Sampling the Banquet 

Once in a Goa Book Club online discussion, Margaret Mascarenhas wondered whether there was such a class of literature called Goan literature. She is a US-born, Venezuelan-raised writer of Goan origin, who has published two novels, Skin (2001) and The Disappearance Irene Dos Santos (2009).

Skin is about a character named Pagan of mixed parentage and her quest for identity, which lands her from California to Goa where her grandmother’s roots lie. The novel is flawed in that the author relies on too many coincidences to get out of dilemmas posed in the plot.

Her other novel is set in Venezuela. Hence I understand why she would discount the notion of Goan literature because both her novels would not fit my definition of Goan literature. To me, literature reflects the life and culture of a people in a particular place. So stories set in Goa dealing with the lives of Goans, their culture and predicaments would meet the test of Goan literature.

That’s a long preamble for this essay that will focus on long fiction (novels) in English. I’ll have a paragraph or two on the novels I’ve read, culled from the reviews I’ve written. I’ll conclude with my comments on Goan poetry in English.

Following the end of the Portuguese colonial rule over Goa in1961, a number of Goan writers published novels and short stories, contributing to a growing body of Goan literature in English.

Francisco Luis Gomes (1829-1869) was the first Goan to publish a novel titled Os Brahamanes (The Brahmans) in 1866. The Brahmans is a story of inter-caste and inter-racial love, faith and sacrifice. Gomes used the novella as a vehicle to articulate his deeply felt views of liberalism, a philosophy of liberty, equality and fraternity that inspired the French Revolution of 1789. The author is said to have been inspired by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose echoes resonate in the novella. I found the quality of writing rather flowery and prone to hyperbole, in keeping with the Romantic tradition.

In 1955 Lambert Mascarenhas (b.1914 and still living in Dona Paula, Goa) published his well-received Sorrowing Lies My Land. The novel covers the time span from roughly 1910 to about 1950. It is a political novel whose message is that the people of Goa under the Portuguese rule were denied basic civil rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, and those who protested were quickly punished or imprisoned.

The limitations of the first person narrative, especially from the point of view of a young boy, dilute the dramatic impact of the action in the second half. Although the reader is aware that it is the author speaking in the guise of the boy, the conflict is rendered less acute nonetheless.

Then there was Orlando da Costa (1929-2006), of mixed parentage, Margao origin, who published O Signo da Ira (The Sign of Wrath) in 1961. Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (b. 1925) in an essay in Ekvott!, the souvenir of the 2008 International Goan Convention held in Toronto, writes, “It must have taken a great deal of courage for Orlando to have written such a pro-Goa book under the noses of Salazar and his PIDE, especially since he had been arrested three times between 1950 and 1953.”

Victor, who lives in the U.S. but visits Goa regularly, published his first novel Tivolem in 1998. The image of Wuthering Heights comes to mind as I think of a suitable analogy for Tivolem. Whereas the gothic novel by Emily Bronte is named after the 19^th century English moorland farmhouse called Wuthering Heights, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s Tivolem is a novel of a place set around the hilltop village of Porvorim in Goa. And while the passion of Heathcliff remains unconsummated in the British work, the love story of Marie-Santana, the Goan protagonist daring enough to assume the powers of the evil eye, leads to a weepy happy ending.

Still, Tivolem is not a novel in the traditional sense. Although it has a plot involving Marie-Santana and one Simon Fernandes, a violinist and stamp collector recently returned to his ancestral village from Kuala Lumpur, its major value resides in the rich profiles of a typical village in Goa of the 1930s.

The late Lino Leitao (1930-2008) published his first novel The Gift of the Holy Cross in 1999, which is set in Goa and deals with the caste system during the freedom struggle from the Portuguese rule.The narrative is held together by an educated imagination that explores the superstitious yet the pragmatic world of two villages, Cavelossim and Carmona in south Goa. And the character that wears the novel’s title is Mario Jaques of Cavelossim whose “miraculous” birth is celebrated for ending the long-lasting drought in the villages.

In 2005 Silviano Barbosa, 63, now living in Canada, published his first novel The Sixth Night, a story of fate or destiny that was prophesied for the baby girl on the sixth night, given that the girl named Linda is born and raised in a Catholic household.

This novel is an interesting blend of fiction and non-fiction in the sense that most first novels tend to be autobiographical. If the reader wants to sample a slice of life as lived in Portuguese Goa in the last 15 years of the colonial rule, this novel has plenty to engage his interest. If the reader wants to know what it’s like for an immigrant to fulfill his Canadian dream, this story has enough to satisfy his curiosity.

Sonia Faleiro, Goa-born journalist and author, published her first novel The Girl in 2006. This is a slim novel set in a Goan village about a girl who drowns herself in the sea.

Published in 2007 is Love and Samsara, a historical novel by Eusebio Rodrigues (b. 1926) of Maryland, USA, now retired as professor emeritus of English literature from Georgetown University. This is an epic novel set in 16^th century India and blends history, adventure, love and spirituality during the arrival of the Portuguese to India and Goa.

I feel that Goan readers will find this novel rather relevant today in a perverse way that history repeats itself. They will be aghast to read about the Muslim traders and their influence in the port villages of Chapora, Anjuna and Ela (Old Goa) before 1510 and how corruption prevailed everywhere. And if this novel carries a message, it is that love is an illusion and samsara is a playground for it.   

Of Mangoes and Monsoons (2009), a first novel by the Ponda-born Suresh Kanekar, 79, is divided into two parts: one part deals with the protagonist Ramesh’s foray in the freedom movement from the Portuguese rule; the other examines the growing up of the protagonist from childhood to university years. It is the latter part that grabs the reader’s interest, loaded as it is with intimate scenes depicted with graphic detail that impressed this reviewer, no slouch himself in portraying sexual conduct.

If you love to read about splitting hairs, exposing ironies in paradoxes, intellectual masturbation that perhaps only students of philosophy are good at, this is a novel for you. The dialogue crackles with energy and wit, showing the protagonist Ramesh Natekar, a freedom fighter, for what he is¯atheist, arrogant, opinionated, stubborn and self-absorbed.

Another first novel The Sting of Peppercorns by Antonio Gomes, 68, a Goan-born, New York-based cardiologist, made its debut in 2010. This one reads like a breathless love story that one imagines unfolding on the cinema screen, a melodrama filled with maudlin sentimentality for the loss of good times that loops in a property-rich, Brahmin Catholic family of Loutolim. 

As I enjoyed reading the novel, I kept wondering about the relevance of the title. It finally came in a separate chapter towards the end when the mystery was unmasked. The title is also a metaphor for the spices for which the Portuguese navigators came to Goa and India. And the link of the Albuquerque house is shown by the ample growth of pepper plants in the compound. For the sting, though, you’ve to read the novel.  

The Cry of the Kingfisher (2010) is a novel seemingly designed to put down superstition, blind faith and religious practices that a good many Catholic Goans follow even today. It is a story that focuses on madness or mental illness symbolised by the cry of the kingfisher, a blue, red and white bird commonly seen in many villages of Goa.

The author Belinda Viegas, is a psychiatrist practising in Goa, born in Nairobi, Kenya, but of Goan origin in Varca. Like many a first-time writer, she draws upon her knowledge, education and practice of psychiatry to develop and flesh out her characters, namely the three main ones, Mayola, Donna and Succorina.

The novel Let Me tell you about Quinta (2011) by SaviaViegas, will appeal more than most to the diaspora Goans settled in the West after the liberation of Goa in 1961. Why? Because crocheted into the intricate design of Quinta, her ancestral mansion in Carmona, are threads of post-colonial life in the village, threads of land reforms and their abuses, threads of locked and robbed houses, of corruption, loot and lawlessness, and the farce of democracy.

As one who has been out of Goa since 1966, I read Viegas’s book with increasing fascination almost bordering on admiration that she could be inspired to write a novel about a house during which course she brought to life and light those ugly and unfortunate happenings that have visited upon Goan villages in the aftermath of freedom and democracy. Oh yes, the wheel has turned a full circle and we can’t return to the past but live in the teeming, ubiquitous, baksheesh-bred present.

There are two other novels that I have yet to read. They are: The Mango and the Tamarind Treeby Leslie de Noronha, and Angela’s Goan Identity by Carmo D’Souza.  

Finally, here are some reviewers’ comments on three of my five novels set in Goa.

Blood & Nemesis (2005). ‘This is Ben Antao's first novel and seasoned readers of novels will detect features which are innovative in this genre in terms of the story line, its grounding in a specific historical period and in the presentational style.  For me, it absorbingly took me from my pre-independence Kenya experience to the time of Goa's liberation in 1961.’---Dr Cornel Da Costa, UK.

The Tailor’s Daughter (2007). ‘Ben Antao’s third novel, The Tailor’s Daughter, is an engaging and moving saga of one Kenyan-born Goan girl’s attempt to cross caste lines through marriage during her brief stay in the land of her ancestors. The Tailor’s Daughter is as fierce a social commentary as it is a book of passion. And what is ultimately most discomforting about Antao’s violent and pitiless play of caste and the longing to transcend it is that in reading it we easily recognize that this story and its consequences continue today’. ---Tony D’Souza, author of The Konkans.

The Priest and His Karma (2009).‘I think that Antao is bold to take on the Catholic Church for their now publicly known sexual misdeeds; at the same time he hedges his bet in having his renegade priest get his comeuppance for having transgressed his holy vows’.---Shane Joseph, author of The Ulysses Man.

A word about Goan poetry

Besides long fiction, there is also poetry being written by Goans. I’ll comment on four poets whose poetic offerings I’ve read and appreciated.

Brian Mendonça – an assistant professor of English at Carmel College, Goa – self-published his first volume of poems in 2006 called Last Bus to Vasco: Poems from Goa. It comes with a CD that illumines his lyrics with his rich and languid voice. Below are the opening 12 lines from 'Requiem to a Sal':

They came

Armed with axes,

And spit its bark with gashes

In a frenzied madness.

The glistening blade

Laying bare

The oozing gum, the ebbing life …

Stroke after stroke

They hack relentlessly,

Until,

With a mighty shudder

What was, ceases to be.

His next was A Peace of India: Poems in Transit (2011), also self-published. Specially commissioned line drawings animate the book, with maps of the various states of India which Brian travelled to. Here the canvas is wider with Goa as part of a poetic collage of India. Here is his poem– a fluid, riverine meditation -- written on and named after his favourite train which connects Vasco to Delhi:

Goa Express

Yamuna

Chambal

Betwa

Narmada

Tapi

Godavari

Krishna

Zuari

Another poet is Ethel Da Costa, journalist and manager of Radio Mirchi Goa, who published Eve’s Revenge in 2008, stories of nemesis that she has given voice after listening to the heart-breaking tales of many women. Below is from 'Hallucinations at Chapora':

She was forced into her first smoke

smiling on edge at the hazy fumes

today she is hooked …

it helps her think clear, she tells me

describing blue waves green and silver

her slashed blue veins

rainbow’s end …

Marinella Proenca from Calangute wrote a series of poetic vignettes called Heart Beat (2008), which evokes nostalgia and Goan memories. A sample below:

Green fields sow a design

of patchwork quilt

Rows in line:

Soft breeze brushing

Waves of shimmering shine--

Consumes the eye, with relief sublime

Cheryl Antao-Xavier, of Goan origin from Karachi, who resides in Mississauga, Canada, is owner of her own publishing firm In Our Words. Below is a sample from her book Dance of the Peacock:

Gazing into the murky depths

Of the steel grey waters of Lake Ontario,

My mind drifts away on a memory

Of the sapphire span of the Arabian Sea,

Where the white-crested waves ever so gently,

Lick the distant shores of Karachi.

Finally, I’d like to say that a surge of creativity has erupted in Goan literature in English since 2000 in fiction and nonfiction, drama and poetry.