Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity

Irene Marques

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612491653
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria africana

This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto's collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra ( Stories of the Birth of the Land ) and Saramago's novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis ( The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector's A hora da estrela ( The Hour of the Star ). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the "poor other"), and the female subject. She also discusses the "ahuman other" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this "ahuman other" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.

Part One

The Bolder Politics of Agency

Chapter One

The Politics of Agency in Couto

The language issue in Mozambique

As in many other postcolonial African societies, the so-called language question in Mozambique continues to be much debated, and is perhaps the very question whose real solution is dependent on the finding of a model that would be able to accommodate the various multicultural and multilingual aspects of the country. The 2004 edition of The Ethnologue indicates that there are 38 Bantoid living languages in Mozambique today—apart from the official language, which is Portuguese. The 1997 census indicates that Portuguese is only spoken by 39.6% of the total Mozambican population, and out of that percentage only 6.5% have it as their mother tongue (Governo de Moçambique, II Recenseamento Geral). The 2007 census shows an increase of the population speaking Portuguese, putting it at 55.2% (Governo de Moçambique, Quadros do 3° Censo). This demonstrates a significant change from the 1980 census which, as observed by Firmino, indicated that Portuguese was spoken by only 24.4% of Mozambicans and among those only 1.2% had it as mother tongue (Firmino 120). One can therefore conclude that the official language has become increasingly accessible to a larger number of people. In fact, there has been a considerable number of primary, high school, and postsecondary institution openings in Mozambique in the last few years, again suggesting that the state is making an effort to reach (and Europeanize) a wider number of Mozambicans. The illiteracy rate for 2011 was at 48.1% (“Mozambique”)—a dramatic change when compared to 93% at the time of independence in 1975. All Bantu languages are considered national or Mozambican languages (“línguas nacionais, línguas moçambicanas”) but not official languages and thus all formal education is conducted in Portuguese. There has been, however, a certain willingness on the part of the current government to change, or at least discuss, the education and language policy in Mozambique. For example, a pilot project was conducted between 1993 and 1997 using Bantu languages as mediums of instruction at the primary level in the provinces of Gaza and Tete. As argued by Armando Lopes in “The Language Situation in Mozambique,” such a project was formulated mainly to address the high failure rates of elementary school children who speak Bantu languages at home and only come into contact with Portuguese upon entering the school system—a system using Portuguese as the only medium of instruction. Due to the success of this pilot project and the perception by a large number of Mozambicans of the importance of Bantu languages for the development, maintenance, and promotion of the Mozambican identity, Bantu languages are currently being used in several provinces as teaching media in the primary school system (see “Proposal for Mozambique” and Benson, “Bridging the Experimentation-Implementation in Bilingual Schooling”). Yets this move towards the use bilingualism in elementary school has also been received with some resistance by parents who want their children to be taught in Portuguese, for that is the official language and thus the one seen as the key to open the “right” doors: the way to access good jobs and a higher standard of living. This reaction on the part of the parents only seems to support what Firmino had already argued in his 1995 study of the language question in Mozambique, where he indicated that Portuguese (and in fact a particular type of Portuguese, in many respects close to European Portuguese) is still one of the greatest marks of social status and the tool that allows prospective workers to obtain prestigious and better paid jobs.

The making official of a language that is spoken only by a minority of citizens can cause numerous problems, as several Africanists have already pointed out, Ng

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being one of the most passionate exponents of an Africanist solution to such problems in his well-known book, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Poor access to national resources, such as education and wellpaid jobs by the majority of Africans, pronounced social stratification, and an inability to express genuine “Africanness” in a colonially imposed language, which in many respects does not have the capacity to understand African ways of life, are some of the reasons against the officialization of excolonial languages. Of course, one can also assert all kinds of reasons why these languages are the best suited to become official languages. In the case of the adoption of Portuguese as the official language for independent Mozambique, Gregório Firmino writes:

In independent Mozambique, the Portuguese language has been granted the status of official language, which means that, just like during the colonial period, Portuguese continues to be the only language used in official functions. Besides, Portuguese has also been promoted by official discourse as língua de unidade nacional (language of national unity). The choice of Portuguese as official language and symbol of unity was a predictable outcome given its history of use in Mozambique, the type of linguistic diversity prevailing in the country, the ideological premises related to the type of society conceived for the country, as well as the need to co-opt the elites in the power structure and the bureaucratic institutions of the new state. . . .No indigenous languages could claim an overwhelming majority of speakers evenly distributed over the national territory. . . . However, the most important rationalization behind the officialization of Portuguese . . . is connected with the development of an ideological framework that associated Portuguese with the promotion of national identity and the creation of a national consciousness. . . . This politically strategic decision signalled the first appropriation of Portuguese and consequent expurgation of its colonial connotations. Portuguese, which had been known by Mozambicans as a colonial language, was now serving anti-colonial purposes. (225-26)

Benedict Anderson has claimed that the modern notion of a nation-state does not require that a group of people share the same cultural traits and beliefs and that it suffices for a group of people living in a given territory to identify themselves with the same national language, even in cases where there are several languages being spoken in the same territory, as is most often the case with postcolonial societies. Anderson’s assumption is rightly based on the fact that the notion of nation-state is an ideological and constructed notion molded by sociohistorical contexts. Furthermore, Anderson claims that the notion of modern statehood is highly dependent on the development of capitalism and print technology, which enable people to think about themselves and relate to each other in new ways, a process that then allows people to see or imagine themselves as a unified group of people, as a sort of community. If we take the case of Mozambique, it would then seem that Anderson’s notion of nation-state can fit perfectly. In fact, Anderson even addresses the Mozambican situation: “If radical Mozambique speaks Portuguese, the significance of this is that Portuguese is the medium through which Mozambique is imagined (and at the same time limits its stretch into Tanzania and Zambia). Seen from this perspective, the use of Portuguese in Mozambique (or English in India) is basically no different that the use of English in Australia or Portuguese in Brazil” (134).

In his comprehensive study of the language question in Mozambique, and using Richard Fox’s notion of national ideologies and the production of national cultures, Firmino has argued that Anderson’s notion of nationhood neglects or at least underplays an important point, namely the fact that “a national culture is generated and maintained by agents and agencies, which is to say that the production of nationalism and national cultures is a process rooted in power relationships. So, in the same way that nationalist ideologies and national cultures are practiced, they are not neutral: they are linked to the imposition of social and cultural hegemony, and they encode social inequalities” (24). This point is, of course, of great importance for postcolonial African countries such as Mozambique. Since the rate of illiteracy is still very high in Mozambique, the spread of the so-called notion of nationhood and “imagined community” as identified by Anderson has not yet occurred at the scale desired and needed to make Mozambique a nation-state in the Andersonian sense. In other words, the technological conditions viewed as necessary to modern nation-state formation—such as literacy, mass communication, and industrialization—are not yet in place, and thus the notion of a Mozambican nationhood remains only in the “imagination” of a minority of Mozambicans, while the rest seem to be living in their own communities, speaking their own (many) languages and thus being Makua, Makonde, Shona, Shangaan, and so forth, which can be positive in the sense that it entails at least cultural freedom. For as Firmino argues, meeting the Andersonian conditions for statehood formation in Mozambique also involves entering a notion of nationhood that has been and continues to be controlled, generated, and maintained by Mozambican state agencies and agents and by the small governing bourgeois elite. In fact, since its independence—and particularly until 1985—the Mozambican state acted in very aggressive ways precisely to implement, construct, and impose the notion of a Mozambican nationhood on Mozambicans. As Lee Skjon has argued in his insightful paper, “The Vanguardist Imperative, Statement of Nation, and the Language Question in Mozambique’s Sociedade Nova, 1975-1985,”

At the national level of social organization, Frelimo [Liberation Front of Mozambique] sought to produce a surplus of specific forms of modernist social(ist) values . . . for circulation—namely, rationality, discipline, and moral will. The vanguard’s control of the state and attempt to organize productive forces more “rationally” through socialist modernization was not primarily for the purpose of realizing collective benefit, nor even bureaucratic power or private gain, but rather to realize and circulate ample evidence of the vanguard’s superiority in these values relative to the mass citizen. Validation of this superiority—i.e., realization of surplus—necessitated production of a citizenry assimilated to these values. Schooling provided the means par excellence for this production, and Portuguese, adopted as the official language of national identity and scholastic instruction, served as a ready-made, standardized semiotic medium through which the social(ist) values would circulate. Accordingly, the vanguard embodied the forms and conditions—school programming, literacy campaigns, organization of collective production, villagization, etc.—of the production of the relations of production constituting the national citizen. . . . But since this nationalist form of consciousness remained culturally distinct and alienated from the majority of the state’s citizens, its expression was synecdochic: the identity and values of the assimilado minority stood for national identity, but had not been internalized by the nation’s unassimilated majority. . . . In this sense it is more appropriate to think in terms of postcolonial state-nations [term borrowed from Abrahamsson and Nilsson], rather than nation-states. (Skjon 3-8)

Thus, the Mozambican nation is literally a “statement” put forward by the elite governing the country, a statement that has often little to do with the values and interests of the many Mozambican groups and furthermore, a statement stated in a language that the majority of Mozambique’s people still cannot—or have great difficulty—understanding. As Hubert Devonish would say, the ideal for Mozambique (and other countries in similar circumstances) would be to arrive “at a situation in which the language of specific local communities, regardless of their size, is employed for the whole range of official language functions within these communities” (40). This has been achieved in countries where bilingualism or multilingualism is implemented, for example, Canada and Switzerland, proving that the notion of nation (nationalism) does not necessarily have to be linked to one specific language and culture but that it can include several.

The language that creates, recreates, and rescues

Along with the Angolan Luandino Vieira and the Brazilian Guimarães Rosa—writers he claims to have been influenced by—Mia Couto is one of the most inventive contemporary Lusophone writers and poets and, many would agree, one of the most innovative and refreshing crafters of the Portuguese language. His style is full of linguistic novelties, including the frequent invention of words often resulting from the mixture of verbs and nouns, the reinvention or recreation of Portuguese proverbs, the use of Mozambican proverbs, sayings, and maxims, and even structural changes, where the language patterns of Bantu languages may be detected. It should be noted, however, that Couto’s language does not necessarily reflect the way people speak in contemporary Mozambique and does not resort to the use of Bantu words very often, contrary to that of Luandino Vieira, who frequently uses words of African origin in his writings. As Couto has put it, “I am of Portuguese origin, I am someone who departs from his own mother tongue and I want to prove that that is not an operation of façade, but that within my own language—which is already also a Mozambican language—such operations can be done profoundly, without having recourse to terms of Bantu languages” (“eu sou de origem portuguesa, sou alguém que parte da sua própria língua materna e quero provar que essa não é uma operação de simples fachada, mas que, dentro da minha própria língua—que também já é uma língua moçambicana—estas operações se podem fazer profundamente, sem fazer recurso a termos que são das línguas bantos” [qtd. in Labin 1019]).

Couto’s use of Portuguese language and the manipulation of discourse that goes along with it constitutes a political act—an act that contests, revises, and refutes not only the Portuguese colonial cultural legacy, but also the political regime imposed by the postindependence Mozambican state, and as Phillip Rothwell points out, “the political models of Europe in general” and the “International Community that tries to set the agenda for the country it seeks to render independent” (172):

Couto has always demonstrated an awareness of Portuguese and, more generally, Western influence on his work. Rather than recusing such influence, he understands and then distorts it. He disrupts the paradigms of Western orthodoxy as he fashions identity by turning European epistemology into a raw, repackageable material. Couto’s propensity to dissolve boundaries [is] apparent, particularly those frontiers that enforce the demarcations of Western tradition. The resultant identity he writes is premised on fluidity, and challenges the rigidity of the systems, both colonial and Marxist, imported from Europe that have dominated Mozambique for most of its history. In the latter phase of his writing, his disavowal of the postmodern project, through an attack on the International Community’s invasion of Mozambican sovereignty, logically completes the postmodern and the nationalist strands in his work. He can justifiably be termed a postmodern nationalist. (28)

Couto is able to recreate (to write) a more balanced Mozambican identity, where the values of the different Mozambican ethnic groups are recognized as being important and given a place to flourish. Given the fact that proverbs, maxims, and sayings are deeply rooted in the oral culture from which they issue, and since they are in fact considered axiomatic truths, Couto’s challenge of Portuguese proverbs and the insertion of Mozambican proverbs in his writing constitute further indication of his deep desire to rescue Mozambican cultural identities and epistemologies, which have been endangered by the long colonial presence and, in many respects, also by the postcolonial regime that followed independence, a regime which valued scientific knowledge and perceived reality utilizing a rather strict, Marxist materialist model. Such a rescuing is undoubtedly very important for a country like Mozambique, where orality has always played (and continues to play) a central role in defining and understanding the general cultural framework. Moreover, Couto’s stylistic innovations can in fact serve to illustrate how the Portuguese language in Mozambique is going through a process which Gregório Firmino has termed as “nativization” (10), “Mozambicanization” (308), or even “endogenization” (198), a process similar to what has happened in many other postcolonial societies with the emergence of the now familiar new Englishes.

In an introductory note to Contos we are told that the stories included in the collection were published in 1996 and 1997 in various newspapers and magazines and then were altered in some ways to be published (with other additional new stories) in the current collection. The note also indicates that the stories are based on the Mozambican quotidian. This supports the idea that the stories do indeed display the current cultural dilemmas affecting Mozambique, a nation struggling to forge a postcolonial identity that is respectful towards the many Mozambican ethnic groups and their epistemologies and ways of life. Couto’s stories are generally characterized by a great emphasis on the traditional precolonial African ways of life and epistemologies mentioned earlier: myth, orature, different cosmogonies, conceptions of time, the interrelation between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and animistic and holistic perceptions of life, where humans, nature, and the universe at large are connected in deep ways and often not perceived as separate entities. For similar and detailed arguments about the multifaceted poetics and narrativistic strategies used by Mia Couto to recover the old Mozambican ways, see also Selina Martins, O Entrelaçar das Vozes Mestiças, Anita Martins Rodrigues de Moraes, O Inconsciente Teórico, and Maria N. Soares Fonseca and Maria Zilda Ferreira Cury, Mia Couto: Espaços Ficcionais ). The characters of the stories are often people who live in rural areas—these constitute the vast majority of Mozambique’s citizens—or people who do not adhere completely to and show resistance towards the assimilation of Western cultural values brought about by both the colonization and postcolonization processes. This suggests that indeed Couto wants to show (display) the rural side of Mozambique, the side less touched by Western cultural values, less touched by the colonization and postcolonization processes: the endogenic or internal side of Mozambican cultures (see also Luís Madureira 175-205).

Although we get the sense that the characters of Couto’s stories live in the colonial or postcolonial present, since there are many references to those historical time frames, be they implicit or explicit, we often sense a strong resistance to those historical realities on the part of the characters. That resistance is frequently accompanied by a sense of loss, a feeling of nostalgia or a confusion (an existential nausea of sorts), which suggest that the characters live in a time of deep cultural crisis, in a society that is robbing them of what they value most and what their ancestors have believed for thousands of years. This feeling might be similar to what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner calls “a kind of vertigo in living” (qtd. in Chamberlin 80) felt by the Aborigines of New Guinea as a result of land displacement and cultural impositions brought about by the colonization process. There is in Contos and in much of Couto’s other fictional writing a feeling that the revolution that brought about colonial independence for Mozambique has failed to create a country where all voices can be heard—and thus we often encounter characters that want to recover an “old time” (“um antigamente”) that gives them the identity and fulfillment they crave, or at least its promise. There is in the current postcolonial condition a painful apathy, a death of spirit, and thus one yearns for the force of a dream to awaken us, like in the times of the anticolonial struggle when Mozambicans were fighting—their hearts and soul in pure expectation—the colonialist masters, having as their ultimate vision a better nation, free of the shackles of oppression which could fulfill their soul and make them feel at home. As Madureira explains,

In Couto’s novels, which (in Patrick Chabal’s apt definition) are “much more explicitly about the history of independent Mozambique, and in this way touch more directly. . . . on the calamity of its postcolonial condition” . . . this promise of a new Mozambique has become a memory. It has reverted to a nostalgic desire for precisely the “ancient dreams”—“the rebellious dreams [sonhos de revolta] which [as Jorge Rebelo proclaims at the time of the armed struggle] you, your parents and your forefathers nourished in silence”—the very aspirations to which the war of liberation itself (“dreams turned into war”) was to give expression, and “awaken like birds.” (217-18)

Couto places the following message in his introduction to Contos:

It is not the light of the sun that we lack. For millions of years the big star has been illuminating the earth and despite that we have not really learned how to see. The world needs to be seen under another light: the moonlight, that clarity that falls with respect and tenderness. Only the moonlight reveals the feminine side of beings. Only the moon reveals the intimacy of our terrestrial dwelling place. It is not the rising of the sun that we need. We lack the birth of the land.

Não é da luz do sol que carecemos. Milenarmente a grande estrela iluminou a terra e, afinal, nós pouco aprendemos a ver. O mundo necessita ser visto sob outra luz: ...