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Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?
The new world, necessarily political, is unreal. We are living the reality of a new suffering world.
Mia Couto has recently been acclaimed as “probably the most original Mozambican writer to date,” a significant figure in the new wave of writers moving away from the “documentary approach” that has characterised Lusophone African literature from its beginnings (Gray 1993).1 In place of the tradition of nineteenth century Western realism upon which this literature has long been dependent, Couto, along with one or two others, has begun developing a new literary language based in the African oral tradition and on African transformations of spoken Portuguese. In Portugal, Couto is said to have acquired a reputation as a writer come in from the fringes to “creolise” the metropolitan mainstream. In Mozambique, he is thought to have successfully integrated into his prose the transition of Portuguese from awesome official language to the kind of flexible medium in which speakers of other languages might find themselves at ease (Gray 1993).
Not the least striking dimension of Couto's originality is what critics have identified as the “peculiar blend of fantasy and reality” which runs through all his fiction. His short stories have been described as “straddling the dividing line between reality and fantasy.” Although ostensibly about the lives of ordinary men and women in today's Mozambique, one critic remarks, the stories are “at once detailed in their account of the realities of daily life and (for the most part) fantastic at their core.” The narrative voice sounds “reassuringly common,”