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Absence: what a Goan writer finds when he embarks on a journey
Eusebio L. Rodrigues, who has been at Georgetown
University's English Department, takes a closer look
at Joao da Veiga Coutinho's "A Kind of Absence: Life
in the Shadows of History" (Yuganta Press,
Connecticut, 1997), and finds the author's search has
taught him many things. Including the lesson that
there is no single way of being a Goan. And that Goans
were among the first to experience a dislocating sense
of exile that is modern; and that Goans must learn to
live without roots, and replace roots with horizons in
order to see a world of infinite possibility. Says the
reviewer: "I hope this review will trigger questions
about what it means to be a Goan."
Eusebio L. Rodrigues
Joao da Veiga Coutinho, a Goan whose inner depths have been
disturbed by mysterious eruptions, writes 'A Kind of Absence:
Life in the Shadows of History' to understand what is happening
to him. He undertakes a painful return to the self he was, so
that the act of writing becomes an invitation to a voyage of
discovery. A shy sensitive seeker he will exhume his buried
self, not to tell all, but to toss out bits and pieces that his
reader has to put together before meanings can emerge.
These emerge reluctantly in spurts of meditations, comments,
musings. They erupt out of a life that is deliberately not
channeled into autobiography -- that would be just a construct
-- but as an erratic, bubbling flow, a random quest crowded with
questions.
It is a two fold quest. That of a writer who begins a
search for he knows not what, one who sets forth to
understand his Goanness, and who insists also that his
reader come along with him on a parallel quest. He
talks to his reader, but keeps him at the distance
proper to art. He offers the reader insights but no
explanations, compels him to experience his own
hesitancies, his broodings, his speculations. Treats
the reader as a kinsman, a Goan frPre, capable of
sharing the experience and of understanding its
meaning.
The journey opens with a meditation on history in general and on
Goan history in particular. No generalizations on history are
offered, for the writer will not trap himself in a definition.
History, an ongoing process, involves time, and time never
stops, it flows. Our writer is a Bakhtinian with a dialogical
imagination.
He begins with the Portuguese intrusion, as he calls it, out of
which both reader and writer have sprung, a traumatic episode in
the life of Goa, of India, and indeed in the history of the
world. He refuses to elaborate at this stage, trusting that his
reader will remember traumatic events like the fall of
Constantinople in 1453. But he will not refer to this fall.
Instead, he leaps into texts that have sketched Goan history
hoping for answers to his questions. He will not describe these
writings either, six or seven of them, written mostly by Goans,
nor will he attack their views. They, like him, were fellow
Goans after all, they were searching for something.
So he has exchanges with them.
* With an old French missionary, whose book, its
title, alas, forgotten, had made Old Goa come alive
for the writer’s father who used to make the little
boy accompany him on his rambles through the Old
City.
* With José Nicolau da Fonseca whose book on Goa,
based on cold statistical facts, was a solid
contribution to the British Imperial Gazetteer of
India.
* With Gerson da Cunha who felt completely at home in
the British colonial world, and quite uneasy about
his Goanness.
* With Father Gabriel Saldanha who willingly assumed a
Portuguese identity.
* With Socrates da Costa who lived comfortably in the
shadow of the Portuguese.
* With Claude Saldanha who was convinced that Goa was
a distinct separate country
* With Peregrino da Costa and Bento de Souza who
praise the absorptive quality of Goans that allowed
them to enter the modern world.
* With A. K. Priolkar for whom the coming of the
Portuguese was a mere stain on Indian history to be
wiped away and forgotten.
A marvelous compression of observations on the Goan self this
chapter, with its enigmatic title, Conversations with the Dead.
Pleasant conversations, unlike the quarrels at a gathering of
immigrants in America mentioned in the opening chapter, where a
cynical Goan observes, Goans are like coconuts, brown on the
outside, white inside.
In this chapter, Goan writers and their books are tossed out
casually, no explanatory footnotes are offered. For the writer
expects his reader to know the Goan texts and be familiar with
them. They are handled lightly, only their essence is revealed.
They allow the writer to present earlier dated views of
Goanness, ones that do not satisfy his Goan sensibility. He does
not want to quarrel with them, just wants to talk to them and
about them.
But these talks are, as the chapter title states, conversations
with the dead. The word "dead" sends forth subtle vibrations of
double meaning for the sensitive reader, who begins to be aware
of the writer’s literary skills.
The reference to the dialogical imagination and to the phrase
"archaeological site" (33) for a Goan points to the writer’s
familiarity with the terms of modern literary criticism. He
makes use of the devices of the French symbolists like
Baudelaire, tries out the organizational techniques of T. S.
Eliot, the breaks, the jumps, the allusions. Introduces moments
of epiphany. As when, on a visit to a wall-less ruined church in
Bassein, he rushes up a naked flight of stairs to gaze on an
emptiness, a nowhere, an absence: "I found myself before a sort
of mirror, face to face with myself, my world (17)."
Above all, our writer is highly conscious of language.
Of two languages really. There is a later Portuguese
version of the book, based on the English one,
slightly longer, packed with vowels, syllables,
nasals, making us aware of the writer’s two languages,
the one he studied when he was in Goa, and the one he
learned when he moved away. Language is integral, he
realizes, to being, to his becoming, to the self. Is
inextricably involved with land, with motherland, with
his homeland, with home. His own written language is
nuanced
-- with Konkani songs and phrases of his childhood,
-- with the Portuguese he studied in school,
-- with the Latin of Lent and the Holy Week,
-- with the French of the symbolists.
Later, he remembers what the Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke
had taught him, the supreme human need for language in order to
exist. Perhaps he needs to discover his true language.
Memories make him jump to Madhya Pradesh where a chicken farm
has been "sliced" (a powerful verb) into rooms for a new
seminary to which he has been sent to devise a curriculum. He
felt an alien here, unmoved by the ancestral presences in river
and on the land, alienated from the language and from the land,
especially when he listens to a baptismal ceremony performed in
Hindi which the whole congregation, but not he, could
understand. Another jump, this time a leap of insight.
He thinks about Goa and about 16th century baptisms conducted in
Latin.
Goans have had their language and the sacred presences
in their soil torn out of their being. Horrified
missionaries banned heathen rites. Churches were
erected on the smashed ruins of temples, just as
mosques in India were often built out of temple
stones. The black and white picture photo on the front
cover presents the hieratic encounter of two sacred
forces seared into the writer’s memory: "In the middle
of the square facing the church, next to the cruzeiro,
the white stuccoed monument surmounted by a black
cross, stands a tree. It is said to be there since
before the church, a silent witness to the sacredness
of the site and to ceremonies once performed in honor
of the exiled divinity (43)."
Yet another leap, an actual one this time, on to a plane bound
via Delhi to Goa, "that uncertain homeland," which he had left
he knew not why and to which he feels compelled to return, why
he knows not: "An unbearable sense of absence colors everything
he sees. He begins a search for he knows not what (73)."
The reader has to be aware of two kinds of search, an outer and
an inner, that merge and dissolve. And use two sets of eyes.
One, for the physical realities of the world the writer had left
a long time ago which has greatly changed. The other will
function only after readjustment, after he has slowed down his
senses and reordered his stunned being, for it involves vision
and memory.
His eye aches as the mind notes erosions in his once familiar
world. Notes: that the ancestral house has aged and gathered
dust; that the old school house looks ill; that the houses on
the street are occupied by strangers; that a whole generation he
had known has vanished into the past.
But this pain, this loss, slowly eases away. It is not
the mind but the senses that have to create his
homeland, his world, the taste and smell of things. He
does not see the land but can smell its faint
fragrance. His being is filled with memories of the
past, with the lost density of his childhood where his
becoming began. But he will not indulge in nostalgia.
He begins to do zazen (76), to sit and meditate. And
re-create his lost world by writing Genesis.
A daring chapter this, the last and longest one, into which the
writer packs his being and his becoming. The Biblical
announcement of the title makes the fifty pages reverberate, and
trumpet forth meanings that jostle and crowd together. It’s
messy this birth, his rebirth, so don’t expect a neat ordered
whole. For different awarenesses, sensations, thoughts, flood
the chapter, so that meanings bubble up like the smells of Goan
paddy fields after the monsoon rains.
The structural order of A Kind of Absence is a fusion of music
and poetry, that of a fado heard in a night club in the Alfama
that senses the lacrimae rerum.
The smells of memory, of the seasons, begin. Memories of the
past and the reality of the present blend together. The rains
revive and generate the smells of the land of his childhood. And
the writer longingly evokes the past seasons, as if the air is
thick with smells and colors of the sacred land. "This is the
time the earth chooses to put out its boldest colors. The
gulmohur catches fire. The pink, the yellow and brown cassia,
the occasional jacaranda hallucinate in the shimmering air
(86)." It is spring that pervades the air: "One knows that the
cashew and the mango are in bloom but the blossoms are almost
invisible, only specks or a touch of red among the foliage
(87)."
A scene out of his past in America bubbles out -- a visit to the
university health center (100) wanting to talk about the
emptiness within him, a sense of absence, the feeling that there
is nowhere to go, no country he belongs to.
He talks to someone called Jones (significantly, the name is of
Freud’s English disciple) who suggests he write, a cure the
writer has prescribed for himself a long time ago, not as
therapy but as a form of spiritual exercise: And he knows why he
has to: "To find the proper human posture, the posture
appropriate to one’s lot and situation. To be restored to
childhood. To still the inner uproar and eventually achieve
silence and with luck perhaps song or laughter (76)."
He proceeds to write.
History and the history of Goa provide the musical background to
his account, vivid, imagistic and impressionistic, not burdened
with factual detail. Europe, as Fernando Pessoa saw it, gazing
across the ocean with greedy eyes on the East at the beginning
of the 16th century.
Tiny Portugal as the first intruder, thirsty for
wealth, drunk with the will to power, armed with naos
and bombards, grabbing a piece of the Indian coast in
order to exercise control over it. Three experiments:
the casados (married men) of Albuquerque which failed;
the unsuccessful ‘Portuguesing’ of the subjects; and
the christianization of the territory, not achieved
through pure evangelization (as was the daring but
limited mode of Roberto de Nobili and of Matteo Ricci)
but by having the land’s "space and time symbols
changed, its language and sacred ecology transformed,
the yearly calendar and seasonal celebrations altered
(106)."
The Portuguese introduced a new culture, a new life, into Goa,
ecclesiastical, spun around the city and the church. The city
was not significant to the writer as a child, except when he
absorbed it on his rambles through Old Goa with his father and
the book of the French missionary.
What he passionately observed and absorbed were the celebrations
and activities of the parish, his home and the church that left
a deep impress on the little one’s sensibilities.
Some were personal, like the celebration of Father’s birthday.
Others took place in the warm atmosphere of the home: the
response to the Angelus bell, the daily reciting of the Rosary.
Many events revolved around the church -— the feast of the
Sacred Heart, the rites on Passion Sunday and the rituals of
Holy Week. It is all lovingly recalled, these events enacted in
Christian space, and lovingly set down so that they will always
be present, and the writer will never suffer a kind of absence.
It is a certain way of always being there, of being a Goan, for
himself as a Goan.
The search has taught him many things: that there is
no single way of being a Goan; that we are no longer
the tribe he referred to at the beginning, one with a
collective identity; that we Goans were among the
first to experience a dislocating sense of exile that
is modern; that Goans must learn to live without
roots, and that we must replace roots with horizons in
order to see a world of infinite possibility; that
what we Goans do have is a sense of freedom.
Dawn is near. Life must go on. The fado will end but its echoes
will linger, for it speaks of universal human longing. We step
out into the dawn with a sense of loss, and yet of possibility,
with a sense of sadness that reaches out to joy. Reconciled to
the human condition, knowing that the search is over, the writer
sings softly to himself about his feeling of freedom:
Another winter is over. I went out for my first long
walk after the months of confinement and saw the
harbinger crocuses. In the fields behind the house
flocks of mallardsare resting before the homeward
flight. Scattered heaps of snow from the last storm
are fast melting, the creeks is filling with the small
noise of tumbling waters. The sound that set me
dreaming in my youth now invites me to remember.
(126-27)
Notes:
1. Joao da Veiga Coutinho, A Kind of Absence: Life in the
Shadows of History, Yuganta Press, Connecticut, 1997.
2. Joao da Veiga Coutinho, Uma espécie de ausLncia, Cotovia,
Fundacao Oriente, Lisboa, 2000.
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