Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Chapter 5: Sleepwalking Lands: Literature and Landscapes of Transformation in Encounters with Mia Couto

Chapter 5 Sleepwalking Lands Literature and Landscapes of Transformation in Encounters with Mia Couto Amanda Hammar Writing Words and Worlds At the heart of this chapter is an exploration of the ways in which words— mostly written words but also language more broadly and fiction and poetry more specifically—engage with the world and how the world (human and nonhuman) in turn “speaks” and thus asserts and (re)creates itself. Related to this, the chapter reflects on the kinds of naturalized boundaries inherent in traditional scientific modes of knowing and representation that more intimate subjective modes can productively challenge. Such naturalized boundaries have produced unnatural dichotomies between, for example, object and subject, nature and culture, science and art, outer and inner worlds, and the living and the dead. Confronting these dichotomies is not aimed at merging everything into indistinctness. Distinctions can and do have analytic and heuristic value.Yet the persistence of dichotomies and of the Enlightenment-based domination—perhaps even the masculinization—of science vis-à-vis humanities needs to remain constantly open to reflexive critique. This is in order to confront what Will Wright (1992) calls the “conceptual incoherence” of scientific knowledge  | Amanda Hammar and its various socially, politically, and ecologically legitimating and distorting projects. My own interest here is especially in the ways in which the different worlds implied by the above-mentioned distinctions—physical worlds, worlds of imagining, spirit worlds, and worlds of practicality, production, and being—articulate with each other. And in this process I am curious about how the boundaries between them are altered. In examining such boundaries and the worlds they seemingly divide, my intention is to consider ways to reframe how we might read, relate to, and represent such worlds and the relationships between them. The inspiration to consider these questions more closely came from an engagement with Mozambican writer Mia Couto’s novel Sleepwalking Land both as a reader and in direct conversation with Couto himself.1 These interweaving encounters with Couto and the reflections they generated on the relationships among war, violence, displacement, and environment and between language and forms of knowing and showing constitute the bulk of this chapter. But before turning directly to the substantive discussion of Couto’s work and his framework for reading the world, I briefly trace my own intellectual uneasiness with the classic distinction between science and literature and then discuss how encountering Couto has added new dimensions to addressing this unease. This provokes reflections on the notion of interconnected domains of knowledge and engagement that provides a potential counterpoint to the limitations and dangers of such dichotomies. Encountering Couto In the academy where I was located for the period of my doctoral research in the late 1990s, particularly in the social sciences and in development studies, I was warned several times to “guard against too much language.” It was a warning not to get “too carried away” with the writing itself, as though language was some kind of dangerous drug that might distort objective reality and undermine the integrity of one’s analysis and the validity of one’s claims.A concern with language, it was implied, was the domain of literature, of “writers” (that is, literary writers) or linguists. Although “scientific objectivity” has been an issue debated from different standpoints for many decades,2 the narrow discourse of objective distance was nonetheless not unusual in this context, namely that social scientists should instead concern themselves with facts and evidence-based analysis, not the words (or passions) through which a social scientist translated these onto Sleepwalking Lands |  the page. The broader message was that social science and literature were somehowirreconcilablyseparatedomainsof knowledgeandshouldremain distinct in terms of access to knowledge and claims to “truth.” At the time I reacted instinctively against this seemingly unnatural separation between what we witness of the world and attempt to understand and interpret on the one hand and how we write or speak about this on the other hand. I was aware then—and have become increasingly so—that writing, be it in literary or so-called scientific forms, is never an isolated act. Language and our relationship to it are powerfully implicated in our ways of seeing, ways of knowing, ways of feeling about, and ways of representing—hence also creating—the worlds that we inhabit. In this sense, words matter deeply. One of the spheres in which disciplinary, theoretical, and to some extent ideological divergences between science...