Mia Couto: Sleepwalking Land

[Heteronym]

Sleepwalking Land takes place in Mozambique during the civil war and follows the lives of Muidinga, an amnesic boy in search of his past, and the old Tuahir, who found Muidinga, taught him to speak again and protects him from the horrors around them. Together they wander, always looking for shelter and food to help them survive another day.

One day they arrive at a burnt bus by the road and make it their home. Nearby the find the a corpse holding notebooks. The story of these two wanderers becomes a frame story for Kindzu, the author of the notebooks, another victim of the war, who leaves his village to become a naparama, a holy warrior, but becomes involved in trying to find the child of a woman he falls in love with.

Jumping from one story to another, Mia Couto paints a terrifying portrait of a country ravaged by war, famine and senseless cruelty. The everyday of his characters is punctuated with hopelessness, madness, fear, petty schemes to get by, rape, and the disruption of human relationships.

Like in Under the Frangipani, the author decries the death of traditions, the killing of memory and the past, and condemns the inherent corruption of the military regime. Oral traditions are much alive in his novels, whether it be in the magical events mixed with reality, in the way the characters constantly tell stories to each other, or in the way they only seem to derive happiness from the tales, real or imagined, that they share, since dreaming is all they have left to call their own.

I slowly grow fonder of Couto?s lyrical prose with each book I read, with its unpredictable wordplay and fanciful choice of words. Some passages resemble prose poems, asking to be read out loud so their alliteration and harmony can achieve full potential. Although this may be difficult to transpose to another language, Mia Couto deals in ideas and emotions that are so familiar to anyone, that reading a translation would hardly be a loss.

 

[Bjorn]

I stood there and watched the soldiers disappear between the wrecked houses. The air was hot, humid. As I watched the sad parade among the ruins, I thought that those of us who were born in this age where the last survivors. After us, there would be no one left to welcome any more people to the world.

Sleepwalking Land is at once a hell of a nightmare and a dream that won't die, bleary-eyed and clear-sighted. Heteronym's summary is a good one, but there's more to it than the mere plot; the two stories rarely intersect, instead they both seem like dreams of each other, occasionally mirroring or rewriting each other, and the question becomes which is the real one - and the answer, of course, that it may not matter since the thing works on dream logic. Which one's the dreamer (storyteller) and which one is the dream (the story) may not matter.

Which is not to say that either of the stories gets short shift. Both are fully-fledged stories in their own rights, travelling - often by cover of darkness - through a country so torn apart, first by oppression (where people are forced to literally turn into animals) and then by civil war, that the very lines of reality get blurred, several different mythologies and worlds of stories get dumped into the world in bits and pieces. Magic may work, but nobody can be sure what it's going to do anymore. Cause and effect get reversed, like they do in dreams, old truths and idioms get turned upside down.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man loses his eye.

It's a beautiful, horriffic, angry, poetic novel. And I wish I could have read this in the original Portuguese (or "Mozambican" as Couto himself calls his language). ****0+