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Sophia Beal interviews Mia Couto
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Following is my translation of an interview with Mia Couto published in Storm Magazine last March. I apologize both interviewed and interviewer for my translation and my obvious shortcomings, but I believe English speaking people should be given a chance of reading it too!
The re-invention game: an interview with Mia Couto, by Sophia Beal (March 2005)
(in Storm magazine)
Mia Couto is one of the most important representatives of Mozambican and African literature. His imagination and ability to capture the echoes of a rich and complex culture make him an unusual writer that contributes to the spreading and development of the Portuguese language. Sophia Beal, a young graduate living in Maputo, Mozambique, interviewed him for Storm Magazine.
SB: You work as a biologist and as a writer. How do you organize your time to be able to do both things?
Mia Couto: Maybe it is not two things; maybe it's only one. The way I see it, there are moments in my life when I am a writer. I am using the verb to be in the sense of being somewhere, not of being a person who writes and I'm doing it on purpose. The moments when I am a writer in the sense of being somewhere are those moments in my life when I have a relation with the world, the others, with things, with other beings, and that relationship allows me to be creative, and allows me to be in a condition of infancy, when I look at the world as someone who is being surprised by it. These moments I have have when I am a biologist. Biology, to me, is not a job, it is a kind of a window to look at the world. Most of the times it allows a sense of unreality that maybe a different job would not allow. Biology also allows me to visit the interior of Mozambique, work with people and collect stories from them. When I am in the rural areas I don't consider I'm working. It is a kind of bridge so that I can be on that other side when I am a writer.
SB: Even if biology is for you a window and not work, does it influence your writing?
Mia Couto: I imagine it does. When I read what I wrote - seldom, I almost never read my books after they're published - when I reread what I have done, I find things that came to me through biology. Particularly the perception of other languages, the way I an be close to a tree or an animal. I can do that with what biology has given me: a way of looking at the world with a different understanding. Meaning, I'm available. This ends up being not scientific, it is not very accurate in the sense of biological science, but biology has allowed me to show that these things called living beings are constructions still moving, unfinished; like small toys. This shows up in my writing, I believe.
SB: In "A Nation without Myths" we can read in the issue of th September 2004 of the SAVANA newspaper: "The history of a nation is similar to the literary epic: one needs to produce an attractive narrative that makes us proud of an image, of an identity that, being made up and a product of history, seems to be a fact of nature. Myth has that function of converting what is historical process into a kind of essence." How do you see yourself as an author in this project of creating and promoting Mozambican myths?
Mia Couto: I see it humbly. I think literary writing has a role in the creation of what are the founding myths of a nation, the so-called national feeling. There has been nations that have built themselves upon literary interventions, in countries where writing is very present. And I don't imagine that this idea, the feeling of being a Portuguese, for example, could be the same thing without Luis de Camões. I don't know, but in the case of the United States there may not be something as present as Camões is to a small nation that has that epic period of the Discoveries as one of its greatest myths. I don't know whether authors such as Walt Whitman or Mark Twain didn't also fulfill, at a certain level and at a certain dimension, the building and invention of some of the American national myths.
In the case of the United States, movies have maybe fulfilled that role of the creation of a "being American" in the sense of the conversion of a narrative to an epic. Of course it is being re-written, it is being corrected. When I was a boy, it wasn't politically incorrect to kill Indians or having that idea of the cowboy was a major builder of the American nation. Today that notion has been reviewed from some movie landmarks like Little Big Man and other films that have questioned that idea that the white man is building himself against the Indians. Today, that idea has been re-structured, but it is the evidence that myths are not for ever, they are being rebuilt and in our case, Mozambique, a country that is just starting, everything is in the beginning. I believe writers are going to have an important role here, particularly to write down those proposals that are just appearing.
SB: Throughout your career, what authors or books have inspired you?
Mia Couto: Not in my career but in my life. For example, a strange thing, a Spaniard called Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote Platero and I. When I was a child I used to read this book and I had a fascination with animals. That passion was one of the reasons why I became a biologist. I wanted to bring all the animals into our house. The donkey, Platero, described in that book was my first time: how poetry could convert an animal into something I could bring into my house. I no longer needed the animal in the house, I had that book that brought me an idea of the relationship between the man and the animal. That marked me deeply. It wasn't a literary issue any more, it was more than a pretty book, it was a way of having the world. This was one example. Then, it was the poetry of some Brazilian and Portuguese such as Sofia de Mello Breyner, Eugénio de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, gave me the confirmation that poetry wasn't just another pretty thing, it was something profoundly real and beautiful because it was true. And it was true because it created true feelings, not because truth exists as an idea.
SB: I see a connection between your work and the work of João Guimarães Rosa in aspects like the closeness to orality and the colloquial language of the people. His narratives are often based in true events and oral stories from the Brazilian "sertão". Do you find inspiration in true facts or is your connection to orality something that comes from you alone?
Mia Couto: I forgot to mention João Guimarães Rosa, but he should have come up in the previous answer. When I first read his short stories ( began by "The Third Margin of the River"), it was a fascination; it was an important moment in my life. As for your question, I don't know that inside and outside exist, that frontier we create between the real event and the made up or fictionalized event. I believe the secret of inspiration is when we break that barrier. When what is reality (or truth) becomes something that is seen as something that is created and vice versa. For instance, imagine something that really happened: I saw a person: I witnessed an accident, I saw someone crying or laughing. When that touches me I immediately enter a state of fiction, that person may be real because he is there and I saw him, I was there, I was a witness. But I enter my writer's side when I picture that person and that event in a fictional frame. The secret lies exactly in that situation of drawing the line when we look at the world, in that moment that is neither night nor day. we can walk in that new system that I like to call the "twilight zone". That is the secret of looking at the world this way, being a writer.
SB: Many of your characters are story tellers that live in fragile situations, but they can be actors in their own lives through the stories they tell. What draws you to this kind of character?
Mia Couto: Let me see if I understood the question. You live here in Mozambique, you have been here for a while and I think you have understood. People are always placed in a situation of living in different worlds, they have to pose, act: if they belong to the rural world when in an urban worlds, they try to look urban. They have to be in a territory a little strange, which implies dealing with codes that aren't those they were born with, they're not their most profound codes. That makes people recreate themselves, reinvent themselves. This situation is very rich because you live with situations that cross your inner self. People's souls are crossed by this world. People are always traveling from one world to the other. When they get married, they celebrate the ceremony here and there. When they are born and when they die, it's like two deaths, two lives. People always live in this situation of having to divide themselves, divide by different records, different ways of looking at themselves and of looking at others. This is a big source of inspiration for anyone, let alone writers. For who ignores this double dimension, the conclusion may be to think that there is a lie here, a game of lies. And it's not that simple. It's not a game of lies but a game of re-inventions. People have to recreate themselves in different stages, different scenarios.
SB: The re-invention theme fascinates me because my area is compared literature where this theme is central, but in a purely theoretical sense, but not here. Here, re-invention is also practical.
Mia Couto: People live that. You have to be two Sophias, three Sophias in your daily life, you have to have something like a fuse. Now you're working on a certain frame, say European, and afterwords you go to a more African frame, if we can call it that.
SB: I am very inspired by your capacity to come up with new narratives. Few authors share you talent for such prolific writing. Where does your inspiration come from? Do ideas come to your mind from reading, writing or just talking?
Mia Couto: From everything, but I believe it comes from the fact that I keep in me an ability to fall in love with objects, moments, books, people, songs. For instance, one thing I try to pass along to my children is that you don't really listen to music anymore. You "hear" music when the music is not good, but when the music is very good and it takes your soul "hear" is not enough. We have to travel to that moment, emigrate to. That is getting lost because as I see with this new generation of my daughters, you listen to music as you do something else, and I find that very awkward. Sometimes I wonder about what makes you smoke. If I smoked, I would only smoke. I would be smoked by the cigarette, let's say. We are talking about inspiration; if I'm with someone, I want to be in a way where I'm totally in that moment, in that relationship. And that is my secret to be totally taken by the moment, and that moment can be triggered by a sentence, a person, a song,a woman, anything.
SB: What are your present literary projects?
Mia Couto: I have started something called "A Chuva Pasmada" (Astounded Rain). It is a book that started being a children's book, but I don't like that category any longer, and it evolved to something else. It is not a book for children, it is merely a book. But it is illustrated, very beautiful illustrations. I am also working on something longer, a novel, let's call it historical, that I am changing into a non-historical book. It has to do with traveling back in time to slavery times. It has to do with people that come from the United States; a long story - I'm not going to tell all of it - that makes me research the epoch and different epochs. I play a little hide and seek with the historical truth.
SB: Of all the prizes you won, is there any one that means more to you?
Mia Couto: May be the prize I won, not me really but the book "Terra Sonâmbula" [Sleepwalking Land - read an extract!]. It was considered one of the best twelve novels of the twentieth century in Africa. I don't know how you can classify a book like that, I am not familiar with the concepts but, it has been very gratifying, because it is a book that caused me much pain, it was written in a painful period, a period of war. I thought it wasn't possible to write a novel about the war while the war lasted. I thought that all great war novels are written after wards, when peace is established. But that was a very intense visitation. During weeks, I could hardly sleep. It was as if the book visited me at night, almost like a night mare. It is a book with challenges and difficult relationships. That is why I made peace with what the book means, because there is a symbolic weight for myself. That book, for me, is my memory of the war and I needed to make peace with it.