Writing on Behalf of Those Women ‘Que Não [?] Têm Escrita’: Gendered Boundaries inside and outside the Fiction of Mia Couto

Abstract

. This article will discuss the relationship between gender and boundaries inside and outside three novels by Mozambican writer Mia Couto: Jesusalém (2009), A Confissão da Leoa (2012) and Mulheres de Cinza (2015). Whereas men and women are forced to occupy separate spaces inside the texts' settings, outside the novels a blurring between masculinity and femininity threatens to occur as Couto aligns his idiosyncratic writing style with that of his fictional women narrators. In subtly fashioning a gender-ambiguous identity on an extra-diegetic level and claiming to speak, through the voice of the female narrator of Mulheres de Cinza, for Mozambicans denied access to the written word, Couto encroaches on the limited space afforded to Mozambican women writers.