A Kind of Absence.

Nazareth, Peter

Joao da Veiga Coutinho. Stamford, Ct. Yuganta. 1997. 127 pages. $9.95. ISBN 0-938999-10-9.

"These pages are about a little tribe called Goans and their history," begins Joao da Veiga Coutinho in a volume subtitled Life in the Shadow of History. "The mind, the discursive mind, is essentially dialogical," he says, as he asks questions of that history, getting excitement from "coming upon a fact or a thought unknown, unheard of before, which suddenly throws open a window, uncovers a pattern of the plot of an event, the truth of a situation." Goans are haunted by a history they must understand because "just as a trauma in the early life of an individual which continues to have disturbing effects at a later age must in some way be re-enacted and deprived of its maleficent power, so in the life of colonized peoples the foundational trauma must be abreacted, as it used to be said, relived in words so it can show itself for what it was and the people affected can take a certain control of the event and of themselves in the fact of it." There are universal lessons here because "Goans must have been among the first to experience the sense of exile that characterizes the modern age."

Coutinho's work reads like a novel with the narrator holding conversations with dead historians, with himself, and with the poet Camoens, who says, "And like the Greeks, Goans also believe that something great has happened on their exiguous soil, though they are hard put to say exactly what it is." Every myth vanishes when questioned. "India" is an invention of the British. "Indian history" began with British rule, not because, as some say, "in India time is said to be conceived as neither a straight-shooting arrow nor measurable cycle," but because what seems to have been lacking was "a genuine curiosity, the will to go and find out (historien), to anchor the tale in verifiable fact." Perhaps because he lives in the U.S., Coutinho is particularly aware, on a return visit, of the energy of the land. "Not the mind but the senses created our world," he states.

Yet we do not get a fullness of the senses because of his form of meditation, unlike Images of Goa by Ben Antao (1990); with a protagonist who figures in every chapter, the volume has a rootedness coming from a writer of fiction, which Antao, living in Canada, has become. Coutinho does not know Goan literature. "People have said to me: books ruined us," he says. "What did they mean? What books?" He continues, "They did make us stumble, confused and unenlightened, into the world of literature whose nature remained unclarified." Would it weaken or strengthen his argument to know that removing the trauma of history could begin by discovering and interpreting Goan literature? (see WLT 59:3, pp. 374-82). Without knowing history, Goans seem doomed to reinvent the wheel.

Perhaps the wheel needs to be reinvented. A Kind of Absence reopens history on the 500th anniversary of the voyage by Vasco da Gama which paved the way for the colonization of Goa and the consequential displacement of a people.

Peter Nazareth University of Iowa