"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 Past, Presently" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 July 2015)

On a recent visit to Singapore, I was reminded that the Portuguese had forayed into the region some years after their Malaccan encounter in the sixteenth century. In 1587, the Portuguese, led by Paulo de Lima Pereira, destroyed Johor Lama, the royal administrative centre of Temasek or Singapura, as it was then known. Returning to the present, 2015 is the year that the city-state of Singapore celebrates its 50^th anniversary as a modern nation, giving rise to many cultural programmes. Among them is the Singapore International Festival of Arts which will take place in August, and as a precursor to its main exhibition, the organisers hosted “The Open Participate Engage Negotiate” (O.P.E.N.) programme from 16 June to 4 July. According to the event brochure, since art festivals are so fleeting, the planners created O.P.E.N. to serve “as a popular academy … to transform attitudes, mindsets, knowledge and emotions…” To this end, the pre-festival included the work of Bangalore-based visual artist Pushpamala N. Using José Veloso Salgado’s 1898 painting “Vasco da Gama perante o Samorim” as her inspiration, Pushpamala N. recreates the orientalist canvas depicting the Portuguese navigator’s first meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut, in 1498, as a photograph. While nearly identical to Salgado’s portrayal of the historic moment, Pushpamala N.’s remake, titled “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama”, departs significantly in that not only are all the figures in her image, including the Portuguese, ‘played’ by South Asians, but also in that it is a self-portrait. The artist herself occupies the role of da Gama.

Painted four centuries after da Gama’s audience with the Zamorin, Salgado’s painting conveys the significance of the incident, not least because of the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to the Indies. Yet, rendered at a point in history when Portuguese colonial power had rapidly been declining, Salgado’s representation of the legendary episode was meant to function nostalgically as a reminder of past glory. In so doing, the picture also reimagines the past, for the Zamorin is said to have been less than impressed with the goods da Gama brought along for the purposes of trade. As for Pushpamala N.’s recasting of Salgado’s depiction, the artist’s use of South Asian bodies, including her own, to people the tableau, strives to centre the colonised, postcolonially. By cross-dressing as da Gama, Pushpamala N. deliberately genders the colonial past, and asks how women, while absent from Salgado’s memorialisation of historical events, might be returned to the scene. Replacing da Gama’s body with her own, Pushpamala N. enquires into the impact colonisation had on those subjects who were part of the milieu in which Salgado’s painting is set, even as their presence is erased.

However, in noting the “feminist commentary” Pushpamala N. offers through her photograph, critic Mayo Martin remains wary of how successful the artist is at dismantling “the original painting’s politics”, given that “[w]hile an Indian cast … take on the roles of the ‘Portuguese’, the ‘Indians’ are, well, still Indians. And it’s still a face-off” (Today, 26 June, 2015). What Martin zeroes in on is an excess of identity in the artwork – an overdetermined ‘Indianness'. But it is precisely because the Indianness in the tableau still settles into a dichotomy that one must question why this is so. A postcolonial rendition of an allegedly successful endeavour, as put on display at a programme hosted in conjunction with the 50^th anniversary of a nation, Pushpamala N.’s meta-image at O.P.E.N. links oceanic histories and places nationalism in tandem with historical fiction. Nevertheless, how effective is the piece in deconstructing the replication of power hierarchies even when the coloniser is removed from the picture?

To answer this query, I turn to the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor's speech last week at the Oxford Union. In it, Tharoor, who hails from Kerala – coincidentally the coast upon which da Gama met the Zamorin – argued that Britain owed India reparations for having impoverished the region which, prior to the arrival of the English, had been on the rise economically. Apart from retroactively imagining a precolonial Indian ‘nation’, Tharoor, much like Salgado's painting, conjures up a mythical past worthy of celebration. For Tharoor, therefore, the problem is solely colonisation, with no mind paid to such matters as caste divisions that not only predated the colonial era, but also continued on and still exist even after the exit of the Europeans. The parallel with Pushpamala N.’s installation, then, and its inability to erase difference in postcolonially representing oppression, is that both Tharoor and the artist fail to see how Indianness is quite capable of sustaining its own hierarchies with little to no assistance from elsewhere. Colonisation may have added other shades of oppression, but the canvas of the past was never pristine to begin with.

From The Goan.

"Golden Men, Tigers, and Jewels" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 2 March 2013)

In Oscar-winning Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), based on Yann Martell’s novel of the same name, an Indian boy reverses Christopher Columbus’ fifteenth century oceanic journey by travelling to the west from the “Indies,” but finds himself in the middle of nowhere, instead. That nowhereness is signified by the strange island that Pi arrives at in the course of his perilous voyage with Richard Parker - the Bengal tiger he is saddled with and tames while lost at sea. The island, populated by meerkats, sustains by day and kills by night – its inlet waters turning toxic. Pi is to discover later that the unpeopled island features on no known map.

Columbus’ own unmapped wanderings “about the Caribbean in search of India” are referred to in Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995) as having caused the explorer to “[write] home to say that the ancient mariners had erred in thinking the earth was round. Rather, he said, it was shaped like a woman’s breast...” In likening Columbus to a lost infant seeking “a cosmic breast,” McClintock identifies “the female body ... as marking ... the limits of the known world...” She adroitly analyzes the European encounter with the “New World” as one replete with a coeval anxiety of the loss of and desire for “the female body,” which is at once maternal and erotic. 

Women’s bodies were as much the metaphor of exploratory longing as the theme that caused this year’s Oscars to hit an all time low. The 85th Academy Awards opened with the song “We Saw Your Boobs” - vexing for many reasons, not least the undermining of professional women by a still largely white boys’ club. That the song was sung by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, only further proves how the pursuit for mainstream acceptance can devolve into a minstrel show of insensitivity to other minorities. Breasts, it would seem, continue to denote the confusion men have with shifting boundaries, both in the landscape of the film industry and in commerce generally. Note Oscar host Seth MacFarlane’s conflation of xenophobia and misogyny in a joke that simultaneously acknowledges and belittles gender and ethnic diversity when he said of Salma Hayek that it mattered little if she could be understood or not, because “she’s hot.”

The incestuousness inherent within Columbus’ hunt for the elusive feminized unknown was intensified by “dreams of pepper and pearls,” McClintock adds, combining the allure of rare foreign goods with domestic necessity. It is reminiscent of the quest for spices and converts by Columbus’ contemporary Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer who did find the sea route to India in 1498, leading to Goa’s later conquest by Afonso de Albuquerque. And while the Prime Minister of a certain island refused to return that famous crown jewel to the former jewel in the crown, David Cameron’s visit last month made it quite clear that the desire for the erstwhile Indies has not tarnished. No doubt, globalization has added sparkle to India’s brand as its economic fortunes experience a sea-change. The island Pi “discovers” is like this rediscovered India - it could never be unknown. Its existence is already prefigured, first by the colonial past and, then, globalization. Life of Pi is quintessentially emblematic of the latter, what with its having been written by a French Canadian, directed by a Taiwanese American, centred on a French-named Indian boy and a Bengal tiger with a British moniker, who are lost at sea upon the sinking of their ship – a Japanese vessel headed for North America. The course is set and new jewels are up for grabs.

To see this article in its original appearance, click here.