Joao-Roque Literary Journal est. 2017

By Ava Sherry

I had been drawn to R. Benedito Ferrão and Vamona Navelcar’s The Destination is the Journey, initially because it wasn’t obvious in its positioning. It felt almost like a puzzle, except with every answer found, another layer of depth revealed itself. The Destination is The Journey forms part of R. Benedito Ferrão’s edited book, Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (2017) which is about a Goan artist – Navelcar (1929-2021) – whose life and identity, due to colonial forces, became dispersed across the boundaries of Africa, Asia, and Europe.

By  Michelle Mendonça Bambawale

The PGI was the centre for community activities. We learnt to play badminton and  there. We looked forward to the PGI’s long event calendar over Christmas. We did not notice the rundown buildings or the peeling paint. The toilets still haunt me, they were filthy and stinky. As young kids, the highlight was the annual Christmas tree party. We always had fashionable new custom-made dresses to wear. There were needle and thread, lime and spoon and sack races. The highlight was waiting for Santa Claus to give us our Christmas presents.

By Suneeta Peres da Costa

I wander in the dark among the rooms in my
father’s house, touching talismans for blessings
and luck. Graffiti of old wounds cover the walls;
the ceiling sags and there are places where the
limestone is pocked and shell-shocked. We are
on land but the water is rising.

By Ashwani Kumar

I hear Columbus is in the city —
a sailor of ocean blue,
spilling secrets of his adventures to storm-starved skies.

Bells ringing, angels singing at traffic lights.
Persian pomegranate seeds scattered along the streets,
each a crimson promise of seers and saints.

Review by Maulee Senapati

Rochelle Potkar’s The D’Costa Family is a novel of quiet detonations. It dismantles the sentimental myth of the family—especially the joint family—to expose its volatile, often coercive architecture. A masterstroke of quiet disruption, an audacious, intimate excavation of a Goan Catholic household, where the fine-meshed threads of the personal and political are intricately woven into the fabric of daily life.

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.