Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Suneeta Peres da Costa, Giramondo Publishing, $19.95.
This coming-of-age story is set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence. Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between collusion in Portuguese rule, and their reliance on the Angolans who are their servants.
Costa’s novella captures with penetrating lyricism the problematic association between the girl and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery and the end of an empire.
Her intellectual awareness advances into an increasing consciousness of the lies of colonialism, and the fierce political fall-outs that ultimately lead to her father’s death, and their exile.
