A novel from Goa that offers the universality of experience
By Jeanne Hromnik
Writers are advised to write about what they know best. It took me a while
to realise that this refers more to mental than material territory, which is
why a middle-class writer can write about a slum child and an urban writer’s
subject can be rural characters. In South Africa we carry this debate all
the way to whether a black person can or cannot write about a white person
and vice versa.
‘The Cry of the Kingfisher’ covers a large geographic area -- Kenya, England
and Goa – where three lives unwind and eventually come together in a story
in which the tension between these three strands is skilfully maintained.
Donna, daughter of affluent Goan parents, grows up in England. Succorina is
born in a Goan village, and Mayola spends her childhood in Nairobi before
the family returns to Goa. The author, Belinda Viegas, is a Goan, who spent
her childhood in Kenya.
There are many very literate people who have never heard of Goa. For me,
also of Goan parentage, it was a delight to have Goa and things Goan treated
naturally and without the need for explanation. Reading the novel, I was
unprepared for the thrill of recognition, the verification of Goan identity
that it offered. However, it was apparent from the beginning that the real
ground of the novel was somewhere else. As Maria Aurora Couto (author of
‘Goa: A Daughter’s Story’) points out on the back cover, it is in essence
‘an honest and courageous exploration of complexities of the human mind’.
‘The Cry of the Kingfisher’ – the bird’s cry is both harsh and lovely –
takes one into areas of sadness and alienation, the cruelty of parental
ambition and traditional beliefs, madness, rebellion and the substitution of
material comfort for love. It juxtaposes the lives of three very different
women, building up and providing release from emotional suspense in a
beautiful act of story telling. The dream sequences that preface the later
‘chapters’ are poignant and revealing.
Unfortunately – for me – ‘The Cry of the Kingfisher’ has a thesis: that
parents impose enormous and unnecessary pressure on their children because
of their ambitions and lack of understanding, and that escape from such
pressure comes from realising one’s own potential and creativity, the only
true source of happiness.
This is best illustrated by Donna, whose socialite mother and ineffective,
though less insensitive, doctor father create in her a constant sense of
failure and alienation until she eventually rebels and finds refuge in a
world of drug addicts and counter culture abhorrent to her parents. Before
this, a family visit to Goa affords the kind of comfort that the child is
desperately in need of. It also introduces one of the two grandmothers who
feature significantly in the novel and whose presence falls credibly within
the story as it unfolds.
‘The Cry of the Kingfisher’, that is to say the story, begins to fail for me
when Donna, with help from Mayola (by now a practising psychiatrist), starts
to analyse her own situation and the novel’s energies begin to flow
increasingly into explanation and remedy. There is a remedy through
psychotherapy even for Succorina, the unwanted village daughter, who escapes
but then returns to her confining and ignorant village world. Mayola, the
psychiatrist, inevitably becomes the voice of the author instead of a
credible character.
There are other interesting points that are raised by ‘The Cry of the
Kingfisher’. Language, for instance. How do you represent in English the
voices of people who, presumably, are speaking in Konkani? Is it important,
difficult as this is, to differentiate between the English of an English
Goan, a Nairobi Goan, a Goan Goan? The Goan diaspora lurks within the novel,
with the consequent demands on the story-teller, and writers from outside
the inner circle of the English-speaking world have a particularly difficult
task.
Such concerns do not really interfere, however, with the success of ‘The Cry
of the Kingfisher’. What the novel offers instead is the universality of
experience, wherever in the world. The nerve endings that it touches so
bravely and honestly are the same everywhere.
(Jeanne Hromnik is an editor based in South Africa. She traces her roots to
the village of Moira in Bardez.)
Source:
http://www.navhindtimes.in/panorama/novel-goa-offers-universality-experience
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