I have now lived in Brazil for thirty odd years, and learned how to speak, read and write Portuguese quite fluently. This has been a revelatory experience, even for someone like me, who grew up multilingual in an India, where 60 years ago, English was a dominant language. Even though I came from a Goan-Bengali background and was aware of the richness of literature in Bengali and so many other Indian languages, the dominance of English worldwide was such it felt that almost all literary and maybe even intellectual activity had to be in English. In this sense, coming to learn and appreciate Portuguese through the medium of music (MPB, Música Popular Brasileira) was my first awakening. Then, as I got more proficient, reading Brazilian literature (Machado de Assis, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, to name just two) was an education and a realization of the Anglocentrism of part of the Western world. It was wonderful to get to know a world of excellent literature in a new language. Later, I slowly became aware of the vibrant literature from the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. This was another revelation, and a new opportunity to see how other colonies had created their own expressive versions of Portuguese, in literature and music. The wonderful Kriol of Guiné-Bissau and the Kriolu of Cabo Verde, with the memorable music of Cesária Évora; the mixture of Kimbundu and Portuguese that results in the expressive Angolan Portuguese, in which Ondjaki and Luaty Beirão create their prose and poetry; the distinctive prose of Paulina Chiziane and Mia Couto from Moçambique: all this captivated me and, at the same time, made me aware of how little of this universe is visible to the Anglocentric world. My new mission is to learn as many of the Creoles as I can: for me, learning Haitian Kriyol would be preferable to learning French. Similarly for the Creoles from Bissau and Cabo Verde, as well as the Noling from Chaul near Bombay.
