"The History of My Squiggle" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (12 June 2016)

What’s in a name? Or rather, the accent that goes into its making? A little squiggle can say so much.

The family tree creation website I am a member of, notified me that I had received a message. Checking my inbox, I saw that the email had come from someone with an impressively hyphenated surname, its many syllables redolent of nineteenth century colonial literature where such elaborate appellations were markers of aristocratic marriage alliances between suitably matched houses. Intrigued, I opened the electronic missive expecting a reconnection with a long lost relative with an illustrious past. Alas, the message, shorter even than the name of its sender, made up in temerity what it lacked in length. “It should be Ferrão”, my would-be patrician relative informed (nose turned up in the air, I imagined), referring to my online rendering of my last name sans tilde.

I shall come to reveal the secret of the missing accent soon, but permit me a while to reminisce about my personal acquaintance with that little squiggle that adorns my name. When I was eight, in preparation for sending me off to boarding school in India, my parents labelled all my things with my name. Though they said it was to protect against theft, it was perhaps their way of reminding me that they were still with me, despite the distance. At school, I would often look at the indelible ink on the inside of my shirt collars and recall my dad’s efforts. His oldest sister, who had dropped by to see me off, decided to stay and help my parents out. Entrusted with writing my own name in the books that I would be taking to school, I busied myself with the task, careful not to make a mistake while trying to impress my aunt who was watching my penmanship.

“You missed something”. I looked up quizzically. Relieving me of book and pen, my aunt added the little wavy line above our family name. “There”, she announced. “Now, you’re done”. Although I had seen the curlicue mark before, it had never dawned on me that it was actually part of my name. It certainly hadn’t been covered in cursive writing class. “What is it?” I enquired of my aunt. “It’s called a tilde”, she explained, “and when you see it over the letter ‘a’ which is next to an ‘o’, you know you have to say those two letters together through your nose. Like this”. She demonstrated, and I laughed at the funny sound she made. I had met my tilde for the first time and I decided that I liked the miniscule chap.

For Goans, especially those with a Catholic heritage residing outside Goa, it is not an uncommon experience to encounter folks who wonder at the seeming disjunction between the colour of our skin and the Europeanness of our names. And yet, even Iberian culture is not without its own miscegeny, what with the over seven century presence of the Moors on the peninsula resulting in such monikers as Almodôvar and Fátima, among others. Nonetheless, Goan names are exactly that. Even as these names may have their roots in histories of colonialism and conversion, in the same way that Goans have adapted Catholicism in uniquely local ways, so too have Portuguese names come to signify endemically Goan culture. For instance, in Goa, when one hears the name ‘Vasco’, it hardly conjures up the plume-hatted European navigator of José Veloso Salgado’s 1898 painting, Vasco da Gama perante o Samorim.

The worldwide ubiquity of the English language has meant that, for many, the skill of vocalizing the nasalized sounds so common in Portuguese is one that takes practice. In turn, this has manifested in the dropping of diacritical marks in the written version of once-sonorous Portuguese words and names, out of convenience and custom. But I would argue that Anglicization has also influenced technology. And to illustrate my point, I must come now to my confession of how I lost my tilde. To my interlocutor, the one who wrote to enquire after my missing online accent, know that it was not misplaced and that I have been aware of its place in my name for some time now. Rather, its disappearance was due to the fact that I am a luddite. I did not know how to use my computer’s keyboard to bend into shape the 451 years of Portuguese colonization that produced the squiggle that my Goan family proudly made its own.

From The Goan.

"The Scribe and the Nun" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (15 May 2016)

A writer of history and a prison-reformer leave behind legacies to contemplate even as they are no more. 

It is true that I knew neither, not the Scribe nor the Nun, except through the legacies they left behind. Both worked with or within structures. For the Scribe, an architectural historian, buildings were culture writ in stone. And for the Nun, the walls of a prison were not what defined its inmates.

Born in 1941 in Arusha, Kenya, the Nun was an educator whose service brought her to Goa, the land of her peoples. Though a participant in causes around India, she is probably best remembered for her work at the storied Aguada Central Jail. They called her the Angel of the Prisoners. Tying together a desire to improve the natural environment with a passion for prison reform, in 2000 the Nun involved the prisoners in an anti-plastic bag drive. The People’s Movement for Civic Action, a group that campaigned against the use of plastic bags, were recruited by the Nun to train prisoners in the skill of recycling newspapers into paper bags. Unenthusiastic at first, due to the low wages associated with such work and not least because of their situation, the prisoners came around when the Nun explained that this training might potentially increase their employability upon their release. But the Nun did more than this by advocating for a reduction in sentences: each set of a thousand bags crafted by a prisoner would lead to his prison-time being shortened by two days. Prison authorities noted that other reforms that the Nun instituted at the jail, such as music and literacy classes, as well as mediation practice, promoted a calming effect. Inmates were less stressed at court hearings, for instance.

While the Nun’s work took place within, for the Scribe the importance of structures derived from their interplay with history. Born in 1952 of Portuguese origin, in addition to writing about Goan architecture, the Scribe also spent time in Goa. In his scholarship of Goan architecture, and in particular that of churches, the Scribe saw in Goan structures of the late colonial period that they could not merely be understood as having imbibed the style of the metropole. Even as it notes that Goan architecture might participate in the use of European aesthetics, the Scribe’s book, Whitewash, Red Stone (2011), sees Goan architecture as being of its own ilk – not a European copy, but uniquely Goan. In establishing stylistic norms, these structures demonstrated institutional power, and that of their elite, in their own local milieu. This counters easy assumptions of the lack of agency in colonial contexts while simultaneously demonstrating the complexity of native hierarchies of authority that did not rely solely on the imprimatur of the coloniser. Structures for the Scribe, then, were not only about edifices, but also how they functioned as metaphors of institutionality.

At the nexus of how the Scribe and the Nun saw structures was in the ability of architecture to render meaning. Evidence of European design outside of Europe need not mean that a Goan church is simply mimicking a foreign style. Rather, the Scribe would have us see such a manifestation of aesthetics as being not only about power, but also the creation of European stylistic culture beyond the limits of geography. In other words, the making of European style can occur outside Europe itself, but its uses are definitively local and germane to the settings of their creation. For the Nun, on the other hand, a structure cannot define its occupants even as it constrains their freedom. The prisoner is no less human based on his or her incarceration. In being invested in prisoner reform, the Nun was, even if indirectly, being critical of the function of prisons which seek only to criminalise and never to rehabilitate. The Nun’s work not only extended to the education of the average inmate, but also advocacy on behalf of those serving life sentences. She saw more for them than the structural confinement of their jail cells.

Paulo Varela Gomes, the Scribe, died at the end of April after battling cancer. Reverend Sister Mary Jane Pinto, the Nun, breathed her last on the twentieth of the same month. The Scribe and the Nun may be no more, but their work on and in Goan structures is a legacy that allows for future possibilities in how we think about architecture and meaning making, of space and confinement, and style and power. May they rest in peace.

 

From The Goan.

"Looking for Phoenicia Street, 1969" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - March 2016)

Beirut, then and now. A son looks for where his father had lived and finds other histories in a haunted present. 

It was the year my parents would marry in Kuwait. In the 1960s, as Goa was annexed by India and the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, signalled the growth of the oil-based Middle Eastern economy, many Goans made their way to the Gulf states due to the rise of employment opportunities there. The American company my father would be employed by for two decades sent him to Lebanon as a trainee in 1969, shortly before my mother would join him in Kuwait, the country where my sister and I would be born.  

Nearly a half-century later, I try to locate the street on which my dad had worked and lived. He had always remembered Beirut fondly, a single twenty-something, then, out in the world on his own for the first time. As a friend and I make our way past the weekend crowd, enjoying views of the Mediterranean from the Corniche, the January sun glints off the windows of the towering Phoenician Hotel to our right. “Middle of the road as you start up on the slope”, my dad had instructed on WhatsApp, in response to my query of how far his office building might be in relation to the hotel that shares its name with the street he had called home. On our left, by the edge of Zaitunay Bay, the once glamorous St. George Hotel, now hollowed out, stands mutely as testament to Beirut’s heyday, its Golden Age. Previously damaged during the civil war, the hotel was the site of the 2005 car-bomb blast that killed then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A large banner cuts across its otherwise silent façade like a scream: “Stop Solidere”, it implores, in reference to the company at the helm of redeveloping downtown Beirut, but clearly not without controversy. 

As I look for Phoenicia Street, its name recalling this country’s even more distant legendary past, I cannot help but think of that mythical bird reborn of the ashes, and wonder about Beirut’s future, its present so at odds with my father’s recollection of his youthful years in the city. In the midst of growing political instability, Syrians and Palestinians continue to seek refuge in Lebanon, these contemporary crises of displacement layered on already uncertain ground. ISIS, the Israeli occupation, and then the November 2015 bombing in southern Beirut that was eclipsed by news of the Paris attacks that same month. Refugee crises have fast become the most apparent political problem of this second decade of the 21^st century, especially as many nations, such as Australia, have balked at taking in the world’s homeless. Yet, ironically, Lebanon has been the shelter of its politically displaced neighbours while dealing with its own instability.

On another day, a young boy follows me as I walk over to Café Younis in Hamra where I was to meet some friends. When my father lived here, this was one of his haunts. He would frequent its cafes with friends he had made from all over the Middle East and other parts of the globe. “Syrian, Syrian”, the lad said, attempting to catch my attention. “Hungry”, he whispered, a shoeshine box in one hand. The vibrant multicultural city was once known as the Paris of the East. Now, its cosmopolitanness is bred from other causes. It is with these lines that the seminal postcolonial text Orientalism (1978) opens: “On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown that ‘it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.’ He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity…” Even as he exemplifies the Beirut of the past as the epitome of how the West imagines the East, the late Palestinian American writer Edward Said captures the ephemerality of a city lost, one still immersed in its own pain.

Of the impossibility of knowing these ghosts in the way only the haunted can, Said goes on to say, “Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering…” As if in illustration of Said’s observation of the juxtaposition of the fantastic past with the tumultuous present, the former somehow made more cognizable than the critical nature of reality, in the erstwhile Phoenician city of Tyre, millennia-old ruins stand monumentally in South Lebanon, almost rendering invisible the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp of modern provenance. 

In Beirut city, amidst the newly rising buildings, there are creative signs of dissent. A stencil of an Anonymous mask on one wall, flowers bursting out of a rifle held by a gunman on another. As I wonder how long these bold displays of public art might last, I continue to confer with my dad who is in Goa. “There was a coffee shop outside”, he advises via messenger, attempting to orientate me. But the company building seems to be non-existent. I ask a few locals. No one has heard of it. I look around to see newer buildings, their silhouettes sharply contrasting with the older architecture of the 60s and 70s, invariably pock-marked with evidence of the civil war. A few blocks further, the ravaged Holiday Inn of the infamous “battle of the hotels” looms inhospitably. “I saw it go up in flames from my balcony”, a Lebanese American friend later finds occasion to convey when we talk about my trip and memories of her childhood. “My landlady must be dead by now. She was in her 60s, then”, dad tells me on the phone when we speak. He had also tried to contact a Lebanese friend he knew to show me around, only to discover that the man and his family were long gone. I had found Phoenicia Street, but it was no longer 1969.

From India Currents. Another version also appears in The Goan.

"For King and Country" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (6 March 2016)

It has been twenty five years since the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. The event continues to resonate internationally, especially given recent events in India. 

The 3^rd of March, 2016 marked the 25^th anniversary of the late Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police officers. Over a year later in May 1992, the tumultuous scenes of civil unrest in Los Angeles could not have felt any closer to home, even as my family and I watched them on the television in Goa. The newscaster offered a recap of the story that we had been following intently since April. Tensions had flared in the aftermath of the verdict in the King beating trial. Despite videotaped evidence by George Holliday who lived near where the beating had taken place, the jury exonerated the policemen responsible for violently assaulting the black motorist. The acquitted policemen, as well as the jury, had been all white. In a year, we would be emigrating to the United States. Los Angeles was our destination. And, like King, my first name is Rodney.

King was so much a part of my consciousness that I would often introduce myself as “Rodney… You know… like King? Rodney King?” I needed the added qualification because, as I was told on more than one occasion, it was odd that someone of my racial background would have “a name like that.” In a city as diverse as Los Angeles, multiculturalism does not equate with awareness or the lack of segregation, and the same could be said for the many places I have called home across the world, India included.

During the unrest, when King famously made his televised plea for the people of his city to “get along,” his statement became the stuff of legendary ridicule. Was it that the notion of co-existing amicably was so simplistic, or that the sentiment had come from an ordinary black man with a rap sheet who had been beaten by the police? What the incident had done was to raise questions about police brutality and whose rights the keepers of the peace were protecting. For South Asian Americans, among members of other ethnic communities, similar issues of racial profiling and civil rights violations rose to a crescendo in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. Racial injustice may not be unique to any one minority group, but it is this very ubiquity of violence that should make us more mindful of its existence, as well as the role the state plays in using violence to undermine the rights of minorities. 

Echoes of the legacy of King’s beating can be heard 25 years later in the contemporary United States where the Black Lives Matters movement continues to draw attention to the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. Similarly, the movement incited by the January death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in India has underscored how state-backed educational institutions perpetuate upper caste privilege while turning a blind eye to the plight of Dalit students. It is no coincidence that in the Vemula moment, charges of anti-nationalism have been levied against those on campuses that have been allegedly involved in questioning abuses of state power. Even so, it is essential to note that current discussions of political dissent and freedom of speech cannot stand in for the struggles of Kashmiris or Dalits.    

King’s arrest still resonates internationally 25 years later as evidence of how it is often the targets of state violence who bear the brunt of having to prove their victimisation. If even after his death, there continue to be efforts to depoliticise Vemula’s suicide through ludicrous claims by the police that he was not actually Dalit, there are parallels to be drawn to the fashion in which Black victims of police violence in the United States find themselves having to prove their lack of criminality. In her article “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia” (1993), Judith Butler explains how King’s body was made synonymous with a threat that required policing to ensure white safety. Similarly in India, Dalit bodies become the site of recognition of upper caste privilege; in effect, saying Vemula may not have been Dalit attempts to reduce upper caste culpability in his death. 

While King’s beating highlighted the racialised nature of state-sponsored violence, it was never his intention to be a cause célèbre. “Long after your case is closed, you are going to have to be Rodney King for the rest of your life. Do you think you can handle that?” attorney Steven Lerman had asked his client, the Los Angeles Times reported in a story following King’s death in 2012. “Steve, I just don’t know,” King replied. The article also quotes an earlier interview in which King mused, “People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks … But it's hard to live up to some people's expectations...” King was an ordinary man upon whom national attention had been thrust. Yet, 25 years later, his story still bears relevance. The same will be true of Rohith Vemula, an ordinary man whose mind was “a glorious thing made up of stardust”, a young person who could not live long enough to see things change, but one who hoped his death would not be in vain.

From The Goan.