Mia Couto: An Interview (III)

Part 3 of an interview with Mia Couto, by scholar Celina Martins.
Part I here and Part II here.

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CM: Within the context of your company IMPACTO - Projectos e Estudos Ambientais (Environment Projects and Studies), you have already coordinated the work of making an inventory of myths and legends and what role they play in traditional natural resources management in the island of Inhaca. It is a work that merges several areas such as biology, anthropology, tightening the bonds between scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge, threatened by oblivion. This work has been a precious reference for those who study the Mozambican vision. What other projects should be taken in the present context of Mozambican society?

Mira Couto: We are a small private company that doesn't have the financial resources. We are trying to attract fundings from donating countries that priviledge research, we can't do everything by ourselves. We have already establish some contacts with European countries for the creation of a fund that will support research. allowing for work to be done unting several areas: culture, biology, anthropolgy, sociology and linguistic, to show that the relationship between culture and knowledge can produce positive projects.

CM: The problem of the translation is staged in the The Last Flight of the Flamingo. The Italina Massimo Risi speaks Portuguese but he can't capture the culture. You have already said that the words "culture" and "future" do not exist in some languages...

Mia Couto: Also in Portuguese thre are many words that do not exist in some local languages, for example, the names given to kindred, the same doesn't exist in Portuguese. I have recently been with peasants in an area where an international park is going to be created. I then noticed that the translator would not translate the word peasant because there wasn't an equivalent in the local language (changana). He would use the word "person". He didn't know any word that could express the fact of being a peasant. In that language  there are no urban people, everybody is a peasant, working the land is not a distinctive factor, nobody is urban. There are several cases of misunderstandings when people aren't speaking only one language, they are conveying concepts, ways of living, habits. For instance in several of these Mozambican cultures, counting is made on the base 5. Official schools don't reflect this characteristic, it is invisible. I imagine that a great majority of these people, according to recent studies, have to translate numbers from a 5-based system to the decimal system.

CM: The Meridional Theater has already staged your Under the Frangipani. In May 2001,, another production of the same team, based on your novel "Mar me Quer" for the Mediterranean Festival in Culturgest, Lisbon. You have been investing in the theatre, like for instance with the play "Xicalamidades" with the group Mutumbela Gogo. What is your relationship with acting? Is it another connection with orality?

Mia Couto: I am connected to a project of the company Mutumbela Gogo, that is already 10 or 12 years old. I work with them, as if they were a school. At a certain time, I asked myself how do I learn how to write, there is no school. For me, the theatre has been a school that has allowed me the confrontation with the Other, to verify the receptivity that the literary message creates and how it is perceived by what we wrongly call the audience.

CM: In all the country, that is still rooted in orality, the reading of anthropologists is a source of knowledge to writers. Besides the famous study by Henri Junod - Uses and Habits of the Bantu, what other works have contributed to your project of unveiling those voices made night?

Mia Couto: I have read the work of José Fialho Feliciano Economic Anthropology of the Thonga, South of Mozambique (buy here). I have read the Harvard University scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah. His book is called In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. I am now reading A mouth full of glass by the Dutch writer Henk Van Woerden (read extract here).

CM: Are you familiar with writer Edouard Glissant?

Mia Couto: I have met him in a congress in Brazil, but up till today I haven't had the chance of reading anything. I would like to know his works though.

CM: Your last novel will be published in September this year. Can you unveil any secret?

Mia Couto: The novel is called A River called Time, a House called Land. It is the story of a young man who goes back home for his grandfather's funeral in his native island. It is the story of that young man with the fantastic world where death becomes an elusive reality.

CM: Could Madeira Island be an inspiring place for a story?

Mia Couto: Madeira is a place where I would like to live. But if I were to live outside of Mozambique, that new place would not be the place of my creation space. I am condemned to write about that universe in the world where I was born and have lived. I will probably take that place with me, like the whale searching for the shore, I am doomed to write about my country. Until now, I have never writen a line that is not about that affective space that I imagine to be Mozambique.

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There is no ending, everything is a perpetual starting over.

tags: mozambique  mia couto  

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