“Somnambulist Land”, by Mia Couto

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

“I am a white man who is African; a non-practicing atheist; a poet who writes in prose; a man with a woman's name; a scientist who has little certainty about science; a writer in the land of orality. So says the Mozambican Mia Couto, one of the best known contemporary African novelists. Translated into twenty languages, both poet and storyteller, biologist by profession, Couto delivers through his romantic work rich in ten memorable titles, the history of his country, its tragedies and the tremendous resilience of its people . His first novel, Land Somnambule which tells as a committed witness the independence of Mozambique and the murderous civil war which followed, is the subject of the literary chronicle of the day.

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When we talk about African literature, we imagine books in French, in English, even in Arabic like the novels of the Egyptian Alaa Al-Aswany or The Season of the migration towards the north of the Sudanese Tayeb Salih. But we rarely think of the Portuguese field to which the Mozambican Mia Couto belongs.

African novelist, but of European origin, the author of Terre somnambule is part of a rich tradition of Portuguese-speaking literature born from almost five centuries of Portuguese presence in Africa. Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique have given birth to some of the great Portuguese-speaking writers, the best known of which are Cape Verdean Balthazar Lopes, the Angolans Pepetela and Ondjaki. Mozambique, where we practice a classical language, close to the warm and inventive Portuguese of Brazil, has given novelists such as Mia Couto, but also poets, notably José Craveirinha, Virgilio de Lemos or Heliodoro Baptista whose works are inspired by the poetry of negritude. Many believe that there is something in the rhythm of Mozambican life, in its landscapes that makes this country have a strangely high number of poets among its writers.

The son of a well-known poet, Fernando Couto, who had fled Portugal from Salazar , Mia Couto, born in Mozambique in 1955, also began his literary career by writing poetry. Even today, man likes to define himself as "  a poet who writes in prose  ". This poetic and dreamlike tone which characterizes the writing of the Mozambican is undoubtedly not unrelated to the success of his first novel Terre somnambule , which made him known.

Between war and peace

Terre somnambule is a novel about the Mozambican civil war, but here we are far from a realistic and militant account of the war. Anti-colonialist at heart, Mia Couto was involved in the 1970s alongside Frelimo, the Liberation Front of Mozambique, in the struggle to wrest his country from the Portuguese colonial yoke. After the independence which took place on June 25, 1975, Mozambique experienced sixteen years of civil war, opposing Frelimo, the ruling party, to Renamo, supported by Rhodesia and South Africa, bastions of white power in Africa and viscerally anti-communists.

It is undoubtedly not accidental that Terre somnambule appears in 1992, the year of the peace agreements between the enemy brothers in Mozambique. However, this novel does not tell about the war as such, but its psychological consequences for men and women. Victims of atrocities and suffering caused by the conflict, the protagonists of the novel will have to rebuild themselves by establishing links with others according to new logics of filiation and presence in space-time. It is this process of rebirth that is told in this beautiful book, through the allegorical journey of an old man and a young adolescent traveling on a deserted road, against a backdrop of war and devastation. 

Wandering and reinvention of self

This duo of old man and young adolescent who are the main protagonists of the story, are called Tuahir and Muidinga respectively. Damaged by life and years of war, they fled from a refugee camp where they died of hunger and promiscuity with the dying. They are doomed to wandering and forgetting, as the title of the novel seems to suggest.

The book opens with this improbable couple walking on a battered road, "  spanning the centuries,  " writes Couto. All around, a landscape of desolation where rotten cars and rotten remains of looting are rotting. Exhausted by the march, the two men stop in front of a car-bush with burnt metal sheets with the corpses of charred passengers still lying inside. Despite the smell of burnt flesh and the fear of seeing the bandits come back, the old man and the child decide to spend the night in the bus.

While searching for food in the suitcase of one of the killed passengers, they come across miraculously intact notebooks by a certain Kindzu. Reading aloud what turns out to be a diary, divided into eleven notebooks, will keep the duo awake for nights. Staging, through detailed evocations of traditions and myths, the ambition of its author to reconnect with the spirit of ancestral vigilante warriors, this tale of the unknown echoes the quest for identity of the protagonists, especially that of young Muidinga who was torn from his family by the war. The adolescent will find in Kindzu's notebooks the key to his destiny.

Suffering and catharsis

Hailed as the revelation of contemporary Portuguese-speaking literature when it was published in 1992, Terre somnambule experienced real esteem success. Critics have underlined the intelligence of its construction in a very delicate and controlled abyss, leading in the last pages of the book to the fusion of the two parallel plots. The readers of this novel were also sensitive to the poetic writing of Mia Couto who draws her images, her metaphors from the roots of the Mozambican oral tradition, while blossoming with the magical realism of the Latin Americans. 

But the main strength of this novel perhaps lies in its humanist and cathartic vision, exorcising the painful aftermath of the Mozambican collective memory with literary spells. This is of course consistent with the author's motto: "  I am a pessimist, but with a lot of hope  ".

Sleepwalker Earth , by Mia Couto. Translated from Portuguese by Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli. Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 1994

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