Even as Ronald only comes to this realization by journeying to the homeland, the sojourn does not make him feel any more or less Goan; if anything, it makes him more attuned to the multiculturalism of Damibia, his birth-country, and its racial segregation and class stratification. Of a community organization called the Goan Institute, Ronald explains that he supported the dropping of the word “Goan” from its title, post-independence, so as to move away from the purpose of its “creation during the colonial period of Divide-and-Rule!” (16). Thereby, the institute could become a space of integration, and “[provide] a window into Goans, so that Goans could at least be known and so that Goans could know Damibians” (16).
“I don’t want to be considered to be a poor innocent victim,” you emphatically state earlier, in reference to critics calling In a Brown Mantle a book about the Asian expulsion. On the contrary, I find your writing refreshing precisely because it considers the multiplicity of Goan diasporic identities when it comes to class and caste. Moreover, you pull the curtain back on the complicity of some Asians within the colonial system, in addition to them being the target of post-independence Africanization policies. You go even further in showing how it was not only Asians who found themselves in dire straits during such times, but also many Africans, including student agitators, minority tribespeople, and the very poor.
So, even as Ronald arrives at his Goanness and Africanness by visiting Goa, his identities are not dependent upon an attachment to the homeland, one can conclude. A similar sort of revelation seems to have occurred for you in your visit to Malaysia, where your mother was from; it even resulted in you writing “Rosie’s Theme.” Have you had the opportunity to visit Goa, and did it similarly influence your writing? Might you also be able to say something about how the Goan and Black East African communities received your novels, given their frank portrayals of interracial relations and the attendant politics of the time?
PN – Africans received In a Brown Mantle very well. All African readers praised the novel. Africans who read the manuscript on behalf of the East African Literature Bureau recommended publication. Theo Luzuka, student at Makerere doing English Honors, who designed the cover of the novel while working for EALB, wrote a critique in The Makererean, the university newspaper, during the time of the expulsion, a long critique, which contradicted what Amin said.
Someone working in the Entebbe post office praised the novel to me and
said he would like to read such a novel by Patels.
It was Goans, with the exception of Antonio da Cruz, who seemed to have
problems with the novel.
I wonder whether I ever mentioned to you Zenaides Morenas who worked for the Uganda government. He and I and Ted Abura from the Ministry of Public Works were sent to Abidjan in 1970 on a water supply project (a project to be financed by the African Development Bank to improve our water supply in rural regions of Uganda). I told him about my novel, which was in manuscript form, and he asked to read it.
When he read it, he said I knew a lot about politics in Uganda but not in Goa so he gave me the book by Alfred Braganza, The Discovery of Goa, to read. (Braganza was a Goan poet born in Kampala.) I did read it and made significant changes in the novel.
Morenas retired and went to Goa before Amin’s coup. He introduced me through letters to a writer and journalist named Antonio da Cruz. I began corresponding with da Cruz.
Da Cruz wrote me many letters about Goan writing. He was very cynical. At one point, I wrote to him that Goan writing reminded me of Chicano writing. He replied that he was not surprised because Goan writing was so full of chicanery.
I sent him In a Brown Mantle and was surprised to receive from him in less than a month a long review of the novel in The Sunday Navhind Times. It was very political and made the connection with Pio Gama Pinto. It was radical in a political way. I liked it, though I thought he overlooked the human side of Goan behavior in Uganda, and he dumped on the Goan Institute. I told him so, and he thought I was finding fault with his writing. It was all or nothing with him.
I edited and included his essay in the Goan anthology, making a change in the
conclusion because he was very patronizing about Africans without realizing it.
I included one of his stories from a volume he sent me, “The Bomboicar.” Sadly, he died before the anthology came out, and we never met. I went with
my parents and siblings to Goa twice: in 1946 and 1950. There are many things that stuck in my mind. The land was different from that in Uganda where I lived. I used to walk about barefooted at that time. I walked from our home in Novo Portugal in Moira to Mapusa. I remember the pigs in the lavatory and was stunned. I went to the small farmland where my step-grandmother lived (my grandfather and grandmother both passed away before I was born).
I was scared of the foxes howling at night. When I had to go from the dining room to the sitting room at night, I had to cross an empty room which was like a corridor. I used to walk quickly through this room. I was six years old. One day, as I was going through the room, my mother shouted from the dining room, “The fox is after you!” I ran through the corridor and collapsed on my father’s lap. He gave me a brandy to recover. He got mad at my mother.
Some of the things Ronald observes were what I saw and thought about.
My father’s neighbor in Novo Portugal was a goldsmith, a Hindu. I remember going to see him at work. Then I took over and began hammering a piece of copper, being determined to turn it into gold, to the amusement of the goldsmith. He had a son named Narayan, who was my age, and we became good friends.
Incidentally, Augusto Pinto wrote to me a few years ago to say his house was directly opposite my grandfather’s house and he could see the house every morning. So, I sent Augusto some of my books: my Trickster book,4 my Two Radio Plays (both produced by the BBC African Theatre). I felt that I was sending my books to my grandfather’s turf.
RBF – Your wonderfully detailed reminisces of Goa, mirror some of my own from visiting my grandmother in Panarim, Aldona, which, incidentally, is the village that adjoins Moira. Furthermore, it was very compelling to read about your process, and in particular how your correspondence with other Goans informed your writing. There is, thus, a sense of the communal here, to evoke Simawe. With your last response in mind, especially in thinking of literature and the communal, I would like to ask you more about one of the most important compendiums of Goan literature to be put together. I am referring, of course, to Goan Literature: A Modern Reader, which you compiled and edited as a special issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature (JSAL) in 1983.
To many of us who come to the study of modern Goan literature, this is the text that at some point became our go-to for reference on the subject, if not a direct source of inspiration. What this issue of the journal indicated to me when I embarked upon my own research was that there was an existing body of writing by Goans, as well as scholarship on the literature of this community. It is equally important to point out that your efforts in chronicling this material, especially in light of its appearing in a journal of a very specific geographic and literary context, was not just to highlight the particularities of Goan literature in relation to a larger corpus of South Asian literature, but also the diversity within this community itself and its cultural production.
What were the challenges you faced in compiling work by a diverse range of Goans of different backgrounds of faith, class/caste, gender, and geographic locations? Here, I am also reminded of Professor John Hobgood’s observation that “Goans [are] ‘cultural brokers,’” a reference you make in your 1988 interview with Irby (98). Is this a theme that one might say informed the compilation of the issue, thinking about the work you did in bringing together Goan writing from the multiple locations of the community’s presence in Asia, Africa, and the West, but also given the heritage of Goans as a people with multiple colonial histories?
PN – I told the story of how I was roped into editing a volume of Goan literature for Michigan State University (in the second edition of the issue of JSAL on modern Goan literature and then in the book5). I may repeat myself in what I say . . .
Dilip Chitre, a writer from Maharashtra, India, told me to take it up and he
would give me advice, connections, etc.
So, I sent out letters, including to Antonio da Cruz.
When I began receiving material from Goa, I found it very strange.
I was an African writer and after coming to the US, I extended my knowledge of African literature to Afro-American literature and Caribbean literature (Singapore literature was to come later).
I thought I would be able to extend my knowledge of the above literatures and take my energies to Goan literature, but found it was not working. But, I did not have much context for Goan literature. I felt I was struggling through mud.
Furthermore, I found that Goan writers seemed to want to break into the
west in their writing, to get famous for their writing in the west. They seemed to
have some wonderful idea of the US which was not mine and they thought they could use me to get famous. I decided that the only way to move would be to take a step back and to develop muscles regarding Goan literature. The first thing I did was to write an essay on Goan writing which had an East African connection, and I published this in Afriscope in Nigeria. Then I moderated a panel on Goan literature in the conference in Wisconsin. By the standards of what I had already done in the other literatures, this was low. But, I found ways of sneaking in Goan connections. I was using myself to draw attention to Goan writing.
In his early book of essays, God Made Alaska for the Indians, Ishmael Reed referred to me as a writer from Goa. The essay in which he refers to me is entitled “Race War in America?”:
Peter Nazareth, a writer from Goa, said: “Many black Americans seem to believe that all was fine in Africa before they were snatched off into slavery, and that they can somehow recapture the innocence of those early days by romantically embracing their African identity, as though nothing has changed in all those years. This is a dangerous illusion, as one can see from African plays like Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost and Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo returns from exile to find his place has been filled, ‘just as the lizard that loses its tail grows another one.’” [(85)]
You will see what I mean if you read my books of literary criticism which came out before the issue of JSAL on Goan literature. I mean about being far ahead as a literary critic of Third World writing. A good example is my book The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility which came out in 1978. It made an impact, despite typos and a title given by the Kenya Literature Bureau instead of what I had given it.
Chitre suggested that I write a letter to The Times Literary Supplement requesting submissions to the Goan issue I was going to edit. The Times Literary Supplement did not normally publish such letters, but it made an exception in this case. Richard Lannoy in Bath saw the letter and wrote to his sister-in-law Bemvinda in Goa to send me copies of the typescript of Violet’s short stories and she did. I found out from her covering letter that Violet had an unpublished novel, Pears from the Willow Tree, so I wrote to Richard Lannoy and sent him some money so he could make and send me a copy, which he did.
I found it very difficult to read Violet’s work because it was very dense, unlike my writing. But that was the time I had been given a research assistant by the Afro- American Studies Program, Joseph Henry, who was African American, and I asked him to read some of the Goan work and tell me about them. It was he who told me Violet’s work was very good and we should publish her short story, “Roses in the Grass,” in its entirety instead of making an extract, as I had intended. He was right. By the time the anthology came out, I was able to read all of Violet’s work, and I realized just how good a writer she was. In fact, one of the best Goan writers. I sent one of her stories to Callaloo, and it was published. And you know the story about how the novel got published.
I found the novel by Leslie [de] Noronha in the library, The Mango and the Tamarind Tree, and I taught it in a class of selected global literature. It went well. I asked Joe to read it and he wrote such a good report that I included it in the volume.
I mentioned The Discovery of Goa by Alfred Braganza which Zenaides Morenas in Uganda had recommended. I lent it to a Goan who never returned it. By chance, when I was in LA visiting with a friend of Mary’s,6 Phyllis Correa, she mentioned she knew Alfred. He was in LA. I went to see him, looked through the Xerox of his book, and selected two chapters, which he sent me.
I chose some extracts from what I was sent to fit into what I felt the manuscript required. When the manuscript became much thicker than I was told to submit, I raised money from the University of Iowa to pay for the extra pages so a double issue could be published. I also raised money to be able to send every writer in the volume a copy.
The person who typed the manuscript was Evalyn Van Allen, niece of the famous James Van Allen, who was working for the Iowa Writers’ Program, and so she did the work without payment. She suggested that we include some of the drawing by Mario Miranda from a volume of his cartoons that someone sent me.
I also included things about Goa and Goan literature by people who were
not Goans such as Adil Jussawalla.
So, I was all embracing.
The first edition included a short introduction by me in which, following the model of Andrew,7 I did not say anything about the work, except for what was in the biobibliographies. But the first printing sold out, and I raised money for a second printing in which I wrote a fuller introduction, which was a shortened version of something I wrote about editing a volume of Goan literature published in World Literature Today.
My father brought me and my siblings up without any consciousness of caste. We did not know what it was, and so we did not know what caste other Goans were. The only time I began to know about caste was at university, from some books I read on religion, and that was academic.
I understood much later that my paternal grandfather did not believe in caste
because it was man-made.
RBF – I am really glad you brought up Violet Dias Lannoy. As you mention, I am familiar with the story of how Pears from the Willow Tree came to be published posthumously and the pivotal part you played in making this happen. Readers of the novel can learn about the book’s pre-publication history—a saga unto itself, and one that involved African American writer Richard Wright—by referring to Richard Lannoy’s introduction and your postscript in the text. I heartily agree that Dias Lannoy is one of the best fiction writers of Goan origin, and an extremely important one, though she has never really gotten her due. This fact is made all the more poignant given the belated publication of her novel.
It is a pleasure to teach Pears from the Willow Tree in my classes on the literature of Goa and its diasporas, not least because students are awed by Dias Lannoy’s mastery of her craft. But they also see the book as a scathing exposé of the caste politics of the Indian nation-state following its independence from the British. This representation of India emerges from Dias Lannoy’s own involvement in the
freedom movement under the tutelage of Gandhi, but it is also true that her book arises out of a sense of disillusionment with Gandhian politics.
“In the minority Goan Christian community, where caste status had never lost its cardinal Indian role, the Dias family were openly proud to be ‘low-caste’ rather than, like the majority of their prosperous middle-class Christian peers, brahmin” (xxii), Richard Lannoy emphasizes when referring to his in-laws. If this was the familial influence Dias Lannoy brought to her writing, it was equally inspired by her larger world view as someone whose birthplace was Portuguese- colonized Mozambique. Certainly, there is an overlap in Dias Lannoy’s personal history and your own, seeing as your existences have spanned multiple geographies, colonizations, and political dispensations.
The JSAL special issue you edited did the important work of preserving the Goan literary legacy of its moment, as epitomized by the discovery of and inclusion of Dias Lannoy’s writing. As a theoretical exercise, were you to compile a contemporary survey of Goan literature today, what would set it apart from its predecessor?
PN – I agree with what you have said about Violet and what Richard said about her work.
I would like to think about your question. But I have a comment regarding my new introduction to the anthology for publication in the book, Pivoting on the Point of Return (inadvertently, the publishers did not include the epigraph by Desmond Hogan, from which the title is taken, which was in the issue of JSAL).
World Literature Today agreed to my condition that I would review books they sent me in the field of African Literature provided I could send them voluntary reviews and take my chances whether they would publish them or not. Most of my reviews of Goan books were my books that I reviewed voluntarily.
WLT selected three of my reviews, not about Goan literature, to publish in a book called Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature, edited by Pamela A. Genova of the University of Oklahoma. My reviews, in Volume 2, were Nuruddin Farrah, Somalia, “Sweet and Sour Milk”; Simon Tay, Singapore, “Alien Asian”; and Evelyn Accad, Lebanon, “L’Exercise.” I did not select these reviews for inclusion in the volume.
So, when writing the new introduction to Pivoting on the Point of Return, I thought, “If they can do it, I can do it.” After all, most Goans will not have been aware of my short reviews in World Literature Today. So, I included the reviews in the new introduction—without asking WLT for permission. I thought cumulatively, they had a lot to say.
Additionally, they would build up the confidence of Goans that their work
was worthwhile and worthy of world recognition.
I looked at your question again, but I find it hard to think about caste issues. Richard Lannoy does not find it hard because he believes it served its purpose. There are people who believe that you move to your caste according to what you can do, not because of any notion of superiority or inferiority. The Indian writer
Shiva Prakash, who was in the International Writing Program some years ago and who attuned my wife and me to reiki, told me he was lower caste but has no objection to Brahmins who do not behave Brahmin.
You will have realized from what I sent you that I am a well-known scholar of Singapore Literature and of African Literature and of Caribbean literature and of African American literature. Not only what these literatures mean: also deciphering the meanings of specific works. And encouraging the writers. And taking from one literature to another, and more important, to the local scene.
I think once I got there, I lost interest in Goan literature as such. I am interested in specific writers, of whom one of the greatest is Violet Dias Lannoy. I feel there are other scholars in the field who can do what I am not so interested in doing. I don’t know enough now to write about Goan literature today. I think you are able to take it further.
I feel privileged that you have turned up to write about my work and ask me
searching questions.
RBF – Thank you, Peter. Again, I would reiterate that my own interest in literature about and by Goans grew out of the pioneering work you did in the field. What I glean from your statement about the multiple other literatures you work on— Singaporean, Caribbean, African, and African American, among others—is that even though you may no longer work on contemporary Goan writing, you see Goan literature as part of a larger terrain. If Violet Dias Lannoy as someone born in Africa who wrote about post-Independence India is emblematic of the “place” of Goan writing in past decades, then one might see a similarity in the American- born Margaret Mascarenhas writing about enslaved Black people, Goa, and Angola in the novel Skin, more recently. Issues of caste, race, displacement, gender, and colonialism are extant in, but definitely not unique to Goan writing; yet, they signal the complexity of the cultural production from and about the territory. That a place so small is entangled with world history, as can be seen in the multiple diasporas of Goans in so many parts of the planet, further complexifies the narrative of Goan literature. However, much work remains to be done in the multiple literatures of Goa as pertains to the different local languages in which such cultural production occurs, as well as the various communities these literatures might represent, including Goa’s First Peoples. The Goan academy itself also needs to develop scholarship that is mindful of caste, indigeneity, diasporic displacement, and regionality to recognize marginalized voices, as well as secure the legacies of writers who are in danger of being forgotten.
In addition to Dias Lannoy, I would suggest that you were also instrumental in bringing back into public memory the work of Leslie de Noronha, whom you previously mentioned. In the past, you shared with me that he wrote to you and your research assistant on the JSAL project, Joseph Henry, and almost as an afterthought revealed that he was gay. What relevance might this have, if any, in future studies of de Noronha’s novels?
PN – Leslie de Noronha’s casual declaration to Joe Henry that he was gay made no difference to our reading of his The Mango and the Tamarind Tree. However, it did prepare me for the gay presence in the sequel, The Dew Drop Inn, which I reviewed in World Literature Today.
RBF – My final question is about your own writing. In your Indian Literature interview with H. S. Shiva Prakash, in 2001, you reply to his question about whether “the writer is completely free in the United States” by emphatically stating that you do not think so, and that “[t]he real battle is taking place in the field of literary criticism,” because it offers “the power to interpret” (161). As one of a rare group of writers who has worked in the fields of both literary criticism and literature creation, might readers still await fiction from you in the future? Please also add anything else we might not have already covered. Thank you for giving so generously of your time.
PN – I have always been interested in writing all kinds of works. As an anthologist, I am able to make a lot of different kinds of writers and writing available which I would not be able to write about in fiction myself. As a literary critic, I am doing a lot of creative criticism, breaking the rules, such as the way I wrote about Suchen Christine Lim’s Fistful of Colours in a book edited by Gwee Li Sui. I said at the end where I was explaining what I did that I took my model from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.
Many people assume that if I write a novel and also criticism, the criticism must be by definition inferior to the fiction. I don’t agree. Whatever comes to me is what I will write. If fiction comes to me again, I will write it. If radio plays come to me again, I will write them. I will not force myself to write in any particular form.
Peter Nazareth is Professor of English, and Advisor to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He was born in Kampala in 1940, his father in Goa, and his mother, though Goan, in Kuala Lumpur, where her father was a classical musician. Nazareth graduated from Makerere University College, obtaining his English Honors degree from the University of London. He did graduate work at Leeds University. A Senior Officer at the Ministry of Finance in Uganda, he left in 1973 to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, after which he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program.
R. Benedito Ferrão is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at The College of William and Mary. His interests are in Afro-Asiatic literary connections between Portuguese and British post/coloniality. In addition to having previously taught at UCLA and BITS (Pilani) Goa, he was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William and Mary. Previously, he was an Endeavour Postdoctoral Fellow at La Trobe University. An internationally published writer of fiction, non-fiction, op-eds, and academic works, his writing appears in Outlook India, Media Diversified, India Currents, Mizna, AwaaZ, The Goan, and the João Roque Literary Journal.
Even as Ronald only comes to this realization by journeying to the homeland, the sojourn does not make him feel any more or less Goan; if anything, it makes him more attuned to the multiculturalism of Damibia, his birth-country, and its racial segregation and class stratification. Of a community organization called the Goan Institute, Ronald explains that he supported the dropping of the word “Goan” from its title, post-independence, so as to move away from the purpose of its “creation during the colonial period of Divide-and-Rule!” (16). Thereby, the institute could become a space of integration, and “[provide] a window into Goans, so that Goans could at least be known and so that Goans could know Damibians” (16).
“I don’t want to be considered to be a poor innocent victim,” you emphatically state earlier, in reference to critics calling In a Brown Mantle a book about the Asian expulsion. On the contrary, I find your writing refreshing precisely because it considers the multiplicity of Goan diasporic identities when it comes to class and caste. Moreover, you pull the curtain back on the complicity of some Asians within the colonial system, in addition to them being the target of post-independence Africanization policies. You go even further in showing how it was not only Asians who found themselves in dire straits during such times, but also many Africans, including student agitators, minority tribespeople, and the very poor.
So, even as Ronald arrives at his Goanness and Africanness by visiting Goa, his identities are not dependent upon an attachment to the homeland, one can conclude. A similar sort of revelation seems to have occurred for you in your visit to Malaysia, where your mother was from; it even resulted in you writing “Rosie’s Theme.” Have you had the opportunity to visit Goa, and did it similarly influence your writing? Might you also be able to say something about how the Goan and Black East African communities received your novels, given their frank portrayals of interracial relations and the attendant politics of the time?
PN – Africans received In a Brown Mantle very well. All African readers praised the novel. Africans who read the manuscript on behalf of the East African Literature Bureau recommended publication. Theo Luzuka, student at Makerere doing English Honors, who designed the cover of the novel while working for EALB, wrote a critique in The Makererean, the university newspaper, during the time of the expulsion, a long critique, which contradicted what Amin said.
Someone working in the Entebbe post office praised the novel to me and
said he would like to read such a novel by Patels.
It was Goans, with the exception of Antonio da Cruz, who seemed to have
problems with the novel.
I wonder whether I ever mentioned to you Zenaides Morenas who worked for the Uganda government. He and I and Ted Abura from the Ministry of Public Works were sent to Abidjan in 1970 on a water supply project (a project to be financed by the African Development Bank to improve our water supply in rural regions of Uganda). I told him about my novel, which was in manuscript form, and he asked to read it.
