Skin - book review

Hi Dale,

I liked it very much and shared it on my Facebook wall. J

Mafalda

Folks,

My father did not believe in caste and he brought up his children in Uganda to know nothing about caste.  Apparently my paternal grandfather in Goa who died before I was born did not believe in caste because it was man-made.

But my maternal grandfather in Malaysia apparently believed in caste.  I first met him in 1960, when he was 76 and blind.  I celebrated my 20th birthday in his house in Kuala Lumpur in 1960.

He was married twice.  He  had three children by his first wife, who died.  He married again and my grandmother had fourteen children, of which my mother was the eldest.

In my large maternal family, there are, through marriage, Chinese, Tamil, Sikh, Malay, Eurasian, Malacca Portuguese, Australian, and Goan... 

My grandfather called me up to his room and told me his story because he said I was a writer and he wanted me to tell his story someday.

I told it fictionally as "Rosie's Theme", published in Malay translation in Dewan Sastera with a boxed article about my real grandfather, and was included in Jerry Pinto's book.  It was published in Confluence, followed by an essay called "Telling Grandpa's Story", which was another way of telling his story.  A photo was included of me carrying my eldest grandson, Christopher.

My daughter Kathy is married to an American, Randy Eccles.  I have two grandsons, Christopher and Aidan.  I asked my wife, Mary, a few years ago, "When you think of your grandsons, do you think of them as Goan or as American?"  "I think of them as my grandsons," she replied.

I met my uncle Gerry in Kuala Lumpur in 2006, following my presentations at the National University of Singapore's centennial celebration. He told me something I had not known: the day my grandfather knew he had created a multicultural family and accepted it. This was just before Jerry Pinto's book was published, which was the first time to my recollection the story was published in a volume about Goans.

Best.

Peter Nazareth

Margaret,

Another thing that happened during my 2006 visit of four days to Kuala Lumpur.  My cousin Ernest, fifth child of my grandfather's daughter by his first wife, took my wife and me (with Sally, his wife, who is Chinese) out for a Hakka dinner.  The restaurant was open air, a few hundred yards from the towers you see in the movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.  It was also a few hundred yards from my grandfather's house (the barrack-like structure mentioned  in my "Rosie's Theme").  So he drove us past my grandfather's (now empty) place.  In "Rosie's Theme", it is mentioned that the landlord decided to displace everyone from the building to he could put up a new, modern building. My grandfather took him to court on the grounds that it was cruel to displace a blind man from his home.  The judge ruled in his favor: the landlord had to wait until my grandfather, then 77, passed away.  My grandfather lived to be nearly 97, by which time the landlord could not prove he had enough money to replace the old building (a Malaysian law).  So the barrack-like building, looking like part of a village, was still there.  Ernest told us that it had now been declared a historical monument.

As for the Malay uncle mentioned in "Rosie's Theme" (the real one on whom the fictional one is based): he died two months ago at the age of 96.  I met him in 2006, and he massaged my back and neck and showed me how to do yoga.  Incidentally, his wife was my aunt Vivian, who became Fatima after getting marred.  She was a twin.  Her twin sister Diana came to Uganda and got married to my cousin Joe Nazareth.  They went to settle in KL with their son Rosario.  Joe died in 1995.  His mother died in KL in her nineties.  They had a Chinese servant whom she taught to speak (a pidgin form of) Swahili.

As I am sure you know, when it comes to writing about the (Goan) family, you are expected to say only the good things the family members tell you.  And even if you try to do it, Goans assume fiction is gossip is something negative and so they read it as something negative and overlook the creativeness and structure and human believability.

In any case, I said two decades ago that the real battle against the dominating Europeanized colonizer (the battle to decolonize the mind, an idea Ngugi wa Thiong'o got from my radio play "X", is taking place in the field of literary criticism, that is, the power to interpret, and to interpret by breaking given structures and endlessly creating new structures, as I have done in my essays "Heading Them Off at the Pass: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed" and "Elvis as Anthology" onto/into which I piggyback Goan stories.

Best.

Peter

Should writers focus on ills of society and pay for it?

I  am glad someone thought about this writers group and implemented this forum for the benefit of Goan writers. It was long needed, so someone could vent out their feelings, frustrations, anxieties on this forum. THANK YOU!

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Silviano C. Barbosa and I am the author of the Canadian/Goan novel, “The Sixth Night” (Sottvi Raat) published in 2004 by Goa Raj Books (My self-published imprint,  for those who feel good to hear this word from their high pedestal, thank you, even though for others  it’s ok to pay for someone else to get it published under another so-called publisher, just so it is not called self-published).

The main objective of this post is to find out if any other Goan author suffered like me for writing a novel based on realities of social life in Goa: specifically in my case –“the caste system”  and the institution of "gaunkaria" which have been intricately entwined for thousands of years in Goa.

Since no author touched upon this so-called controversial subject, I went ahead and gave it a treatise in my novel. As soon as it was published and reviewed by Ben Antao  on Goan Observer, dwelling on its caste system proclivities, I got a barrage of hate-letters and threats from the gaunkars and “Chaddo” caste apologists and this book was almost banished.

I wonder what was controversial in this book? By all historical accounts, aren’t 95% of Goans, the orginal people of Goa before (1961) whose occupations in life consisted of fishermen, labourers, carpenters, dhobis, toddy-tappers, etc. ?They are  the real natives of Goa for over thousands of years  who lived in their own homes in their own lands until they were usurped by the FIRST IMMIGRANTS (so-called ghattis) of Goa, the Saraswats (Bamonns) and their warrior caste armies of Kshatryas (Chaddos)?

These Bamons and Chaddos took over the land in Goa from the Shudras and the tribals of Goa like Kunbis, Velips, etc and sent them to the hills (Otherwise which native tribe would live in the hills leaving the fertile land behind in the first place?). And can you believe the Communidade call these native Shudras settlers (MORADORES)? Did they consult a dictionary? You think Bamonns and Chaddos would allow these Shudras to come to their villages and settle in prime areas of their villages after them? This confirms the Shudras were in Goa long before the so-called gaunkars.

Eventually the Bamonns and Chaddos became the whole and sole owners of Goa and the exclusive members of Gaunkaria, later known as “Communidade” and received the zonn (share) and were hence called zonnkars for life with their male lineage. And the Shudra community became perpetual tenants, slaves  and landless. Even the natives of Australia, Canada and other countries have their land-rights recognized, except in Goa and in India.

This continued till today and even in the Church, Bamonns and Chaddos distinguished themselves using the red coloured confrade in the procession to demonstrate their superiority and could exclusively celebrate the patron saint of the village, when they became Christian. The Shudras must wear the Blue confrade or else. And the Portuguese Bishops and priests kept quiet and closed their eyes and ears and let this go on exclusively in Goa and may be rest of India too . This could never happen in Europe and certainly not in America or Canada. And the POPE did not know about this? How could these Christians let this happen? And the whole world raised  a furor in South Africa because of apartheid. My God! look at Goa  even today. There are wards like “Bamonwaddo”, Mazilwaddo, Mharvaddo, “Boyam-vaddo” in Goa where apartheid started thousands of years ago and  United Nations is not aware of this? And no one seems to be in hurry to change this.

I cannot believe that Shudras CAN NEVER BE GAUNKARS OF GOA.  Is it their fault that they lived in Goa before other immigrants invaded Goa? So WHEN WILL SHUDRAS SEE THEIR LIBERATION? Ex-CM Bandodkar helped a little with the tenancy legislation. Today’s  gaunkars would rather sell the Communidade land to the other recent immigrants but would never  give an inch of their land willingly to the real pre-1961 Shudra natives of Goa (moradores).

Aren’t Goan novelists supposed to bring this to light? And I did. And what did I get ? A very negative response. And when a renowned Goan author wrote an article about  recent authors and writers in Goa, he only mentioned Ben Antao and Lino leitao , as the writers who have written a lot about Goan caste, which of course they did. When I wrote back to this author that he did not mention about my novel, that had extensive coverage about caste, there was no response of course.

So do writers serve to write about the society that deviates from normalcy?  A couple years ago a goanetter copied the entire chapter of my novel and pasted it on his goanet post without giving credit to the author (me) and asked what goanetters felt about this thesis from chapter 15 in my book  “Dr. B.J. Furtado’s Manuscript”. No one responded. I guess it was too hot to handle. Better to hide and let it pass.

For more details, read the novel “The Sixth Night” even if it hurts you when you turn every page. Remember you are not to blame for the sins of your ancestors!

Silviano Barbosa,

Gaunkar of the Universe!

Toronto, Canada!

July 22, 2011

Folks,

Since we are discussing reviews, let me mention my particular experience.

In the mid-seventies, I received a letter from Ivar Ivask, the editor of "World Literature Today", a quarterly published in Norman, Oklahoma, inviting me to write reviews of books in the field of African Literature.  WLT would send me the books and my reviews had to be of 500 words.  This was a challenge to me since I had never written such short reviews. I decided I would try to pack into the short reviews information, a sense of what was in the work, and make my reviews compact and resonant.  So I replied accepting, on two conditions: that I would not be confined to African literature, and that I could send in volunteer reviews (that is, of books I read which had not been sent to me by WLT).  Ivask agreed.  I began sending in volunteer reviews.  Among them were reviews of Singapore Literature--I had been given a great foundation for doing work on Singapore Literature in my first interview done in 1977 with Edwin Thumboo, the unofficial poet laureate of Singapore, a six-hour interview published world wide in many extracts and now included in its entire form in my book on Thumboo and now available on-line--which many Singapore writers used as blurbs to their books. And I began to send in reviews of books by Goans, sometimes slipping in references to other Goan books, which got published too.

A few years ago, a book on twentieth century writing in English was published in two volumes consisting of selections from WLT.  Among them were three reviews by me: Simon Tay, Alien Asian (Singapore); a book by a Lebanese writer (the name and title escape me right now); and a novel by Nuruddin Farah (Somalia).  I decided that if they could use my WLT reviews, so could I.  So when I wrote my Foreword to "Pivoting on the Point of Return", I wrote a long essay about my adventures in editing a volume of Goan literature within which I included my WLT reviews of Goan books.

WLT went through many changes.  The length of review was increased to 750 words.  The size and format of WLT was changed several times, leaving very few pages for reviews.  My subscription ran out and I did not notice.  I stopped receiving books to review.  So my time with WLT was over.

I think one of my best reviews was of a book of poems by the Caribbean trumpeter, Shake Keane.  I tried to write the review like a jazz solo on trumpet and I think I succeeded.

Peter Nazareth

PS In Alien Asian, Simon Tay (a poet and novelist) wrote about my "Elvis as Anthology" class, and I mentioned this in my WLT review.  So the class and Elvis and I are mentioned in the two volume set of Twentieth Century Literature in English.  I had nothing with the selection of the three reviews out of about 160 reviews I wrote for WLT.  Many of those reviews are now being purchased on-line.

Dear Selma,

       At the Goan convention in Toronto in 1988, I was in charge of the table of books for a few hours.  A Goan teenager came to the table, looked to the right, looked to the left, sidled up to me, picked up a copy of JSAL (the Goan issue I had edited), quickly paid me for it, and left quickly with the issue under arm.

        Peter

Anne,

I am glad you responded to what I said.

In fact I have been writing this way for quite a while.  Of course the story varies like an oral work that depends on the time, the place, and the audience: it has to be fresh each time.  What I said here is in my "Rosie's Theme" and "Telling Grandpa's Story" except in a different context, and the story is updated. 

I explained in "Telling Grandpa's Story", published in Confluence, Thornton Heath, that I tried telling my Grandfather's story in my first novel, "In a Brown Mantle", but my friend Tova Raz whose husband was a financial advisor in the Ministry of Finance where I worked (from Jerusalem) read the manuscript and told me it was too much and did not work.  [I was turned down by my alma mater, Makerere University so I joint the Uganda government and was posted to the Ministry of Finance.  It was the best place for me to be since I had decided from my experience at Leeds University that I had been miseducated and needed to re-educate myself.]  So I deleted it.  I realized after I wrote "The General is Up" that it did not work because it was told by a male narrator.  The story was not about just a list of persons in my grandfather's family but about survival and adaptation and change.  That is, a story of how Goans survived far from Goa and yet changed and took in and contributed to other cultures.  So it had to be a woman telling the story because Goans have survived thanks to Goan women, who make the key decisions about the survival of the family.  George Kapa in "The General is Up" quarrels with his friend David D'Costa who has now decided to leave Damibia (like Uganda), accusing him of being under the control of his wife like all Goan men.  I don't think George (or Ronald D'Mello or I at the time of writing the novel) understood why this was so.  It is now presented in Rosie's voice.  I used the name "Rosie" because it is optimistic and "theme" because it is not a story because it goes from A to B to C but it is a theme like music and in fact it swells into a song of survival, which I based (with the author's permission) on the poem "We Are the World Wanderers" by Manohar Sardessai, to whom I gave credit  in the Jerry Pinto anthology (sadly, he died a few months before the anthology came out).

Like Ishmael Reed in "The Last Days of Louisiana Red", I think of my writing as a gumbo, a mix of different dishes, not only in content but also form: I mix up literary criticism, autobiography, fiction, music.  People frequently say to me, "Why don't you write your memoirs?"  I reply that I am always doing this: but if I were to write "Memoirs", there would be only one meaning to the story/stories and I would not be able to use it/them again; this way I am endlessly using my story to find meanings in other writings.  The most eminent scholar in the English Department at the University of Iowa, Sherman Paul, chaired the committee that recommended my promotion to full professor (which happened in 1985), calling my essay "Heading Them Off At the Pass: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed" my showpiece.  There are autobiographical elements in this novel, and references to the Asian Expulsion from Uganda.  I expanded the spiral form in this essay to write a long essay, "Elvis as Anthology", of which Leslie Waters said in an essay in a tribute to Walter Benjamin in Boundary, "this is a great essay": and Goans are named in this essay (Nobby D'Souza, Henry Rodrigues, Norman Remedios, Lavoisier Cardozo, and others).

The beginning of this way of writing can be traced to my time doing postgraduate experience at Leeds University, where the chair of the English Department, famous for beginning an empire on Commonwealth Literature, told me I was not good enough.  In my Introduction to my first book of criticism, "Literature and Society in Modern Africa", I stated that I discovered at Leeds that I did not belong to the same world and worldview as the English literary critics.

The University of Iowa judges scholars more by production and creativeness than qualifications.  Leeds did not think I was good enough so I don't have a Ph D or Master's from the University of Leeds but I am a full professor at the University of Iowa. I keep producing my gumbo.

Best.

Peter

Dear Silviano,

I have stayed out of this discussion because I have not read your novel in its entirety since it was published.  I read it in manuscript form several years ago and you generously acknowledged my assistance in the (beautifully published) novel.  I started reading the novel (when I was here in Ashburn, Virginia, as I am now, visiting with my grandsons).  I read the beginning six times but each time it would not sink in.  I was troubled by two things happening at the time.  One was a problem with a graduate student (an African-American, who I thought was brilliant but the university thought there otherwise: they wanted me to return for a meeting to discuss dismissing him from the university, a meeting attended by campus police when it took place, without my bring there) and my godmother in Toronto who was ill and was dying (she died and I came to Toronto for the funeral).  I put the novel aside and meant to get back to it to see whether it was me or whether there was a problem with the novel.  Since Frederick has clarified that this is a chat line for readers, not writers, I want to make clear that one's state of mind as a reader affects the text one is reading.  I still have not got back to it because I sometimes feel I was not born to only read books--the work I do in Iowa includes reading several books a month and I want a life...

But one question to be raised is this: you are discussing only the content of your novel, but there is the question of how the novel is written.  This should be discussed.  What if the subject is profound but the execution is not?

You said in your earlier message: "Even the natives of Australia, Canada and other countries have their land-rights recognized, except in Goa and in India." This may be partially true, but not entirely.  A few years ago, I was on the Ph. D. Committee of Jodi Byrd, a Chicasaw (Indian) who wrote about what she called "Cacophony".  Her thesis was that everywhere in the world where the colonized had revolted against the English colonizers, it was not the indigenous people who revolted but the settlers.  That is to say the settlers, who came from England rebelled against the mother country but they continued to dominate the real original people of the land.  She argues that postcolonial studies does not take this into account but only deals with the settlers.

Much of what you are writing about in Goa I did not know.  It was not the world I grew up in.  My world from the sixties onwards was full of political forces which I as a civil servant could not ignore but sought to understand, write about with understanding, and take action.  The oppressed people were not lower caste Goans or original Goan inhabitants of the land. Who killed a lot of Africans in the country?  Not upper caste Goans. Who put Idi Amin into power? The answers are in my writing--but a Goan who wrote several years ago to Goa Today from London to disagree with the fine interview with me by Frederick chose to write about "The General is Up" without mentioning the General!!!  Have Goans been blinded by the forces we are obsequious to because we owed them our living, the forces that scapegoated and even abandoned us when colonization was coming to an end.

In Malaysia, where my mother was born, the oppressed people under British rule were Malays.  Malays (at least the elites) came into power at "Merdeka" ("Uhuru" in East Africa).  They called themselves "Bumi Putra", which is taken to mean "sons of the soil".  Yet my cousin Alberto Gomes did research for his Ph. D. into the aboriginal people of the land, one community of which, the "Orang Asli", he took me to see in 1986, who were hostile to the Malays, whom they saw as their oppressors, even though they used the Malay language.

Oppression is a complex thing, as is ending oppressession, as is writing a novel about ending oppression, as is reading about oppression and taking action to end oppression. One of the lessons of Idi Amin is that the "oppressed" are not necessarily kind-hearted people who will treat other people wonderfully when they come into power.

Several novelists have faced problems over getting their work published or being praised for the work.  They persist.

Best.

Peter

Folks,

I mentioned form and structure in my previous message.

Here is a summary of the form and structure of some of my creative writing:

"Brave New Cosmos", one-act play performed at Makerere University in 1963--under the influence of Cheknov, I believed that what happened on the stage had to give the appearance of being as incomplete as in real life, with the characters not completing sentences, and it was up to the audience to look at the whole stage and figure out what was really going on beyond the comprehension of the characters.  The three characters had well-known African names so you could identify the tribe and country. Produced by the BBC in 1963 without sound effects added by the producer to make up for the audience not being able to see the whole stage.

"The Hospital", a radio-play, produced by the BBC in 1964, which depended on sound and sound-effects.  The  characters had African names or were nameless.  The play was written under the influence of Kafka "Metamorphosis" and showed the dehumanization and destruction of the individual in a postcolonial society.

"X", a radio-play performed by the BBC in 1965.  I was under the influence of Brecht at the time and wanted to expose the mechanics of radio to show how the mind was colonized under colonialism, expose and deconstruct the methods of colonizing the mind and thus show the audience how to decolonize their minds.  There were African names in the play or nameless "characters".

"In a Brown Mantle", novel, 1972.  Narrated by a Goan politician in self-imposed exile in London.  Reading about the attempted assassination of his colleague in Damibia (a Uganda-like country), he feels the need to confess and he does confess by writing things down.  It is like a Catholic confession where he tries to slide by his really big sin, but conscience figures turn up in his mind to guide him and draw attention to what he is dodging.  The strongest influence on me at the time of writing was VS Naipaul's "The Mimic Men", about which I wrote an essay (published, revised and published again in my first book of criticism, 1972).  Many of the characters were Goan with Goan (that is, Catholic Goans because there were very few Goan Hindus in East Africa) names. Most of the African names were made up to sound like African names.  They were made-up so readers could not make any tribal accusations, e.g. "He did that because he was Acholi."  I kept one Luganda name in, "Kyeyune", because it sounded like "key", which has a meaning.

"The General is Up", novel, 1984, revised edition 1991.  It bears comparison to "X" in exposing methods of mind-control and in deconstruction.  It seems to be omniscient narration, in contrast to the first novel, until you get to the Epilogue and realize you have been fooled: it was written by a person who seems to be a major character in the novel.  And it seems to have been edited and published by an American of Lebanese origin, who edited it to make it palatable to Americans.  I made up the African names for the same reason as in the first novel.  The Goan Institute (based on the Entebbe Goan Institute) plays an even more important role than in the first one.  I used the name "Damibia" for the country again because of the religious connotations ("Damnation!":  God figures in both novels, more indirectly in this one--the artist plays God by creating the work).

"Rosie's Theme", published several times, written after the second novel above.  The two novels are written by males and in both males are central while women are on the periphery in terms of the structure of the novels but not in terms of importance to the meaning of the novel.  Many readers and scholars get confused about this distinction and accuse the novels of being male-centered.  "Rosie's Theme" has a woman narrator, telling her own story.  It was meant to be a third novel but it got complete in a short piece.  The woman is a Goan in Iowa who came from a Uganda-like country in Africa (like the second novel) with husband and children and lives in Iowa; she met her maternal grandfather in Kuala Lumpur and also visited Goa.  She pooh-poohs her husband's political ideas and says that all people are tribal. She is telling her story to someone so it is not stream-of-consciousnes, unlike the first novel, which means she says what she wants to say.  Of course, she does not realize that there are amusing contradictions in the way she generalizes.  For example, she talks about visiting an Israeli friend who married an Englishwoman and lives in London who complained that his wife's father and his brother do not speak to each other although they live on the same street.  She agrees with the Israeli that Goans, like middle-Easterners, are not like this, forgetting that she tells us that her grandfather and his brother lived in the same barracks like structure in Kuala Lumpur, two apartments away, and had not talked to each other for years.  She celebrates Goan survival at the end, having recounted what is a multicultural experience. 

I have not said anything about my short stories or how I use fictional techniques in my literary and music criticism.

Peter

Book Review

“The Sixth Night”

 A novel by Silviano C. Barbosa

Review by Lino Leitao,

Author of the novel “The Gift of the Holy Cross”

THE SIXTH NIGHT

            by

Silviano C. Barbosa

Goa Raj Books

Toronto, Canada.