Mia Couto and the enchantment of rain
In his preface to Rain and Other Stories, Mia Couto refers to the remaking of the world following the Mozambican civil war: ‘we soak our faces in this rain of hope, this water of benedreamtion’. Pluvial rain, as Nuttall terms it, can bring huge destruction, as can drought, its absence. Scholars have...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | Afrikaans |
| Published: |
AOSIS
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Literator |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/2087 |
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| Summary: | In his preface to Rain and Other Stories, Mia Couto refers to the remaking of the world following the Mozambican civil war: ‘we soak our faces in this rain of hope, this water of benedreamtion’. Pluvial rain, as Nuttall terms it, can bring huge destruction, as can drought, its absence. Scholars have insisted on the agency of water, including African ecocritics who argue for an ‘animist conception of the world’ which transposes and transgresses boundaries and identities. Garuba specifically refers to the ‘persistent re-enchantment of the world’ whereby the ‘rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical’. This article explores the range of roles, agentic and enchanted, which Couto accords rain in his stories. Although he rejected the label ‘magic realist’, his translator Chabal argues that in his stories the fantastic ‘transmutes the fictitious into the factual’ so that ‘all boundaries are put into question’: between past and present, far and near, material and spiritual. And he seeks to regain the ‘brotherhood’, the ‘relation’, the ‘link between nature and humanity’. Ashcroft says Couto’s vision as a writer is to ‘give back to the word its divine power … the power to enchant things, be these trees, birds, or landscapes’. Samuelson too claims that Couto’s stories ‘invoke an enlivening ecocritical method’ that draws readers into a ‘sacred web’, an ‘indivisible body, an ‘interconnected world’. While the notion of enchantment is not unproblematic, the interconnections it entails between human and environment, material and spiritual, generate a receptive matrix in which to understand and recognise the agency of rain.
Contribution: This article engages with ecocritical readings of the stories of Mia Couto by examining his treatment of rain and his approach to the issue of enchantment. It thus contributes to criticism of his work as well as to the growing field of ecocriticism in this country. |
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| ISSN: | 0258-2279 2219-8237 |