On the Floor of the World: Slow Violence and the Death Sentence in Mia Couto

Abstract

Mozambican poet, novelist and ecologist Mia Couto has published numerous works that escape the expectation that he represent only the challenges of postcolonial Mozambique, its anti-colonial struggle and consequent civil war. At the same time, his fiction does concern forms of death sentence lingering within the country, not least in his work’s recurring reference to the demonic violence underlying its beauty: landmines. These forms of death sentence, so frequently characterized by persistent and deferred violence, are brought to perception through Couto’s fiction. However, crucially those forms are accompanied by a kind of animism that operates to imagine death otherwise. The death sentence represented through Couto’s fiction is accordingly doubled. This article puts this doubling in the context of slow violence, magical realism and animism in order to demonstrate ways in which the death sentence can in certain circumstances be understood as a matter of persistence rather than as something that happens at one moment and after which it is definitely over. Couto’s fictions represent in often very indirect ways a postcolonial and post-war Mozambique that is reconstructing itself, or dreaming itself, in ways that resist the imposition of a form of ‘globalist realism’. Through this latter realism, Mozambique is made to feel the necessity of being accessible or transparent. One way in which it is made to dream ‘legally’ is to fix its past in a clearly defined pre-history and to draw a hard and fast line between its ‘realist’ present and a more spiritually dynamic (and also persistent) past.