14 DECEMBER 2019
(Clockwise from left) Former Indian
VAISHNAVI SANKHWALKAR
TheSouzayou
haven'tmet
M
ary D’Souza rises, two storeys tall,
out of a welter of blue-green waves
and tendrils, a brown Venus emerg-
ing from the sea. Her head is framed
in a golden halo, while silver and
bronze suns shine over her shoulders. Her hair is ruf-
fled, the effect of the wind rushing through it as she
speeds around the track. She wears the black shorts
and white T-shirt of a 1950s runner, “GOA” embla-
zoned across the torso.
D’Souza won a gold in the 4x100m relay at the
1954 Manila Asian Games to go with the silver in the
same event and the bronze in the 200m that she
had won in 1951, at the inaugural Asiad in New Delhi.
She was also India’s first double international, rep-
resenting the country in hockey as well. In 1956,
when she was at the height of her powers — she
broke the Asian record in both 100m and 200m
that year — India found it didn’t have the funds to
send a women’s contingent to Melbourne, and a
possible Olympic medal eluded her.
“Stories like this out of Goa are rarely heard,”
says Vivek Menezes, writer, photographer and inde-
fatigable promoter of Goan culture. He is curator of
a segment called “Mundo Goa” in the 2019 edition
of Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, which begins
tomorrow. He is using the opportunity to bring sto-
ries like D’Souza’s into the light, through a street art
project titled ICON. His
collaborator in this ini- SOLOMON’S
tiative is Solomon
Souza, grandson of
MURALSON
Goa’s most famous SHUTTERSIN
artist son, F N Souza. THEMAHANEH
Under Menezes’s guid-
YEHUDAMARKET
ance, Souza is execut-
ing a series of 20-odd INJERUSALEM,
murals depicting some DEPICT
of the state’s other illus- PERSONALITIES
trious children on the
walls of houses, office
FROMISRAELI
buildings, and shops. HISTORY
So, on a house in
Saligao, poet Eunice D’Souza dwells in a forest with
an African grey parrot on her head and lines from
one of her poems beside her, which read “Learn
DAPHNE DE SOUZA
from an almond leaf / which flames as it falls”. At the
Aldona Institute clubhouse, “India’s Louis
Armstrong” Chic Chocolate croons into a micro-
phone. On a wall in Taleigao, one of India’s greatest
football goalkeepers, Brahmanand Sankhwalkar,
leaps to prevent the sun from entering his goal. In Panjim,
artist Angela Fonseca, in his Gandhi topi, breaks out of the
frame of an Islamic arch of the type you will find in sev-
eral of his paintings, which bend the geographic bound-
aries of Christian iconography.
Just around the corner from this mural of Fonseca, I
watch as Souza iconises Mary D’Souza. It’s a jaw-drop-
ping experience. He stands on a crane platform, whose
movement he controls through a panel on the protective
railing. In one hand, he holds a phone on which is a
small black-and-white picture of his subject. In the oth-
er, he wields a spray can that he chooses from amongst
a handful around his feet, each with a different shade of
paint. With no grid laid out, and no outlines drawn, he
flourishes his instrument like the sword of Zorro, splash-
football captain Brahmanand
Sankhwalkar stands in front of a
mural of him in action; Solomon
Souza at work on a mural of
Maestro António Fortunato de
Figueiredo, founder of the Goa
Symphony Orchestra; the mural of
Mary D'Souza; Vivek Menezes and
Solomon Souza (left) at a painting
of Bollywood music great
Anthony Gonsalves
ANIRUDDHA SEN GUPTA
ing his art and his signature onto plaster that offers no
resistance to his skill.
“Solomon is a savant,” says Menezes to me, several
times. “With him, one and one and one don’t make three.
They add up to whatever he wants them to.” Menezes was
friends with F N, the elder Souza, in the last years of the
latter’s life, when they both lived in New York. “His artis-
tic legacy, I feel, has not been sufficiently celebrated,” he
says, “and much of what I do in the arts arena is with
Souza in mind.” So when F N’s grandson Solomon
“popped up on [his] radar some years ago”, he paid close
attention. “It was with great fascination that I saw that
Solomon was an impressive artist in his own right.”
What particularly caught his eye was a series of murals
Solomon (@SolomonSouza on Instagram) had done on
THE GOOD LIFE |
VIVEK MENEZES
Solomon Souza, grandson
of the legendary artist
F N Souza, is in Goa right now
and painting the town red
(and blue and yellow), says
Aniruddha Sen Gupta
the shutters of shops in the Mahaneh Yehuda
market in Jerusalem, depicting personalities from
Israeli history. “When Serendipity asked me to
curate Mundo Goa,” Menezes continues,
“Solomon was top of my list.” Inspired by the
“shuk” (market) series, Menezes called Souza to
ask if he would undertake a similar street art proj-
ect in Goa, the land of his grandfather’s birth.
“I was very surprised when Vivek first con-
tacted me through Facebook,” Souza says. “I
thought, ‘Wow, this is awesome; something com-
pletely new’. But a lot of people say a lot of things.
Then we spoke on the phone, and things started
moving. It turned very real.”
On a Facebook post at the time, he wrote, “It is
a part of my roots which I have never had the
opportunity to really dig into and nurture, a rich
treasure trove of culture and heritage that I have
left unopened for decades...” Once here — his
first time in the land of his grandfather’s birth —
he swiftly dove into that treasure trove, exploring
its bright jewels and hidden gems. “I feel like
I’ve been here forever,” he tells me.
We’re talking over a cup of coffee in a Panjim
restaurant, at the end of the strenuous day he
has spent on Mary D’Souza’s portrait. He’s in a
singlet and shorts, flecked with paint on his
clothes and his body. He should be tired out of
his skull, but he’s full of smiles and energy. He
must be very fit, I suggest, and his age probably
helps (he’s just 26).
“I smoke a lot, drink and party, eat all sorts of
junk,” he laughs. “The painting is my exercise.”
The speed with which he creates his murals does
ensure quite a workout: The Mary D’Souza art-
work took him about six hours to complete, and
he did not rest at all in that time.
His enthusiasm and youthful charm is catch-
ing. While he was painting, people in neigh-
bouring offices watched fascinated, and passers-
by stopped and offered their views. Menezes,
who arrived later in the day to watch him put fin-
ishing touches to the mural, was happy to impart
information about the work. And when Souza
finally descended from his lofty perch, some of
those who had been watching him wanted to
take selfies with him, and he obliged them.
Daphne Pearl de Souza, Menezes’s assistant
curator on Mundo Goa, sings Souza’s praises.
“He’s a gem of a person,” she says. “Very humble
and accommodating. No fuss. But he likes break-
ing rules and taking risks.” She has been arranging the
locations for the murals, handling permissions and paper-
work. “The public’s reaction has been very supportive
and encouraging,” she says. “Getting permissions is always
a challenge... You can’t always get a yes.” But there have
been far more positive reactions than negative, and Goans
by and large — especially in the villages where some local
icons have been painted — have been excited at having
their heroes and heroines recognised in this manner.
Solomon sees one key parallel in Jerusalem, where he
has lived for the past 11 years, and Goa. “They are both
places that are very real,” he says. “Yes, they have their
own issues and share of problems. But for me personal-
ly, Jerusalem has been empowering. It has made me who
I am today.”
v
The wrong
man
A O SCOTT
O
n July 27, 1996, a homemade bomb
exploded at Centennial Olympic Park in
Atlanta, the host city for that year’s
Summer Olympics. Two people died and 100
were hurt. It was carried out by an anti-abortion
militant named Eric Rudolph.
Rudolph’s name is mentioned only near the
end of Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood’s new film
about the aftermath of the Atlanta bombing. The
movie isn’t about the bomber, but rather about
the security guard who found a backpack full of
explosives and shrapnel under a bench and
sounded the alarm. Nonetheless, the spectre of
domestic right-wing terrorism haunts the movie,
an unseen and unnamed evil tearing at the bright
fabric of American optimism.
Eastwood, in nearly half a century as a major
filmmaker and even longer as an axiom of popu-
lar culture, has chronicled the fraying of that
cloth, and also plucked at a thread or two. Richard
Jewell, with a screenplay by Billy Ray, is one of his
more obviously political films, though not always
in obvious ways. In spite of some efforts to inter-
pret it as a veiled pro-Trump polemic, the film
doesn’t track neatly with current ideological agi-
tations. The political fractures Eastwood exposes
are more elemental than even the most ferocious
partisanship. This is a morality tale — in a good
way, mostly — about the vulnerability of the indi-
vidual citizen in the face of state power and about
the fate of a private person menaced by the
machinery of publicity.
Though he acts bravely and responsibly at a
moment of crisis, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser)
isn’t entirely a hero. We first meet him about 10
years before the bombing, pushing a cart full of
office supplies. That’s where he meets Winston
Bryant (Sam Rockwell), an irascible lawyer who
will become his champion later on. Jewell is
polite, hard-working and prone to surprising,
unsolicited acts of generosity. He keeps Bryant’s
desk drawer stocked with Snickers bars. At
Centennial Olympic Park in 1996, he hands out
soft drinks to co-workers, police officers and oth-
er thirsty people.
A still from Richard Jewell
There might be something a little peculiar
about him. Eastwood, Ray and Hauser (who is
nothing short of brilliant) cleverly invite the audi-
ence to judge Jewell the way his tormentors even-
tually will: on the basis of prejudices we might not
even admit to ourselves. He’s overweight. He lives
with his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates). He has a
habit of taking things too seriously and of trying
a little too hard to fit in. He treats members of the
Atlanta Police Department and the FBI like his
professional peers, and seems blind to their con-
descension. “I’m law enforcement too,” he says to
the agents who are investigating him as a poten-
tial terrorist, with an earnestness that is both
comical and pathetic.
The main heavies are Tom Shaw, a stone-faced
FBI man played by Jon Hamm, and Kathy
Scruggs, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution. It’s her reporting that sets off a feed-
ing frenzy in the newspapers and on the airwaves.
Scruggs, played by Olivia Wilde, was a real person
(she died in 2001). Tom Shaw was not, and the
implication that Scruggs had sex with him in
exchange for information about the bombing
case has no apparent basis in reality. The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution has threatened legal action
against Warner Bros for the way its journalists,
Scruggs in particular, are portrayed in the film,
and the studio has pushed back. On strictly dra-
matic grounds, the character is, at best, a collec-
tion of lazy, sexist screenwriting clichés.
That isn’t so unusual in Hollywood, but what’s
worse is that Eastwood and Ray subject Scruggs —
depicted as a newsroom mean girl with nothing
but scorn for her female colleagues — to a type of
profiling analogous to what Jewell endured.
Assuming that an ambitious woman journalist
must be sleeping with her sources isn’t all that
different from assuming that a fat man who lives
with his mother must have planted a bomb.
The shadows are what linger from this flawed,
fascinating movie. As usual with Eastwood, it is
shot (by Yves Bélanger) and edited (by Joel Cox) in
a clean, blunt, matter-of-fact style. The story
moves in a straight line, gathering momentum
and suspense even as it lingers over odd, everyday
moments. It doesn’t feel especially complicated or
textured until it’s almost finished.
Richard Jewell is a rebuke to institutional arro-
gance and a defence of individual dignity, some-
times clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly
shrewd and sensitive in its effort to understand its
protagonist and what happened to him. The polit-
ical implications of his ordeal are interesting to
contemplate, but its essential nature is clear
enough. He was bullied.
©2019 The New York Times