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1 - Mia Couto in Context
- Edited by Grant Hamilton, David Huddart
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- Book:
- A Companion to Mia Couto
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 22 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 September 2016, pp 17-24
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- Chapter
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Summary
What would become, in the course of time, the discipline of postcolonial studies has its roots in the theoreticians and writers of the Anglophone and Francophone worlds – writers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Chinua Achebe. As a specifically academic field of study, it was pioneered in the universities of the English-speaking world. For a number of years, it was assumed that literature from the former colonies of Portugal would be no more than a derivative of what was happening in the English- and French-speaking ex-colonies. However, in recent years the writing of cultural theorists such as Walter Mignolo, in the case of Latin America, or Boaventura de Sousa Santos in Portugal, has encouraged scholars in Portugal and Brazil, and elsewhere, to think in terms of a form of postcolonialism that is unique to the experience of the former colonies of Portugal and Spain. In addition, the availability in translation of literary works from Portuguese-speaking Africa, as well as Brazil, has slowly begun to make the Lusophone experience more widely known, and this development is exemplified by the present volume on Mia Couto.
One of the most important contributions that scholarship can make to the advancement of knowledge about writing in Portuguese from Africa, America or Asia is to counteract the pigeonholing effects of literary criticism in the mainstream media. It is, for example, hardly an exaggeration to say that it is a sine qua non of reviews of literary fiction translated from Portuguese that writers must be labelled as magical realists – a relic, somehow, of the boom years of the Latin American novel of half a century ago. The benchmark here is inevitably the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez, and his cult novel, Cien años de soledad (1967), first published in English in 1970 as One Hundred Years of Solitude. ‘Magical realism’ is a term that has been attached in the Anglophone press to such diverse writers as the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramago and the younger Mia Couto. It is a lazy, journalistic term to describe what is assumed to be a peculiarly Ibero-American belief system in which supernatural, unexplained events have a direct effect on tangible reality to create a world in which the implausible and the real mingle in daily life.
An Interview with Mia Couto
- Edited by Grant Hamilton, David Huddart
-
- Book:
- A Companion to Mia Couto
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 22 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 September 2016, pp 14-16
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The idea of World literature is currently enjoying something of a resurgence in academia. What do you think of it as a concept? Is it more helpful than other, perhaps more familiar forms of categorization, such as African literature or postcolonial literature?
As far as I am concerned, it's a step sideways rather than a step forward. Literature, like any other art form, has always been of the world. This apparently new category is a way of classifying the literature of the so-called ‘others’. But I believe that there is a process, albeit one without continuity, by which the arts from Africa, Asia and South America have been acknowledged. Works from these parts of the world are beginning to gain recognition through their quality, without the need for any other additional criterion of evaluation.
Undoubtedly, the ‘exotic’ accounts for some appeal of World literature – that is to say, the sense one has of reading about lands far away from one's own (even if those accounts are far from paradisiacal). Do you consciously look to capture or reflect this idea of the exotic by figuring specifically Mozambican elements in your fiction?
Writers always speak of ‘lands far away from one's own’. No matter how familiar an English writer may be with English reality, he eventually travels through a territory that is his own private terrain, with its mysteries and peculiarities. I write from Mozambique, and my first readers are Mozambicans. The ‘Mozambican’ components of my narratives are not motivated by any desire for exotic display or appeal.
Of course, World literature is intimately related to the art of translation. Indeed, most of your readers will have first encountered your work in translation. What are your thoughts on (the very possibility of) translation?
My experience has generally been very good. Translators do not only translate languages; they translate a voice, concretely, the voice of a given author. Their work is therefore not solely technical. It is essentially the work of a co-author. And that's how I work with translators, the assumption being that they are re-creating the book alongside me. The truth is that there is a poetic element in my prose that would not allow it to be done in any other way.