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BrieFNcounters: GOA'S WRITERS ARE MULTICULTURAL BY INHERITANCE
Given his energy levels and zest for life, you wouldn't guess
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro is an octogenarian. If he's not
mentoring young writers and egging them on, he's spending
long hours perfecting sheaves of manuscript pages or taking a
keen interest in his love of music.
Born in 1925 in the village of Porvorim, he lived his life in
the shadow of his father, who, he says, could do almost
anything not just well but with panache. Victor
Rangel-Ribeiro has had two careers -- one first in Bombay,
and the second in the United States. And they have
encompassed several fields.
In education, he was a high school teacher in Mumbai, and in
New York a teacher of illiterates, a teacher of the poor and
disadvantaged both young and old, a teacher of university
students, and for a very short time a "teacher of pampered
teenagers whose parents were so rich they did not give a damn
about getting a good education".
As a journalist, he has been a reporter, subeditor, and
assistant editor in Mumbai, and has then written for the New
York papers as well. In advertising, he became the first
Indian to be copy chief with J. Walter Thompson Co. in
Mumbai, and was also the first Indian to be copy chief with a
very small advertising agency in New York.
In music, Rangel-Ribeiro was a music critic with the Times
and the Express in Bombay, and in New York he wrote music
criticism for The New York Times. The International Chamber
Orchestra, funded by the Ford Foundation in the 1960s, chose
him as their first conductor and he led the group in its
inaugural season.
In the late 1970s he was appointed music director of New
York’s Beethoven Society and under his guidance they were
invited to become a member of the very prestigious Lincoln
Center of the Performing Arts. VRR began writing at a very
early age, and his efforts were encouraged by both parents
and siblings.
At St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, he started a
writers' club and a typewritten magazine. Late John
Correia Afonso, the Indo-Portuguese historian, was
a member; prominent ad man Gerson da Cunha joined
later. His short stories began to appear in the
Illustrated Weekly, and they were illustrated by
Mario Miranda.
In New York, he stopped writing fiction for a while but began
again in 1988 after meeting in Bombay with Mulk Raj Anand. He
also began editing manuscripts professionally, and edited
some forty nonfiction books for such publishers like
Macmillans. On the personal front, he adds: "In 1954, I
married the very talented and beautiful young pianist Lea
Vaz. Our partnership has endured and has enriched our lives.
We have a daughter, Eva, and a son, Eric, and five
grandchildren."
Frederick "FN" Noronha took advantage of his current visit to
Goa, where he's actively egging on a GoaWriters' group among
other things, to pick Rangel-Ribeiro's experiences and put
issues linked to Goan achievements and shortcomings in
context. Excerpts:
------------------------------------------------------------
Mentoring writers back in Goa seems to be a priority for you
at this stage of your career. Am I right? If so, why?
------------------------------------------------------------
Back in 1988, when the great pioneering novelist Mulk Raj
Anand was slightly older than I am now and was also
frightfully busy, he spent three whole days talking to me
about the craft of writing, and the advice he gave me then
proved to be invaluable. If he could spend so much time
mentoring someone who was quite unknown, as I was then,
merely because I had reached out to him, I felt I too should
extend a helping hand to those who reach out to me.
I have made mentoring writers in Goa a priority because I see
how much talent we have here, how much eagerness to write and
to be published; I see also how little professional guidance
is available.
------------------------------------------------------------
What do you see as the potential of the young Goan writer
both back at home and in the diaspora?
------------------------------------------------------------
Young Goan writers have the same potential that young
non-Goan writers have, but what they achieve will depend
strictly on the inner drive they feel, the training they
receive, the skills they develop, the amount of effort they
are willing to put in, and their willingness to cope with
failure before they achieve true success.
My experience has been that many young Goans have the drive
to write, but lack the willingness to put in the very hard
effort that is needed to first master the English language,
and then to master their craft.
------------------------------------------------------------
What in your view are the three main strengths and
weaknesses that the Goan writer-in-the making has, and
suffers from?
------------------------------------------------------------
The first strength is that our writers are
multicultural by inheritance and almost by nature;
the second is that they are probably also
multilingual; the third is that, by nature, they
are also wanderers. Thus, a Goan writer is at home
almost anywhere in the world, and is as likely to
succeed in the United States as in Brazil, or
Portugal or England or Australia, or -- much closer
to home -- in Mumbai.
The first weakness that young Goan writers suffer from is the
fact that it is difficult for them to get a true sense of the
quality of their own writing, when they are in fact fish
swimming around in a very small pond. The second weakness is
that, surrounded as they are by so much mediocre writing,
they tend to be easily satisfied. This leads to the third
weakness: since they are satisfied with their very first
efforts, they don’t bother to revise, to rewrite, to polish
to the nth degree. To paraphrase the Bible, it is in the
sweat of our brow that we must earn our writing credits.
------------------------------------------------------------
How do you see Goans, as a community, succeeding globally in
terms of two specific creative talents -- writing and music?
Could you give some prominent examples?
------------------------------------------------------------
Goans have long enjoyed a reputation of being successful in
music, and indeed recently some have made their mark
internationally.
Gavin Martin, Noel Flores, and Marialena Fernandes come to
mind as pianists. Patricia Rosario in England has achieved
star status as a singer. Many others have achieved modest
success in foreign lands. In every case, success came as the
result of additional high-quality training overseas, and very
hard work on the part of each individual. I speak now only of
practitioners of Western classical music; I know nothing of
other fields.
I am not sure that any Goans have achieved global success as
writers. The late Orlando da Costa and I have enjoyed some
recognition, and so has Margaret Mascarenhas. Dom Moraes, who
passed away recently, made waves as a brilliant young poet;
but he never visited Goa, regarded himself as a Brit, and
would perhaps have taken it amiss if the rest of us Goans
tried to bask in his reflected glory.
------------------------------------------------------------
Why do more Goans among the diaspora seem to be making it, as
compared to writers back home? What’s going wrong here? The
lack of publishing firms, the lack of quality, the lack of
competition….
------------------------------------------------------------
Goan writers in the diaspora soon find themselves enrolled,
willy-nilly, in the school of hard knocks. They have to
compete with writers who are tops in their field, and are
often of world class; to compete, the Goan must work very
hard at his craft, and he does.
For an answer as to why Goan writers find it difficult to
succeed in Goa, see my answer earlier, where we discuss
weaknesses.
------------------------------------------------------------
What do you rate as your best writing achievement in your
lifetime?
------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps it is my book on the performance of Baroque
music, which was really a pioneering book that took
me ten years to research and write. From studying
countless pieces of ancient music and books written
by old masters I had to figure out how such music
was played two hundred years before I was born.
When it was published, my book helped to change the way even
top musicians performed and recorded old music, and it was
highly praised by Yehudi Menuhin and other world class
performers.
In fiction, I am proud of my novel Tivolem, which won an
award in the USA and helped place Goa on the literary map.
But I am also proud of my translations into English of some
twenty poems by late 19th century French poets; they were
published by Dover in a collection of songs by Ernest
Chausson.
------------------------------------------------------------
Some decades later, when we’re gone, what would you like to
be remembered as?
------------------------------------------------------------
I very much doubt that, even a few decades after I am gone, I
will be remembered for anything. If I’m going to be
remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as a
compassionate human being, who wanted peace and justice for
all.
------------------------------------------------------------
Among the many roles you played across the continents, which
do you see as the most challenging?
------------------------------------------------------------
The most challenging task I ever undertook was in education,
working at different age levels with disadvantaged Blacks and
Hispanics in New York. For a while I taught teenagers in a
special school in Harlem; most of them had been on drugs, and
some of them still were; all had been expelled from their
previous schools and were all rebellious.
It took weeks and months to change their attitude, but
eventually they became my friends and began to learn.
At another point I worked with adult illiterates; as soon as
they began to learn, I set them to work teaching others. In a
section of Brooklyn known as the drug capital of the United
States, I worked with senior citizens who had quit school in
the second and third standard and helped them get their
matriculation equivalency diploma in from two to six months.
It was challenging, but it was a labour of love.
------------------------------------------------------------
If there were three things you would like to leave for Goa
and her people, what would these be?
------------------------------------------------------------
A sense of discipline. A feeling of brotherhood. A thirst for
ethical values.
------------------------------------------------------------
At a time when many Goans would have just given up, you’re
still working exceedingly hard. Can you tell us what an
average VRR day is like, and what drives you?
------------------------------------------------------------
What drives me is that I wake up each morning and give thanks
for the gift of another beautiful day.
Back in the States we normally breakfast at seven, but I
sometimes start the writing day before then. Chores and
errands take up part of the day itself; I read or do some
research in the afternoon and write again in the evening and
often late into the night -- it all depends on what I am
working on and how the ideas are flowing. Quite often I will
find myself working on several writing projects at the same
time.
For much of the day, I listen to classical music while
writing or doing other chores, but when my wife begins to
play the piano, I turn the radio off. In the States I spend
about an hour a day studying music. Music brought Lea and me
together almost sixty years ago, and music continues to be an
inspiring and energizing factor in our life.
On some evenings we socialize. After dinner we watch TV
comedies for an hour and catch up on the late news. Then
there’s more reading and writing to do until bedtime.
Way back in 1941, when I had just joined St. Xavier’s College
in what was then Bombay, Fr. Coyne (the principal) used to
spend a couple of hours a week advising me. He hoped, I
think, that I would become a Jesuit. One bit of advice he
gave me has stayed with me all these years.
He said: "Every night, before you go to bed, ask
yourself these three questions: How have I touched
today the life of someone I know? How have I
touched today the life of someone I do not know?
How have I improved today on the talents that God
has given me? "If you cannot answer any of these
questions with a 'yes', do not go to sleep until
you have set that right."
Now that I think of it, that piece of advice is what really
drives me.
FOOTNOTE: Victor Rangel-Ribeiro can be contacted at
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and you can expect a helpful reply in
your writing quest, provided you're willing to put in your
part of the work.
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Frederick "FN" Noronha is a Goa-based writer, active in cyberspace,
who writes on issues both within and beyond Goa. Email
contact: fred at bytesforall.org
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