Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism

Abstract

In 1974, in the turbulent and heady months that followed April, I watched with growing adolescent rage as the conceptual framework of my colonial life-world crumbled abruptly around me. For the first time in my life, I heard the words colony and colonialism refer to a birthplace I had been educated to imagine as an integral and indissoluble part of the European fatherland. Admittedly, my experience of the metropolis amounted to little more than an amalgam of exotic toponyms that I had to commit to memory in order to pass my geography exams. My idea of Portugal was, in fact, ultimately reducible to the grainy newsreel footage of jolly, well-fed dignitaries, and on a single and memorable occasion the gleam of an unelected head of state's bald pate rushing past me in the backseat of an American limousine . . . after I had stood at attention for hours, at the age of eight or nine, clad in a borrowed Mocidade Portuguese uniform, with the infinite weight of the imperial standard resting unsteadily on my belt buckle. Nevertheless, I believed, probably with most of my classmates, that the Portuguese mode of being in Africa was, as the dictator Salazar defined it in the pages of Life magazine in the early sixties, buttressed by a natural [national] penchant [um pendor natural] toward multiracialism, a vocation to establish contacts with other