Mia Couto: An Interview

This is an interview with one of my favorite writers Mia Couto, by Celina Martins. I found it in Portuguese and translated it into English. I thank Celina Martins for the chance to know more about Mia Couto and I apologize for my mistakes and translation shortcomings.

Story Writer Mia Couto
The Poetics of Diversity

A talk with the writer from Mozambique in Funchal, Madeira
April 22, 2002

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CM: You have lived your childhood and part of your adolescence in Beira (aerial view here, long download), a space where the European, African and Indian cultures remained distant by racist issues during the period of the Portuguese colonization. Being the child of Portuguese emigrants, how did you reached the true Mozambique? Who were your guides in that discovery of the other bank of the river?

Mia Couto: First, Beira was a very particular city because that stigma of racial division was there, it was probably the place in Mozambique where that spacial hierarchy by race was the most evident. Secondly, Beira was also a swamp, that spacial organization wasn't totally successful. Beira ended up being, until the Independence, a mixed city where the banks of black, white territories and those of other races intertwined. And for some circumstances in my life, I lived on that bank, the others were on the other side of the street: Indians, blacks, Chinese mulattoes - that existed only in Beira. That helped me find the Mestizos.

On the other hand, my parents had adopted an older boy, João Joaquinho. He lived in our house: he was a black boy whose parents had given him to be raised and educated by my parents. He was like a brother. Africa was there in my house because of that boy, and also outside, on the street, a meeting place with others. I wouldn't say that I knew the true Mozambique, but I lived in those several Mozambiques and the way they intersected. I question that notion of true Mozambique, because you can only reach that Mozambique from readings of possible crossings, not only race crossing but between different cultures, of African cultures of different ethnic groups. Beira was also the city to where many people from other ethnic groups emigrated, and that favored a situation where several Mestizos coexisted.

CM: In what perspective was literature taught at school?

Mia Couto: Only Portuguese authors were taught. I believe the teaching model was copied from the Portuguese standard with the same flaws that standard had in the Portugal of the time. We collectively hated Camões, Almeida Garrett, Herculano.

CM: Do you define yourself as a bootlegger between Europe and Africa, West and East. Positioning yourself like that means a constant wondering from writing to orality. Isn't that a privileged position?

Mia Couto: Yes. Going back to the first answer, I was born in particular circumstances that allowed me, with no effort, as something natural, to contact those cultural crossings. I am an European who tries to go on a journey into that other space. I am the departing point and the arrival point, a border being, located between several territories.

CM: As you have already referred in other interviews, the importance of the poets Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner and Eugénio de Andrade and of the Brazilians Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Manoel de Barros, how did poetry influence your work?

Mia Couto: Poetry is philosophy. A different way of explaining the world.

CM: What is your relationship with words?

Mia Couto: The search for a certain music. I am a frustrated musician.

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Part II here and Part III here.

tags: africa  mozambique  mia couto  

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