Living on the edge of the world

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Read how The Last Flight of The Flamingo was born. Click here

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

Mia Couto's latest novel is reviewed on this site. Click here to read the review.

The Last Flight of The Flamingo
Mia Couto
Translated by David Brookshaw
2004
Serpent’s Tail, London

Reviewed by Richard Bartlett

It is unusual for Mia Couto to situate two voices in the present. In The Last Flight of The Flamingo (originally published in Portuguese in 2000 as O Último Voo do Flamingo) he addresses a matter that is close to his heart, an issue that is not peculiar to Mozambique but he uses the peculiarities of Mozambique to tell a tale of environmental tragedy. Community and environment are intertwined and so the tragedy of the one is tragedy of the other. And this symbiotic tragedy requires all tenses present. Which is unusual.

The tragedy is the disappearance of the flamingos from their traditional nesting areas, but this environmental event is a latch which Couto uses to open the skies gaze upon a community which is grappling with the death throes of a war and the painful emergence of peace and global indifference. The Last Flight of The Flamingo is Couto’s second novel to have been published in English. The first was Under the Frangipani (Serpent’s Tail, 2001), which together with Terra Sonambula (Sleepwalking Land) and Um Rio Chamado Tempo, Uma Casa Chamada Terra (A River Called Time, A House Called Land) comprise a quartet of novels which chart Mozambique’s recent history from civil war, through isolation and the implementation of peace to vagaries of globalisation.

What links these novels is not their characters or the plot or even the setting – it is the grander historical narrative. Terra Sonambula (one of Africa’s 100 best books) deals with Mozambique’s civil war, Under the Frangipani with a people re-establishing their identity removed from the war, Last Flight of The Flamingo with the impact of the United Nations peacekeepers on the country, while Um Rio Chamada Tempo grapples with a nation that has come to terms with its past and needs to deal with its future. Couto has produced another novel, published in 1999, and titled simply Vinte e Cinco (Twenty-Five), referring to 25 years of independence. This book is more a tangent to the narrative of Mozambique as nation, an identifying moment, rather than an era.

"One is teased into the next testimony, seduced into a magicalism that is all too real"

The Last Flight of the Flamingo stands out in the quartet because it is the only one to have the two main portagonists talking to each other face to face. The book relates the curious investigation into the deaths of the ‘Blue helmets’, as the UN soldiers were known, who explode inexplicably, leaving only their genitals behind. An Italian, Massimo Risi (whose name could be understood in Portuguese, albeit at a stretch, as ‘most laughable’) is sent to the remote village of Tizangara where the mysterious deaths are afflicting the UN peacekeeping force. Although he understands Portuguese the town administration insists that a translator is appointed. Because the translator is narrator we never learn his name, he writes what he learns and transcribes his tale for the benefit of future generations. Which means, of course, that although the protagonists face each other their tense is not present – although they communicate through the spoken word, rather than the written, as is the case in Couto’s other works.

So although this is one person’s narrative, it is comprised of the meanderings of an entire community. Meanderings are metaphysical as well as real and involve linguistic gymnastics at which Couto is a past master. As our narrator says of his father: "He wasn't speaking what he was saying....It is the duty of each word not to be nothing at all." So we are not allowed to think in straight lines – we can follow the narrative quite easily from arrival of Massimo Risi to his departure after solving the mystery, but this is not a linear narrative. It is subject to constant interjections because it is not one person's story – it is the story of nation and its interaction with itself, finding a way to tell its own story, without depending on the 'outsider'. Couto could almost be referring to himself when the town administrator writes in one of his epistles "I am writing crookedly in straight lines". This trait is not just Couto's limitless creativity, it is his remarkable ability of turning a mirror on his compatriots and turning their foibles, struggles and mundanities into a masterpiece of fiction.

What makes it so much more than a report into the deaths of the ‘Blue helmets’ is that Couto has created a tale so dripping, so saturated with wisdom and humour that one is teased into the next testimony, seduced into a magicalism that is all too real. Couto is often described as an African proponent of magical realism, and at a superficial level such a label appears appropriate. But the Mozambique he writes of is all too real. It is not a place of imagination. It is a place where all that is surreal exists because it is too real to be anything else. Take this example of the town preparing to welcome the UN delegation:

The crowd displayed a prominent banner with huge letters on it: ‘Welcome to our Soviet comrades! Long live the internationalism of the proletariat!’ The administrator immediately ordered the banner to be withdrawn. and there’d be no long living to anyone. The people were somewhat confused with regard to the current times.
– Distribute our own banners, the ones we had painted yesterday.
– It would be better if we didn’t, Your Excellency.
– And why not?
– It’s because the paint has disappeared from the warehouse.
– And what about the cloth?
– The cloth didn’t disappear. That was stolen.

This surreal world is populated with magic, but that magic only makes it even more real – there are the praying mantises who carry the souls of the dead, the man who undresses from his bones before going to sleep, the old-young woman who is rejuvenated with love and the dreams that are a link not so much to a spirit world, but to a world that seems unbelievable unless we can convince ourselves it is a dream. Such as the hyenas who are so fat because they "steal from the country until only the bones are left".

This world of real magicalism is populated with characters and events that could seem surreal to someone who has not experienced Mozambique, but Couto, whose work as a journalist and now a marine biologist has taken him to all the corners of his country, offers us snippets of this experience. Like the town administrator who "diverted" an ambulance that had been donated by some project so that his step-son can start a transport business. Or the town prostitute who was sent to a forgotten corner of the country as part of Operation Production – "When you want to clean a nation, all you produce is dirt", she tells us. It is one such experience that leads Massimo Risi to solve the problem of the exploding soldiers. It turns out to be another example of corruption striving to ensure its survival in a community that is learning to define itself in the aftermath of colonialism, marxism, UN intervention and state paternalism.
As the witchdoctor Andorinho says:

"We’re timber that’s been left out in the rain. Now, we’re no good for firewood or for providing shade. We’ve got to dry out in the light of a sun that doesn’t yet exist. That sun can only be born within us."

When Mia Couto accepted the Mario Antonio prize for this book in 2001, it was this passage from that he quoted and explained that The Last Flight of The Flamingo addresses "a lack of a completely whole land, an extreme theft of hope committed by the ruthlessness of the powerful". Ultimately this is a book about hope, about the expectation that the sun from the other side of the world will appear, that the void will be filled, the land will be restored. But it is a painful process, one symbolised by the flamingo, whose gradual disappearance inspired Couto to create a work in homage to "those messengers of the skies, those discrete, divine couriers". (Read Mia Couto’s full acceptance speech, click here). In writing, and in launching that writing into the void as Massimo Risi does, there is an expectation that the writings will not disappear, but that they will be seen as a symbol by those who most need them, not those who most abuse them.

Abuse of power and indifference to the people affected by the structures of power is a theme that Couto constantly raises in The Last Flight of The Flamingo. The whites who invaded not just the land, but minds as well. The administrator who finds that the poor people just get in the way of him doing his job. The United Nations who "believed they were the masters of frontiers, able to manufacture concord". As the narrator’s father says: " Their problem is to keep order that enables them to be boss." And then there are the "newly rich who went around pillaging the territory". But in the end it is the people who tell their own story, despite the attempts of Massimo Risi to record everything. He is left with nothing to tell, because the people do it for him. They even teach him how to walk because "knowing how to tread this ground is the difference between life and death".

Couto treads the ground of Mozambique, of his environment, of his country's past and present, of a people’s loves and lives, with the care, not of a tresspasser, but of someone who knows he will have to tread that path again in this lifetime. Or another.

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