s Iberian past, and especially in the context of the Inquisition. Yes, Xavier was responsible for its initiation, but whether it was as repressive as common lore has made it out to be is the subject of contemporary debate. Further, conversion to Catholicism in South Asia was not without some degree of choice. For those that chose to escape the yoke of the caste system, conversion was an expression of agency rather than external force. 

As he did on his visit to Bolivia earlier this year, the Pope is expected to apologize for the part played by the Church in the oppression of indigenous peoples in North America. But this apology is going to be a tone-deaf one in that Serra’s canonization is an institutional choice rather than a popular one. That Goans, Catholic and otherwise, still revere Xavier, for example, underscores how so many centuries later he has come to represent an icon who was adopted by a people. The same is not true of Serra.        

From  The Goan.

"Not your Child" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (6 September 2015)

His name is Aylan Kurdi. The picture of this lifeless child on a Turkish beach became a recurring image in news stories and posts on social media last week. Consider that there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who has lost a child. Language fails in being able to grasp the enormity of such grief. But it is not for images to speak a thousand words to fill this void, especially when tragedy such as this should not be for the purposes of public sharing. The virality of the image became a way to take ownership over the child’s body as an object of grief – available to any and everyone who could have access to it. To see it was to partake in a personal exercise of commiseration without needing to attend to the profoundly larger matter that had caused this misfortune. The universal distribution and consumption of the image was an act of refusal to see Aylan as a person whose death was the direct result of the fact that he was Syrian rather than just any three-year-old whose life had ended much too soon. In this very hyper-visibility, Aylan has been rendered invisible. 

It is the sharing of the image that has made this tragic event extraordinary. And even as it brings newfound awareness to the Syrian refugee crisis, it can be guaranteed that this attention will only be fleeting because it revolves around the desire to quell the anguish felt upon the loss of an innocent child. In evoking the innocence of a now-dead child, the distressing image both underscores this horror as being unique while at the same time universalizing the child as a symbol of colour-blind humanity. In other words, it is Aylan’s very Syrianness that disappears in the image of his death being made quantifiable as personalised grief, but also then being made spectacular for the very same reason. The problem with spectacle is that its newness will always fade, for it is only spectacle in its ability to appeal and, so, be consumed. 

Conversely, there is nothing spectacular about the Syrian refugee crisis, especially because refugee crises have become so rife that one cannot tell apart the fleeing Rohingya from the beleaguered Tamils or displaced Palestinians. These days, one cannot differentiate Manus Island from Calais or a Turkish beach. They blend into one another as borders close against the hopeless homeless. These geographies blur in how media apprises us of the fracturing of the worlds of the displaced and in how we now expect to come to awareness through the mundane being made phenomenal. Three-year-olds die in such circumstances all the time, even when we do not see their bodies. But that a three-year-old has to die to be seen is not any kind of solution.

In verse that has now become widely quoted, the Kenyan-born Somali British poet Warsan Shire provides this assessment in the ironically named poem “Home”: 

You have to understand,  

No one puts their children in a boat  

Unless the water is safer than the land. 

Children, Shire notes – as in the plural; the many whose namelessness is a metaphor for their homelessness. The multiple on-going refugee crises that vie for our attention are occurrences that can only be described as being profoundly contemporary. In Guests and Aliens (1999), scholar of globalisation, Saskia Sassen, perceives the rise of the post-World War I nation-state as being a location predicated upon the exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’. In her words, “nationalism [was] associated with states seeking sovereign control over their territories ... The coupling of state sovereignty and nationalism with border control made the ‘foreigner’ an outsider. The state was correspondingly able to define refugees as not belonging to the national society, as not being entitled to the rights of citizens” (p. 78). That Aylan perished in liminal waters reveals the dangers of land that Shire remarks upon. Only this time, it is not the former homeland that is the solely perilous site, but also the exclusionary shores yonder.

As a preamble to sharing her own literary work at an event today, my colleague Hermine Pinson began by reading to her audience the poem “blessing the boats” by African American writer Lucille Clifton (1936-2010). For me, the words of Clifton’s hopeful poem were a salve to the searing image so glibly shared of the drowned child: 

may the tide 

that is entering even now

… carry you out 

beyond the face of fear

... open your eyes to water 

water waving forever 

and may you in your innocence 

sail through this to that

There is promise beyond the waters, Clifton tells us, echoing Shire’s observation that “No one puts their children in a boat / Unless the water is safer than the land.” An innocent child tried to “sail through this to that”. He was claimed by the waters outside the borders, outside ourselves. His name is Aylan Kurdi. He is not the only one.

From The Goan.