Discovering his fatherland ... Ivo de Figueiredo ... ‘A Stranger at My Table’
Frederick Noronha
Discovering his fatherland
December 7, 2019 Zest 78 Views
In ‘A Stranger at My Table’ which was launched at the ongoing Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) at
The International Centre Goa, Dona Paula, Norwegian author Ivo de
Figueiredo traces his estranged father’s Goan and East African roots and
family history
CHRISTINE MACHADO
NT BUZZ
Ivo de Figueiredo grew up identifying himself solely with his
Norwegian culture. The son of a Norwegian mother and a Goan father who
divorced when he was still a young boy, Figueiredo had no interest in
his father’s family background, given their sour
relationship.
However, as he hit his mid-forties, he began to feel an urge to know
what happened between them. “So I started my journey into his life, and
it was crazy. It felt like I had discovered a hidden door in the house
of my childhood, and when I opened that door, the whole world came
tumbling out. So I wrote a book. I’m a writer, what else is there to
do?” admits the author.
His memoir ‘A Stranger at My Table’, which was released at GALF 2019,
navigates a difficult search for the origins of his estranged father,
which opens a door to a family history spanning four continents, five
centuries and the rise and fall of two empires.
Having emigrated from the Portuguese colony of Goa to British East
Africa, and later to the West, his father’s ancestors were Indians with
European ways and values—trusted servants of the imperial powers. But in
postcolonial times they became homeless, redundant, caught between the
age of empires and the age of nations.
The book tells the story of a family unwittingly tied to two European
empires, which paid the price for their downfall, weathering revolution
and many forms of prejudice. Much of the book takes place in East
Africa, in Pemba, Zanzibar, Tanzania and Kenya. As he began on this
journey however, Figueiredo recalls that having not seen his father in
years, he didn’t have the courage to visit him in Spain, where he lived.
“So instead I travelled in his life. I went to East Africa, then to Goa.
I collected letters and photographs and visited my uncles and aunts in
the US,” he says. But at some point he realised that he couldn’t escape
the physical encounter. “I went to see him in Spain, and from there the
story becomes quite dramatic… But it changed me, I got rid of my demons,
and achieved a reconciliation with him,” he says.
Figueiredo also admits that while there is a tendency for people not to
preserve old documents, pictures, etc, especially when they move from
one country to another, he was lucky as interestingly his dad had kept
everything neatly sorted. “Why I don’t know, that’s one of the mysteries
I’m trying to solve,” he says.
He was also nervous about getting his family’s approval for this book.
But in the end, he says, they embraced the book. “I would never have
published the book without my mother’s approval, as she was the victim
of my father’s abuse. And I got her approval,” he says. His main ethical
consideration, however, was regarding his father. “There is no denial
that I have exposed his life, and he can’t defend himself as he began
suffering from dementia before the book was finished. I have tried to
handle this dilemma the best way I could, but there will always be an
element of cognitive dissonance with these kinds of memoirs. Ethically
it doesn’t add up. But I’m taking care of him now, paying my debt,” he
says.
Talking about his first experience of Goa, which was some years ago, he
reveals that he “expected to wake up from some sort of dream of the
‘Golden Goa’ that my family had conserved, as so many expats”. He says:
“My great grandfather emigrated from Saligao to Pemba around 1900, and
settled in Pemba and Zanzibar. He went back, of course, but dad’s
generation had only a vague idea of Goan life. Their Goa was ‘Goa
dourado’, not ‘Goa indica’. But what happened when I came to Goa, was
that I didn’t wake up, or rather it was like I was walking in and out of
myths and reality.” In the book, he adds, he has tried to give an
honest account of how it is to experience a place that is a dream to
some people, and hard reality to others.
His interaction with other families that have similar stories of
odysseys from Goa to Africa and then elsewhere, also helped. “Comparing
the life of the Goans that stayed on, and those who left, was a real
eye-opener – much in the same way as in Goa itself,” he says, adding
that his family story, like so many Goan expat-stories, is all about
staying or leaving or living in between. “In East Africa what struck me
the most was how life after the colonial breakdown differed between
classes. The higher you go on the social ladder, the more likely you
would be to miss the good old empire. On the other end, I met a couple
where he was high caste, and she from a low caste. They were grateful to
Karume, the dictator of Zanzibar, because if it wasn’t for him, they
could never have married!” he reveals.
Having previously penned biographies of Norwegian playwright and theatre
director, Henrik Ibsen and painter Edvard Munch, he states that writing
his own family story wasn’t all that different. “When you write about
yourself and people close to you, you still have to conceive them as
characters, like you would in a novel. You need to create a distance to
make the believable and interesting, even if you, of course, stay true
to the sources and facts,” he says. “This book is not my diary, not me
just pouring my heart out. It’s literature.”
But at the same time, he admits there were struggles while putting it
together. “This book is an impossible project. I wanted to write about
the smallest of things, about the lives of a handful of people, about
myself and my own inner life, and at the same time encompass the large
structures of society, the rise and fall of empires, the grinding wheels
of history, and see how the latter shapes and moulds the life of the
small people,” he says. The only way to do that, he says, is by
combining one’s own subjective narrative with an ethos built on honesty,
transparency and a critical and self-critical attitude. “There are more
questions than truths in this book. My only hope is that my search
reflects the search of other people and families,” he says.
--