10 Dec 2019  |   04:07am IST

Getting to know home and family

Norwegian author with Goan roots in Saligao, Ivo de Figueiredo, was here for the Goa Arts and Literary Festival and released his memoir ‘A Stranger at My Table’. His understanding of his father helped him understand Goa and his life better and the choices he made that made him. In a conversation with Cafe, he felt his book raised more questions than threw up answers about the lives of those who leave their roots behind and explore a new world

 

 

The relationship with one’s father will always

determine the nature of one’s relationship with one’s roots. For sons and daughters of multi-racial parentage it can make for a very interesting experience. For Norwegian author Ivo de Figueiredo tracing his estranged father’s Goan and East African roots and family history has been an interesting experience.

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.

As he got older, he felt the need to understand himself better. He felt the need to understand what happened with his father. He commenced his journey by visiting the cities his father resided in. He read all the communication, met with all the relatives and learned more of the man.

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 ruled 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. As Ivo puts it “My father knew how to navigate the societies of British East Africa and Goa as well as India”.

The book explores the links of a family tied to two European empires. Much of the book takes place in Pemba, Zanzibar and other countries on the continent. Like many father and son relationships, he shared a very difficult one with his father and having not seen his father in years, it took some courage on his part to visit him in Spain, where he lived. It was a dramatic meeting and it changed him. He said “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.

What was also important for him was the approval of the family. He said I made him very nervous but, in the end, they embraced the book. His mother was fine with it and his father who he said was exposed by the book is now suffering from dementia. Significantly, it is he, as he said, who is now taking care of him.

Speaking about his first experience of Goa, he revealed that he expected to wake up from some sort of dream of the ‘Golden Goa . He said his 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 he came to Goa, was that he did not wake up, or rather it was like he 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.

He ended by saying that there were more questions that truths in this book and that his only hope was that his search reflected the search of other people and families.