Mia Couto, the magnetic corner of Mozambique

by Sébastien Lapaque

4th february 2015

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"​White and Mozambican, born on the 5th of July, 1955 in Beira, by the Indian Ocean shore, a biologist that "writes in his spare time". When an african writer is evoked, one tends to think of books published in english by the likes of nigerian Wole Soyinka or the south African Nadine Gordimer, in French, like the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma, or even in Arabic like the Egiptian Alaa Al-Aswany...

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Couto writes in portuguese.

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A craftsman of a classical language, precise and sober, different of the creole found in Cape verde, Guiné-Bissau or in Equatorial Guinea, but somehow close to the warm and spiced portuguese spoken in Angola and Brazil, Couto humbly claims it for himself as well. "The mozambican portuguese - or in other words, the portuguese of Mozambique - is by itself a place of conflict and ambiguity. Mozambique's embrace of Lusophony is one charged with reservation, denial and suspicious approval." said the writer during is speech given in 2001 at the Faro University in Portugal. António Emílio Leite Couto, nicknamed Mia still as a boy for is love for cats, is drawn to underdogs and meaningful contradictions. He goes on: "I am a white man that is african; a non practicing atheist; a poet that writes prose; a man with a women's name, a scientist unsure of science; a writer in the land of orality." Son of the journalist and poet Fernando Couto (1924-2013), was born in the region of Porto and migrated very young to Mozambique, he looks with irony to his personal reality within a country of 25 million inhabitants. I belong to an almost extinct tribe. We are somewhere around 2500 people. Actually reading his work we can tell ethnicity doesn't mean much to him, as he puts it himself "every man is a race" and there laysm undoubtedly is only political doctrine. However he doesn't forget the Mozambicans that have learnt to distrust the white men, the "mezungos" and their language, the portuguese, as an instrument of oppression. The caravels are long gone from the Lourenço Marques harbour, named Maputo after the liberation in 1975 after 5 centuries of colonization. In Couto's work many characters express this feeling of depersonalization. Such is the case in Under the Frangipani a mock thriller that evoques the turbulent period of the post-liberation years. "I always studied the mission, with the priests. They shaped my ways, they set the thresholds of my expectations. They taught me in language other than my mother tongue." A white man  in  Mozambique trying to "de-portuguese" himself. "I apologize for my portuguese, I don't know what is the language I speak anymore, my grammar is all over the place and is the color of this land. It's not just the way I talk that is different. It's the way I think."

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The portuguese language as a spoil of war

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In 1975, more than 80% of the population didn't speak portuguese; today they are around 60%. Considering the proximity with South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania where English is spoken, the FRELIMO (Mozambique's Liberation Front) leaders were tempted to adopt english as the official language, to erase any trace of the portuguese presence. In their first congress in 1962 that matter was discussed. The decision (written in english...) to make portuguese the prevalent communication medium between the several etnic groups and serve as an unification language marked the transformative claim of an instrument of colonial domination into its opposite.  "Portuguese was adopted not as heritage, but as the most important trophy of war", Couto points out, echoing the famous phrase by Algerian writer Kateb Yacine: "The french language was and still remains a spoil of war". Hence, "the mozambican government has contributed more for the portuguese language than centuries of colonization, through its own national interest, internal cohesion efforts and the construction of its own identity".

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The portuguese Mozambique was an improvised country by the sea, and along the counters of bureaucracy, there was "a glimpse of a country, a corpse of sorts, dusty and only preserved by  its stagnant condition, no one daring to touch it, at risk of dissolving it." observed a 19th century  french traveller. With the arrival of the 20th century, nothing changed. Apart from the seaside cities, where a minority of "absorbed", black men that where beneficiaries of a status that allowed them to serve the administration, the people from the country side kept on using the bantu languages. In 1975, 41 of those indigenous languages were recognized as "national languages" by the new constitution and portuguese kept its "official language" status. If we add the sign language, also registered on the constitution, in Mozambique 43 languages are used - while the Arabic, Indian languages and Chinese are a minority. Couto's work was born on a unprecedented linguistic magnetic field: Portuguese is not Mozambicans language it is the language of "mozambicanity". An utopia? The country needed that after a civil war that lasted from 1976 to 1992 and killed one million people.

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"A good story was more powerful than a rifle or a knife." discovers in awe our narrator from Jerusalem. That phrase is the base to Couto's life and destiny. A militant for the independence of Mozambique, worked as a journalist at Tempo Magazine and at Notícias de Maputo newspaper in the 1970's, became committed to poetry in the 80's and then moved to prose where he found a lyricism and intimacy that reverberated more fairly with himself. He chose to promote a dialogue between the living and the dead, the visible and invisible, to explore silences. That's right, "silences", plural. There isn't just one silence. Every silence is pregnant of music. After a first collection of poems published in his country in 1983, his novels and short stories having been translated in 20 languages allowed an unprecedented relationship with the real world, that pays tribute to the western literary tradition and to african orality. "We must amplify your hearing. Here, you see, we live orally.", he writes in one of his novels, in the shape of poetic art and literature manifesto.

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"Playcreate" and "Speakinvent"

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By accompanying the birth of a nation that he wished grew like a poem, Couto worked towards the "mozambication" of the portuguese, as Mário de Andrade and the São Paulo Modernists had done in the first quarter of the 20th Century by "brasilianing" it in order to invent a native political and literary overground.  

Through Luanda, the Angolan capital city, whose artists and intellectuals communicated much more directly with Rio de Janeiro than those in Maputo, his ambition linked him with brasilian hallmarks such as João Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Amado or Manuel Bandeira, who were capable of coming up with their own identity via trademark words. In Couto's ouvre, where neologisms are abundant, such as language riddles and games, this appropriation exercise is fascinating. To qualify his work, the writer elaborated the verb "brincriar", born from the conjunction of the  "brincar" and "criar'', to play and to create respectively.

Tampering the pure portuguese with borrowed words from the Mozambican national languages to impose a new narrative model, he claims the pleasure of "falinventar". Conjunction of speak and invent.
 
With words he seemingly discovers everytime he hits his keyboard, this writer has the gift of making tangible the connection between men and earth, to materialize children's dreams and to make bearable the weight of unhappiness. Native of a country where he can only count with a few thousands readers, he relies on a 250 million Lusophone community and translations for his enchantment to be heard.

He isn't talking with Mozambique but with the world. With him, a place is never singularly defined and to articulate with the universal he's ready to knock down any walls, as the portuguese poet Miguel Torga puts it: "The universe has no walls.". "Writing is not a function or a mission", says the pale african with the affectionate, creative, intense and musical prose. "I write to be happy. Sophia de Mello Breyner, the portuguese poet told stories for her sick children to go to sleep. I write to cradle a world that seems sick to me." So I come up with stories." Through time, these married with Africa's contemporary grandiosity and misery. After the decolonization and civil war cycle, brief dreams of peace were shattered by "the indecency of those who enriched themselves at the expense of others", laments a writer less disengaged than expected. To his contemporary africans, Couto offers the words that will allow them to nullify the western men's enchantment. "Today are times of bleaching wonders" he writes in O Fio das missangas. Couto aims to tell us as much of the wonders as of the bleach."

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Sébastien Lapaque is a writer.

His last book  Theorie de Rio de Janeiro [Teoria do Rio de Janeiro], Actes Sud, Arles, 2014.