VI Congresso Nacional Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada /
X Colóquio de Outono Comemorativo das Vanguardas – Universidade do Minho 2009/2010
Embracing the local and the global in Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da
Sereia and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying
Ana Luísa Pires
Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Mar / IPL
As a cultural construct, contemporary postcolonial literature plays an important
role in the processes of cultural exchange, via its discussion of novel subject matters
and through the employment of fresh literary perspectives. If, on the one hand,
globalized processes of publishing have greatly increased the potential for cultural
exchange, on the other hand, as contemporary postcolonial writers still largely
depend on the Western publishing industry and reading public, they find themselves
caught up in a creative tension between the wish to introduce more local and
potentially controversial issues and the need to maintain the type of narrative and
choice of themes that Western readers are familiar and comfortable with. This
ambivalence can be traced in Mia Couto and Zakes Mda’s novels, for while
commonly focusing on previously marginalized perspectives and exploring
innovative literary devices, they nevertheless entail an acknowledgement of their
prospective readership.
At the beginning of Ways of Dying, the story is suddenly interrupted and the
reader directly addressed by its communal narrative voice:
It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our
lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know
things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s
closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the
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village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it
once happened… ‘, we are the ‘they’. No individual owns the story. The
community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit. We
would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells this story if you had
not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria
(Mda, 2002:12).
As Mda admitted in an interview to the journal Africultures, it was his awareness that
the implied readership of the novel is mostly urban and Western-educated, therefore
possibly not familiar with the characteristics of the traditional African mode of oral
storytelling, which motivated this explanation:
Here, the story is told by a communal voice. Because, as I tried to explain some
way yet - I had to explain that because many readers from the West would not
understand – this we is the plural who tells the story. [italics in the original] (…)
But I wouldn’t explain that if the reader belonged to those people, to the culture
from which I come (Mongo-Mboussa, 2002).
While the adoption of this communal narrative voice might be regarded as an attempt
to approach an important element of African aesthetics – orature- the literary genre
Mda chooses – the novel – is clearly a Western one. Articulating aspects of both
African and Western literary traditions in his novel results in an ambivalent narrative
style that questions categorization.
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Through the story the villagers in O Outro Pé da Sereia decide to tell the AfricanAmerican Benjamin Southman, a member of an NGO who has travelled to
Mozambique in search of his origins, Mia Couto deftly deconstructs some of the
most common representations associated with Africa, produced both inside and
outside the African continent, and commonly reproduced in postcolonial African
literature. To meet the foreigner’s expectations about Africa, that story will include
carefully chosen ingredients, such as the description of past episodes of great
suffering related to colonialism and slavery, and a female character with special
spiritual powers, who will make the connection between present and past times by
communicating with Benjamin’s ancestors. Rather than deceiving one another,
Benjamin Southman and the inhabitants of Vila Longe deceive themselves; the
former, because it seems more comfortable to rely on the false security provided by
stereotypes instead of risking finding new realities, and the latter because they agree
to assume what the West expects from them, therefore distorting their complex
identities. This relationship, marked by lies and misconceptions on both sides,
appears to illustrate Couto’s criticism of Africa’s subservience to the West, as well as
the Western insistence on perpetuating an exotic picture of the African continent, but
it might also be applied to some postcolonial African writers and their Western
readers: “A Europa continua a visitar África como quem vai em peregrinação – para
encontrar o que ela acredita ali ter deixado. África ainda olha a Europa com algum
oportunismo
desresponsabilizante
–
ficámos
independentes
mas
não
nos
emancipámos” (Couto, 2000:491).
An important aspect both novels stress is that like any other identity,
contemporary black identities were developed in motion, by way of encountering and
handling exogenous cultural influences. Subjectivity is therefore presented in the two
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novels as interactive and not as being based on essences or fixed material conditions.
Mda and Couto assume in their novels what seems to be one of the greatest
challenges for contemporary postcolonial narratives, which is to find the balance, as
Boaventura Sousa Santos puts it, between homogeneity and fragmentation:
O desafio é (…) o de encontrar uma dosagem equilibrada de homogeneidade e
fragmentação, já que não há identidade sem diferença e a diferença pressupõe uma
certa homogeneidade que permite identificar o que é diferente nas diferenças. (…)
A literatura é, talvez, de todas as criações culturais, aquela em que melhor pode
obter-se o equilíbrio dinâmico entre homogeneidade e fragmentação ( Sousa
Santos, 2001:35).
Contrasting with the 1960s novels of decolonisation (and in the South African
context, with anti-apartheid novels) that focused predominantly on the nation and on
the analysis of the effects of acculturation, merely observing the subjects’ reactions
to outside influences, the contemporary postcolonial novel addresses instead the
postcolonial reality as part of a transcultural phenomenon, and considers how
postcolonial subjects deal with endogenously and exogenously-induced identity
conflicts.
Describing important historical moments in an uncompromising way, both O
Outro Pé da Sereia and Ways of Dying encourage readers to remember and reflect
upon the different stories of the diverse people who compose the (hi)stories of plural
postcolonial and post-apartheid societies.
O Outro Pé da Sereia unfolds in two alternate narratives that represent two
relevant times for the history of Mozambique: a contemporary narrative and a
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historical narrative that goes back to the sixteenth century to describe the early stage
of colonization. At the intersection of the two narratives is the picture of a country
that, like its inhabitants, is still on a journey to find itself. The characters in the
contemporary narrative have chosen to pervert their past by erasing the negative
aspects related to their history, such as the African peoples’ complicity in the slave
trade. While recognizing one’s personal as well as collective past mistakes may be
empowering, it is also a complex and painful process, due to the inevitable difficulty
in admitting one’s faults and to the sense of shame and guilt associated with the
acknowledgement of past wrongdoings. To avoid the feeling of remorse, the
inhabitants of Vila Longe resort to a magical tree that erases their memories, freeing
them from any sense of responsibility or guilt:
Não havia em toda a redondeza um exemplar maior de mulambe. A árvore era
conhecida, desde há séculos, como «a árvore das voltas»: quem rodasse três vezes
em seu redor perdia a memória. Deixaria de saber de onde veio, quem eram os
seus antepassados. Tudo para ele se tornaria recente, sem raiz, sem amarras.
Quem não tem passado não pode ser responsabilizado. O que se perde em
amnésia, ganha-se em amnistia (Couto, 2006:320-321).
Forgetting the past may give them the false reassurance of a clear conscience, but
their hopeless lives seem to imply that along with disagreeable memories they may
also have lost an important part of their individual and collective history, as the
barber of Vila Longe laments in the epigraph to chapter seventeen:
Primeiro, perdemos lembrança de termos sido do rio.
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A seguir, esquecemos a terra que nos pertencera.
Depois da nossa memória ter perdido a geografia,
Acabou perdendo a sua própria história.
Agora, não temos sequer ideia de termos perdido alguma coisa. (Idem, 331)
Ways of Dying depicts the period of transition in South Africa as a time of great
instability and irrational violence, in a tone that balances carnivalesque fantasy with
apocalyptic reality. While the apocalyptical imagery conveys a realistic picture of the
ways of dying during the transition period, the carnivalesque antics challenge the
established social order, pointing to the possibility of creating more socially and
culturally constructive ways of living. As Sten Moslund explains:
the ambiguous representation of the past in Ways of Dying, which simultaneously
confirms a well-known picture of reality and disrupts our normative perceptions
of reality, enforces on the reader a new and fresh engagement with history before
him or her. In other words, it provokes an attention-drawing and, with its
metaphorical potency, consciousness-raising actuality, which urges the centre of
society to reconsider its derisive perception of the periphery (Moslund, 2003:106).
By presenting Toloki, a solitary character whose dormant artistic personality
comes alive through his relationship with Noria, and who lives at the margins of
society, as the novel’s main character, Mda gives the readers a very particular point
of view of the tragic events that took place during the transition period, and also
seems to be stressing the relevance of everyday actions and the common people for
post-apartheid South Africa. While at first sight Toloki’s marginalized position might
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seem disadvantageous, it allows him to have a fresh and relatively unpartisan
perspective of the new situations he is faced with, as well as the means to define his
own version of history.
Discussing topics that involve local cultures and (hi)stories in their novels,
depicting them as local representations of global questions, and therefore
contributing to a greater awareness of these local perspectives among Western
readers, both novelists make use of the historical past as a critical investment in the
present and the future, by emphasizing the relevance of cultural memory and
remembrance.
Works cited
Couto, Mia (2000), “A Guerra é uma cobra que usa os nossos dentes para nos morder”,
in Maria-Alzira Seixo et al. (eds.), The Paths of Multiculturalism—Travel Writings and
Postcolonialism., Lisboa, Edições Cosmos, pp. 487-491.
__ __
(2006), O Outro Pé da Sereia, Lisboa, Editorial Caminho.
Mda, Zakes (2002), Ways of Dying, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface, (2002),” Interview with Zakes Mda”. Retrieved
25
Oct.2008.
<http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=revue_affiche_articleno=5428>
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Moslund, Sten Pultz (2003), Making Use of History in New South African Fiction.
Historical Perspectives in Three Post-Apartheid Novels, Copenhagen, Museum
Tusculanum Press.
Santos, Boaventura Sousa (2001), “Entre Prospero e Caliban – Colonialismo, póscolonialismo e interidentidade”. in Maria Irene Ramalho & António Sousa Ribeiro
(eds), Entre ser e estar—Raízes, Percursos e Discursos da Identidade, Porto, Edições
Afrontamento, pp. 23-85.
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