This title is not available in English
The many shadows of war
As Duas Sombras do Rio
João Paulo Borges Coelho
2003
Caminho, Portugal
260 pages
Reviewed by Tony Simões da Silva
As Duas Sombras do Rio (The Two Shadows of the River) is João Paulo Borges Coelho’s first novel, but the themes it explores are familiar to the body of his work as a historian of the Portuguese colonial wars, and of Mozambican postcolonial history in particular. Anyone familiar with his academic writing will notice that the setting for As Duas Sombras do Rio, Bawa and Zumbo, have repeatedly figured in his essays and publications. The novel explores Mozambique’s troubled past, and more specifically the human cost of endless conflicts between various political forces over the last decades of the 20th century.
The historical background of As Duas Sombras do Rio is thus a constant in the telling of the story. Much as this is essentially a work of fiction, As Duas Sombras do Rio offers also a detailed depiction of Mozambique’s recent political history, in fact tracing it back to the earlier expeditions by European slave traders in search of merchandise, the later arrival of and settlement of the land by Catholic missionaries, and more recently, in the 20th century, the Portuguese colonial administration. However, this is an aspect that Borges Coelho handles with considerable subtlety. Thus, although no account of the experiences of refugees can overlook the political and historical context that led to their present condition, Borges Coelho is careful not to overload the text with a didactic tone.
Indeed, it is hardly surprising that in a nation as scarred by war as Mozambique is, artists should find themselves drawn to the recording of that experience, and more specifically of the impact of war on ordinary human beings. The war as depicted by Borges Coelho is essentially the kind of brutal and bloody African war the outside world has come to consume with all the insouciance of a lacklustre theatrical production. War, in Africa, has long ago lost the ability to shock, and while we might on occasion react to the horrors of Rwanda with some semblance of humanity, the more recent conflicts in Liberia and Ethiopia should persuade us that war is, in contemporary Africa, the banality of everyday life. As the narrator remarks at one stage, "As guerras são sempre assim, abundantes de vítimas e escassas de culpados". "Wars are always like that, abundant with the victims and scarce with the guilty".
Borges Coelho’s novel offers an intimate portrait of the stories that compassion fatigue has long led us to stop caring about, but in its open treatment of the foibles of each character the novel also rejects the sentimental tone of ‘NGO speak’, of the type that in the UK led to a number of aid organisations being accused of ‘overstating the food crisis in Africa’. The novel’s somewhat fragmented structure, and its myriad characters, parallel the very experiences the refugees undergo, shifting constantly and often abruptly between places and viewpoints. The only certainty the peasants and small-time bureaucrats can expect to count on is precisely the continually unsettled conditions in which they exist.
In As Duas Sombras do Rio [although cumbersome, I am inclined to translate the title as The Two Shadows of the River, rather than as the more grammatically accurate The River’s Two Shadows] Borges Coelho focuses on the experiences of the masses of refugees that a seemingly endless war has produced in Mozambique, here represented by the populations of Zumbo, Feira and Bawa. Set in a small enclave of land shared by Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, a point at which all three countries share the mighty Zambezi River, the novel tells the story of a large cast of characters, mostly the anonymous hordes displaced by violent and regular conflicts between the Mozambican government and a range of smaller groups of men, often themselves unsure about their political allegiances. In fact, one of the points the work makes seems to be that much of what passed for war was in essence a random sequence of events generated alternately, though on occasion simultaneously by political principles, personal greed or sheer boredom.
As we see the world through the eyes of ordinary people such as Amina, Maria Isabel, Amoda Xavier, Jonas and others, we are led to question both the ethics and the logic of the internecine struggles that have torn Mozambique apart, pitting sibling against sibling, turning children against parents, leading community leaders to betray the trust of their people time and again. The m’fiti Leónidas Ntsato casts on the town administrator very early in the narrative might then be read as metonymic of the broader spell under which Mozambican society has lived for well over 30 years, and perhaps really from the days of European contact. The human skeletons that populate the landscape, "as planícies do norte cheias de ossadas….Ossadas que finalmente o sol limpou até tornar alvas e quase puras" ("the plains of the north full of skeletons....Skeletons which the sun ultimately cleans until white and almost pure"), become in this context the new language of place and identity. The bleached bones of thousands of people accumulating lazily, indeed eerily naturally, all over the land out of which the people cultivate a meagre living, constitute an integral dimension of the experience of being alive in the postcolonial nation.
But let me start at the beginning. As Duas Sombras do Rio opens with the character of Leónidas Ntsato, one of the work’s main characters, lying face down on a strip of land we are yet to discover is set in the middle of the vast lake that resulted from the damming of the Zambezi River, Cahora Bassa hydro-electric project. A tale of progress and destruction, the dam was intended to produce the power Mozambican industry required, but more significantly the Portuguese colonial administration sought to cash in on the fast-growing needs of apartheid South Africa. Thirty years later, it remains as a symbol of Mozambique’s unbalanced relationship with South Africa, essentially producing electricity to power South African industry.
In the novel, the lively world that the lake constitutes epitomises the fast-changing geographical and political landscapes Mozambican people have had to learn and re-learn over a period of centuries. The references to the vast mass of land covered by the water, and the houses of colonists visible on the clearer days, apparently still standing, again speak of the continuous and, to the local people, incomprehensible processes that have affected their lives so profoundly. Ntsato’s confused state of mind, which is revealed as the result of a conflict between the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ elements of the nation, the snake and the lion, reflects the turmoil the inhabitants of Bawa, Feira and Zumbo now experience as a constant in their lives. "[P]ossessed by the spirits of the lion and of the snake", symbolic also, we are told, of South and North, Ntsato conveys the disharmony at the heart of the nation. In the healthy resolution of Ntsato’s problem resides the nation’s ability to move on, leaving behind the deep imprint of war, but also of a broader imbalance between tradition and modernity.
The novel thus tells the story of Ntsato, husband to Amina, father to five children, a villager and a fisherman who, for some time now, has been behaving erratically. Possessed by spirits, Ntsato now exists on the margins of the village, and completely disconnected from his own family. When we first meet him at the beginning of the novel, we are told that he was not dead, simply ‘desacordado’. Desacordado, literally ‘not awake’, would seem in the novel to refer then to some in-between state, since although living he might as well be dead, at least to those who know, care about and rely on him. His condition, which neither the Western-educated nurse nor the native nganga Gamanhundo can diagnose accurately, has meant that Ntsato is able to inhabit two worlds simultaneously – one, that of his family and neighbours; the other, a kind of supernatural space where he is immune to the bullets and landmines that regularly claim the lives or limbs of his people. He moves freely and invisibly between the various locations on the margins of the river, silent witness to the endless horrors that have become the banality of everyday life in northwest Mozambique.
Lying down on the sands of the Zambezi River, at the opening of the novel, Ntsato views the world with the usual lack of focus and perspective that have long determined his life. Looking around him, he finds that the trees and the soil have swapped places, and the water and the sky too are now ‘out of joint’. This Daliesque opening becomes therefore one of the central ways in which Borges Coelho organises a story of pain and suffering, of instability and loss. Once given up for dead by family and friends, Leónidas Ntsato’s return to the world of the living haunts both his family and the village. Throughout the novel, Ntsato roams restlessly in and out of the family home and of the village, impelling the narrative by the sheer inscrutability of his condition.
Long after the nurse Inês gives up trying to cure him, and after she herself becomes a victim of the military conflicts, opting for prostituting herself to one of the many rebel leaders in the hope of avoiding being raped serially by his men, the nganga Gamanhundo continues to seek a solution for Ntsato’s odd actions. But he too will struggle unsuccessfully, and when a solution arrives it will be by personal choice rather than by the intervention of others. He walks quietly, incomprehensibly, into the wide lake that the dam created – "o mar de Kebrabassa" ("the sea of Kebrabassa"). Was he, like thousands of his compatriots, trying to escape the latest impending wave of destruction at the end of yet another invading army, or simply looking to find the "a tranquilidade e a indiferença dos afogados"? (..."the peace and indifference of the drowned?") Perhaps the answer does not matter; the story we have read was not Ntsato’s, or certainly not his own; it was the story of the Zambezi River, silent witness to history from time immemorial, seducing people to travel up in search of riches, taking back the landless, frightened masses of refugees in search of peace.
At 260 pages, As Duas Sombras do Rio is a short novel, though an ambitious one. The play on light and shadow, self and other, the river and ghost-like presence of Ntsato throughout the narrative, combined with the work’s African setting resonate with Conrad’s more famous examination of ‘the human condition’. Written in a plain but beguiling style, As Duas Sombras do Rio makes no distinction between the real and the supernatural, inviting also the obvious comparisons with the magical realist narratives. Perhaps it is difficult to imagine a Mozambican writer working in Portuguese who does not have some familiarity with the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Augusto Roa Bastos. But perhaps like Marquez, or the much younger Arundhati Roy in India, Borges Coelho will reply that his work is not so much magical realist, as mundanely real. Stories such these are the staple of what much of contemporary Mozambique is about – stories of despair and desperation, but also of hope, of resilience, of an unshakeable belief in a better tomorrow; stories simultaneously so horrific and magical that we are left pondering where to draw the boundaries.
A final comment on the work and its publishers. Once again, Caminho brings us the work of another Mozambican writer, having previously published the writing of Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, Suleiman Cassamo and others. Caminho seems to be performing in relation to Lusophone African writing the role once played by Heinemann with reference to Anglophone African writing. Given the extent to which the survival of a local publishing industry in Mozambique or any other former Portuguese colony is likely to be a long way off, long may its commitment to new African writing in Portuguese last.
Tony Simões da Silva is an English lecturer at the University of Exeter, England.
