The Psychopathology of Post-colonial Mozambique: Mia Couto's Voices Made Night

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?

The new world, necessarily political, is unreal. We are living the reality of a new suffering world.

Julia Kristeva

Mia Couto has recently been acclaimed as “probably the most original Mozambican writer to date,” a significant figure in the new wave of writers moving away from the “documentary approach” that has characterised Lusophone African literature from its beginnings (Gray 1993). ¹ In place of the tradition of nineteenth century Western realism upon which this literature has long been dependent, Couto, along with one or two others, has begun developing a new literary language based in the African oral tradition and on African transformations of spoken Portuguese. In Portugal, Couto is said to have acquired a reputation as a writer come in from the fringes to “creolise” the metropolitan mainstream. In Mozambique, he is thought to have successfully integrated into his prose the transition of Portuguese from awesome official language to the kind of flexible medium in which speakers of other languages might find themselves at ease (Gray 1993).

Not the least striking dimension of Couto’s originality is what critics have identified as the “peculiar blend of fantasy and reality” which runs through all his fiction. His short stories have been described as “straddling the dividing line between reality and fantasy.” Although ostensibly about the lives of ordinary men and women in today’s Mozambique, one critic remarks, the stories are “at once detailed in their account of the realities of daily life and (for the most part) fantastic at their core.” The narrative voice sounds “reassuringly common,” the stories are “uncannily familiar,” and they “appear plausible,” but they are at the same time “as magical or fantastic as fairy tales” (Chabal 1996, 78).

Much of the critical energy in recent responses to Mia Couto has focussed on trying to account for this mix, with diverse results. For David Brookshaw (1990), for example, it is Couto’s fascination with the role of fantasy in the lives of the poor which motivates his move away from strictly realist modes: “What interests Couto is the power of fantasy, and its ability to rule the lives of those who are alienated by poverty. Fantasy becomes a compensatory mechanism, but equally a destructive, anti-life force. . . ” (11). In Brookshaw’s reading, Couto presents us with a world in which belief in the supernatural and in age-old myths and legends motivates the illusions of which his protagonists are victims. These take different forms in different characters, but ultimately their effects are the same—lost in the grip of fantasies and obsessions over which they have little control, Couto’s protagonists lose their ability to act in the cause of what is good and to achieve genuine solidarity with their fellow men.

For Patrick Chabal (1996), on the other hand, Couto’s fictional blend of fantasy and reality arises out of the “fantastical” nature of Mozambique itself:

Poorly integrated by the Portuguese during the colonial period, badly bruised by the nationalist struggle and torn asunder by civil war since independence, Mozambique is not yet a country in any meaningful sense of the word. Largely shorn of the social cultural attributes of the modern nation-state with which Africans could readily identify, Mozambique is itself part reality and part fiction. And as the reality is so often unpalatable, survival entails living firmly in one’s individual fantasy world. One of Mia Couto’s characters, the bird seller, says: “My race is myself, Joao Passarinheiro. . . . My race is me myself. A person is an individual humanity. Each man is his race.”

(79–80; my emphasis)

In Chabal’s view, Couto’s use of the fantastic is never gratuitous: “It is deeply rooted in the mental world engendered by a society in the process of constructing itself as a modern post-colonial state while being ravaged by one of the most vicious and...