Voices Made Night

Mia Couto

Mia Couto, who writes in Portuguese and is Mozambican, has over time become one of the most admired of African writers. It might be said that the poetic surrealism of his style marvellously combines the avant-garde with the traditions of oral story-telling; it is also the case that in his accounts (mostly) of those who live in conditions of deep wretchedness, his narrative gaze is always compassionate, but never sentimental. In fact, Couto shocks the reader into recognising the emotional and ideological malformations — particularly the tendency towards cruelty, violence and scapegoating — that result from poverty and isolation.

In this short discussion of his early collection of stories (first published in 1986 as Vozes Anoitecidas; published in the Heinemann English translation by David Brookshaw in 1990), it can be suggested that the stir created by this text is ascribable, in the first place, to the startling, poetic vividness of Couto’s language use — recognisable even in translation. For instance, a man in a comatose state is referred to as “remain[ing] on the other side of his eyelids” (102), while a sensuous widow is “a woman of capacious virtue” (8). A dying creature remains barely alive because “the blood had not yet unbuttoned its body” (24) and we are told that “true goodness cannot be measured in times of abundance but when hunger dances in the bodies of men” (26).

The story called “Saide, The Bucket of Water” has the following opening paragraph:

An afternoon of wood and zinc. Sloping roofs brushed by the mist. The watery lids of the afternoon seemed to release bats into the air.

To consolidate these impressions of an eerie bleakness — appropriate to the lonely alcoholic’s abandoned and hopeless, but haunted condition — the next sentence reads:

In the cane shanty, the landscape was kissed only by death (49).

This last sentence points forward to what we learn at the end: the protagonist’s godsend of a wife having left him to escape his abuse, he has been maintaining the illusion of her continued presence in his shanty home to fool his neighbours.

But of course Couto’s evocations of a number of small village, city and countryside scenarios — usually combining the tragic with the grotesquely absurd — almost always point from the particular case to the broader context of impoverished postcoloniality. As the author writes in the Foreword to this collection of stories:

The most harrowing thing about poverty is the
ignorance it has of itself. Faced by an absence of
everything, men abstain from dreams, depriving
themselves of the desire to be others. There exists
in nothingness that illusion of plenitude which causes
life to stop and voices to become night.

In the poignant story titled “How Old Jossias Was Saved From The Waters”, the old man (Jossias) initially looks forward to the way the rain will (he imagines)

lick the wounds of the earth, like some stray dog

and he fantasises about a great harvest when

the corn will call [him] “sir” (63).

But the rains go on, and on, and there is a great flood. A boat (manned by officials) comes by to rescue him, but he has to be forcibly dragged onto it. The narrator concludes:

they saved him from death, but they did not save him from life (67),

because

he, Jossias … continued the same as before, up alongside the breadline — “Saving someone should be a complete service,” [Jossias] had concluded. “It’s no use lifting someone up and then abandoning them without wanting to know the afterwards of it all” (68).

A more telling comment on aid to Africa, and development funding generally, is hard to imagine.

“The Tale of The Two Who Returned From The Dead” again involves a flood — one so devastating that it obliterates a whole village, “pulled up by its roots” so that “not even the scar of the place remained” (71). It is in this story that the two men who were thought to have drowned, yet return unharmed to the settlement, discover that the greedy village leaders administering flood relief refuse to acknowledge their survival — merely so as to hog more of the handouts to themselves. The truth of oppression dawns like a terrible, poignant, yet funny epiphany (derived from the realities of his own body) on one of the two “drowned” men: “

“Just because we are above, we tread on our feet. That’s how injustice begins in this world. Now in this case, those feet are myself and Luis, ignored, fallen amongst the dust of the river” (74).

The story called “The Girl With A Twisted Future” is one of several in which Couto explores (or, one might say, fiercely yet wryly exposes) the all too prevalent pattern — amongst the wretchedly poor and powerless — of exploitation or victimisation of women, particularly wives and daughters. Here, a father literally malforms his eldest daughter’s body because he believes that she can be “marketed” to make the family rich: “Filomenha would be a contortionist, displayed and advertised along the highways and byways of afar”, the father decides as he “order[s] his daughter” to practise (77). Predictably it all goes horribly wrong, causing Filomenha terrible pain and (eventually) the young girl’s death — the father sublimely unconscious, all the time, that he is killing his child. But the misguided bid for fame and fortune is a sort of protest against the forgottenness of poverty, a state in which

An event is never native. It always comes
from outside, it shakes souls, inflames time
and then beats a retreat. … The world possesses
places where its timeless rotation stops and rests.
This was such a place. (78-79)

The tale titled “So You Haven’t Flown Yet, Carlota Gentina?” is presented in the form of the testimony of an imprisoned madman who murdered his innocently sleeping wife — by pouring boiling water over her to test his insane superstition concerning her supposed witchery. Couto deftly entwines the horrifying black humour of the story with social commentary (in the words of the madman himself):

As it is, even when we’re white, we’re black.
With respect, your honour, you’re black too, let
me tell you. It’s a defect in the race of mankind,
this race of ours which is everybody’s. Our voices,
blind and broken, no longer have authority. We only
give orders to the weak: women and children. Even
they have begun to be slow to obey. The power of a
minion is to make others feel even smaller, to tread on
others just as he himself is trodden on by his superiors.
Crawling, that’s what the job of souls is. (47)

When a man — “Patanhose, the snake mechanic” (85) — openly practises a form of witchery involving creatures (in his case, snakes) he is ostracised, but not destroyed — even though it turns out that he killed his own children by his former wife, the beautiful Chinese woman Mississe (because, in his eyes, they were “Children without any future. Mulatto-Chinese, a race without a race” — [89]). Poverty and its sufferings, in this story as in several others, are exacerbated by the loneliness or psychic isolation caused by oppression and rejection practised within families and marriages. Patanhoca’s ex-wife is described as a “widow” with “Death” as “the only garden around her house, enclosing [her] widow’s despair”, whereas Patanhoca’s control over his snakes is “the art of those who have lost the skill of living” (85). In a comment wonderfully applicable to the collection as a whole, the narrator in this story says:

If I invent, then it’s life that’s to blame. After all, the truth is no more than the mulatto daughter of a dishonest question. (83)

Many of these brief, potent evocations of Mozambican peasant life cannot even be described within the limited length of a piece like the present one. Suffice to say (in conclusion) that Couto’s sophistication as a social and political analyst is hidden, never blatant — as in the story called “The Day Mabata-bata Exploded” (17), a tale that combines in its evocation the brutalities of the rural cattle-herding system (leaving boys uneducated and perennially exploited), and the irresponsibility of warmongers who leave the countryside booby-trapped with landmines. Especially poignant (and well known) is “The Barber’s Most Famous Customer” (105), in which the playful fantasies of the village barber are brutally destroyed by the military system’s need to exhibit “spies” and “infiltrators”.

Altogether, Voices Made Night is a profoundly memorable collection of tales, burning with its author’s fierce political indignation and social conscience, but implicitly castigating, equally, the weaknesses and cruelty of those among the poor who exacerbate their own and others’ sufferings.

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