Letter from Mozambique

Mia Couto’s most recent novel (translated into English in 2004) begins with a ‘large organ on the loose’: a severed penis, like a ‘fleshy hyphen’, is discovered lying on a road in the Mozambican village of Tizangara. It seems that another UN soldier has exploded, for in a nearby tree is a telltale blue helmet. A delegation of Mozambican and UN officials descends on Tizangara, and an Italian, Massimo Risi, is left behind to find out why six UN soldiers have been “eclipsed” and who is responsible. The Last Flight of the Flamingo (first published in Portuguese as O ultimo voo do flamingo in 2000) is Couto’s most successful attempt yet to incorporate the animistic traditions of Mozambican culture into a European fictional framework. It is funny, mercilessly satirical and unmistakably African. All the more unusual, then, that Couto is not black, nor even mixed race, but the son of left-wing intellectuals who fled Salazar’s Portugal in 1951 and settled in Beira, the second-largest city in Mozambique, and the busiest port. All three Couto boys were born in Beira, Mia in 1955. He tells me this over a coffee at the venerable Hotel Polana in Maputo, the capital. The splendid, breezy terrace overlooking the pool and the bay is still the same as it was in 1922 when the hotel was built; transcribing the interview, I can hear birdsong, as well as the clinking of cups, the ringing of mobile phones and a deep bass laugh, which doesn’t belong to either of us. I have to rewind and replay the tape endlessly to understand the full import of Couto’s idiosyncratic English, which he is forced to speak because my basic Portuguese is not up to the task. Part of what distinguished the Coutos from many of their fellow émigrés was that they ‘were open and very keen to construct our cultural and social family, to substitute our biological family’, most of whom were otherwise seen only during rare trips to Portugal. Part of it, too, owes something to the higgledy-piggledy way Beira was built, unlike the severe grid of Maputo. ‘There was not such a clear frontier between the areas for whites, and for mulattos and for Indians and for blacks,’ says Couto, whose parents allowed him to mix freely with the black children on the other side of the road. He learned to speak the local dialect fluently when he was four or five years old, and absorbed, as he put it, ‘the stories and songs of both sides’; so that ‘what produces the ground of your imagination is already mixed’. In 1972, Couto began to study medicine at the University in Maputo, which was then still called Lourenço Marques. There, he was recruited by agents of the revolutionary movement Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, aka Frelimo, who instructed him to ‘infiltrate the newspapers’. He dropped his studies and became a journalist and so was in place when the 1974 coup d’état in Portugal came earlier than anticipated, leaving Frelimo with a still-fragile foothold in the cities. Salazar was replaced with a leftist government that gave Mozambique its liberty, much to the bitterness of Portuguese Mozambicans who were intent on creating a unilateral independence, much as in neighbouring Rhodesia. Couto describes it all now ‘as a very great time. Even if it was an illusion that we were transforming the world, it was not just a dream. We were taking history into our own hands.’ Full independence came in 1975; two years later, Couto was made director of the Frelimo news agency, AIM. According to Couto, ‘we were so motivated to believe in ourselves, to do things’ that there was no need for political repression in the early days of Frelimo’s rule. Samora Machel, who headed both the party and the country, had almost godlike status. Now, looking back, he says, ‘we were so naïve’. Five or six years after independence, Couto received a card that entitled him to buy goods at a ‘special’ shop, one that had foreign goods (by then food was in short supply in Maputo). ‘I refused it. It was against my principles. I began to query Frelimo, to think that everything is not true.’ Soon, he got into trouble when he refused to publish an editorial endorsing the state line on police punishment. A few months later, he resigned and felt the full force of Frelimo’s control when he had to apply for permission to return to university. I was initially attracted to the story of Mozambique’s liberation struggle and the attempt to create a socialist state for two reasons. One, because I thought Frelimo’s leaders, unlike Julius Nyerere, had come up with a distinctive African humanism, one that blended Marxism with the local culture. Two, because I fancied that they might have pulled it off if South Africa hadn’t financed and armed a particularly brutal destabilising guerrilla movement, which plunged the country back into a war that lasted sixteen years and eroded Frelimo’s aspirations. It seemed a deeply sad outcome. With the idea of writing my own book in mind, I read a lot of pro-Frelimo literature, written by academics and people who worked in Mozambique in the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the collected speeches of Samora Machel (published by Zed Books in London). Machel liked to speak for three or four hours, alternately admonishing and exhorting his audience. The speeches read today as if from a slightly sinister Never Never Land, but are no less moving for it. Now, after three weeks of interviewing Mozambicans, I see that the task I’ve set myself is hellishly more difficult than I thought, and also more interesting. Mia Couto sets me straight on Frelimo’s constitution, which, far from drawing on African culture, presumed there was an ‘empty space’ that could be filled by ‘models created in Europe, far removed from the spiritual reality of the people … They fought against traditional values and called it obscurantism.’ Machel was fond of ‘isms’, particularly tribalism and regionalism, against which he often fulminated, in favour of the ‘scientific and materialist view’. Attractive as this once sounded, I also see now that my entire reading of the Mozambican revolution has been dominated by a Western philosophical naïveté, which will have to go. Couto has written five collections of short stories and three novels, David Brookshaw has translated the novels for Serpent’s Tail, the latest of which, Sleepwalking Land (originally published in Portugese in 1992), came out on April 1, too late for inclusion in this Letter. Brookshaw cannot, therefore, be held responsible for the greater sureness of its language and wit, though in both books something of Couto’s playful inventiveness with Portuguese is inevitably lost. Apart from the wayward missing sexual organ, which in any case only has a brief part, The Last Flight of the Flamingo also features an engaging narrator who was invisible to his mother on account of a little piece of him remaining inside her at birth, and an arrogant administrator who has grown powerful through trading on his credentials as a freedom fighter, and who is fond of remarking that ‘a goat eats where it is tethered’. No one gets off lightly in this book, for the narrator tells us that the foreigners in the delegation, ‘anxiously clutched their cameras against their bellies, in case the devil managed to spirit them away’. Mia Couto doesn’t always get it right (at times the dialogue can sound a bit wooden), but there is no question that he is engaged in the exciting process of creating a new literature, one that makes use of the stories and songs of both sides.

Nicola Walker

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