THINKING BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE
Mozambique author blends storytelling and realism to show us the world as it is
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 writer from Mozambique, begins his novel 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 his father has created its own, physical world for himself, two sons, and the dictation assistant 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 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 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 its own notions of class and etiquette, of the good, the bad and the compatible. But the book is also about the world Couto actually inhabits — not Mozambique, 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 playing at being — a native. And we can mostly name the few successful writers who have had other, nonwriterly jobs: Wallace Stevens, insurance executive; William 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 tend 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 among the Inuit for being recognized as an Inuk 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, is he adopting a voice, an identity? Do I identify with his thoughts about identity because they’re coming from a man with European ancestry, like myself ?
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 born there, and no more not-African than racial conciliators like Mandela, PanAfricanists like Julius Nyerere or separatists like Mobutu Sese Seko.
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 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.