Book Reviews
List compiled by Frederick Noronha Email: fred@bytesforall.org Also taken from the GoaNet Mailing list.
Reviews
Tales
Of Another Kind, Kid's Stories BASED IN GOA
Transitions
House By The Sea
Book reviews in Brief
At Sixteen, He finds
The College Of Wildlife More Educative
Old Goa Books Quoted At
A Premium
The Transforming of Goa
There's
More To Goa In Print Than You Would Dream - Frederick Noronha
Bible
Translated Into Konkani...Over 30 Years Of Freetime
Catholic
Life In Goa
Mangoes
Award Winning
Novel "Tivolem" by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
Robber Baron
or Hero ? Review of "Vasco da Gama" Book
Book Review
"A KIND OF ABSENCE"
Book Review "Goa Down The Ages"
Historical Book - Goa & Portugal: Their Cultural Links GOA:
Continuity & Change
I am very happy to inform
you that my book, entitled: Goa: Memories of My Homeland, has been published
today in Ontario, Canada. It contains 18 nostalgic English poems, 5 English
Short Stories, 12 illustrations, a 10-page Goa in Pictures section, 150 Goan
Proverbs and Sayings, and a glossary of Portuguese, Latin and Konkani words
used in the book.
I am sure, this book will certainly take the reader to blessed times with
evocative glimpses into a blissful era that has aged, perhaps, but is not
forgotten. Written in narrative verse, it will bring back memories while you
delve into our unique culture and traditions, with glimpses of Goa through
illustrations and photographs. It is about our beautiful land we so
lovingly call, in just those three matchless letters: “G O A” that we always
will remember wherever in the world we are.
To those who would like to know about Goa, this book will provide an initial
brief insight into the history, tradition and culture of our beautiful
homeland.
I hope this book will keep Goa where it should be – forever close to our
hearts and minds.
I would appreciate if you would please let your friends know about my book.
Thank you.
Yours truly
Tony Fernandes
1261 Killaby Drive,
Mississauga, L5V 2C2,
Ontario, Canada
TO ORDER YOUR COPY
PLEASE CONTACT: 905-816-0619
PRICE $20.00 CDN
Hello Friends
Nursery books "Geetbharati" published
Balgeet Niketan has
published Geetbharati nursery rhymes Book-1 for KG and Pre-primary school
children in Goa . It contains Goan nursery rhymes, action songs, play songs,
traditional and as well as new stories with detailed and vivid drawings.
Editor of the book Tukaram Shet said that Geetbharati the book would help
educational, physical, cultural, social and linguistic development of Goan
children and it would make the children creative and talented. The copies
of the book are available at Konkani Bhasha Mandal, Margao and Panjim office
and other leading book sellers in Goa. HND
Review - Goa Freaks, BY Cleo Odzer
This book is a personal account by Cleo Odzer of her hippie years(1976-80) in India and specifically Goa. After describing how and why she comes to Goa, the story then turns to the heart of the matter : DRUGS. Goa it turns out is this paradise where drugs can be easily obtained or imported, free from an "intrusive" and opressive government that lets its people do what they want.
The story then gets quite interesting as she describes how the "Goa Freaks" organize various scams to smuggle drugs from asia to N.America, specially Canada, which they found to be an easy place smuggle stuff to. Also gripping are those tense "close calls" when she almost gets caught at Customs.
The smuggling was usually done during the monsoons - a perfect time to leave the dreary rain soaked beaches of Anjuna. The money they earned from these scams would then be used to finance their carefree lives in Goa during the non-monsoon months and to finance their scams for the next year. Ironically, the portion covering their lives in Goa(if you want to call it that), gets pretty boring. It basically boils down to one thing: being stoned and wandering from party to party and getting even more stoned. After a while it gets pretty depressing.
The GoaFreaks were a relatively tightly knit community of Europeans, N.Americans and Australians. Unfortunately this means that Goans, Goa and India get very little coverage in this book. While reading the book, it felt like the Goan Police and the goan people were in a state of permanent hybernation, thus allowing the Goa Freaks to, well, totally freak out.
Cleo has a homepage with many pictures from the book. The url is: http://sensemedia.net/moohalo/252
She has also written another book "Patapong
Sisters". But that as they say, is another story...http://www.well.com/user/patpong
Marlon Menezes
Book Review - Pears From The Willow Tree
Eugene Correia Email:generio@cheerful.com
Finding Gandhian idealism in post-colonial India by Eugene Correia
Pears from the Willow Tree, by Violet Dias Lannoy, published by Three Continents Press, Washington, D.C. (US $14.50 paper)
Taking the title from an Indian proverb, Violet Dias Lannoy's Pears from the Willow Tree portrays the travails of a Gandhian to unveil and correct the corruption and nepotism prevailing in a school.
Sebastian, Seb for short, is an Indian Christian (obviously a Goan because of his fondess for sorpotel, a Goan delicacy) idealist who leaves the luxury of Bombay to go in search of Sikanda, the founder of a school called the Center for National Orientation, mockingly known as The Dump, located in a village. At the school, he encounters all that he holds in disregard and disrespect. He tries to convert the rebellious Ashok and works hard to convince the elders to accept Goba, an outcast.
In the protagonist, one finds the beliefs and views which Lannoy held so dearly. Seb reflects the confusion and confrontation Lannoy experiened herself as a Catholic Goan, married to a non-Goan and then remarried to a white Britisher. Seb also defines the norms and limitations of Gandhism and the thinking of post-colonial India. Seb, like Ashok and others in the book, belong to the Lost Generation.
Drawn into the vortex of this new state of thinking in the new independant state of India are the secular as well as liberal views of the leaders of the freedom movement. In one passage, Seb's friend Nesta tries to provide some answers to Seb's dilemma in understanding such leaders as Gandhi and Nehru. Here's what Nesta says: "We've rendered ourselves incapable of getting down there where life seethes and mingling with the people. Yes, even believing with them, and fearing and loving and worshipping and hating them. ... And so we go on nuturing our egotism in the vacuum of our liberal obscurity, our revolutionary zeal reduced to commenting on the news which others make."
Unfortunately for Seb, it fails to find the master, Sikanda, who dies before Seb's arrival at the school. Seb's arrival is looked upon with suspicion and the faculty believes Seb will become the school's headmaster. But to Seb's dismay, the founder had already nominated the owner of the property on which the school stood. Though disappointed, Seb undergoes a self-examination and realizes that he himself was not true to himself. He finds himself guilty of ambition, a non-Gandhian trait.
The school itself is not free from scandals. Malti, the senior administrator, bears a child fathered by the dead founder, and there's apprehension of a homosexual relationship between the founder and Ashok. Seb, however, is able to provide some direction and guidance to the school's educational goals. He provides the necessary strength and the students in turn provide encouraging results.
Lannoy's description of some of the exchanges between the teachers and students are stunning. She is also able to capture the location and the going-ons in the school with skill.
Lannoy's husband Richard pays a glowing tribute to the fortitude of mind and soul and the endless flow of energy that made up the author who lived in India, East Africa, England and France.
Noted critic and writer, Prof. Peter Nazareth, University of Iowa, who is credited as having "rediscovered" Lannoy, provides a critical afterword. Quoting from her entry in Musings, a journal Lannoy maintained, he mentions, "Under the heading 'Citizen of no-land', she wrote in Musings, 'How long and hard I resisted the idea. Belong nowhere? And her answer: No land, no roots, no base? I do belong. A land for whose freedom I fought. In her fiction, this land is India and Africa. What is lost can be found. Violet Dias Lannoy must be reclaimed as a novelist by Goa, India, and Africa.
Book Review - Memoirs Of Goa
Excerpts of a chapter from MEMOIRS OF GOA by Alfredo de Mello
.....For those not acquainted with the Hindu gods, it is necessary to explain why the god Ganesh has an elephant's head on top of a headless human body. The Hindu Trinity is composed of Brahma, the creator, preserver, or transformer and reabsorber of everything. Though it is Being in itself, without attributes and qualities and hence impersonal, it may also be conceived as a personal High God, usually as Vishnu or Shiva, who is characterized by sublime and adorable qualities. These three great figures (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) constitute the so-called Hindu Trinity ( TRIMURTI, " the one Whole with three forms"). In Goa, the Hindus are generally Vishnuites, that is worshippers of Vishnu, though there are important communities of Saivites (followers of Shiva); for instance, the SMARTS , and CUDALDESKARS are Saivites, whereas the sasticars (Salcete) bardescars (Bardez), pednecars (Pernem) are Vishnuites.
In Hindu mythology Shiva married the goddess Parvati, and the second son of this celestial couple, was called Ganesh ( or Ganesa). The legend was that Ganesh was standing guard at the door while his mother Parvati bathed. When Shiva approached, unaware that this was his son, he was enraged at being kept away from his wife and sent his attendants against Ganesh, whose head was cut off in the scuffle. Great was Parvati's grief, and Shiva promised to cut off the head of the first living creature that he came across and join it to the body. This was an elephant, and thus he became the elephant-headed Hindu god, who has four arms, pot-bellied, riding upon a rat. Ganesh is the first god invoked at the beginning of worship or a new enterprise and his image is often seen at the entrance of temples or houses. He is a patron of letters and learning and he is the legendary scribe who wrote down the MAHABHARATA ( Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty) from Vyasa's dictation (2)
Ganesh-caturthi, the festival celebrating his birth falls on the fourth day (caturthi) of the lunar month Bhadrapada (August-September) and is observed with particular enthusiasm in the state of Maharashtra, on the west coast of India just north of Goa. As mentioned before, the Hindus of Goa are mostly Saivites, that is worshippers of Shiva, and therefore in their pantheon, appear Parvati and of course Ganesh.
The Hindus of Panjim make a papier mach=E9 life-size image of Ganesh,= painted dark blue, and parade him during this festival, the most important being that of the fourth day of the waxing moon, on which, it is said, that there is a problem - Sankat.
On this day the hindus fast and when the moon rises on the horizon, then the hindus make a "puja" or a rite, which consists of an offer of a mound of sesame flour and mixed with sugar, on a platter, of flowers, perfumes and seasonal fruits, because this feast is also destined as a thanksgiving for the harvests. On a small low table are placed conical figures made of cowdung; verses of the Vedas are recited, in Sanskrit, uttered by the "boto" or priest, and the figure of the god is illumined.
During the festivities a lot of bonfires are lit, and fireworks, which instead of being allowed to fly upwards, are thrown to the ground. When the festivites are over, they take the images on trucks, with a procession, dancing and playing ,then go on a boat and immerse the conical figures in the middle of the Mandovi river, shouting "mory=E0!"
After the festivities are over, one night there is a great outcry and ringing of bells and fireworks. The papier-mache figure of Ganesh all dressed up with flower garlands, is paraded, and preceded by a band of musicians. At the plaza next to the Adil Khan Palace, where in 1945 the statue of Abbe Faria would be erected, all sit down and sing hymns in marathi, accompanied by a small harmonium, the TABLA and the CAUSALINS. Then they take the god Ganesh to a boat and leave the god happily in the waters of the river Mandovi, which dissolves it. They choose the place where the river is deepest, because if the tide brings it back, it is a sign that the god is not satisfied with the homage done to him.
This year, the river Mandovi returned Ganesh to its shore, and the Hindus attending the temple, gave the dried papier-mache god to us children, as they saw that we were admiring this elephant-headed god, with his broken tusk. Evidently it was bad omen for the hindus to have Ganesh returned from the river, and they feared for the harvests, and the merchants were haunted with ideas of bad luck in their business enterprises. It appears that the second rice crop (December-January) called VAINGAN turned out to be a failure (3). Evidently Ganesh was not pleased this year. We carried it home, to play with it, until it was destroyed by rains , or by our awkward games with it..........
(2) The Mahabharata consists of a mass of legendary and didactic material worked around a central heroic narrative telling of the struggle for supremacy between two related families, the Kauravas and the Pandavas. It is an important source for a knowledge of Hinduism as it evolved during the period c 400 B.C. to AD 200, that is a span of sixhundred years. Therefore it was not written by Vyasa alone, but by a great number of other writers who composed the greatest poem of almost 100,000 couples, its length thus being about seven times that of the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY combined.
(3) There are two rice crops per year in Goa. The most important is sown at the beginning of the monsoon, and reaped in September, and is called SORODIO. The second crop, which is irrigated by the waters from canals, and dykes, is reaped in January, and is called VAINGAN
Peace Alfredo de Mello
Email:ademello@adinet.com.uy
Book Review - Angela's Goan Identity
Goan book in WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
From SUMMER 1995: WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Pg 646 G o a Reviewer: Peter Nazareth, University of Iowa
Carmo D'Souza. Angela's Goan Identity Panaji, Goa, India. New Age. 1994. x+147 pages. Rs 35
Showing the churches of Old Goa to Merlin, a Dutch woman, the protagonist of Carmo D'Souza's novel Angela's Goan Identity thinks: "Her own Goan character was so much like the fusion of those arts. Goans were moulded into two cultures [Eastern and Western]. The two cultures were blended and yet could be separated. When needed, one side could be pulled, stretched and exaggerated to predominate over the other. It's a kind of a mechanism Goans use, to meet a situation, requiring adjustment. Goans are at home, whether in the deserts [sic] of Africa or the cities of America. The Goan community is found integrated into all the communities of the world." As a Goan, I find this a telling observation; but the novel tempers it.
Angela is born into a Goan landlord family in the last stage of portuguese. We get glimpses into the feudal behaviour of the landlord class, the relationship of Goan Catholicism to Hinduism, the Portuguese educational system, the invasion by India, and the new system under the Indian government (which some Goans cannot adjust to, leaving for Portugal even if they are the sons of freedom fighters or Hindus). Dom Manuel named his daughter "Anjali", but the priest insists on calling her "Angela". The work is a bildungstoman, but its concern is the growth not so much of Angela as her understanding of Goan identity.
Each member of her family marries an "outsider": John, a sailor; Merlin; Mervin, a doctor whose mother was a servant to Angela's family, father a customs officer in Africa and grandmother a fisherwoman; Joseph, a teacher from Kerala. A classmate, a Hindu, marries a Portuguese woman. And Angela marries Milka, a Sikh. Each "outsider" has something to offer. John says it is sailors who have built the Goan identity because culture is dormant in every Goan and needs a journey across the seas to evolve. When there is a referendum on whether Goa should be absorbed into Maharashtra or be a state, Joseph, who loves quoting Shakespeare and Keats, delivers such a nationalistic speech that someone says, "That man has a Goan heart and feelings." Milka refers to art outside fiction: the famous Mario does justice to Goa "because he brings a lot of Goan craziness beautifully on the canvas" with a sense of humour, just as D'Souza does in the novel. Praising their honesty, Milka says that Goans have been asleep since the seventeenth century.
It is tempting to wake up from a long exploitation by asserting a fixed identity, but D'Souza valorizes change. The last Portuguese vgovernor is praised for not following instructions to institute a scorched-earth policy. Of his daughter's marriage to Mervin, Dom Manuel thinks, "Class and caste would slowly disappear. Somewhere, somebody had to begin." Angela marks "her old ideas wrong, one by one... in her memory computer. Those hippies were really upsetting her ideas."
D'Souza's notion that outsiders are helping retrieve Goan identity is borne out by the Goans in the fiction of Rohington Mistry and M.G.Vassanji, particularly the narrator/historian of the latter's prizewinning third novel, The Book of Secrets (Toronto, 1994; see WLT 69:1, p 210). There is a question mark at the end of D'Souza's novel, "venturing its gentle reader to think on," as Ashwin Tombat says in his foreword. Goan identity may be like the Goan dish bebinca, made by Dona Isabella with the assistance of Merlin: "Each layer is baked separately to its proper colour, before they are joined to make a whole."
NOTE: If there are any mistakes in the above ... they're mine! The photo-copy I secured isn't too good. BTW, such writers do need support from the Goa community, one feels. This book, despite its low price (barely $1 in Goa!), has ironically not yet got the readership it deserves, while it has been reviewed in WORLD LITERATURE TODAY.
Dr. Carmo D'Souza can be contacted c/o Mr. Ismael D'Souza, Porbavaddo, Calangute 403510 Goa India. His book is available for sale by mail-order (postage, packaging extra) from The Other India Bookstore at Mapusa Email:oibs@goa1.dot.net.in
Frederick Noronha
Email:fred@goa1.dot.net.in
Journal of South Asian Literature
Goan Literature: A Modern Reader
[Do Goans take Goan literature for granted? It seems we do, and that's probably because of the it's-ours-so-it-can't-really-be- important attitude. This essay, reproduced below, is by Peter Nazareth, the guest-editor of the Journal of South Asian Literature issue of Winter-Spring 1983 of the Michigan State University, which was a special issue titled Goan Literature: A Modern Reader. Maybe writing in languages like Konkani or Marathi is not adequately covered in this issue, which still however remains a very insightful volume:]
INTRODUCTION By Peter Nazareth
The request was made across the lunch table when I was visiting Michigan State University. I thought I was being invited to write an article on Goan literature, and if I had the chutzpah to talk to the Michigan State faculty about "Time in the Third World," well, I could do this too.
When I returned to Iowa City, I found out from Surjit Singh Dulai's follow-up letter that I had committed myself to editing an issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature on Goan literature. My first impulse was to back down.
What did I know of Goan literature? True, I was a Goan and my first novel contains Goan characters, as do some of my short stories, but these were part of African literature. But I was born in Uganda and had only been to Goa twice as a child. My mother is Goan but was born in Malaysia. My father had come from Goa to work in the British administration, intending to return home, but finally had made the decision to remain in Africa because he realized his children, who were born in Africa, were attached to Africa, not Goa. And so he is buried in Africa: while his children are on the North American continent. That perpetual exile that Goans seem unable to end...
I had been president of the Entebbe Goan Institute, three times, one of the oldest Goan institutes in East Africa. But I considered myself primarily an African. I was instrumental in changing the name of the Institute to "Entebbe Institute." My writings (criticism, fiction and radio plays) are published in Africa. I was involved chiefly with African literature.
Before I could reject Professor Dulai's request, however, I was persuaded by Dilip Chitre, an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program, to give it a try. He said he would give me contacts and addresses.
Well, I could not deny some connection with Goan literature. Goa Today had re-published one of my "Goan" short stories, which caused problems in my home-town of Entebbe, one of the readers there believing that the story was about him (he had not noticed it when it had appeared four months earlier in Ghala, published in Nairobi.
I had friends in Goa such as Zenaides Morenas, who had worked in the Uganda Civil Service (as I did) and who had sent me some Goan writing on his return home. And Prof. Paul Greenough had told me that there indeed was Goan literature. So I sent letters to The Times of India, the Sunday Navhind Times, The Times Literary Supplement and Goa Today, inviting submissions.
Material came in: from India, Australia, England, Portugal, and elsewhere. Many Goans, like West Indians, were living outside, yearning for home, refusing to be denationalized, returning only to leave again.
I received writing by Goans which was not about Goa or Goans, about Goa which was not by Goans, about Goa by those who claimed one parent to be Goan, and by someone in India who had started an organization to trace ancestry through the mother. I discovered that Goans had written in thirteen languages, of which the chief were English, Portuguese, Marathi and Konkani, the last of these, the mother tongue, being written in four different scripts.
How was I going to read the work, let alone evaluate it? I had studied English literature for my degree and graduate work. I knew Konkani only subliminally, the language having been pushed out of my mouth by a colonial system which made us believe the English were ruling us because they were culturally and linguistically superior. We had to speak English at home, our teachers told us. Our parents spoke bilingually to us, but we replied in English. If we needed another language to get on in the society, it was Kiswahili.
I sought help. I did not get the fellowship I applied for to go to Portugal and Goa to find out whether I had done any more than scrape the tip of the iceberg, whether what I had were not pieces that had broken off and floated away.
People who had agreed to translate from Konkani did not deliver. I had English translations of people who had high reputations in Konkani literature which read so badly I wondered whether their reputations were undeserved. And I found some of the literature very strange, particularly poetry written before the fifties. The subjects seemed hopelessly romantic, the treatment archaic, the psyche concerned with the irrelevant.
Was it just because I was out of touch? Or was it that being involved with the exciting literature of a whole continent, Africa, my responses were sound: that Goan writers were trapped in a deep, airless well? Julio Cesar Monteiro Martins, a member of the International Writing Program from Brazil, said that when the dictatorship in Portugal fell, people all over the world thought that there would be the emergence of a great underground literature. But nothing came forth: censorship had gone on for so long that people were born used to the state of censorship. Luis de Menezes Braganza, the father of Goan nationalism, said that he sometimes wondered "if emigration might not be something more than an economic safety valve. An escape for the soul of our youth. Getting out, they do not get sullied in the stagnant pool. They breathe the air of our times."
I got involved, involuntarily, with the quarrels of the Goan literary scene. Antonio da Cruz wrote a fine, if one-sided, critique of my novel in the Sunday Navhind Times under the title, "African Goans with Pants Down." There followed several heated exchanges in the same newspaper, and Doreen de Souza concluded, "If Peter Nazareth, the author of the novel In a Brown Mantle, who is highly qualified and a prominent East African patriot, chose to stay away from the land of his ancestors, why then should anyone object to other African Goans leaving the shores of Goa?"
In fact, I had left Uganda during the early years of Idi Amin's reign to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, my Uganda citizenship taken away, intending to return to Uganda. Being "patriotic" does not exempt one from the political problems in Africa: rather, it puts one on the front line. As a writer, I never left Africa.
But we are talking here of Goan writing. I received a series of rude replies from a Goan born in Africa, who refused to let me do anything with his writing. I received two letters simultaneously from a Goan writer, one saying that I had listened to all his enemies, the other pleading to help him get to the United States as Americans and Goans could be friends and he and I, together, would astound the world.
At this point, Dilip Chitre told me that there was no such thing as Goan literature. I told him that he enjoyed being Leader of the Opposition.
It was with relief that I turned to Joseph K. Henry, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, who was appointed my research assistant on the project, thanks to Dr. Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Afro-African Studies Program. Being a graduate student in literature and a black American, he was an objective yet sympathetic mind that I needed.
Black Americans, like Goans, have been through a long, denationalizing colonial experience which still affects both the social reality and psyche. Not only did Joseph Henry keep me going through the rough patches, he was in a position to understand what Goan literature was about while escaping special pleadings. For just as there is a tendency to undervalue "one's own" literature, being trained to find value only in what comes from the colonial metropolis, there is a counter-tendency to overvalue it.
Finding many similarities between Caribbean and Goan literature, and yet enough differences so as to understand the nature of the similarities, I received much comradely advice from Andrew Salkey of Jamaica, who, in addition to publishing his own novels, children's novels and poetry, has edited several books of Caribbean writing.
I did find things of value in Goan literature. Writers like Raul Furtado and Lucio Rodrigues were of the highest order, the former as poet and short story writer, the latter as short story writer, essayist and folklorist. I was able to identify with the poets of my generation such as Eunice de Souza, Santan Rodrigues and Hubert Nazareth (no relation). These poets deal with the fragmented experience of Goans, searching for the missing centre, the deep Third World need to end alienation.
Frederick Noronha
Email:fred@goa1.dot.net.in