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Mia Couto and the Exercise of Modesty (II)
Finally, for my birthday (!!), the second part of the interview with Mia Couto, by Marilene Felinto. Read the first part here.
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For your generation, was it impossible to live in Mozambique without being involved in the Independence Movement and the Civil War?
Couto: There was no other way. It was a kind of existential solution. You could only be if you were a militant. We didn't even questioned other possibilities. And we were so married to that period of history that now I have been in Frelimo's congress and I am critical. I believe I am not a Frelimo man anymore because Frelimo became something else. They confess it themselves, they are not social-democrats anymore.
What is your main criticism of the party?
Couto: I think Frelimo now has a false, masked speech, with objectives that are still socialist when they had all become successful entrepreneurs. I am not there anymore. But when Frelimo sung it was a fascinating thing for me. I remember the first time I saw Samora Machel, he was a god to us, we made him godlike. He was our Guevara.
And when we went as journalists meet this man in Tanzania, on the way there, we were all thinking on how we would impress that man. We wanted him to like us. Each one was thinking what to say: "Look, I know part of his speeches by heart, I can quote Frelimo stuff". And when we got there, the impression I had was that we was a man of a great magnetism, a person that had an aura around him, and he was very short, with a lot of energy. The first question he asked was "Can any of you sing?". We didn't.
As intellectuals, we could do political things. This made me think later on. He told us "How is it possible that a man can't sing or dance? What can you do?" We knew how to do things that were a bit boring, right? That was the great fascination, Frelimo could sing.
Now, when I come to the Congress and they begin to sing those songs, those old militants that I used to know, who were all young back then, a piece of my own history was there and there were the dead too, that always create a religious feeling with the world. Because Samora was also there, those national heroes, they were being remembered in that atmosphere of celebration, almost like a mess. I used to think like that, I can't toss that part of my life. If I did, I would be left with a void. If I weren't attentive and vigilant, I would be sing the same "hurrays".
I am available to defend certain things, but I have to go through the sieve of my conscience today. Frelimo has credentiated itself like this: "We are the country". In fact, Frelimo used to be all Mozambicans that shared that great cause. It was good in that moment of great commotion but it became something less good, even before the death of Samora Machel. Afterwords there was no longer a plan to generate but a plan to manage, and when models had to be set up, to govern, it wasn't good for a critical sense that had to be there. To think always that "we are the country" accommodates. And it is no longer true.
Did the war start because of discontent of the several groups towards Frelimo?
Couto: In a particular moment, I believe all Mozanbicans were with Frelimo. It was the great national purpose. But then some Frelimo leaders had distanced themselves because of exile, because they had studied in Europe, because they had been fascinated by the soviet models of experience and they distanced themselves culturally from the country. And what they didn't know were their own roots. They learned to not know that. The greatest mistakes had a reason that was more cultural than political, if we can separate them like this.
The government models that were set up, whether they were socialist or capitalist were distant from us, did not awake our deep culture, the deepest soul of this country. When we speak about Africa, now I can speak of Africa, we usually speak in a simplistic way, like one thing only. In general, people don't see the importance of religion, the religious factor.
I can't understand Brazilians if I don't understand what determines much of the Brazilian soul, religion, the catholic church as it is. I can't understand Africa if I don't understand something that doesn't even have a name, the African religion, sometimes called animism.
Africans themselves don't understand that they must search that feeling of what they are, of their own present dynamics, from the understanding of their connections with the gods. I believe Frelimo failed there. The war that started was also a religious war, an identity war, searching for an identity. It explains how the war became so violent.
The war started after how long?
Couto: Almost immediately. I don't even think we can call it a war, that generalized conflict that happened here, of violence against a central and centralizing State. In 1977 we had the war against Rhodesia, present day Zimbabwe, a classical warm but under that war those conflicts that then lead to Renamo and the civil war were already there.
You believe its origins were religious?
Couto: I thinks its origins were a number of them, one being religion. Frelimo was a Marxist regime. It fought religion head on. It didn't come to act like the Soviet Union because it couldn't, it had no ability to do so, but they wanted to. The worst was that it all happened silently and it could not be seen, because it was that war against the African religion, the religion of ancestors that is not an institution.
African religion doesn't have a link to the Vatican, it is not a separate body. The religious leader is also the political leader, the person managing the village, the family leader. That aggression ended up having consequences that were immediately political.
Did you see it right away?
Couto: No. It took some time. I only understood it when it was too late. It always happens like that in my life, when I realize it, it's already too late. i think we only had signals back then. I understood something was not right, not only religiously but also culturally.
For example, beads were no longer allowed as currency by the agricultural commission because it was considered non important, it didn't have any commercial value and that was one of the mistakes (The Russian population used beads as currency, instead of money). I knew something wasn't well. It was a power blind to all this, so it didn't work even if it had good intentions politically.
Was anybody at the time able to see it?
Couto: In the beginning, the critical voices were few, afterwords more voices raised against mostly the communal villages, that was a big issue. Frelimo wanted to organize the countryside according to a model taken from other countries. Communal villages were a disaster. It followed a certain logic of government, the centralized government. You can't build hospitals and schools in every small place.
It didn't work because it was all done in a rush, in an administrative way. Not seductively, attractively where people would joint on their own will. in Mozambique the land is a church, where the dead are buried. And that is where I communicate with the divinity, the sacred. The value of land has to be seen under that perspective too.
In the project I was just showing you, it is necessary to remove people from that region of the National Park. There are 20.000 people living there. But when you mention it, you have to think those people are connected to this land by a different kind of connection that can't be replaced, it can't be compensated, it's like going to Brazil and destroying a church.
The power that traditional leaders, although I don't like the term "traditional leaders", in rural power is still there. This is a rural country, a country dominated by orality, a country where modern governing only administers a strip, a varnish. The rest is governed by other forces, other kinds of logic.
Those traditional leaders have the power because they have been given this task of managing their land, and by the gods, they are mere instruments of the gods to administer the land. When you remove an individual from their place, he looses that power. The issue becomes political too, an issue of power. And that is why you can't change those mechanisms easily.
Were there many whites in that group of your generation?
Couto: I have always been one of the few white men. Whites in Mozambique have always been a minority that doesn't count.
At the time of the most intense crisis, were you discriminated against? Are your parents Portuguese?
Couto: My parents are Portuguese. Colonial racism was against mulattoes and blacks. I was considered a second rate white because I was born here. I didn't have access to certain ranks in the colonial government. My parents were first rate whites, I was a second rate white. My children would be third rate whites, there was a hierarchy.
It was a system that discriminated more against blacks. But there was a door that determined the difference from the British colonization. Here you could, being black, be white. You could be assimilated and have privileges that your race didn't use to have. But you had to give up your culture, your religion, your name, because you would have to change your name.
The factor race was a factor but not the important one. It was a factor that you could move through. That is the difference from the British racism because when you're black you have no way out, you'll always be black. After the Independence I was never subject to racism, I have never been discriminated against like that.
In my daily life I don't feel it. I forget my race. But every now and then there are cases where because of a certain opportunism, when the door is too narrow and only one person can go at a time. Then they remember I'm white and maybe I'm not so representative. The American model of affirmative action is also very strong.
Is it strong?
Sometimes it is. It isn't an official policy like for instance in South Africa, but it is. It is used as an argument when necessary.
Do you agree with it?
No. I can't think that policy there where it was born. Apparently it appears with a purpose that is totally different from the goals used or applied here. Affirmative action appeared to impose minority rights. Here it is used by the majority and that is somewhat odd. For instance rap, a rebellion against who's in power is so strong here because those in power, being black, are still white.
In this sense that people feel excluded culturally. To have access to a certain social status they have to copy, they have to speak Portuguese, for example. They have to give up their original culture and that creates a sense of anxiety. In the end people think an affirmative action movement is legitimate because they're fighting something that is almost phantom like. An affirmative action movement here should stand for me as a minority, right?
But you are the colonizer, right?
But I could be Chinese. Imagine that I'm Chinese. There are Chinese Mozambicans. They are a small minority and they could use that mechanism of affirmative action to say "ah, I have to be present too, I have to be represented". And the opposite is true.
How did your parents react at the time of the Independence. Did they think of leaving?
They have left, four times, always for good, they would go back to Portugal because this was no longer the country that they had known, that they had learned to love.
Did they leave out of fear?
No, by mismatches.
How were the Portuguese treated then?
At the time there were 250 thousand Portuguese in Mozambique and almost all of them left in the first two, three years of Independence. They left massively. It was the so-called container period because they put everything they owned, all their belongings, all their lives in those big boxes and left by boat or airplane.
Did your parents leave too?
Not during that period. At my house I was lucky because when my father left Portugal he also left for political reasons, opposition. My father helped as much as he could Mozambican Independence. He used to say "you are something different, you belong to this country, it's as if I have given children to a land that is not mine any more." He knew that would happen. And so did my mother.
How many children were you?
Three. And all of us have engaged and given our lives, risked something for this country and fought against what Portugal was. In that first moment, there was a profound ignorance, the Portuguese that lived here believed this was Portugal. It was a surprise. For them, they had been sold, that's what they used to say.
There was a rebellion right during that period of transition to Independence. In that day there was a rebellion that was called "September 7". My house was invaded, broken, because they thought my father, because he was a journalist pro-Frelimo, was a traitor. The idea was that us Portuguese us white were being betrayed and the main traitors, because they didn't acknowledge in the other race the ability to be a person, were the white men.
All their rage was directed to wards those of their own race, who were considered traitors that had sold the country to Frelimo. We had to flee. We had to take my father to Beira and he stayed there for a while until Frelimo was in control again. But that was an unusual situation. The rest of the Portuguese, they weren't mistreated but they thought the country was not ready, Mozambicans were not ready, a disaster would follow, they were onboard the Titanic and before the iceberg appeared they had to escape.
And they did. It was inevitable. Today there is a tendency to try and correct that, of re-writing history. They say that may be with a longer transition period. That is not true. The transition was fine. There was no violence, except those cases I mentioned and it was started by themselves.
You live in a country where 50% of the population can't read or write. Books. The number of books published is low, an average of a a thousand books for each release. How does that affect you?
Couto: The average reaches 3 thousand books. It is obviously sad that most people can't write or doesn't have access to books. On the other hand, it is a challenge that forces you to understand, as I have said before, that you need to know how to use different media. I end up turning a negative thing into a positive factor for me.
For instance, my passage through theater was one of the best schools I had, I was writing for a theater group to which I have belonged for 14 years. Writing for them and them realizing how people reacted when they were watching the plays here in the city, in the rural areas, which were the differences, has taught me a lot about communicating with others.
It is a challenge. You need to understand that the great frontier is not between being able to read or not, it is between the universe of writing and the universe of orality. That is the great frontier. The universe of orality is not something minor, it is a good school, a different system of thought. It was in this system of thought that I have learned what is the most important for me today.
The way I write was created from this condition of a country dominated by orality, a country that tells stories orally. Today I feel like I don't have a territory , when something fascinates me. For example, I read Guimaraes Rosa, I read the same page 50 times over because that writing throws me outside of writing, it pushes me away from the page, because it lights up the voices of the story tellers of my youth.
Do you think that Mozambique lacks a writer, a black voice?
Couto: My opinion is divided. On one hand I think that it makes no sense talking about races when you talk about literature. Obviously when you ask "lacks", it "lacks" for whom? For literature itself? That would be the big question. Does literature live from that sort of representations? By sex, or race? But in the other side, I understand that the country need to see itself on someone that is the dominant race. I understand that is a process that has to happen and is happening, it can't happen administratively, you can't promote it.
The great writers of Mozambique are various, they come up and they are all black. There will eventually be a mestizo. Because there's not a chance. Just to have an idea, if white Mozambicans are 5 thousand, that's a lot already. In a country of 17 million people, it doesn't mean much, it is a group condemned to extinction. How many mestizos are there, 30 thousand, 40 thousand?
Do races mix here?
Couto: It depends on the region. By the coast it happens. In some provinces where the Portuguese presence is older, like Zambezi or Inhambane, it happens more. But the problem for me, to close this idea about literature, is that I believe that even those blacks that are making a name in literature are cultural mulatto's, they are all urban, they were already born in the Portuguese language, they rarely can speak a language other than Portuguese. That is how I feel. I don't feel like a representative of the white race, I feel like I am a mulatto, culturally.
Did you ever read a review on how you represent black people in your literature? How magic realism that you use so much would make that task easier?
Couto: I think that is nonsense. The writer is a builder of made up worlds. From that point of view, I should never write about women, for instance. Or a woman could never build male characters. Literature is the contrary of that. The contrary of our condition, a city person could not write about the countryside.
Guimarães Rosa, a city man, couldn't write about the Brazilian "sertão". When I write, in my mind, I am building characters and they are obviously black, almost all of them, unless I identity myself differently. Because this is my world, the world I have lived in, where I was born, and when I go to Europe I am surprised at first by the feeling of seeing so many white people.
It is the first reaction I have when I'm not in my place, because there's so many whites. So, naturally, when I build a character, it comes out black, because I'm Mozambican. But something else could come up, of course. I think it is nonsense to read a book like that.
Why the surname "Mia"?
Couto: Because of the cats. I was a kid, about 2 or 3 years old, I thought I was a cat, I ate with the cats. My parents had to pull me aside and tell me I wasn't a cat. And it stayed with me. Outside or Mozambique people always expect a woman or a black man [because of my name].
There was a time, in a delegation of Samora Machel that went from here to visit Fidel Castro, I was the only man ever to whom Fidek Castro has given skirts, necklaces and earrings, thinking I was a woman. He offered everyone gifts and my box. It amuses me. Those matters of identity amuse me a lot, either sex or race. I don't have a race. My race is myself.
Do you think there should be more contact between Brazil and Mozambique?
Couto: We have to push where it is necessary. In our areas some things might depend on people. I don't believe in institutions. In this aspect, institutions will go separate ways. Brasil will be American and we will be Africa. And on top of it, we are Africa turned to the other side.
We have our backs to Brasil. We are already India, the East. We have to be in a different universe. But I think that historical and cultural relationships have made me find a brother, Guimarães, but there are other important people, like Caetano, Chico Buarque, thta had an enormous influence.
Chico, Caetano, Gilberto, those people have made us proud of this because at a certain point we were even ashamed of speaking the language of the colonizer. The language of the poorer showing that that language was rich and it could shine when sung. That has to be continued and it has always been done against the current by people, not institutions.
Parts of this interview have been published in the supplment “Mundo” of “Folha de S. Paulo”, July 21, 2002.
Marilene Felinto
Writer, author of "O Lago Encantado de Grongonzo", "Postcard" and "Jornalisticamente Incorreto". She is also a columnist at the "Folha de S. Paulo".