(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
BIOGRAPHY
Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1957, the son of Portuguese immigrants. His father was a journalist in search of more opportunities, and his mother was an orphan. Upon arrival, his father was shocked by the social ine- qualities and abuses in Mozambique, and although Mia Couto grew up in a more privileged situation in Mozambique, he was conscious that the world around him was not how it should be. In the schools he attended while growing up, there were very few blacks, and his teachers did what they could to keep the blacks in their place. He says that it was Europe inside his house, but Africa in the streets. Mia Couto, on the one hand, describes Beira as very volatile because of the barriers between the whites and the blacks. But he also speaks of the city in idyllic tones, talking about his childhood as a time in which he mixed freely with blacks, spoke the African language Sena, and attended sto- rytelling sessions. In this environment of tension and opportunity, Couto grew up with both a regard for mankind and a love of literature.
Mia Couto went to Maputo, then called Lourenc¸o Marques, to study medicine at the university. It was precisely at this same time that Frelimo, the socialist party in Mozambique, was growing in its struggle to overthrow the colonial government. Mia Couto was deeply involved in the struggle, and he says of that time in school that he was more a militant than he was a student; however, as a white, his participation in the resistance was very problematic. He was sus- pected of being an infiltrator by blacks, while the Portuguese saw him as a traitor. Although he originally came to Maputo to study medicine, he had, like his father, practiced some journalism on the side. Because the majority of the journalists were Portuguese, in 1974 Frelimo asked Couto to leave his studies for a year to help spread information and propagate their cause. He first worked at the newspaper Tribuna, then served as the director of the Agencia de Infor- mao Nacional (National Information Agency) for a few years before working as the director of the magazine Tempo, and eventually returned to newspaper work with Notı´cias. Twelve years after ‘‘temporarily’’ leaving his studies, Couto asked to step down and returned to the university to study biology. He says that he felt that his youth had slipped away from him; he wanted to rediscover his country and affirm the connections that he had felt during his childhood.
Mia Couto did not leave journalism entirely. He has continued to write and publish through the local periodicals. Many of his shorter writings were previ- ously published in Maputo. He also continues to publish a weekly article ‘‘Queixato´rio’’ in the paper Domingo. Mia Couto has also recently formed his own business doing work in biology.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Mia Couto began as a poet, publishing his first poem at the age of fourteen. Numerous poems since then appeared in periodicals before the release of his collection Raiz de Oravalho in 1983. Various other poems have been published in anthologies listed in the Bibliography. Differing from his prose writing, the poetry is more introspective and self-reflexive and raises principally questions of identity. For example, in the poetry collected in No reino de Caliban, many of the poems contain images of dispersion and the consequent need for recon- struction. In ‘‘Segundo poema da alienao,’’ he writes of his name, ‘‘estilhace- se em mil pedac¸os’’ (broken into thousands of pieces), which the poem then reconstructs ‘‘like a vein that finds its body again.’’ The imagery is frequently informed by Marxist thought, reflecting Couto’s involvement with Frelimo. His later writing reflects a more critical position on Marxist rhetoric, as can be seen in ‘‘O secreto namoro de Deloinda’’ and ‘‘O retro-camarada’’ of Cronicando. This more personal poetry, with its emphasis on metaphysical aesthetics, shows the influence of the poet Jose´ Craveirinha, considered the father of Mozambican literature. It also reflects the resistance taken up by the Associaa˜o de Escritores Moc¸ambicanos (Association of Mozambican Writers) to the poetry of combat that dominated the period.
Mia Couto is currently better known for his prose writing. His shorter prose pieces are ‘‘esto´rias’’ and ‘‘cro´nicas.’’ The ‘‘esto´rias,’’ or short stories, are in- cluded in the collections Vozes Anoitecidas and Cada homem e´ uma ra a . The ‘‘cro´nicas’’ are short journalistic pieces, usually published in periodicals, and are part of a well-established Lusophone tradition. Under ‘‘cro´nicas’’ fit Cron- icando, the noun made into a gerund, and Esto´rias Abensonhadas. Rather than looking at Mia Couto’s published work chronologically or in such generic cat- egories, this discussion will instead trace a few themes found throughout his work.
Like many post-colonial writers, Mia Couto confronts the question of language. With respect to the colonial language legacy, authors like Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind advocate for authors the exclusive use of indigenous African languages. Mia Couto seems to respond to such calls in two ways. For Couto, as for many ‘‘assimilated’’ Mozambicans, Portuguese is his mother tongue. Further, Couto believes that the Portuguese language has been appropriated and reborn as an African language. Throughout his work, Couto himself participates in this transformation with an infusion of neologisms, hybrid words, and local terminology. He often also inverts the standard Portuguese syntax to reflect the spoken word, which raises the second part of the language question: the relationship of writing to the oral tradition.
Couto draws heavily on the stories from the oral tradition, both from his own experiences (see the interviews listed in the Bibliography) and from ethno- graphic sources (see the epigraph to ‘‘Lenda de Namaro´i’’ in Esto´rias Aben- sonhadas). In an attempt to minimize the influence of the European literary tradition, many Africanists trace the origin of African literature to the oral tra- dition, with writing being merely another material extension of the same. Couto occasionally reverses this relationship, with the transference being from the writ- ten to the oral. For example, in Terra Sonambula, the boy Muidinga spends most of the evenings reading to his ‘‘uncle’’ Tuahir from some notebooks they found. This is already a reversal of the traditional storytelling order of the old instructing the young. During one of their excursions, Tuahir wishes that they had the notebooks to read. Muidinga responds, ‘‘Deixei os cadernos la´ no mach- imbombo. Mas eu ja´ li outro caderno, mais a` frente. Lhe posso contar o que diz, quase sei tudo de cabec¸a, palavra por palavra’’ (I left the notebooks back at the bus. But I already read ahead in another notebook. I can tell you what it says; I almost know it by heart, word for word). A similar reversal can also be seen in the story ‘‘A carta’’ of Cronicando.
In addition to questioning the relationship between writing and orality, many of Mia Couto’s stories do not define the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the inside or outside of the text. As he says in the introduction to Vozes Anoitecidas, the stories came ‘‘a partir de qualquer coisa acontecida de verdade mas que me foi contada como se tivesse ocorrido na outra margem do mundo’’ (from something that really happened but that was told to me as if it had hap- pened on the other side of the world). Recall that Couto was a journalist and that many of these stories were first published in newspapers. This play between the real and the fictional becomes even more interesting in light of the expec- tation that journalism relay the news, that is, facts. But Couto in interviews and in his stories critiques these conventions. For example, in Esto´rias Abenson- hadas, the story ‘‘Pranto de coqueiro’’ opens with ‘‘It was an event that came out in the newspaper’’; ‘‘No rio, ale´m da curva’’ begins with ‘‘I quote the true news from the paper.’’ What follows, then, is not what one would expect to read in a news article. In the story ‘‘Sangue da avo´, manchando a alcatifa’’ (Grandma’s blood is staining the carpet) in Cronicando, old grandmother Car- olina moves to Maputo to live with her son’s family. As she is watching television, a report on armed bandits comes on. The grandmother leaps from the couch and attacks the television, accuses her son of allowing bandits into his home, and then returns to her home in the interior. The grandmother is unable to separate what happens within the television from what she has experienced. As in the works of many Lusophone writers today, such as Pepetela and Un- gulani Ba Ka Khosa, Couto questions the distinctions between the factual and the fictional.
For at least thirty years preceding the peace accord in 1994, Mozambique was at continual war, initially combating colonial rule and subsequently thrown into civil war. Within the devastated landscape that occupies much of Couto’s stories, children play the role of both victims and the hope for the future. The story ‘‘O apocalipse privado do tio Gegu ’’ of Cada homem e´ uma ra a tellse换 of an orphan turned bandit, something that anyone familiar with the news from Mozambique knows was not uncommon. The story opens with ‘‘Histo´ria de um homem e´ sempre mal contada’’ (A man’s history is always poorly told). Here the two main characters are an uncle and his young, unnamed orphan. They live near a swamp, on the edges of society. In order to survive, the uncle Gegue换 trains the young boy as a bandit and teaches him how to live from terror and violence.
In many respects, ‘‘O apocalipse privado do tio Gegue’’ is similar to Terra Sona入mbula. However, in the novel Couto turns the narrative into one of hope; the brutal reality is mixed with mythology portending rebirth. Again the main characters are an uncle, Tuahir, and an orphan. This time the orphan is given a name, Muidinga. They also live on the edges, in a burned-out bus. The narrative goes back and forth between the adventures of Tuahir and Muidinga and those of Kindzu. Kindzu is the first-person narrator of the notebooks already men- tioned. The place where Muidinga and Tuahir live is not one of desolation only, but implies a kind of underworld. Tuahir is like a shade, seemingly without body; he is described as ‘‘magro, parece ter perdido toda a substancia’’ (thin, he looks as though he had lost all substance). His role is that of a guide to Muidinga: ‘‘O velho teve que lhe ensinar todos os inı´cios’’ (The old man had to teach him all the beginnings). Their cyclical journeys to and from the bus turn into initiations. Although Terra Sona入mbula ends without completing the rite of passage, the pattern points toward Muidinga’s pending integration into society, and the story ends portending mythical transformation. Aware of the contemporary realities, Couto’s mythic optimism points toward the emergence of a new era in Mozambique. In many ways, this shift toward a more optimistic view can be traced chronologically in Couto’s works. He indicates the change himself in the introduction to Esto´rias Abensonhadas, where he describes the pieces as ‘‘foram escritas depois da guerra’’ (written after the war).
It is not surprising that for a biologist, nature would be a recurring image. In many stories, nature plays more of a scenic role, with the landscape or water as a metaphor. At other times, as in Cronicando, three playful but equally polemic pieces discuss the mistreatment and destruction of animals. In ‘‘Animais, animenos’’ and ‘‘No zoo-ilo´gico,’’ Couto does this through a series of wordplays with the names of animals, as the titles indicate. In ‘‘O monstro infantil,’’ the victim is the elephant whose murder Couto calls ‘‘elefanticı´nio.’’ In Esto´rias Abensonhadas, Couto also addresses nature and its exploitation. For example, in ‘‘O adeus da sombra,’’ a young person travels into the interior in search of an herb necessary to cure an ailing friend. When he arrives at an old herbalist’s home, she tells him that the people in the ‘‘cidade cortam tudo, nem as raı´zes nos deixam’’ (city cut everything, not even leaving the roots).
Differing from these few examples of the exploitation of the environment, in the majority of the writing here discussed, Couto does not usually address po- litical issues directly. He draws a distinction between his two genres of writing, reserving his more polemical and didactic words for other venues. For example, he addresses the destabilized condition of Mozambique through an almost al- legorical story in ‘‘A guerra dos palhac¸os’’ of Esto´rias Abensonhadas. Here two clowns come into town and begin to fight. At first the observers watch with curiosity, but eventually the entire town is drawn into the fight. By the end, the clowns stop fighting and walk away laughing, leaving the town behind in ruins. Couto’s double engagement with writing as an aesthetic enterprise and writing as journalism, highly conscious of the harrowing conditions, is part of what makes his works so engaging. He has not divorced art from reality but works out of common and brutal experience a hopeful narrative.
It is this very role that Couto assumes, however, that places him in a prob- lematic position familiar to many postcolonial writers. His work reflects a pre- occupation with the marginalized, the orphans, the elderly, the abused women, the mulato, the monhe´ (Indian), and the displaced. In many ways, Couto tries to give voice to them, to represent them in his stories. His writing is not naı¨ve, but seeks to promote possibilities and reconcile conflictive differences. But, as noted at the beginning, Couto is himself from a more privileged class, which has over time distanced him from the more common experience. Gayatri Chak- ravorty Spivak has described in her seminal essay ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ how the ‘‘postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss’’ (Marx- ism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988], 287). As mentioned earlier, Couto is conscious of this distance and attempts to bridge it. However, the suspicion that Couto encountered in the struggle for independence has continued to some degree, including among some fellow writers who attribute his publishing suc- cess to his privileged upbringing and newspaper work.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The majority of critics to date highly praise Mia Couto as an important voice in Lusophone literature. In 1989 Cronicando was awarded the Pre´mio Anual de Jornalismo Areosa Pena by the Organization of Mozambican Journalists. The popularity of his writing has inspired some to adapt the stories, like ‘‘Sidney Poitier na barbearia de Firipe Beruberu’’ from Cada homem e´ uma ra a, to the theater. Nevertheless, the majority of the scholarship on Couto has played the perpetual role of introduction that much of Lusophone African literature faces. In an analysis of the development of Mozambican literature, Patrick Chabal concludes his discussion of emerging writers with Mia Couto, describing him as the most original new prose writer. The reason cited is Couto’s inventive use of language.
It is in this inventive vein that other scholars, like Mary L. Daniel, have begun to open the discussion on the influence of the Brazilian writer Joa˜o Guimares Rosa. During the enormously important Regionalist movement in Brazil during the mid-twentieth century, Guimara˜es Rosa emerged as a writer who was con- scious of the social situation of the interior of Brazil, but even more concerned in his writing with a reconfiguration of language. As a consequence of the use of regionalist dialect and erudite linguistic inventiveness, Guimara˜es Rosa has been credited with the creation of a uniquely Brazilian literary language. The echoes are obvious, not in the least because of the ubiquitousness of neologisms in Mia Couto’s prose. He has himself expressed in interviews the influence of Guimara˜es Rosa. Couto also appears to pay homage to him in his most recent collection, Esto´rias Abensonhadas. The first word of the title reminds one of Guimara˜es Rosa’s Primeiras Esto´rias. They are both collections of very short pieces. The second half of Couto’s title is a past-participle neologism combining ‘‘abenc¸oar’’ (to bless) and ‘‘sonhar’’ (to dream).
The scholarship on Mia Couto will undoubtedly continue to increase as schol- ars begin to further examine, for example, the central role that the mythology of the oral tradition plays or the mistreatment of women. Couto is still a rela- tively young writer, and there is most likely much more to look forward to. In fact, Mia Couto’s most recent work, A Varanda do Frangipani, was released just as this volume was being finalized to go into press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Mia Couto
Cada homem e´ uma ra a . Uma Terra Sem Amos 44. Lisboa: Caminho, 1990.
Cronicando. Maputo: Notı´cias, 1988. 2nd ed. Uma Terra Sem Amos 52. Lisboa: Cam- inho, 1991.
Esto´rias Abensonhadas. Uma Terra Sem Amos 69. Lisboa: Caminho, 1994.
‘‘Identidade,’’ ‘‘A voz do pedreiro,’’ ‘‘Poema da minha alienao,’’ ‘‘Confide换ncia,’’ ‘‘Incompleta reflexa˜o,’’ ‘‘Segundo poema da alienao.’’ No reino de Caliban: Antologia panora´mica da poesia africana de expressa˜o portugu sae入 . Ed. Manuel Ferreira. Vol. 3. Lisboa: Seara Nova, 1985.
(October/December 1980): 543–45.
Raiz de Orvalho. Gostar de ler. Maputo: Cadernos Tempo, 1983.
‘‘Sem ti,’’ ‘‘Sobre algumas palavras de Alberto Lacerda.’’ As palavras amadurecem. Beira: Diario de Moc¸ambique, 1988. 109–10.
Terra Sona入mbula. Uma Terra Sem Amos 62. Lisboa: Caminho, 1992.
VozesAnoitecidas. Karingana 1. Maputo: Associao de Escritores Moc¸ambicanos, 1986. 2nd ed. Uma Terra Sem Amos 34. Lisboa: Caminho, 1987.
A Varanda do Frangipani. Uma Terra Sem Amos 76. Lisboa: Caminho, 1996.
Translations
Every Man Is a Race. Trans. David Brookshaw. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994.
‘‘Grandma’s Blood Is Staining the Carpet.’’ Trans. by Peter Bush. Literary Review 38.4 (Summer 1995): 604–5.
A Sleepwalking Land (excerpt). Trans. by David Brookshaw. Literary Review 38.4 (Sum- mer 1995): 593–603.
Voices Made Night. Trans. David Brookshaw. African Writers Series. London: Heine- mann, 1990.
Selected Studies of Mia Couto
Chabal, Patrick, ed. The Post-Colonial Literature of Lusophone Africa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Couto, Mia. Interview. ‘‘Cada hombre es una raza.’’ By Ignacio Cabria. Quimera (Oc- tober 1992): 71–74.
——— . Interview. ‘‘Mia Couto: Escrevo por ma˜os de outros.’’ By Nelson Sau´te. Jornal de Letras, Artes & Ideias 11.475 (August 13, 1991): 10–11.
——— . Interview. Vozes Moc¸ambicanas. By Patrick Chabal. Lisboa: Vega, 1994. 274– 291.
Daniel, Mary L. ‘‘Mia Couto: Guimara˜es Rosa’s Newest Literary Heir in Africa.’’ Luso- Brazilian Review 32.1 (1995): 1–16.
Louro, Joa˜o. ‘‘O mito e a realidade.’’ Jornal de Letras, Artes & Ideias 11.501 (February 11, 1992): 6.
©Medina, Cremilda
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