The condition of Goa raises the anxiety of Goans to higher decimals. The future of Goa and Goans seems to be closed. Goa seems to have become a land of lost dreams for Goans at several levels. To understand this condition, one may have to use the notion of hauntology developed by Jacques Derrida.
Haunting gives intensity to ideas. It enables our language to catch the experiential modality of life that produces drag and a sense of unhoming. Haunting helps us manifest how abusive powers impact daily life. It makes us feel that time has lost its joint.
Goa does not feel at home today. All things Goan seem to be falling apart. This feeling afflicts our being in time. The way we organise past, present and future loses its balance. There is some inevitable excess that seems troubling. The weight of this excess afflicts our imagination of present and future and brings discomfort. Hence, to some extent haunting of this kind is a frightening experience. It points to harm inflicted or loss induced and sets into motion a desire to seek remedy or recovery.
The failing condition of Goa seems to have become such that Goa itself is experienced as a haunting place. All things that seem to have a harmonious assigned place are falling apart. The wall of security that held Goan life together seems to be cracking and falling down. The Goan order of things that we assumed and took for granted, the cosmos that held field, hill, church, temple, creek, village in one moral world, is breaking apart. Hence, haunting becomes a psychopolitics and urges us to do something about the failing order of life. Goans feel pulled to rectify the disturbing condition.
We need to heed Herbert Marcuse, who told us that these tendencies that seek a response can be subversive to politics that produces lost pasts and lost futures. The hauntologies that afflict Goa can dismantle the reigning conditions that produce them, or push us further into cycles of disruption. Hence, it is necessary to understand the hauntologies and embrace therapies that are emancipative.
To understand these hauntologies, we have to give up binary logic of our either or thinking and come to understand how past and future inhabit our present life. The lost past drives us to bring future to that past and use present as means of that recovery. A lost future cripples our present, and we lose direction. Thus, both past and future live in our present. Present is not pure. It is haunted.
Politics in Goa is often inviting ghost of past, remembering misdeeds of colonizers. Ghost of conversion, temple destruction and Inquisition are summoned and chronopower is manufactured that authorizes present to take revenge for the past misdeeds .Often this revenge is directed and even practiced on neo-villains by neo-victims. Goans who lived together for centuries are recast as villains and victims of five hundred year old story. This is hauntology of lost past that imprisons present.
There is also ghost of future that haunts Goans differently. Fear of loss of land to outsiders, fear of extinction of Goan demography, fear of becoming minority in own land, paints future as already lost. This closed future gives subject position of being victims to Goans and government and its cronies the position of being villains, and opposition maybe given position of messiah who will come and save. Thus, our hauntologies afflict us differently. Ghostly history calls phantoms of past while ghostly future invents phantoms of future. But hauntologies invent victims, villains and messiahs. Indeed, hauntologies produce their own light at end of tunnel. But often that headlight is light of engine that is coming to crash us. We think light is hope, but here it is train coming to destroy.
We cannot dismiss both political and subversive power of hauntologies. Hauntology can wake us. But we cannot be prisoners of present that is locked between vengeful past and closed future. We need to see through politics that invites spectres and expel our present from phobia of closed future. Alternate futures are not closed or unimaginable. We cannot be one dimensional Goans locked into sick present without possibility of imagination of a alternate future. Marcuse warned of one dimensional man who loses capacity to imagine negation. Goa risks producing one dimensional Goans who can only complain, only sell, only leave, only blame past.
We have the challenge to enact a great refusal. This refusal, as Marcuse meant, rejects lost past as destiny, as well as lost future as fate, as well as unwelcoming present as prison. Great refusal says: I will not be governed by ghost you summon to make me hate my neighbour. I will not be governed by ghost you summon to make me believe future is already sold. Great refusal is not denial. It is critical yes that comes through critical no.
Our openness to present, and embrace of failed past as well as dream of hope filled future can be result of this great refusal. To embrace failed past does not mean to celebrate failure. It means to mourn it, learn from it, and let it teach us what not to repeat. To embrace present does not mean to accept its corruption. It means to see its cracks and live in cracks as hyposubjects who care, play, adapt and laugh. To dream future does not mean to invent fantasy. It means to build plane of immanence where new knowledge objects, land, health, jobs, ecology, dignity, comunidade, can congregate and produce new resonance.
Hence, challenge for Goans is to rise above prison of now. Future has not run out. There is no more future to come only if we believe there is none. Goa is not land of lost dreams unless we stop dreaming. Dreaming here is not escapism. It is ontological labour. It is work of keeping future open when power wants future closed. It is work of keeping past open as resource and not as weapon.
Goa needs daring. Daring to dream is first political act. When we dare to dream in Goa, we refuse both Goa-side that becomes narrow nativism and Goa-cide that becomes sale deed. We choose Goa-side as fidelity to abundance, to wholeness, to home that can still be built. We choose examined thought over haunted thought. We choose hyposubject ease over hypersubject mastery.
That is why the final sentence must be declaration, and not a wish. Goa is not land of lost dreams. We dare to dream in Goa.
