Beyond Black and White in Mozambique

Mia Cuoto, a contender for the Nobel Prize, opens the scope on the question of African literature

We are how we live. Reality is an archipelago of possible worlds. Subjective and objective are merely one more questionable binary, a weak attempt at describing the way the world works, and how we work in it.

Mia Couto, a novelist from Mozambique, begins The Tuner of Silences by challenging another binary: sound and silence. Couto heads his first chapter with a verse from the late Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, “I listen, unaware/Whether that I hear is silence/ Or god.” Mwanito, the tuner of the title, is 11, and his father needs his particular kinds of silences, silences Mwanito works at to get just right, to calm a mind that is so dissonant that he’s created its own, physical world for himself, his two sons, and his old amanuensis from his military days. In a less fatuous version of M. Night Shymalan’s The Village, the family lives outside a town, on an old game reserve so large you can’t walk to the edge of it. He’s told his sons the rest of the world has been destroyed, and they are the only survivors. The sons both know and don’t know that this is a lie, living fully in their father’s world, according to its precepts, its physical and mental boundaries, but they are not shocked when they see evidence that their father’s world is just that.

People have called Couto a magic realist, but that is profoundly misleading. Jorge Amado never thought a statue of a saint could actually get up and jump ship, Garcia Marquez did not believe he lived in a world in which a young woman could be floated away on the wings of butterflies. Magic realists are confabulators, creators of fabulous things whose distance from the world the reader lives in is the point to be pondered and marvelled at. Couto really just wants to show us the world as it is.

It’s a metaphorical take on the worlds parents create for their children, with their own rules and prejudices, their own notions of class and etiquette, of the good, the bad and the fungible. But the book is also about the world Couto actually inhabits — not Mozambique, though it is set there, but the one that permits him to be African, to speak Portuguese, to be white, a writer, and a working biologist.

As North Americans, we are mostly binary thinkers; our ideas about identity unforgivingly rigid. We have made fun of Grey Owl for becoming — or trying to become, or playing at being — First Nations. And we can mostly name the few successful writers who have had other, non-writerly jobs: Wallace Stevens, insurance executive; Willam Carlos Williams, doctor. One is, for the most part, either something, or one is something else.

There’s a case to be made that most of our heads are still in the 19th century, and like many explorers of other worlds from that era, we have a tendency to paste our own notions onto others. It’s significant that the Ojibwe did not make fun of Grey Owl/Archibald Belaney, and that the standard for being recognized as an Inuk among the Inuit is simply that you live as one.

There is no question Couto is African. He calls into question what it means to be African, at least as far as we are concerned. And we are concerned — I was concerned. When he writes about Africa, about his home, both in his novels and in his remarkable essays, also just translated this year and collected into a book called Pensativities, is he appropriating a voice, an identity? Do I identify with his thoughts about identity because they’re coming from a head of a man with European ancestry, like myself? Was it wrong that I breathed a sigh of relief when in a speech he gave in 2008, he quoted another Mozambican writer, Patricio Langa, whose name I read as black African ( and checked later: he is), to say, “I have a real phobia about the intentions behind those who present things as genuine or authentic. It was intentions like these that created Nazi ideologies, as well as people like Mobutu and his ideas of African authenticity. We don’t want any more producers of murderous identities.”

I sucked that breath back in again when he said this, in his own voice, in another speech from the same year.

“The point I wish to make is that, along with a limitless capacity for self- denial, we still suffer from the delusion that we deserve more than others because we suffered in the past. ‘ History is in debt to us,’ this is what we think. But History is in debt to everyone and doesn’t pay anyone back.” Those African first person plurals rankled. Does he have the right to include his own self in that “selfdenial”? Is this not just a case of the white man tromping into a place, calling it his own, and then trumpeting his presumptuousness to the world?

All very possible. But his work, his novels and his essays, are a formidable case that it is not, that he is indeed both African and not African, no less African than anyone else born there, and no more not-African than racial conciliators like Mandela, Pan- Africanists like Julius Nyerere, or separatists like Mobutu.

This is important stuff for us to wrap our heads around, both philosophically and practically. Consider a case currently before the Supreme Court, for instance: In Canada v. Daniels an argument is being made to define indigeneity for legal purposes in Canada not through blood, but through self- identification and community recognition. It’s radical for us. For Couto, it’s the water he swims in.

In another of his translated novels, Confession of the Lioness, published in English this past summer, Couto writes about a recent period in northern Mozambique when lions were killing people. It became a national emergency, and hunters were hired to go up at try to kill the lions. But the governmental efforts, as well as the general perception of the crisis, were diluted by the fact that, in the region, the people were saying that though, yes, it was lions that were killing people, lions also are people, because those two things are not, they said, always different things. We might need an answer to that — Was there a serial killer on the loose? Were people using the cover of a rampage of lions to settle old scores? Or had Shrödinger finally made it to Africa? — but Couto does not. They were lions, and they were people. And if lions can be people, then a white man can be an African, and a biologist can be, if his recent Neustadt Prize is any indication, a presumptive Nobel Prize- winning writer that we Canadians, especially, should be reading.