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Mia Couto's first novel, Terra Sonâmbula was listed as one of the top 12 best books from Africa. Click here to read an extract from this book.

Read Mia Couto's letter to George W Bush on the war in Iraq. Click here

For a review of Couto's latest book, in English, click here

A grand metaphor of Mozambique

Um Rio Chamado Tempo, Uma Casa Chamada Terra
Author: Mia Couto
2002
Caminho, Lisbon and Ndjira, Maputo

Reviewed by Richard Bartlett

The technique of using two narrators to tell one story is common in Mia Couto's novels: one present, one past, one living, one dead and the two of them simultaneously telling one story of one nation. Terra Sonâmbula has the young boy reading from the diaries of a dead compatriot, Varanda do Frangipani has the living police inspector and the ex-resident of an old age home living in his head. Um Rio Chamado Tempo, Uma Casa Chamada Terra (A River Called Time, A House Called Land) is no different, only this time there is one voice – a grandson – with a second narrator – a deceased but not yet buried grandfather – making its presence felt through the handwriting of the first.

The bi-central character in this story is Mariano Malilane, who died, or rather is on his deathbed, after collapsing during a family photograph. He is not living, but not yet dead - a medical anomaly - and his grandson Mariano is sent for. The grandson lives in the city across the river which separates the island of Luar-do-Chao from the mainland. Against tradition, grandfather Mariano has specified that his grandson shall be in charge of the funeral proceedings, much to the chagrine of the three sons.

In many senses Couto's latest novel is not an unusual story - the family patriarch dies and the entire extended family (including the namesake grandson) return home for the mourning and burial. And as they gather many secrets and hidden feuds begin to emerge. But that is where the 'usual' ends, for this is not a story of affairs and feuds, but of an entire nation facing up to the histories of all its idiosyncratic family members.

This family, its history and its dysfunctions, is representative in many respects. Representativeof an extended family, and representative of the country of which it is a product. As a family it is almost soap-operatic in its dimensions. It has tales of lost and unrequited love, absent husband fighting in a faraway war, three very different brothers, an ostracised sister-in-law, a mother who died during childbirth, a jealous wife, a philandering patriarch, burning ships, drug deals gone sour and a scheme to sell the family home to developers who want to turn it into a hotel, and many secrets besides.

But when it comes to this family as representative of the country from which it originates the link is not quite so straightforward. The reader knows Mia Couto is one of Mozambique's best authors (if they bother to read the back flap) but otherwise his novel is set in a fictional ,unnamed country, which is a change from all his previous novels which are set in contemporary Mozambique. By using the fictional island of Luar-do-Chao across the bay from 'the city' as the central point in this novel, Couto is beginning to comment on the state of post-colonial Africa, and not just his country in particular. Yet this novel is still firmly grounded in Mozambique. A more obvious clue is where he explains the name of the family home: "We call it Nyumba-Kaya to satisfy family members from the North and the South. 'Nyumba' is the word for 'house' in the languages of the north. In the idioms of the south, house is said 'kaya'." The predominance of southern ethnic groups in the government, and public life, of Mozambique is constant source of concern for those from the north.

Of course there is the title of the book too. The river is without beginning nor end, like time and

"It is a story of a younger generation receiving the keys to the house and discovering how empty rooms become spaces of magical potential"

the people who inhabit the book are the river, just as the river defines them. Similarly the house is everywhere, it is land, it is that which belongs to all who live in it, and to sell it would be to subject the family to uncertainty and misery.

The Malilane family destiny is bound to its land and by the water which surrounds it. Its history has been shaped by a history of colonialism, armed struggle and post-colonial socialism and capitalism. The three brothers represent these different facets of the country's history - one is a peasant who has never left the family land, one was a guerrilla in the struggle for liberation and now a forgotten hero, and the other is a neocolonial capitalist who flaunts his shining new all-terrain vehicle. Couto has created a grand metaphor for Mozambique's struggle to turn its rampant economic growth and multi-party democracy to the benefit of its people and not just its bureaucrats.

But he does so beautifully and without resort to rhetoric, ever. It is a story of personal emotion of national proportions, of a younger generation receiving the keys to the house and discovering how empty rooms become spaces of magical potential. It is a story of a young student learning the importance of family as he steps into the shoes of the patriarch. Of a young man coming face-to-face with his father. Of lovers and wives coming to terms with the loss of loved ones. But it is a story firmly, even humorously, rooted in Mozambique.

Consider the meeting of Mariano (elder) courting his future wife:

"I am not girlfriendable, Mariano."
"And if I ask you for a kiss?"
"I will delay for an entire life before giving you that kiss."
"I'll wait, then."
The advantage of being poor is knowing how to wait. To wait without pain, Because it is waiting without hope. ...the secret is to delay the suffering, cook it on the slowliest fire, until it dissipates, dilutes, in the infinity of time.

But there is humour in the poverty, as when the family is debating what to do with the living corpse of Mariano:

"It could be better to take him to the morgue."
"What morgue? There's not even a hospital here."
"But father can't stay like this, neither buried nor ressucitated. We could, for example, put him in the coldroom at Pesca-Mar."
"Sorry Ultimio, I can't see father frozen among the tuna, cod and prawns. He wouldn't be seen dead..."

And there is wisdom; not that of arrogance but of having nothing to lose:

"Does illness have a beginning? Or is it like love: those things which only exist after having been remembered?"

And magic. It would be too easy to call it magic of a realist kind. That automatically invites comparisons with Latin America and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and while Couto is certainly deserving of such worthy comparisons, they do little to allow a real understanding and grasp of the African's originality. Like the concept of nation, the magic resides in the people and is manifest not in their action but in their circumstance.

The very idea behind the elder Mariano writing through the hand of his grandson is one of ordinary magic – it might be unusual, surprising even, but it is not supernatural. Just as when the earth closes and it proves impossible to bury Mariano. Whenever the gravedigger, or anyone else, takes spade to earth a metallic clunk is the only result and no grave is possible. Until Mariano reveals the cause of the earth's refusal to accept him. He reveals his secrets - the death he caused and the life he created - and in so doing allows himself to be buried. The river has similar qualities, refusing to allow a gun used in a murder to sink into its depths. And the earth too, spits out the cocaine which two old men thought was fertilizer.

Ultimately this novel is one of possibility, not of unguarded, limitless hope that was the aftermath of revolution, but allows the realisation that the hope of that time has not been lost if only we are willing to shape it. As the legend of Luar-do-Chão says:

When there is no other ink in the world the poet uses his own blood. With no paper available, he writes on his own body. Thus arises the voice, the river anchored in itself. Like blood: without ending nor source.

Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.