Vivek Menezes
Eunice de Souza was already 67 when she delivered her first public reading in her ancestral homeland, on a luminous evening in 2007, on a little stage under a vast rain tree (now cut down) behind the magnificent 150-year-old Old Goa Medical College building that had just then been handed over – absolutely shockingly – to Delhi developers to convert into a shopping mall.
The great poet, and legendary professor of English Literature at Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College had been invited to Panjim (actually it was by me) as part of Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa, an exploratory and eventually pathbreaking art exhibition curated with rare brilliance by Ranjit Hoskote, which did wind up having the desired effect of reversing the mall plans. But there were many other significant reverberations from that moment, when four generations of Goan artists were shown side by side from Angelo da Fonseca (born 1902) to Shilpa Mayenkar Naik (born 1981). Together, next to each other, their interconnectedness became undeniable. Hoskote described the effect as “an invisible river” in his (in retrospect hugely impactful) curatorial essay, pointing out “geographical contiguity does not mean that Goa and mainland India share the same universe of meaning: Goa’s special historic evolution…its pride in its ancient internationalism avant la lettre, sets it at a tangent to the self-image of an India that has been formed with the experience of British colonialism as its basis. The relationship between Goa’s artists and mainland India has, not surprisingly, been ambiguous and erratic, even unstable.”
Looking back from today’s vantage, Aparanta was the pivot away from the plight Hoskote described, and Eunice de Souza also played a crucial part in turning the trajectory towards what it is today (where the Old GMC hosts many annual cultural jamborees: IFFI, Serendipity, Goa Open Arts). It is true you could almost feel the ground shift when she read her poems – so many with raw naked power about being Goan - and I recall agreeing enthusiastically with the acclaimed writer/director Venita Coelho afterwards when she told me “this is the Goa I want to live in.”
To some extent, against all odds, that did come true, especially after the Goa Arts + Literature Festival (GALF) was founded in 2009 by the Goa Writers group (represented by the eminent Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo and myself) in partnership with International Centre Goa, taking explicit inspiration from Eunice’s insightful line about “ways of belonging.” It has proven a durable founding principle over 15 years and 14 editions, and before she died in 2017 it is a point of pride we repeatedly hosted and continuously honoured our literary titan. At least this one time, justice was served.
Happily, it looks like Eunice de Souza’s oeuvre – without any doubt one of the most incandescent of our times – will continue to galvanize new generations thanks to her literary executor, fellow poet and very close friend and colleague of more than 40 years Melanie Silgardo, under whose guidance Penguin India has just published Volcano, an instantly invaluable new collection. Here are all of Eunice’s published poems plus seven that are entirely new, as well as three introductions: by the poet herself for her first collected poems in 2009, another by Silgardo for the second edition published posthumously in 2019, and a new one by the Harvard University professor Vidyan Ravinthiran.
Volcano is a great book, but with a nondescript cover, and disappointing title compared to A Necklace of Skulls, which is what Eunice had herself chosen. Unfortunately, Ravinthiran’s introduction to Volcano similarly underwhelms – including some inexplicably lazy tone-deafedness about his subject’s cultural history like describing 1970s Goa as “deeply and idiosyncratically Portuguese” – when compared to his own fine 2020 analysis of this same oeuvre in Yale Review. Interestingly, in that essay Speech Acts, he zoomed in on the identical lines that lit a spark under us in Panjim in 2007: “No matter that / my name is Greek / my surname Portuguese / my language alien. // There are ways / of belonging.” Today, when blood-and-soil rootedness has become tyrannical in India, her objections sound more than frazzled; they sound heroic.”
I think that is true, and it seems to me that Eunice de Souza’s work continues to ring out with exemplary relevance while much of what was written with far more bombast by her (almost all male) contemporaries is tending to fade away. Silgardo says it best herself in her 2019 introduction: “she never baulked at using her life, her curiosity, her engagement with lovers, friends, students, retainers as her material. But her poems transcended the personal, the ‘confessional’- she gave them context and moral perspective with a lightness, dryness, irreverence and humour that became her hallmark. She was a poet whose touchstone was the honest, the authentic, the unguarded self. She left us a small but potent legacy- poems that will survive us all.”
Via email from London, where she has lived since the 1980s, Silgardo told me that Eunice’s book collection is at her beloved Xavier’s after “she had whittled them down to the essentials, touchstones for living and writing - so there is a library alcove dedicated to her. (She always joked about wanting a grotto on the campus). But it would be nice to have a poetry prize for women in her name - she would like that.” What we already know is “her poems are as fresh as ever - and I would put that down to her directness and spareness of thought, and the way she had of digging deep into the particular - her particular - and finding the universal. Tonally, she had perfect pitch, and was able to harmonise the speaking and poetic voice - while freighting it with frailties and fierceness. She touched everything she taught and wrote with an honesty and urgency - and, in life did get up some people's noses. 'Best to meet in poems' she says in Five London Pieces -- and I hope she has new readers meeting her for a long time to come.”