In a paper presented at a national level seminar on ‘Portuguese Language and Literature – Past, Present and Future’, Paul Melo e Castro dwelt on Vimala Devi, Elsa da Rocha and Epitacio Pais, concluding that all the three Goan writers writing in Portuguese ‘deserve a readership in twenty-first century Goa’. Last week, the teacher of Portuguese at the University of Leeds, UK, was present at the release of an edited version of Pais’ unpublished novel Preia-Mar (High Tide) bringing the writer back into focus. And so, while 21st century Goa will read Pais again, it is only those who understand the language of the State’s former colonial master who will be able to appreciate the work, for Preia-Mar comes in the language it was originally written in – Portuguese.
Devi, Rocha, Pais are all Goan authors, or to be more specific as Melo e Castor describes them as, ‘from the formerly privileged Lusophone section of society’ who wrote in Portuguese after Liberation and focused on the ‘historical oppression of the subaltern, a subject that had previously received scant attention’. While Devi is currently based in Portugal, Rocha and Pais, both primary school teachers are no more among the living.
Preia-Mar, published by Goa 1556 in association with Golden Heart Emporium, is set in the 1970s, a decade after Liberation and during the period when mining was beginning to boom and tourism was just beginning to bloom. It is the story of Leo who comes from a privileged family, but not financially stable, and so he makes attempts to strike it rich as so many did at that time. As the blurb on the back cover says, “Moving through various strata representative of the society of his times – new ascendant classes linked to smuggling, mining and politics, hippies tired of the West in search of drugs and spirituality, the fishermen of the coast and repatriates from Idi Amin’s Uganda, the novel reaches a climax that defies local tradition even as it calls into question the principles of the new order.”
“He depicts the lowest subaltern of all, the tribal population, the ‘mull goenkars’ he sees as both trapped in tradition and corrupted by modernity. In his stories there is no real break, for those at the very bottom at least, between the lattermost period of colonialism and the first decade of Indian rule,” Melo e Castro had said in the same paper.
Speaking to Herald, he said, “I think the importance of Pais’ work is two-fold. Aesthetically, he is a great writer, showing, like other writers of his generation from Portugal and Portuguese Africa, the influence of the sort of pared down, colloquial yet precise writing of Americans like Hemingway or Steinbeck. Thematically, his stories reflects the great changes that swept Goa from the 1950s onwards – mining, tourism, the shifting of attitudes, hegemonies and relations of power between the different strata of Goan society in a way I find in little other Goan literature.”
‘Prei-Mar’ is a novel from Pais who otherwise wrote short stories. The novel is important to the Goa of today, says Melo e Castro, because of “the various threads, themes found in Pais’ short story writing are explored there in greater depth”.
Jose Pereira may have considered Pais as “one of the finest writers in the long tradition of Goan literature in Portuguese”. Others like Devi and Manuel de Seabra thought he was an author who felt “the world around him in all its tragedy and poetry”, but few knew him, or rather of him and his works, in Goa. Yet, Pais was never forgotten by Goa, it was just that he was not known. The Portuguese newspapers on which his stories appeared stopped publication decades ago. The Portuguese programme on All India Radio on which he read out his stories is no longer aired. Will Preia-Mar bring him to readers in Goa?
Unlikely, as the novel is in Portuguese, a language few in the State speak and even fewer would be capable of reading and appreciating the written word. Pais writing that has been described as ‘terse and caustic’ still awaits recognition in the land of his birth, though as Melo e Castro said, the book is a happy end to the tragedies of Epitacio Pais.
