I approached one of the books of Mozambican writer Mia Couto.
Mia Couto in your path as a writer you love to write short stories. And often this literary style is considered by many less valid, as opposed to the great novel.
Mia Couto: This is not a concept created by a writer indeed. Are not the authors who think so. It is the market, are publishers. Creating a hierarchy of literary genres is an offense for literature.
You also use these type of stories because it has to do with African culture, an oral tradition of telling stories like these "abessonhadas".
MC: That's true, but it is not decisive. I think everywhere to make stories, all people produce stories and so if I was born in Alaska or South America I would be moved to the same degree to write short stories.
This book is also about hope? Because it was written after the colonial and civil war in Mozambique.
MC: Yes, this is called "abessonhadas” because it is a work that brings the dream and blessing, that's what we dreamed it would. In fact the next twenty years was in 1992 when the civil war ended, there was a very happy period of effective peace. Now, unfortunately, again the dark clouds appear, but I think we will be able to overcome it.
Another characteristic of your books is the language are the new words you invented. I know that is part of the African universe, but when he began writing must have been an impact because inventing words is not easy for publishers, or some public?
MC: In Mozambique there was a reaction, yes. But it was not something done fresh, it was not me who started this process, if the writers did not invent words, invent a way to tell a story that's just them and their own language. I guess I'm not as pioneer because Claudino Vieira had done the same in Angola, or Ascêncio de Freitas in Mozambique, I had many teachers.
The words that you made up are very musical, is on purpose or not?
MC: No, I think it has to do with the poetry that wants to be music.
In these stories there is a lot of magic, extraordinary events, there is an almost parallel to the South American literature, as a rule, European literature, particularly in Portugal, does not have many authors dealing with these issues.
MC: I do not know if that's quite so, but Latin America, Africa and Asia are probably closer, are areas where these culture of orality were not crushed, speaking in metaphors and where people tell stories as easily as if it were a written argument. Has to do with the failure of the imagination of the European writer, it also has to do with a certain predominance of a kind of language over another.
In these stories Abesonhadas you have a favorite?
MC: I do not remember, it is very difficult to say this, but I think the "blind estrelinho" touches me a lot, because more than once blind people spoke like this story moved them, once I was in a center for disables of the war, I do not know is it called so today, and for them "blind estrelinho" is one of their colleagues, it is a story that moves me a lot, because it's like a blind man can "see" many things, is not about disability, it is much that it can be compensated.
