Landmines, language, and dismemberment: Mia Couto's imperial residues

Abstract

Mia Couto's The Last Flight of the Flamingo, set during the UN-monitored peace settlement of Mozambique's decade-long civil war, directs our eyes towards the places and people ignored and unseen by the dominant narratives of globalization. The novel asks that we pay attention to the sundry residues of empire in Mozambique – the severed penis of a UN peacekeeper, bullet holes and landmines, the rural poor, living and dead – because revealing these residues forces recognition of the hidden, leftover injustices of colonialism, globalization, and modernity. Couto's oral narrative models what I call ‘residual epistemology’, a way of knowing that draws on the residues of previous stories and storytellers and so assumes an always-mediated engagement with others, rejecting ideas of independence and objectivity. Drawing primarily on Raymond Williams' notion of the residual, I consider the material and conceptual residues of empire as simultaneously symbols of the invisible and as alternative or oppositional models for reading the lives of the poor.