Goan literature spans the globe

An intriguing milestone for

Goan literature

occurred in lakeside Lillehammer, in Norway, earlier this week. Headlining one session of the Norsk Litteraturfestival (the national literature festival of Norway), Jerry Pinto and Ivo de Figueiredo took the stage at the city library to discuss ‘Mother and Father in Goa’. The festival organisers explained, “These two authors have had different upbringings and different types of families, but they both write within the genre known as narrative non-fiction. While their roots may be Goan, they reside in dramatically different countrieshow does this influence their memoirs and the way they write about family relationships … the stage is set for a meeting that spans time, place and literature.”

Both featured authors are highly significant stars in their own right. Still in his very early 50s, Jerry Pinto is already a beloved living landmark of Mumbai’s contemporary culture: spectacularly gifted, deeply compassionate, acutely perceptive, a hard-working polymathic autodidact with tremendous range. Always a torrentially prolific journalist and poet, he is now also an award-winning translator who produces one jewel after another (his 2015 translation of Daya Pawar’s ‘Baluta’the first Dalit autobiography in Marathiis particularly notable). In 2012, he released an unquestioned masterpiece of a debut novel, loosely based on the life of his own family in Mahim. ‘Em and the Big Hoom’ has won the Hindu Literary Prize, the Sahitya Akademi award, and the $150,000 Windham-Campbell award from Yale.

Roughly the same age as Pinto, Ivo de Figueiredo has also distinguished himself in multiple genres. A highly regarded prose stylist, he has written several books on Norway’s 19th century realist literary genius, Henrik Ibsen. In 2002, he won the Brage Prize for a biography of Johan Hjort, the fascist-turned-liberal hero of anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. A few months ago, he won the highly prestigious biennial Sprakprisen (granted by the Norwegian Language Council for excellence in Norwegian in non-fiction), for ‘A Stranger at My Table: A Family Story’, which traces Figueiredo’s quest to understand and find answers to that most Goan of questions“what is my identity?”

Soon to be published in English, the book is about “Indians with European ways and values, trusted servants of the imperial powers. When colonialism came to an end, they became homeless, redundant, caught between the age of empires and the age of nations and were thus forced to fight their way westwards. Some came to the United States, some to England. One got away from the others and ended up in Bamble, on the coast of Norway. This is the story of a family created by European empires, who paid the price for their downfall. It is the story of a family that never stops losing each other, but always manages to find each other again. More than anything, this is an account of a son searching for his father’s story, and ending up rewriting his own.”

Figueiredo uses a structure that is “a mixture between the documentary, the Jewish heritage epos and the post-colonial novel”, which has some underlying similarities to Pinto’s novel. The theme of many-layered Goan diasporic culture runs through both books. As one UK reviewer wrote about ‘Em and the Big Hoom’, “In a scene in which the Big Hoom’s future mother-in-law and her sister encourage him to propose, the women begin by speaking their best Portuguese before switching to English (in which Bertha uses only two all-purpose nouns, ‘thissing’ and ‘this-thing’) and then to Konkani, the language of ‘the tiller of the soil and the bearer of the load’. This is an India that many people won’t have seen.”

In fact, that is precisely the underlying genius and value of Goan writing, in whatever form, and in all its main literary languages: Konkani, Marathi, English and Portuguese. For too many wasted years, far too much talent has been squandered on pointless turf wars. Even now, a significant proportion of Goan intellectuals and writers engage in a suicidal death match over script, with no benefit to either side, and the only sure loser being the mother tongue itself. The absurd squabbling conspicuously ignores a most basic truththe scripts and languages may vary, but the literature is one. Goan writing is enriched by each contribution in any language, in a spectacular heritage that spans five different scripts, and comfortably includes both the English of Jerry Pinto and the Norwegian of Ivo de Figueiredo.

The writer is a photographer and a widely published columnist. Views expressed are his own


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