Joao-Roque Literary Journal est. 2017

By Heta Pandit

Why do we call it a book release, Rochelle? In fact, isn’t it just the reverse of release? Holding, reading, and experiencing a book is an inhalation, a holding in of your breath, a waiting for a revelation. That is exactly how I felt when I began reading Coins in Rivers. I wonder why the perpetrators of all the atrocities described against women are men. You write as a feminist; you see and understand scars. Even the ones under the skin. And yet, I see a soft gentle touch, not the caustic, harsh, and scarred perspective of a hard-core man-hater.

By Selma Carvalho

Longlisted for the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023, Mrinalini Harchandrai discusses her book. This story was inspired by my mother’s childhood experiences in 1961 Goa. So quite a fair bit of the details of life then have been reaped or borrowed from family stories itself. I myself spent my childhood summers visiting my grandmother’s home in Goa, so perhaps some facility with the tongue and an understanding of mindset nuances seeped into me over the years.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 26

Icarus is dead, Icarus is alive. He resurrects himself in all of us as surely he must, in that tiny seedling hope, reaching for a dream which lies beyond our grasp. This then is the premise of Reshma Ruia’s haunting novel, Still Lives (Renard Press, 2022), drawing the reader in immediately and imperceptibly into a brooding sense of loss, a palpable dissolution, a wounded self, searching through the gloaming.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 25

At the heart of the controversy lies Teha’amana, his muse, barely thirteen (or was she eleven) when forty-three-year-old Gauguin, by arrangement with her Foster Mother, took her as his ‘bride.’ Could Teha’amana give her consent in such an arrangement? And if we assume some diluted and distorted form of consent, did she have any agency in this action?

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 25

In 1877, urged by the British, Barghash formed an army and it is customary within British military tradition to have a band attached to battalions, in order to perform marching and ceremonial music. What is extraordinary is that in a time of colonial hierarchies defined by race, the intended band for Barghash’s army would comprise almost entirely of Goans from the west coast of India.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 25

Devi’s writing is an exquisite capture of mid-century Goan society, mores and landscape. The detailed descriptions of the houses and households in particular are of interest for the sheer opulence they conjure up, a gilded age indeed which faded far too soon, and it is easy to see why for so many Goans, there persists a saudade for a paradise lost.

By Jugneeta Suda

Issue no 24

Artist Julio D’ Souza has rendered the Last Supper many times in the last 13 years. When I talked to him he said, “Irrespective of how many I have painted, when I set out to paint again, for me, it’s One Last Supper” Every-time. Without exception. The magnetic pull is the metaphor in the painting, a family/community coming together to partake of a meal at the dining table. A masterpiece embedding the dance of ‘Light & Shadow’, the polarities are palpable.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 23

Reshma Ruia is an award-winning British-Asian writer. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy.’ Her second novel A Mouthful of Silence was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. Here in conversation with Reshma, we discuss her newly released collection of short stories titled Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness (Dahlia Press, 2021) exploring characters who are trying to heal from their wounded selves.

By R. Benedito Ferrao and Deborah Julia Al-Najjar

Issue no. 22

The past stays with us, this we know. But what we can be less certain of is how the future possesses us even before we arrive at it. Before 1991, India had only one television channel. That changed with the dramatic overhauling of the country’s economy in the last decade of the twentieth century.

By Alia Yunis

Issue no 22

In one of my favorite photos of my mom, she and her friends peek out of a train heading to Baghdad on a short holiday escape from Kuwait, circa 1958. I asked her once why they were going to Baghdad. The answer was simple.

By Marlon Menezes

Issue no 22

It was on the 2nd of August that I woke up to the familiar wail of Arabic on my radio, but I immediately realized that I was listening to the wrong language in the wrong country. I was in Canada and the Arabic I heard was a plea for help from Radio Kuwait that was re-broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a lead-in to their headline story that morning.

By Wafer Shayota

Issue no 22

Wafer Shayota’s paintings are both graphic and ghostly. The two art pieces are an account and an accounting of historical wrongs.

By Noor Alhuda Aljawad

Issue no 22

I was born in Southern California in late August 1991, a year and a few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I say Saddam’s invasion, and not Iraq’s, because every Iraqi person I have ever known, be they family members or friends, opposed what my great aunt Raja’ described as اعتداء, an act of aggression.

By Shahd Alshammari

Issue no 22

Teta came to Kuwait long before she knew that home could be a place you called home. Long before she ever heard the saying “Home is where the heart is,” and long before she hung a plaque with these words on it in English – a language not her own – on her kitchen’s wall.

By Dena-Al-Adeeb

Issue no 22

Disturbance is a visual and performative memoir presented as a triptych video art project. The piece is comprised of three videos, entitled 1990, 1980, and 2003 –– years in which the first Gulf War erupted, the Iraq-Iran war started, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq took place. 1990, 1980, and 2003 correspond to the artist’s displacements due to the same events.

By Dina Lobo

Issue no 22

My father recalls a humbling moment three months into the Gulf War in Kuwait, in which food was scarce. He walks me through his sensorial recollections of 1991. Black skies for weeks as he was unable to distinguish morning from night due to the firing of oil wells. The background echoing with noises of rockets, explosions, and gunshots that made sleep difficult.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 21

In the end, F. N. Souza belongs to Goans. Apart from the Tate Gallery, London, displaying one of Souza’s most emblematic works, the ‘Crucifixion,’ and Grosvenor Gallery having the occasional retrospective, F. N Souza elicits little recognition. There are no biographies paying tribute to the artist, no English heritage plaques commemorating the places he lived in, nor are there regular references made to his work in that definitive art reviewer, the TLS; he does not seep into the British consciousness the way his contemporary Francis Bacon does or even the less distinguished and one-time boarder at Souza’s house, Keith Vaughan does.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 19

What becomes clear is that by the late 19th century, increasingly, metropolitan Bombay rather than Goa became the centripetal location from where Goan elite in the diaspora sought direction. The ambitions of Bombay-Goans like Leandro Mascarenhas, B.X. Furtado and Dr Acacio G. Viegas who were founding members of the Associacao Goanna de Mutuo Auxilio Ltd, the Uniao Goanna and the Instituto Luso-Indiano were mirrored in Pakistan and East Africa

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 19

There is a kind of secular light which washes over Siddharth’s collection of poems titled A Moveable East (Red River, 2021), its 136 pages divided into seven sections. I say secular not because it shies away from the sacred but rather because he embraces the sacred with a purity of heart, embraces the universal goodness that lies at the core of each faith tradition, and claims as his own the unique voice of these faiths, their many moments of shadow and space.

In conversation with Rochelle Potkar

Issue no 19

As these stories organically came about, I gleaned that the common thread was Bombay, later Mumbai. As one consumes the ebb and flow, sea-breeze, buzz and bustle, march and spring, it puts you into the rhythm of its heartbeat and the city speaks to you. There is a hum that I have not felt in other cities of the world, rare like Bombay blood group. This hangover is one of memory, in and outside the city then. More so, of the joint march of its citizenry of all classes—industrious as bees and ants.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 19

Neema Shah joins this sparse but important canon of Asian-African literature with her debut novel Kololo Hill (Picador, 2021), the focus of which is also the interrupted and scattered lives of the Asian exodus. It has fallen largely to the sons and daughters of those who left Africa and settled in the new worlds of Canada and UK to tell this story. Shah’s mother was born in Kenya and her father in Tanzania who migrated to the UK.

By Jugneeta Sudan

Issue no 19

National award winning artist Vitesh Naik, who began from humble beginnings in Jan 1974, has been awarded the 2021-22 Pollock–Krasner Foundation grant. Considering his passion and perseverance, the outcome has been most satisfying. It began with a sketch of his teacher in history class for which he was suspended for 3 months.

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 19

Maria Augusta Elvira de Sousa is lost to history. She wanders its corridors, unclaimed. In accounts by European chroniclers, her ethnicity remains a shadowy unknown to be guessed at, presumed most likely to be a Portuguese woman. But I am determined to reclaim Elvira’s rightful place, because Elvira was a Goan.