It is in the city of Beira, on the coast of Mozambique, that the action of the new novel by Mia Couto, the leading writer of her country, takes place. The Mapper of Absences recounts the return to his native country of an aging poet, in search of the ghosts of his past. Through a poetic and baroque back and forth between the past and the present, the character reconstructs the puzzle of his life, going back to the origin of the traumas that structured him. Between history and nostalgia.
” It is the story of a Portuguese journalist and poet, an ingenuous man who is given evidence of a massacre committed in 1973 in Mozambique by Portuguese troops. This good and ingenuous man was my father. At that time, the national liberation war was at the gates of our city Beira. Madness was the response in some white neighborhoods. (…) This novel is inspired by real people and episodes. In other words, in this book, neither the people, nor the dates, nor the places are intended to be fiction. »
It is with these introductory remarks that The Mapper of Absencesthe new novel by Mia Couto. Poet, storyteller, Couto is a prolific author, with a dozen novels and several volumes of short stories to his credit. His newly released novel is based on the life of his father, told by a largely self-fictional narrator.
The anti-colonial struggle
Famous poet, the narrator-character of the novel, Diogo Santiago grew up in mozambique, as does the author. He returns to Beira, his hometown, on the occasion of the presentation of a distinction by a local university. But it is perhaps the quest for the past that is the real reason for this return to the country. ” This is where my childhood was torn…I’m coming to mend this tear “, he confides to his hosts.
The return to the places of childhood brings to the surface the memories of the past. The narrator has forgotten nothing of the balance of power between whites and blacks in the colonial society where he grew up, neither the hatred nor the violence of yesteryear… The headlong quest in which Diogo embarked on s accelerates when a beautiful and young admirer, crossed during one of his conferences on poetry, sends him the archives of the former colonial political police. These documents concern the subversive activities of the narrator’s father, a journalist and poet in his turn, who had espoused the cause of the colonized Africans. Police reports, but also letters, excerpts from diaries and various notations that make up these archives, structure the novel.
The 1970s to which these archives refer were a turning point in the Portuguese colonies in Africa, with the rise of guerrilla movements. In February 1973, the guerrillas of Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) derailed a passenger train about a hundred kilometers from Beira. In retaliation for this ambush, terrible atrocities were perpetrated by the colonial army against the local populations, notably at Inhaminga, not far from Beira. ” If there was a hell on earth, this hell was the city of Inhaminga », says the author to one of his characters.
Diogo remembers witnessing these atrocities. Barely 10 years old, he was in Inhaminga where he had accompanied his father. He had been commissioned by the Portuguese Communist Party to go and investigate the massacre of civilians, in order to denounce colonial barbarism to the world. Arrived at his destination in the warmth of the tropical morning, Diogo saw with his own eyes the corpses of slaughtered villagers, piled up in the central square of the village. They were guarded by young soldiers, themselves terrified by the extent of the evil they had committed, on command.
Often placed in the category of magical realism and fantasy, Mia Couto’s work is deeply rooted in reality. ” All fiction has its origins in reality, claims Mia Couto. It was while revisiting Beira that I learned that in Inhaminga, located not far from my hometown, the Portuguese army had perpetrated the most brutal massacre in colonial history. It has been forgotten, even here in Mozambique because these atrocities took place a few months before the country’s independence. This explains why the Inhaminga massacre is passed over in silence. There was a consensus between the young soldiers who took power in Lisbon following the coup d’etat of April 25, 1974 and the guerrillas who were fighting in Mozambique for independence. I had to go down to the depths of collective memory to imagine the extent of this massacre”.
A historian like no other
It is to this underground work that the title of the novel refers, The Mapper of Absences. For Mia Couto, if the novelist draws the material for his stories from history, he is not a historian like any other. Using the imagination as a tool, he digs into the quicksand of memory to bring out hidden realities, filling in the holes in institutional history.
The Inhaminga massacre is one of these hidden realities. Just like the suicide of the interracial couple who, almost half a century ago, threw themselves together into the Punguè River, which crosses the city. “The drama of a subversive love could be more subversive than a thousand political pamphlets”, explains the narrator to his admirer-turned-lover, Liana Campos, without knowing that she was the daughter of this cursed couple of legend and that she is , like him, ” in search of its history “.
It will be understood, the quest for the ghosts of the past is the real theme of the Absence Mapper. Alongside the deceased and remembered father, in whose footsteps the son seems to want to inscribe his future, appear some female figures, colorful, exceptional in courage and dignity. The most remarkable is undoubtedly Maniara, a black, hieratic woman, crossed in the darkness of Inhaminga. She is a black Antigone, determined to perform rituals celebrating martyrs, claiming loud and clear her right to bury her own in the name of her community.
Mia Couto readily acknowledges this. The construction of characters is The construction of characters is one of the fundamental aspects of his fictional work. ” I build my novels in a completely chaotic way, but it seems to me that everything begins for me, he argues, with the character. He or she takes possession of me and tells me his story. The story takes shape as the voices of the characters grow in me. However, do not believe that my characters live disconnected from reality, ignoring the outside world. The inner voices are connected to the diversity of lives and voices that characterize the Mozambican world in which my characters evolve. I define myself as a translator of realities and not just as a writer. »
Finally, with characters from poets and writers playing a leading role in the plot, this latest opus by Mia Couto will be read as an eminently literary novel. His characters poetically inhabit the world. The novel opens with a lesson on poetry. ” Poetry is not a literary genre, it is a language prior to all words », reminds the narrator to the listeners of the conferences he gives in Beira, while outside the storm rumbles which is about to devastate the city. The novel closes with a profound reflection on the virtues redemptive of literature, which by transforming life into history, absence into presence, engraves them in the marble of time.
The Mapper of Absences, by Mia Couto. Translated from Portuguese by Elisabeth Monteiro Rodrigues. Editions Métailié, 347 pages, 22.80 euros.
►Also read : Revisiting the darkness of colonial Mozambique, with the Portuguese-speaking Mia Couto (1/2)