Questions about Mia Couto’s contemporary novel

Abstract

Flora Süssekind in bringing the concept of “choralities” in the article “Unidentified verbal objects” (2013) suggests the emergence of “irruptions of choral modes in Brazilian literary culture. Often linked to a certain instability of forms and cultural field in general “(p. 1). These Brazilian texts that have choral forms and logics represent an index of the changes that occur in the literature, since these changes also seem to reach the Mozambican literature in Terra sonâmbula, by Mia Couto (2007). In Terra Sonâmbula, we perceive some markings of “choralities”through the overlapping or tension of the genres: “Terra Sonâmbula is a novel constructed by parodying the short story, as a generic prismatic structure, associated with the parable, the fable, the allegory and the prophecy, sewn together by the constant intrusion of the proverb“(Leite, 2012, p. 176). The adoption of these formal macrostructures evidences the interpretative model of the reality of the Mozambican society. Of course the constitution of the novel is given by the presence of several genres, but more than the overlapping of literary genres we see that this novel presents overlapping voices (voices of Mozambican mestizo, blacks, foreigners), overlapping discourses (several narrators), crossing spaces (the sea  and the land), and the conciliation or not, of two systems: oral and written, represented by the characters Muindinga (reader of the notebooks) and Kindzu (writer of the stories contained in the notebooks) are perfect examples of the constant disruption of contemporary literature with earlier literary traditions.