The Mozambican Mia Couto is the most decorated living poet in Portuguese. His awards include the 2013 Camões Prize, the Lusophone world’s highest literary honour, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born to Portuguese settlers, Couto supported the overthrow of colonial powers by FRELIMO in the years that followed Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. His first book of poems, Raiz de Orvalho (Root of Dew) was published shortly afterwards, and his first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), was voted among the best African books of the 20th Century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. He works as a biologist and environmental consultant in Maputo.
Couto spoke with Hirondina Joshua, among Mozambique’s leading contemporary poets. Joshua is the author of Os Ângulos da Casa (In the Corners of the Home), a work personally supported by Couto; her poetry has been commended by UNESCO and published in Modern Poetry in Translation and Interpret.
This set of interviews between leading Portuguese-speaking intellectuals is translated into English for the first time by our editor, James Appleby. Next in the series will be Joshua’s conversation with Djamila Ribeiro, Brazilian Black feminist philosopher. The full Portuguese texts can be read on Joshua’s website, linked in the footnotes.
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HJ: I was thinking again of the time we met.
MC: We were at a literature festival, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the city of Maputo. I recognised you from an anthology, so I walked over and said I loved your work.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or thank you. At events like that, it’s easy to remember that both the writer and the world are caught in a trap of time. Can a text escape that trap? Is writing another dimension of life – or is it different? Are you someone different when you write?
We’re told that reality and fiction are two different dimensions, but I don’t know if that’s true. After all, there are still cultures with no boundary between the real and invented world; we all come from cultures where the distinction is unclear and much of what we knew was dictated by dreams. Wisdom like that – organic knowledge, knowledge of the whole – is something the poet can rescue in our own time.
Fortunately, in Mozambique, that ancient idea of the universe survives, with no separation between living and non-living creatures, or what does or does not have a soul. A mountain can be sacred, a river can be female, a stone can have a soul. Literature, and poetry especially, looks to remake that integrated vision of the world, where things are never simply things, and the soul of the universe is shared by all. In so many of our indigenous languages, there’s no specific word for ‘nature’ – that’s not nothing. And so when I write, I lose my fear of being small. I transform into the stuff of the universe, into other people, into the whole of humanity. Not because of how large I might become, but because I let all life take its possession of me.
When I think of creation, I see the great anthology of text that comes before us. All the images in our dreams, the creations that come before creation, the rhythm we play to. And still, words can feel completely out of our control: rebelling against syntax, invading grammar. It’s hard to know if creation is more like revelation or a spell that the writer goes under.
Perhaps I can start with what I think of as good writing. It’s hard to judge a text based on only one quality, but for me a good text is one that makes me lose my role as reader. A strange sensation takes over, the illusion – or perhaps the hope – of a text I am also the author of, written precisely as I read it.
People have created a set of hierarchies and borders, crowned by the ‘real world’ as it is revealed to us, diminishing the value of stories, myths, and dreams. Oral culture is dismissed as the culture of so-called primitives. And while each human being is a creator and a poet, their many ways of expression are slowly suffocated, and the windows close through which we might see the infinite dimensions of the world.
But can we truly talk about imagination without tying it back to reality?
I simply don’t know what reality is. No one does, and yet we keep up appearances of knowing what it means: a sort of flattened dimension in which we all live. But reality is plural, different as any human individual, as any human culture; different as each religion in its era and worldview. One of those multiple dimensions, I believe, can only be glimpsed through poetry. Poetry – all metaphor – is not only an artistic discipline, it’s a way of seeing life and of feeling your humanity.
And inspiration is when we take a step inside, feel something, shake a sigh loose, and no matter the risks we run, do the same again and again.
Let’s say I’m walking in the city and I stop by a tree. If I let myself, even for a moment, become accessible to that other creature, something transcendent will occur. There’s a Mozambican saying that sums this up beautifully: If you see an ant’s eyes, well, you’re an ant.
Our face is the site of our first relationship with the other, but we see only theirs and not our own. There’s something extraordinary about one-way mirrors, isn’t there? And something compromising in the moment you look at another. Sometimes I wonder, could someone who had never seen their own reflection know what was ugly and what beautiful? Because every mirror reflects some things and erases others. Interesting, don’t you think, that so many authors claim they hate to read their own work – could all this be why? Does it hurt to see yourself?
Some people can only see themselves through the eyes of others.
It brings us to the question of how language and imagery transform outside of the books they’re written in. When I imagine a character’s face, I’m struck by the impression that they truly exist, even if I’ve never met anyone remotely similar. I had the same feeling when I watched a film of one of your books. The speech was the same as the text you’d written, but it sounded so different in the voice of an actor.
The written word is born to become voice, and when you read a text aloud, you give the word a body. But as you do so, you also tighten its confines, and that’s especially true of the adaptation of a book to another medium: theatre, music, cinema. You have to resist the temptation to copy a text directly from one medium to another: that’s why a good book can make a bad play, or a bad book can be the start of a great film. It’s also why reading has the closest relationship to writing; a reader invents what the text only suggests: a landscape, the face and voice of a character, the shine and shadow of a glance. Every reader is another author, but the same thing can’t be said of film, which comes to its viewer much more fully formed.
And what is life? An eternal poetic exercise?
The only answer is to accept that we don’t know. Life as we understand it could be a rarity in our galaxy – perhaps it only exists on Earth. And even when we talk about our planet, we should admit that life only occupies the thinnest slice of our immense world. The vast majority of this sphere contains no life at all. I understand that this isn’t the most literary of answers – here you can maybe see my training as a biologist. We biologists are trained to measure and to limit, but life escapes characterisations of that kind. Life is more than the sum of every living thing on earth. It’s a fine net, an infinite threadwork of almost imperceptible relationships, and together with billions of other beings we create a kind of miracle: an eternity every moment. There are scientists – and they deserve our deepest respect – who dedicate their lives to answering the question of when life began on our planet. But perhaps there are other answers: in every instant, life is born and reborn.
That network of invisible relationships not only creates life, it keeps life living. And it’s poetry that shows us there is no boundary between the living and the non-living. A river is a living entity, and the mountain, and the earth, and the sea, and the clouds. Every animal and plant shares something fundamental with us; we are the siblings of every species that lives within and without us. So when Niels Bohr, the great physicist, was asked to define the structure of the atom that he himself had pioneered, he said, “We must be clear: when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
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This interview was conducted as part of a project, organised by Hirondina Joshua. You can find out more about Hirondina’s work by following her on Instagram or Facebook @hirondinajoshuaofficial or on her website at www.hirondinajoshua.com
Discover more about the work of Mia Couto at www.miacouto.org or on Facebook @miacoutooficial
Photo credits: Luis Miguel Martins
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