Joao-Roque Literary Journal est. 2017

Review by Michelle M. Bambawale

I encountered Maria Aurora Couto through her two earlier works. In Goa: A Daughter's Story, I marvelled at the grandeur of the life she described in the palatial houses of Salcette, with their colonial connections through the Portuguese language, music, food, and lifestyle. Filomena’s Journeys: A Portrait of a Marriage, a Family, and a Culture, was heartbreaking.

Review by Selma Carvalho

We have to have an honest conversation about the role of the regional writer, that faithful chronicler of the immediacy of the life he encounters around him. He has no greater purpose other than to document this life—its history, nature, people, idiosyncrasies—captured by his indefatigable pen and preserved for posterity. Without the regional writer, literature cannot thrive, authenticity cannot thrive, geographical specificity cannot thrive.

By Augusto Pinto

Issue no 26

Raktachandan by Sanjiv Verenkar is the latest Konkani book to win the Sahitya Akademi award. It is the eighth collection of poetry of this veteran journalist and writer of books on contemporary Goan history. The title Raktachandan refers to the tree species pterocarpus santalinus (red sandalwood in English) that has many medicinal qualities. Among other uses, in the days before modern balms and ointments invaded our pharmacies it was used as a pain-killer for a variety of aches, wounds and swellings.

By Glenis M. Mendonca

Issue no 25

When the world went into lockdown, the Margao Book Club (MBC), based in South Goa-India, met over Zoom to have interesting book discussions. In a quirky moment, the members thought of trying their hand at writing verse. The eight Rasas of Bharata’s Natyashastra, were decided as a frame for inspiration. Sixteen MBC members found respite in setting their imagination go riot in verse, and a couple of months later the curator of the Club, Savia Viegas (author, artist and art curator) selected the best to create this blissful panacea to the trapped minds and christened it ‘Viral Verse’.

Review by Selma Carvalho

Issue no 24

There are so many familiar and acclaimed names the reader will recognise: Salil Chaturvedi, Anita Pinto, Jessica Faleiro, Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, Nathaniel da Costa, Veena Gomes-Patwardhan, Bina Datwani, Pantaleao Fernandes, Edith Melo Furtado, Sheela Jaywant, Jeanne Hromnik, Bina Nayak, Kornelia C. Rebello, Alisa Souza, and Alexyz Fernandes, who all have work included in the anthology…

By Bina Nayak

An excerpt from Starfish Pickle reproduced with permission. Another tormenting night stretch ahead of Tara. The nagging pain caused by her tattoo bothers hers. Trying not to focus on it, she wishes, Balgo had stayed a bit longer to massage it away. Whatever he did for those few seconds seemed to work. She wonders if he’s sitting on a beach somewhere, laughing at the stars.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 23

A book excerpt and reading from A Sisterhood of Swans. She belongs to the sisterhood of swans seeking to pair for life, curving their necks to entwine with the perfect mate. Only, she has realized, her species is doomed to disappointment. Her disastrous choice in men is fuelled not just by a chaotic childhood but by a loss of sexual agency as she embarks on a series of doomed relationships.

Review by Rochelle Potkar

Issue no 21

Of every other emotion and feeling, love is the most powerful, and though this theme groans under a dismission of romanticising life, it flutters every now and then to the surface with equally redemptive qualities. What makes possible dialog between two poets, who have never met and are separated by vast expanses of time and space? Perhaps their intuitive understanding of time and space itself, and all that lies in between.

Review by Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 17

It is relevant that the Manohar Parrikar biography titled ‘An Extraordinary Life’, (Penguin, 2020) makes note of Parrikar’s ‘obviously handsome’ looks, likened by his friends to the on-screen idol Amol Palekar. Leaders are not made, they are born to greatness. They have certain qualities—a certain charisma—which instils in the masses hope and confidence. It is his good looks, his easy charm, his quick wit which endeared Parrikar to Goans, and it is impossible to think of him without feeling for him a certain admiration and affection.

Review by Selma Carvalho

Issue no 16

Poetry in many ways is an unforgiving literary form; it refuses to resonate if it is not confessional. Novelist and short story writers can bleed ink borrowing other people’s lives, but the poet has to bare their own, make it available to us, the reader, and in this Fernandes excels; she is intimately accessible, her conversational style is not clouded by obscure references…

Review by Selma Carvalho

Issue no 16

In the thematically unified collection, The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Press, 2019), Laura Besley sets a tone of intimacy and immediacy. In ‘The Motherhood Contract’ she writes, ‘You must not tell the mother-to-be that she may not instantly love her child.’ At the heart of being a mother is this paradox: we fall in love with that moulting mass of moth-breath we give birth too, but nothing prepares us for the reality of motherhood—the days without end, the days consumed with isolation, fatigue, and rage.

Review by Glenis M. Mendonca

Issue no 15

Irene Cardozo took over two years to read, select and gradually translate into Roman Konkani the legendary tales we have all read in English, and thread them into a book titled, Kirnnam (the rays). The book was published under the Bhurgeanche Sahitya Yeuzonn imprint by the Dalgado Konkani Academy in 2019.

By America Hart

Issue no. 14

This book tells of a journey that author Mona Dash takes, spanning ten years and two continents – India and the UK – in order to achieve what for some women seems simple: To conceive, give birth, and raise a healthy child. Some mothers face challenges when trying to conceive; others during pregnancy.

By Augusto Pinto

Issue no. 13

Her latest collection of short stories in Konkani is Aart which means ‘afflicted’ or ‘distressed’. This is Jayanti Naik’s third collection of short stories after Garjan (1989); and her 2004 Sahitya Award winning collection Athang. It contains 17 short stories written between 2005 and 2018. Incidentally some of these like ‘Uma’, ‘Naman’, ‘Itsapurti’, ‘Khyast’ and ‘Jait’ are available elsewhere to the reader in English translation in The Salt of the Earth, (Goa1556, 2017).

By Augusto Pinto

Issue no. 12

Catharsis is a Greek word which means cleansing, but in the context of the arts is regarded as the purifying or purging of depressing emotions like pity and fear by creating art that is tragic. This is what Viegas’s writing and painting attempts to achieve in Song Sung Blue, the life-story of a Goan Catholic woman named Divina

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 12

Life is not a passage of random events; it’s the constant and conscious creating and culling of culture, and in that cull, how do we retain parts of ourselves? Love ‘n Share It (2018) by Bennet Paes is, on the face of it, a fictional love story set in Paes’s beloved Sashti (roughly south) Goa, but within its many folds is the memory of a Goa lost or at any rate fading. Paes is not unique in being preoccupied with the past.

By Brian Lobo

Issue no. 12

This book is an anecdotal compilation of Edwin’s vast collection of three hundred blogs, showcasing the vicissitudes of life. The cherry-picked stories document his variegated experiences and are woven by a common theme – life and its phases

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 11

Of immediate interest is the etymology of the term ‘East Indian’ ironically coined for a community which lives on the west coast of India. The popularly accepted explanation for this term is that they comprised of people either allied with or working for the East India Company. Brenda, quotes respected sources, challenging this notion.

By Ben Antao

Issue no. 11

Musings is by the Mumbai-born journalist Ashlesha Athavale, who has lived in Panjim, Goa from 1980 to 1990. Those early formative and impressionable years have provided her the raw material to craft the book

By Savia Viegas

Issue no. 11

A biography titled, Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death, (Goa 1556, 2018) by Leonor Figueiredo and translated from the Portuguese by D. A. Smith, pieces together the life of this firebrand rebel, and the controversies that surround it.  Despite the lacunae of source material, the book has been extensively researched, and builds a lucid and unbiased narrative of Valles.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 11

Curiously, a road in Nairobi is named after Pio Gama Pinto. Curious, because it’s named after a Goan. But Pio was foremost a Kenyan, deeply involved in Kenya’s nationalist struggle, and whose assassination, in 1965, made him Kenya’s first martyr.

Issue no 9

By Siddharth Dasgupta

Potkar’s new collection of poetry is a celebration of the small and the not so small, where even the soul-grinding monotony of secretarial work has the propensity to be graced with the willing hand of karma.

Issue no. 9

By Cielo G. Festino

Each one of the five stories that comprise the book has a woman as its main character and deals with the unusual and, sometimes, tragic events that have, sadly, become part of their everyday lives.

Issue no. 8

The facts of the case are these: It is a crime thriller set in Goa. The dead body of 19 year-old student Namita Kulkarni has washed ashore on Morjim beach. Almost immediately, in Guy Maupassant style, a cast of characters present themselves on stage. There is the protagonist and upright small-town policeman, Inspector Cajetan (Caji) Pinto, and his bumbling side-kick Joao.

Issue no. 6

When at last, towards the tail-end of the book, we discover that, Tilo and Musa ‘had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved and (perhaps unsolvable) puzzle'. We don’t really care.