Your new book comes almost a decade after Goa: A Daughter’s Story. Was Filomena’s Journeys at the back of your mind after you finished writing the previous book?
The suggestion that I should write about my parents or about Goa pursued me from the time I began the book on Graham Greene around 1983. Friends from Dharwar who are writers themselves suggested that I write about my mother or my father, and that I should give up Greene. I always did feel my mother’s life needed to be celebrated, a thought that was daunting yet reinforced by repeated suggestions in various ways with insistent regularity over the years.
A Daughter’s Story was your “search to understand the history of my community and transformation within Goan society”. Yet Filomena’s Journeys reads almost like a sequel to the earlier book.
The first book was a personal account of cultural transformation in which my family served as an example, but the book encompassed much more. And, yes, the personal voice held it together, linking centuries and decades of cultural history.
This book is a tribute to my mother in which I try to understand the complex cultural, social and political worlds in which my parents lived. Though from the same community, their worlds differed and made them into the individuals they became. It is also a way of understanding how the personal is always political.
Family memoirs are hardly easy to write, especially if the material cuts to the bone. Is the book a sort of coming to terms with a troubled past?
I came to terms with the past through living with great determination in the present. Even as a schoolgirl I was inspired by my mother and equally in some ways by my father. Life in Dharwar liberated us, and yet we were raised in a very Goan Catholic home with our languages spoken alongside English.
How difficult was it to research and write the book?
Writing this book was not, by any means, easy. I was fortunate to find support and information from extended family and friends on both sides. I found an amazing amount of social history in the O Ultramar and O Heraldo of those times. That was a treasure trove for me—the world of my parents came alive. So much has been lost through negligence of this archive by authorities and what survives is entirely due to the dedication of librarians working against all odds.
Why did you choose not to write in the first person, wouldn’t that have worked better for the reader?
I did not write in the first person because I could not. The necessary distance was impossible when thinking ‘my mother/my father’. In fact I could not even start. The book was written after much persuasion over many years by friends and later by readers of A Daughter’s Story. Many asked why so little was said about my mother in the book, and my explanation was that my father exemplified the culture I was writing about. The book was about Goa and not about my family. I found it amazing how many strangers responded to the brief references to my parents in that first book.
It was my editor, Ravi Singh, who suggested that it should be narrated in the third person. This strategy released the flow.
Filomena’s Journeys is your tribute to your mother’s courage that sustained a young family through great adversity. Yet the more compelling passages in the book deal with the painful memories of your father’s abandonment and complete decline.
Remember Aristotle’s pity and terror in his definition of the cathartic effect of a great tragedy. Tragedy is always more compelling. They were also the most difficult sections for me to write. And the distance afforded by time and the fact that I grew up away from his world helped me. Perhaps my description of his world is an unsparing assessment of a section of the Goan society which I knew intimately through the lives of my parents.
You describe your father, Chico Figueiredo, as a man “trapped in the confines of his birth”, a victim of the world of privilege. Your father’s story would find echo in the histories of scores of other Catholic Brahmin families in Goa.
Absolutely, but I would say Catholic upper caste families, not just Brahmin. For me it is saddening to see so many in my community unable to deal with social and political change, who remain locked in the past. The Hindu community went into trade and other forms of business and professional life even before Liberation. Also there was cultural continuity in their lives. The Catholic experience is the outcome of a transformation I have written about in my earlier book. Hence the change is more fundamental to their sense of self and has created a deep sense of insecurity.
Are you worried about the kind of reception the book will get here in Goa, given that though we get 3 million tourists a year, we’re still such a closed society?
I have been fortunate in finding a readership beyond Goa. But readers in Goa do matter to me very much indeed. I have tried to avoid self censorship. I do believe that we are a society capable of introspecting with maturity and that the time has come when it is necessary for us to do so. Closed sections of society exist in every community and I think all those who write memoirs, autobiographies or fiction in which the personal is perceived by those in the know, have to deal with criticism. I am fortunate that my earlier book was read, appreciated and criticised.
Living in Dharwar obviously gave you an “outsider” perspective on the prism of Goan life. Did the distance afford you a more dispassionate overview of the complex social dynamics at play in your parents’ lives?
Oh, yes. Dharwar was crucial to all that I am and all that I write. When Girish Karnad released A Daughter’s Story he said, ‘This book is a product of both Goa and Dharwar.’ Now the time I have spent reflecting on the lives of my parents, and living more fully in Goa, has helped me understand in some measure the complex social dynamics you have so ably spotted!
A Daughter’s Story was criticised for not having gone deep enough into the personal story. Has the experience of writing this one been cathartic?
Cathartic in the most profound sense and hence, illuminating. Accompanying my mother’s journey was a sort of epiphany for me.
As you say in your book, your return to Goa with Alban, your husband, the first time was coming full circle. Now you have definitively returned to the red soil of your ancestors.
Yes and no. Red earth, certainly, but at a far remove in crucial ways for me from Borda, Margão. I am in Aldona, in Bardez.
(Read also the exclusive excerpt of the book that appears on today’s edit page)
After her well received ‘Goa: A Daughter’s Story’, author Maria Aurora Couto’s new book ‘Filomena’s Journeys’ moves into far more personal territory bringing into close focus the lives of her parents and early 20th century Catholic Goa and its complex interplay of social and class dynamics. In this exclusive interview to Herald before the India release of the book, Couto tells DEVIKA SEQUEIRA of the challenges in writing a family memoir that, also in a sense, holds a mirror on a community that is still ‘locked in the past’. Excerpts from the interview
