“The Seduction of Ash:” Mia Couto’s “The Day Mabata-bata Exploded” and “The Bird-Dreaming Baobab”

Abstract

Chesca Long-Innes argues that Mia Couto's installation of the fantastic in his short story collection, Voices Made Night, may best be understood not so much as a product of any 'magical realist' poetics, but as 'naturalised,' or motivated as a function of the collective neurosis of a [Mozambican] society traumatised by its continuing history of poverty and extreme violence. Couto's use of the fantastic, she adds, encompasses both empirical and psychic reality, and both are characterised by instability and elusiveness. The collection, she then maintains, constitutes a reinvention or reimagining of subjective realities constructed and perpetuated by the social trauma underpinning what she terms the psycho-pathology of post-colonial Mozambique, in which the society as a whole is [. . .] caught in the grip of a profound depression or melancholia.