Our life seems to have gathered momentum to
such an extent that what we visualise as future is displacing our present. The
future is coming towards us at a rate that we fail to keep pace with and are
tossed by its affective intensities that seem to put us in a chaotic direction.
The emergence of a future that is refusing to wait to be born immerses us into
a responsive mode that loses sight of the present and its opportunities. This
has brought about the death of Goan in us. We seem to be ready and willing to give up our Goanness to
belong to the future that will never really be ours.
This schizophrenic de-centring or split of a
Goan seems to have reached its completion in our days. Some would say that
fragmentation of Goans really begun during colonization. But we may have to disagree
with this proposal because we may not have Goa had colonization not occurred.
Perhaps, others might hold the fissures began under late colonization in the
nineteen century and grew steadily under post-colonial appropriation of Goa in
the Indian Union. The threatening
ellipse of a Goan is already producing ripples of anxieties among us as the
death of Goans seem inevitable. The rates of in-migration and out-migration
exhibit that we might soon have to celebrate the funeral of ‘Goykar’. But the
shrinking space of Goans in Goa by the day is yet to ring alarm bells amidst
us.
This (dis)articulation of the death of Goan
has to be viewed within the tradition of Nietzsche’s declaration of death of
God, or the Foucaultian (Michel Foucault) celebration of the funeral of Man or
the bold assertion of the death of the author by Roland Barthes.
It is metaphoric attempt to (dis)articulte a
feeling that fails to undergo the false freedom of repression. The
fragmentation and schizophrenic de-centring of the self of a Goan in our
post-colonial society both in Goa and abroad seems to have reached the point of
no return. This leads us to understand how a Goan is living in the borderland,
in a condition of being in-between both in Goa and abroad. Hence, we may have
to ask the Freudian question: ‘What does a Goan want?’
Some of us feel more Goan when we become more
like the white colonizers and hence are
on a migration trail to Europe, America and Australia etc., while others seem
to feel more Goan by seeking to become more Indian while at the same time
ironically several Indians celebrate the in-between, third space that Goa
excites in their imagination.
These ambivalent psychic identifications
indicates the complexity behind the dying Goan. Is this an amputation or an
excision of our Goan-ness? The dismembering memory of the past colonial
separation and conversion of significant
part of Goan community seems to continue to afflict Goans who strive to seek their
lost self in two identifiable directions, one into a transgressive cosmopolitan
realm while the other into conformist domain of a religio-cultural nationalism.
But other minorities Goans like the Muslim and mull-nivasi people are also
tossed around by the raging storm. The
original Goan Muslims are lost in the inflow other Muslims brethren from Karnataka
and elsewhere and the mull-nivasi people are left to find their place in an
ever evolving Goa.
This double alienation of Goans from Goa has
produced a culture that feeds our tourism industry which certainly thrives on
the loss of a master narrative of Goa. The loss of integrative master narrative
of Goa has allowed the tourism industry to construct Goa as an exotic tourist
destination while keeping the two major Goan communities in an embrace of
unease. This unease has also been politically milked by major political parties
in the Goan political scene. The loss and recovery of self under colonization
has set Goans in search of Utopian/ dystopian identities, one of which looks at
the mainland India while the other goes beyond it.
This mimics the self of colonizers in doubly
alienated Goan self, wherein, on one hand significant number of Goans are
pushed to image the white men by way of
attaining of the Portuguese Passport while several others join those who
reproduce the civilizing mission (through Hinduization) of the colonizers even
through violent acts of de-civility. One
might trace psychic violence on both paths that are being sought by Goans
today. Somehow colonial trauma seeks healing in a continuous repetition that
hybridizes into a mimicry of the colonizers. It is ironical that Goans move in
two direction pushed by colonial trauma without feeling embarrassed in any
manner. Both are taking differently the place of colonizers leading to an
accelerated extinction of a Goan.
Hence, it is as if the proverbial mad man of
Nietzsche who declared the death of God and boasted that his ilk has killed him
seems to be replaced by a mad tourists roaming on our celestial beaches stating
with a sense of déjà-vue that ‘Goan is dead and we have displaced him/er’. But,
before we go into the sunset, we need to resuscitate the dying Goan. But is
this possible? Can we really put the clock back as some among us might feel
confident to do so?
Some might feel that Colonial residue or
karma can be washed away by forcing on
the strayed other (Goan) what is a
metabolized and singularized as national culture in our days. But such mimicry
of singularized Indian self itself is un-Indian and certainly un-Goan. It
appears impossible and therefore, foolish to reclaim a pure, original and
substantive Goan self. The Goan self is not fixed in the sands of time but has
metamorphized over challenging changing conditions. What we have is a hybridized reclaiming of
the selves of Goans looking in two directions and hence we Goans live in an
uneasy embrace.
May be we need to open ourselves to the platitudinous
and salubrious possibilities of being Goans within the precarious conditions
that confront us intimately today. There is no point in looking for the missing
Goan in Goa of today. We do not have to look for a Goan where he/she is
not. Such scopic strategies that look
for the missing Indian in a Goan can only quickly bring the death of a Goan
that is threatening us. Indeed, we have
to give up our ‘tendencies of looking and speaking without being seen’. This
means what we need is come to the (dis)comforting table of plurilogue that
promises to inaugurate the new Upanisadic moment that will Goanize as well as
truly Indianize us all.
Goans should wake up and it's time to come out and openly go against the forces those are destroying Goa. I have been observing people queing up for LED bulbs but none coming forward for causes those can light up their lives forever. This is where we are, sit back and just criticize the wrong doings of the government at balcao's and pubs. The real force should be in our strength to take on this destructive government.
ReplyDeleteSaturnino Rodrigues
Seraulim