Mia Couto: An Interview (II)

Second part of an interview to Mozambican writer Mia Couto, by Cecilia Martins:
(Go to the First Part here and go to Part III here)

CM: Ever since Voices Made Night was published, critics consider you one of the most significant fiction writers of the post-independence generation. However,  when we read your short stories and novels, we discover the passion and delirium of poetry. Are prose and poetry siamese sisters for you?

Mia Couto: I come from poetry. My first book, Root of Dew, was a book of poems. I therefore started by writing poetry and after that I think I never ceased being a poet, in the sense of translating the the magical sense of the word and, till today, I consider I am writing stories in a poetic way. I also believe that poetry may help the transgression work I want to do. Because the reality I want to unveil is a reality that can only be told by a certain magic sense and by a certain transgression of frontiers, between verse and prose, writing and orality. And poetry helps that deconstruction.

CM: In "Deolinda's Secret Relationship" (in Cronicando) it represents the alienation of a "marxistianist". In "The National Widow" (in Contos do Nascer da Terra) you unmask the artifice of the revolutionary heroe. In what way has marxism leninism was a failed project in Mozambican society?

Mia Couto: I think that what failed in that project was not so much a political failure, but a cultural failure, no one questioned the fact that the fundamentals of that political system were thought and structured in a different context.  Therefore the marxist model failed, just as the capitalist model will fail because unique characteristics, Mozambique social dynamics are not considered. In this sense I don't think political dividents should be taken from this, all models that come from the outside are going to fail. 

CM: I read some of your chronicles of the section "Imaginadâncias" (imagidances) of the daily paper Domingo. I have set some correspondences with the book Cronicando. Have you tried to create a fusion of the story and the journalistic chronicle, a systhesis between oral and writen? Have you tried to create a new genre?

Mia Couto: That fusion was there before me. I believe I haven't created anything new. What I have learned was to get there, because I was a journalist and the models of creating and of making communication troubled me. I believed it was necessary to question all that and I have noticed that in Mozambique news are often given by telling stories. I thought that would probably help me in a moment when I was trying not to be a journalist. Abandoning my journalistic activity, I knew I wanted to maintain a certain bond with orality, I wanted to find new paths for conveying information in Mozambique.

CM: I will now quote three short stories where the transcendence of conflict appears as the structuring line. In the "Russian Princess" (in Every Man is a Race), you rewrite the androginous myth: at the end the light footprints of the Nadia's feminine foot replace the limping foot of the Duarte Fortin, the black. In "Tears for siamese brothers" (in Contos do Nascer da Terra) the rivalry between the siamese is resolved through the love of Marineusa whose siamese tears interconnects them as a necklace. The same motif reappears in the short story "The voyage og the weeping cook": Felizminha seasons with tears the food of her lonely employer, because she misses her homeland. One day, as a signal of apreciation, the Portuguese invites her to travel to her wanted village. Despite of chaos, physical and moral misery that undermine your country, do you agree that your writing is a search for utopia?

Mia Couto: May be the answer is in that chaotic and misery condition, the dream becomes the way out, the answer. Sometimes we try to see it as a specifically African attitude, but I believe it is an aspect of the human condition, the comunity has the urgency to respond through an utopia when facing extreme conditions.

CM: Is it true that the short story "Quissico Whales" (Voices Made Night) has been based on a true story?

Mia Couto: It is a very common legend in costal areas. The whale is always seens as a mythical and generous animal, an animal capable of giving.In some areas, whales leans towards land, comes to the beach and gives herself. People come and serve themselves, cutting pieces. In other areas you can order, the whale always brings something.

CM: But in the end of the short story there is an ambiguity coming from the reference to submarines...

Mia Couto: In this sense, as a writer, i place myself in a different frontier. I don't have to believe the legend, I can adopt other point of view.

CM: Your appropriation of the legend allows for different levels of reading?

Mia Couto: Yes, exactly to show that there are several dimensions to the same reality.

CM: Sometimes the reader has the feeling that each novel is a short story that grew. How do you build the plot of your longer narratives?

Mia Couto: I don't have a method. I am a bit chaotic, but I have just finished a novel now: I always start from a suggestion and then that suggestion gives birth to characters. It's the characters who ask for a story and that story is woven together to created a main theme.

CM: Colonization left a heritage of division into two Mozambiques, the costal and the interior that are still today not understanding each other. In what way can literature be the beginning of a future dialogue?

Mia Couto: I believe it can. But not literature by itself, all other artforms may help these two worlds to at least start talking and to understand each other, on the basis of mutual knowledge. I consider that what other african writers and myself try to do is to suggest to that Other that there is no reason to be afraid, those cultures are afraid of each other because they don't know each other. That is the drama ever more obvious: there are different universes in Mozambique uncapable of communicating. One of them has certain hegemonic habits, the one closer to the European reality, they can replay their cultural and political model. These representatives impose themselves to the Others as if they were globalization delegates, the affiliates of modernization. This causes an impact between cultures that don't want to loose their identity. One of the roots of violence is ignorance, and although literature does not have the power by itself, it can be an open door, the bridge between those distanced universes.

CM: You develop the intrusion theme in the media in the traditional universe of your fiction and in some jokes shared in cultural gatherings. The shock seems to derive from different visions of the world more that from technological novelties. Would this be a problem that would occur in all the communities that irrupt modernity, such as Mozambique?

Mia Couto: Yes, I believe so. That meeting of cultures is always, in principle, traumatic, because it is not a meeting, it is an abusive incursion. What reaches these cultures are not European cultures, but emanations, symbolic representations by means of technology. We still keep the imagery of the first encounters of the European discoverers that traded insignificant objects that shimmered at the eyes of Africans. We are more or less repeating that model of relationship. There is no globalization, what we see is the export and imposition of signals, not even models, the model is with the producer, Africans passively consume those signals that are the shinniest and the most appealing.

CM: There is a certain urgency in setting the essence of Mozambique. In Europe, the news tend to spread parcial images. On the one hand, one sees the imaged of a country broken by war, the floodings and the recent wave of violence. On the other hand, the image of an example and of exception in Africa is sold, because Mozambique has managed to meet some economical expectations. In 1999, I realized the existence of two different islands: Maputo and Inhambane, and I was aware that there would be many others. We could therefore mention a certain opacity of the country as an immense and dense multicultural mosaic, impossible of categorizing and whose investigation presupposes a continuous search?

Mia Couto: The question already includes the answer. There isn't a way of setting the photo, of focusing on the diversity of the country Mozambique, the important is the intercrossing of diverse realities. The curious thing is I, just as previous generations of writers, are older that our own country: we are thirty, forty, fifty years old and the country is only twenty and something years old. This implies a certain epic feeling: we are helping to give this country a face.

CM: Is is risky to talk about Mozambican literature now?

Mia Couto: Going back to the last question, I don't think there is such a thing that we can call Mozambique, there is portrait without the frame, but this portrait can still be defined, there are common traits that allow for an identity to be established, It would be difficult to say that an Angolan writer would not fit in the same literary project. It's a literature being made.

CM: Do you think Africans are little by little devouring Portuguese language guiltlessly? Could you please quote examples of how the people gives the Portuguese language their world vision?

Mia Couto: Mozambicans are operating on the Portuguese language a very free and guiltless change. This taking over it raises another problem: portuguese has occupied an hegemonic position that may lead to the extinction of some natives languages. In Mozambique there isn't an institutional and conceptual principle that allows these languages to co-exist and help each other. For example, the use of gerund "something is being made" in the perception of a dynamic. The expressions of the passive voice "I was beaten", "I was given"...

CM: Isn't it an influence from the English language?

Mia Couto: Not from the English language. It is a phenomena that I believe comes fom the indigenous languages. It is a kind of literal translation. Another example: "The car slept outside", meaning the car wasn't parked in the garage. This idea that the car sleeps is the animation of an object. If someone asks me if this newspaper is today's, I've heard an answer like "This newspaper doesn't work anymore", which I think is a particularly fortunate expression since newspapers do work.

CM: In what way could the Portuguese language project be fruitful?

Mia Couto: That will be the theme of my conference tomorrow. It could be fruitful is it were a meeting of wishes and it would be fruitful if the adoption of the Portuguese language as the official language was not made at the expense of other languages. What is missing is making this more visible and looking at it not as a problem, but as a fact. Portuguese speaking countries have multiple languages, you cannot just ignore these languages by administrative decision. The Portuguese language has to know how to get married, has to help other languages to survive. The basic idea that the portuguese of Mozambique and Angola can be fixed, marginalizing other languages is an idea that is wrong from the point of view of the adoption of the portuguese in African countries.

CM: That is the idea defended by Glissant, the ungency of living "the imaginary of every language".

Mia Couto: No doubt about it, you can't do it any other way. Movements to contest this have already been created. They wouln't be necessary at all if there were more realistic policies, that were more respectful of those different linguistic realities.

CM: As a biologist, what have you learned in your incursions into the jungle, those contacts with the logic of rurality?

Mia Couto: What I learn is to unlearn: one feels like questioning our certainties, not to acquire other certainties, not that. What I feel like is the journey, listening is already learning. Because of our fast lives, we are invited to stop listening. Therefore, paying attention to speach, silences and pauses is also a form of learning.

tags: africa  mozambique  mia couto  

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