- Brian Mendonça
Dear Senõr Osualdo Deus Lima
(Coach, Football team, São Tomé e Principe, Lusofonia Game 2014)
Thank you for coming to
India. Thank you for coming to Goa. I watched your team play against Macao at Tilak
Maidan, Vasco. Truly the match belonged to your boys. You only needed a draw to
qualify for the next round. Yes, Macao drew blood first just before half time in
the 45th minute but STP (São Tomé e Principe) came back into the game in the
56th minute through a header by skipper Vando Neto. You just needed
to hold the game and force a draw. But the plucky greens from Macao were all
over you, bothering the goal like a hornet’s nest.
And then in the dying
moments of the game Rodney Pinto Tagus brought down a player from Macao in your
penalty area. Like the river Tagus in
Portugal, Rodney would change the tide of History. The goal which ensued
through the penalty kick put you out of the reckoning for the gold. Frankly I
didn’t know you were down to 9 men, as against their 11.
At Miramar, your women’s
team won the beach volleyball against Goa India with consummate ease. Grooving
to the music, the STP duo were enjoying every moment of their outing. The
women’s team carried the flag onward at the Lusofonia Games, Goa 2014.
But struggle has been no
stranger to you and your brothers and sisters in Africa’s tiniest island
nation. In 1974 you threw of the yoke of the Portuguese colonizers and emerged
into the light of your own beauty. A beauty which was bought at a price – so
vividly put into words by Maria Manuela Margarido -- one of your foremost women
poets in her poem ‘Landscape’. The
imagery is so evocative of the emblems of Goa, replete with the insinuation of
resistance to violence.
Landscape
by Maria Manuela Margarido
Translated from the Portuguese by Julia Kirst
Nightfall ... grass on the back
of the gleaming black man
on his way to the yard.
Grey parrots
explode in the palm trees’ comb
and cross each other in my childhood dream,
in the blue porcelain of oysters.
High dream, high
like the coconut tree along the ocean
with its golden and firm fruits
like obstructed stones
oscillating in a tornado’s womb
ploughing the sky with its mad
plumes.
In the sky the severe anguish
of revolt passes by
with its claws its anxieties its uncertainties.
And an image of rustic lines
takes over the time and the word.
of the gleaming black man
on his way to the yard.
Grey parrots
explode in the palm trees’ comb
and cross each other in my childhood dream,
in the blue porcelain of oysters.
High dream, high
like the coconut tree along the ocean
with its golden and firm fruits
like obstructed stones
oscillating in a tornado’s womb
ploughing the sky with its mad
plumes.
In the sky the severe anguish
of revolt passes by
with its claws its anxieties its uncertainties.
And an image of rustic lines
takes over the time and the word.
Along with contemporary
poet Alda do Espirito Santo who was imprisoned and tortured for protesting the
massacre of 1953 it is these women’s voices which appear so emphatically in
your literature of São Tomé.
If one were to recall the
book of Ecclesiastes Senõr Lima, ‘To every thing there is a season / And a time
for every purpose under the heaven.’ Earlier it was a time to make war, now it
is a time to play games.
Yours affectionately
Brian
(West stand)
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Published in Weekender, Gomantak Times, St, Inez, Goa, Sunday 2 February 2014; Pix courtesy: http://agendaculturalpiracicabana.blogspot(dot)in/2009/11/dia-da-consciencia-negra-mario-de.html
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