Vivek Menezes
Seeking to follow in the footsteps of many significant artists, writers, musicians from around the world who have retreated to Goa at crucial periods in their creative lives, the brilliant young Goan-British-Israeli artist Solomon Souza has brought his wife and three tiny tots out of fraught Jerusalem into the lush late-monsoon landscapes of India’s smallest state. Viewing along on social media, it is like a switch flipped in the stream of artworks this prodigious talent keeps on drawing and painting and sharing. His new countryside images are seriously compelling, and over the phone yesterday, the 32-year-old told me that “my mind is more at ease here. I am able to allow myself to relax, and find that more peaceful place where paintings of beauty, not beasts, come from.”
In this, of course, there are reminders of Souza’s extraordinary grandfather, the great modernist Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) of Saligao, South Bombay, London and New York, who also uncannily channeled the zeitgeist into his artworks, and similarly tracked back to Goa for rejuvenation, as recalled in the wonderful little 1955 Villiers book Words & Lines: “I painted the earth and its tillers with broad strokes, heavily outlining masses of brilliant colours. Peasants in different moods, eating and drinking, toiling in the fields, bathing in a river or lagoon, climbing palm trees, distilling liquor, assembling in church, praying in procession with priests and acolytes carrying the monstrance, relics and images: ailing and dying, mourning and merrymaking in market places and feasting at weddings. I used to write a lot too.”
The older Souza was writing about the Goa of 70 years ago, but it’s truly fascinating how many contemporary artists have reported similar experiences. Here’s what the great Pulitzer Prize-winning jazzman Henry Threadgill writes about living in Moira in the early 2000s in his superb 2023 biography Easily Slip into Another World. Goa “allowed me to establish a new rhythm in my creative life” and “once I eradicated the continual buzz of what even then was an overconnected world, I found I could devote time to listening to what was going on in my head. I slowed down and paid attention to my senses: the new spices and colors and sounds around me. I would spend hours reading. I think I read everything Agatha Christie wrote. Dostoevsky. Books on physics and astronomy. I had a telescope on the veranda and I would spend hours peering at the constellations. And above all I composed. I got a record deal with Columbia just when I started spending significant time in India.
I wrote all the music on my three Columbia albums while I was sequestered there in Moira. The sources of inspiration were endless.” Something similar was happening with quite a number of people in those years. The late photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s initial Goa oeuvre was beautiful but predictable images from old Catholic homes, but then – over years of languorous intimacy with his partner Laxmi Menon - he made one of the most spellbinding bodies of work in the history of photography. Meanwhile, not too far down the Bardez roads, Dayanita Singh was becoming the standout Indian artist of her generation, and Amitav Ghosh was writing his incredible Ibis Trilogy (in my opinion, one of the greatest achievements in Indian letters). We all know things are different now, with Goa is under tremendous pressure, and far more than the creative classes seeking refuge here.
Though it is perfectly right to concentrate on the things going wrong in this moment – from criminal misgovernance to communal mischief – it is equally vital to note the things this confounding little society continues to get mostly right, including holding to our humanity while so many around us lose theirs. This is why many people are fleeing here, from around India and the world, as this beleaguered little state has come to stand out as a beacon of safe haven. Souza himself says he felt helpless in Israel, as “the situation is drenched in the blood and pain of endless conflict. Being a father myself, I am absolutely heartbroken by the devastation and suffering in Gaza, and I pray every day for peace and reconciliation. Not a day goes by without me shedding tears of frustration and loss, and I know many people here are really anguished and upset too. What is happening now hurts the heart, and burns the brain.” Souza says “on a number of occasions I have had people, sometimes quite far separated from this conflict, who have lashed out at me verbally and physically for being Israeli, and sometimes for simply following my religion of Judaism.
They have no care for my actual opinions or beliefs, and act as though I am somehow responsible for this mess for simply being Israeli.” Now, like so many artists before him (including, of course, his famous grandfather) he is hoping it will be different here: “we are staying 50 metres from a mosque in this little village by the sea, and so 5 times every day I can hear the Azaan. It’s a deeply familiar and comforting sound that reminds me of Jerusalem, and makes me feel at home. Goa is a true example of peace and harmony between communities. My hopes are high. I want to plant seeds and be fruitful, to nurture the potential. To work towards the future.