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The Last Flight of the Flamingo, by Mia Couto
The Last Flight of the Flamingo was first published in 2001 in Portuguese. Last year, the book has been published in English by Serpent's Tail Publishing House, translated by David Brookshaw.
A review by Richard Bartlett here.
Another review by Neil Ayres here.
Publisher's description here.
When the book was first published, it was awarded a prize by the Gulbenkian Foundation. This is the prize acceptance speech given by Mia Couto at the time, June 2001 (taken from www.africanreviewofbooks.com):
In the summer of 1998, walking along a beach in the south of Mozambique, I came across the feather of a flamingo floating across the sand. The local fishermen had told me that, in days gone by, flocks of flamingos nested in that area. For some time, however, they had not come.
Meanwhile, the fishermen still awaited a visit from those scrawny angels of the wind. In the tradition of that place, the flamingos are the eternal harbingers of hope.
An inexplicable anguish accosted me - and what if those birds never returned again? And what if the flamingos from all the beaches had been swallowed by distant shadows?
My chest tightened in anxious premonition. It was not a simple longing for those creatures. It was a definitive absence of those messengers of the skies, those discrete, divine couriers.
I kept that feather in my house and placed it on top of my computer. During the two years in which I wrote this novel, that feather confronted me as if it were a narrow window in the sky through which the birds, and their secret voyages, filed.
The Last Flight of the Flamingo speaks of a perverse manufacturing of absence - a lack of a completely whole land, an extreme theft of hope committed by the ruthlessness of the powerful. The advance of these consumers of nations forces us, ourselves, writers, to a growing moral obligation. Against the indecency of those who enrich themselves at the expense of everything and everyone, against those who have their hands dripping with blood, against the lies and crime and fear, against all of this the words of writers should be constructed.
This duty to my country and my era has guided not only this book as much as all my previous novels. In all of them I have been confronted with the same demons and have felt the need to invent the same treasured territory, where it should be possible to recreate beliefs and repair the callouses of suffering in our lives.
In Terra Sonambula (Sleepwalking Land), the writing, in the end, merges with the earth of the savanna. "Spread by a wind which was born not of the air but of the very ground, the pages spread out over the road. Then the letters, one by one, became transformed into grains of sand and, piece by piece, all my writings were being transformed into pages of sand."
In Under the Frangipani, the narrator ends up having being transformed into a tree and comes to emigrate from himself to this thread of eternity.
In The Last Flight of the Flamingo, seated on the edge of a ravine, the characters make a paper bird from the page into which they are written. And they launch this simulated bird over the ultimate abyss, reinvesting in the word that magical rebirth of everything. Land, trees, sky: it is along the margins of these worlds that I attempt the illusion of a seam. It is a piece of writing that hopes to embrace the dialects of the land, become the sap of the plants and, from time to time, dreams of flying on the scarlet wing. It is a limited response to the makers of war and builders of misery. But it is that which I know and which I am capable of, that in which I lay out my life and the time in which I live.
I recall, in closing, the words of the witchdoctor Zeca Andorinho: "We are wood which has been left in the rain. Now we neither burn nor give shade. We have to dry out in the light of a Sun which does not yet exist. And this Sun can only be born within each one of us."
To the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, to the poet Mario Antonio, to my parents Fernando and Maria de Jesus, to my wife Patricia, to my children Dawany, Luciana and Rita, to all my family, to Joao Joaoquinho and Joana Tembe, to Carlos Cardoso, to the compatriots who do my country justice, to Editorial Caminho, I express my thanks. Many thanks for helping me in believing that this Sun of which Andorinho spoke is rising on the other side of the world. And in believing that the fishermen of my country will rejoice in the return of the flamingos. And that one feather will continue to enchant those who are writing and inventing a country called Mozambique.
The photo of the flamingos is by John Neystadt, a photographer living in Israel that, funny enough, does something else for a job. Visit his website, full of wonderful photos of places around the world.