By R. Benedito Ferrão
Paul Melo e Castro talks about the translations Life Stories: The Collected Stories of Maria Elsa da Rocha (Goa 1556, 2023), Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais (CinnamonTeal, 2023), and Regional Tales (CinnamonTeal, 2024) which brings together stories by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 25
Devi’s writing is an exquisite capture of mid-century Goan society, mores and landscape. The detailed descriptions of the houses and households in particular are of interest for the sheer opulence they conjure up, a gilded age indeed which faded far too soon, and it is easy to see why for so many Goans, there persists a saudade for a paradise lost.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 19
Neema Shah joins this sparse but important canon of Asian-African literature with her debut novel Kololo Hill (Picador, 2021), the focus of which is also the interrupted and scattered lives of the Asian exodus. It has fallen largely to the sons and daughters of those who left Africa and settled in the new worlds of Canada and UK to tell this story. Shah’s mother was born in Kenya and her father in Tanzania who migrated to the UK.
By Augusto Pinto
Issue no 18
In 2013 a poetry collection came out which in my opinion is a jewel of Konkani literature. There are those who might dispute this view and indeed regard this collection as not merely valueless but even pornographic. Be that as it may, one thing is true: anyone who has read this particular poetry collection will agree that it is the most controversial work of literature ever produced in Konkani.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
the home has always been a special place, one we take for granted perhaps, but which dwells in our imagination—the geographic specificity of it, the relationships which unfold within it, the momentous events we share and celebrate—and particularly the homes of our childhood remain with us, becoming an indelible part of our consciousness.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
My great-grandfather Ignatius Borges was from Sadashivgad in Karwar; he worked as a motorman for the railways and travelled often. His younger son, Stephen, my grandfather, served briefly in the army, before moving to Bombay in the 1940s, where he lived in a kudd, a short distance from Cavel. He got married to a Goan bride, my grandmother, Anna Vaz, and got himself a job as a tailor, and settled on Grant Road.
By R. Benedito Ferrao
Issue no 16
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.
By Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (preview only)
Issue no 16
What was the state of literature in Goa, a hundred years ago? With no radio or TV, and only one movie theatre in distant Panjim, surely people spent a lot of time reading? Yes, they read a lot of newspapers, that sprouted like mushrooms, and died almost as quickly. And what about books? Seventy-three long years had passed between the publication of Os Brahmanes and Chord and Discords. What were people reading in the intervening years?
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 13
We exist outside of ourselves. This moment of consciousness is the birth of literature – the ability to perceive ourselves and to give form to perception is what allows us to introspect and immortalise experience. It’s a profound loss to Goans, that we grow up exiled from our own literary legacy.
By Paul Melo e Castro
Issue no. 12
Had anything been published in Goa in Portuguese? I’d never heard of anything. But after a little rummaging about I discovered in my own university library a copy of Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra’s A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, a two-volume essay and anthology on Goan writing. If Goa’s literary heritage in Portuguese survives, and if it is still an object of study today, it’s in large measure down to Devi and Seabra’s efforts.
By Ben Antao
Issue no. 9
I understand that the place of one’s childhood and early influences leave an indelible stamp on the memory and subconscious, but can it be so profound as to negate all subsequently lived experiences in other lands? Indeed, this seems to be malady afflicting Goans in the diaspora who at one time in their lives had the luck to sample life in colonial East Africa.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue No. 8
Review of A House of Many Mansions: Goan Literature in Portuguese. Portuguese was for centuries, Goa’s prime language: of instruction, of transaction, of cultural interaction, of aspiration, and perhaps more importantly, it was the language of literature. The fact that literature has not yet found its rightful place in Goan historiography shows how miserably we have failed to understand its role.
