Literature is always more compromised when they paint coarse. It happened in times of war in Europe, for example, and something similar happens in Africa today, still subject to external dictates, to extravagant and immoral pacts between dictators and democracies; to stagnant and forgotten wars; to threatened natural spaces. Africa has everything for the necessary awakening of consciences from the story of writers dedicated to the sole cause of the transmission of realities.
Of course, the Africa resulting from European colonialism has its burdens that are difficult to separate. Thanks to which they benefit from each other under inexplicable alliances. Mia Couto tells us above all about Mozambique detached from a Portugal that only established colonialism in the new Indian Ocean as a stop and inn for businesses of all kinds. Past and present like a strange scenario...
And yes, as strange as it may seem, fiction has a lot of work to do in this field of approaching buried, uncomfortable and even lacerating truths. Because from the story of the day we are capable of greater empathy than from the chronic or journalistic. It will be due to the bombardment of information and its overexposure to information that is constantly annulled in its frantic future.
Certainly writers like My Couto They are necessary for an approach to very real scenarios constructed from an artificial historical conception. In his case, Mozambique is the paradigm, while Africa may be the extension of an existential, cultural and colonial synecdoche to which he already pointed. Chinua achebe.
Top 3 recommended novels by Mia Couto
The Absence Mapper
Diogo Santiago, a prestigious Mozambican intellectual, returns after years of absence to Beira, his hometown, to receive a tribute. There he meets Liana Campos, a magnetic and mysterious woman with whom he shares a past yet to be unraveled.
In the process, Diogo recalls the trip he made with his father to Inhaminga, a territory occupied by the Portuguese colonial troops, in search of a missing relative, and the mark that his first encounter with misery and war would leave on him. His memories will lead him to outline the figure of his father, a poet, a womanizer but full of loyalty and courage; that of his mother, impregnated by the verses of her husband, and those of other childhood characters that will help him illuminate his own enigmas.
Unintentionally, Diogo will support Liana in her quest to find the truths of her story, which begins with a woman falling into the void from the top of a building. Accompanying them as one more character, the imminent presence of a cyclone will finish shaking the foundations of the past of both.
Sleepwalking earth
The civil war intensified in Mozambique in the eighties and the population fled their homes. Elder Tuahir and Muidinga, a boy who was rescued from the grave where he was to be buried, seek shelter in a burned-out bus. Among the personal effects of one of the dead passengers, they find some notebooks that narrate his life. As Muidinga reads them, that story and his own seem to unfold in parallel and to run between reality and dream.
Mozambican Trilogy
This is, among others, the story of the ambition and downfall of Emperor Ngungunyane, sovereign of the State of Gaza, in Mozambique. It is also the story of Imani, a young woman from the Vachopi ethnic group who was born in the mid-nineteenth century, daughter of the ashes of her sisters and a family of Nguni soldiers.
When the Vachopi lands are invaded by Emperor Ngungunyane, its inhabitants allied themselves with the Portuguese monarchy and this territory became the new colony of Goroa. And this is also the story of the exile of Sergeant Germano de Melo, a republican soldier who will make Imani his interpreter, and whose love will provoke a diplomatic, political and tribal conflict: the State of Gaza will end up defeated in 1895 by the Portuguese, its king will be deported to the Azores and legend has it that only a box full of sand remained of him and his empire.
