The Diaspora Jigsaw
By V. M. de Malar
Lets admit it; we feel more whole these days, when so many children of Goa come back to celebrate holidays in the homeland. Sleepy bylanes and quiet vaddos bustle with activity, with lights and star lanterns, with family reunions and ceremonious parties. Laughter resounds, joyful music rings out, our gentle village culture may be under great pressure, and it languishes quite forlorn most of the year, but this is the time of replenishment, when so many from the diaspora return home.
What an interesting return it is. The multigenerational Goan family reunion, circa 2005, is a sociologists bonanza. Several generations laced throughout the Lusophone and Anglophone worlds have borne rich and unusual fruit. Keep your ears open and youll easily pick up clipped British tones interspersed with the slower Australian drawl alternating with those characteristic slower North American cadences and much more. East Africa, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, Kuwait, Qatar, U.A. E, Saudi Arabia, you name it, our striving community is there in force. It is a story of struggle and achievement, of tremendous fortitude in difficult circumstances.
Theres mind-boggling adaptability. There is no surprise that the first successful NRI in the West was a Faria from Colvale, or that weve contributed mighty freedom fighters to the anticolonialists in Mozambique and Kenya, or that the only Indian cabinet member in the UK is our own Keith Vaz. Weve got Goans representing Canada in field hockey, another in Norways football team, and yet another bright young star burning up the amateur golf circuit in the USA.
This week, Victor Menezes gave 1.5 million dollars to the IIT campus which nurtured his early promise. This grandson of Pomburpa had a stunning career in international banking, including a stint as CEO of global behemoth Citibank. Its the most striking corporate success story in our diaspora, but hardly exclusive, not when you count Menezess brother Ivan, the North American CEO of giant distiller Diageo, or the IT honcho Romulus Pereira, or Tony Fernandes and his giant-slaying budget airline, AirAsia.
Alas, few of these overseas achievements have meant anything to Goa. We Goans have a marvellous capacity to fade into the landscape, but the flip side of this is that we can very easily become alienated from another, especially in the diaspora. So, associations proliferate to a ludicrous degree, round up five Goans in London or Mombasa and you find that they hold six different pompous titles in seven different absurd Goan clubs. Its cruel irony, were the worlds best at adapting to adverse circumstances, but the worlds worst at adapting to each other.
Part of this is historys burden, the plight of a systematically denationalized people that suffered genuine trauma during 450 long years of colonization by a second-rate European power, and two centuries of iniquity during the Inquisition. The fabled Goan cultural fluidity was a survival mechanism, first of all.
Part of it is simple economics. Our homeland languished for centuries; generation after generation has been compelled to leave. They flooded in different directions to Portuguese Mozambique and British Tanganyika, to Macao and to Brazil its not very easy to come back together after that psychologically violent dispersal to the ends of the earth.
But were in a new era now, with Western diaspora into third and fourth generations, and Goa the prized tourism destination in a resurgent India. Other parts of India have tapped the diaspora, and are reaping huge financial, cultural and social rewards. There is no reason why we cannot do it, and we really have to do it if we are to hold on to what is recognizable in our homeland in this period of rapid growth and development.
I walked the normally quiet hillside near Saligao this week with the youngest generation of Goans, with American citizen holding hands with Australian, with Mumbaikars joining voices with Londoner and Torontonian. Tagores aptly named Stray Birds came rushing to mind, a diasporic plaint: lead me in the center of thy silence to fill my heart with song. For its almost 2006, and weve turned a corner into unknown territory. As we put together the puzzle of Goas future, lets hope that some of those missing pieces come back.
- Forwarded by www.goa-world.com
This first of its kind Gulf-Goans e-newsletter archived at www.yahoogroups.com/group/gulf-goans is dedicated to Goans around the Globe and is moderated/edited by Gaspar Almeida (since 1994) and presented by Ulysses Menezes, owner of http://www.goa-world.com website.
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Goa Sudharop Awards Programme - January 3, 2006 at 4:30-6:00 pm at Caritas Complex Hall, St. Inez, Panjim. Goa Sudharop a USA based NGO works for the betterment of Goa and Goans. See past awards at http://www.goasudharop.org/gs_awards.htm.
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