Couto’s language is enriched by his country’s idioms, voices — and possibilities. “We are still in the process of creating one nation,” he said, made of “different languages, different beliefs.”
MAPUTO, Mozambique — Sipping sparkling water in an upscale neighborhood of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, Mia Couto, arguably the best-known writer in Portuguese-speaking Africa, leaned back to tell the story of the day when words failed him.
It was 1972, and he’d been summoned to formalize his underground ties to the guerrilla movement that had been fighting Portugal for Mozambique’s independence since 1964. He was 17.
“There were maybe 30 people in that room,” he said. “I was the only white guy.” Each person was called forward to deliver a narrative, their “story of suffering,” before a stern-looking, three-man revolutionary committee representing the Mozambique Liberation Front, or Frelimo in its Portuguese acronym. If they were judged to have suffered enough, the committee would welcome them into the inner sanctum of the revolution.
Under a portrait of Samora Machel, a exiled leader of the movement, Couto panicked. He knew his privilege, he said. What suffering did he have to offer? He hatched a plan. He would declare he had suffered because he had seen the suffering of others, he said. But when called, he found he could not speak.
His budding reputation as a poet saved him: The revolution needs its poems, he said he was told.
Unable to narrate himself into the story of Mozambique on that day, Couto has been writing about the country ever since, as if to atone for that original sin. His life has been woven into the history of the nation, and he has become the foremost chronicler of Mozambique’s antiheroes: its women, its peasants, even its dead.
As his characters grapple with violence, isolation and modernity in far-flung corners of the country, the lines of reality can blur, often through magical and otherworldly explanations drawn from folklore, witchcraft and religion.
As Yussuf Adam, an academic who first met Couto in the 1970s, put it: “Mia is a creator of worlds.”
For his work, Couto was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Camões prize, one of the most important literary awards in the Portuguese language, among many others. His most recent work, a novel called “The Drinker of Horizons,” is the last installment of a trilogy about colonialism in Mozambique, and will appear in English on Tuesday, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Couto’s parents emigrated to Mozambique from Portugal in 1953 to escape António Salazar’s fascist regime. He was born two years later, in Beira, a town built on an estuary on the Indian Ocean, and raised in an apartment above an arms dealership.
Growing up in Beira, known then as a conservative town with rigid racial divisions, was a formative experience: “I am still being born there,” said Couto, who also speaks two other Mozambican languages, Sena and Changana (badly, he emphasized.)
Portugal became a land of the imagination, a country that existed only in stories, Couto said.
“I had a need to create a family,” he said, “and that family was Mozambique.”
The overthrow of Salazar’s successors by the Portuguese military in 1974 hastened the independence of several of the country’s colonies in Africa. After a year of fear and turmoil in Lourenço Marques — Maputo’s name at the time — Mozambique became independent in 1975.
Couto remembers feeling at the time like he was living an “epic.” The family would huddle around secret Radio Frelimo broadcasts from Dar es-Salaam, in Tanzania, where Frelimo was founded, listening to the voices of the revolution. At 17, Couto headed to Lourenço Marques.
“I was coming to fight,” Couto said. Active in Frelimo’s underground networks, Couto discussed left-wing politics with other student revolutionaries, recalled Ricardo Santos, a longtime friend.
Couto became a prominent journalist in the newly independent country and was active in ideological debates in Mozambique’s magazines and periodicals. Frelimo, focused on national unity, had adopted Portuguese as the official language, raising the question, for Couto and many others, of whether the language of the former colonial power could be refashioned into a modernizing and revolutionary weapon.
In articles from that era, Couto quoted Machel, the revolutionary leader, who called for making the Portuguese language into “an instrument of combat” for the new Mozambique. While Couto cites as inspiration Brazilian and Angolan writers who also wrote in the language and pushed its boundaries, Couto’s Portuguese is also a product of what was, for a time, a radically left-wing regime. In a free country, Couto and other Mozambican writers believed, the language should also be free.
“We had this very romantic and naïve perception that everything could become new: a new world, a new man,” Couto said.
Couto embraced what became known as “enrichment,” or the idea that the Portuguese language could be reimagined and infused with the potential of the emerging Mozambique. When Couto published his first collection of short stories, “Voices Made Night,” in Maputo in 1986 — and republished it in Portugal the following year — the peppering of Portuguese with slang and words from other Mozambican languages caused a stir. Characters in these short stories, many of which were recently republished in English in a collection called “Sea Loves Me,” speak with voices that are recognizably Mozambican.
In Portugal, critics raved. Couto’s creativity, playfulness and hybridization of standard Portuguese with elements that marked it as uniquely Mozambican make him “a linguistic innovator,” said David Brookshaw, who has been translating Couto’s work since the 1980s.
At home in Mozambique, though, some argued that his style was patronizing and that Mozambicans would never speak that way. Couto’s writing, critics said, was the linguistic exoticism of a Portuguese writer with no lived experience of the characters he imagined.
“He was being attacked by people,” Adam said. “They would say, ‘How can Mia be considered Mozambican?’” Adam added that he still regularly hears such criticism, which casts Couto as an outsider.
The debates share parallels with contemporary discussions in North America about authenticity and appropriation. Couto said he doesn’t let them stop him. “I fought for this country,” he said. “This is the truth.”
Following those restrictions would mean “I would only be allowed to write about myself,” he added. “I cannot be a prisoner of this.”
In “Sands of the Emperor,” his recent trilogy about the colonization of Mozambique, he narrates the Portuguese conquest of the Gaza Kingdom through the eyes of a teenage girl, Imani.
“If I am writing about a woman,” Couto said, “then to be true I must find something or someone inside me that is a woman. It is that exercise that makes this real.”
If revolutionary idealism generated creativity for Couto, then the reality of building a country after the revolution made Couto begin to distance himself from politics. When he published his first work, a poetry collection in 1983, Couto had already become disillusioned with Frelimo.
“We need poetry to stay at the margins, not inside politics, otherwise it is not poetry,” he said. “It should be somewhere between reality and dreams.”
Mozambique had by then careered into a civil war that would last over a decade and kill over one million people. “It changed everything,” Couto said of the war. His disenchantment gave his writing an irony that became a marker of his storytelling.
His breakout novel, “Sleepwalking Land,” which was published in 1992, the year the civil war ended, follows an elderly man and a young boy wandering through a wounded nation trying to make sense of the disasters that have befallen it. It ends without closure.
Couto has found increasing favor in Maputo, where he and two brothers set up a foundation to foster literature and the arts. But despite picking up awards abroad, he was not recognized with the José Craveirinha literary award, the most prestigious in Mozambique, until 2022.
Bringing up Couto’s name still raises, for many of his contemporaries, some of the country’s essential debates: about the role of Portuguese, about the left and how it was abandoned in the mid-1980s, and about identity.
Cracking open a large beer one evening in her garden on the dusty outskirts of Maputo, Paulina Chiziane, one of the first women to publish a novel in independent Mozambique, said that the country’s literary world, like all others, is divided by rivalries and jealousy.
“There are many people on the outside, who begin to think and imagine things,” she said.
“He is white and a man, I am Black and a woman,” she said of Couto, but “we are moving together.”
They are part of the same effort, Chiziane said. “Mozambican literature will come one day, not with me, not with Mia, but one day.”
Couto agrees. “We are building myths,” he said. “This country needs myths to build its own foundations.” He pauses. “We are still in the process of creating one nation; one nation that can bring together these different languages, different beliefs. We are substitutes for the prophets.”
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