My trip to Goa for the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF), where I launched Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death, was a success. The book was well-received, and I met a ton of interesting folks. I don't hang out with writers very often, so it was a real treat meeting poets, novelists, short story writers, and essayists from all over India and beyond.
Naturally, I wound up coming home with books by some of the people I met, one of whom was Australian writer Suneeta Peres da Costa. We got to talking when it turned out that her novella Saudade, released earlier this year, tells the story of a young woman of Goan origin growing up in the final years of Portuguese rule in Angola, much like Sita Valles. This wasn't the only Goans-in-Africa project I came across while at GALF, either; in another post I'll talk about Nalini de Sousa's film Enviado Especial/Special Envoy, about Aquino de Bragança.
While there are broad similarities of background between Sita and Maria-Cristina, Saudade's narrator, I'm not interested in trying to draw close comparisons between the two, not only because one is real and the other fictional, but because Saudade tells a different kind of story altogether.
Like Sita Valles' parents, Maria-Cristina's come from Goa, which as a long-standing Portuguese colony occupied a unique place in the Portuguese imagination and in Portugal's colonial hierarchy. As fairly Europeanized speakers of Portuguese—although Maria-Cristina's parents also speak Konkani at home—and Catholics, they occupy a higher rung on the social ladder than the black Angolans who are their servants and neighbors, whom they consider backward, threatening, barely human. In turn, black Angolans see the family as Portuguese, despite their not being white—a sentiment shared, and acted upon, by Maria-Cristina's father, a labor lawyer for the Portuguese government. Saudade presents the uncomfortable complexity of the relationships between different colonial subjects in a clear yet rather understated way, and doesn't fail to cast it all in the particularly Lusitanian light that shone grimly over Angola in the '60s.
The language of the novella as a whole is quiet, like someone murmuring to themselves while going through an old photo album, or taking their time while writing in a diary, even as the events of the book become increasingly violent. The immediacy of Maria-Cristina's experience of childhood and adolescence is described with a clarity found only in fiction—hardly a criticism—while historical events unfold at an ever-shrinking remove, like a letter arriving from a distant frontier, a radio broadcast heard in the next room, a knock at the door late at night. This juxtaposition, coupled with Maria-Cristina's keen eye for the details of her Goan-inflected Angolan world, her observations of her family and social life, and the hindsight march through history and the consequences thereof for the characters, make reading Saudade a compelling experience.
Readers unfamiliar with Portugal's history in Africa and India may have some difficulty with the novella's numerous historical and cultural references, but nowhere near enough to impede one's understanding and enjoyment of the book. Indeed, the sense of the exotic imparted by the layers of Portuguese, Goan, and Angolan imagery forces readers to see beyond the Luso-tropical façade of Portuguese colonialism and ask themselves just how "exotic" the lives of the characters really are, while also providing the backdrop for the experience of the novella's titular saudade.
Saudade is one of those words the Portuguese are proud of for its slipperiness, its refusal to be translated simply as "longing" or "yearning." It's been written about at length elsewhere, so I won't go into it here, other than to say that insofar as saudade can also mean a nostalgia for something that never quite was, it makes an excellent title for a book about a woman who cannot help but look back to an uneasy past, built upon the groaning armature of a dying empire that, for all its cruelty and vanity, is still what made her who she was and is.
With Saudade—which here in the States is available for the Kindle—Suneeta Peres da Costa has given English-speakers world a remarkable tale of the Portuguese-speaking world, and one that I highly recommend.
DAS
12.24.18
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