‘The Goan is Dead’! -- By Fr. Victor Ferrao

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.