When it comes to it, we take stock in the middle of our existence and ask ourselves: do we have more yesterdays or more tomorrows? What I wanted was for time to slow down, to stop like the wrecked ship.
One of the various lists of books I’m working through is the twelve greatest African books of the twentieth century. Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land
Couto was born in Mozambique, although unlike the other eleven authors on the list, he’s white. He lived through the country’s independence and the resulting seventeen-year civil war, between the country’s first government, a Soviet-aligned Marxist government that shut all the country’s religious schools, and a pro-democracy guerrilla group, RENAMO. Sleepwalking Land tells the story of that civil war by focusing on its effect on the population, eschewing any depictions of actual warfare.
The novel contains two narratives. One tells the story of a pair of refugees, an old man and a young boy he has saved from a refugee camp, who take up shelter in a burned-out bus, where they find a suitcase containing the notebooks of a dead man whose body was found nearby. The young boy reads the stories in the notebooks to the old man, with unusual consequences for their immediate environs. Those notebooks tell the story of Kindzu, whose life story appears to be part allegory for the history of Mozambique, but with a focus on what has been lost through colonialism, civil war, and corruption. He is guided by a dwarf who came from the heavens to a woman named Farida, who gave up her son to adoption many years earlier and begs Kindzu to try to find him. Kindzu’s search for Gaspar yields the occasional clue but he never seems to get close to his quarry, symbolizing the way innocence, once lost, can’t be regained, but along the way he meets many villagers and acquaintances of Farida, whose stories further depict the horrors of civil war.
Couto’s style makes heavy use of magical realism, while his prose mixes the simple structures of African literature (like Things Fall Apart