Scientist Helga do Rosario Gomes announced on the
GoaResearchNet the death of Joao da Veiga Coutinho, and
shared this note from his son Ravi: "Yesterday, my friend,
mentor, and father, Joao V. Coutinho passed away at
the age of 97. He died as he had hoped: at home,
surrounded by those who loved him. While my heart
is broken, my chief consolation is that his
near-century on this Earth was full of life. Over
the course of his lifetime he was a priest, WWII
POW camp translator, foreign correspondent,
humanitarian aid worker, professor, published
author, loving husband to my mom, Barbara K. Webber
and, finally, a father. He spoke 13 languages and
left a lasting academic impact on the fields of
sociology, education, and theology. He is,
unquestionably, the smartest man I will ever have
the privilege of meeting, and I was fortunate to
have him shape my life. He was a great fan of
Tagore, after whom my name was chosen, who wrote:
'Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only
putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.'
His light will never be extinguished, and he will
live on through the lives of those he loved,
taught, and befriended. I love you, Dad."
Below is a review of Joao da Viega-Coutinho's *A Kind of
Absence*, reviewed by the late Dr George Coelho in the Goan
Overseas Digest (Oct-Dec 1998), a magazine that was edited by
statistician Dr Eddie Fernandes. Dr Coelho was an early
Goanetter, and was pleased by the new forms of networking
younger generations (then) of Goans were taking to. He saw it
as the precursor of a Goan Renaissance.
GO DIGEST WRITES: Born in Bombay, Dr Coelho graduated from St
Xavier's College in Latin and English. He served in the
Indian Armed Forces in World war II, rising to the rank kof
Major. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from
Harvard University in 1956. He was Health Science
Administrator and International Health Officer at the
National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland until
his retirement in 1996. George has published in
professional journals and edited several books on mental
health issues. In the last 10 years, he has been drawn to his
first love, literature and poetry, attending international
conferences in portugal and Goa an dpublished essays on Goan
poetry in Portuguese.
----------
Book review by Dr George Coelho
THE FULL TITLE is *A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of
History* (Yuganta Press, USA). It is a beautifully crafted
volume of essays, edited and published by Ralph Nazareth,
poet, professor of literature and President of Yuganta Press,
Stamford, Connecticut.
A timely and significant work, it is conversational in tone,
in the mode of Socratic dialogue. Neither didactic nor
dogmatic, theessays are written in a lucid and elegant style:
they flow with the cadence and imagery of a prose poem. They
invite reflection and meditation.
In his Preliminary Remarks, the author speaks of his essays
as "musings fragmentary in part, explorations....There are
more questions than answers, not because answers that are
widely satisfying are few (this is, after all, a search
undertaken on one's own behalf) but because questions must be
asked and multiplied and lived with, before there can be
answers."
The book cover displays a faint silhouette of the facade of
the Santo Espirito Church of Margao, around which the author
remembers playing as a child in his grandmother's home.
There is history there, the author muses: "Our churches in
Goa are built upon the ruins of destroyed Hindu temples (III,
p42). In the middle of the square facing the Church of the
Santo Espirito, Margao, Salcete, next to the cruzeiro, the
white stuccoed monument surmounted by a black cross, stands a
tree. It is said to have been there since before the church,
a silent witness to the sacredness of the site, and
ceremonies once performed in honour of the exiled divinity
(III, p43).
Part I: Thinking about History is the first essay, sounding
the major theme of Absence: "There has been no Goan
history... our story remains untold. What is it and where is
it to be found? What are its outlines and what are its
salient features? What are its sources? What should it cover?
What should it show and explain? Our history was largely made
by others. We were caught in it, almost in spite of
ourselves. We have to salvage what is ourse; see how much of
it belongs to us (I, p8,9).
This theme of Absence recurs in the following motifs:
i) The loss of a vital connection with an ancestral land.
ii) The lack of a history of one's own, a proper universe.
For "The Portuguese wrote their own story in these parts..."
Part II: Conversations with th eDead discusses several
versions of Goan history written by Goans (prior to Indian
Independence in 1947). The critical issue is: Are Goans
protagonists in Indo-Portuguese history? Or are they mere
stage hands and props providing local color?
The author explains his sense of history: "To have a history
is not simply to have a past. To have a history is to
struggle with the past, and wrest from it its meaning. The
purpose is to define ourself, to find one's place in this
sense, the question 'do Goans have a history?' does not much
mean, 'do they have a past?' as 'do they have a future?' It
means: what does the past say about the future? Has it
created a type of human being who can face the open and claim
a place to stand on?
Part III: A Certain Way of Being There elaborates the theme
of absence in an autobiographical note. The author confesses:
he is unable to name the grasses which he sees durijng his
visit to a mission station in a village in North India.
His melancholy is an expression of the desire to belong -- to
be acknowledged by the Indian village people whom he has come
all the way to help.
"For just as I cannot name the birds or the grasses, I cannot
exchange more than the barest greeting with the people...
wold it be possible to begin again, to create a space
dedicated solely to straightening out human relationships,
our relationships with the people and our common relationship
to the land?... (III, p37).
The author meditates on the numinous presences dwelling
everywhere, and how they have been denied: "The Indian land
carries a load of symbols and is saturated with presences."
(III, p40). Our churches in Goa are built upon the ruins of
destroyed Hindu temples....
"(For the Goan Christian) how does the Indian land become
foreign if not enemy territory? By what process were we
weanted? Who made the breasts so bitter that we were ever
after unable to be nursed at them?" (III, p42).
Part IV: The Uncertain Homeland develops the major theme of
Absence by projecting the image of the itinerant lodger: "A
man sits in someone's house on a hot rainy way.... He has
moved from another state across the country -- across the
continent -- and is put up by friendly people while his
rented house is being got ready. His things are with the
movers; he does not have what he needs for his work... He has
been there before... in fact most of his life, a guest in
someone's house, waiting for his own to be finished, though
it never quite gets finished... (IV, p57)
Part V: Genesis is the final essay. Here the author proudly
recalls a time when an autonomous Goan personality takes
shape, by the creative moulding of certain Portuguese
elements into the Indian cultural matrix. In the latter half
of the 18th century, for example, far-reaching reforms (in
education, polity, administration and social order) were
inaugurated by the Marques de Pombal, and a new Goan reality
"slowly matured, the idea and reality of a Goan culture
distinct from the cultures of Portugal and India, a creation
of the land's own children."
The author illustrates the Goan expression of this
unique development in several cultural domains. "A
sense of Goanness appeared. There emerged a new
interest in things Goan, Goan political and social
history as distinct from the exploits of Portuguese
heroes and rulers, in ancient local institutions,
their evolution or erosion, family histories, and
biographies of significant men... a new style of
Goan architecture... a new authentically Goan
cuisine, ballroom dancing" and the *mando*, an art
song an ddance which created its own choreography
as well as its lyrics and music." (V, p121,122)
The author fondly recalls his childhood in the family
household in Goa which reflected this new multicultural
world: "this was the world they talked abotu at grandmother's
house, the world we had just missed. Our own world seemed to
pale in comparison. Ours was never free from a touch of
sadness, an apprehension that perhaps home was not really
home, that true life was otherwise if not elsewhere." (V.
p122,123)
Nevertheless, about a hundred years ago, Goans ventured
beyond their island shores and charted a new tradition, our
modern world of uprooting, relocation and renovation:
"Goans must have been among the first to experience
the sense of exile that characterizes the modern
age. Not the emigrants alone, but long before
leaving home for more promised lands, some at least
must have known nostalgia of loss, the sadness
of the irretrievable, resulting from the knowledge
that there was no land where they could hope to
find roots?"
The author ends on a wistful note, but with stoic
resolution: "There is no single way of being Goan... We must
learn to live withotu roots... we have been severed,
disconnected from the soil and its presence, a history in
which we have been no more than guests, victims, auxiliaries,
that make us turn to an India before that history began. But
the India we can relate to is in the process of creating
itself... Roots have been replaced by horizons." (V. p126).
In their venturesomeness, Goans can join in this process, if
they will, not as pawns or props, but as protagonists.
--
The book *A Kind of Absence* was (at the time of the review)
available from Yuganta Press, 6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford,
CT, USA, pp.127, $9.95.
The author, Joao da Veiga Coutinho, was born in Margao, Goa
to a distinguished family of physicians, priests and
journalists. He studied at St Xavier's College, Bombay and
pursued theological studies at the Jesuit Faculty at Louvain,
Belgium. Emigrating to the US, he was involved with community
development in both North and South America.
