‘The Konkans’

New on the fiction shelves is The Konkans by Tony D’Souza, a writer who spent three years as an AIDS educator in West Africa. That experience resulted in his debut novel, Whiteman. He also penned what could be a response to Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride, a short story published in McSweeney’s called ‘The Man Who Married a Tree.’

The Konkans is more his own coming-of-age story, teasing out some of the ironic cultural inversions in a mixed-race family. It’s a tolerant, multiculti response to essentialism, one which reminds me of the Loins of Punjab point of view.

Here’s an excerpt about the narrator’s uncles moving in with his Konkan dad and Peace Corps mom in Chicago:

When they got off the plane at O’Hare in 1973, they were both sporting Fu Manchu mustaches that swept the edges of their chins, because an American kung fu film had been all the rage in India the year before, and knowing nothing of America other than that, they’d grown those mustaches to get ready for their immigration… According to my uncle, they became very popular with the girls.

The first thing my father said to his brothers at the airport… was, ‘Those mustaches have to go.’ He stopped at a Walgreens on the way home to by disposable razors, and before they could even sit down to their first American meal… they were in the basement bathroom shaving while my father looked on with his arms crossed…

My mother… [had] gone to India… because she had believed in John F. Kennedy’s vision… in marrying my father, she’d brought home with her the one living-and-breathing souvenir of that place who could also get a job in America. Sponsoring over my uncles was done to spite him… Many were the nights that my mother drank and sang and talked Konkani with them while my father glowered in his study…

[...] All of the things she loved about India — the flowers in the women’s hair, the call of the fishmonger in the mornings… the fuss and hullabaloo that went along with every simple transaction… those were all of the very same things that made [my father] hate that place.

A reviewer picked up on the same cultural inversions:

Is a white woman in a sari a pathetic poseur? Kind of, D’Souza allows, but she’s also a tragic figure escaping her own grim upbringing to embrace an environment that moved her deeply. Is it self-hating for an Indian family to deify Vasco da Gama? Probably, D’Souza implies, but his portrait of the D’Sai family reveals a history so thick with distortions that embracing a less-­varnished truth would tear down the pride that sustains them. [Link]

What he has created — with an appealingly unfashionable simplicity of language — is a rich, warm, personal yarn, bright with a pride and love that survive even the choppier shifts in his chapters… ”You are a very small people in India, as are we Sikhs,” a fellow Indian immigrant explains to Sam early in his Chicago days, by way of bonding. ”But when you roar in the crowd, your roar is heard like ours is. We are the soldiers of India, you are its Jews. Both are good.” [Link]

D’Souza’s real-life parents were also Konkan and white, and in fiction at least he has a conflicted relationship with his ethnic background. The book draws deeply on his own biography:

Tony D’Souza

The Konkans are the Catholic Indians of Goa that Portuguese colonization left behind. They collaborated with the British during the Raj, and the narrator explores the wrongs of his grandfather, who was a police commissioner for the British, and who tortured and killed Hindus to enrich himself. [Link]

[I] had a little flat right on the Kensington Gardens and there is this gaudy, gilded monument about six stories tall in the gardens and facing the Royal Albert Hall call the Albert Memorial… it’s a masturbatory love-fest to British colonialism, beautiful, but awful because it celebrates in a phony way all that blood.

…. I’d leave my flat and walk through the gardens and look at that big obscenity and shake my fist at dead and golden Albert on his throne. Because The Konkans is about colonialism and its aftermath… [Link]

D’Souza talks about his own identity conflict and his ability to pass as white:

My mother was born in Detroit in 1939, and my father was born in Bajpi near Mangalore, in 1942. My mother escaped poverty and joined the Peace Corps in 1966, hoping to make a difference in the world. She was sent to India, where she lived in Chikmagulur, Karnataka, teaching low-caste women how to make smokeless ovens… she and my father began a relationship that led to their elopement, and eventual relocation to Chicago… At first, they kept close ties to the Indian community that began to blossom along Devon Avenue; as I and my sister grew, our status as a mixed-race family, as well as our being Catholic Konkans drew us away from the larger Sikh, Hindu and Muslim majorities…

My very first taxi driver in Madras drove me around for an hour when he knew my hotel was only a few blocks from the airport; I quickly understood that I fit in in India as uncomfortably as I did in America… In my early fiction, my narrators are often young American men who do not have racial identity conflicts, have Anglo names such as ‘Jack’ and ‘Alex,’ and who the reader identifies as white. Most people assume I am Jewish, Italian, Spanish or North African. And for the sake of ease, I often allow myself to pass for these things. But I grew up with India in my home and in my blood…

This is the story of a Konkan man’s collaboration with the British as a police officer during the Raj, his involvement in the sandalwood smuggling trade… [and] the little-known Goan Inquisition conducted by the Portuguese that created the Catholics of India through torture and fire…

I loved [my father] and had a lot of difficult racial issues that revolved around… me being able to pass for white when I wanted… if he had lived I would have not been able to pursue writing… I would have gone to law school and lived my life for my father. [Link]

Just like British and American desi writers camping out in Delhi and Bombay for inspiration, he lives in Nicaragua on the cheap and gets kicked out regularly to renew his visa:

I drove my truck here from Florida so I could live cheap and live in another language and be in a new place and get to know it. But the Nicaraguans make me leave the country every month for three days with the truck, so every month I go down to Costa Rica to renew papers, and when I come back, some ex-pat has rented the cheap little dig… [Link]

He’s a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), but his style is less spare:

… we went with Harcourt. I was leaning their way anyway because they publish Jose Saramago and he along with Cormac McCarthy and JM Coetzee are our best living writers. I said it tangentially in the New York Times Book Review, I say it to everybody: McCarthy deserves the Nobel. [Link]

He shares some tips on getting published:

I submitted probably twenty stories in eight years to the New Yorker, most of which would go on to be published in the lit journals. Of course the New Yorker turned them all down. Within four months of getting my agent, I was in the New Yorker, and then I was in it again later that year. They say they take stuff from the slush pile, but…

I was very lucky to get an introduction to [agent] Liz Darhansoff, and that she didn’t close her door on me when she didn’t want my early books. But I also would e-mail her once and only once and the e-mails were brief… then a month or so later the rejection would come… I wouldn’t e-mail her or anything until the next book was done, and then I’d write, “Liz, will you look at my new book?”

And he artfully lets drop a mention of his Playboy spread

[My editors] just kind of roll their eyes at the things I do. Like I was in this Playboy fashion shoot, you can find it on-line. When they saw the pictures, they all just collectively groaned. [Link]