Since a couple of years ago I am driven by an urge to write short poems in my mother tongue – Konknni. This period corresponds to a radical change in my professional life pattern as University departmental head and professor, from a relatively hectic administrative and teaching routine to a somewhat calm and relaxed retired life. Major changes in routine seem to affect our health. I noticed that happening to me, leading to a deterioration of a chronic heart problem and to the need of an urgent surgical intervention to replace the mitral valve.
What does that all mean to my faultless regularity, during past nine years or so as a fortnightly columnist of Herald and little less number of years in another Goan daily of more recent presence in Goa? Not very much in terms of time spent, but quite significant by way of helping me to redefine my thoughts and feelings, integrating better the past professional experience into a fresh vision about life and reality. The title of this column echoes this change, or refocusing.
The element of “relaxation” is a new insight into my understanding of culture. It had not struck me so forcefully before, as it does now. It helps me to appreciate the inclusive essence of culture, better than its exclusivist nature, stressed during our life as adults, when we are driven by a competitive spirit, that seeks to excel, often covering the fragilities and chinks in our armour.
It is the inclusive or protective feature of culture that welcomes us into this world when we are born, helpless on our own, caringly embraced and protected by the social and cultural environment, notwithstanding normal exceptions and accidental asides. It is again a rewinding of the same process that takes place as we grow older, and become increasingly dependent upon helping hands and good will of others. It is not unfair or humiliating if this end-phase is referred to as a second childhood.
As mentioned earlier, it is during the intermediate adult phase that is spent in a drive for achievements that the divisive and exclusive side of culture comes to the fore, and takes the centre stage. In a growingly globalised society, where new technologies enhance centripetal forces aimed at reducing the distance, the centrifugal forces resist and grow, resulting in ever more violent reactions and clashes of cultural identities, expression in new nationalisms and ethnic cleansings.
Efforts at harmonising the divisiveness and its threatening consequences are only apparent and always temporary. They seek to avert mutually destructive trends while no contending party has an edge or the upper hand, postponing thereby a return to feuds. This has been the history of human evolution since the appearance of the human species on the face of the earth.
Cultures emerged naturally as instinctive defence tools for the survival of the species through its protective and defensive capacities, amidst changing threats from natural forces and other human societies. It is through cultures that human species, unlike all the species, took care of its evolution, challenging successfully the Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest. Through cultures even those unfit for survival get a chance to live.
Many who are born handicapped or become deficient later, can benefit from the protective hand of individual and institutional means sustained by cultural precepts and injunctions. This does not mean that cultural functioning is linear and easy to anticipate. Ambiguities in cultural decisions can result from major technological inputs which could promise major benefits, but without a desirably high level of success ensured. Such adventurism could eventually result in a cultural suicide and consequent self-destruction of the human species.
How do these somewhat digressive and futuristic reflections linked with my new urge of writing poems in my native language? If successful, I would regard it as a feat after an education that since its primary phase sought to erase my mother tongue during the colonial era. The trend continued later as the only path to a successful professional career, inside and outside the native cultural boundaries.
Following my settlement in Portugal about a quarter century ago, I conducted courses in Konknni language and Goan culture with the backing of the Fundação Oriente during several years for relatively large groups of interested compatriots and ethnic Portuguese. That was a way of convincing myself and others that one’s native culture and its linguistic soul could sustain me emotionally beyond my native cradle, which I never viewed as a cage.
We all know that a cradle is for babies, not for adults, who should develop the ability to move anywhere with the confidence inherited from one’s cultural moorings. I am grateful for the opportunity provided to me by two Goan dailies as their columnist. That enhances my cultural links, already sustained by a life-long activity of historical research. The new web media, like the FB, arrived as a fresh boon that enables me to bridge distances and return to the protective embrace of the native culture that served as my launching pad in life.
To conclude, my poems in Konknni reflect my confidence and ability to vent my deepest feelings about my life experiences that only poetic expression can convey best, without fear of being misunderstood and without need to be defensive. It is like a home-coming , enriched by the Upanishadic global family – Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa.
