So, the strangeness for me was to write as a Goan writer. But my father brought me up to believe I had to help Goans any way I could so I took up the challenge because I thought I could bring my experience as an African writer
—Peter Nazareth
By R. Benedito Ferrão
Peter Nazareth is Professor of English, and Advisor to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He was born in Kampala in 1940, his father having emigrated there from Goa. Nazareth graduated from Makerere University College, obtaining his English Honors degree from the University of London. He did graduate work at Leeds University. A Senior Officer at the Ministry of Finance in Uganda, he left in 1973 to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, after which he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program. He is the author of several books and plays, notably In a Brown Mantle (East African Literature Bureau, 1972) and The General is Up (Writers Workshop, 1984).
Conducted between February and April, 2017, this e-conversation between R. Benedito Ferrão and writer, literary critic, and professor Peter Nazareth engages him in topics of the Goan diaspora, Goan literature, as well as his own writing and criticism. As a writer of novels, radio plays, and short stories, and as a critic of multiple literatures, Nazareth is asked to reflect upon historical, personal, and other influences on his work, as well as the reception of it. In his responses, Nazareth draws from familial and personal history as a writer whose lived connections include East Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the West. Additionally, his perspective covers such moments of import as the end of colonialism in East Africa and the Asian expulsion from Idi Amin’s Uganda. He is also asked to comment upon the trajectory of twentieth and twenty-first century Goan literature as an early anthologist of writing by those of Goan origins in various parts of the world. In so doing, Nazareth recalls how he came to the work of writers Leslie de Noronha and Violet Dias Lannoy, the latter an author whose novel was published posthumously. Further, the gamut of issues covered include inter-communal socialities and antagonisms, literature and identity diversity, and the fraught terrain of claims to authenticity.
What follows are excerpts of the interview which can be read in its entirety here.
RBF: What drew you to writing?
PN: I was the first-born son in the family. My sister Ruth was born when I was over four years old, and so I was in effect a lone person. My father had a lot of books in our house, including joke books. He was well known by Goans for giving fine speeches and always including a joke in the speeches. He also liked reading comic books—I think this was the influence of my mother. So, I grew up reading and liking all kinds of writing. My father loved writing limericks, so I was used to the notion that I could write all kinds of things. So, from way back I liked writing all kinds of things, and I was also good at editing the work of other students whom I encouraged to write. In my last year at Kololo Secondary School in Kampala, Ganesh Bagchi—who was a writer of plays, Shavian plays, which he acted in with his wife, who was also a teacher in the Kololo School—made me editor of the second issue of the School magazine, The Kololian. (Kololo School was opened in 1954, and half the students and faculty from the Old Kampala secondary school in Old Kampala were transferred to Kololo School.) Bagchi gave me a free hand. I could make the magazine as thick as I liked. In that issue, I also included my literary criticism, a short story (I think the character was named Ronald), book reviews, etc. I wrote so much that I published some of my work as being “by an editor” (I had roped in other students to be on the editorial board). So, from way back, I was writing all kinds of things and not considering that one genre of writing was inferior to another. This story is told by me in my essay “The Kololian and S.T. Writerji” in the volume Exodus: Kololian Perspectives, which I co-edited, published by The Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2002.
RBF: You refer to the various influences in your youth as being the motivation for your life path as a writer in multiple genres. On the one hand, you bear witness to the stimuli around you: books in your household, your father’s own diverse reading practices as well as his adeptness at oratory, and also the encouragement you received while at secondary school to participate in writing and editing in an institutional fashion. But, on the other hand, you mention the loneliness of being the first-born and how reading helped you mitigate this. Two related questions arise, then. The first is how did writing help you develop a sense of interiority, or did writing, in fact, function as a kind of escape for you? Indeed, I am thinking here of the very evident and recurrent theme of exile that appears in your novels and literary criticism. To follow up, my other question is about origins, as well. As you know, I was drawn to your work because we share a common history—both of us are connected to the Goan British East African Diaspora (GBEAD). Your writing on the subject of this diaspora, as a scholar and fiction-writer, is part of a limited corpus of literature and criticism about the GBEAD by someone who also happens to be a Goan who was born in East Africa during the colonial period. At the risk of labeling you a GBEAD writer—a category that would be self-limiting and inadequate in explaining the range of your oeuvre—what role did this fact of history play in your becoming a writer? To be honest, I am curious about the rarity of such a phenomenon—that of the GBEAD writer. This, given middle-class, diasporic predilections for, shall we say, more “productive” lifestyles, as well as the general lack of support for writerly pursuits as the end of the colonial era drew nigh and then in its aftermath, even as these are the very substance of your writing!
PN: I never thought of writing as an escape or of myself as a member of a diaspora. I should add that my father was a civil servant posted to Entebbe and he remained there until I completed primary school (a Goan primary school) and had to go to Kampala to a secondary school, in old Kampala to begin with. I stayed with my aunt Lily, my father’s sister, for four years: she was a nurse at Nakasero hospital in Kampala. My father wrote powerful letters, as did my Aunt, so I was used to the notion that I too could write. In Kampala, I was befriended by the Gomes family, famous (as my brother John has written) for designing the busuuti, which is the national dress of the women in Buganda. It is also called the Gomisi. A stamp in Uganda was issued of the Gomisi. The Gomes family consisted of Marcella, also a nurse at Nakesero hospital with my aunt, Julie, Roger, Ella and John. They loved comics: American ones (Captain Marvel) and British ones (Beano among them). They also used to buy a comic-book-styled publication of short stories. They were very generous in sharing their comics with me. A couple of years ago, I signed The General is Up for Ella who lives in Toronto. As far as I know, the Gomes family read but did not write. Two other friends in Kampala, who were equally generous and loaned me their comics, were Helen and Norman Godinho: Batman, Classics Illustrated, and others. I never thought of myself as being in a diaspora, as I mentioned above. At Makerere, I wrote as a Makerere student just like the other Makerere students, and I was accepted as one. I was even elected Chairman of Mitchell Hall though there were less than ten Asian students out of 130. At Leeds and back in Uganda, I wrote as an Ugandan, an East African, and was considered to be an African writer. My photo was on the cover of Afriscope magazine in the early seventies with other African writers (I only knew of this cover from a Nigerian writer, Kole Omotoso, when he was in the International Writing Program). So, the strangeness for me was to write as a Goan writer. But my father brought me up to believe I had to help Goans any way I could so I took up the challenge because I thought I could bring my experience as an African writer (which led to my reading and writing about Caribbean Literature and AfroAmerican Literature) to make a contribution to Goan writers. I did not call myself a Goan writer. In fact, I did not include any of my fiction in the JSAL2 issue on Goan literature. The editor in chief, Carlo Coppola, when he received the manuscript, phoned me to ask why I had not included any of my work in it. “Because I am not a Goan writer,” I said. He insisted that I include something of mine, which is why I included an extract from In a Brown Mantle because I had included an essay on that novel by Antonio da Cruz, which he had originally published in The Sunday Navhind Times and my novel could link up with that essay.
R. Benedito Ferrão has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at The College of William and Mary. He is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Research Fellow at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa. Curator of the 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of the same title (Fundação Oriente, 2017) to accompany this retrospective of the artist’s work. His fiction and creative non-fiction can be read in Riksha, The Good Men Project, Mizna, The João Roque Literary Journal, and other publications.
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