ABSTRACT
In her recent English-language novella Saudade (2018), the Australian-born writer Suneeta Peres da Costa (b. 1976) draws on her Goan heritage and family’s recent diasporic experience. The novella introduces the protagonist Maria-Cristina, the young daughter of a Portuguese-speaking Catholic Goan expatriate family who migrated to Angola after the incorporation of Goa by India in 1961. Through this child’s vision of everyday domestic life in Angola, Peres da Costa constructs a portrait of a migrant minority family ambivalent about their own culture and trying to adapt to a new society where signs of decolonisation are already evident. This short Bildungsroman set within a dysfunctional, uncommunicative family shows its young protagonist, unaided by memory or anecdote, piecing together her own complex diasporic family history suggested by food, dress, culture, and language – the common imperial language of Portuguese and also Angola’s Kimbundu and Goa’s Konkani. Maria-Cristina also draws on gossip and local politics, up until the time of her own sudden return to her family in Goa after Angolan independence and her father’s suicide. This chapter addresses the way a more complex sense of identity and culture is discovered and constructed through the traces of daily life and its interruptions recorded in the girl’s awakening consciousness.
