Gavin Barrett

The landscape of Goa in Writing

The landscape of Goa in Writing

By Selma Carvalho

Poet and playwright Owen Sheers thinks landscape is what happens to nature when humans arrive. We create landscape, otherwise nature exists, forlorn, desultory and on its own. In every manner the newly released anthology The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art 2025, edited by me and published by Cinnamon Teal, encapsulates this ethos of Goans interacting with the land of Goa. Identity is that most unknowable thing, constantly changing, a mere shadow on the edges of our consciousness, and yet if something were to exist as Goan identity than that something is our love of the land.

Gavin Barrett: I am a Pocomomo - a postcolonial modern mongrel

Gavin Barrett: I am a Pocomomo - a postcolonial modern mongrel

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no. 18

I am what I call a pocomomo—a postcolonial modern mongrel. I am Goan thanks to my mother and Anglo-Indian thanks to my dad and am fortunate to be claimed by both communities. Without meaning to sound precious, my lived experience contains many exiles. So there is always the yearning for Goa that many in the Goan diaspora feel.