Title: Who the bleep cares about Goan authors and humour? By: Selma Carvalho Source: Goan Voice Daily Newsletter 24 Oct. 2010 at http://www.goanvoice.org.uk
Full text: My mother is an unusual character. Unusual because if you visit the solitary village she comes from in Goa and the mind-numbing silence of her ancestral house in the interiors of this village, you will never guess she speaks three languages; English, Portuguese and Konkani. So she had at her disposal three languages she could teach her children and whether it was a sense of nationalistic loyalty or some preserve logic, she insisted that her two older children at least would speak only in Konkani. This put me in a very precarious position. It made me a social pariah in a world of six-year olds with sticky fingers and snotty noses who called me names because I could only speak this alien tongue. Perhaps to make up for this or perhaps because it was the only Catholic school in Dubai, she sent me to St. Mary's, affiliated to the University of London. Here I was force-fed huge portions of Dickens, the Durrell brothers, Emily Bronte and Somerset Maugham and as a result I grew up believing only the English had a monopoly on English literature and I certainly grew up unaware that Goans had their own English Literature. About two days ago, I came across a superb piece of writing, quite by accident, in a book entitled, Modern Goan Literature (ed. Peter Nazareth, Goa, 1556)[ http://goa1556.goa-india.org/index.php?page=buy-books-via-paypal]. The Mango and the Tamarind Tree by Leslie de Noronha took my breath away. Very rarely will I interrupt my evening ritual of watching television to complete reading a chapter but such was the wit and wisdom of Noronha's writing, that even British drama had to wait. "The mothers of Olinda and Philomena died shortly after child-birth, crushed partly by the weight of their pedigree and partly by pernicious anaemia and carcinoma of the cervix, respectively," is a line from this book. It is not often one comes across a singular sentence alternating so sumptuously between mirth and pathos. I don't know anything about Leslie de Noronha. I don't know if Leslie comes from one of those villages my mother lived in, insignificant dots on a landscape mapped by the Portuguese and relegated to obscurity by civilization; where only an audacious moon and an indomitable army of fireflies light up the night sky which otherwise darkens prematurely and lulls people to sleep. Or perhaps Leslie was fortunate to have landed on more fertile soil and had the opportunity to cultivate his genius. After an extensive google search I learn that Leslie was brave enough to write a campy book, as in gay, called the Dew Drop Inn, all the more surprising when Leslie used to be the Bombay theatre critic for the Catholic newspaper, The Examiner. I had to ask myself, who are these Goans? Like gymnasts, they have elasticated the English language and stretched it to weave their own magical stories of Goa. And there's another thing; whether it's Victor Rangel-Ribeiro writing about the goings-on in mythical Tivolem [http://www.amazon.com/Tivolem-Rangel-Ribeiro/dp/1571310193] or Lambert Mascarenhas in Sorrowing Lies My Land [http://www.amazon.com/Sorrowing-Lies-Land-Lambert-Mascarenhas/dp/818556941X ], there is this sweet, nectarine-like wit running through these stories. Our art forms seem to be drenched in humour. We see this in tiatr. I have this theory that tiatrists are literary figures without the dictionary. These were people who didn't have recourse to books and the fine art of writing and so they parleyed their talent on stage. It might be the big, dramatic scene at the end which makes or breaks the theatre production but it's the humour skits along the way that sell the tickets; the hilarious comebacks, the dead-pan delivery and the timing, all practiced to perfection by our comedic genius. What is it about Goans that puts humour at the vortex of our interactions? Was it the long conversations on moonlit nights in the balcao that lent itself to a friendly-fire of puns and innuendo? I remember my grand-uncle, Caetano Aguiar, uncle to tiatrist, M. Boyer, regaling us at family gatherings; the women in his family, he said, all had huge breasts and spindly legs which is why they could never walk a straight line. Tall and almost patrician in his elegance, he often took centre stage, with his big, oratory voice and inborn sense of the theatrical. Bosomy women and men emaciated by hard labour would howl in laughter. The incongruence and slight irony of the setting relieved momentarily by humour. Or maybe our humour evolved as a defence mechanism against Colonial press censorship and a stifling of political aspirations or was it a coy way of overcoming parochial inhibitions even as liberal ideas flooded our minds and bodies with desire. Humour is after all the earliest and the deadliest form of social protest. I feel sorry for myself, for letting four decades of my life pass by without really getting to know Goan English Literature. I feel sorry that Goan children, especially in the Diaspora, grow up ever so ashamed of being Goan because they are unaware of our rich heritage. Do leave your feedback at carvalho_...@yahoo.com Selma Carvalho is the author of the book Into the Diaspora Wilderness http://selmacarvalho.squarespace.com/reviews-etc/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Now available in Toronto, a few copies of *Into The Diaspora Wilderness* by Selma Carvalho. Contact Bosco D'Mello bo...@goanet.org (416) 803-7264 http://selmacarvalho.squarespace.com/
