A Companion To João Paulo Borges Coelho Rewriting The (Post) Colonial Remains (Reconfiguring Identities in The... (Elena Brugioni (Editor) Etc

Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse,
and Paulo de Medeiros (eds)
A Companion to
João Paulo Borges
Coelho
Rewriting the (Post)Colonial Remains
Peter Lang
RECONFIGURING IDENTITIES IN THE
PORTUGUESE-SPEAKING WORLD
‘This companion to João Paulo Borges Coelho’s historical and fictional work, the
first of its kind in English, represents an inestimable and decisive contribution to
scholarship on the work of one of the most prominent writers from Mozambique.
It will be an indispensable help in teaching any of Borges Coelho’s works and in
addressing their postcolonial political dimension.’
— Professor Jerónimo Pizarro, University of the Andes, Colombia
‘Since 2003, Mozambican author João Paulo Borges Coelho has produced a
rich corpus of fiction that delivers a nuanced portrait of his country’s past and its
present. This comprehensive volume, which includes an English translation of one
of his stories, performs an invaluable service by situating Borges Coelho’s work in
a national and transnational context. The various theoretical approaches presented
here successfully establish Borges Coelho as one of the leading contemporary
authors of the Portuguese-speaking world.’
— Professor Ellen W. Sapega, University of Wisconsin – Madison
This companion offers a critical overview of a great part of the literary oeuvre of the
acclaimed Mozambican writer and historian João Paulo Borges Coelho. It focuses on
a multiplicity of elements central to his literary project, underscoring the originality
and complexity of one of the most prominent authors from the Portuguese-speaking
world. With contributions from scholars hailing from different academic disciplines
including history, this collection offers a compelling and original reading of Borges
Coelho’s fictional work, engaging with current critical debates in the fields of literary
theory, postcolonial studies, world-literature, and eco-criticism. The book advances
new critical paths within Portuguese-speaking literary studies from a comparative
perspective. At the same time it is addressed to a variety of scholars and advanced
students in other, related fields.
Elena Brugioni is Assistant Professor in African literatures and postcolonial theory

in the Department of Literary Theory at the University of Campinas (Brazil) and
Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Literary Theory and History at Unicamp.
Orlando Grossegesse is Professor of German and Comparative Literary Studies at
the Institute of Arts and Humanities at the University of Minho (Braga).
Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the
University of Warwick.
www.peterlang.com
A Companion to João Paulo
Borges Coelho
P O R T U G U E S E - S P E A K I N G W O R L D
Edited by
Paulo de Medeiros and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
Vol. 14
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
and Paulo de Medeiros (eds)
A Companion to João
Paulo Borges Coelho
Rewriting the (Post)Colonial

Remains
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brugioni, Elena, editor. | Grossegesse, Orlando, editor. | Medeiros, Paulo de, 1958- editor.
Title: A companion to João Paulo Borges Coelho : rewriting the (post)colonial remains / edited by
Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse and Paulo de Medeiros.
Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019057274 (print) | LCCN 2019057275 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781787079861 (paperback) | ISBN 9781787079878 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781787079885 (epub) | ISBN 9781787079892 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Coelho, João Paulo Borges—Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PQ9939.C64 Z65 2019 (print) | LCC PQ9939.C64 (ebook) |
DDC 869.3/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057274
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057275
Cover image: Tommaso Rada.
Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 2235-0144
ISBN 978-1-78707-986-1 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-987-8 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-78707-988-5 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-989-2 (mobi)
© Peter Lang AG 2020
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
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oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com
Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse, and Paulo de Medeiros have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.
All rights reserved.
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This publication has been peer reviewed.
Contents
Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse, and

Paulo de Medeiros
Introduction 1
João Paulo Borges Coelho: A Short Biography 9
João Paulo Borges Coelho

1 The Enchanted Cloth 11
Paolo Israel
2 The Archive and the Fable: Trajectory of a Mozambican
Historian 37
Nazir Ahmed Can

3 Poetics and Politics of Memory: Notes on João Paulo Borges
Coelho’s Novels 69
Ana Mafalda Leite

4 Narratives of the Indian Ocean in the Writing of João Paulo
Borges Coelho: A Transnational Geography 91
Rui Gonçalves Miranda

5 History, Literature, and the Indices of the Ocean: Force of
Signification in Borges Coelho’s ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ 107
vi Contents
Jessica Falconi
6 The Tourism Imaginary in Hinyambaan 131
Orlando Grossegesse
7 A Parody of Final Redemption: The Uses of Geopolitical
Fiction in O Olho de Hertzog 151
Elena Brugioni
8 Of Clues, Traces, and Minor Histories: Theorizing the Genre
of Historical Novel in Rainhas da Noite 179
Emanuelle Santos
9 Towards a World-Literary Aesthetics of Postcolonial
Memory: Rainhas da Noite by João Paulo Borges Coelho 203
Paulo de Medeiros
10 The Drowning of Time: Ecological Catastrophe, Dialectics,
and Allegorical Realism in João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Ponta
Gea and Água: Uma novela rural 219
Notes on Contributors 249
Index 255
and Paulo de Medeiros
Introduction
This book proposes a critical overview of the literary work published by

the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho. It focuses on different
aspects of his biography and literary project and underscores the ori-
ginality and complexity of one of the most prominent authors from the
Portuguese-speaking world.
With the contribution of scholars from different academic contexts
and fields of study in the Humanities, the volume offers a compelling and
original reading of Borges Coelho’s historical and fictional work, engaging
with current critical debates in the fields of comparative literatures, literary
theory, and postcolonial studies, and therefore puts forward new critical paths
within the Portuguese-speaking literary field, as well as comparative insights
for scholars and students of the Humanities at large. The book represents the
first monograph published in English1 dedicated to the fictional work of João
Paulo Borges Coelho, and therefore an important bibliographical source for
scholars from the Anglophone world, offering new comparative possibilities
within the fields of Lusophone literary studies and African literatures.
Considering the increasing academic interest in Borges Coelho’s lit-
erary work, especially within Portuguese-speaking contexts, but also in
Anglophone and Francophone universities, we believe that this publication
will fill an important gap, as well as hopefully contributing to the dissem-
ination of Borges Coelho’s literary work in English-speaking contexts. In
this regard, the short story ‘O pano encantado’ [The Enchanted Cloth],2
1 There are already two books published in Portuguese entirely dedicated to the
literary work of João Paulo Borges Coelho: Nazir Ahmed Can, Discurso e poder
nos romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho (Maputo: Alcance Editores, 2014), and
Sheila Khan, Sandra Sousa, Leonor Simas-Almeida, Isabel A. Ferreira Gould and
Nazir Ahmed Can, eds, Visitas a João Paulo Borges Coelho: leituras, diálogos e futuros
(Lisboa: Colibri, 2017).
2 Included in Índicos indícios – Setentrião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005).
2 Elena Brugioni et al.
translated by David Brookshaw, that opens the volume gives the reader
a taste of the valuable and original literary project developed by Borges
Coelho, whose translation into English will undeniably add an important
voice to the polyphony of the Portuguese-speaking literary canon already
published in English, and possibly promote new critical readings of Borges
Coelho, such as the one recently consolidated by the Warwick Research
Collective on World-Literature.3
A publication composed by a selection of essays by diverse hands always
and inevitably raises many problems and questions, particularly when the
aim is crossing linguistic, academic and editorial boundaries, involving
scholars usually working in a field still deeply defined by its linguistic iden-
tity, and therefore posing a number of issues: from the scarcity of resources
dedicated to the translation of academic essays, to personal or professional
impediments or the challenge of publishing a book on an author barely
known in English-speaking contexts. Therefore, as usual, the final result
is not quite that which had been initially conceived and discussed by us
when the project was initiated. Yet, in spite of, or rather thanks to, the
many changes and adjustments the project underwent along the way, the
book represents what we view as a strong contribution to scholarship on
the work of João Paulo Borges Coelho. For this we would like to express
our deep and sincere gratitude to the authors who willingly accepted to
join the project, honouring with their contributions a writer and a person
that we all hold in high regard.
***
If the literary work of João Paulo Borges Coelho does not provide easy
answers, neither does it pose uncomplicated questions. As shown by the
chapters in this volume, the author and his work hardly fit the established
labels that frequently shape the language of our time, especially within
an academic context. Since 2003, Borges Coelho has published eleven
books – seven novels, a collection of short stories, and three novellas –
all deeply engaged with different moments and places of Mozambican
3 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-

Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Introduction 3
history and territory, as well as clearly open to global historical events and
transnational cultural networks.4 In this regards, it is worth addressing
the literary corpus of the author in order to highlight the variety that
characterizes this literary project.
As duas Sombras do Rio [The Two Shadows of the River]5 – the
author’s first literary work – is a novel that deals with a peculiar moment
of Mozambican history, its so-called civil war, and is set in the emblematic
space of the Zambezi region and the Zumbo district. The book offers a
compelling and original narrative regarding the cultural environment that
characterizes the region, addressing the violent impact of the war on the
different communities that inhabit the region, and focusing on cultural
practices, knowledge and beliefs that define the very identity of the people
and the world around the Zambezi River.
The author’s second novel, As visitas do Dr. Valdez [The visits of
Dr Valdez],6 is a masterful postcolonial parody – a brilliant example of
mimicry as theorized by Homi K. Bhabha – set in the city of Beira, where
two old settlers ladies lost their personal doctor, who would be replaced
by their black servant in order to disguise the changes of times which all
the characters are about to experience. The novel depicts all contradictions
and ambiguities of a moment of transition, lived in a private space, and
therefore repositions the relation between the colonial past and the post-
independent era beyond the rhetoric of opposition. The book won the
literary Prize José Craveirinha, consecrating the author inside and outside
the ‘republic of letters’ in Portuguese.
Índicos Indícios I – II Setentrião e Meridião [Indian Ocean Traces –
North and South]7 is the first collection of short stories published by Borges
4 The author has published also three books of graphic novels: Akapwitchi Akaporo –
armas e escravos (1981), No tempo do Farelahi (1984) and Namacurra (1984), all
currently out of print. Borges Coelho’s literary work is published in Portugal by
Editorial Caminho and in Maputo by Editora Ndjira, the Mozambican publishing
house of Caminho.
5 João Paulo Borges Coelho, As duas Sombras do Rio (Lisboa: Caminho, 2003).
6 João Paulo Borges Coelho, As visitas do Dr. Valdez (Lisboa: Caminho, 2004).
7 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios I – Setentrião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005);
João Paulo Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios II – Meridião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005);
João Paulo Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios I – II (Maputo: Ndjira, 2006).
Coelho, and offers an emblematic intersection between the Mozambican

territory and history within the complex network of the Indian Ocean
space-time, addressed in each short story as the paradigmatic index for a
maritime dimension of the Mozambican national context.
In 2006, the author published Crónica da Rua 513.2 [Chronicle of Street
513.2],8 a novel set in an unnamed street of Maputo (Lourenço Marques,
during the colonial era), depicted as an exemplary place, inhabited by the
ghosts of the past and where in the present real people struggle to make
sense of colonial memories and transformations of the post-independent
time. This is a brilliant metonymic narrative articulating the tension be-
tween space and time within a postcolonial political dimension.
In 2007, his fourth novel Campo de Trânsito [The Transit Camp]9 was
published. A work inspired by the re-education camps established by the
first Frelimo government in order to educate people and build the New
Man, the novel also addresses power relations and bio-political issues, of-
fering an inspiring narrative concerning the ‘camp’ as an aesthetic paradigm
for contemporary literary writing.
The first of the three novellas is Hinyambaan. Novela burlesca
[Hinyambaan. Burlesque novella] (2008).10 Its title is a parody of the South
African pronunciation of Hinhambane – the touristic city 300 kilometres
north of Maputo. It depicts a trip undertaken by a South African white
family who, during their holidays, are befallen with several incidents, in
an ironic take on the misunderstandings between Mozambicans and their
South African neighbours.
O Olho de Hertzog [The Eye of Hertzog]11 is possibly the first openly
historical novel published by the author, counterpointing different his-
torical events and characters in the scenario of Lourenço Marques (today
Maputo) in the aftermath of the First World War in East Africa. The book
won the LEYA International Literary Prize in 2009, and was welcomed by
critics as one of the new masterpieces of Mozambican literature.
8 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Crónica da Rua 513.2 (Lisboa: Caminho, 2006).
9 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Campo de Transito (Lisboa: Caminho, 2007).
10 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Hinyambaan. Novela Burlesca (Lisboa: Caminho, 2008).
11 João Paulo Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog (Alfragide: Leya, 2010).
Introduction 5
In 2011, the author published his second novella, Cidade dos Espelhos.
Novela futurista [City of Mirrors. Futuristic novella],12 a dystopian narrative
that deploys a post-human and post-apocalyptic atmosphere and proposes
a fierce critique to contemporary political regimes, inside and outside the
Mozambican context.
Rainhas da Noite [Queens of the Night],13 a novel published in 2013,
is set in the small mining city of Moatize during the so-called period of
late colonialism (1950). It addresses the living experience of three women
and their interaction with the local community, offering an original meta-
critical discourse regarding the workings of history and memory within a
postcolonial context.
Água. Uma novela rural [Water. A Rural Novella]14 is the last of the
three novellas published by the author, and possibly the work in which the
eco-critical dimension of Borges Coelho’s literary writing became more
explicit, offering, at the same time, an original reflection regarding the very
concept of modernity within the periphery of the Mozambican nation.
Ponta Gea [Cape Gea],15 his most recent novel, is a hybrid narrative
that intersects the aesthetics of short narrative forms with the sub-genre of
memoirs. The city of Beira – and its peculiar political and cultural envir-
onment within Mozambique – is used to represent and remember a kind
of micro-cosmos of the country’s political and social life.
***
Although this volume does not pretend to cover all works published by
Borges Coelho, it does propose different critical approaches in order to
highlight the multiplicity of readings and reflections inspired by his lit-
erary project.
Before dealing with literature, Paolo Israel offers a narrative appraisal
of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s trajectory as a historian, in the broader
context of knowledge production in socialist Mozambique. Following the
12 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Cidade dos Espelhos. Novela futurista (Lisboa: Caminho,
2011).
13 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite (Lisboa: Caminho, 2013).
14 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Água. Uma novela rural (Lisboa: Caminho, 2016).
15 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea (Lisboa: Caminho, 2017).
articulations of intellectual biography, the chapter focuses especially on his

engagements with the history of the liberation struggles and its archives,
underlining his unique position analysing the role of the liberation ‘fable’
in Mozambican collective memory, and at the same time observing his
shift to fiction as a possible disenchantment with the discourse of history
itself. The chapter by Nazir Ahmed Can presents an overview of the art-
istic project proposed by Borges Coelho, demonstrating how his literary
work finds its unity through the combination of regularity and experimen-
tation, an unusual blend in the literary scene. Starting from the diversifi-
cation of times, spaces, people, and narrative stances, opposing the rigid
vision of established powers, the author interprets the silences of official
historiography and expands the horizon of local memory. By looking at
his first novels, Nazir Ahmed Can analyses the way these options enable,
on the one hand, a clever reading about violence and, on the other, an act
of aesthetic renovation in Mozambican literature.
Ana Mafalda Leite discusses the importance of narrative as a cultural
element of transit that entwines the shores of the Indian Ocean, creating
a specific geography between the coastline and the islands. Her chapter
demonstrates how that transit is charted in Borges Coelho’s writings and
how it interweaves two different types of Indian Ocean topographical
representation: the descriptive meta-narrative of historical origin and the
literary-fictional narrative, which lies at the intersection of myth and history.
A fragmentary geography of the Indian Ocean, built in different narratives,
is thus mapped onto the creative multiplicity of the Mozambican author.
Rui Gonçalves Miranda analyses the short narratives of Índicos Indícios
(2005) shedding light on the ways in which the indexes and traces of the
Indian Ocean both historicize and storify political alternatives. The rep-
resentations of law and democracy – the force of and the enforcing of law
( Jacques Derrida) – in short stories such as ‘Casas de Ferro’ [Iron houses]
and ‘A Força do Mar de Agosto’ [The strength of the sea in August] high-
light the way in which literature performs (‘as literature’) an always already
political role beyond denouncing and/or engagement ( Jacques Rancière).
The ‘Indian Ocean’, both as social-political method and as literary device,
presents no escapist route; rather, it stresses the tension and conflict under-
writing a ‘within’ which is without defined borders or propriety. In the
Introduction 7
short stories, the ‘sea’ demands and performs a logic other to the ‘law of
the land’, thus enabling us to resist authoritarianism in the present and to
project beyond a preordained future. Jessica Falconi looks at the novella
Hinyambaan (2008), focusing on the representation of tourist practices
and exploring the tourist gaze16 performed by the South African characters,
as well as their ideas of nature and culture, mainly based on prejudices and
stereotypes about Mozambique and Mozambican people. Conversely, the
description of the cultural encounter and interaction between the South
African family and the ‘native’ Mozambican character Djika-Djika, and his
family, display a powerful representation of a contact zone, as theorized by
Mary Louise Pratt, where the gaze becomes mutual. Finally, this chapter
explores the role of material culture – objects, food, drinks, etc. – in the
construction of the tourist gaze, as well as in the representation of cultural
interaction. Orlando Grossegesse analyses the novel O Olho de Hertzog
(2010), observing how Borges Coelho rewrites the past. Starting with
Linda Hutcheon’s category of historiographic metafiction, the chapter deals
with the specific parody of teleological construction of history, which not-
ably contributes to the critical cosmopolitanism of this novel. A peculiar
spacetime (David Harvey) on the periphery of colonial empires lends an
ex-centric perspective on traditional Eurocentric historiography. Therefore,
a comparison with Imperium (2012), a novel by the Swiss author Christian
Kracht, sheds light on the uses of geopolitical fiction in partly overlapping
periods since 1902 to the immediate aftermath of the First World War.
O Olho de Hertzog goes clearly beyond repositioning Mozambican colo-
nial identity in the beginning of the twentieth century, aiming towards a
self-reflexive or even self-ironical positioning within twenty-first-century
transnational world literature.
Elena Brugioni, through a reading of the novel Rainhas da Noite (2013),
proposes a reflection regarding conceptual constellations – traces, clues,
archive, and witness – that appear to be crucial in the novel, as well as in
Borges Coelho’s literary project. Addressing literary writing as a practice
of critical and epistemological formulation and reflection, a number of sig-
nificant clues occur, defining the novel as a place of production of historical
16 John Urry, and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011).
and philosophical knowledge that become crucial for the creation of a

‘cultural memory’ in Mozambique. Emanuelle Santos discusses the ways in
which Borges Coelho’s widely acknowledged talent creates literary works
that conjugate the global and the local, being able to illuminate the connec-
tion between postcolonial memory and world-literature. In her reading of
the novel Rainhas da Noite, she argues that the nuanced representation of
colonialism through memory operates a critique of postcolonial societies
which is inherently transnational and systemic.
In the closing chapter, Paulo de Medeiros proposes a critical approach
to the two novels Ponta Gea (2016) and Água: Uma novela rural (2017).
According to Medeiros, the latest novel Ponta Gea means an intense process
of working through memory that starts by positing memory itself as water.
On the other hand, Água reflects on the contradictions of Mozambican
society as it undergoes rapid and drastic changes related both to mod-
ernity and to climate change. Both texts draw on some of the author’s
established preoccupations, themes and images, focused on the crucial
function of water. Not only in terms of their content, but also due to their
formal experimentations, these novels constitute daring interventions in
Mozambican and Lusophone literature. The essay discusses them in terms
of their engagement with ecological issues, dialectics, memory, and tech-
nology. At the same time, Medeiros analyses the novels’ aesthetic aspects,
from the question of (magical) realism to the various processes of allegor-
izing deployed.
João Paulo Borges Coelho: A Short Biography
João Paulo Borges Coelho is a Mozambican writer and historian. He

studied History at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo and got
his PhD in Economic and Social History at the University of Bradford
(UK). He has been Professor of Mozambican and African History at the
University Eduardo Mondlane for over thirty years, and he is now retired.
Born in 1955, Borges Coelho spent his childhood between the Ibo
Island and the small mining village of Moatize. Later, he moved with his
family to the city of Beira, in the central region of Mozambique, where he
lived until the beginning of the War of Independence. During this period,
he moved to Portugal to study at the University of Lisbon. He did not con-
clude his studies in Portugal, and he ‘never really felt at home’ in Lisbon.
In 1975, after the Carnation Revolution of April 1974, he caught an ‘empty
plane’ to Mozambique, and returned to Maputo, where he has lived, since
then, with his wife and family.1
1 The quotations are from the autobiographical article published by João Paulo
Borges Coelho, ‘Uma Sucessão de lugares’, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, 1020
(November 2009), 14–17.
João Paulo Borges Coelho
1
The Enchanted Cloth
One has to cross the bridge to get to Mozambique Island. A narrow,

metal, almost endless bridge that takes us from the mainland to the other
side. As always, there are those who view the island warily, and others for
whom it is the centre of the world, and who regard the other side as wil-
derness. Whatever the case, and no matter what each one calls it, it is the
bridge that contains all the mystery, for by joining the two sides, it also
makes us remember we are separated. Without a bridge, it would be a
whole world in itself; with it, the Island became an island, a closed space
that one can only enter or leave by crossing the bridge. As on all islands,
its inhabitants are ill at ease, sometimes viewing the mainland with scorn,
other times with desire. Never, on the other hand, deciding to venture
into it.
Jamal, the tailor, is also uneasy, sitting on his ageless blackwood stool in
that ancient room with its thick walls, split down the middle by the crude
shaft of daylight bursting in through the door, like a knife cleaving open
flesh. And as the day progresses, the knife stirs around in the dark wound,
the patches of shade move, while Jamal both seeks them and avoids them;
avoiding the light to seek out the cool, moving into the light so that he can
see what he is doing on his Singer, it too ageless, his calloused feet pedal-
ling to make it purr and, in so doing, sewing the cloth he is working with.
Or rather, it is to see what he is doing on Mr Rashid’s Singer, for he is
the owner of the The Year 2000 Tailor’s Shop, an enterprise with a future
name that has already passed. That is the problem with dates when they
are given a name designed to induce in us a sensation that they are bea-
cons showing us the way to a purpose. As if they were cutting up real time
when, in truth, they are merely slicing up the time we have in our own
subconscious. How good it would be if it were so straightforward, taking
its time over our periods of pleasure, making our pain quick; the future is
12 João Paulo Borges Coelho
what lies ahead, the past is what is over and done with. Sadly, though, it is
not like that on this island, where the relationships established between
things and time are more than mysterious.
Mr Rashid, for example, one day decided that by calling his establish-
ment The Year 2000 Tailor’s Shop, his business would bear all the signs
of an enterprise of the future, thus demonstrating in concrete terms, how
things would be when we reached that still distant date, but which he
could already glimpse.
That’s how it will be when we enter the new millennium, he said,
every business flourishing just as my business here is already flourishing.
And it was not just his own tailor’s that gained a fine air, but it passed
this on to the immediate neighbourhood and to the whole Island. 2000. The
future. Time, however, ran swiftly, the end of the old millennium was fast
approaching, its final year turned as inconspicuously as all the others, the
only difference being that with this year’s passing, The Year 2000 Tailor’s
Shop could at last become what it was intended to be, a tailor’s shop taking
pride of place in the appropriate year. But afterwards, the same ceaseless
passage of time, accelerated away towards the future, in such a way that
the meaning with which Mr Rashid had once sought to endow his pro-
ject, became inverted. The future was now in the past, and the formerly
promising Year 2000 Tailor’s Shop sank into stagnation if not outright
decay, thus proving our naivety, as if what was to come could be ordered
up and were not the whim of whoever commands us and regulates time.
So much so that behind that heavy old door, there flows a future in the
past, the result of Mr Rashid’s ingenuity rather than ours, given that the
idea and initiative were his.
Or maybe not. For nowhere, no matter how hard we look, do we find
any written record of The Year 2000 Tailor’s Shop. There is no sign, no
panel, not even a sheet of headed notepaper with its name on it, ordered
from some modest printer’s in Nampula. We know that this is the name
of the business only because Mr Rashid approached us as we walked past,
and spoke to us in an undertone, as if he were confiding a secret:
Come in, dear customer, this is The 2000 Tailor’s Shop, we make
clothes for men, women, children, we do repairs – just like someone talking
about a restorative – repairs, hems, we take items in and let them out, so that
whether you are putting on weight or slimming down – usually slimming
The Enchanted Cloth 13
down, for here, only the sick grow fat – the customer can remain loyal to
the clothes he is wearing.
And Mr Rashid goes on and on, like a drone buzzing through the air
next to our ears:
I’ve made suits for many important Portuguese, politicians, company
directors, meaning here that he can also make them for us, who are more
mundane, lacking the air of a politician or a director, with a regular body,
so easy to measure.
I can even tell you straight off, without the need for a tape measure,
what your waist measurements are, your chest and thighs, your inside leg
measurements, as well as those between your ankle and your hip; would
you care to take a bet?
All this uttered by word of mouth, nothing written down. Just like the
opening hours, which are spoken, sometimes opening at seven, sometimes at
eleven, and closing at the end of the day or when night has fallen. Moreover,
if necessary, if we are in urgent need, there will be no problem whatsoever,
for all Mr Rashid needs to do is to have a little word with Jamal, and he
will go on stitching our things late into the night, by the light of a lamp,
pedalling on the Singer as it purrs away, guiding the cloth with his hands,
following the lines that Mr Rashid has drawn with his smooth triangle of
blue chalk, the lines that synthesize the whims of our body, the area of cloth
that we shall occupy, a curve here, another one a little further on, leaving
thoughtful nips or prudent tucks so that we may, as far as is possible, pre-
sent ourselves in the way we desire. At the moment, everything is laid out
smooth and flat. But we shouldn’t worry, it’s a provisional stage, and there
will be no one better than Jamal to understand the curlicues that Mr Rashid
has left on the cloth. He will align some of the contours next to the needle,
so that they can be stitched; he will ignore others, dead-ends that he won’t
follow, for they are signs that a more radical treatment is needed there, an
operation that Mr Rashid will carry out with the help of his dark, heavy
scissors. These other lines drawn differently seem to be saying:
Caution required! A needle and thread aren’t enough here, what this
needs is amputation!
Mr Rashid applies the razor-sharp scissors, which cut the smooth cloth
with a velvety rasp – a bit of a turn to one side, a bit to the other, useful or
useless for various purposes of which we are ignorant – and a shiver runs
through us, as if the scissors, while cutting the cloth, were cutting through
us, and Mr Rashid smiles, touched by our concern.
Don’t worry, dear customer, for what I am severing now is to be re-
attached afterwards in a new and necessary fashion, don’t worry, for I shan’t
leave your legs severed from your trunk. Everything that I’m separating now
is to be joined later in this new and necessary fashion, in such a way that
you can leave here, bearing the same cloth you brought in when it was flat
and smooth, but now transformed into a three-dimensional work of art,
adjusted to your body, whether this is thin or fat, or just normal, as yours
seems to be. It will be so well adjusted to you that it will be as if you, dear
customer, had been born already dressed in the garment. And all this for
a price that will leave you pleasantly surprised.
All this by word of mouth, whispered from Mr Rashid’s lips into our
ear, without any witnesses, so that, in the extreme unlikelihood of it having
to be queried, he would deny all knowledge, and we would have nothing
tangible by way of proof. Everything by word of mouth, just as there is no
stamped paper, as we have already said, for all sums are done in his head,
nor are there any accounts, because the money passes from our hands
straight into Mr Rashid’s pocket, in the opposite direction to the trousers
that he drew and cut, and that Jamal stitched with that innate intuition of
his, and that Mr Rashid took back again in order to iron them – blowing
into this latter so as to keep the coals hot – and then fold them. The trou-
sers, newly pressed and still warm, came in this direction; the money went
in the other. And all this concluded without any record at all, as if it had
never happened, as if the money had been born in Mr Rashid’s pocket and
the trousers had always been ours, wrapped around our legs.
If you still have any doubts, take a stroll down memory lane, dear
customer,
Mr Rashid adds, thinking we look as if we have a memory,
and see if you remember a suit of the finest pin-striped fabric that Dr
Arantes de Oliveira loved to wear when he was Governor-General, and that
fitted him like a glove; he bought it here, we were already called The Year
2000 Tailor’s Shop, although we didn’t yet have Jamal, but in those days
our enterprise sounded as if it belonged even more to the future, to outer
space, to the planet Mars even. Newer than the shop, and even then only
by a year, was that American film shown at the Almeida Garrett picture
house in Nampula that proved so popular with folk. The Governor bought
his suit for a bargain price. There’s even a photo where everything he is
wearing is mine except for the extremities, that is, the hat he either wore
on his head or carried in his hand, which had been sent him by Salazar
himself so people said, and the shoes, I don’t know where he got those,
but one can’t know everything. So if it hadn’t been for me, all we could see
would be a stark naked Governor-General, with only a pair of shoes on
his feet and a hat in his hand! Upon which, Mr Rashid laughed, finding
his own joke funny.
All this said without a word being written down. In accepting this, we
climb that single step, then penetrate the shade of that huge, empty room,
while our footsteps echo on the flagstone floor, and proffer the piece of cloth
we carry in our hand to Mr Rashid. Yes, because The Year 2000 Tailor’s
Shop doesn’t make things out of nothing, it merely transforms them; it
only works with the customer’s raw material.
Before, we had everything,
Mr Rashid explains,
worsted or tweed, cashmere, silk and cotton velvets, fine and coarse
linen, hemp, muslins and printed cottons, tulle and even black-man’s-fabric,
made from the purest Daman cotton for our poorest customers. But there’s
no longer any, maybe because things don’t get here so easily, given that we
are on an island.
Either that or so that there should no longer be any trace of what we
make here, as some people once said.
We hand him the piece of cloth in which we have placed so many
hopes, upon which we have elaborated so many private fantasies, and Mr
Rashid inspects it with a critical eye. He feels it, sniffs it. And he mumbles,
somewhat disappointed:
They don’t make cloth like they used to!
Maybe this reserve is a way of preparing the way, devaluing the cloth
we have brought him in order to better emphasize the miracle that is about
to occur, thanks to his work and skill, and that of Jamal.
Well, I’ll see what I can do.
He tugs at the end of the tape measure he carries around his shoul-
ders like a sleeping snake, he cracks it through the air with an abrupt
gesture, and now he’s a tamer, rousing the beast in order to begin his act.
The tape measure snaps into life. Mr Rashid now orders us to remain still,
arms in the air and legs apart, as if he were a policeman about to frisk us.
He examines our bodily parts – he does the same with both men and
women, the difference lying in the roundness of shape, and therefore in
the different measurements, more than in moral conventions – and he
does this in order to establish what we really are, which manifests itself
much less in what we say, and much more in the volume we occupy. And
it’s only by knowing what we really are that Mr Rashid will be able to
understand our dreams and satisfy them. There we are, standing stock still
and vaguely anxious, feeling ourselves being examined there where we are
at our most vulnerable, our body, far more than our ideas, knowing deep
down that it is no use pulling in our stomach or clenching our thighs, for
his methods for getting to the truth are infallible. Oblivious to our path-
etic, inner anxieties, Mr Rashid carries on with his measurements, noting
down mysterious numbers relating to our shape on a tiny piece of paper,
with a thick pencil of the sort that are no longer used, with two tips, one
red, the other blue, and this one may indeed be the last of its kind unless
of course he has others stored away in some unknown location, given that
he is so cautious about the future. So arcane are the numbers he notes
down that it is doubtful whether a bookkeeper with even the most thor-
ough expertise in accountancy, would be able to reach a conclusion as to
what they meant.
That thirty-six, is it really thirty-six, or could it in fact be 36,000?
A smile.
Just thirty-six, but centimetres. You mustn’t allow your greed to attach
zeros where they shouldn’t be. We don’t do clothes for giants, sir, only
normal-sized people. And apart from this, scrupulous as we are, we measure
everything down to the last centimetre.
Once the measurements have been taken and their secrets revealed,
we can at last relax. Lower our arms, bring our legs together, return to the
posture we held before, to our previous state. We can even take advantage
of the ancient chair in order to regain our serenity. A timeless chair he
offers us, possibly of Austrian manufacture, and the only one to be seen
in that vast room with its bare walls and stone floor, that is, if we exclude
Jamal’s old stool.
It’s a good idea to sit down because we are going to have a long wait.
Here, no one seems to attach much importance to the passage of time which,
as we have seen, they only measure in millennia. They preserve their energy
by letting it flow, nevertheless alert to the slightest signal that it might pass
us in the direction of the future. So tenuous is it that we have to pay par-
ticular attention to its passing. Mr Rashid will answer our concerns with
monosyllables (whether the trousers might be too long, whether they have
pockets and hems), or even in brief sentences if he is having a good day.
Jamal will remain supremely indifferent, at the most an occasional vague
smile confirming whatever Mr Rashid needs to know about us; both of
them seem to pity us for the way their little routines overwhelm us.
After a while, a long, slow while, by which time we have got used to
waiting, we are no longer struck by the skill with which Jamal follows his
boss’s instructions, the only ones that are actually written down, scrawled
in blue on the cloth we have brought. We grow tired of watching his re-
peated movements as he interprets his mysterious orders, and turn our gaze
to the street, to watch the passers-by.
There may well be children on their way to the madrasa, boys walking
noisily along with boys; girls with girls, silent, their gaze directed at the
ground in front of them, only looking up occasionally to flash a glance
around them; old men of a timeless age, wearing kufis, and riding equally
ancient bicycles that creak and shake but still move forward; beautiful
women carrying things on their hips or their heads; and tourists, almost
always Italian.
Guarda che bello!
They pass through our field of vision, which is framed by the narrow
doorway, and we do not even have time to take in their features, which,
as a consequence, makes them all look alike. As if there were just a single
pair of children, an old man, a pretty girl, two or three tourists, continually
passing, always the same ones, merely changing their clothes and, in the
process, leaving us bemused. As if they were Mr Rashid’s models parading
along a tiny catwalk to give us an idea of what The Year 2000 Tailor’s Shop
had to offer.
Occasionally, one of them slows down and peeps inside towards the
darkness, blinking in their efforts to see the helpless clients as they wait,
concerned that they won’t think much of the clothes we are wearing before
we have received Mr Rashid’s promised new suit. Someone who is trying
to glimpse us, though to no avail, blinded by the intense light brought in
from outside. But we can see him easily, and are happy to look, because
for an instant, we are able to gauge more specific details than the vague
generalities parading swiftly along the already mentioned catwalk. And
what we see is blind curiosity seeking to discover us, while all Mr Rashid
sees is a badly dressed physique, upon which he advertises his wares in the
laboured tones of a foreign language. As for Jamal, we do not know what
he sees. He is, as we have already noted, unfathomable.
At long last, when not even the passer-by constitutes a novelty, we
plunge back into the stifling formality of the darkened room, where Mr
Rashid checks continually to make sure that everything is proceeding as
planned. Jamal, his eyes fixed on our cloth, pedals away. Both of them
make the same repeated movements. We take a deep breath and allow
our conscience to sleep, our body to slumber so that our skin may feel, as
does theirs, the gentle brush of time passing. It is so slow, so subtle and
light, that we can only sense it if we are truly quiet, on the point of sleep.
It is not like a breeze, for there is nothing extraordinary about the arrival
of this, apart from the fact that it blows. It is time itself, and we can only
grasp this when the air is still, if we ourselves are still, if the silence is com-
plete, apart that is, from the hushed click of the Singer that Jamal pedals,
while always remaining in the same place. Then, we close our eyes, allow
the sensation to migrate to the tips of our fingers, our ears, our nose, and
when we are fully captivated by this cutaneous, peripheral attention and
peace and quiet has fully returned, we shall feel time brush slowly past us.
Always coming from behind us, behind our backs; always going forward,
towards wherever we are looking.
Later, much later, when so much time has passed by that we consider
ourselves immune and therefore eternal, Mr Rashid will come and rouse
us, smiling, in his hands the almost finished garment, which merely needs a
few threads snipped, a couple of edges clipped, before it is of course pressed
with the steam iron and the work completed. But we have to see it before
this happens, so that we can appreciate all the hard work that has gone on
so far, for it is this final stage, which will bring it to fruition, and that will
conceal all the effort that has gone into making it. We do so with a sigh,
almost as if the product will never live up to our expectations.
Then, we see Jamal seemingly at a loss in front of his Singer, looking
vaguely embarrassed at the sewing machine, as if his presence there could
only be justified when he was pedalling. Not knowing what to do with his
hands, feet, or gaze, as he stares fixedly at the machine, and he will remain
like that until Mr Rashid gives him another piece of cloth, which will allow
him to set off at last, pedalling away towards his completed task.
Mr Rashid smiles. He knows only too well what we see, understands
what we are thinking.
Jamal’s like that,
His smile seems to indicate,
Jamal only feels at ease when he’s pedalling, only then does he truly
feel himself. And you know, dear customer, that if you want to leave him
a little something, a small token of your appreciation, please step forward
now while I turn my back to do my final checks and wrap up your garment,
nothing much, for nothing leaves The Year 2000 Tailor’s shop without
being duly packaged and presentable from both the outside and the inside.
But take care: don’t tell him, for example, that it’s for a little drink, for
while that wouldn’t offend me as I am older and more experienced, it will
offend the boy, whom I have always known as being respectful of Allah, the
Merciful One. Tell him that it is just a little token, for he will know what
to do with the any extra he has, given that we make do with so little here.
Afterwards, when we have thanked him and left, packet in hand, and
turned the corner heading to the Rua dos Arcos, Mr Rashid will say:
All right, Jamal, that’s enough for today.
And then again, straightaway:
All right, Jamal, that’s enough for today.
He says it twice, this man who repeats things for fear of forgetting.
He gives the order to stop work twice, in the same way as when he leaves a
piece of cloth with his blue lines drawn on it for Jamal on top of the Singer,
he returns shortly afterwards, repeating the instruction, in order to make
sure that a particular line he was thinking of had in fact been drawn, or
still lingered in the realm of his intention. In the same way that, having
measured our waist, he will return once again, the tape measure twisting
in his hands, and apologizing profusely, will ask us to get up so that he can
make sure he took the correct measurement. Can it be that we have grown
thinner? Or that we have put on weight? Not at all, it is merely Mr Rashid
beset by his doubts, his lack of trust in his memory, the need to repeat every
gesture, every measurement he takes, each line he draws.
That’s enough for today, Jamal.
This is what he will say, the iron key in his hand, attached with a string
as dark and timeless as itself. Where did this key come from? How many
hands held it until it allowed itself to be attached to the master tailor’s
trousers by means of a piece of string?
It will be seven or eleven o’clock, the end of the day or already night
time and dark, depending on the amount of work the order has required
and the time that has crept past us on its headlong journey. Mr Rashid will
close the thick wooden door, and turn the key in the lock, with a rasp of
iron against iron. Inside, a wider, emptier silence will fall, without knife
thrusts of light to injure it, without the suppuration of darkness that wounds
discharge. Only a plump mouse scampering silently along the edges, just
as the Singer’s needle had followed the blue lines drawn on the cloth but
a short time before, pausing in its journey as if beset by a doubt or an idea
at a fork in the road. To the left or right?
And if the mouse sets off along an even darker road, the needle, in
contrast, always followed the imperceptible signs left by Mr Rashid to in-
dicate that this was the road leading to the completed work.
When Mr Rashid turns the key in the lock, iron rasping against iron,
the two men will look at each other one last time. Mr Rashid, more distract-
edly, wondering what to do next; Jamal, more attentive, awaiting one last
piece of information, a final instruction, to know whether he needs to arrive
early the next morning in order to attend to a new order, or some other
matter. The two men spend so much time together, they are together for
longer than they are apart, that this happens every time they bid each other
goodnight. And then there is always that obsession with repeating things.
He’s going to come back, I know he’s going to come back,
Jamal thinks.
And sure enough, Mr Rashid, as if he had heard him, stops, turns on
his heel and returns to make sure he has locked the door.
Only then does Jamal finally start to walk away, his steps short and
light, until he is lost in the bazaar. From time to time, he glances back over
his shoulder, in case Mr Rashid retraces his steps yet again, back across the
space that now separates them.
Jamal is nearly young enough to be Mr Rashid’s son, unless we are
mistaken in our estimation of his age. However, the two are not as familiar
with each other as one might expect, and this, we think, is due more to
the distance kept by Jamal, who is respectful while not lacking in his own
spirit. And this, in turn, may explain Mr Rashid’s distance. All of this is
absolutely tacit, leaving them entangled together. As they work, they seem
like two aristocrats sizing each other up in that decrepit old room.
Mr Jamal!
Mr Rashid will say in a loud voice booming across the emptiness, as
he hands him the cloth, already marked and scored with secret squiggles in
blue chalk. At first, in our ignorance, we thought this was some ritual car-
ried out to impress the customer, with whom they were not yet acquainted.
But then, we dismissed such an idea. After all, they know our inside leg
measurements from the ankle to the groin, and the outside measurements
up to the hip, as well as our waist measurement and all the rest. But then,
while they are well acquainted with our body, they may not be so sure of
our intentions (about which they will continue to probe us while we wait).
Mr Jamal!
He will call, holding out the already marked cloth, with explicit ges-
tures, so that the customer may see it passing from hand to hand, and
therefore passing on to a new stage in the masterpiece. Once the architec-
ture of the imagination and the dream has been concluded, the detailed,
exact technical work needs to begin so that everything may be completed
as promised, without any mishaps. Taking all the time needed, and with
all the appropriate formality. Jamal allows himself to nod briefly, as if he
were acknowledging all three – his boss, the piece of cloth and the cus-
tomer – without going to the length of getting to his feet. He never gets
up from the age-old wooden stool in front of the Singer, unless it is when
he arrives at work, or leaves. As if he had no right to wander around the
room; as if he didn’t dare. He sticks out his arms and receives the piece
of cloth with the same pomp and ceremony he might receive a piece of
treasure or a baton in a relay race.
We imagine, without any certainty that this may be the case, that Mr
Rashid sees himself as being the most important protagonist – not only the
initial spark responsible for igniting the project, but also the guiding light
on its journey through to completion – while Jamal does the rest, faithfully
following the lines drawn, doubtless with great precision and consummate
care, but not exceeding the mere execution of an order. In one, the art of
studying a body and translating it into the two dimensions of the cloth, in
the other, patience and precision. In one, genius, in the other, obedience.
However, sensing what Mr Rashid thinks with regard to Jamal is not the
same as guessing what Jamal may think.
He skirts the bazaar, as we have said. The market is still open although
business is coming to an end under the light of lanterns or anything they
can get hold of by way of illumination. Soon, it will be deserted, the stalls
cleared, just one or two dogs rummaging silently through the rubbish, for
no matter how little there is to sell, how much austerity, there is never any
shortage of trash. He remembers the fruit that he is supposed to get, and
it is now too late to buy any. He progresses with his short steps, and the
slight, almost imperceptible gesture he begins to make and then quickly
abandons, may have been to greet someone passing by on the other side of
the street who had not noticed him, or may have merely been to indicate
some conclusion he had come to while walking along. After passing the
empty space that had once been a garden, he turns right by the Church of
Our Lady of Good Health, or rather almost turns right for it is here that
he stops, aware that the hour has come. It is here that he stops and pulls
from his pocket a handkerchief and lays it on the ground, an offcut aban-
doned dismissively by some unknown customer, but which now permits
him to kneel and pray, turned in the right direction. His expression be-
trays a silent struggle that is either real or in our imagination. On the one
hand, the amiability that prayer always induces in him, on the other the
restrained irritation felt at having to stop right here, on the corner by the
church of Our Lady of Good Health, because he is late.
I accept this as one of my shortcomings,
Mr Rashid would reply, if Jamal dared ask him the question.
But I don’t do it deliberately. Like others, I am god-fearing too, I also
say my prayers at the appropriate hour, and instead of keeping quiet as
you tend to do, you could have reminded me that it was nearly time for
prayers. I would have let you go, I would have given you enough time to
get to the mosque.
And turning to us:
I would have done it, you can be sure, because I am god-fearing as well.
Although I’m not moved by the same sense of urgency.
Not long afterwards, when it is already dark, Jamal folds the hand-
kerchief again and resumes his journey. At another hour, he would turn
left, and visit a relative at Marangonha in order to resolve a matter that
has remained unsettled for the last few days. But it is not the right time
for that. He leaves the street and turns onto a twisting path, traced by a
Singer needle that has gone mad and cast off all control, advancing at its
own whim as if there were no blue chalk line to guide it. This is the path he
follows, this thread of dirty water running through the urban jumble that
makes up the area of Esteu, a muddled forest of houses that are so small
that the secrets they may have wanted to conceal are inevitably there for
all to see: they are, therefore, secrets on display that the passer-by pretends
not to see, as he utters his greeting.
Good evening! Good evening!
Good evening!
They answer him.
There is the flicker of yellow light from the lamps. There is smoke. The
smell of mealie pap bubbling away on the flame, of fish frying in the pan.
For it is the hour for such routines, such occurrences.
After Esteu comes Litine, and the same labyrinth, the same open display
of whoever is at home, the same reticence on the part of the passer-by who
chooses not to look, it is all so similar that we ask ourselves why someone
went to the trouble to give the areas different names – like Mr Rashid
carrying out two movements to complete a single act – when one would
suffice. Esteu and Litine. The same succession of little worlds that Jamal
crosses, all of them identical, drenched in a darkness that the fragile light
from the lanterns can no longer challenge, a path that the eyes no longer
see but the feet know only too well. Would it be the same if Mr Rashid
forgot to draw his line on the cloth? Jamal proceeding with assurance as if
nothing had happened? Jamal, his eyes closed, finding his way across the
smooth cloth devoid of any lines?
Macaripe, at long last, an area the same as the others. And his house
the same as all the others as well. The same secrets for all to see, now his
own; the same residue of dirty water thrown out onto the street; the same
fish writhing in the pan; the enamel mug, pock-marked with rust; the mat
rolled out letting off its odour; the stool for him to sit on, the old chair for
him to sit on; the wide sifting basket upon which chilli peppers are laid
out to dry when there is sun, and which is now waiting for daytime; the
jujube tree in the backyard, blocking out the stars as it is doing now, and
which provides a patch of shade during the day; the piece of wire stretching
from its twisted branch as far as the wall, from which, throughout the day,
have hung the handkerchiefs and trousers, the wraps worn by the women
of the house to cover themselves, and that have all now been gathered in
in case of accidents. And the wire you have to duck under so that it doesn’t
dig into your neck. You have to duck under it to get back into the house,
duck under it to get out of the house, duck under it to go and fetch water
from the clay pot, and duck under it again when you wander out for no
reason at all, except to be able to enjoy this little space. His old mother
passes backwards and forwards with no need to duck, for she is small and
when she bends over to sweep the floor with her little brush, her face almost
touches the ground. A house identical to all the others but from where you
can see, during the day, or guess at night, the old water tank, and beyond
that the Christian cemetery.
At home, Jamal spends his days sitting on the chair like a statue or
as if he were toiling with his boss’s Singer. We have already explained his
attitude while he is there, whereas here, the greater physical distance en-
hances the absentee’s authority. He sits correctly, with his back straight
and his knees together.
Someone calls him from outside.
Just a minute!
And it’s as if he were telling them not to call him again. Still seated,
he carefully opens the brown paper parcel that he has taken out of the case
under his bed, and places it on his lap. It contains a thick, heavy cloth, of a
colour that is hard to define in the light of the lamp (we shall have to wait
for daytime to come in order to ascertain this). With it still folded, Jamal
looks around as if he were seeking someone, as if he feared a presence. It
occurs to us that it may be some motionless customer, his legs open and
arms raised, waiting to be measured and given the once over; and that
Jamal, sitting there on his chair, by the light of the lamp, transforms the
numbers he jots down into lines drawn on this thick cloth of unknown
colour, in a parallel piece of business that Mr Rashid will never discover.
But no: such an explanation would be too easy. So then, we surmise that
he fears the sudden appearance of Mr Rashid himself, coming all the way
from Unidade (an area once known as Santo António in the days when
the Christians held sway) to surprise him a second time. Jamal maybe fears
that this may happen, knowing as he does the tendency of his boss to repeat
everything that he does. Twice for every action.
In the first, Mr Rashid seemed distracted, looking at the models on his
catwalk outside. A pair of boys, another pair of girls, an old man pedalling
with difficulty his equally ancient bicycle, one hand on the handlebars, the
other holding onto his kufi so that the sudden gust of wind that has stirred
the dust on the road, won’t blow it off his head; finally, a pretty woman
with a pot full of water drawn from the fountain, and a group of tourists.
Guarda che bello!
On that first occasion, Mr Rashid set off in pursuit of a possible cus-
tomer, and Jamal remained in the middle of the room, in the middle of
the darkness. Then, he unwrapped a packet and took out another piece of
cloth, coarser than the one he has in his hands, but containing the same
almost completed design. All that was needed was a quick passage of the
Singer’s needle across it to complete the work, to close the circle. Looking
around him, Jamal also wanted to ensure there was no one present. Only
the same mouse sneaking round a corner, having chosen the darkest path.
His hands shaking with the haste, he threaded the needle, smoothed out
the cloth and pedalled furiously, sweat running down his back. For the
first time, feeling the rush of time in that place.
There was a tiny flower stitched on this first piece of cloth, repre-
senting the sister island of Zanzibar; a line joining it to another flower of
a different colour, Muqdisho, the country of the sharks; and it was when
he was hurrying to complete this itinerary – each flower failing to fully
represent the place it was meant to, but merely suggesting it – that he felt
Mr Rashid’s icy glare freeze the sweat on his back.
What are you doing, Jamal?

I’m stitching a piece of cloth of no importance, boss. Something of
mine. To pass the time.
There are no private commissions in my tailor’s shop, Jamal.
A heavy silence fell. And then, suddenly, the camera flashes from the
Italian tourist woman peppering the darkness of the room like the distant
lightning of a silent storm.
Guarda che bello!
She exclaimed, seeing the first piece of cloth that Jamal failed to conceal
in time. So many nights spent in this struggle, so much irritation when he
didn’t have enough thread or was unable to give shape to an idea.
How much is it?
And Mr Rashid quoting a price that suddenly came into his head,
without any consideration for Jamal’s backbreaking journey, the sister island
of Zanzibar so far away, so hard to reach, Muqdisho still farther away, those
tiny grey flowers on the blue cloth, sharks that were so laborious to em-
broider. Mr Rashid, oblivious to all this, closing the deal as if it concerned
some trousers he had measured and drawn his lines on, and was now fin-
ished. Taking the cloth from on top of the Singer, crossing the room with
it in his hands to go and press it with the iron and wrap it up, for nothing
leaves The Year 2000 Tailor’s shop without being duly packaged, com-
pleted both inside and out.
On that occasion, Jamal stared at the Singer emptily, gazed at his hands
abandoned on the machine, without knowing what to do with them. Jamal’s
cloth gone thither, in exchange for the money coming hither, all without
any paper record, as if the Italian woman’s money had been Mr Rashid’s
all along, and Jamal’s cloth hers. So much so that if needed, the tourist
wouldn’t have to prove the purchase. Nor would Jamal be able to tell you
how the dream written out on that first piece of cloth had eluded him.
I didn’t do it out of malice,
Mr Rashid would say, if he were asked about it.
It was merely a good piece of business, part of which, a good part, ended
up going to Jamal who, I acknowledge, was the one who created the work.
And I paid him his due share. But he also needs to be made aware that he
used my premises, my sewing machine, the reputation bestowed on us all
by this tailor’s shop, whose very name points to the future.
We cannot, however, dismiss other reasons that may have prompted

Mr Rashid’s actions, based in the principle that artistry and genius belonged
to one, while the other merely had an eye for technique and detail. Now
Jamal had challenged this principle, progressing without any blue chalk
lines to guide him.
It won’t happen again this time, with this second piece of cloth. Jamal
looks around once more to make sure. But at this hour, Mr Rashid is in
the backyard of his house in Unidade, carrying a grandson in his arms, the
son of a daughter who has come from Mecuburi to visit him. Occupied in
avuncular attentions, Mr Rashid isn’t thinking of Jamal; and he therefore
won’t place his grandson on the sleeping mat, and he won’t be making his
way through Quirahi to get to Macaripe on a furtive visit to his assistant’s
home. It never occurs to him that Jamal is unfolding a new piece of cloth
by the light of his lamp, reviewing the distance he has covered, the journey
made so far, and calculating how far he still has to go.
The line on the cloth starts at Jamal’s house in Macaripe; it draws
strange signs that seek to express the values held dear by the tailor in that
little space, the ideas that come to him there.
Purity, devotion.
Then, there is a dead straight line that denotes a bridge, an almost end-
less, metal bridge, over which one reaches Lumbo, and from there to Grande
and Pequena Cabaceira, and from there to Mossuril. It curves around the
Bay of Condúcia and at last begins to gather speed, while at the same time
shedding detail. Mecúfi is still clearly marked, followed straightaway by
the wide, blue Pemba Bay, bounded by Wimbi on this side and Londo on
the other. From here, it reaches the clear serenity of Quissanga and the
hurly-burly of the fishermen and women at Tandanhangue, coming and
going along the watery paths among the trees that grow in the sea, blue
chalk lines on the cloth that Jamal has sewn in bright green. The Quirimba
Islands, little shiny beads on a bracelet; Mucojo and its silence, its slow, vast
forest of palms where Jamal spent so many nights embroidering minute
coconut trees, microscopic coconuts that ruined his eyesight by the light
of his lamp. Even so, it was worth it. Then, we pass onwards to Quiterajo
and Palma, to Quionga, after which the line is interrupted to allow the
waters of the Rovuma to flow past, a thick stripe that Jamal placed there
to separate us from our neighbours.
The cloth’s narrative continues. Mtwara, Lindi, Kilwa, Mafia and

Bagamoyo are sombre, already foreign places, painfully bearing the burden
of the memory of slaves. Jamal has not forgotten to record this memory
by using chain stitches, to remind us of the chains that shackled those
wretched creatures to rocks, chains that were used so that the only thing
to get away would be the desire for freedom. In Zanzibar, almost adjacent
to it, the lines grow wavy, and with this, Jamal was trying to evoke the
smells that pervade the air and waft upwards into the heavens, the smell
of pepper and cinnamon, of cloves and sesame roasting on braziers, all this
in single or double herringbone stitch, the same stitch used to evoke the
waves. Pemba, Mombasa, Malindi and Pate, the needle wrote diligently, all
places Jamal knows well even though he has never been there. And then,
after this, a succession of place names whose vowels are repeated just as Mr
Rashid repeats a gesture after having made it: Kaambooni, Buur Gaabo,
Kismaayo and Baraawa. And this repetition is also the echo these names
produce inside Jamal’s head. In Muqdisho, the tailor attempted, with the
colours he used, to depict the dun-coloured coast, the emerald sea dotted
with sharks. Once again, he embroidered the same little grey stitches he
had made on the cloth that the Italian woman had taken from him: each
stitch a tiny shark. Caluua, another name with vowels repeated, is already
on the edge of the cloth; but he needs to make a curve and advance a little
further as far as Berbera and Djibouti, at which point the continent comes
to an end and we are obliged to cross the sea at Bab al Mandab. Another
wide stripe of vivid blue thread.
After this, there are lands that none of us know about in this part of
the world, and that only the truly faithful venture to in all confidence: Al
Mukha, Al Hudaydah, Masaqif, Jizan, Al Qunfidhah, which Jamal displays
because he has read of them in the Book, and so he is sure they are there,
and in that order. Further on, Jiddah, the gateway, and finally, Makkah,
the coveted holy land.
That should be the end. It should be, but it isn’t, because without our
noticing it, we have become so absorbed in following the lines embroidered
in the coarse cloth, that we have done a complete circle, and rather than
go from one extremity to the other, we have come back to the departure
point. And while Makkah is where it is supposed to be, it is also in a certain
house in the poor quarter of Macaripe, on the Island of Mozambique, which

is where the long journey began. Can the embroiderer have made a mis-
take, by placing the origin and destination in the same place? Confusing
the straight reality of his itinerary with the circular route of his ideas? Far
from it, for Jamal has astutely sought to show that it was necessary to go
and come back in order for everything to make sense and for him to be a
haji, a believer who has visited the City.
Jamal smiles, almost incredulously. He caresses his almost completed
work and looks around. No infidel tourist will look at this cloth with a
view to buying it; no boss will come over from the Unidade area to take
it away from him. And he smiles in the darkness, an almost fierce smile.
Jamal!
Just a minute!
The next morning, the day is ushered in with the prayer, tea and bread.
And Jamal sets off again, now in the opposite direction. And that’s how it
is always: Esteu, Litine, Macaripe at night; Macaripe, Litine and Esteu in
the morning, then round the corner by the church of Our Lady of Good
Health before penetrating the ruined city, the bazaar awakening to the
sound of the first voices in conversation, the still slumbering tailor’s shop,
while he waits for Mr Rashid, with a leisurely gesture,
Good morning, Jamal!
Good morning, boss!
to produce the huge key from his pocket, and with the harsh sound of
iron rasping against iron, open the door so that the shaft of light can stab
through the darkness, like a cleaver cutting fresh meat. The old Singer sits
patiently, almost ready, just requiring its needle to be threaded, and gentle
pressure on its pedal to set off with a purr. That faint sound, the signal that
it is daytime and the tailor’s shop is open for business.
Mr Rashid is also God fearing, though not as strict in his observance
as his employee. He fears Him intermittently, when he remembers, when
his conscience assails him. But he has so much to think about – someone
who owes him for a coat and hasn’t paid, an order for thread that hasn’t
arrived from Monapo – that the only time he has left is for praying and
not reflection. He prays at Naquira, the oldest of the religious brother-
hoods. Or rather he pretends to pray, Jamal thinks. For, according to his
assistant, it is impossible to pray to the sound of the drum beats they play
there during prayers, in that uncivilized brotherhood frequented by his
boss, and which has allowed itself to become sullied by the values of the
land and of men, when only those of God should prevail. Jamal despises
these popular manifestations which stain the purity of the celebration of
faith, and maybe it is this, rather than the other matters, that distance him
from his boss.
Let us return to the cloth. Having surveyed the itinerary on the front,
that which departed and returned all in one movement, we now examine
the back, for it is there that one normally finds the roots, the secret of the
enigma behind each stitch. There one finds the foundations of all the il-
lusory buildings through which the embroiderer has led us, his hidden
explanation. There, all his artfulness is laid bare and made clear. However,
when we turn the cloth over, rather than an explanation, what we find, to
our surprise, is a wondrous, new line, so that the back is also the front. But
a front with a radically different content, which is the history that justifies
all Jamal’s efforts, the history of his dikiri, his brotherhood.
A small rosette, faded by time, reveals where it all began: al-Shadhuli
founding the brotherhood of Shadhuliyya, in the distant year of 1258,
whether truth or legend. Then, straight after this, a little link in flower
stitch takes us to al-Yashruti, a Tunisian who creates a vigorous offshoot of
this brotherhood. After this, an outstretched hand, and another receiving it
represent al-Yashruti passing the brotherhood on to his favoured disciple,
Shaykh Darwish, and another outstretched hand towards another recipient,
passing on the ijaza, the authorized history of the brotherhood, to someone
emerging from the shadows of that indefinite past and depicted as a larger
rosette, a vast sun shining in the centre of the cloth. It is Shaykh Ma’ruf,
a direct descendant of Fatima, the Prophet’s beloved daughter. Ma’ruf at
the cloth’s heart, flashing sunbeams in Venetian embroidery, and emerging
from it a chain-stitch line that leads us to Fatima, and then from her, in
more delicate sand stitch, to the Prophet Himself.
As we continue, we see some yellow nuggets speckling everything, also
in sand stitch, which symbolize one thing and its opposite, the wealth of
Ma’ruf and also his scorn for the royal family of the Comoros, and for the
rich potentates of those lands. Ma’ruf, enraged, disgusted witness of the
sultan’s acquiescence to the intentions of the infidels, selling his best lands
to the French, ignoring the word of God, surrendering to customs that
are odious to His eyes. Ma’ruf manifesting his anger, and for this reason
forced to take flight to Zanzibar, crossing the Indian Ocean, pursued by
the powerful; and Jamal the tailor solemnly depicting this flight across
the sea in cross stitch. In the following year, 1897, the cloth shows Ma’ruf
landing on the Island of Mozambique – a tiny bean-shaped embroidery
that we only managed to discover through close examination – to estab-
lish his Shadhuliyya Yashrutiyya brotherhood, and so spread the Divine
Word. With a little imagination, we can even see that it was a sunny day,
with a full tide, when he disembarked in the spot where he would later
build the Great Mosque, a half-moon illustrating these two facts, with a
sinuous long-armed stitch depicting the waters.
From this point on, the way the story is embroidered on the cloth
reflects the joy in Jamal’s heart, the smooth movements he made while he
stitched, and which caused amazement and admiration in the family when
they saw him doing this. He stitched it on a cool, clear night, when the full
moon almost mitigated the need for a lamp.
Ma’ruf always intended (this was his struggle) that Islam should be
purified and cleansed of infidel customs, and the tailor believes deeply that
this is how it should be. Ma’ruf had two disciples on the island, represented
by two eyelets on the cloth, a plain one referring to the founder of the
brotherhood in Angoche, and who was of no great interest to Jamal, and the
other, darker and in stronger outline, which corresponds to Shaykh Jimba,
who became the guardian of the brotherhood’s recorded history so as to
be able to continue the work when the master left. A new hand delivering
to another hand receiving, record this event. Unfortunately, after this,
shadows re-emerge, stitched some time afterwards, at the time of the full
moon, by Jamal who was in a bad mood, kicking aside the pock-marked
enamel mug if this got in his way, and almost allowing the wire from the
jujube tree to slash his throat when his irritation distracted him. Shadows
that correspond to periods of decline, sometimes depicted with appropriate
stitch-work, herringbone or mismatched, other times with frenzied scrawls
that almost injure the cloth, Jamal’s odium and frustration dripping onto
it over so many nights of painful toil, while the whole of the Island slept.
Shaykh Jima dies – the cloth tells us the year is 1921 – leaving in his
place Shaykh Gulamo to take over the fortunes of the dikiri. A number
of notable figures challenge the legitimacy of the succession, the cloth be-
coming more complex in order to record the arguments involved in the
heated discussion. From one of these groups, the Shadhuliyya Madaniyya
dikiri is born, Jamal’s brotherhood, which is why it is represented with
greater intensity and detail, although we are almost at the end of the cloth.
A final exhalation of purity amid the rubble and ruins. A fragile white flower
among the Island’s stones. At this point, Gulamo is clearly repudiated by
means of various signs. He is said to have preached weakened versions of
Islam, which paid lip service both to the European and the African worlds,
thus besmirching the purity of the Message. Leading these accusations
is al-Madani, an isolated figure, but one whom Jamal considers, and his
stitches bear this out, to be on a direct line of succession from Jimba, and
Ma’ruf, Dariwsh, and al-Yashruti, Al-Shadhuli and, inshallah, from the
Prophet Himself.
From this point on, the cloth once again loses its clarity, taking on
sombre colours and displaying stitches devoid of any technique that might
distinguish them or provoke our admiration; mere untidy scrawls, like those
of a child. Grubby scribblings that smell of the hatred left by the hands
that stitched them, though guided by the white thread of purity. Two of
these stand out from the others, in a vaguely zig-zag stitch, full of thorn-
like angles. One of these refers to the brotherhood of Sa’dat, a dakiri whose
members were men of standing, but who forgot that all are equal in the
eyes of Islam. And one can even see, bent over in a corner, inside the self-
same brotherhood, Shaykh Abdurrahman, an incoherent little figure, so
arrogant and at the same time submissive, composing a musical ode to the
colonialist Carmona; a double crime, the already grave one of subservience
while singing the praises of an infidel, coupled with the even more serious
crime of composing an ode in honour of a living man, which Carmona was
at that time. As if they knew the future that only God knows, as if they
were aware of the sins that the colonialist would not commit.
This story could have been like the dense, silky lock of a woman’s hair,
all the dikiri rolling forward towards the future to create one vast, pure
brotherhood. That is what could have happened, but of course it didn’t.
And while two dark branches head off on their own in disarray – the
Naquira of Mr Rashid, his boss, ever more lost to African licentiousness,

the Qadiriyya of Abdurahman, kow-towing ever more in the service of
infidel overlords – in the centre, a delicate but pure white embroidery
represents the Shadhuliyya Madaniyya, Jamal’s brotherhood, unpolluted
and insuperable in its defence of the faith.
When he completes this piece of embroidery, Jamal feels thirsty and
full of hatred. He stretches out his hand and feels around until he finds
the pock-marked mug with which to slake his momentary thirst. He will
only satisfy the final, true thirst, when the cloth is ready and he can wash
it. He will then collect the water from this wash, and carry it, with all the
embroidered signs diluted within it; the places and the saints, the verses of
the Book and the noble deeds. Only that water will truly satisfy his thirst.
But what about the hatred? How will he stifle his hatred?
***
We return to the tailor’s shop some time later. In our hands a new
piece of cloth, and a craving for a new image as we feel that the one we took
from there previously is now frayed. In the end, we too repeat our actions.
Another cut of cloth in our hands, as well as the hope of seeing it puff out
and gain enough volume to cover us. We excuse ourselves, blinking into
the darkness from where we sense the silence of a conversation that has
been interrupted. On top of the Singer, lies a strange piece of coarse cloth
of uncertain colour. We would have to wait until the light stabbed it if we
wanted to identify the colour of that cloth heavy with all the brocades that
it carries, so heavy that the old machine all but buckles under its weight.
Beyond the cloth, in the middle of the room, the two men contemplate
each other in silence.
We apologize for our interruption. In Mr Rashid, there is an attempt
to reveal the same expression as always when he receives a customer, the
same mannerism of repeating gestures, which he considers a sign of wisdom.
Twice or more times, as many as necessary. He believes that only by doing
this can we establish routines that will allow us to move forward.
Take a look at this masterpiece, dear customer!
And our shame at the modest, printed cloth we have brought is ac-
centuated, for it lacks the textures and designs that are so prolific on the
other piece.
Look, and tell me what you think!

Just like that, inventing some modest need for another person’s opinion.
Without telling us on this occasion that the blue lines on this piece of cloth
were not of his making, but had been drawn by Jamal’s faith.
We look at the heavy cloth with genuine interest, and try to take it
all in. At one end of it, the beginning of the Island itself (we know that
now), Jamal’s house in Macaripe; at the other end, but in the same place,
Makkah, the holy land which one must visit and return from; in between, a
succession of names, a string of places, the adventures one must experience
in order to get there. We turn it over, but it tells us nothing, blind as we
are, incapable of reading the virtues of the Prophet’s followers, described
there with unequivocal clarity. And the weakness of those who allowed
their faith to be sullied.
What do you say, dear customer?
We look at this cloth almost in the shape of a banana, and we cannot
see, whichever way we look, any more than the Island. At one end, the
Fort, a skin of rough stone with a soul of the whitest lime; at the other,
the Brahmin crematorium exhaling, according to one poet, essences and
petals, jasmine, and a tall, vertical column of thick smoke; in between,
the tightly packed districts, Esteu, Litine and Macaripe itself, on one side,
where the embroidery appears to have begun. And on the other, Quirahi
and Unidade, Areal and Marangonha, with the old water trough once
used by the houseboys for washing clothes. Then, straight after that, in a
more scattered, hurried and vague line, the stone houses in their gradual
state of decay.
It was not these streets wending their way through ruins that inter-
ested the embroiderer, we conclude. To one side, a loose, forgotten thread,
which Jamal, for a second time, was imprudent enough to think he might
fix by using Mr Rashid’s Singer. An umbilical cord, which, for us who only
see what we are able to see, is a narrow, metal, almost endless bridge, and
which Mr Rashid may well cut through with his dark, heavy scissors so
that the Island will once again be an island. Before he hands us the work,
if that is our wish, and if it is within our means.
Or maybe not. For Jamal’s hands are gripping the top of the sewing
machine, and he knows this time what to do with them. One of them will
deal with Mr Rashid, and along with him, the noisy, uncultured, blas-
phemous and excessive traditions of this place. The other is reserved for us,
mere customers, and all that we represent. So that the purity of his solitary
designs may therefore be fulfilled.
Translated by David Brookshaw

Paolo Israel
2
The Archive and the Fable: Trajectory of a
Mozambican Historian
ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a narrative appraisal of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s trajectory as a
historian, in the broader context of knowledge production in socialist Mozambique.
Following the articulations of Borges Coelho’s intellectual biography, the chapter focuses
especially on his engagements with the history of the liberation struggle and its archives.
While scholarship produced by the History Workshop at Centro de Estudos Africanos
pursued the recovery of the peasantry’s political consciousness through oral history, Borges
Coelho took a less trodden route, working with the fragmented archives left behind by
the Portuguese. His licenciatura thesis reconstructs the beginning of the struggle in Tete,
offering an early critique of oral history and a discussion of the possibilities inherent
in colonial archives. Concurrently he co-authored a teaching manual on the liberation
struggle, which would never see the light of day due to political anxieties surrounding its
content. Throughout the years of civil conflict he carried on this patient work of archival
excavation by editing the journal Arquivo. A number of special issues focused on cities,
which Frelimo’s discourse condemned as sites of moral corruption. These somewhat ec-
centric endeavours would put Borges Coelho in a unique position to analyse, in a later
phase of his career, the role of the liberation ‘fable’ in Mozambican collective memory.
Yet at the same time his main interest shifted to fiction, signalling perhaps an impasse or
disenchantment with the discourse of history itself.
In 1973, when the liberation war in Mozambique was drawing to an

end, João Paulo Borges Coelho, a young man from a middle-class settler
family rooted in the city of Beira, decided to study in Lisbon, so as to
experience life in the metropole.1 To convince his father that he needed
1 The biographic information presented in this chapter draws from a 140-minute
interview with João Paulo Borges Coelho, held at his home in Maputo on 21 March
2018. All unreferenced quotes in the text refer to this interview, translated by
38 Paolo Israel
to leave, he opted for the discipline of psychology, which was unavailable

in Lourenço Marques. The choice was but as a ‘pretext to see Europe’. In
Lisbon the student went through a fleeting process of radicalization, min-
gling with Maoist and Trotskyist groups and going out at night to paint
Viva Frelimo and MPLA signs on the walls.2 The kind of labour psych-
ology then offered at the moribund fascist university seemed merely ‘a
course to teach how to con workers’; João Paulo dropped it in favour of
history. The discipline was then the terrain of a clash between ‘a decadent
national history that was about to end and an exceedingly politicized his-
tory that was about to be born’.
After the Carnation revolution of 25 April 1974, the Borges Coelho
family fled from Beira, stronghold of the colonial regime, and returned
to Portugal. João Paulo took an empty plane in the opposite direction,
‘returning home to leave home’. He found Beira falling apart and ut-
terly unliveable. Colonists flooded out. Authority figures connected to
myself. I have sometimes recurred to the device of free indirect discourse – which,
according to Carlo Ginzburg (Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2012, 150) is an unsolved challenge that fiction poses
to history – to describe events and situations from the perspective of the biograph-
ical subject. It came natural to write of Borges Coelho as ‘João Paulo’, not to flaunt
an intimacy we do not have, but because this is how he is best known in Maputo’s
intellectual circles. I wish to thank Rui Assubuji, Colin Darch, Mustafah Dhadha,
Carlos Fernandes, Patricia Hayes, and João Paulo Borges Coelho himself for their
precious comments on a first draft of this essay.
2 The Frente de Libertação de Moçambique [Frelimo, Front for the Liberation of
Mozambique] was the main liberation movement in Mozambique, which took
power after 1975 under the leadership of Samora Machel. The twentieth-century
history of Mozambique is marked by a particularly predatory form of coloni-
alism; a ten-year liberation struggle based on Maoist principles of the ‘people’s
war’ (1964–74); single-party Marxist-Leninist rule (1975–92); a sixteen-year civil
conflict (1977–92); and a turn to unbridled liberalism, steered by socialist-turned-
entrepreneurs elites. Mozambican historiography is animated by two central de-
bates: the one, on the nature of the liberation movement and party-State, and
whether to consider it an emancipatory project undermined by errors and external
interference, or a repressive dictatorship; the second on the nature of the civil
conflict, and whether to consider it a case of cold war destabilization or a war for
democracy.
The Archive and the Fable 39
Frelimo – policemen, politicians – arbitrarily confiscated residences, ve-

hicles and goods. After one week, João Paulo abandoned the family house
and moved to Maputo. He obtained employment as a night teacher in a sec-
ondary school and enrolled again in history at the University of Lourenço
Marques, soon-to-be renamed Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM).3
The period of transition offered a privileged experience to a small
cohort of students, taught by a clutch of international Marxist visiting
professors from all over the world. Among them were a youthful Allen
Isaacman, a staunch supporter of Frelimo with close ties to the leadership;
exponents of the French ‘modes of production’ school of historical an-
thropology, such as Claude Meillassoux, Cathérine Coquery-Vidrovitch
and Pierre-Philippe Rey; the pioneer of geopolitics, Yves Lacoste; mem-
bers of the Dar es Salaam historical school who had moved on to a new
revolutionary frontier; a passionate Italian historian, Anna Maria Gentili,
amongst others. It was ‘a rich period’, the lectures a continuous surprise.
The two years spent in Lisbon had been insufficient to afford a grasp
of the reality of the colonial metropole, but had somewhat vaccinated
João Paulo against the Marxist orthodoxy which he could observe in his
brief flirtations with Lisbon’s underground revolutionary circles. Unlike
many others, he didn’t conceive of his return to Mozambique as a project
of total political surrender. There was little militant spirit, little romantic
infatuation in the choice. It was a personal strategy. He’d returned as an
onlooker. ‘The bourgeois matrix prevailed’.4
After a few months of studies and evening teaching, a paternal aunt
joined him in the large Maputo apartment he rented. A catholic nun, she
had become radicalized in the wake of 25 April, had written a letter to
president Samora Machel pleading to be readmitted into Mozambique,
and had received a plane ticket by return of post. The aunt, who would go
on to become a major figure in the Mozambican Women’s Organization,
critiqued the nephew for his refusal to participate in neighbourhood vigi-
lance groups tasked with ‘hunting down reactionaries’. João Paulo retorted
3 The change of name occurred in 1976.

4 These should obviously be read as the retrospective considerations of a man in his
sixties who has lived through the demise of a socialist regime.
40 Paolo Israel
that he had enough on its plate with studying and teaching. Soon new op-
portunities would open up in the rapidly transforming university.
II
In the aftermath of independence, the colonial Instituto de Investigação

Cientifica de Moçambique [Institute for Scientific Inquiry in Mozambique]
was reformed, becoming an umbrella institution that hosted a number of
research units and centres: the Centro de Estudos Africanos [Centre for
African Studies] (CEA), propelled by Aquino de Bragança’s visionary
leadership;5 the Centro de Ecologia [Centre for Ecology]; the Centro de
Estudos de Comunicação [Centre for Communication Studies], and the
Técnicas Básicas de Aproveitamento de Recursos Naturais [Basic Techniques
of Exploitation of Natural Resources] (TBARN). The latter unit was
headed by António Quadros, a Portuguese painter, poet and polymath
who had settled in Lourenço Marques in 1964, mingling with the local
artistic intelligentsia. Amongst other achievements, Quadros had pub-
lished under heteronym a landmark book of revolutionary poetry, Eu o
povo, which extolled the virtues of nature as ally of the freedom fighter.
The book would become a huge popular success as well as a source of
puzzlement for Frelimo’s Department of Ideological Work, which strug-
gled to put a face to its fictive author, guerrilla Barbabé João Matimati.6
5 In the past ten years, the retrospective literature on the CEA has grown, reflecting
both a rebirth of the centre as intellectual space and the onset of self-celebratory nos-
talgia. The most encompassing critical work remains Carlos Fernandes, Dinâmicas
de pesquisa em Ciências Sociais no Moçambique pós-independente: O caso do Centro
de Estudos Africano, 1975–1990 (PhD Thesis, Universidade Federal de Salvador de
Bahia, 2011).
6 For a discussion of the trajectory – and the silencing – of this book, see Maria-
Benedita Basto, ‘Enjeux, double je(ux): hétéronomie, genre et nation dans Eu o
Povo de António Quadros/Mutimati Barnabé João’, in M.-B. Basto, ed., Enjeux
Littéraires et Constructions d’Espaces Démocratiques en Afrique Subsaharienne
(Paris: Editions EHESS, 2008), 183–216.
Quadros envisaged the TBARN as a space in which the humanities and

the applied natural sciences would operate in synergy.7 João Paulo was
hired as intern together with half-a-dozen colleagues and initiated into
the history of arts and technology by engaging the work of scholars such
as André Leroy-Gourhan and Jack Goody. Concurrently, TBARN pro-
moted close engagement with o campo – the field, the countryside, home
of the peasantry, at once the idealized revolutionary class and the target of
the State’s modernizing interventions. A silo and a fish tank were erected
by the IICM’s premises; students experimented with agriculture, apicul-
ture, animal traction and irrigation; peasants were invited to take part in
weeklong workshops. Samora Machel occasionally visited the project on
Sundays.
In April 1979, João Paulo, by now TBARN’s deputy director, was dis-
patched to the remote northerly district of Mavago in Niassa – the Siberia
of Mozambique – with the objective of sketching a development strategy
based entirely on local resources. The team spent two years in the bush,
taking monthly shifts and remaining cut off from communication during
the rainy season. The project floundered against its own achievements. The
team encouraged a group of sons of returnees from Tanzania to establish
a brick-baking cooperative, which ended up generating good revenues in
a context of widespread poverty. The governor called the team members,
commended them for the work, but informed them that he was regret-
tably obliged to see them off: the local party structures had argued that,
by boosting a specific cooperative, the project was de facto introducing
capitalism in the district.8
Quadros’ TBARN entertained relationships both amicable and tense
with the CEA and Aquino de Bragança, who referred to it as ‘the crazy
7 On TBARN see José Sá’s reportage ‘TBARN: Mobilizar a natureza’, Tempo, 448
(13 May 1979, 16–21), with photographs by Kok Nam, as well as João Paulo Borges
Coelho, ‘Memories of Ruth First in Mozambique’, Review of African Political
Economy, 117 (2008), 502–3 and Fernandes, Dinâmicas de pesquisa em Ciências
Sociais no Moçambique pós-independente, 57.
8 In an interview given to Tempo, João Paulo would highlight the lack of penetration
of the structures of revolutionary power in the countryside (Calane da Silva, ‘Aqui
Fermenta a Nação’, Tempo, 528, 23 November 1980, 14–23).
42 Paolo Israel
man’s project’.9 The two centres collaborated on some of the Não Vamos
Esquecer bulletins published by CEA, whose objective was to produce a
decolonized history relevant to the socialist present.10 To the students in-
vested in practical agricultural work, the History Workshop’s approach
appeared as ‘squarely populist’. But ultimately TBARN’s own students
determined Quadros’ resignation over a ‘silly quarrel’, perhaps sparked by
their own unresolved populism. Quadros wanted to welcome the peas-
ants into the campus; the students wanted to reach out to the campo. The
quarrel escalated, and Quadros left the centre.
In the aftermath of Quadros’ resignation João Paulo was invited, to-
gether with his friend José Negrão and John Saul, a former member of the
Dar es Salaam school, to join the newly established Faculty of Marxism–
Leninism. The Faculty offered courses in political formation (formação
política) which were compulsory for students across disciplines. Such
courses were predominantly taught by East Germans, who promoted a
rather dogmatic and decontextualized version of Marxism. To João Paulo
their lecturing style was ironically remindful of the colonial high-school
compulsory courses in Political and Administrative Structure of the Nation,
meant to inculcate the values of the Salazarist state through rote learning
of a handful of formulas. Frelimo’s department of Ideological Work also
worried about the lack of local content in the curriculum; the three young
lecturers were recruited to counter-balance this tendency by introducing
a course in Mozambican history focused on the liberation struggle saga.
Historians and theorists came close to blows: Saul had to be dragged away
as he was about to punch an orthodox East German Marxist.11
9 Quadros in return referred to Aquino as the intriguista, ‘the plotter’, and to CEA as
‘that setting of international plotters’ (Borges Coelho, ‘Memories of Ruth First in
Mozambique’, 503).
10 The title of the publication, ‘Let’s not forget’, draws from a revolutionary song. On
the History Workshop (Oficina de História), see especially Fernandes’ Dinâmicas
de pesquisa em Ciências Sociais no Moçambique pós-independente, who focuses on its
ideological complicity with Frelimo.
11 A similar account of such conflict based on other testimonies is provided in Fernandes
Dinâmicas de pesquisa em Ciências Sociais no Moçambique pós-independente,
115–16 and Lavinia Gasperini, Moçambique: Educação e Desenvolvimento Rural
In this ebullient climate of intellectual confrontation, while João Paulo

was beginning to elaborate a direction for his licenciatura dissertation, a
touchy request came from the university’s rectorship: to produce a teaching
manual on the history of the liberation struggle that would be used in the
new Marxism–Leninism syllabus.
III
The rewriting of the nation’s history had been at the centre of a bold col-
lective endeavour piloted at the Department of History under the direc-
tion of Carlos Serra. In 1981 Serra, who had just obtained a BA in history,
coordinated a group of students to produce a history of Mozambique in
three volumes, to be used in the final year of secondary schools.12 The
work was anchored in a conception of history as class struggle and mode
of production theory. It moved from the emergence of stratified societies
and kingdoms, analysed in broad strokes and with little concession to the
romance of precolonial African egalitarianism; through imperialist ag-
gression and the impact of capitalism in the formative years of Portuguese
colonial rule, dwelling especially on chartered companies and migrant
labour; to the heyday of colonial rule and the solidification of the fas-
cist state. The third volume covered the early resistance to colonialism,
including a brief foray into cultural and literary expression, but prudently
(Rome: Edizioni Lavoro/ISCOS, 1989), 77–8. I thank Carlos Fernandes for

directing me to Gasperini’s text.
12 The majority of the authors – Aurelio Rocha, David Hedges, Eduardo Medeiros,
Gerhard Liesegang, José Moreira, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Yussuf Adam – went on to
become either professors of History at UEM or important public intellectuals.
I consulted the second edition: Carlos Serra, ed., Historia de Moçambique, vol. I–II
(Maputo: Promedia, 2000) and David Hedges, ed., vol. III (Maputo: Promedia,
1999), which lacks Serra’s original introduction.
44 Paolo Israel
ended in 1961, at the threshold of formation of the liberation movement,

Frelimo.13
Rector Fernando Ganhão entrusted the writing of the new teaching
manual of the liberation struggle to Luis de Brito, who was then director
of the Faculty of Marxism–Leninism, and the two newly hired lecturers.
The two were then dipping into the colonial archives to reconstruct dif-
ferent aspects of the struggle for their respective dissertations; but no lib-
eration sources were available to write the manual, except for photographic
documentation and a few taped interviews of Samora Machel, which were
made available by Ganhão. Soon after beginning work on the manual, de
Brito resigned as faculty director on account of unsurmountable conflicts
with the East Germans.
A first draft was completed in 1983; the two adjunct authors worked
thrice-weekly on the layout at the Tempo printer. One evening Sol de
Carvalho, director of Tempo magazine, called João Paulo: ‘Don’t come
over: the book has been seized by security’. On the following morning, the
secretary of UEM’s Frelimo committee informed the two that they were
fired, as persons unworthy of the party’s trust. João Paulo prepared for the
worst: going back to high-school teaching, possibly even arrest.
One can only surmise what provoked such censorial wrath, since the
reasons for the confiscation were not communicated and no formal inquiry
was instituted. The manual follows the history of the liberation struggle in
six chapters that bring the reader from the formation of Frelimo, through
war and crisis, to triumph.14 The narrative is punctuated by boxed texts
with short biographies of leaders, snapshots on specific events, and excerpts
13 As noted by Serra (Historia de Moçambique, vol. I, x), scholars have offered opposed
evaluations of the manuals. José Capela described them as imbued with ‘ideological
apriorism’, while René Pelissier commended them.
14 Luís de Brito, João Paulo Borges Coelho, and José Negrão, História de Moçambique,
vol. IV: A Luta de Libertação Nacional, unpublished manuscript, 1983. I was able
to consult the penultimate draft, kindly provided by Colin Darch, which has still
corrections and incomplete visual material. The draft is divided in six chapters: the
origins and constitution of Frelimo; the first congress and the struggle for unity;
preparation to the armed struggle; beginnings of the armed struggle; the struggle
between the two lines; popular revolutionary war. A seventh chapter would cover
independence.
from Frelimo’s programmatic documents and publications; otherwise, no

sources are quoted. Throughout its narrative, the manual highlights the
internal conflicts and contradictions that plagued the liberation movement
since its foundation. The aftermath of Frelimo’s first congress is described
as marked by ‘lutas surdas envolvendo sobre tudo quadros e dirigentes
das anteriores organizações’ [subterranean struggles involving especially
staff and leaders of the previous organizations].15 Equally unflattering
is the depiction of Frelimo’s first training camp, Kongwa, populated by
‘agitadores’ [agitators] and ‘assassinos’ [murderers] who showed off expen-
sive shows and clothes to impress local girls; demanded salaries and schol-
arships; and held that ‘o inimigo era o branco e o indiano, que era preciso
matar indiscriminadamente para se obter a independência e a liberdade’
[the enemy was the White and the Indian, whom it was necessary to kill
indiscriminately].16 Also highlighted is the divergence between Lázaro
Nkavandame’s push for a ‘guerra total e imediata’ [total and immediate
war] to be won in three days by ‘pau, catana e azagaia’ [cudgel, machete
and arrow] and the project of a prolonged people’s war.17 A whole section
is devoted to the role of dissident movement Coremo.18 Another, to the
‘problemas de tipo novo’ [problems of a new kind] that the populations
faced in the semi-liberated zones – lack of food, insecurity, organization –
which often pushed them to seek the guidance of the ‘antigos chefes tribais’
[old tribal chiefs], and which translated into conflict between political
and military authority, northerners and southerners, men and women.19
The entire fifth chapter on ‘The struggle between the two lines’ offers an
15 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 14.

16 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 21–2.
17 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 23.
18 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 33. ‘I believe
it must be a more general title about puppets. In this way it promotes Coremo’, an
anonymous reader annotated on the draft I consulted.
19 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 38–9. The
discussion of continued gender oppression went against the mythical depiction of
women’s liberation through the formation of the Destacamento Feminino [Female
Detachment], the military unit led by Josina Machel. The History Workshops
registered continued gendered friction in their fieldwork in the 1980s, but never
highlighted it with such clarity in any of their written reports.
46 Paolo Israel
extended discussion of the social dimensions of the crisis that tore apart
the movement between 1968 and 1969. Even the sixth chapter on ‘Popular
Revolutionary War’, which showcases João Paulo’s burgeoning interest
in military history, contains a section on ‘puppet groups’ and vigilance.
Throughout the manual the authors side with Frelimo’s official political
line against dissidents, puppets and power-mongers, all the while dissecting
the social contradictions that underpinned such recurring and pervasive
political conflict. The tensions are therefore laid bare as a fundamental
component of the struggle’s history.
Perhaps it was another detail, though, that ultimately determined the
apprehension of the manuscript: the description of Eduardo Mondlane’s
death by parcel bomb, which in the party’s official version and schoolbooks
would have occurred in Frelimo’s office in central Dar es Salaam, but which
the manual locates at the private residence of a pessoa amiga (easily con-
struable as ‘female friend’) in Msasani Bay, after Mondlane had taken a jog
on the beach. This version of the events would be publicly corroborated
by Joaquim Chissano only in February 2006.20 The manual also states that
the book-bomb that killed Mondlane, while prepared by PIDE, had been
delivered by ‘one of the elements of the reactionary line’, a formulation
vague enough to make room for wide-ranged speculations.
On the afternoon of the same day in which he was dismissed, João
Paulo received a phone call from the rector, who summoned him to the
university. ‘I don’t know what is going to happen’, João Paulo said to his wife.
‘You are reintegrated, choose the unity where you would like to work’, the
rector announced. A powerful political figure in his own right, the rector
had managed to defend his subordinates against the party commissioner.
‘Traumatized’ by the experience, João Paulo asked to be deployed at the
university’s publishing centre. The volume coordinator, Luis de Brito, was
less fortunate: a few months later, in the confusion of the newly initiated
Operation Production, he was seized and dispatched to Niassa to work
in a State farm – a reeducation of sorts – for having refused to attend a
20 Chissano answered the question of a reporter from Canal Moçambique after the
thirty-seventh commemoration of Mondlane’s death at the heroes’ monument. The
pessoa amiga was Betty King, secretary of Mondlane’s wife, Janet.
compulsory course in Marxism–Leninism taught by the same East Germans

he had dared confronting.21
An extract of the incriminating manuscript would be published as a
detachable annex to Tempo magazine, purged of most references to internal
conflict and stripped of Mondlane’s death altogether.22 Over half of the
annex is occupied by the sixth chapter of the original manual, on popular
war and victory. This truncated document would remain for thirty years
the closest thing to an official history of the liberation struggle, while a
mimeo of the full version would be informally used as supporting material
in Frelimo’s training school in Matola.
IV
Meanwhile, building on an inborn drawing talent, João Paulo had made

his first forays into narrative fiction through the medium of comic strips.
Akapwitchi Akaporo: Armas e escravos [Weapons and slaves], published in
1981 with a programmatic title that explicitly refers to the ‘gun-slave cycle’
thesis, explores the contradictory consciousness of anti-colonial resistance
in Swahili slave-raiding chieftaincies.23 The story is set in the time of the
21 The chronology of these events is a tad uncertain. I rely on the only written
account of de Brito’s reeducation, provided by Gasperini, Moçambique: Educação e
Desenvolvimento Rural, 77; also discussed in Fernandes, Dinâmicas de pesquisa em
Ciências Sociais no Moçambique pós-independente, 116. In all likelihood, the farm
was Unango. On ‘Operation Production’ see Carlos Domingos Quembo, O Poder
do Poder: Operação Produção e invenção dos ‘improdutivos’ urbanos no Moçambique
Socialista, 1983–1988 (Maputo: Alcance, 2017). On state farms and reeducation
camps in Niassa, see Bendito Machava, The Morality of Revolution: Urban Cleanup
Campaigns, Reeducation Camps, and Citizenship in Socialist Mozambique (1974–
1988) (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2018).
22 Luís de Brito, João Paulo Borges Coelho, and José Negrão, ‘Sobre a Luta de
Libertação Nacional’, Tempo, 728 (23 September 1984), p. 25–56.
23 For a recent review of the ‘gun-slave’ hypothesis, according to which the traffic in
firearms generated more slavery, in a vicious cycle, see Warren C. Whatley, ‘The
48 Paolo Israel
Marave, sheik of Sancul, who defied the Portuguese and attacked their gar-
rison at Mossuril in 1898. Drawn in a style reminiscent of Hugo Pratt, the
strip follows the vicissitudes of a slave caravan through the interior and
back to the coast, and its confrontations with the Portuguese, who try to
blockade the trade, and the local villagers, target of the raids.24 In the final
pages, the historian allegorizes the struggle of Macote, caravan guide, to
swim back to the coast after setting fire to a Portuguese gunship: ‘In the
confusion of waters, the effort is contradictory. When he comes to the
surface, he prides himself on having defeated the Portuguese and having
contributed to the great Marave army; but when the wave brings him to
the depths, he remembers the carver of masks’ – another allegorical char-
acter – ‘and asks himself: Where do all those slaves go?’ (see Figure 2.1).25
In the time of Farelahi (Borges Coelho 1984) returns to the same cast
of characters, exploring in a longer narrative Mouzinho de Albuquerque’s
first botched attempt at the ‘pacification’ of northern Mozambique. The
strip reads like a treatise in military history, dissecting Mouzinho’s war-
fare tactics of expansion through the establishing of tax-collecting forts,
and Farelahi’s victorious guerilla-like response, evocative of Frelimo’s own
people’s war. But the titular hero is far-sighted and forecasts the enemy’s
inevitable triumph with yet another allegory: ‘Selling slaves is like selling
body parts. We sold the arms and legs, we remained without them to fight or
flee and finally they will come and get our head and heart’ (see Figure 2.2).26
The third and last strip, Namacurra, was published in 1987 as an annex
of the magazine Kurica. It follows again Macote in an adventure on the
Zambezian prazos, where he falls in love with a decayed princess (dona)
and witnesses the invasion of German general Von Lettow-Vorbeck during
the First World War.27
gun-slave hypothesis and the 18th century British slave trade’, Explorations in
Economic History, 67 (2018), 80–104.
24 Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt fused storytelling with historical research. His strips
were often featured in the Mozambican national newspaper Noticias.
25 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Akapwichi Akaporo, Armas e escravos (Maputo: Instituto
Nacional do Livro e do Disco, 1981), 59.
26 João Paulo Borges Coelho, No Tempo do Farelahi (Maputo: Instituto Nacional do
Livro e do Disco, 1984), 89.
27 I could unfortunately not get hold of Namacurra – even João Paulo does not have
a copy. I rely therefore on José Pimentel Teixeira, ‘Namacurra, a I Guerra Mundial
Figure 2.1. Macote, caravan guide, and the contradictory consciousness of resistance to
colonialism (a drawing by João Paulo, from Akapwitchi Akaporo)
All three strips were set in northern Mozambique, where João Paulo
had his deepest local roots – a maternal grandmother from Ibo, of Mauritian
origins, and a coconut plantation by the post of Mucojo. They were drawn
almost as a game, together with João Paulo’s small firstborn son, but re-
nowned journalist Machado Da Graça had them printed in 20,000 copies
and promoted as an example of historical popularization. The strips were
em Moçambique na banda desenhada de João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Canal de

Moçambique (24 September 2014), 14.
50 Paolo Israel
presented to an exhibition in Italy; Hugo Pratt sent a message to congratu-

late a talented imitator, disappointingly signing himself as ‘Corto Maltese’,
one of his characters.
Figure 2.2. Farelahi compares slavery to the selling of body parts (a drawing by João
Paulo, from No Tempo do Farelahi)
After this felicitous interlude with fiction, however heavily dominated

by historical argument, outlets for creativity shut down. A project of an
animation film on the history of the liberation struggle in collaboration
with Mendes de Oliveira, a theatre practitioner, had to be abandoned; the
first sketch found its way into the Tempo censored annex (see Figure 2.3).
Paper was scarce, ink expensive, the mood austere; João Paulo felt insecure
in a heavily constrained context, which he still inhabited somewhat as a
‘clandestine observer’.
Figure 2.3. Frelimo guerrillas carrying weapons and materials (a drawing by João Paulo,
from the Tempo insert on the Liberation Struggle)
The experiences of conflict between TBARN and CEA, Marxist dog-

matics and historians, party officials and university structures, had alerted
João Paulo to the difficulties of engaging with the contemporary history
of Mozambique, especially liberation histories. Besides the political pres-
sures, the main epistemological stumbling block was the unavailability of
written sources, kept by Frelimo in an archive with restricted access.
In the mid-1980s, a burgeoning generation of historians embarked on
the writing of their licenciatura dissertations.28 Historians linked to CEA,
like Yussuf Adam, drew from the corpus of interviews with protagonists of
the armed struggle gathered in the course of collective field trips from 1979
onwards, to reconstruct the history of resistance to colonialism.29 Perhaps
28 Formally equivalent to a Honours dissertation, the requirements for a licenciatura

thesis at the time were more stringent than an average MA in today’s Anglophone
system.
29 The most notable dissertations to come out of the CEA experience were written
by Yussuf Adam, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Isabel Casimiro and Alexandrino José, who
all went on to become important figures of Mozambican historiography. For a
52 Paolo Israel
inspired by Allen Isaacman’s pathbreaking example, others engaged with

precolonial history – still a respectably politicized endeavour, but not as
susceptible of attracting immediate attention and censorship.30 João Paulo
and José Negrão took a less trodden path. Accepting the ‘fair deal’ offered by
the director of the Mozambican Historical Archive (AHM), Inês Nogueira
da Costa, who provided access to specific fonds in exchange for a thorough
cataloguing, they set to work on the counterinsurgency documentation
left behind by the Portuguese. The endeavour went against the grain of
the accepted epistemological wisdom that had underpinned especially the
History Workshop’s approach, to which Portuguese documents – often
qualified as ‘the enemy’s sources’ – were to be handled with radical sus-
picion, as irredeemably imbued with class bias and an imperial outlook.
João Paulo dipped in the fonds devoted to the province of Tete. Less
mythified than the northerly province of Cabo Delgado, where the struggle
had begun and the most extensive network of ‘liberated zones’ had been es-
tablished, Tete had nonetheless occupied a crucial role in Frelimo’s military
strategy: wedged between three countries and highly susceptible to infiltra-
tion, it was the backdrop of the most gargantuan modernization project of
the decadent colonial State, the Cahora Bassa dam, which would remain
an object of political contention well into the postcolonial dispensation.31
It took over two years to organize, catalogue and study a set of documents
that covered a period of merely five years (1966–71). On the occasion of the
public defence, in 1986, Rector Fernando Ganhão critiqued the candidate
for his over-reliance on colonial sources. João Paulo’s response was twofold.
Influenced by Carlo Ginzburg’s developing ideas around the brushing of
discussion, see Adam Yussuf, and José Alexandrino, ‘History of Investigation,

Investigation of a History’, presentation to the seminar Social Movements. Social
transformation and the Struggle for Democracy in Africa (Harare, 1–3 June 1988),
esp. 11 and ff.
30 Such was the path taken by prominent expatriate historians Gerhard Liesegang and
David Hedges, whose work had a lasting impact on history of State-formation and
slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
31 On the Cahora Bassa dam, see Allen F. Isaacman, and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams,
Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in
Mozambique, 1965–2007 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015).
history against the grain and the paradigm of the clue,32 João Paulo argued
that it was possible to distil historical truth from the contradictions inherent
in the colonial sources – for instance, by studying the different reasons
that various interpreters adduced for the widespread practice of intensive
tobacco smuggling across the border during the war. Secondly, João Paulo
raised the question about the restricted access to the Frelimo archive, which
forced researchers to turn to colonial documentation.
The dissertation was published with minimal alterations in 1989, a
‘slim green book’ typewritten on translucent paper. The introduction of the
monograph discusses the risks inherent in the extensive use of Portuguese
documentation: attributing excessive importance to the military aspect,
which Frelimo deemed to be secondary to the social and cultural trans-
formations that the popular revolutionary war was supposed to bring forth;
and displacing, dispersing or diminishing the central role played by the
liberation movement. To allay those concerns, the introduction follows
three lines of argument. The first is a critique of the privileged use of oral
histories, both inherently imprecise and subject to a ‘teleological’ devi-
ation, so that ‘as respostas sigam ao encontro daquilo que o inquiridor
“quer ouvir”, num processo muitas vezes subconsciente, até’ [answers fulfil
what the inquirer ‘wants to hear’, in a process often even subconscious].33
Such critique was pioneering, in a moment in which not only the History
Workshop in Maputo, but also its namesake in Johannesburg, resolutely
defended a perspective of ‘history from below’ grounded on the recovery of
oral testimony from the (black) underclasses.34 Secondly, the introduction
32 See respectively Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a 16th-
Century Miller (London: Routledge, 1976); Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud
and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method’, History Workshop, 9
(1980), 5–36.
33 João Paulo Borges Coelho, O Início da Luta Armada em Tete, 1968–1969: A primeira
fase da guerra e a reacção colonial (Maputo: Arquívo Histórico de Moçambique),
1989, 12.
34 The ground-breaking critique of the fetishization of oral history in African
studies is Isabel Hofmeyr’s ‘Wailing for Purity. Oral studies in Southern African
studies’, African Studies, 54/2 (1995), 16–31, which built on Leroy Vail and
Landeg White’s Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), largely developed from
54 Paolo Israel
made a distinction between documentation of ‘pure propaganda’ and the

one meant to orient the functioning of the various echelons of the colonial
apparatus, organized in increasing degrees of secrecy.35 The latter proved
more fecund for historical inquiry. It was generally driven by an aspiration
to ‘affirm the truth’, be it the truth of domination; marked by lack of cohe-
sion and internal contradictions; and produced by structures independent
from each other – local governments, secret services, political police and
the army – which entered into a dialogue over the events to interpret.
Finally, the introduction argued that the practice of war itself might be
generative of new social relations, an argument with Fanonian overtones
which resonated as well with Frelimo’s official discourse.
The three chapters of the monograph follow the years leading up to
the opening of the Tete front (1966–9), moving from a discussion of the
arrangement of the Portuguese forces on the ground; to an analysis of
Frelimo’s diplomatic position vis-à-vis Malawi, Zambia and the dissident
groups, especially COREMO; to the effective beginning of military hostil-
ities in 1968. The last chapter demonstrates the belated nature of Portuguese
intelligence, which could grasp the military movements and position of
its enemy only after the fact, when they were no longer relevant; and the
extremely fragmented and mobile character of Frelimo’s presence on the
ground – rhizomatic, one might say – with constantly changing bases and
chains of command.
The book is unparalleled in its description of the military dynamics of
the liberation war, which even today remain blurry, yet it does not deliver
Mozambican material. For a critique of the Wits History Workshop see Jung Ran
Forte, Paolo Israel, and Leslie Witz, Out of History: Reimagining South African
Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016) and Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, and
Ciraj Rassool, Unsettled History: The Making of South African Public Pasts (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). The connections between the Wits
and the UEM history workshops have not sufficiently been explored.
35 These points were expanded in an article devoted specifically to the methodo-
logical discussion of written colonial sources – ‘not enemy sources, but our sources,
once we appropriate them and work with them’. See João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘A
Investigação Recente da Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional: Contexto, Práticas
e Perspectivas’, Arquivo: Boletim do Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, 17 (1995),
159–79.
on the promise of opening a window, through the analysis of war, onto mat-
ters of social transformation and political consciousness, as if those were
ultimately impermeable to the gaze of colonial intelligence. The military
angle also does not ultimately enable an appraisal of the central problem
of liberation struggle historiography, that of dissidence and political vio-
lence, which in the north of the country went hand in hand with Frelimo’s
progressive militarization.36
The monograph’s methodological critique concluded on the hope
that in-depth research on the colonial archive might enable ‘um trabalho
estruturado e sistemático com as fontes orais cuja perspectiva se empobrece
a cada dia que passa’ [a structured and systematic work with oral sources,
whose perspective becomes poorer day after day].37 An experiment in this
direction was the lengthy interview with Celestino de Sousa, leader of a
small Frelimo network in Tete between 1965 and 1966. Throughout the
forty-page transcript, the interviewer prompts Celestino with knowledge
of names, places, organizational structures, diplomatic relations, modus
operandi, which stimulate the recollection and sharpen its focus; yet, ul-
timately, one might wonder if the richness of the material is the result of a
fortunate encounter with a born storyteller, rather than a methodological
breakthrough.38
36 For the latter see Yussuf Adam, ‘Mueda, 1917–90: Resistência, Colonialismo,
Libertação e Desenvolvimento’, Arquivo: Boletim do Arquivo Histórico de
Moçambique, 14 (1993), 4–102. In a keynote address to a conference meant to re-
think the history of the Mozambican liberation struggle, Colin Darch, building
on the pioneering work carried out by James Belich on the colonial wars in New
Zealand, argued for the crucial importance of military history (‘A História da Luta
Armada de Libertação de Moçambique e os Desafios da Comunicação Científica’,
paper presented at the seminar Desafios de Pesquisa da História da Luta de
Libertação Nacional na Actualidade, Maputo, 16–18 September 2015). Darch’s com-
munication, much like Borges Coelho’s monograph, leaves un-theorized the point
of articulation between military strategy and popular consciousness, bypassing as
well the problem of political violence.
37 Borges Coelho, O Início da Luta Armada em Tete, 1968–1969, 17.
38 The interview was carried out together with José Negrão in late 1983 and published
several years later: ‘Entrevista com Celestino de Sousa: A actividade da Frelimo em
Tete, 1964–67’, Arquivo: Boletim do Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, 10 (1991),
56 Paolo Israel
The use of colonial sources in interviews was also not deprived of

ethical and epistemological risks. Celestino de Sousa’s underground cell
was composed of five people, four of whom were named in the colonial
documentation. The fifth member was not named, because he’d been an
informant of PIDE. At the end of the interview Celestino invited João
Paulo to meet in Moatize a member of the cell whose name was not one
of the four. In the evening, João Paulo reviewed the documentation and
realized that the person could only have been the informant. He spent
the night cogitating. Should he go? Should he unmask someone who’d
been a traitor almost twenty years before, in the very moment in which
people ‘compromised’ with the colonial regime were being processed by
Samora Machel and urban ‘unproductives’ were deported to Niassa?39 In
the morning he decided he didn’t have this right. ‘I’m not going,’ he told
Celestino, ‘I’m afraid of being ambushed by Renamo’. The rebel movement
was making headways in Tete.40
VI
All the while João Paulo occupied a marginal position at UEM. The lo-
cation he had chosen after his half-a-day dismissal, at the Núcleo editorial
[publishing centre], was nonetheless stimulating. João Paulo took the
133–68. The Oficina the História had a similar fortunate encounter with a born
storyteller in Mueda, João Cornelio Mandanda, whose interviews occupy over five
hours of tape, but whose voice was largely shaped by Frelimo’s official narrative.
39 On the meeting of the compromised, held in Maputo in 1983, see Victor Igreja,
‘Frelimo’s Political Ruling Through Violence and Memory in Postcolonial
Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36/4 (December 2010), 539–56,
and Maria Paula Meneses, ‘Hidden Processes of Reconciliation in Mozambique: The
Entangled Histories of Truth-seeking Commissions held between 1975 and 1982’,
Africa Development, 41, 4 (2016), 153–80.
40 The Resistencia Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo) was a contras movement cre-
ated by neighbouring Rhodesia, with complicity of the CIA, and under the lead-
ership of Frelimo dissidents, which would gain widespread popular support in a
sixteen-year-long war.
initiative of publishing a number of guides and readers that specified the

rules, requirements and bibliography for each course. Before this material
was produced, students enrolled without having a notion of what they
would go through. The centre also published posters for social campaigns;
a literary magazine, Eco, which showcased some of the most promising
poets of the post-independence period, including Mia Couto; and Bento
Sitoe’s Zabela, the first work of fiction in the Ronga language. Paper was
scarce and expensive; printing required some shady bookkeeping.
On account of the experience acquired during the cataloguing of the
Tete fonds and at the publishing centre, João Paulo was invited in 1987 to
direct a biannual scholarly journal published by the Mozambique Historical
Archive, which would be called Arquivo. A special issue was devoted each
year to a city or province of Mozambique: Maputo, Mozambique Island,
Beira, Inhambane, Tete, Cabo Delgado, Manica and Gaza.41 The first five
special issues focused on the history of major Mozambican cities, as if
to counter-balance the representation of urban spaces as sites of moral
corruption, which was a cornerstone of Samora Machel’s rhetoric.42 All
the editing work was carried out by João Paulo, with the sole help of an
assistant with a primary school certificate, who composed the journal on
a rudimentary electric typewriter, yet with astonishing spelling assured-
ness. Much as the 1981 manuals constituted an early collective statement
of an emerging generation of historians grounded in the theory of class
struggle, and the 1983–7 Não Vamos Esquecer bulletins presented an en-
gaged plea for a ‘history from below’ grounded in orality and the experi-
ence of labour, the typewritten pages of Arquivo would define the shape
of a mature Mozambican historiography, grounded in empirical research
and epistemological debate.
In 1986 Samora Machel died; a new rector, Rui Baltazar, was appointed
at UEM. Towards the end of his short tenure, Baltazar summoned once
41 A complete list of the Arquivo issues, with a brief discussion of their content as well
as covers, can be found at <http://www.mozambiquehistory.net/arquivo.php>.
42 See Colin Darch, and David Hedges, ‘Political Rhetoric in the Transition to
Mozambican Independence: Samora Machel in Beira, June 1975’, Kronos, 39 (2013),
32–65. In our conversation, João Paulo considered the choice coincidental, for the
first special issue was published for the centenary of Maputo, but the result is none-
theless a complex historical grounding of Mozambique’s urban spaces.
58 Paolo Israel
more the two authors of the censored manual. ‘The University owes you
an explanation,’ he said, ‘but I don’t have one’. He had tried his best to
understand why the book had been apprehended, but could not obtain
an answer. Perhaps the manual was too Samorian, he speculated; but that
illation might have well been a product of the times, or of the rector’s own
political leanings. In any case, the rector acknowledged the university’s
responsibility and indebtedness to the authors. ‘Why don’t you go do a
doctorate overseas?’ he proposed. Peter Fry, who directed the regional
Ford Foundation, offered two fellowships. Negrão went to Sweden; João
Paulo to Bradford, UK. It was 1990, the country brought to its knees by
civil conflict, the republic no longer popular, the party resigned to struc-
tural adjustment, the capital city strangled by rebels.
VII
The departure to the United Kingdom implied a return to Tete, both in-
tellectual and physical. João Paulo chose as PhD subject the history of
forced resettlement in the province between 1968 and 1982. The choice
stemmed from at least two sources: the TBARN experience, with its
emphasis on bridging material and cultural phenomena; and the under-
standing, matured in the engagement with the colonial archive, of the
crucial role that fortified villages (aldeamentos) had played during the lib-
eration struggle. Another factor might have been the relative availability
of archival documents on the implementation of communal villages and
cooperatives in Tete.
The thesis’ originality is to bridge the colonial and postcolonial dispen-
sations, so as to demonstrate that, however radically different in ideology,
the two regimes were driven by a similar attitude towards its peasantry: the
drive to break down the segmentarity of pre-colonial formations and control
agricultural production by forcibly resettling people into large villages. In
the precolonial period a ‘dynamic of permanent segmentation, associated
to a great and critically-needed accuracy in locating the most fertile lands,
determined a pattern of scattered settlement composed of small shifting

villages’,43 which would interact with the larger states by maintaining their
functional autonomy. During the late colonial period, resettlement in for-
tified villages was used as military strategy to contain Frelimo’s expansion,
generating a ‘re-peasantization’ of a population that had become massively
enmeshed in migrant labour. Driven by a modernist agenda and borrowing
from Julius Nyerere’s idea of vijiji vyaujamaa [family-hood villages], Frelimo
would discourage people from leaving the aldeamentos and aggressively
promoted its own politics of villagization, thus in effect stunting the rural
development of Tete.
The thesis was also a missed opportunity to intervene in the emerging
debate about the ‘social basis’ of Renamo during the civil war. In 1990 French
anthropologist Christian Geffray, a former associate the Departamento de
Antropologia e Arqueologia [Department of Anthropology and Archeology],
a neighbour of CEA, had published a book that explained Renamo’s popu-
larity in the province of Nampula as a reaction to Frelimo’s vanguardist
policies, especially forced villagization and the repression of traditional
authority.44 The ‘Geffray thesis’ was refuted by CEA intellectuals, whom
Geffray had lambasted in a scathing portrayal as haughty populists and party
bootlickers.45 João Paulo’s dissertation, whose focus was precisely communal
villages, responded only laterally to Geffray, suggesting prudence in drawing
conclusions. Tete was then in a state of utter chaos; while it seemed certain
that Frelimo’s villagization programme had stifled the economic potential
43 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the
Mozambican Province of Tete: A History of State Resettlement Policies, Development
and War (PhD thesis, University of Bradford, 1993), 18.
44 Christian Geffray, La cause des armes au Mozambique: anthropologie d’une guerre
civile (Paris: Karthala, 1990).
45 Christian Geffray, ‘Fragments d’un discours du pouvoir (1975–85)’, Politique
Africaine, 29 (1988), 71–85. See especially Bridget O’Laughlin, ‘A base social da
guerra em Moçambique’, Estudos Moçambicanos, 10 (1992), 107–42, and Alice
Dinerman, Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial
Africa: The case of Mozambique, 1975–1994 (London: Routledge, 2006). Sérgio
Chicava, ‘“They can kill us but we won’t go to the communal villages!” Peasants and
the Policy of “Socialisation of the Countryside” in Zambezia’, Kronos, 39 (2013),
112–30, has written in support of Geffray’s thesis.
60 Paolo Israel
of rural areas and generated malcontent, the empirical basis was too thin
to establish a clear connection with the support enjoyed by Renamo.
Largely based on archival sources, the PhD led João Paulo to engage
further with oral history. One experience stood out: a collective interview
with war veterans, which aimed to map and understand Frelimo’s military
structures during the liberation war.46 People came by bicycle from neigh-
bouring villages and districts to participate, disposing themselves in the
room according to the sectors in which they had fought. Again, the con-
versation short-circuited the colonial archives with the lived experiences
of guerillas. For instance, João Paulo read aloud from one document: ‘The
chief (régulo) Buxo was killed in 1971 at the door of his house’. One person
raised his hand: ‘I was there: I was the one who killed him’.47 The image of
the humanism of the liberation war was slowly coming undone.
The thesis was submitted in 1993; João Paulo returned to a position at
UEM’s History Department.48 Peace between Frelimo and Renamo had
just been signed and the country headed towards elections. One of the
foremost tasks ahead was the integration and demobilization of the two
rival armies, which had both systematically engaged in atrocities against
civilians. João Paulo’s expertise in military history earned him a consult-
ancy research grant on the demobilization of soldiers, which resulted in a
lengthy co-authored article published in a special issue of Arquivo.49 The
46 ‘Entrevista com a Associação dos Antigos Combatentes de Tete: Uma Conversa

Sobre a Luta de Libertação Nacional na Frente de Tete’, Arquivo: Boletim do Arquivo
Histórico de Moçambique, 13 (1993), 99–137.
47 The interview was published in Arquivo in 1993. João Paulo’s engagements with oral
history are overall not massive, if one considers that only seven interviews spanning
ten years are quoted in the PhD thesis (Protected Villages and Communal Villages
in the Mozambican Province of Tete, 443). What is truly important, rather than
quantity, is the use of colonial documentation in interviews. This method was not
used by the History Workshop, which dealt with orality as an autonomous source,
sometimes silencing versions of the past that resonated with the colonial archive
more than with the official narrative.
48 The thesis was co-supervised by Gary Littlejohn at Bradford and David Hedges
at UEM.
49 João Paulo Borges Coelho, and Alex Vines, ‘Desmobilização e Reintegração de Ex-
Combatentes em Moçambique’, Arquivo, 19 (1996), 5–110.
article analysed two contrasting approaches to the reintegration of combat-

ants: purification, often achieved through ritual means, and reconciliation,
the result of a more laborious process of dialogue. In 1997, another con-
sultancy brought João Paulo to the district of Zumbo at the westernmost
tip of Tete, by the Zambezi River, near the border of Zambia and a natural
park, to study the movement of people in the aftermath of war. The social
landscape was so complex, so rich with stories of poaching, smuggling and
border-crossing, that it exceeded what could be conveyed in the language
of a consultancy report or a journal article. João Paulo began to consider
other avenues.
In 1999 Inês Nogueira da Costa, director of AHM, resigned. João
Paulo was approached to take over the prestigious position, but declined.
In the course of the following twenty years, the new director, Joel das Neves
Tembe, had to negotiate with an increasingly defensive Frelimo the condi-
tions of access to its liberation archives, hosted at AHM. In the transition
from Joaquim Chissano’s presidency to that of Emilio Guebuza – architect
of the most violent policies of reeducation in the 1980s and promoter of
unbridled liberalization and primitive accumulation in the 2000s – Frelimo
threatened on several occasions to take possession of its archive, just as
the Museum of Revolution was declared its sole property. But the arch-
ives remained at AHM: the least sensitive sections informally opened to
researchers; the rest, shut.
VIII
The ‘trauma’ of the closed archives – an insurmountable obstacle for ser-

ious, encompassing research on contemporary Mozambican history –
and the need to find to a new language to portray the ‘bubbling world
of crisscrossing things’ experienced in Zumbo, prompted João Paulo’s
(re)turn to fiction. The novel As duas sombras do rio came out in 2003: still
a tentative work, brimming with local colour and stock characters, and
yet a new beginning.
62 Paolo Israel
In the same years in which a literary career was launched, João Paulo
articulated the conceptual intervention that made the most lasting impact
on the fledgling international field of Mozambican historiography. In a
communication first presented at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris, João Paulo dissected the structure of the liberation history
‘fable’ almost in narratological terms.50 The fable was composed of a simple
structure – a colonial massacre, a first shot, gradual purification from trai-
tors and reactionaries, final victory – and organized around clear-cut bin-
aries: ‘colonialismo versus revolução, reaccionários versus revolucionários,
civis versus militares, rural versus urbano’ [colonialism vs revolution, reac-
tionaries vs revolutionaries, civilians vs military, rural vs urban].51 Most
importantly, the fable should always remain oral, never to be written down.
The oral nature of the fable allowed for periodic retouches according to
the political demands of the present, all the while investing those who
had experienced the liberation struggle with the unquestioned authority
of the witness. This insight, which expanded the critique of orality ma-
tured during the work on Tete, was also afforded by the incident of the
censored manual. Yet the essay foresaw a gradual but irrevocable ‘opening
up’ of the fable, with the multiplication of written memoirs by protagon-
ists of the struggle, which would give rise to a polyphony of voices, instead
of a dominant single narrative. The fable was bound to progressively age.
And should the conditions for writing history remain unfavourable, with
the archives shut down and the protagonists ageing or dying out, then
perhaps fiction writing should take over the burden of engaging with the
50 The communication was presented in 2005. For the published versions, see João
Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Politics and Contemporary History in Mozambique: A Set
of Epistemological Notes’, Kronos 39 (2013), 20–32, and ‘Abrir a fábula: Questões da
política do passado em Moçambique’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 106 (2015),
153–66. The critique occurs in complete isolation from the postcolonial critiques
of the colonial archive and liberation narratives that the reception of Foucault’s
work had enabled in the Anglophone academic milieux (see for instance Carolyn
Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive. New York: Springer, 2002). João Paulo de-
scribes himself as a fierce adversary of ‘postmodernism’ and deconstruction.
51 Borges Coelho, ‘Abrir a fábula: Questões da política do passado em
Moçambique’, 156.
dwindling fable and the territory of collective memory, ‘torna[ndo] possível

pensar na luta de libertação sem necessariamente a experimentar’ [making
it possible to think about liberation struggles without necessarily having
experienced them].52
That would be the path that João Paulo himself would take, progres-
sively forsaking history in favour of fiction. One might wonder about such
a shift. The two modalities are, in João Paulo’s view, antipodal: the one
committed to empirical research and epistemological reflection, the other
to self-exploration and experimentation with language; the one invested
in public debate, the other ‘occupying silent spaces’.53 João Paulo’s trajec-
tory as historian can be read as a sustained critical effort to understand the
history of the Mozambican liberation struggle, constantly devising strat-
egies to bypass political censorship, but never falling prey to the a-priori
hostility to Frelimo that characterized a later generation of scholars. Is
the shift to fiction to be understood as middle-age disillusion or fatigue?
As the actualization of a latent liberal sensibility, an indulgence with self-
hood stemming directly from the bourgeois roots that João Paulo, quite
candidly, never disavowed? As the prolongation of an experimentalism
which saw in Quadros a father figure, and in the comics a first outlet? As
a fall-back determined by the obdurate closure of the archives? As the ex-
pression of an intimate desire, which should not be named or reduced to
political determinants? While one ponders these questions, which sit on
the uncomfortable edge between individual psychology and history, it is
worth noting that, as much as the context of revolutionary Mozambique
might have been constraining and threatening, it also, if fleetingly, instilled
a breath of utopianism into artistic, scholarly and cultural production at
large. Perhaps the transformation of a critical historian into a novelist is
also a legacy of that moment.
52 Borges Coelho, ‘Abrir a fábula: Questões da política do passado em

Moçambique’, 164.
53 For a radically opposite take about the relationship between history and literature,
see Ivan Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les
sciences sociales (Paris: Seuil, 2014).
64 Paolo Israel
Perhaps we should just heed João Paulo’s own consideration and

counsel: ‘We don’t have to be sad. You shouldn’t take a path that embit-
ters you.’54
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Nazir Ahmed Can
3
Poetics and Politics of Memory: Notes on João Paulo
Borges Coelho’s Novels1
ABSTRACT
The artistic project of João Paulo Borges Coelho finds its unity through the combination of
regularity and experimentation, an unusual blend in the literary scene. Relatively under the
radar, his work opens new ways to the literatures written in Portuguese. Starting from the
diversification of times, spaces, people and narrative stances, opposing the rigid vision of the
established powers, the writer analyses the silences of the official historiography and expands
the horizon of the local memory. By looking at his six first novels, the author’s favourite
literary genre, we will analyse the way these options enable, on one side, a clever reading
about violence and, on the other, an act of aesthetic renovation in Mozambican literature.
The artistic project of João Paulo Borges Coelho finds its unity in the
combination of regularity and experimentation, an unusual blend in the
current literary scene. Starting from the diversification of times, spaces,
people and narrative stances, opposing the rigid vision of established
powers, the author analyses the silences of the official historiography
and expands the horizon of the local memory. By looking at his first six
novels,2 the author’s favourite literary genre,3 we will analyse the way these
1 This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de
Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001, Project
88887.364731/2019-00, Institutional Internationalization Program – CAPES-
PrINT. As this text was written between 2018 and 2019, it was also supported
by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq
(Brazil) (Productivity Researcher Grant, Level 2) – and by Rio de Janeiro Research
Foundation – FAPERJ (Brazil) (Young Researcher of Rio de Janeiro Program).
2 Since 2003, João Paulo Borges Coelho has published seven novels, two volumes
of tales and three novellas. He also wrote three comics, launched in Maputo at
the beginning of the 1980s, and some short narratives spread in published works
of different nature. Among the latters, we highlight ‘Anjo voador’, included
in the collective volume edited by Sheila Khan et al., Visitas a João Paulo Borges
Coelho: leituras, diálogos e futuros (Lisboa: Colibri, 2017), 229–34.
3 Regarding the novelistic production of the author, see the recent article of Rita
Chaves, published by journal Mulemba, in a special issue dedicated to the literary
70 Nazir Ahmed Can
options enable, on the one hand, a clever reading of violence and, on the
other, the aesthetic renovation in Mozambican literature.
In spite of also being a historian, João Paulo Borges Coelho avoids the
didactic approach. The History emerging from his narratives is a knowledge
that is appropriate for occultation, revision and representation. Relying on
strategies such as metonyms, metaphors or allegories, mediated by humour
and irony, the author plays on the shifts between ‘small’ (everyday stories)
and ‘big’ (History). Virtuous, the former reveals and pluralizes the latter.
Thus, his novels explore the ties between the poetics and the politics of
memory to identify some continuities of the colonial in the postcolonial
time, hence refuting the official narratives of both periods.4
The first novel, As duas sombras do rio (2003), comes from the travels
of João Paulo Borges Coelho across the Zumbo region during the civil war
that devastated the country for almost two decades. The contact with the
Zambezi River meant a turning point in his intellectual production, as he
reveals in an interview given to Carmen Secco:
De alguma forma, ele incutiu em mim uma forma de escrever ficção a partir da
surpresa provocada pelos lugares. O rio é importante, de facto, por ser ele que marca
indubitavelmente a vida das comunidades retratadas e porque ele é uma espécie de
chave do Moçambique actual, tal como se configura. Aquele rio é imenso, um dos
maiores do mundo (um dos mais fundos, no sentido divisório).5
[Somehow, the River Zambezi inspired me a way of writing fictions starting from
the surprise provoked by the places seen. This river is important, in fact it marks
undoubtedly the lives of the communities portrayed and because it is a kind of key
for contemporary Mozambique, in its configuration. This river is enormous, one of
the biggest in the world (one of the deepest, division-wise).]
work of João Paulo Borges Coelho. In this essay, Chaves identifies some singular-
ities in the narratives of the Mozambican writer and examines the connections with
the novel in the contemporary context. Rita Chaves, ‘O romance em João Paulo
Borges Coelho: respirar a diferença na escrita’, Mulemba, 18/10 (2018), 14–31.
4 Nazir Ahmed Can, Discurso e poder nos romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho
(Maputo: Alcance, 2014), 15.
5 Carmen Secco, ‘Entrevista a João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Buala <http://www.buala.
org/pt/cara-a-cara/entrevista-a-joao-paulo-borges-coelho> accessed 19 December
2009.
Poetics and Politics of Memory 71
As a circular space of History, the Zambezi River is, in As duas sombras

do rio, the stage of a division opposing two imaginaries: one from the north,
sustained by female elements, the water and the snake; the other, from the
south, protected by masculine elements, the fire and the lion. In the heart
of this big river there is the Cacessemo Island, where the ‘crazy’ Leónidas
Ntsato is found; he is a character inspired by an existing person the author
met when he visited the region. It is an unusual witness, hosting in his body
the rival spirits of the snake and the lion, hence living a private war, but
similar to the one that spread around the nation. Unable to find anyone
who understands the political outreach of his problem, this character hides
himself on the banks of the river, finding repose only in the final part of
the book, when he reconciles with the Zambezi on the way to Cacessemo
or to his premeditated drowning.
Leónidas Ntsato keeps, for the above reasons, an intimate and tragic
relation with the Zambezi, a place where beginning and end are equiva-
lent. Specifically for the fact that he belongs to two worlds and cannot
and does not want to refuse any of them, Ntsato represents the paradoxes
of the internal refugee. It is an individual that feels unwelcome because of
the mythic theology and political practices of this place, a border that de-
limits the separation between extremes. By the way, the border, a recurring
element in Borges Coelho’s production, forms in As duas sombras do rio
the first space of interaction and mobility, but also of tension and violence.
Unlike various contemporary authors, from Africa and elsewhere, who hold
a didactic appeal to hybridism, Borges Coelho rethinks the political and
communitarian resistance to hybridism. In his works, the boundaries be-
tween life and death, the snake and the lion, between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’
or between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ are ‘distressing and incessantly amplified’,
as Agamben states in his reflections on refugees.6 The strange condition
of Ntsato, displaced in his own land, permeates the narrative structure
itself: the protagonist, affected by the ambivalence syndrome, is absent in
more than a hundred pages.
6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida (Valencia: Pre-
Textos, 2003), 208.
72 Nazir Ahmed Can
By analysing some of the protagonists of Índicos Indícios I. Setentrião,

the first volume of short stories, Fátima Mendonça calls attention to the
‘configuration of the protagonist shaped by the paradigm of the anti-hero’.7
Borges Coelho’s protagonists are built through invariability and dual iden-
tities and do not give the reader the certainty of what is already conse-
crated.8 In fact, despite their singularities, heroes such as Ntsato (As duas
sombras do rio), Vicente (As visitas do Dr. Valdez), Tito (Crónica da Rua
513.2), Mungau (Campo de Trânsito), Jamal (‘Pano encantado’) or Laissone
(Cidade dos Espelhos), share some characteristics: they are young, somehow
ingenuous, silent, nearly never they stand against in a rhetorical way. In
addition, they are similar, from this perspective, to the ‘tragic hero’, the in-
dividual ‘still silent, immature’, mentioned by Walter Benjamin. On the one
hand, they do not give voice to an oppressed collectivity, because they do
not enunciate an open discourse revealing their conditions or presenting
their claims. On the other hand, they cannot be considered as models, they
do not even define themselves as such, they are in the process of doing so,9
and almost always in a losing situation. Due to the ambivalence connecting
them to more than one world, they end up suffering from mistrust, pre-
conceptions and exclusion from the societies represented in the novels.
It is important to stress the fact that the secondary characters of As
duas sombras do rio accompany the ambivalent and incomplete character
of the protagonist. All of them are characterized by duplicity, thus, they
mirror the waters of the Zambezi. Here is another original aspect of Borges
Coelho’s writing in the Mozambican prose: secondary characters are not
accessories to the development of the actions; on the contrary, they evolve
in the same direction (ambivalence), bring their own individual material
(always incomplete) and acquire the same qualitative status (inconstancy)
7 Fátima Mendonça, ‘Hibridismo ou estratégias narrativas? Modelos de herói na

ficção narrativa de Ngugi wa T’hiongo, Alex la Guma e João Paulo Borges Coelho’,
in Mar Garcia, Felicity Hand, and Nazir Ahmed Can, eds, Indicities/Indices/
Indícios. Hybridations problématiques dans les littératures de l’Océan Indien (Ille-
sur-Têt: Éditions K’A, 2010), 204.
8 Mendonça, ‘Hibridismo ou estratégias narrativas? …’, 207.
9 Walter Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemande (Paris: Flammarionm,
1985), 116.
of the main characters of the whole narrative. In this way, the author em-
barks on a complex journey, still little explored in the national literature,
as the structural polyphony of his work does not come solely from the
confrontation of different consciences, but also from the divisions experi-
enced by each individual.10
In the first critical analysis of Borges Coelho’s literary production,
Francisco Noa highlights some of the aspects that would be confirmed
in the following novels of the author. Starting from the reflections about
Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, Noa identifies four main appeals in
As duas sombras do rio: the appeal to the game, visible in a narrative where
‘everything is open due to the amplitude and inclusiveness of the spatial,
temporal and human dimensions represented there’; the appeal to the
dream, that makes us ‘alienate momentously from our own world’; the
appeal to the thought, fulfilled in the ‘attentive and rationalising look of
the narrator’, who ‘puts us in the presence of the perplexities of a deter-
mined world (the one of the Mozambicans), in a specific moment (the civil
war)’; finally, the appeal to the time, that brings out ‘a human or inhuman
dimension of a historical situation’.11 If As duas sombras do rio basically
reminds – following the ‘appeals’ cited by Noa – the spatial separation
between north and south as the main reason of communitarian and ex-
istential division of the characters, in As visitas do Dr. Valdez (2004) the
theme of the border is developed as a temporal metaphor. Taking place
in a time that is very close to the independence of Mozambique, the nar-
rative goes around the life of Vicente, a young black employee who dis-
guises himself as an old white doctor (Valdez), in a triple transformation
that aims at satisfying the nostalgia of his mistresses, the sisters Sá Amélia
and Sá Caetana. The two old ladies represent the ‘possible family’ for the
young Mozambican, who inherited the art of serving from his dad, Cosme
Paulino, and History. On one side, Vicente, transitioning to the adult age,
wishes to escape his fate of submission to take part in the transformation
10 With regards to this aspect, even though it is developed in another context, see the
analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin, La poétique de Dostoïevski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1998), 148–53.
11 Francisco Noa, ‘As duas margens do rio ou as muitas margens do romance e da vida’,
Domingo (7 September 2003).
74 Nazir Ahmed Can
occurring in Mozambique – also in a full transition to independence; but,

on the other side, he remembers the words of his father, when he wanted
him to continue working as servant and looking after the ladies, as if they
were part of his family.12 The nearly visceral attachment to these two op-
posed worlds and times accentuates the ambiguity of the relations between
the protagonists of the novel who are invited to take on different and un-
expected identities.
Thus, in an ambiguous movement, Vicente reinvents a Portuguese
figure from the colonial past, Dr Valdez, and rescues the memory of his
father. In this dramatization, not only the colonizer and the past, embodied
in Dr Valdez, are partially represented and ridiculed. The two times – past
and present – and the different personalities of those times intersect and
disfigure each other.13 As visitas do Dr. Valdez utilizes, in this way, the strat-
egies of the mask, ambiguity, polysemy and mimicry, as theorized by Homi
Bhabha in The Location of Culture. It is important, however, to make some
distinctions between Bhabha’s theoretical standpoint and Borges Coelho’s
literary imaginary. In some moments, Vicente feels ridiculed because of
his condition, the flop of some of his subversive strategies and, finally, his
own impossibility of agency – a decision with a real and efficacious effect.
If, according to the Indian theorist, mimicry becomes a type of agency that
makes the other (the colonized) similar through derision and the approxi-
mation to the world of the colonizer, Vicente’s mimicry does not manage
to reach that effect. On the contrary, while he is masked, the servant can
just bring out his rage and his claims, in an ironic way. But his mistresses
will always have the power of interrupting the game. Vicente can, as much
as he can, stage some rebellious actions, within the limitations of his social
12 After all, the stories of Cosme Paulino and the direct pressure of his orders put
on Vicente are very close to what Achille Mbembe states. For the Cameroonian
scholar, the colonized, at times, tried to include the colonial factor in the cases of
parenthood and interpret the social relations of domination, starting from a dis-
course of lineage and genealogy – Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie. Essai sur
l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 282.
13 Almiro Lobo calls attention to the way this novel establishes a space in-between,
that makes us reconsider difficult heritage, but vital to understand the present –
Almiro Lobo, ‘Quatro compassos para uma leitura descomprometida’, meia noite
(10 April 2006), 42.
context. However, he will be able to act more or less openly – or with

agency – only in the final part of the narrative, in a different setting, that
is, the moment when the winds of revolution enter through the window
of that house. We cannot, for this reason, confirm with much certainty
the existence of an other who transfigures in the presence of the metropol-
itan authority (as Bhabha suggests). Due the strict, tragic and inevitable
bound with the colonial history, Vicente does only what he can and when
he can. Built on different strategies of dramatization (gesture, voice and
look, respectively), the three visits of Dr Valdez, done by Vicente on those
Sundays when he is off from work, give the young colonized some times
of freedom, but also submission. The worker-actor goes from the carni-
valesque14 that entails the subversive inversion of the values, to the safety
valve,15 that applies to those circumstances where the symbolic reversion
implies the participation of the authorities.
Borges Coelho’s artistic and intellectual project does not dialogue with
theorists who focus on the colonial dualism (Albert Memmi ou Frantz
Fanon) or the postcolonial hybridism (Bhabha and his followers from
the postcolonial studies of culturalist orientation). For the writer these
two historical moments are bound by a dialectical relation of symbolic
violence: in the context of the Mozambican independence, the relations
between power and domination follow a political willingness to silence
all those places that, somehow, were linked to the past. In fact, it was de-
cided that the ideas of ‘past’ and ‘colonization’ would be put in the same
category. The affiliation to the other time (old or new) that his characters
establish is, in first place, ‘forbidden’ by the authorities and, on the other
hand, generates individuals that are ontologically unstable, turbulent and
with limited or non-existing agency.
The interferences between the colonial and postcolonial times is
again predicted in Crónica da Rua 513.2. The novel published in 2006 ex-
plores the lives of the residents of a mixed street (with reference to race,
gender and social class) during the period of transition to the political
14 See: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais y su Mundo (Barcelona: Barral, 1974).

15 See: Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen
and West, 1963); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
(Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
76 Nazir Ahmed Can
independence of Mozambique. Starting from the praise of Musil’s Der

Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities], included in the
epigraph, Crónica da Rua 513.2 looks at the transformation of a everyday
street with the beginning of the revolution. Thus, in the absence of a heroic
protagonist (who would go against the anti-epic tone of this coral novel),
Crónica da Rua 513.2 hides a bigger complexity: to describe in a minuscule
space the years before and after the Mozambican revolution. Under the
sign of smallness, the reader is invited to think upon the most remarkable
events in the recent history of the region: the trapped house that colonist
Dr Pestana leaves for the new resident of number 7; the repression against
the Indians living in Mozambique during the 1960s, after the annexation of
Goa by the Indian Union (in the little stars on the notebook of Marques,
heartbroken for the leaving of the Goan Buba), as well as the ambiguous
situation of those who remained after 1975 (such as Valgy, delirious street
merchant, owner of an empty shop, but full of stories); the oppression of
the political discourse against the individual (implied in every chapter);
the re-education camps, spread in the hole that transforms the north of the
street in a cavity ‘cheia de mosquitos’ [full of mosquitos]16 and in the long
journey of Tito Nharreluga; the civil war, that comes across like a storm
on a beach (Chapter 22). As a mixed space, overloaded with images from
a daily life that can be the caricature of a convulse country in transition
like a deformed face of other worlds, this street represents a place of inter-
rogation, that defines nothing, but evokes a lot of things.
The title summarizes the aim of this work: to ally the minuscule space
(of a street) to the vast time of the (biblical) Chronicles. From the first
chapter, titled ‘Prólogo: sobre os nomes e a rua’ [Prologue: on names and
the streets],17 we verify the importance given to three components: time,
name and space. In the place of the expected 2.513 (typical numeration of
some streets of Maputo) there is the number 2, the number of ambivalence
and duplicity, put in the end:
de forma que o enigmático número da Rua 513.2 permaneceu como estava. Tirá-lo
de nome da rua seria como que desprezar a aritmética na altura em que ela era
16 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Crónica da Rua 513.2 (Lisboa: Caminho, 2006), 107.
17 In dialogue with ‘Noms de pays: le nom’ (À la Recherche du temps perdu), by Marcel
Proust.
mais necessária, para dividir por todos a riqueza que esteve inacessível no tempo
colonial.18
[so that the enigmatic number of the Rua 513.2 remained as it was. To remove it
from the street name would be like despising arithmetic in a time when it was most
needed, in order to share, among everyone, the richness that was inaccessible during
colonial time.]
If we follow this subtle reference (about not ‘despising arithmetic’)

and divide these numbers (513 by 2), we will have 256.5. Or, in addition,
a hidden date, 25 June 1975, the day of the independence of the country.
Therefore, the title of the novel itself contains some of the strategies of
the entire work: the symbolic communication between the coordinates
of the existence (space and time), expressing continuities, ambiguities and
contradictions. The names of the characters ( Josefate, Basílio, Valgy, Tito,
Judite, Filimone, Santiago, etc.) also suggest an ironic appropriation of the
biblical text. The novel re-discusses some of the political postulates of the
post-independence period through the overlap of enunciates that approxi-
mate the heroic discourse of the revolution to a theological conception of
the world. The intertext problematizes, in a nutshell, two opposite models
of perfection: the religious one, coming from the past, and the political
one, looking at the future.
On the other hand, the mediation of memory can be done, above all,
through ‘residues of the past’, ghosts of the former inhabitants of the street
still remaining in the houses, after the revolution, with the complicity of the
new residents. The former PIDE Monteiro (competing for the seat of the
hall against the Party Secretary, Filimone Tembe), the mechanic Marques
(accomplice in the working and personal interests of the mechanic Ferraz),
the white prostitute Arminda (who, sitting on the edge of the bed, gives
suggestions to the new resident, Antonieta), etc. helped the author create
points of contact between times. In this sense, the trajectories of the ghosts
of the past can be read concurrently with the process of self-recognition of
the residents who host them. Acting on a border of indetermination, the
ghosts corrupt the ideal of purity of the new times, pluralize the meaning
18 Borges Coelho, Crónica da Rua 513.2, 14.

78 Nazir Ahmed Can
given to the memory and destabilize the dogmatism of its uses in the pre-
sent times. The term itself suggests contaminations of the past with the
present and of time with space. With the meaning of (spatial) vestige as
well as (temporal) split, the notion of ‘residue’ indicates the permanence
of the phenomenon of exception as a rule structuring society. Indeed this
phenomenon provides the principal theme for the following novel.
Campo de Trânsito (2007) develops from different strategies compared
to the previous novels, which – as observed by Fátima Mendonça – ‘afastam
a narrativa da referencialidade’ [move the narrative away from referentiality],
both geographically and temporally.19 In fact, in this novel, Borges Coelho
avoids the ‘identificação biunívoca’ [biunivoque identification], according
to which the space of the narrative is supposed to be the space of the writer’s
origin.20 The narrative centres on the Kafkaesque story of J. Mungau: being
captured without any apparent reason in his own house in the city, the char-
acter starts a journey whose first destination is a jail where he stays overnight.
From there, Mungau is sent to the Transit Camp, a provisional space, as the
name suggests. In this ‘fim do mundo’ [end of the world]21 it is established
that prisoners are moved to the New Camp or to the Old Camp. Mungau
does not realize that his process is similar to those of other prisoners and that
his life, starting from that day, is submitted to the law based on exceptions.
Borges Coelho deliberately avoids the generic and meddles with the
complicated task of thinking about the concept of exception, bringing to the
Mozambican literary space a perspective that includes history, philosophy,
politics and arts. For this reason, we also state that this novel, more than
representing exclusively the re-education camps created by the Frelimo
during the post-independence, describes the phases of the historical for-
mation of the power that gain significance in the places of exception where
their protagonists act. These places, foreshadowed in the city, become more
noticeable in jail (the nomos of the modern for Foucault)22 and culminate
19 Fátima Mendonça, ‘Ovídio e Kafka nas margens do Lúrio’, in Literatura

Moçambicana – as dobras da escrita (Maputo: Ndjira, 2011), 207.
20 Mendonça, ‘Ovídio e Kafka nas margens do Lúrio’, 206.
21 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Campo de Trânsito (Lisboa: Caminho, 2007), 63.
22 This approach is consolidated in Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de
la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
in the camp (the nomos of the modern for Agamben). Therefore, the naked
life of Mungau, hunted in the polis and brought to the camp, being excluded
from one place and included in another, abandoned to the new sovereign’s
mercy in a context of exposure and animalization, marks the dawn of the
historic and bio-political time.23 Taking into account some of the narrative
clues (most importantly topographic, related to Mungau’s journey from
a city whose routes may remind us of Maputo), we could suggest that the
author, inspired by the Mozambican reality, builds a plot with global out-
reach. Meanwhile, History provides just the motto for a philosophical
question and an aesthetic experience, hence being used as a direction, not
a destination.24
The Transit Camp, a space of absolute exception, is a sort of final
place, where inversions represent the norm: ‘Estranha aquela disposição, os
guardas vivendo juntos numa camarata, os detidos em casinhas individuais’
[That disposition looks strange, the guards live together in a room, the
prisoners in individual small houses].25 In this space, the protagonist
feels the paradox of exile and its double meaning of punishment and
refuge: ‘Descreve mentalmente este lugar quando está longe, e quanto mais
exacta sente essa descrição mais nítida é a sensação de que está inventando
uma nova casa’ [Picture in your mind this place when it is far; the more
exact your description is, the clearer is the feeling that you are inventing a
23 See: Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida (Valencia:
Pre-Textos, 2003).
24 For Roberto Vecchi, an analysis on the relation between the political and the
literary exception in Índicos Indícios, João Paulo Borges Coelho ‘settles in this
intersection between exception and example, showing in this “exceptioning” the
permanent state of exception that has dominated decades of Mozambique contem-
porary history – its genesis, its birth, its childhood as nation always at war – how
only the impossibility of representation can be represented; how narrative does not
stimulate any – neither pedagogic nor performative – full sense of the past that
could result from the attentive and meticulous observation and incorporation of
the gathered signs’ – Roberto Vecchi, ‘Excepting the Exception: A Bloodstained
Cartography of Mozambique in João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Índicos Indícios’, in
Cristina Demaria, and Macdonald Daly, eds, The Genres of Post-Conflict Testimonies
(Nottingham: Critical Cultural and Communications Press, 2009), 248.
25 Borges Coelho, Campo de Trânsito, 42.
80 Nazir Ahmed Can
new house].26 If, during his whole experience, the protagonist is tormented
by doubts, from the smallest and apparently meaningless – ‘De que será que
me acusam?’ [What are they accusing me of ?]27 – to the more existential
ones – ‘Onde estou? […] Quem sou?’ [Where am I? Who am I?]28 – in the
Transit Camp all his gestures gain the mark of an inaugural doubt, related
to the physical transformation and to the origin:
‘Será que os meus olhos se estão tornando claros?’, pergunta-se com preocupação.
‘Será que deixei de saber aonde pertenço?’29
[‘Maybe my eyes are getting lighter?’, he asks himself worried. ‘Maybe I forgot where
I belong to?’]
The half-open door to the office of the Transit Camp’s director sum-
marizes the magnitude of these uncertainties: ‘Mungau detém-se por um
momento no umbral na dúvida se será mais curial aguardar até ser chamado
ou tomar a iniciativa de se anunciar (o guarda nada lhe disse a respeito)’
[Mungau stands by the threshold, doubting whether it is more curial to
wait to be called or take the initiative and present himself (the guard said
nothing about this)].30 The ‘threshold’ is the place of the protagonist’s
supreme abandonment (in relation to himself and to the law), as suggested
by the lexical choice ‘curial’, meaning ‘respectful’, ‘convenient’. The word re-
calls the etymological origin ‘Curia’, that is the papal court or the pontifical
tribunal. Indeed, Mungau’s impasse is very similar to what is experienced
by Joseph K., protagonist of Der Process [The Trial], by Franz Kafka. In
both cases the space of ‘already open’ represents the materialization of the
state of exception, considering that, for Agamben, just for being open it
immobilizes, symbolizing that precize moment when the law does not pre-
scribe anything.31 Massimo Cacciari, analysing the same exert of The Trial,
comes to a similar conclusion: how can we enter what is ‘already open’?

29 Borges Coelho, Campo de Trânsito, 121–2.
30 Borges Coelho, Campo de Trânsito, 57–8.
31 Giorgio Agamben, Lo que queda de Auschwitz: El archivo y el testigo (Homo
Sacer III) (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2005), 69.
The farmer cannot enter, because it is ontologically impossible to enter

what is already open.32 The half-open door of the Director synthesizes,
thus, not only the paradox of the law (neither open, nor closed, neither
interior, nor exterior) and its techniques of manipulation and alienation
(spatial, gestural), but also the maximum moment of loneliness experi-
enced by the character. Therefore we can identify in Mungau’s experience
the stages of formation of the Modern State (or ‘State of the Spectacle’),33
including simultaneously techniques of subjective individualization and
objective procedures of totalization. Contrarily to Joseph K., who never
crosses the border because the guard does not allow the access, Mungau
enters the Director’s office and, since then, is exposed to the suffering of
power, such as confrontation and voluntary servitude.
O Olho de Hertzog (2009) redefines the relations between Mozambique
and the world in the more distant time of the First World War. The novel is
composed of two parallel narratives that complete each other through the
element of mystery. The protagonist of both stories is Hans Mahrenholz, a
German officer who, inspired by a good dose of courage and romanticism,
travels in a Zeppelin to the north of Mozambique, jumps with a parachute
and lands alone in the middle of the forest, in order to join the troops of
general Lettow-Vorbeck. Starting from the story of the general – known
for his eccentricity, leadership skills and tactic sharpness, but also for having
never lost a battle, expanding the agonizing German power to the Eastern
coast of Africa – it is offered a panel of the participation of Mozambique
in the First World War. The second narrative, focused on the colonial cap-
ital, Lourenço Marques, and told in first person by the transformed Hans
Mahrenholz (or Henry Miller, his new and secret identity), presents the
immediate memory of that war and describes the enigmatic search of the
‘Hertzog’s eye’ diamond, extracted from the South African mines and
hidden in Mozambique.
Written in a Portuguese language that deploys the classical forms,
Borges Coelho’s narratives also give importance to characters from different
geographical contexts (from Congo and India, from the Islamic territories
32 Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), 69.

33 Guy Debord, Comentarios sobre la sociedad del espectáculo (Barcelona: Anagrama,
1990), 19.
82 Nazir Ahmed Can
of the Indian Ocean and South Africa, Belgium, France or Germany, just
to say a few). Thanks to these characters the author validates one of the
hypotheses that run around his literary production: the nation is not the
exclusive result of the Empire (fatalist vision) or of itself (essentialist vision).
As Stefan Helgesson points out, in O Olho de Hertzog, specifically, Borges
Coelho privileges the cosmopolitan panorama of Southeast Africa, pre-
senting Mozambique as a place that combines the interests of Europeans
and African, South Africans and Mozambicans, British and Germans, co-
lonials and proto-nationalists.34 In the same way, Maria-Benedita Basto
claims that this work challenges the reader to get rid of pre-established
categories by playing on the characters’ ambiguities and on a style which
derives from the combination of different genres (journal articles, editor-
ials, exerts from books, personal messages, billboards, posters, etc.).35 In
order to describe the fractures and contradictions of an age, filled with tense
encounters among characters from different latitudes, Borges Coelho uses
a vast intertextual chain. Explicitly or implicitly, Durrell, Italo Calvino,
W. G. Sebald, Coetzee, Graham Greene and Lettow-Vorbeck’s diaries
interact with the journalistic texts and O Livro da Dor, by João Albasini,
or the poetry of Rui Knopfli and José Craveirinha, three of the biggest
chroniclers of the Mozambican capital in the twentieth century. At the
same time, the space appears as a productive intertextual source for the in-
terpretation of that age. A rarefied setting in the national prose, the former
capital Lourenço Marques, gains in O Olho de Hertzog a status similar to a
protagonist: ‘Cidade estranha, esta em que as misérias são sempre envolvidas
por uma pomposa roupagem’ [A strange city, where the miseries are always
wrapped in a pompous clothing].36 Due to the proliferation of lights, signs
and posters, the city becomes like a palimpsest, revealing and dissimulating
itself in the ‘folds’ of each corner.
34 Stefan Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho, João Albasini and the Worlding of
Mozambican Literature’, 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada, 3 (2013), 91–106.
35 Maria-Benedita Basto, ‘Danse de l’histoire, écritures mobiles: enjeux contemporains
dans les littératures de l’Angola et du Mozambique’, Révue de Littérature Comparée,
4 (2011), 457–77.
36 João Paulo Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog (Lisboa: Alfragide, 2010), p. 323.
Hans Mahrenholz has the task of deciphering the secret of that uni-
verse. For the German, this city also has its allure: intriguing women crossing
his path, delirious stories to listen to, and an artistic environment that is
developing under influence of different European vanguards; finally, cir-
cles of interests that do not leave him completely alone, even when they
are illusionary or dissimulated. For example, in a night of heavy drinking
at Gato Preto, the Mozambican version of the Chat Noir in Paris, we can
see a series of interactions crossing the destinies of Mahrenholz, Satie,
Picasso and Klimt. Thus, guiding the reader through the streets of the city,
but disorienting Hans in the search for himself, the places and people of
Lourenço Marques constitute a sort of labyrinthine archive.
Progressively, Hans realizes the duality of meanings coexisting within
the city: ‘Estranha cidade esta, pensa Hans, onde todos os que chegam se
dizem movidos por razões que não são as verdadeiras’ [What a strange
city, thinks Hans, where all those who arrive say they are moved by reasons
that are not the real ones].37 The dual nature of Lourenço Marques is con-
firmed when Hans explores the suburban world in João Albasini’s company.
Albasini was a prominent journalist with an historical role in developing
Mozambique’s protonationalism in the beginning of the twentieth century.
By turning him into a fictional character, O Olho de Hertzog can be seen as
one of the rare acts of consolidating the national literary system with an
homage to one of its founders. It will be, then, the eccentric intellectual
who introduces to Hans ‘a sombra da cidade branca, a cidade que a outra
cidade esconde nas suas costas’ [the shadow of the white city, the city that
the other city hides behind its back].38 The perspective of the colonial city
divided in two39 makes the protagonist ask an open question:
O empedrado das ruas começa a dar lugar ao pó e à lama, a alvenaria à palha. Quase
abruptamente, como se transpusessem uma fronteira. Engasgam-se aqui os anúncios,
vão deixando de ter o que dizer […] Enquanto correm por cima da lama, olha em volta,
na direção do coração do mundo de palha, e só encontra mais cartazes desmembrados,
37 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 378.

39 For a deeper analysis about Lourenço Marques under this perspective, see José Luís
Cabaço, Moçambique. Identidade, Colonialismo e Libertação (São Paulo: Editora
Unesp–ANPOCS, 2009).
84 Nazir Ahmed Can
servindo para tudo menos para dizer o que neles vem escrito – para cobrir a casa da
chuva, para isolar o quintal dos ladrões. Que diriam eles? Para lá do grito desconexo
dos cartazes, que diriam eles se não fosse este silêncio?
[The stones of the streets give space to the dust and mud, the brickwork to the straw.
Almost abruptly, as if they had crossed a border. Advertisements here choke, losing
what they really have to say […] While they run on the mud, [Hans] looks around,
in the direction of the heart of the world of straw, and only finds dismembered pos-
ters, for any use except for telling what is written on them – for sheltering the house
from the rain, protecting the yard from thieves. What would they say? Beyond the
disjointed scream of the posters, what would they say if it were not this silence?]40
By privileging an historical time through elements associated to the

geography (dust, mud, straw, border, advertisements choking, dismembered
posters, deprived houses), to the detriment of an overtly explicit enunci-
ation, Borges Coelho inaugurates, although partially, an aesthetic about the
suburbs of the capital. In those places, decades after the events included in
the narrative, rose the desire for independence due to the ‘elevados níveis
de adesão ao processo da luta de libertação’ [high levels of adherence to the
process of fight for freedom].41 This option arises after the emphasis given
to other regions of the country: the villages surrounding the Zambezi (in
As duas sombras do rio), Mucojo and Beira (in As visitas do Dr. Valdez),
the Mozambican part of the Indian Ocean (in the two volumes of Índicos
Indícios) Maputo (in Crónica da Rua 513.2), Inhambane (in Hinyambaan),
besides those places where the referentiality is exclusively fictional (Campo
de Trânsito and Cidade dos Espelhos). The amplification of the ‘literary ter-
ritoriality of the country’42 is a central concern in the artistic project of
Borges Coelho. Rita Chaves demonstrates how the author, since his first
work, is also concerned about the ‘occupation of other regions, including, in
his imaginary, places that the independent country still know little about’.43
40 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 334–5.

41 Luís Bernardo Honwana, A velha casa de madeira e zinco (Maputo: Alcance,
2017), 35.
42 Rita Chaves, ‘Notas sobre a Ficção e a História em João Paulo Borges Coelho’,
in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, and Maria Paula Meneses, eds, Moçambique: das
palavras escritas (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2008), 188.
43 Chaves, ‘Notas sobre a Ficção e a História em João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 188.
Rainhas da Noite (2013) is set in two places, Moatize e Maputo. But,

contrarily to the former novel, it focuses on two periods: colonial and post-
colonial. This novel describes the way how the notebook of memories gives
space to an investigation about time and its forms of confiscation. Written
by Maria Eugénia Murilo, a character who recently arrived to Portugal at
the end of the 1950s, this notebook is found by the narrator in an informal
market of the Mozambican capital, fifty years later. Between its lines, the
narrator predicts the key for a plot. What triggers his work, in the mean-
time, is the announcement of Maria Eugénia’s death, published few months
after by Travessa Chassafar, a former servant of the author, in the obituaries
of the newspaper Notícias. Here are the three protagonists of the story: a
narrator coming from the colonial and rural past of Moatize, an uneasy
narrator living in the urban postcolonial present of Maputo and a witness
who travels between these two times and spaces.
Even though they take relevant roles in the literary universe, the women
of this novel – the Portuguese and the Belgian Annemarie, Agnès Fink and
Suzanne Clijsters – acquire unprecedented relevance. The investigator-
narrator returns only at the end of each of the nine chapters following the
Prologue, in a small section titled ‘Notes’. In order to interpret the labyrin-
thine lines of Maria Eugénia’s notebook, the narrator rethinks the games
of power of the community around the Coal Company and the destiny of
those women. On one side, the search for clues about the past makes him
go through the Mozambican capital of the present time. The encounters
with Travessa Chassafar, always occurring in different places, help with the
drawing of the cartography of contemporary Maputo. This is, in fact, the
first national novel facing a challenge of such scale and with such precision.
Through a diverse range of details, increasingly relevant for the abundance
of adjectives and comparisons, the author shows the contradictions of the
Mozambican capital without the mediation of irony.
In the parallel story, Maria Eugénia is a sort of archetype of singularity,
and the face of a past which has been ignored by Mozambican contem-
poraneity. In other words, the so characteristic demiurgical power of the
narrator in Borges Coelho’s works (nobody is more important than him in
his narratives) does not prevent, for the first time in his production, a char-
acter from surpassing him in terms of importance. Despite the hesitations
86 Nazir Ahmed Can
and contradictions of her actions, Maria Eugénia is an exemplary heroine,

fitting within a work that does not tend to give exemplarity to the char-
acters. Thus, instead of the anti-heroes and tragic heroes of Coelho’s first
novels, the figure of the old Chassafar and the four foreign women appear
in Rainhas da noite with all the subtleties that divide them. The objective,
however, is similar to those of other works: to present a more complex
past – due to its plurality – than the one divulged by the official contem-
porary discourses.
The question of the time and its usage for different scopes is, as a
matter of fact, one of the obsessions of Borges Coelho’s intellectual and
artistic project. In this novel, where the work as a historian is discussed as a
theme and not just as one of the multiple intertextual elements, this topic
is announced by ‘reforços externos’ [external supporting elements]44 that
complete the information contained in the notebook. The three types of
material generally used by the historian are here analysed: photographs,
archival documents and the witness. The adding of photographs proves that
‘o meu texto não está isento de vulnerabilidades’ [my text is not without
weaknesses] and that, ‘ao obrigá-lo a partilhar o espaço com as imagens,
a intenção não foi mais que aproximar o texto das minhas notas do texto
do caderno, e com isso fazer uma espécie de vénia a este último’ [obliging
it to share the space with images, the intention was no more than approxi-
mating the words of my notes to the text of the notebook, hence making
a sort of reverence to the latter].45
The documents of the archive are subject to a strong scrutiny, as they
represent the way how the time is instrumentalized according to the spe-
cific interests. Despite the temptations, for the opening that helped with
the research about the notebook of Maria Eugénia, these archives were
‘pejado de armadilhas’ [full of traps]:46 on one side, they gave the illusion
of including everything; on the other side, they ignored how ‘se escoam
entretanto, e se perdem, os ódios e os amores. Os segredos’ [hate and love
flaw and vanish in the meantime. The secrets].47 Despite its unmistakable
44 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite (Lisboa: Caminho, 2013), 24.
45 Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite (Lisboa: Caminho, 2013), 24.
46 Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite, 141.
importance for knowledge of the past, the archive has numerous weaknesses.
Not only because it disregards the secrets mentioned by the narrator, but
also because, in certain contexts, it is managed by the instituted powers. In
the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, for example, many archives remain
confidential, inaccessible to the public. We could even suggest that the
historian João Paulo Borges Coelho became a writer because of these re-
strictions. For being connected to the hegemonic narratives, ‘destrinçando
quem pertencia ao passado e de quem era o futuro’ [dividing who belonged
to the past and who is part of the future],48 these documents, according to
the narrator, distort the link that could have been between time and reality.
For this reason, contrarily to the expectations, the archive is here defined as
a ‘fábrica de papéis […] empenhada em trocar essa atividade pela produção
do esquecimento’ [paper factory […] involved in swapping its activity with
the production of oblivion].49 The third source used, the witness, turns out
to be the most complex. Travessa Chassafar establishes, as previously men-
tioned, a link between past and present. The encounters between the old
man and the narrator are marked by the typical oscillation of those who
consider memory management as a mechanism of personal defence. From
the productive perspective of ambiguity, the figure of Travessa Chassafar
acquires a dimension which is ampler than we would expect. His presence,
also integrated in the contemporaneity, does not become hostage of a rigid
version of the past.
Finally, by trying to destabilize the doxas (producing the aversion of the
writer) through an aesthetic research on the paradox (generating different
versions in the narratives), Borges Coelho rethinks the relations between
Mozambique and the world of yesterday and today. With the creation of
a new type of character, the amplification of the literary geography, the
game of confluences between historical regimes and rival ideologies, the
cult of the classic register of the language that, however, does not make im-
possible the diversification of positions of the narrator, among other strat-
egies, Borges Coelho’s work consolidates the novel and the Mozambican
literary system. Influenced by other forms of art, such as comics, cinema,

88 Nazir Ahmed Can
theatre, painting, architecture or music, being the richest in terms of inter-

textuality – due to a dialogue with texts of other linguistic worlds – Borges
Coelho’s production is also one of the most challenging in the field of
Portuguese language. It is limited to this field because there are no trans-
lations, besides the Italian version of some of his novels.
On this journey through his narratives we have seen how historical
facts are revisited by everyday characters without qualities. For this per-
spective, the author demonstrates how travelling back in the past can be
filled with the complexities of the present time. It is evident, as a matter of
fact, the use of the memorial register in his novels. But he was more inter-
ested in linking it to an open field of questions, rather than putting it in
the fixed regime of truth. Therefore, his fiction invites us to think about
the institutionalization of amnesia, but also about the desire to remember.
Translated by Vincenzo Cammarata, King’s College London
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Ana Mafalda Leite
4
Narratives of the Indian Ocean in the Writing
of João Paulo Borges Coelho: A Transnational
Geography
ABSTRACT
In this chapter I aim to discuss the importance of narrative as a cultural element of transit
that entwines the shores of the Indian Ocean, creating a geography of the space between
the coastline and the islands. I further aim to demonstrate how that transit is charted in
the writings of João Paulo Borges Coelho and how the author interweaves two different
types of Indian Ocean topographical representation: the descriptive meta-narrative of
historical origin and the literary-fictional narrative, which lies at the intersection of myth
and history. A fragmentary geography of the Indian Ocean, built in different narratives,
is thus mapped onto this creative duplicity of the Mozambican author.
We prefer to treat the Indian Ocean region as one, among many, liminal spaces of
hybrid evolution, an area whose boundaries are both moveable and porous, which
brings us close to Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke’s notion of transnational
imaginative geography.1
In this chapter2 I aim to discuss the importance of narrative as a cultural

element of transit that entwines the shores of the Indian Ocean, creating
a geography of the space between the coastline and the islands. I further
aim to demonstrate how that transit is charted in the writings of João
Paulo Borges Coelho and how the author interweaves two different types
of Indian Ocean topographical representation: the descriptive meta-
narrative of historical origin and the literary-fictional narrative, which
lies at the intersection of myth and history. A fragmentary geography
of the Indian Ocean, built in different narratives, is thus mapped onto
1 Shanty Moorthy, and Jamal Ashraf Jamal, eds, Indian Ocean Studies Cultural,
Social, and Political Perspective (Routledge: New York, London, 2010), 5.
2 A Portuguese version of this chapter was published in Remate de Males,
Campinas-SP, 38/1 (2018), 63–74.
92 Ana Mafalda Leite
this creative duplicity of the Mozambican author. As Devleena Gosh

and Stephen Muecke argue, ‘[t]‌he Indian Ocean is a kind of Foucauldian
heterotopia, a space of diverse, fragmentary and alternate narratives
which empirically resist any normalizing gaze.’3
First narrative, the history
The issue of spatial boundaries helps us theorize and place in historical context
the Indian Ocean as an inter-regional arena of political, economic, and cultural
interaction.4
In an essay presented in Barcelona in 2009, ‘O Índico como lugar’ [The

Indian Ocean as a location],5 João Paulo Borges Coelho reflects upon the
Indian Ocean from a twofold perspective, as an historian and as a writer.
Using a concept such as spiritu loci or genius loci, he seeks to unravel the
location as an autonomous and self-regulated entity.
The proposition put forth by the author in his intervention stemmed
from the assumption that locations are guarded by Genii and that there
are itineraries of the imagination that can lead us from the simple, literal,
locations to the literary locations. Based on this reasoning, the author pro-
poses that the same principle be applied to the Indian Ocean.
aqui falamos de um espaço amplo que, sendo embora o mais pequeno dos três grandes
oceanos – um terço do Pacífico, menos 10 por cento que o Atlântico – ocupa uma
vasta área de quase setenta milhões de quilómetros quadrados. Ainda por cima uma
área líquida (e haverá entidade mais incapturável do que as águas?). Mais do que
3 Devleena Ghosh, and Stephen Muecke, eds, Cultures of Trade Indian Ocean
Exchanges (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 5.
4 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6.
5 Unpublished essay presented at the International Conference Indicities/Indices/
Indícios – ‘Hybridity in Indian Ocean Literature’. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
23–25 April 2009 (copy of the text obtained by courtesy of the author).
A Transnational Geography 93
isso, um espaço com muitas facetas que são outras tantas tonalidades que lhe são
conferidas pelas margens. E margens, neste caso, muito diversas. Como depreender
daqui uma unidade que nos permita, a partir dela, chegar ao ‘Genius’?6
[here we are talking about an ample space that, despite being the smallest of the three
great oceans – one third of the Pacific, 10 per cent less than the Atlantic – occupies
a broad area of nearly 70 million square miles. Furthermore, it is a liquid area (and
might there be a more uncapturable entity than water?). More than that, it is a space
with many facets, which reflect just as many nuances, conferred by its shores; and,
in this case, very diverse shores. How to infer, from this, a unity that could serve as
a point of departure to reach the ‘Genius’?]
João Paulo Borges Coelho conceives of literature not as the definition

of a planned route that one must follow, but rather as a relatively inco-
herent field of experimentation, as he puts it. It is intrinsic to his narra-
tive art to name places that are prisoners of the shadows. His background
as a historian and his experience as a traveller of both literature and the
Indian Ocean have afforded him a grasp on the soul of this sea. He thus
subscribes to the words of fellow historian Michael Pearson, who claims
that ‘[r]‌ather than look out at the oceans from the land, as so many earlier
books have done, a history of an ocean has to reverse this angle and look
from the sea to the land, and most obviously to the coast. There has to be
attention to land areas bordering the ocean, that is the littoral’.7 Borges
Coelho comments further:
Foi deixando-se cruzar em viagens de longo curso que o Índico revelou as suas
margens distantes como margens, não mais pequenos mundos fechados. Desde logo o
Índico das frotas chinesas de barcos bojudos e deselegantes, verdadeiros paquidermes
navegantes que em 1421, oriundos de Calecute, escalaram Mogadiscio, Zanzibar e
Sofala num empreendimento que envolveu árabes, venezianos e hindus.8
[In letting itself be traversed in long voyages, the Indian Ocean revealed its distant
shores as actual shores, no longer as small enclosed worlds. From the very beginning,
it was the Indian Ocean of the Chinese fleets with their bulging and inelegant boats –
authentic sailing pachyderms that in 1421, coming from Calicut, called at Mogadishu,
Zanzibar and Sofala in an enterprise which involved Arabs, Venetians and Hindus.]
6 Borges Coelho, ‘O Índico como lugar’, 5.

7 Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 5.
Looking back in time, the author unveils an even more ancient Indian
Ocean, from before the ninth century, navigated by fleets of Arab, Persian
and Hindu dhows, following the rhythm of the monsoon. He further
refers to the importance of coastal and commercial fishing transit, enu-
merating the different kinds of vessels that can be found along the Indian
coast of Mozambique:
Destes pequenos barcos da costa moçambicana inventariei lanchas e almadias de

diversos tipos um pouco por todo o lado, chatas, uombes, pangaias e chitatarros na
baía de Maputo, caíques e hafas na Ilha de Moçambique, mutereres e cangaias nas
Chocas, machuas, mádias, inchós, dhows e mitumbuís em Pemba, cangaias e mutereres
em Relanzapo, cumpulos na baía de Memba, caláuas, ashuis, galavas e pangaias em
Nova Sofala.9
[From the small boats of the Mozambican coast, I made a list of speedboats and
dugouts of different kinds found more or less everywhere – chatas, uombes, pangaias
and chitatarros in the Maputo bay, caíques and hafas on the Island of Mozambique,
mutereres and cangaias in the Chocas, machuas, mádias, inchós, dhows and mitumbuís
in Pemba, cangaias and mutereres in Relanzapo, cumpulos in the Memba bay, caláuas,
ashuis, galavas and pangaias in Nova Sofala.]
The author demonstrates that the Indian Ocean is more propitious to

sailing than any other ocean. One of its distinctive features, as he ex-
plains, are the monsoon winds, which blow north of the Ecuador – half
the year the north-east monsoon, the other half the south-west mon-
soon – creating a highly favourable mechanism for the connections be-
tween the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula and the African
coast. Creatively, through the explanation of the etymology of the word
monsoon, Borges Coelho slowly reveals the secret and intertwined con-
nections of the Genius of this sea:
Segundo uns dicionários, a palavra monção deriva do italiano monsore e esta do malaio
musim, significando ‘época do ano’; segundo outros, a palavra inglesa monsoon deriva
do holandês monsooen, esta do português monção, que por sua vez derivaria do árabe
mausim, com o mesmo significado. De qualquer forma, tais derivações mostram

eloquentemente, por via da etimologia (da história das palavras e das ligações secretas
que estas estabelecem entre si) como o acto de navegar ligava todas estas margens.10
[According to some dictionaries, the word monsoon derives from the Italian monsore,
and the latter from the Malay musim, which means ‘time of year’; according to other
dictionaries, the English word monsoon comes from the Dutch monsooen, and the
latter from the Portuguese monção, which in turn is supposed to have derived from
the Arabic mausim, with the same meaning. In any case, such derivations eloquently
show, by means of etymology (the history of the words and the secret connections
between them), how the act of sailing connected all these shores.]
Long-haul sailing fostered contacts between different shores, bringing

Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Indonesians, Persians and later Europeans
closer together. It further enabled exchanges of all kinds of materials,
namely fabrics, flora and fauna, having also paved the way for the arrival
of new religions and alphabets. The coastal areas share common features,
as well as ancient cultural affinities. Examples of that are the dissemin-
ation of Islam or the emergence of Swahili culture and language, which
spread throughout the entire coast from the south of Somalia all the way
to the north of Mozambique.
Following the argumentation and enumeration of some of the char-
acteristics that single out the Indian Ocean as a historic and cultural loca-
tion, the author establishes the landscape references and the signs, which
epitomize the individuality of the Indian sea:
Por esta altura penso estar já estabelecida uma certa individualidade deste grande
oceano: na periferia feita de praias amarelas e objectos aguçados (os coqueiros,
os minaretes das mesquitas, os velhos padrões portugueses e as pequenas velas
triangulares), nos seus ventos constantes e tão característicos, nos seus amuos
destruidores. Em características físicas que suscitam a imaginação.11
[By now, I believe we have already established a certain individuality of this great
ocean: in the periphery, made of yellow beaches and sharp objects (the coconut trees,
the minarets on the mosques, the old Portuguese patterns and the small triangular
sails), in its constant and characteristic winds, in its devastating huffs, in physical
characteristics that excite the imagination.]

Thus, historian and author João Paulo Borges Coelho finds echo in the
words of scholars Shanti Moorty and Ashraf Jamal when they state that
‘the Indian Ocean region possesses an internal commonality which en-
ables us to view it as an area in itself: commonalities of history, geog-
raphy, merchant capital and trade, ethnicity, culture, and religion.’12 In
other words, by characterizing some of the aspects belonging to the genius
loci of the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, the Mozambican historian
falls into the theoretical and creative framework of Ocean Studies: ‘So
what exactly does Indian Ocean studies entail? Our focus is the Indian
Ocean region, by which we mean the ocean itself, its littoral and hinter-
land, fully embedded in the global, and viewed from the perspective of
contemporary human interests, human histories, human movements’.13
Second narrative, the myth and the parable
Human histories and human movements are, after all, what the
Mozambican author unveils in his narratives about the Indian Ocean. In
the two short story books by Borges Coelho, jointly titled Índicos Indícios
[Indian Indices], we can see that the wordplay and the poetic alliteration
in the title hint at the transit and consistency of the signs of the Indian
Ocean’s genius loci along the entire Mozambican coastline. In this essay,
I shall refer to two short stories in particular – ‘Ibo Azul’ [Blue Ibo]14 and
‘A Força do Mar de Agosto’ [The Strength of the August Sea]15 – to rep-
resent the author’s literary narrative about the Indian Ocean.
In fact, in the final part of his presentation in 2009, Borges Coelho
already refers to one of the short stories (the second one that I shall analyse
in this paper) and to his knowledge and love of travel along the shores of the
12 Shanti Moorthy, and Ashraf Jamal, eds, Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and
Political Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 4.
13 Moorthy and Jamal, Indian Ocean Studies, 5.
14 Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios I Setentrião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005).
15 Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios II Meridião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005).
Indian Ocean: ‘Há escassos três meses voltei a percorrer 2000 quilómetros
de costa, a partir da margem apalpando o mar como quem apalpa o lombo
de um bicho, a ver se lhe descubro o segredo. Estou certo de que um dia
conseguirei’ [Barely three months ago I once again travelled 2,000 kilo-
metres of coastline, feeling the sea from the shore as one feels up the saddle
of any creature, trying to unveil its secret. I am certain that someday I will].16
The author recalls a comment on the short story ‘The Strength of the
August Sea’:
Dedico-me portanto a fazer inventários, e desses inventários faz parte a listagem

dos despojos que o Genius do Índico guarda na sua caverna. Recorrendo ao artifício
de tornar o mar transparente pude descobrir, no chão da baía de Maputo, entre mil
outras coisas, um galeão austríaco do século XVIII cheio de panos e colheres de prata,
do acto de comércio que ficou por consumar ficando os africanos a comer à mão e
os europeus sem os almejados pentes de marfim, despenteados; um pequeno avião
afundado com os dois pilotos lá dentro, ostentando gestos suspensos que faziam parte
de uma amaragem de emergência; um rebocador na barra misteriosamente desapare-
cido; e, claro, milhares de pequenos pescadores afogados, serenamente adormecidos
nas planícies e jardins do fundo do mar, as canoas feitas féretros, as redes mortalhas.17
[I therefore devote myself to making inventories and those inventories include the
list of the spoils that the Genius of the Indian Ocean keeps in its cave. Through the
craft of making the sea transparent, I was able to uncover among a thousand other
things, on the ground of the Maputo bay, an Austrian galleon from the eighteenth
century, full of cloths and silver spoons, remnant of an unfulfilled commercial trans-
action which left Africans to eat with their hands and Europeans unkempt, longing
for their ivory combs; a small sunken plane with both pilots inside, suspended in
gestures that were part of an emergency sea landing; a towboat that mysteriously
disappeared in the harbour entrance; and, of course, thousands of small drowned
fishermen, serenely asleep on the plains and gardens of the bottom of the sea, their
canoes turned to coffins and their nets to shrouds.]
With these two short story books, the narratives of the Mozambican
author resume the focus on the country’s coastline and its cultural trans-
national differential features, in contrast to the hinterland. According to
Borges Coelho:

África é um continente de interiores, é lá que se situavam as grandes unidades

políticas pré-coloniais, os chamados impérios, enquanto o litoral se esfarelava em
pequeníssimas unidades de soberania disputada. Há portanto este contraste entre
as culturas hierárquicas do ferro, das armas e dos tambores, e as pequenas culturas
comerciais, das velas de pano e das redes de pesca. Falei já na minuciosa pequena arte
da navegação costeira e pesqueira africana, a arte dos troncos de árvore escavados e
das redes pacientemente entretecidas.18
[Africa is a continent of hinterlands that is where the great pre-colonial political units
could be found, the so-called empires, whereas the littoral crumbled into the smallest
units of disputed sovereignty. Thus, there is this contrast between the hierarchical
cultures of iron, weapons and drums and the modest trade cultures of cloth sails and
fishing nets. I have already mentioned the small detailed art of African coastal and
fishing navigation, the art of carved out tree trunks and patiently weaved fishing nets.]
The relationship between time and space in the narratives of Indian

Indices plays a central role in the reflection about hidden memories and
historical oblivion, about the palimpsest of commercial and colonial tran-
sits that took place many centuries before. The Indian Ocean depicted in
the short stories – which take place on different islands, such as Ibo, Santa
Carolina, Mozambique Island, Xefina, bays and port cities – is presented
as a secret reservoir of a simultaneously cultural and historical memory.
Such is the case with the two narratives selected for this paper, ‘Blue Ibo’
and ‘The Strength of the August Sea’, which portray the Indian Ocean as
a place of world creation and topography of memory.
The first narrative transforms the notion of time into a sacral moment,
whereas the second makes a critical and moral use of the parable to reflect
about an ocean become land or desert, showing that after all the sea is also
another kind of land and domicile. The first short story narrates the path of
a man who initiates his journey in the neighbourhood of the cemetery of
Ibo, Munaua, and elicits memories from the nineteenth century through the
names on tombstones, which he perchance recognizes or imagines, remem-
bering and describing space/time with almost absolute synchronicity. This
sacral union of time and space lends to the narrative all the characteristics
of an inaugural myth. In fact, the displacement from the cemetery to the
bay can be equated with a world beginning, portrayed in the account of a

man’s encounter – a foreigner travelling across the island – with a native

woman wearing a m’siro mask,19 digging clams at the beach:
Num certo tempo veio vindo um homem. Caminhava depressa, como se o chamasse
um encontro desde há muito aprazado. E só o facto de se deter a espaços, olhando
curioso as minúsculas criaturas do chão da praia, permitia adivinhar que afinal era
apenas a ansiedade que o empurrava, apenas a impaciência de permanecer no mesmo
lugar.20
[At a certain time, there came a man. He walked fast, as if summoned by an encounter
that was long overdue. And the mere fact that he stopped occasionally, curiously
gazing at the tiny creatures on the beach, suggested that it was solely anxiety that
pushed him, the sole impatience of remaining in the same place.]
That primary encounter may have taken place in the past or in the pre-
sent – ‘At a certain time’ – with the narrator practically staging the art of
‘once upon a time’, leading the reader to acknowledge the timelessness of
the story, in which feminine beauty and slowness contrast with masculine
haste and urgency. Just as the houses, the trees and the sea, the woman
that emerges from the beach is almost a vision, who vests the landscape
with the erotic human dimension, the desire that can annul the distance:
Por um momento, enquanto do outro lado o homem prossegue a caminhada, a mulher

fica assim, o tronco direito, as mãos entreabrindo o pano que lhe cobre o ventre tenro
para renovar o nó que o fecha sobre os seios fartos. Lentamente os dedos precisos
agarram as pontas, manipulam-nas, e o nó já largo e lasso volta a ser fino e apertado.
É muito jovem esta mulher, mas o homem notará antiquíssimos sinais nesse olhar
que ela espalha, quando o puder ver. Quando entre os dois já não houver a distância
que ainda falta percorrer.21
[For a moment, while on the other side the man continues with his walk, the woman
remains like this, upright torso, her hands half opening the cloth covering her tender
womb so that she may redo the knot that binds it over her large breasts. Slowly, her
precise fingers grab the tips, handle them, and the knot, now wide and loose, once
again becomes slender and tight. She is very young, this woman, but the man will
19 Traditional beauty mask made out of white powder extracted from the Mussiro
plant, or m’siro (scientifically Olax Dissitiflora).
20 Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios I Setentrião, 192.
21 Coelho, João Paulo, Índicos Indícios I Setentrião, 195.
see ancient signs in the gaze that she spreads, when she sees him; when the distance
that remains between them no longer exists.]
The narrator shapes that meeting into a kind of prime moment of creation
between those who arrive from abroad and those whose feet are firmly on
the ground: ‘Pouco falta para que se encontrem, uma vez que convergem
para o mesmo lugar’ [Little is left for them to meet, since they are conver-
ging towards the same place].22 On the other hand, as the woman symbol-
ically represents the land and the man represents the sea, they both evoke
an undulating movement between those who arrive, the boat, those who
receive, and the land, where the in/out and sea/land transit shapes the
coastal condition of cultural sharing of the Indian Ocean:
Para ter lugar o encontro que está para acontecer não basta que cada um dos dois
caminhe na direcção certa. É também necessária a espera. De outro modo seria como
quase sempre acontece, o espaço e o tempo desentendendo-se, multiplicando-se os
atrasos, fortalecendo-se as amargas solidões. […] Esperam a espera que se espera
numa ilha, de ver os barcos a chegar, quando irão partir, mais a espera particular deste
lugar onde o tempo adormeceu. […] Lembremo-nos, porém que o conhecimento do
homem é universal, enquanto que a mulher se apoia somente nas histórias das avós
e naquilo que as margens do Índico deixam ver.23
[For the impending encounter to take place it is not enough for one of them to walk
in the right direction. They must also wait. Otherwise, it would be as it almost always
is, time and space in disagreement, multiple delays, bitter solitudes. […] They await
the waiting that one awaits on an island, to see the boats arrive, when they might
leave, plus the particular waiting of this place where time has gone to sleep. […] Let
us be reminded, however, that the man’s knowledge is universal, whereas the woman
relies solely on the stories of her grandmothers and on that which the shores of the
Indian Ocean allow her to see.]
Neither the man nor the woman, have a name, whereas the ancestors of
the location are designated by their given names. These two beings form a
pair of creation, symbolically representing the coming and going motion
of the sea, the crossover of different identities. The woman’s gaze is de-
scribed as mysterious and unfathomable, and the m’siro mask covering

23 Coelho, João Paulo, Índicos Indícios I Setentrião, 202; 203; 205.
her face prevents its revelation while attracting the man’s desire. This man
and this woman represent two faces of the world, ‘estabelecendo preciosa
ponte entre duas margens que fosse vital unir’ [establishing a precious
bridge between two shores that had to be bound],24 connected by the
ocean in its movement. ‘Ocorreu-lhe até, sem saber já em que momento,
que estivessem os dois mergulhados, e a praia inteira, nas águas aniladas
e invertidas de um espelho’ [It even occurred to him, no longer knowing
when, that they both were submerged, as well as the entire beach, in the
blueish and inverted waters of a mirror].25
This narrative further describes and enumerates the different kinds of
vessels used for fishing and sailing. The relationship amongst the islanders
takes place on the boundary between land and sea, with the vessels serving
as metaphors for a different way of living on the land, that is, in a closer
relationship with the ocean:
Os barcos chegam e partem para Tandanhangue e outros lugares, ou adejam em redor

da ilha. Grandes kavokos de madeira grossa puxados pelo remar cadenciado e vigoroso
dos marinheiros; kalawas com seus negros panos como se cumprissem um pressagio
luto, barbatanas de tubarão sinistramente evoluindo ao largo; pequenos ntumbwés
com as suas asas pairando sobre as águas como as das borboletas, tímidos como elas;
gasolinas ronceiros que chegam fumegando pelo atalho do mangal, se a maré cheia o
permite, para que os passageiros, quem quer que sejam, se possam deslumbrar com
a visão do Ibo emergindo da folhagem. Joia brilhante, ilusão.26
[The boats arrive and depart for Tandanhangue and other places, or flutter around the
island. Large kavokos of thick wood propelled by the cadenced and vigorous rowing
of the sailors; kalawas with their black cloths as if in ominous mourning, shark fins
sinisterly evolving off the coast; small ntumbwés with their wings fluttering over the
water like butterflies, shy like them; sluggish ‘gasolinas’ (small engine boats) that
arrive blowing out smoke through the mangrove shortcut, high tide permitting, so
that the passengers, whoever they may be, can be blown away by the sight of the Ibo
emerging from the foliage. Shiny jewel, an illusion.]

The boats are like a miniature cosmos in the Indian Ocean space, re-
vealing the genius of the location, and how coastal and island societies
live in Mozambique, similarly to other coastal areas of the Indian Ocean.
With regard to the Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson states that ‘A his-
tory of an ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and
sea’.27 And that is what happens in the second narrative, ‘The Strength of
the August Sea’. It acquires the dimension of a parable upon mention of
the disappearance of water from the Maputo bay, since it elicits, intertext-
ually and fragmentarily, the biblical parables of water separation, of Jonah
swallowed by the whale, or even Plato’s myth of the cavern. Thus begins
Borges Coelho’s short story: ‘Um dia acordou a baía sem água’ [One day
the bay woke up without water].28 It continues:
Até onde a vista alcançava – que no caso dos pescadores é bem longe, habituados
que estão a perscrutar uma superfície que é lisa e sem obstáculos – ficara aquilo tudo
um deserto. Um deserto salpicado de pequenos pontos prateados, brancos e negros
ou até de outras cores, que eram os peixes contorcendo-se em busca de ar ou água,
ou ar na água.29
[As far as the eye could see – which in the case of fishermen is very far, since they are
used to scouting a flat, unimpeded surface – all that remained was a desert. A desert
sprinkled with small dots of silver, white, black and even other colours, which were
the fish wriggling in search of air or water, or air in the water.]
Departing from the transformation of the sea into land, the narrator pre-
sents an eccentric vision of the Indian Ocean, simultaneously providing
a reflection about colonial past and memory as well as postcolonial
present. To the author, the Indian Ocean is a place of intersections and
contradictions, of commercial and cultural exchange, but it is also a place
that awakens the memory of slavery and colonial enterprise. It thus be-
comes clear why the vastness of uncovered land, due to the emptying of
the sea, lays bare tragic secrets, wreckages, remains of bodies, of ships, of
overlapping times, all entangled in a massive cemetery and ample desert.
27 Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 5.

28 Borges Coelho, Índicos Indícios II Meridião, 125.
Such metaphors exacerbate the visionary and simultaneously parodic di-

mension of the narrative.
Through its small internal narratives, which gradually unveil the vast-
ness of the maritime desert/cemetery, ‘The Strength of the August Sea’
draws attention to ecological, political and historical questions. The sea
becomes a new land and a new map to be filled, now exposed, bare, too
visible. That which the sea swallowed, as the whale did to Jonah, unveils
itself, providing knowledge and bewilderment. Indicative of stories of many
epochs, the necrotic vision of that humid desert now becomes a project
of new commercial exchange, new urban development and occupation.
In other words, once the potential of the hidden sea narratives has been
uncovered, that legacy becomes the bargaining chip of other obscure nar-
ratives of the land:
Entretanto, no extremo de cima assustavam-se os da Ilha da Inhaca. É que desde

sempre tinham visto o sol pondo-se numa minúscula cidade de Maputo ao longe,
sempre envolta em névoa, o seu mistério amansado pela distância e pela repetição.
E agora murmurava-se de boca em boca, ela aproximar-se-ia ruidosa num som rouco
de bulldozers como um voraz bicho já arrotando antes de comê-los. Lançaria as suas
avenidas como um grande polvo lançando os tentáculos, exalaria os seus fumos negros
e espessos de cidade como esse polvo lança a sua tinta. Metáfora marinha, mas nem
por isso menos ameaçadora e real. Ilhéus que eram, temiam essas coisas por não ter
retaguarda para onde fugir.30
[Meanwhile, on the upper end of the island, those from Inhaca Island were scared.
They had always seen the sun set over a tiny city of Maputo from afar, always shrouded
in mist, its mystery tamed by distance and repetition. And now there were murmurs
spreading by word of mouth that the city would move closer, loudly, in a hoarse sound
of bulldozers like a rapacious critter that is already burping before even eating them.
It would launch its avenues like a big octopus spreading its tentacles, it would exhale
its dark, thick fumes like that same octopus shoots its ink. While this is a maritime
metaphor, it is not any less real or threatening. As islanders, they feared those things
because they had no place to run to.]
The parable stages an attempt to unravel the mysteries laid bare by the sea,
now become land, inverting geographies, parodying the new commercial

exchanges, the transnational economic interests, and the disrespect for

ecology and nature.
To understand the phenomenon of the disappearance of the sea, several
stakeholders were called. First came the Technical Assistance Team, in a frus-
trated attempt to make sense of the case, armed with ‘réguas e compassos,
teolitos e gepeésses,31 binóculos e telemóveis, lépetopes e transmissores
com os respectivos repetidores’ [rulers and pairs of compasses, theodolites
and gee-pee-esse, binoculars and mobile phones, laptops and transmitters
with the respective transponders],32 all this to find the cause of the sudden
disappearance of the sea. In the narrative sequence, it then becomes neces-
sary to procure aerial help from the South Africans, who photographically
map all the vast area of debris and shipwrecks:
Depois, em novo quadrado, surpreendidos pelos flashes do sul-africano equipamento,

mágica aparição, um grupo de marinheiros austríacos a soldo de um tal Guilherme
Bolts, procurando ainda recolher a vela do estai para oferecer menos resistência à
traiçoeira tempestade que se abateu sobre o barco sem aviso, num fim de tarde de
Setembro de 1779, naqueles desconhecidos e longínquos mares africanos.33
[Then, in a new square, surprised by the flashes of the South African equipment, a
magical apparition – a group of Austrian sailors hired by a William Bolts, still trying
to take down the staysail to offer less resistance to the treacherous storm that came
down on the boat unannounced, on a late September afternoon in 1779, in those
unknown and far-off African seas.]
The North Americans finally volunteered to help as well, since they have a
different way of photographing that space, through satellites. After a slow
and sequential unveiling of the map of remains piled up in the interior of
the sea, the narrative stages the plans for the construction of a new city,
designed in quadrangular spaces to be occupied. But the narrative ends
with nature yet again making way for normalcy, with the sea once more
enveloping the bay:
31 The text is referring to Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Foi nesta altura do processo, quando subia o tom da altercação – os planeadores

procurando satisfazer o apetite e o povo também, cada um o respectivo – que
aconteceu aquilo que só pode acontecer no mês de Agosto. O cacimbo, aquecido por
um sol que se fortalecia à medida que subia a encosta do dia, começou a liquefazer-se
e com isso se desfizeram os seus secretos jogos de espelhos e reflexos, mágicos e
tortuosos caminhos da visão: afinal havia mar, só que tão quieto e transparente, tão
leve e tão etéreo que passara despercebido.34
[It was at this point of the process, when the argument began to escalate – the plan-
ners attempting to satisfy their appetite and the people their own – that happened
what can only happen in the month of August. The dew, warmed by a sun that
got stronger as the day progressed, began to liquefy and with it its secret games of
mirrors and reflections, magical and tortuous paths of sight: after all there was sea,
only so quiet and transparent, so light and so ethereal that it had gone unnoticed!]
In this narrative, Borges Coelho builds a creative and imaginary geog-

raphy that reverts sea to land and transparency to obscurity, bridging
gaps between past and present, based on a moving logic of economics
and transaction that binds the depth of time (the sea cave, the multiple
pasts) to the transparent surface of the present. The narratives of Indian
Indices circulate like sea tides, re-establishing areas of contact in which
stories intertwine and repeat themselves in different ways. Colonial past
and postcolonial present renegotiate the narratives.
A fertile ground for the critical exchange of fables and for the recre-
ation of geographies and myths, the narration of João Paulo Borges Coelho
reinvents imageries of the Indian Ocean in the quest for the genius loci of
an ocean that is simultaneously magic, incantatory, tragic and grim in al-
ternate narratives:
Can we develop our knowledge of an area like the Indian Ocean – producing and
trading in facts – without references to the narratives that undermine that trade?
There are colonial fictions; how can we be sure our knowledge is not compromised
by such a fictional framework? And there are post-colonial fabulations, stories that
describe other kinds of becomings.35

35 Stephen Muecke, ‘What makes a carpet fly? Cultural Studies in the Indian Ocean’,
Transforming Cultures eJournal, 3/2 (2008), 30.
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——, Índicos Indícios II Meridião (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005).
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‘Hybridity in Indian Ocean Literature’. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
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Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: University of South Africa
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Rui Gonçalves Miranda
5
History, Literature, and the Indices of the
Ocean: Force of Signification in Borges Coelho’s
‘A força do mar de Agosto’
ABSTRACT
The impact of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ rests largely on its
concurrent conceptualization of the Indian Ocean and its instrumental use of the Indian
Ocean as a literary device. In Borges Coelho’s short story, the sea is made into something
other than a mere background for (neo)colonial – military, economic – endeavours or
a simple metaphor at the service of historical and philosophical enterprises. The spatial
reframing operated in the short story’s arresting premise – that of a sea which does not
wet – sets off a process of writing and reading (in and of ) the sea which illustrates as well
as enacts literature’s potential to unsettle both conceptualizations of History and ac-
cepted historical records. The political critique of authoritarian practices and neoliberal
diktats that unfolds in the text is inseparable from a wider textual and contextual (local
and global) examination of sedimented historical, political and philosophical forms that
literature may, perhaps should, force open.
Retracing the ocean
João Paulo Borges Coelho’s two-volume short story collection Índicos

indícios [Indic Indices/Traces of the Indian Ocean],1 published in 2005,
addresses the roles and meanings of the often overlooked sea off the
Mozambican coast in the imaginary of the inland and of the numerous
islands. It does so primarily by offsetting a textualized topography of
coastal Mozambique against formulaic cartographies of the nation. The
collection as a whole makes evident, on the one hand, the limitations of
1 All translations are my own, unless when stated otherwise. The collection has not
been translated into English, so I offer two possible translations that attempt to en-
capsulate the meanings of the title in the original.
108 Rui Gonçalves Miranda
nationbound frameworks in addressing the traces in and of the sea; on

the other, it highlights the ways in which the seas function as surfaces and
depths of contact, commerce, and conflict – historically speaking and at
present.2
I would like to follow Roberto Vecchi’s insight that the topoi-graphy
of Borges Coelho’s Índicos indícios runs counter to the cartography of the
colonizer (which traces the rivers, not the sea) and that it allows for the
coastal space, ‘the decisive variable of the narrative’, to go hand in hand with
a ‘reconfiguration of historical time’.3 The force of this spatial framing lies
in its illustration and enacting of literature’s contribution towards a post-
colonial questioning and problematizing of accepted historical record.
Ultimately, the relevance of the Indian Ocean goes beyond mere geography
as Borges Coelho puts it in the preface to volume I, Setentrião [The North].
The Mozambican coastline, plus the numerous islands surrounded by the
sea, is extensive but, according to the preface, the area bathed by the sea is:
muito, muito maior se tivermos em conta as histórias que esse simples facto tem
alimentado no imaginário do presente e ao longo do tanto tempo que passou. […]
Por detrás de tantos nomes e tantos cruzamentos, de tanta diversidade, é sempre o
mesmo, o mar.4
[much, much more extensive if one bears in mind the histories which that simple
fact has fuelled in today’s imaginary and throughout the vast period of time since
elapsed. […] Behind so many names and so many crossings, so much diversity, it is
always the same, the sea.]
The short stories in Índicos Indícios attest to the cultural and ethnic diver-
sity, fluidity and porosity of several Mozambican groups and individuals,
shaped by religious and cultural encounters enabled by the commercial
2 Two examples, among many: the ‘migration crisis’ in the Mediterranean; the diplo-
matic and militar tension in the so-called South China Sea.
3 Roberto Vecchi, ‘Excepting the exception: A bloodstained cartography of
Mozambique in João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Índicos indícios’, in Cristina
(Nottingham: CCCP, 2009), 240–1.
4 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Índicos indícios I: setentrião (Lisboa: Caminho,
2005), 9–10.
History, Literature, and the Indices of the Ocean 109
circuits of the Indian Ocean and the Mozambican coast and islands.
There is certainly, as Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal suggest in their
introduction to the volume Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and
Political Perspectives (2010), a necessity to re-evaluate the ocean, its roles,
functions and respective critical perspectives. Whether the answer is to
have the ocean ‘anthropomorphized’, as if ‘it could not exist or possess a
meaning were it not a mirror of humankind’, is another matter entirely.5
The sea demands an approach that is able to counter what John Mack has
denounced as the traditional historiographical representation of the seas
‘either as the backdrop to the stage on which the real action is seen to take
place – that is, the land’ or ‘as the means of connection between activ-
ities taking place at coasts and in their interiors’. This leads Mack to con-
clude: ‘The characteristics of the sea itself, the nature of man’s interactions
with it, the alliances and liaisons which takes place on it and because of it,
the contacts effected, cemented or cast asunder, are all largely absent from
this historiography.’6
What follows reads Borges Coelho’s short story ‘A força do mar de
Agosto’ [The Force of the August Sea], featured in volume II (Meridião
[The South]) of the Índicos Indícios collection, with an interest both in
the conceptualization of the Indian Ocean (Indian Ocean as a method, to
quote Isabel Hofmeyr)7 and in the instrumental use of the Indian Ocean
as a literary device. ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ supplements a historiog-
raphy that has either addressed the sea or, under that pretence, has often
used the seas as a metaphor for a meta-reflexive approach to the historian’s
task. Its use of marine metaphors may also provide a critical comment on
how certain philosophers (of history, among others) have forged and pro-
jected a given image of the sea. The narrator of this particular short story,
penned by a fictionalist who is an established academic historian, will
make full use of the performative powers of literary fiction with a view to
5 Shanti Moorthy, and Ashraf Jamal, ‘Introduction: New Conjunctures in Maritime

Imaginaries’, in Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives
(London: Routledge, 2010), 1.
6 John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2011), 19–20.
7 Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The complicating sea: The Indian Ocean as method’, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32/3 (2012), 584–90.
addressing the histories and the stories brought about with the force of sea,
too often overlooked on account of the aforementioned representational
bias toward the land.
‘A força do mar de Agosto’ adopts a singular paradoxical approach to
the rescuing of the role and function of the sea: its premise is that of a sea
which ‘não molha’ [does not wet].8 Although this situation will prove to
be temporary and, by the end of the short story (it is, in fact, the ending
of the short story), the sea will recover its true force as unexpectedly as it
had been lost in the first place, this will be enough to break the ‘grande
coluna do tempo’ [large column of time] and invite questions regarding
the legitimacy of the supposedly natural order of things once the calm sea
renders historical incidents, accidents, and events (the vast majority of
which had not been recorded by history) visible in a ‘desarrumação sem
hierarquia’ [untidiness without hierarchy].9 The ending of the short story,
with a return to ‘normality’ which unmasks the miscalculation of all plans
and endeavours that had interpreted the apparent solidification of the sea as
a carte blanche for its appropriation, emphasizes a political reading which
is particularly rich if one takes into account Jacques Rancière’s attempt to
circumscribe a ‘politics of literature’. Rancière’s definition of politics, in
this context, is as follows:
a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not
allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific
subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways
of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking.10
One can therefore discuss ‘politics of literature’ when ‘literature as lit-

erature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this
intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common
world.’ ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ raises critical, discursive and historical
questions about what is and/or is not seen, heard, done by whom (not)
8 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Índicos indícios II: meridião (Lisboa: Caminho,
2005), 126.
9 Borges Coelho, Índicos indícios II: meridião, 134.
10 Jacques Rancière, ‘The politics of literature’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics
(London: Continuum, 2010), 152.
and to whom, and it engages polemically in a discussion that is both local

and universal, historical and imaginary. All of the above does not pre-
clude the fact that ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ engages with area studies,
history, critical theory, political discourse, etc., via the forms and the force
of a literary text. It thus confirms the validity of Rancière’s definition of
the syntagm ‘politics of literature’ as meaning that ‘literature “does” pol-
itics as literature’.11
Remainders and reminders
The narrative of ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ begins with the reporting of

a strange occurrence: there is no sea in the bay of Maputo, not at least in
the traditional understanding of sea. A stone thrown by a child does not
skip along the water, a fisherman’s boat, a xitatarru, does not glide and the
fisherman finds himself dragging it through a surface which had seem-
ingly become a very particular sort of desert. Water was seemingly solid,
marble-like, no one and nothing was wet.
For those with an interest in historiography, this description of the
sea may evoke Jules Michelet reference in La Mer (1861) to the seawater’s
‘gelatinous effect’ (as it ‘is whitish and rather viscous’), which causes the
sea’s ‘plants and creatures’ to ‘gleam through it [seawater] as through a di-
aphanous garment’.12 In ‘A força do mar de Agosto’, the sea will ultimately
acquire a degree of transparency when in its apparent solid state (most not-
ably, with the help of technology), thus ironically christallizing Michelet’s
vision on the ‘transparent seas of the Indies’, and the way in which ‘the
phantasmagoria which the depths afford’ strikes those who encounter it.13
The revelation that Borges Coelho’s short story produces is as unreal as the
natural phenomena to which Michelet referred, but the phantasmagoria
11 Rancière, ‘The politics of literature’, 152.

12 Quoted by Roland Barthes, Michelet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), 41.
13 Quoted by Barthes, Michelet, 41.
that is now visible – albeit still, to an extent, submerged or buried under

water – is historical through and through; indeed, in the preface to volume
II of Índicos Indícios Borges Coelho mentions the concomitant traits of
heaviness and transparency that the sea bears when referring to this very
same short story.14 The seeming solidification of the sea exposes histor-
ical (Indic) indices which call out to the present: a small airplane which
had been thought to have crashed on land, and two skeletons; a group
of Austrian soldiers under the orders of William Bolts, shipwrecked in
September 1779 and their cargo of textiles and silver spoons that they
hoped to exchange with ‘os locais que viemos a ser nós’[‘the locals that came
to be us]; a much more recent young sailor, still in colonial times, in his
sport boat Vauriant; a tow ship from the harbour; a catamaran tragically
shipwrecked – all of its occupants deceased, except for a woman who was
saved by a dolphin; women and children who picked shellfish by hand;
last, and least, as one will come to see, an unexpected cemetery: a number
of fishermen enclosed in their characteristic xitatarrus.
The ‘solidification’ of the sea acts as a device that breaks the vertical ar-
rangement of time (the column of time, in the text) and lays bare a temporal
line of traces which is not ordered or classified, it is untidy and irregular and
illogical, in the previously mentioned ‘desarrumação sem hierarquia’: traces
that cannot be recovered, that point in multiple temporal directions and
that cannot be traced back to an origin or fit into a format. The ‘[p]‌equenos
e desencontrados vestígios’ [small and conflicting vestiges] – chief among
them the unexpected cemetery of ‘pequenos pescadores imóveis, como se
dormissem’ [small still fishermen, as if they were asleep]15 – are a reminder
of colonial (and postcolonial) encounters in and through the sea, a fitting il-
lustration of postcoloniality as a ‘concatenation of multiple temporalities’.16
The focus on the varied and diverse ‘desencontrados vestígios’ rather
than on documented encounters accounts for what Achille Mbembe has

16 Achille Mbembe, ‘Africa in motion: an interview with the post-colonialism the-
oretician Achille Mbembe’, interviewed by Christian Höller, Springerin magazine,
3 (2002). <https://www.springerin.at/en/2002/3/afrika-in-bewegung/> accessed
20 February 2018.
described as ‘time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its

multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences’.17 The spatialized
timespace, rearranged according to no dominant (epistemological, discip-
linary, political, ideological) hierarchy, fits in with Mbembe’s view that ‘the
notion of the “postcolony” refers to a timescape which is simultaneously in
the process of being formed and of being dissolved through a movement
that brings both the “being formed” and the “being dissolved” into colli-
sion’.18 The pseudo-solidification of the sea creates a device through which
the habitual formations and dissolutions (in and through the waves, move-
ments, and forces of the sea) come to a temporary still and can therefore
be glimpsed. In the short story, the authorities will nevertheless wilfully
ignore any findings that could come from a change in and of perception.
In Rancière’s reading of the ‘poetics of knowledge’ in history texts,
Rancière pursues history’s seemingly contradictory reliance upon literary
traits as it purports to purge itself of literariness in its quest for a scien-
tific history. Rancière praises Jules Michelet’s Republican paradigm, often
criticized for its Romanticized approach and the use of literary artifices,
precisely because it reveals an understanding of the relevance of ‘litera-
ture’ in addressing the past. It stands in contrast to the Annales school’s
well-documented use of literary works as ‘historical’ documents (even if
Fernand Braudel’s study on the Mediterranean was a watershed publication
on the historiography of the seas). Given Hayden White’s interest in the
interface between history and literary tropes, it is hardly surprising that
he took upon the task of writing the foreword to the English-language
translation of Rancière’s Les noms de l’histoire: Éssai de poétique du savoir
[The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge].19 In the foreword,
White summarizes Rancière’s take on Michelet:
17 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2001), 13.
18 Mbembe, ‘Africa in motion: an interview with the post-colonialism theoretician
Achille Mbembe’.
19 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Michelet goes into the archives not in order to read the documents as the dead indices
of events now past, but in order to immerse himself in those documents as fragments
of the past still living in the present. […] Instead of interpreting the documents,
Michelet lets them speak for themselves by showing them to us. The difference be-
tween the dead written word, which, like a corpse, can only be viewed, and the live
spoken word, which can only be heard, is effaced.20
As suggested by Dmitri Nikulin, Rancière’s positing that ‘a historian

should lend his or her voice to those who have been missed in and by
history’ draws heavily not just from Michelet, but from Roland Barthes’s
reading of Michelet’s life and work.21 Let us recall that, in Barthes’ view,
Michelet innovates by reorganizing history:
not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal
death. The historian’s duties are not established in terms of the general concept of
historical truth, but only confronting each dead man of history; his function is not
of an intellectual order, it is at once of a social and a sacred order. The historian is
in fact a civil magistrate in charge of administering the estate of the dead (a formula
Michelet derives from Camões in the Indies).22
In the context of a reading of Índicos indícios, the quasi-anecdotal refer-

ence to Luís de Camões’s administrative post (when Camões is better
known as, among other things, the epic poet of Portuguese maritime ex-
pansion) is a helpful reminder of a colonial administering of life and/
or death. Incidentally, Camões lived off the Mozambican coast during
his prolonged and interrupted return to Portugal after being discharged
from the office with the title that proved inspirational to Michelet.
In the remapping of the coast promoted by the arrest of the come and
go of the waves, which makes visible the graveyard whose remains are –
unlike other remains – beyond recovery, identification and mourning,
20 Hayden White, ‘Foreword: Rancière’s revisionism’, in Jacques Rancière, The Names

of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), xvi.
21 Dmitri Nikulin, ‘The names in history: Rancière’s new historical poetics’, in Jean-
Philippe Deranty, and Alison Ross, eds, Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary
Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality (London: Continuum, 2012), 75.
22 Barthes, Michelet, 82.
the xitatarrus do not mark the spot; yet they are a visible remainder, and a
reminder. According to White, this is the lesson that Rancière takes from
Michelet: Michelet succeeded in ‘making them [the poor] speak as silent
people’, ‘the historian keeps them silent by making them visible’.23 The now
visible, small, disseminated corpses of the the poor fishermen in the ‘un-
expected cemetery’ offer a platform – however tenuous – for addressing,
in Borges Coelho’s own words, Africa’s unresolved relationship with the
sea.24 The corpses present both a historical imperative and an alternative
to colonial histories without relinquishing an engagement with colonial
capitalism. The corpses, buried in their boats and their nets, victims of the
dangers to which their precarious living conditions exposed them, emerge
only to be ignored and marginalized by the present government who will
take control and appropriate the (now) ‘land’ in which they are buried. As
was in the past, during colonial administration, so is – as a result – in today’s
‘devenir autoritaire’ [becoming authoritarian], embodied in the short story’s
fierce neoliberal and neocolonial forces, foreign or national: there are no
obstacles to what Mbembe calls ‘economic appropriation’.25
Appropriations: Blank sheet, spattered desert
After the sea apparently becomes solid, the authorities decide to investi-
gate only when the smell of rotten fish on the surface can no longer be ig-
nored. The ‘Polícia Municipal’ [Municipal Police] tries to blame the locals,
the fishermen and the fishwives. Seen as this is ultimately unconvincing,
the ‘Brigada dos Técnicos’ [Brigade of Technicians] is brought up from
the rear and comes to the front: the military lexicon foreshadows what
will take place next. The Brigade is equipped with rulers and compasses,
23 White, ‘Foreword: Rancière’s revisionism’, xvi.

24 João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Entrevista com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, interviewed
by Rita Chaves, Via Atlântica 16 (2009), 155.
25 Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée
(Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2013), 80.
GPS and transmitors, mobile phones, so that they are able to compare
what they see before them to the topographical and hidrographical
charts. As they prepare to lay the groundwork for an unbridled attempt
at appropriation, the best they can do in order to come to terms with the
newly found landscape is, quite farsically, to install a toilet as a model for
illustrating how the water could have been flushed out of the bay – if the
rivers cannot be traced, the sewer pipes can. The South Africans, given
their expertise in photographing the Mozambican land – to set up bases
during the war, to install gaspipes (and the narrator is quick to point out
how gas pipes and sewer pipes are not dissimilar) – were now called upon
as friendly neighbours (narrator dixit), or perhaps not so friendly:
Vieram com os seus técnicos e aviões, quadricularam a baía e fotografaram, um a um,

os quadrados que a partir do ar imaginavam cá em baixo.
Num deles estaria o ralo, ou ao menos a explicação.26
[They came with their technicians and planes, squared the bay and photographed,
one by one, the squares that from the air they imagined here below.
In one of them would be the drain, or at least the explanation.]
Attempts to scrutinize, survey, charter will persistently try to fit the sea
into the representations and the possibilities that they presuppose and
impose top down (‘a partir do ar imaginavam cá em baixo’); ironically, the
narrator compares the product of the US and South African’s mapping
techniques to abstractionist and cubist painting styles.27 Maps, photo-
graphs, satellites will ultimately fail in their search for a no less imagined
(from high above, from the air, in opposition to the ‘here below’) origin,
or explanation – they are no match for untidiness without hierarchy.
Although the skeletons in the now-closeted space of Maputo Bay are now
exposed, the Government, rather unsurprisingly and unlike the historian
writer, remains oblivious to the ‘estate of the dead’. Western technology
and ideology (in the North American and South African apparatuses)
are ultimately ineffective and the Government adds insult to injury by

ignoring the visible ‘disposition’ of the past as a multiple, multidirectional

space. The Government would rather wilfully imagine and project (now
from the land as, before, the South Africans from the air) this space as a
blank slate.
The impossibility of thinking beyond the paradigm of the appropri-
ation of virgin land, ‘vasto espaço branco por preencher’ [vast blank space
to be filled in], lays bare the motivations of the ‘Governo de todo nós’
[Government of all of us] that closes off any possibility for other scientific
efforts and endeavours by going all in on ‘soluções mais tangíveis, as ditas
nossas soluções’ [more tangible solutions, the so-called our solutions].28 The
appeal to rely on ‘as nossas próprias forças’ [our own strengths] translates
into a ‘Plano Director’ [master plan], drawn ‘numa grande folha branca’ [on
a big white page],29 with a view to urbanizing as much of the area as pos-
sible. Through the Government’s configuration of the sea as a blank space
for neocolonial filling in, the crisis in the sea has patently become – as the
neoliberal mantra holds – an opportunity, predictably, for the expansion
of capital. The Government will repeat in the sea, now as farce, a tragic
history of colonization of the land: it will build nothing except for a road
and gas stations so that, in light of modern neoliberal conceptions, enter-
prising citizens may have free reign to buy generators, to dig wells, to build
high walls and hire private security with dogs and batons to guarantee the
success of this exclusive development.30
The white page of paper on which the plan is drawn is symptomatic
of the Government’s position and, to an extent, of its wishful thinking.
Although the sea in its apparent solid state is described as a desert, it is
instantly clear that it is far from being a blank canvas on which plans and
desires can be effortlessly carried out; the attribution of an adjective to
the desert makes this obvious: ‘Um deserto salpicado de pequenos pontos
prateados, brancos e negros ou até de outras cores’ [A desert spattered with
small dots in silver, white and black or even in other colours].31 The dots
that authorities and technochrats will come to map, identify and wilfully

30 Borges Coelho, Índicos indícios II: meridião, 135–6.
ignore are not a form that can easily be apprehended. The description of
the dots as spatters metonymically transposes to these remnants the flu-
idity that is attributable to the sea and that is exceptionally suspended in
the beginning of the short story. The same word, salpicos, is applied specif-
ically to the thousands of xitatarrus that will be found ‘Salpicando vários
quadrados’ [Spattering several squares].32 The spatters were always there –
foreshadowing the fact that, as one will come to address, the sea was always
already there even if its force (quietly undermining all potential forms of
survey, planning, development and appropriation) went unnoticed.
After all there was sea
The fishermen in the bay have no documents that can entitle them to
any say, let alone to prove possession of the (liquid) sea, and hence their
claims for possession of some of the new emerging land goes unheard,
in the same way that the now visible corpses of the dead fishermen from
the past (presumably their ancestors) are overlooked. The inhabitants of
the island of Inhaca are equally powerless. They can only murmur con-
cerns vis-à-vis the inevitable incorporation and/or blotting out, whose
growlings their own murmurings anticipate:
E agora, murmurava-se de boca em boca, ela (Maputo) aproximar-se-ia ruidosa num
som rouco de bulldozers, como um voraz bicho já arrotando antes de comê-los.
Lançaria as suas avenidas como um grande polvo lançando os tentáculos, exalaria os
seus fumos negros e espessos de cidade como esse polvo lança a sua tinta. Metáfora
marinha, mas nem por isso menos ameaçadora e real.33
[And now, it was murmured by word of mouth, she (Maputo) would noisily edge
closer in a husky sound of bulldozers, as a voracious animal belching already before
eating them. It would throw its avenues as a large octopus throws its tentacles, it would

exhale its thick and dark city smoke as such an octopus throws its ink. A marine
metaphor, but as threatening and real nonetheless.]
The black ink and smoke are expected to fill in the vast blank space and
blot out any dots that spatter the desert. The irony of having a marine
metaphor describe the voracious expansion and development of land is
not lost on the reader when the dimensions of Leviathan and Behemoth
are fused precisely at the moment when islanders get stuck between a hard
place (the ‘mar imenso’ [immense sea]) and the Maputo Bay sea which
has now been appropriated as land. As they are about to throw themselves
into the unknown open sea, they are rescued in extremis from the roaring
bulldozers by the restoration of the flow in the bay of Maputo, as are the
seashore inhabitants, and the fishermen. The precarious community (for
a lack of a better word) of islanders is spared from total exclusion, seem-
ingly paradoxically, via the separation that the sea in the bay insures once
normality is restored. The fishermen are saved from being evicted from
the sea which had provided them with a means of livelihood and was the
cemetery of their ancestors.
What ultimately interrupts the incorporation and annihilation
the islanders, fishermen, or the seashore inhabitants was always already
there: ‘afinal havia mar, só que tão quieto e transparente, tão leve e tão
etéreo que passara despercebido!’ [after all there was sea, only it was so
quiet and transparent, so light and so ethereal that it had gone unnoticed].34
The sea’s ethereal transparency may invoke further the already mentoined
Michelet’s description of seawater as a diaphanous garment and the ensuing
phantasmagory which the historian intuited. However, more than a site
of historical difference, the sea is a producer of differences, it interrupts an
infinite projection and expansion of the ipse via the difference(s) already
there, even if unnoticed at first sight or upon ever closer inspection (South
Africa, the USA, the Government of all of us).
The story of these ‘communities’, who live off and by the sea, who resist
annihilation by an Authority and a Plan which is not able to listen to them
or to recognize them as stakeholders only because the sea is – contrary to
what different agents, institutions and forces, national and international

had perceived – liquid, its waves come and go, points to the sea as more
than simply an ‘other’ to the land, which can dialectically be sublated; if
anything, its coming and going interrupts sublation. This touches upon
the role that the sea has played in philosophy of history or political phil-
osophy as it goes against the Hegelian formulation of the sea as the merely
dialectical ‘origin of “commingling”, “heterogeneity”, and “extraneousness”’.
Roberto Esposito refers to Friedrich Hegel’s notorious framing of Africa
as outside the westward unfolding of the Geist while highlighting also
the sea’s merely dialectical role in the Hegel’s vision of the expansion of
Europe: the sea is ‘the place of the improper’, only to be subsumed in and
by the proper.35 In Esposito’s view, who carries out, in Communitas: The
Origin and Destiny of Community, a critique of Martin Heidegger’s seminal
reading of the sea in Hölderlin, it also undercuts Heidegger’s reiteration of
Hegel’s formulation. In Esposito’s counter-reading, the movement of the sea
prefigures Esposito’s own definition of community:36 the sea may very well
be the ‘site of the improper’,37 but – to paraphrase Jacques Derrida – there
is no dehors mer. In Hölderlin, ‘[t]‌he sea withdraws, and in this withdrawal
it is actualized not in two distinct passages but within one movement: it
withdraws giving itself – as a gift to others, and it gives itself as a gift as it
withdraws. The sea’s withdrawal leaves the land to be’.38 Esposito’s dismant-
ling of Heiddeger’s ontological investment in Hölderlin’s sea continues:
Hölderlin’s verses constitute the exact reversal of that heroic epic of the sea that Hegel
philosophically ‘sang’ under the mark of the infinite expansion of Europe. Contrary
to this vision, Hölderlin’s sea reminds us of our shared inability to be appropriated;
35 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 107.
36 Roberto Esposito defines ‘community’ as not ‘the inter of the esse, but the esse as
inter’, ‘being itself as a relationship’. That leads to a discussion of the superimpos-
ition of being and nothing: ‘being of community is the gap, the spacing that re-
lates us to others in a common non-belonging, a loss of what is one’s own which
never manages to be added up into a common good. Only lack is common, not
possession, property and appropriation’; see Roberto Esposito, ‘Community
and nihilism’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 1
(2009), 27.
37 Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 107.
38 Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 108–9.
pure crossing [traversata] without ‘forward’ or ‘back’, as Hölderlin makes clear in the
third version of the lyric. An absolute present withdrawn as much from the sirens
of Utopia as from the calls of nostalgia – Theodor Adorno will also remark upon
this in his polemic with Heidegger. The present is the time of the loss of the origin.
[…] That it [the sea] doesn’t have an end, nor a direction, nor a logic means that the
origin itself has been cast so deeply into the abyss that it cannot be shown except
in the movement with which it withdraws. This is the sea: the eternal coming and
going of waves: withdrawing as a countermovement of the stroke; the undertow that
leaves something on the earth, and vice versa, because the sea in question isn’t to be
understood in opposition to land but rather as its secret meaning; the oscillating,
precarious, and troubling dimension that constitutes the hidden undercurrent of
land, that which land is incapable of seeing by itself, its blind spot.39
The coincidence of the flow of the sea being restored just as the inhab-
itants of the islands prepare to flee into the unknown reinforces the im-
portance of the come and go of the sea. The sea, as a literary device, pre-
sents no escapist route, either through nostalgia or utopian projection
(a ‘new dawn’ in unknown Perth, a ‘sol novinho em folha’ [brand new
sun])40 across and beyond the sea. The force of the sea lies rather in its
bringing together as, and because, it separates – hence the clear danger of
anthropomorphizing the oceans, in imagining its subjects and the ocean
as a subject. There is no ‘us’ in the short story except in the rhetoric of
the authoritarian becoming (to use Mbembe’s term) of the ‘Governo
de todo nós’ [Government of all of us] when it pushes its ‘ditas nossas
soluções’ [the so-called our solutions] and appeals to ‘as nossas próprias
forças’ [our own strengths] as a smokescreen to push on its programme
of disenfranchisement, exclusion, and economic appropriation. The force
of the sea ultimately interrupts the ipseistic projection of the becoming
authoritarian selfsame. The come and go of the sea (and of ‘community’
and its non-subject) calls for a reading that goes beyond projected forms.
The force of sea – both hiding and revealing, coming and going – ul-
timately interrupts the extension and/or the mirroring of the selfsame
(i.e. the Authority of the land, ordered into a Master Plan projected onto
blank sheets). But neither does it provide the land(ed) authorities with an
39 Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 109–10.

opposite; it rather confronts them with their blindspots and limits to the
otherness (what or who) the selfsame can appropriate.
The force of the sea stresses the otherness within, and a within which
is without defined borders or propriety. The remnants (vessels, corpses) are
traces, an absence rendered noticeable: indices (Indian Ocean’s or other-
wise) point only to a presence insofar as that same presence is beyond
recuperation – it is a sign of absence as much as it is of presence. This
irrecuperability is not, for fiction, an admission of defeat; it is a condition
of possibility. The suspension of the column of time brought about by the
spatizalization of the sea (sea as a temporary space for investment and de-
velopment with a view to colonization) brings to the forefront the ways
in which it is not time and space that define the relation between self and
(its) other, but rather what Derrida has termed spacing:
Spacing designates nothing, nothing that is, no presence at a distance; it is the index
of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that
indicates an irreducible alterity.41
Ultimately, the ‘force’ of the sea interrupts the sublimation, the projected
erasure (devouring or blotting out, as was the threat of the marine meta-
phor) which a ‘solidified’ sea promised; the marks of the corpses, the
corpses as marks indicated already (in the desert splattered with small
dots) a spacing, a movement and an alterity, which could not be – dialect-
ically or otherwise – erased, filled in, blotted out. What these ‘communi-
ties’ have in common is the negative force of the sea which separates them
as much as brings them into play.
Always the same, always different
The risk of overlooking, or approaching acritically, the ways in which

Indian Ocean is constructed, represented and articulated in and through
literature is, first and foremost, to miss out on varied and diverse
41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Positions: interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy

Scarpetta’, in Positions (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 81.
connections that make studying the Indian Ocean relevant in the first
place. Literature provides a way of questioning, of placing in question,
and as the question, the relation between the local and the global pre-
cisely because it is one of the privileged instances of where the local (the
spacetime of Mozambican coast, the North (Setentrião) and the South
(Meridião); the Indic indices) is necessarily in tension with the global
(concepts, writings).
As Borges Coelho has not failed to mention in interviews, the short
stories in Índicos Indícios are grounded on the local geography and history
of Mozambique42 but the porosity of African literary writing (including his
own), the way in which it is inexorably embedded as well as in dialogue with
a wider, ‘global/universal’ context cannot be denied; indeed African litera-
ture should strive to become ‘literatura universal’ so as to counter ethnicist
or exoticist prejudices, often in tandem with marketing ploys. The move to
‘desafricanizar essa literatura face ao olhar do Outro’43 [de-Africanize that
literature in relation to the gaze of the Other] ends up mirroring other acts
in different areas which share a similar performative trait: in history, with
authors such as Michael Pearson proposing the notion of Afrasian sea to
counter the erasure and invisibility of the East African coast agents and ports
in the studies on the Indian Ocean trade;44 in philosophy, the countering of
the Hegelian submission of Africa (and, consequently, of African thinkers)
to the realm of the obscure, of the unthought with V. Y. Mudimbe’s ‘am-
bivalent rhetorical move’ in his rewriting of Michel Foucault (‘L’Ordre du
discours? [The Order of Discourse]) in L’odeur du père (chapter ‘Quel ordre
du discours africain?’),45 or Achille Mbembe’s insistence that it is insuffi-
cient, when ‘dealing with African societies’ “historicity”’, to address merely
42 See João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘A literatura e o léxico da pós-colonialidade: uma

conversa com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, interviewed by Elena Brugioni, Diacrítica
3/24 (2010), 443.
43 See Borges Coelho, ‘Entrevista com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 158–9.
44 See, for instance, Michael Pearson, ‘The Swahili coast in the Afrasian Sea’, in Port
Cities and Intruders. The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern
Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 36–62. On the
overlooking of East African commerce, see Chandra Richard De Silva, ‘Indian Ocean
but not African Sea: the erasure of East African commerce from History’, Journal of
Black Studies 29/5 (1999), 684–94.
45 See Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2007), 83–4.
what happens ‘on the continent itself at the interface between the working
of internal forces and the working of international actors’. According to
Mbembe, it is crucial to undertake a ‘critical delving into Western history
and the theories that claim to interpret it’.46 In ‘A força do mar de Agosto’,
the xitatarrus (those in the past, underwater; those in the present too) stand
as a necessary reminder of the tension between local and global, as their
temporal ubiquity keeps them in dialogue and tension with the several ves-
sels (colonial or post-independence ships, such as the ones owned by the
islanders; airplanes, Mozambican and South African; American satellites)
without ever hinting at nostalgic or utopian projects. Even if unbeknown to
the islanders, fishermen, or residents of the shore, their story is interwoven
with foreign agents and interests and/or the unrecognized ‘olhar do Outro’
of South Africans, USA, or Australia as much as it is with the equally dis-
tant but nevertheless intrusive Government, or every Indic index that the
supposedly solid sea ultimately rendered visible.
‘A força do mar de Agosto’ functions as a marine allegory in which
the exceptional, brief metamorphosis of the sea reveals the underlying
groundlessness of the authoritarian political and economic power struc-
tures which grip the (home)land. In fact, the pseudo-solidification of the
sea made visible what was and is always there, merely unnoticed: the un-
tidiness without hierarchy, the conflicting vestiges. The ‘mar de Agosto’,
by ultimately resisting appropriation and – more significantly still – sub-
limation, thwarts the laws and logics of the land (i.e. explore and map out;
conquer and occupy; invest the capital and reap the dividends) and in the
process exposes the ways in which the logics and the laws of the land are
themselves ultimately groundless. The sea in ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ acts
as a force which questions the forms (historical, cultural, economic, inevit-
ably political) and it is as such – force rather than forms – that it must be
addressed. Seeking for the easy way out (‘ralo’ [drain]) or an ‘explanation’,
rather than attending to the tensions and dissemination of the come and
go, will therefore inevitably fail to scratch the surface, irrespectively of how
transparent the sea is (or was, briefly, when, to all appearances, it was so-
lidified). As previously addressed, the search for an explanation is merely
46 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.

a thinly disguised excuse to carry on with business as usual by imposing a

‘Plano Director’ which plays into and in tune with the interests of (neoco-
lonial, neoliberal) enterprise. As abovementioned, the South African and
US agents will be asked to apply to the sea the expertise – on gas pipes and
on satellites – they had picked up on somewhat dubious past dealings and
and/or under false pretence.
In addressing the small, and the smallness of, remains (or indices) and
the force of the sea, ‘A força do mar de Agosto’ exposes the intricate rela-
tion between the sea’s history, stories and imaginary. The force of the sea
lies in its deployment as a device that can address the traces in the Indian
Ocean and contribute towards assuaging Borges Coelho’s concerns, ex-
pressed in interviews, regarding the neoliberal drive (globally speaking, and
in Mozambique) towards erasing and manipulating memory, on the one
hand and, on the other, towards shutting down the capacity to ‘imaginar o
futuro’ [imagine the future].47 It can be said that Borges Coelho’s concep-
tion of the role of literature partially coincides with Barthes’s and Rancière’s
vision of what Michelet’s history, underlined and underwritten by its lit-
erary traits, had the potential to offer. However, Rancière’s ‘scientific and
political project’ which complements the history of the victors with the
‘the story of the vanquished, the abject, and the downcast of history’48
and provides the excluded (the poor) with a ‘voice’49 cannot be equated
with Borges Coelho’s concern for those who suffer and cannot speak out
because they lack the ‘capacidade, força, voz, para se fazer ouvir’ [capacity,
strength, voice, to make themselves heard].50 There are meaningful over-
laps, and the short story’s allegiance to those missed by and in history
can be traced in the language of the text as it offsets the ‘pequeno’ (small
vestiges, dots, fishermen) against the ‘grande’ (large octopus, large white
sheet, large column of time).
47 João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Entrevista a João Paulo Borges Coelho’, interviewed by
Ana Patrício Vicente Peixinho Santos, Navegações 4/1 (2011), 109.
48 White, ‘Foreword: Rancière’s revisionism’, ix.
49 Nikulin, ‘The names in history: Rancière’s new historical poetics’, 76.
50 Borges Coelho, ‘A literatura e o léxico da pós-colonialidade: uma conversa com
João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 443.
Borges Coelho’s efforts, however, might be read as an exploration of

how literature works in disjunction in relation to history. Vecchi’s com-
pelling case for including Borges Coelho’s short stories in the tradition
of estória [tale, story], which can be traced back to Brazil and earned a
significant following in literature in Portuguese from African countries,
is an apt reminder of a productive tension at work.51 One can find in João
Guimarães Rosa’s insistence on the differences between the elements of
the pair história [history; story] and the less common estória [story; tale]
a step towards Borges Coelho’s own take that literature’s distinctive contri-
bution is not towards filling in the gaps, providing coordinates, but rather
working by contrast. According to Borges Coelho, it is up to the novel
(mutatis mutandis, the short story), with its characteristically freer and less
responsible exercise of the imagination, to go beyond the dead indices of
history and to make visible who (as well as what) has been hidden, buried
or overlooked: ‘A historiografia interpreta enquanto o romance, aberto,
dispõe’ [Historiography interprets whereas the novel, open, exposes].52 The
homophony between estória and história helps inscribe and highlight the
difference between history and story, a difference – furthermore – which
draws attention to itself through and in writing. To Jacques Derrida’s ques-
tion on whether ‘politics or the political’ is not also ‘this engagement with
powerlessness?’,53 Borges Coelho’s histórias/estórias provide an answer in
writing, through literature’s role both as ‘instituted fiction’ and ‘fictive
institution which in principle allows one to say everything’,54 the role of
opening up the possibility of multiple perspectives and directions in the
face of a neoliberal shutdown of meanigful ties between past, present, and
future. The politics of ‘A força do mar de Agosto’, with its rendering visible
(the índices in the sea) and sayable (murmured by islanders and coastal
51 Vecchi, ‘Excepting the exception: A bloodstained cartography of Mozambique in

João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Índicos indícios’, 242–3.
52 See Borges Coelho, ‘Entrevista com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 153–4.
53 Jacques Derrida, ‘Politics and friendship’, in Negotiations: Interventions and
Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 193.
54 Jacques Derrida, and Derek Attridge, ‘“This strange institution called lit-
erature”: an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Acts of Literature (London,
New York: Routledge, 1992), 36.
inhabitants) may lie in the aforementioned Rancièrean involvement ‘in

this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being,
doing and saying that frames a polemical common world’ as much as in a
Derridan engagement with powerlessness.
The untidiness without hierarchy, which in the short story acts as a
reminder of the sea’s force and of its toing and froing even when its force is
only seemingly suspended for a period, acts as a reminder of the processes
of writing and reading as operating in contrast to finding ‘the drain, or at
least an explanation’; reading – in literature as well as in history – cannot be
reduced to a search for a solution, an interpretation, or an exercise in filling
in the gaps. In Glas, Derrida (as Michelet, Barthes, Heidegger before him,
and Rancière afterwards;55 without forgetting, of course, Borges Coelho)
also deploys a marine metaphor. Derrida evokes the operation of the sea
dredging machine as an illustration of the exercise of reading, of an inex-
haustible and constantly shifting attempt to get to the bottom, to grasp a
meaning that is constantly reconstituted (though not as the same) by the
toing and froing of the sea. Derrida’s enactment in Glas, while meditating
on the reading of Jean Genet’s text in interplay with Hegel and disrupting
the omnivorous appetite of the Hegelian system, acts as a warning of how it
is only too easy to guarantee a reading by setting up or settling for a heading,
subsuming other discourses into the logic of a selfsame. Derrida exemplifies
with the defamiliarizing (la mère [the mother]; la mer [the sea]) ‘matrix
or grammar’ of the ‘dredging machine’ being manipulated by some levers:
And I scrape (racle) the bottom, hook onto stones and algae there that I lift in order
to set them down on the ground while the water quickly falls back from the mouth.
And I begin again to scrape (racler), to scratch, to dredge the bottom of the sea, the
mother (mer).
I barely hear the noise of the water from the little room.
The toothed matrix (matrice dentée) only withdraws what it can, some algae, some
stones. Some bits (morceaux), since it bites (mord). Detached. But the remain(s)
55 For Nikulin, the sea in Rancière ‘is a metaphor that is more than a metaphor’; see
Nikulin, ‘The names in history: Rancière’s new historical poetics’, 72.
passes between its teeth, between its lips. You do not catch the sea. She always re-
forms herself.56
The ‘toothed matrix’ dredging the bottom of the sea destabilizes without
appropriating, performing against and because of the constant re-
enactment (the performative and the to-comeness) of the sea, the unpre-
dictable and the remains. In this way, it performs as a critique of the teleo-
logical Hegelian omnivorousness played out also, as Esposito’s critique
makes clear, in his positing of Europe’s seaborne infinite expansion. This
machine exemplifies a different praxis to that of the other apparatuses
in the short story: the airplane and satellites used by the South African
and US teams in the text project a framework upon the sea, from above,
searching for and interpreting clues for an origin or an explanation to the
text and the indices with which they are confronted. In Derrida’s image,
as is the case in the short story, the sea is in no way alien – quite the con-
trary – to the production of meaning. Furthermore, as in the short story
once again, it cannot simply be posited as the other to a (pre-existing)
selfsame (as such), to be appropriated. This image stands perhaps as one
of the best illustrations of the point made by Derrida in Writing and
Difference, in a critique of structuralism’s overreliance on the concept and
meaning of ‘form’, of the necessary force (the movement, the violence) to
the reading of any text.57 The short story’s precipitate ending (‘afinal havia
mar’) lays bare that beyond and underneath the forms (the squares into
which the new space is mapped out and which became the crux of the
dispute between fishermen and the authorities), simultaneously under-
writing them and ultimately undermining them, the force of the sea was
always in play, already undermining the verticality of the large column
of time.
The sea, even if and when solidified, would still prove to be too much
of a challenge to the the technology and ideology of the Government’s
Brigades. If there is to be, as Borges Coelho hopes, a chance to imagine
the future, this would entail being open to what is other and cannot be
56 Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 204–5.

57 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force and signification’, in Writing and Difference (London,
New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–35.
determined in advance. It would also mean accepting that Indic indices

must be consistently reread, always with a difference. The sea, always the
same, ever differently. You do not catch the sea, it always reforms itself.
That is the force of the sea of August.
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——, ‘A literatura e o léxico da pós-colonialidade: uma conversa com João Paulo
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——, ‘Entrevista a João Paulo Borges Coelho’, interviewed by Ana Patrício Vicente
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Jessica Falconi
The Tourism Imaginary in Hinyambaan

6
ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the representations of tourism and the tourism imaginary in the
novella Hinyambaan by João Paulo Borges Coelho (2007). Drawing on some theoretical
concepts of critical tourism studies, such as the concepts of ‘tourist gaze’, ‘tourist glance’
and ‘mutual gaze’, the chapter sheds light on how tourism is represented in the novella
as a socially and culturally mediated and constructed practice. The essay then broaches
aspects such as the relationship between tourism, nature and environment, as well as the
various types of interaction between tourists and ‘locals’ that happen through the typical
tourist practices, such as food consumption and the purchase of ‘authentic’ objects. On the
other hand, the essay analyses the representation of the specific regional linkage between
South Africa and Mozambique, also in the light of their historical relationship during the
colonial past. In the final section the essay discusses the role of the non-human, mostly
objects, in the development of the novella.
Hinyambaan: novela burlesca by João Paulo Borges Coelho, published

in 2007, tells the rocambolesque story of a South African family’s travels
in the country of Mozambique. On their way to the seaside resort of
Inhambane to enjoy their holiday, the Odendaals finally reach their des-
tination only after the occurrence of several incidents. These transform
the itinerary of what was supposedly a peaceful trip into an on the road
experience, marked by adventures and misadventures, which are humor-
ously described by the narrator of the novella.
Drawing on theoretical concepts of the transdisciplinary research field
of critical tourism studies, such as the concepts of ‘tourist gaze’, ‘tourist
glance’ and ‘mutual gaze’, the essay aims to analyse the representation of
tourism and its main aspects, such as, what tourism’s relation to the envir-
onment is, how people regard each other and what the cultural interactions
between tourists and locals are. I contextualize these aspects in the light
of the regional linkage between Mozambique and South Africa in terms
of tourist practice, tourism imaginary and cultural interaction. Indeed,
ever since the colonial period in Mozambique and the apartheid regime
132 Jessica Falconi
in South Africa, tourism has constituted an important link in the polit-

ical and economic connections between the two neighbouring countries,
which is still promoted by their respective governments through agreements
concerning cross-border areas and national parks. The novella by Borges
Coelho also alludes to these relations by summoning a South African
family’s imaginary with regard to Mozambique, which is considered as a
poor and underdeveloped country. Incidentally, the title, Hinyambaan – a
peculiar pronunciation of the name ‘Inhambane’ by the character Hermann
Odendaal – seems, at the outset, to point to this sense of the imaginary and
to a supposedly prior knowledge, which is already rather distorted and will,
as we shall see, emerge at various moments in the Odendaal family’s trip.
The novella begins by providing a background context to the trip,
mentioning the Odendaal’s previous experiences of tourism together with
their usual holiday companions, the du Plessis family.
Como sempre, os Odendaal e os du Plessis fariam férias juntos. Desta vez tinham
até um plano mais ambicioso, em nada parecido com visitas a Lost City, entediantes
horas de espera a leopardos e girafas no Kruger Park (como se fosse natural os
homens surpreenderem os bichos e não o contrário), ou apartamentos partilhados
em Plettenberg Bay onde as duas famílias se acotovelavam para espreitar o mar.1
[As always, the Odendaals and the du Plessis would spend their holiday together.
This time they even had a more ambitious plan, which was nothing like the visits
to the Lost City, tedious hours waiting for leopards and giraffes at the Kruger Park
(as if it were natural for men to surprise beasts and not the other way round), or
shared flats in Plettenberg Bay where the two families elbowed each other to get a
glimpse of the sea.]
The narrator’s allusions, seemingly of little significance, point to the

vast industry of South African tourism. This allows one to draw a rough
sketch of the first characteristics in the Odendaals’ tourism imaginary, since
the places which are mentioned constitute a reference to the standardized
types and experiences of domestic and international touristic consumerism.
In fact, the first place which is mentioned is Lost City, a theme park cre-
ated within the Sun City resort, in the north-eastern province. The park
1 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Hinyambaan (Lisboa: Caminho, 2007), 7. Translations

are mine.
The Tourism Imaginary in Hinyambaan 133
stages represent a fictitious ancient African kingdom, which was supposedly

destroyed during a violent earthquake. The Lost City is merely one of the
countless examples of the creation of themed spaces which invest in the re-
invention of several contexts of cultural heritage, putting on a show of other
places and times for tourist consumption. As Jeanne van Eeden argues, by
resorting to fake ruins and recreated tropical beaches, Lost City embodies
the ideas and fantasies of a deep and mythical Africa, manipulating the past
as well as the memory and identity connected with the places.2
The famous Kruger Park is one of the most well-known symbols of
wildlife tourism in Africa. It represents, as is the case of other parks of the
same typology, one of the most significant examples of the evolution of
what Franklin defines as the zoological gaze3 and of the encounter between
humans and animals. As Beardsworth & Bryman point out, encounter is
one of the ‘modes of engagement through which the wild animal is experi-
enced’ by humans. It is the most direct mode of engagement since ‘it entails
the individual actually being in the physical presence of the unrestrained
animal in its own environment’.4 The narrator’s remark ‘(as if it were natural
for men to surprise beasts and not the other way round)’ points out, in an
ironic fashion, to the way in which these tourist practices – and the whole
‘tourism production system’5 that is, all of the economic, commercial and
social systems that support tourism – are based on an idea of ‘natural’ and
of ‘nature’, the construction of which ensues from a relation between the
human and the non-human, and where the former traditionally occupies
a hegemonic position. The relationship between humans and animal also
marks other moments in the Odendaals’ journey, revealing itself to be a
significant aspect, which I will later return to.
2 Jeanne van Eeden, ‘Theming Mythical Africa at the Lost City’ in Scott A. Lukas,
ed., The Themed Space. Locating Culture, Nation and the Self (Plymouth: Lexington
Books, 2007), 113–36.
3 Adrian Franklin, ‘Zoological gaze’, in Adrian Franklin, ed., Animals and Modern
Cultures: A Sociology of Human– Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage,
1999), 62–83.
4 Alan Beardsworth, and Alan Bryman, ‘The wild animal in late modernity. The case
of the Disneyization of zoos’, Tourist Studies 1/1 (2001), 85.
5 Stephen Britton, ‘Tourism, Capital and Place: Towards a Critical Geography of
Tourism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9/4 (1991), 455.
134 Jessica Falconi
The third location mentioned in the incipit of the novella, Plettenberg

Bay, which lies in the vicinity of several natural parks and reserves in the
Western Cape, also stands out as an important domestic and international
tourist destination in South Africa. In the text, it is the sea that constitutes
the natural element associated to this place, representing a sense of alterity
for the character Henrietta Odendaal – both fascinating and terrifying –
which can be compared to the mythical past of Lost City, or to the animals
in the Kruger Park. These are features which can, in a certain way, be do-
mesticated only through distance, symbolic or physical, which is ensured
by the act of viewing. Indeed, the prospect of a boat trip, proposed by a
friend, Joss du Plessis, constitutes a source of anxiety for Henrietta, who
‘tinha uma relação distante, embora não forçosamente inamistosa, com o
mar’ [had a distant, though not inevitably hostile, relationship with the
sea].6 This relationship, which is explained by Henrietta’s background, is
entirely connected to sight:
Oriunda dos arredores de Welkom, no interior, vira-o na verdade apenas por três
vezes: numa excursão a Capetown no tempo da High School, que incluiu uma manhã
de domingo em Simonstown a ver pinguins; na viagem de núpcias a Knysna, passada
agradavelmente num chalet sobranceiro à lagoa a cometer loucuras que hoje a fariam
corar, entremeadas de dúzias de ostras de viveiro e cálices de Chenin branco de Klein
Constantia; e, claro, da disputada janela do apartamento em Plettenberg Bay. Mas
uma coisa é ver o mar e outra entrar dentro dele.7
[Originally from the outskirts of Welkom in the interior, she had in truth only seen
it three times: on an outing to Capetown in her High School days, which included a
Sunday morning in Simonstown looking at penguins; on her honeymoon to Knysna,
pleasantly spent in a chalet which overlooked the lagoon, doing crazy things that
would make her blush today, interspersed with dozens of farm oysters and goblets of
white Chenin from Klein Constantia; and, of course, the highly contested flat window
in Plettenberg Bay. But it is one thing to see the sea and quite another to get into it.]
The excerpt illustrates the visual dimension of the relation which

Henrietta establishes with the sea. Also, it allows one to think about a
possible relationship between Henrietta’s discomfort with the sea and the
6 Borges Coelho, Hinyambaan, 8.

issue of racial segregation on South African beaches. In fact, the places

mentioned – Simonstown, Plettenberg bay – also carry references to the
apartheid’s past, being mostly white tourist destinations. Moreover, as Jayne
M. Rogerson points out, ‘The formal legislative demise of beach apartheid
during 1990 did not result in radical changes in the racial complexion of
South Africa’s beach spaces’.8 The excerpt simultaneously allows one to
extend the map of the Odendaals’ tourism experiences mentioned at the
beginning of the novella, adding new features and calling for the consump-
tion of food and drink, which will develop into an important role in the
narration of the South African family’s journey to Mozambique. The nar-
rator draws an internal cartography,9 which reveals something of the charac-
ters’ identities and points to the literary and symbolic nature of maps. This
use of the implicit map unfolds into explicit maps, both by alluding to the
physical maps used by the Odendaals, as well as by describing the journey
itself, which takes on a diagetic purpose.10 An essential tool for tourists,
the maps of Mozambique nurture the fantasy of destination: ‘O propósito
[…] é chegar a Inhambane, um ponto sublinhado repetidamente no mapa
como objectivo da viagem’ [The purpose […] is to reach Inhambane, a
point which is repeatedly underlined on the map as being the destination
of the journey].11 However, along the route, the maps which are folded and
unfolded by Henrietta Odendaal, eventually cease to keep their promise
of knowledge and control, unveiling the relation between cartographic
knowledge and the power of falsification and approximation.12 This is
perceived by Hermann Odendaal as follows:
8 Jayne M. Rogerson, ‘Kicking Sand in the Face of Apartheid: Segregated Beaches in

South Africa’, Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series 35 (2017), 106–7.
9 Marina Guglielmi, and Giulio Iacoli, eds, Piani sul mondo. Le mappe
nell’immaginazione letteraria (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012), 15.
10 I am referring to the taxonomy of the presence of maps in literature outlined by
Guglielmi and Iacoli In this taxonomy, the authors distinguish two main typolo-
gies – implicit and explicit maps; three kinds of insertion – description, material
insertion and allusion – and four functions – diegetic, spatial, social and individual.
12 Marina Guglielmi, ‘Mappe mentali, cartografie personali, autobiografie’ in
Guglielmi, and Iacoli, eds, Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione
letteraria, 49.
136 Jessica Falconi
Já disse muitas vezes que esses mapas não são para gente normal. Nunca encontramos
o que queremos à primeira tentativa. Um dia destes ainda escrevo uma carta a essa
cambada.13
[I’ve often said that those maps are not for normal people. We never find what we want
the first time round. One of these days I’m still going to write a letter to that bunch.]
If maps represent the material form of a presumed prior knowledge

by the Odendaals of their destination, another source in the construction
of fantasies and the tourist imaginary concerning Mozambique is con-
stituted by their friend, du Plessis. Although he is a physically absent au-
thority during the journey, he is present through the ideas and statements
repeated frequently by Herman Odendaal. In their study on the building
of the tourist gaze, Urry and Larsen explain that tourist destinations are
chosen due to the sense of anticipation they evoke, which is further nur-
tured by dreams and fantasies of great pleasure.14 In fact, although the
boat trip is cancelled, for reasons which are not explained clearly by du
Plessis, Hermann Odendaal does not renounce the holiday destination,
and sets off with the family in his Corolla. The car is a powerful symbol
of the democratization of travel and mass tourism, yet it is the element of
destination which now constitutes the distinguishing feature of the social
differentiation of tourism. Thus, the destination – a point underlined on
the map and the object of fantasies – becomes an indispensable challenge
in confirming the Odendaal’s social identity. As it was stated by the Italian
writer Gianni Celati in 1978, exoticism has ceased to be an effect of mobility
and has become its cause.15 On the other hand, the means of transport used
will determine the development of the entire journey, which is marked
by stops, reversals in direction, encounters and bewildering experiences
which begin to affect the Odendaals’ relation with space. The car journey
additionally introduces into the narrative a careful description of the route
itself – with references to bends, road signs, solid lines, etc. – providing a

14 John Urry, and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011), 19.
15 Gianni Celati, ‘Situazioni esotiche sul territorio’, in Anita Licari, Roberta
Maccagnini, and Lina Zecchi, eds, Letteratura, esotismo, colonialismo
(Bologna: Cappelli, 1978), 7–26.
translation of an explicit map, which will take us across the border between
the two countries, and where the journey’s destination and the sea emerge
like a mirage at the end of the novella.
From the very beginning of the itinerary, Hermann and Henrietta
Odendaal reveal a sense of prejudice and stereotype with regard to the
neighbouring country. This prejudice drives the entire process of collecting
and interpreting the signs which structure their tourist practice. This pro-
cess is inherent to what the sociologist John Urry defines as the tourist gaze,
a way of experiencing tourism which is socially, historically and culturally
constructed and regulated. The tourist gaze ‘organises the encounters of
visitors with the “other”, providing some sense of competence, pleasure and
structure to those experiences’.16 If photographs and images generally play
a crucial role in the construction of what the tourist sees, the authors also
highlight the variety of practices and discourses which participate in this
contruction, affirming that ‘each gaze depends upon practices and material
relations as upon discourses and signs’.17 In the novella by Borges Coelho,
the Odendaals’ view is highly regulated by the words of their friend du
Plessis and by previously constituted ideas, whose origin is not revealed,
suggesting that they belong to a widely pervasive and consolidated common
discourse which affects their way of looking at, seeing, and interpreting
space and people in Mozambique. In the case of the Odendaals, their tourist
gaze is closely linked also to the specific historic relationship shared by the
two neighbouring countries and to the common discourse on the ‘under-
development’ and the poverty of Mozambique. Through Hermann’s words,
we are acquainted with the fact that du Plessis used to travel to Mozambique
during the colonial period, conveying to his friend a sense of nostalgia
for that era and its imaginary of a colonial urban space, as well as a harsh
criticism of the postcolonial government: ‘O Joss du Plessis diz que nessa
altura se nadava em cerveja de primeira qualidade e se comiam toneladas
de camarões. Isso claro antes destes tipos de agora terem destruído a cidade’
[ Joss du Plessis says that at the time you could swim in top-quality beer and
ate tons of prawns. That, of course, before these guys of today destroyed
16 Urry, and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 14.

138 Jessica Falconi
the city].18 Du Plessis’s words reported by Hermann Odendaal probably

point to past tourism experiences in Mozambique, marked by privileged
consuming habits that are sources of colonial nostalgia. In the present nar-
rative, du Plessis’ visits to Mozambique still continue due to his professional
involvement in the construction of roads in the capital of the independent
State, highlighting the role of South Africa in the ‘development’ and the
building of a new Mozambique. This determines another additional trans-
mission to Hermann of a negative imaginary relating to the postcolonial
African city, which is perceived as being essentially dysfunctional and dan-
gerous: ‘De qualquer maneira, o Joss du Plessis disse que não se perde nada
em não visitar Mapiutou. Aquilo não é propriamente uma cidade, é antes
um amontoado de lixo, assaltantes e polícias corruptos’ [Anyway, Joss du
Plessis said that you miss nothing if you don’t visit Mapiutou. It’s not exactly
a city, just a heap of rubbish, thieves and corrupt police officers].19 Indeed,
besides the ideas ‘received’ by their friend’s claims, both of the Odendaals
reveal anxiety when relating to the urban and suburban space, while the
rural space is perceived to be apparently more comfortable.
In turn, Henrietta also brings her supposed prior knowledge to bear
when interpreting the Mozambican space. In the argument about how
to light the coal to cook sausages, she states: ‘Nesse caso acenderemos o
carvão com folhas e galhos secos. Basta olhar em volta para ver que quase
tudo isto é mato. Daqui para a frente é tudo assim, pelo menos foi o que me
disseram’ [In this case, we’ll light the coals with dry leaves and twigs. You
just need to look around to see that almost all of this is bush. From here
onwards it’s all like this, at least that’s what I was told].20 This statement
points to her critical and homogenizing vision of the space: her personal
perception is inextricably linked to a collective imaginary based on preju-
dice when dealing with the civilization level of the neighbouring country.
On the other hand, and in frequent contrast with her husband’s statements,
the South African occasionally reproduces a discourse set between the
politically correct and the paternalistic, activating an imaginary related to
poverty, undervelopment and the difficulties to which the country has been

subjected. For instance, when her attention is drawn to a small garden which
divides the Matola avenue in two lines, Henrietta says: ‘Coitados […] Vê-se
que fazem um esforço para embelezarem a estrada, apesar das dificuldades
por que passam’ [Poor creatures […] You can see they make an effort to
embellish the road, despite the difficulties that they experience].21 Then,
after seeing some children selling flowers at the entrance to the cemetery,
she comments: ‘Coitadinhos […] Aposto que se não vendem as flores que
têm passarão fome em casa. Se calhar, até levam pancada dos pais por isso’
[Poor creatures […] I bet that if they don’t sell all their flowers, they will
have to go hungry at home. Maybe their parents will even beat them for it].22
These passages also emphasize the way in which two typologies of views
are articulated in tourism: one is designated by Larsen as the tourist glance,
the visual experience produced in the context of a means of transportation,
such as the car, train or bus, where an immobile traveller sees a parade of
moving images before him, rather like the cinema;23 and the previously
mentioned tourist gaze, a way of experiencing tourism which anchors on en-
coded social and cultural practices as well as discourses. In fact, the moving
images which Henrietta sees through the ‘frame’ of the car windscreen are
first articulated in a narrative, and then crystallized in images which evoke
a pre-established imaginary. Here, Henrietta exemplifies the parallelism
between the tourist and the semiotic identified by Jonathan Culler: ‘This
mode of gazing shows how tourists are in a way semioticians, reading the
landscape for signifiers of certain preestablished notions or signs derived
from discourses of travel and tourism’.24 Furthermore, her words reveal the
self-referential nature of the tourist gaze, since the character believes that
the viewed acts in order to give a better view to the viewer.
Once the initial difficulties arising from the uselessness of the maps
have been surpassed, the Odendaals will encounter experiences which
are typical of tourist journeys. In particular, as if he were following an
absent tour guide – the friend du Plessis – Hermann is especially driven

23 Jonas Larsen, Performing Tourist Photography, PhD Thesis (Roskilde University
Digital Archive, 2004).
24 Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics, 1 (1981), 128.
140 Jessica Falconi
by the desire to share standardized experiences of South African tourism

in Mozambique and the quest for local authenticity. When he encounters
some cashew nut vendors, he is immediately concerned about trying the
‘local’ product which, according to du Plessis, ‘não tem nada a ver com
aquele que encontramos em lata nos supermercados’ [has nothing to do
with what you find in tins at supermarkets].25 Furthermore, when he sees
that some cars from South Africa have stopped at the crowded roadside to
buy goods from the fruit sellers, he decides to stop as well because, as the
narrator observes, ‘invade-o o desconforto de eles poderem experimentar
algo que a si escape’ [he is overwhelmed by the discomfort that they would
experience something that might escape him].26 This episode underlines the
mediated nature, at a social and collective level, of the tourist imaginary and
gaze, since Hermann Odendaal needs to do what other tourist from South
Africa do. The crowd and the presence of cars from South Africa, here,
function as the marker of a touristic experience that can’t be missed. The
search for local foods is a key element of tourist practices and is connected
to the search for authenticity and exoticism. In the novella, the experience
is, however, rather unsuccessful, and the author resorts to an image which
has been exotically motivated and encoded by western literature:
O cheiro é inebriante, o calor intenso. As moscas zunem em volta, enlouquecidas pela

fruta madura. No meio de tudo isto Henrietta Odendaal começa a sentir zonzuras,
estranhas mas não inéditas euforias; as suas anafadas faces avermelham-se, falta-lhe
o ar e não há abanar de leque que resolva.27
[The smell is intoxicating, the heat intense. Flies buzz around, maddened by the ripe
fruit. Amidst all of this, Henrietta Odendaal begins to feel some giddy spells, strange
but not unprecedented euphorias; her plump cheeks become ruddy, she can’t get
enough air, no amount of fanning is able to resolve this.]
Although the sense of sight dominates most tourist practices, this

excerpt points to an overall involvement of the senses, making tourism a
highly kinaesthetic experience, during which the tourist is exposed to a loss
of control. As Urry and Larsen point out, if vision is the dominant sense in

touristic practice, it is not the only one that tourists activate. Since ‘there
are limits on how much vision can explain’, the whole body is involved in
experiencing new places and cultures.28
The search for local authenticity, determined by the tourist imaginary,
produces another incident which borders on parody. This occurs when
the family comes across a group of mask vendors. Although unexpected –
‘Máscaras!, grita Hermann, voltando a meter travões a fundo’ [Masks!,
shouts Hermann, again slamming on the brakes] – the encounter is imme-
diately domesticated by the South African imaginary, ‘comprar artesanato
é um objectivo secundário anotado no seu caderninho de viagem’ [buying
handicrafts is a secondary objective jotted down in his little travel note-
book].29 Involving the other family members, Hermann proves to be capable
of evaluating these works of art, and insists that they observe the unique
features in every mask, each of which is only apparently the same as the
other. This logic is quite particular to the consumer of tourist art: he in-
vests in his own ability to distinguish genuine from copy. By invoking du
Plessis once again, Hermann reproduces truisms concerning the ingenuity
of African art, and its quoted price in international markets, which high-
lights the role of material culture in the tourist imaginary. Physical contact
with the wood of the masks – ‘toma-lhes o peso, passa a mão por elas para
se certificar se estão bem polidas’ [feel their weight, run your hands over
them to check that they have been well polished] – once again emphasizes
that there is an investment of the other senses in the pleasure derived from
the tourist experience, the materiality of the objects and of the places. On
the other hand, when Hermann urges all the family members to put on
the masks, the handicraft objects are renegotiated by the tourist gaze and
become signs of alterity, of a deep and exotic Africa which the Odendaals
ridicule in a group performance: ‘Somos a tribo dos Odendaal’ [We are
the Odendaal tribe!].30
The acquisition of the masks plays a central role in the development
of the narrative by establishing a turning point. It is from this moment on
that the South Africans’ journey definitively changes course. The euphoria

142 Jessica Falconi
caused by the masks encourages Hermann to drive faster and he is even-

tually stopped by a police officer. From here onwards, and due to their
encounter with the Mozambican boy Djika-Djika, who claims that he is
also on his way to Inhambane, the Odendaals’ interaction with the local
inhabitants becomes more direct, which subsequently causes a veritable
convergence/divergence of cultures.
From the perspective of the tourist gaze, Djika Djika represents the
local, like a native informant, someone who is accustomed to the presence
of, and interaction with, tourists, in this case from South Africa. However,
during the narrative, he ultimately subverts this role by destabilizing the
Odendaals’ apparently predictable route. This is demonstrated by the count-
less questions Hermann asks the boy in order to understand where he
comes from, which route he took and where he is going. Bridging the gap
between two worlds and a translator of cultures – whose translation of the
language points to the manipulative and creative dimensions of cultural
translation – Djika-Djika represents someone who has followed a path that
Hermann cannot understand, thus subverting the tourist’s cartographic
certainties and inscribing an other map in the family’s itinerary. This other
map also highlights the importance of what Darya Maoz defines as the
mutual gaze, a kind of gaze in which the tourist gaze and the local one
articulate and which is established by the meeting. If tourists gaze upon
locals, they are also gazed upon by them, and the mutual gaze construct
and modify their mutual perceptions. As Maoz points out, locals usually
react to tourists and to the tourist gaze according to different types of re-
sponse, such as cooperation, veiled resistence, and open resistence.31 As a
way for locals to negotiate, control and contest the presence of tourists,
these strategies point to the resulting complexity of power relations at play
in the mutual gaze and in the tourists/locals interaction. In the novella,
it is at the moment of the meeting with Djika-Djika that locals’ strategies
of cooperation, veiled resistence and manipulation emerge. Wisely and
subtly manipulated by Djika-Djika, the Odendaals end up at the boy’s
house, where his large family lives and where the Corolla becomes, for a
31 Darya Maoz, ‘The mutual gaze’, Annals of Tourism Research 33 (2006), 221–39.
time, the material space of this mutual gaze that turn the tourists into the
mad behind the bars:
Entretanto o pequeno Corolla é neste momento uma antecâmera de onde os Odendaal

observam este estranho mundo, sem saber o que fazer. Há pouco sentiam-se tão
importantes no destino de Djika Djika, agora constrange-os a sensação de serem
descartáveis. Perguntam-se como foi possível ter aqui chegado, como foi que se
meteram nesta situação. Isso até à altura em que alguém deve ter perguntado, pois é
nesse dado passo que a multidão se vira para o carro, com grande curiosidade: ‘Valungu!
Valungu!’ dizem como se cantassem.32
[Meanwhile the small Corolla is now a lobby, from which the Odendaals observe
this strange world, not knowing what to do. A short while ago they believed them-
selves to be so important to Djika Djika’s fate, but now they are constrained by the
sensation of being disposable. They ask themselves how they could possibly have got
here, how they were put into this situation. This until the moment when someone
must have asked, because it is when this step is taken that the crowd turns to the car,
with great curiosity: ‘Valungu! Valungu!’ they say, as if singing.]
Ousted from their control over the territory and, temporarily, of the
importance attributed to them by Djika-Djika, the Odendaals observe ‘this
strange world’, but are also exposed to the gaze ensuing from it. The complex
relations of power and the manner in which the roles are played out in this
mutual gaze are emphasized by the language itself. This can be inferred from
the narrator’s comment, when the boy introduces Hermann Odendaal as his
boss: ‘Di-lo ufanamente também, com um peculiar sentido de propriedade.
Como se patrão fosse uma coisa que tivéssemos, não alguém que nos tem
a nós’ [He says this with great pride, with an odd sense of propriety. As if
boss were something you owned, not someone who owned you].33
This subtle game of role subversion involves Henrietta Odendaal even
more directly when the woman, ‘guiada por uma espécie de instinto’ [guided
by some sort of instinct],34 comes across the women of the household pre-
paring a meal. The shed in which the women are cooking becomes another
concrete space of mutual gaze since the activities of preparing and eating

144 Jessica Falconi
food are of great symbolic scope in terms of power, meeting, hospitality

and cultural contamination.
For the women of the house, Henrietta’s presence in the kitchen area
represents an infraction of the codes of hospitality, which is faced in a
mutual gaze with curiosity, humour and a touch of paternalism. When
the South African woman offers to help, the women of the house react
by resisting covertly and by exercising their power subtly, giving her some
easy tasks to do: ‘Pretendem que demonstre merecimento antes que possa
intervir em níveis mais elevados, aqueles que verdadeiramente determinam
o sucesso de uma refeição’ [They intend to make her prove that she is
worthy before she can intervene at higher levels, those which truly deter-
mine the success of a meal].35 Henrietta is, in turn, confronted with the
social and cultural differences which are manifested in the preparation of
the meal, which shatter her references. In an attempt to impose her own
knowledge and identity, the South African suggests cooking the chicken
with a cranberry sauce sent by an aunt of hers from England: ‘mostrará
como se cozinha de verdade uma galinha!’ [she will show them how to
really cook a chicken!].36 However, the Mozambican women laugh at her
and continue to relegate her to a subordinate role in the kitchen, clearly
adopting a strategy of veiled resistance. Henrietta’s cranberry sauce and the
Mozambican Francisca Musweki’s piripiri chilli constitute symbols and ref-
erences to distinct traditions and cultural habits, as well as group identities.
Accustomed to eating meat purchased from supermarkets – handled
and packaged to look like more of a human invention than a product of
nature – Henrietta feels uneasy when confronted with the animal ma-
teriality of the food to be served at dinner: ‘esta confusão de asas e penas
jorrando sangue pelo pescoço’ [this mess of wings and feathers with blood
spurting from the neck].37 The anxiety of cultural contamination – gener-
ated by the ritual of socialization at mealtime – is associated to the fear of
animal contamination, triggered by the sight of elements which remind her
of the origin of the food itself, and which are encoded as being inedible:

Onde estão os nacos conhecidos? A coxa e a perna? O peito e as asas? Há patas com
unhas, uma ou outra pena teimosamente agarrada ainda à carne, Henrietta Odendaal
seria até capaz de jurar que viu um olho no seu prato, talvez mesmo a metade in-
ferior de um bico.
[Where are the recognizable chunks? The thigh and the drumstick? The breast and
the wings? There are feet with nails, occasionally a feather which is still stubbornly
stuck to the flesh, Henrietta would even be able to swear she had seen an eye on her
plate, maybe even the bottom half of a beak.]38
If the phantom of cannibalism lurks in the wings of Henrietta’s fanta-

sies, the fear to swallow and/or be swallowed by the other, it is Djika-Djika
who also reveals some anxiety with regard to food, thus expressing the
association between food, group identity and the fear of contamination.
When still in the car, he receives a sandwich offered by Henrietta and, before
eating it, ‘abre-a para lhe inspeccionar atentamente o conteúdo’ [opens it to
inspect its contents carefully];39 or when Francisca Musweki and Henrietta
take Vovó Thum her dinner, the old woman is afraid to accept the food as
she suspects that the South African woman has prepared it. These allusions
take food as a central element in decoding the mutual perceptions between
South African tourists and Mozambican ‘locals’. From both sides, the fear
of contamination and the transgression of identity boundaries materialize
in food. However, despite all of the initial fears, the dinner successfully
performs its role in the ritual of socialization and friendly interaction,
favouring a greater proximity between the two worlds and providing mo-
ments of transgression of everyday rules, thus configuring the table space
into a contact zone.
The narrator’s parodic descriptions of Henrietta’s anxieties also evoke
the relationship between humans and nature, which rises to the surface at
various moments in the texts. In addition to his references to tourist ex-
periences, which are marked by the zoological gaze (the Kruger Park, the
penguins in Simonstown), the narrator alludes to the activities of camping
and trekking already experienced by the Odendaals who, in fact, intend
to camp in Inhambane. As Larsen points out, camping translates a type
38 Borges Coelho, Hinyambaan, 64–5.

146 Jessica Falconi
of tourist experience which is linked to the act of inhabiting.40 Involving

family and/or friends, the intention in this kind of tourism is to build an
alternative ‘house’ and a space for sharing, where everyday life becomes
extraordinary, thus reinforcing the sense of family union. Camping is also
a way – however temporary – of inhabiting which implies contact with
and contamination by nature; it is conducive to generating sensations of
harmony and union with others or with the environment. The develop-
ment of the novella is marked by a lack of dialogue and unity within the
Odendaal family, as well as by their unstable relations of friendship with the
du Plessis family: the cancellation of the trip by the du Plessis; Henrietta’s
consequent misgivings; the frequent contrasts between the spouses, or
their daughter Hannah’s attitude of isolation, via headphones. All of these
aspects suggest that the tourist practice, and more specifically, camping in
Inhambane has become a necessary action, one that will recompose family
identity and cohesion. From this perspective, one might also read into
the fact that there is some orthographic similarity in the pronunciation
of Hinyambaan, repeated stubbornly by the father, with the initials of all
of the family members’ names: Hermann, Henrietta, Hendrik, Hannah.
At the same time, Henrietta clearly faces the journey beyond the
national boundaries and the encounter with nature as something which
threatens family and individual integrity. As was previously remarked upon,
the prospect of a boat trip and a greater direct contact with the sea, as well
as her husband and son’s fishing projects, awakens sensations of fear and
anxiety within her: ‘há muito devotada inteiramente à família, encarava
qualquer ameaça a um dos seus como uma ameaça a si própria’ [wholly
dedicated to her family for many years, she considered any threat to one
of her own as a threat to herself ].41
The running over of a dog during the journey also evokes the char-
acters’ attitudes and their imaginary with regard to animals. The narrator
explains that for Henrietta ‘os animais não têm alma. Todavia, têm-na
os que com eles lidam, e com um valor que se mede, entre outras coisas,
pela atitude que adoptam em relação a todas as criaturas e à natureza em
40 Larsen, Performing Tourism Photography, 52.

geral. Afinal, tudo é obra de Deus’ [animals have no soul. However, those
who deal with them do have one so that their value is measured, amongst
other things, by the attitudes they adopt in relation to all creatures and to
nature as a whole. After all, everything is God’s work].42 Henrietta’s ideas,
marked by Christian thought concerning respect for the integrity of cre-
ation, construct animals as a form of alterity, whose principal purpose is
to constitute and confirm humankind. As Greg Garrard states, from an
ecocritical viewpoint, the frontier between humans and animals is an ar-
bitrary construction of interaction and inter-constitution, since humans
created this divisive line themselves. Animals have made us human, in a
game of mirrors – another declension of the mutual gaze – which is con-
stantly reconfigured.43
As the novella unfolds, the relationship with nature plays a crucial role
in safeguarding the Odendaal family’s integrity. When little Hendrik disap-
pears in the bush, his parents and sister are taken by the Mozambicans to the
old grandmother Vovó Thum to ask for counsel. In order to help the tourists,
the elderly Vovó draws on another form of knowledge, which the modern
era has sidelined, and ‘reduced to the domain of superstition, primitivism
and irrationality’.44 This knowledge is anchored on a distinct relation with
nature and its signs, and will make it possible to supply the key needed to
find the lost boy: ‘onde estiver molhado é onde está o menino esperando
por nós’ [where it is wet is where the boy is waiting for us]. Hendrik’s dis-
appearance also highlights the vulnerability of the group’s identity. Once
the geographic and cultural borders have been crossed, reference context
of their identity has also been removed. If meeting and cooperating with
the other in the contact zone ultimately reconstitutes family unity, the end
of the novella indicates that there has been a significant change in the char-
acters’ social universe. When Henrietta’s suspicions are confirmed, and the
‘betrayal’ by their friend du Plessis is revealed in their last encounter, the
other that the Odendaals in fact ‘discover’ and find belongs to the order of
the same. In other words, the journey beyond national borders turns out
42 Borges Coelho, Hinyambaan, 33–4.

43 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2012), 104.
44 Sheila Khan, ‘Ler o sul em viagem: duas epistemologias literárias do sul global em
Hinyambaan e em Um estranho em Goa’, Via Atlântica 17 (2010), 36.
148 Jessica Falconi
to be a journey within the social and family boundaries of the characters.

This points to the self-reference dimension of the journey,45 as well as of
many tourist practices.
The elements of unpredictability and chance, which also dominate the
trajectory of the characters in this book by Borges Coelho, are central to
many of the texts classified as belonging to the literary genre of the novella.
Hermann Wetzel attributes a dominant role to chance in the specific genre
variation of the adventure novella.46 In the case of Hinyambaaan, analysis
shows how chance is the result of the interaction between subjects; yet, the
same can be said of the interaction between human and non-human, where
unpredictability is, in most cases, inscribed in the non-human element –
objects, animals, food and drinks. It is from this perspective that one should
consider the maps, the masks and the running over of the dog; the paper
kite which Hendrik was going after when he got lost; the cashew drink
which makes Hermann Odendaal dizzy. These are non-human elements
which have developed distinct functions and are invested with meaning.
In the case of the masks, the object – now devoid of any practical use – de-
velops its secondary function only as a ‘possessed object’, thus becoming a
sign which is incorporated into a system of cultural meanings. The kite is
rather different since it executes its ‘skills’, flying and drawing little Hendrik
further into the bush, thus developing its role in the narrative. However, as
objects, both share the double nature of things: materiality and symbolic
meaning are simoultaneously inscribed in them.
Therefore, if tourism and the imaginary are to be considered points
of departure in the narrative of Hinyambaan, the trajectory leading to the
point of arrival is constantly marked and mediated by the irruption of the
non-human, and of objects in particular. In the sociological perspective of
Bruno Latour, as actants, objects become the mediators of human inter-
action, since they transform what they transport and its output cannot be
entirely predicted based on input. Due to their lack of predictability, objects
45 Roberta Iannone, Emanuele Rossi, and Mario P. Salani, eds, Viaggio nel viaggio.
Appunti per una sociologia del viaggio (Rome: Meltemi, 2005).
46 Hermann Wetzel, ‘Premesse per una storia del genere della novella. La novella
romanza dal Due al Seicento’, in AA. VV. La novella italiana. Atti del Convegno di
Caprarola (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1989), 265–81.
influence human action and social relations, producing unexpected results.

Neither entirely autonomous nor totally dependent on human’s action,
objects are set halfway between the local dimension of interaction – two
subjects who are face-to-face and who are isolated from their contexts –
and the global dimension – the underlying social structures and contexts of
the interacting subjects.47 Also, they convey both their materiality, which
resists human intention, as well as their symbolical meaning, which returns
them the to the human social order. This perspective reveals itself to be
rather significant in order to highlight the fictional dimension of the world
created by the author of the novella: through the unpredictable nature of
the non-human, Hinyambaan merges the space between the macro-level
relations of South Africa and Mozambique, with the micro-level inter-
action between characters.
Cultural interaction cannot be reinstated in the macro context alone,
nor can it be restricted to the subjects’ micro-contexts. As such, within the
textual space of the novella, it must thus exist between the local and global,
on the border of fiction.
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47 Bruno Latour, ‘Une sociologie sans objet? Note théorique sur l’interobjectivité’,
Sociologie du travail 36/4 (1994), 587–607.
150 Jessica Falconi
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Cultures: A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity (London:
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M., and Giulio Iacoli, eds, Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione
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Sociologie du travail 36/4 (1994), 587–607.
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Van Eeden, Jeanne, ‘Theming Mythical Africa at the Lost City’, in Scott A. Lukas,
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Lexington Books, 2007), 113–36.
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di Caprarola (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1989), 265–81.
Orlando Grossegesse
7
A Parody of Final Redemption: The Uses of
Geopolitical Fiction in O Olho de Hertzog
ABSTRACT
In his novel O Olho de Hertzog (2010), João Paulo Borges Coelho rewrites the past. Starting
with Linda Hutcheon’s category of historiographic metafiction, this chapter will focus on
the specific parody of the teleological construction of history, which notably contributes
to the critical cosmopolitanism of this novel. A peculiar spacetime on the periphery of co-
lonial empires lends an ex-centric perspective on Eurocentric historiography. Therefore,
a comparison with Imperium (2012), a novel by the Swiss author Christian Kracht, sheds
light on the uses of geopolitical fiction in partly overlapping periods since 1902 to the
immediate aftermath of the First World War. O Olho de Hertzog goes clearly beyond
repositioning Mozambican colonial identity in the beginning of the twentieth century,
aiming towards a self-reflexive or even self-ironical positioning within twenty-first-century
transnational world literature.
‘I wanted to show that already at that time [1917–18] the whole world
was connected, albeit by more difficult and slower means’ – this state-
ment, made by João Paulo Borges Coelho in conversation with Rita
Chaves,1 defines O Olho de Hertzog [The eye of Hertzog] as a novel in-
spired by a historical approach to globalization at the beginning of the
twentieth century.2 Literary critics hailed the novel as significant for the
‘gradual shift of emphasis from a national to a more open-ended global
1 ‘mostrar que, embora por meios mais difíceis e demorados, o mundo estava já nessa
altura todo ligado’. Rita Chaves, ‘Entrevista com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Via
Atlântica, 16 (2009), 166. All translations from Portuguese are mine. I would like to
thank Andreia Sarabando for her stylistic review of the whole essay, including my
translations, as well as Ana Paula Correia for her careful critical reading.
2 From a critical viewpoint of economic and social history, large-scale globaliza-
tion began in the 1820s. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-
tury, the connectivity of the world’s economies and cultures grew very quickly. See
Kevin H. O’Rourke, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘When did globalisation begin?’,
European Review of Economic History, 6/1 (2002), 23–50.
152 Orlando Grossegesse
or cosmopolitan paradigm in Mozambican writing’.3 Following this dia-

chronic view, Stefan Helgesson is not the only one to privilege the un-
equal pair João Albasini – a pioneer for Mozambican intellectual iden-
tity4 – and the newly arrived German officer Hans Mahrenholz (under
the guise of the South African reporter Henry Miller), as the centre of
a historical fiction rooted in cosmopolitan Lourenço Marques, which is
perceived in its typical division of a colonial city in two, one of ‘stone’
and the other of ‘straw’.5 By doing so, the diamond plot – considered
‘frivolous in comparison with the struggles of Albasini and other co-
lonial subjects’ – is relegated to a ‘narrative device that enables Coelho
to weave a cosmopolitan tapestry of narratives’.6 It seems to me hasty
to reduce this plot, already announced in the title, to its discursive di-
mension, even though most readers may agree that the plurality of nar-
rative lines allows for the creation of an open fictional universe whose
connectedness and outreach to other places of the world apparently tally
with Borges Coelho’s statement – further on I will read this differently,
maintaining the tapestry metaphor. A reading that only picks up on the
parts which fit into a foundational narrative of Mozambican identity in
the beginning of the twentieth century and which can be linked to a pol-
itically engaged concept of critical cosmopolitism7 does not do justice
to the complexity of the narrative and its meanings. O Olho de Hertzog
goes clearly beyond a plain parody of the imperial and colonial adventure
novel in the sense of a putative tendency towards ‘postmodern generic
eclecticism’.8 In my view, Linda Hutcheon’s redefinition of parody in the
3 Stefan Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho, João Albasini and the Worlding of
Mozambican Literature’, 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada, 3 (2013), 95. While
writing this essay, I often found it helpful to develop my arguments in dialogue with
this article.
4 See Jeanne Marie Penvenne, ‘João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): The
Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique’, Journal of
African History, 37/3 (1996), 419–64.
5 See Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 103, commenting on João Paulo Borges
Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog (Alfragide: Leya, 2010), 292.
6 Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 99; 94.
7 See Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 104.
8 Helgesson ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 93.
A Parody of Final Redemption 153
context of postmodernism is crucial in order to grasp the particular way

this novel suggests that ‘to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and
in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from
being conclusive and teleological’.9 Borges Coelho describes his novel as
‘um flirt com a História’ [a flirting with history], positioning the narra-
tive between illusionary reconstruction and falsification, between what
happened and what might have happened.10 This clearly corresponds to
Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, which ‘plays upon
the truth and lies of the historical record’.11
As a reader who is not specialized in Mozambican literature, I will argue
that O Olho de Hertzog makes use of geopolitical fiction for a self-reflexive
or even self-ironical positioning within a transnational world literature of
the twenty-first century.12 In this sense, a comparison with Imperium (2012),
written by the Swiss author Christian Kracht, may be helpful. Both novels
develop specific representations of spaces far away from Europe, character-
ized by differently ‘exceptional’ European colonialisms – a topic I will return
to, with awareness of Ann Laura Stoler’s caveat that empire depends on ‘the
production of exceptions’.13 Mozambique and New Guinea are imagined
from the perspectives of whites who are driven by the desire to dive into
another geographical space as a starting point for alternative life projects,
but whose frames of reference remain European (to be precise, in the case of
Coelho’s novel, combined with Boer South African). Mahrenholz’s new life
after ‘o meu mergulho africano’ [my African plunge]14 is but one case among
others who are partly inspired in real figures and that inhabit the pages of
O Olho de Hertzog, while August Engelhardt – fictionally transformed
9 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York:

Routledge, 1988), 110.
10 Borges Coelho in Chaves, ‘Entrevista …’, 165.
11 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 114. The well-known definition can be
found on page 93.
12 Following the concept developed by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World
Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures, Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2008.
13 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18
(2006), 128.
into the anti-hero of Imperium – is the creator of a revolutionary ‘free life’

project based on the idealized qualities of the coconut as nutritional and
spiritual panacea. In 1902, he emigrated from his Bavarian homeland to the
Bismarck Archipelago in the South Pacific and bought land for a coconut
plantation on the island of Kabakon, situated 28 miles from Herbertshöhe
(present-day Kokopo), where the German New Guinea imperial adminis-
tration was based between 1884 and 1910, after which it moved to Rabaul.
Despite huge differences both in narrative and aesthetic terms, a few
striking similarities help to shed light on the affinities between Borges Coelho’s
and Kracht’s uses of geopolitical fiction in partly overlapping periods from
1902 to the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which is the main
timeline of the story set in Lourenço Marques. The above-mentioned historical
approach to globalization inspires both fictional universes. These are situated
on the fringes of the belated and short-lived German colonial empire, which
can be considered exceptional in contrast with Britain’s hegemonic coloni-
alism.15 Although neither large nor successful, the establishment of German
colonies and the attempts to expand them affected international policies in
a period of extreme tension.16
In this context, the strategic relevance of the world’s most powerful
transmitting station in Nauen, near Berlin, is often neglected. Established
in 1905 for experimental purposes by Telefunken, the station was enlarged
in several stages between 1908 and 1916. As the core of a wireless network,
Nauen connected Germany with faraway colonies without having to use
British-controlled undersea telegraph lines.17 From a critical viewpoint,
15 For a comparative discussion of the case of Germany within a typology of con-

tinental/colonial empires, see Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘The German Empire: An
Empire?’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008), 146–7. I consider absolutely rele-
vant the differentiated discussion in Stefan Berger, ‘Building the Nation Among
Visions of German Empire’, in Berger, S., and Alexei Miller, eds, Nationalizing
Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 247–308.
16 See Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1978).
17 ‘Until the beginning of the war in August 1914, only the station in Kamina (Togo)
was completed and had started regular service. It should have become a junction for
the wireless communication with the stations in Cameroon, East, and Southwest
Africa. The station under construction in Windhoek (Southwest Africa) was
it is interesting to observe how a modern project of communicative glo-

balization which included North America18 was linked to the revival of
a medieval idea of empire.19 This leads me to question specific geopolit-
ical and historical concepts inherent to both fictions, which at significant
moments of their stories – what a striking coincidence! – refer to Nauen.
There is no absolute evidence about effective communication between
Nauen and the imperial possessions in the South Seas. In 1914, the joint
Dutch-German subsidiary of Telefunken managed to build a radio station
in Rabaul. This happened just a few months before the arrival of Australian
soldiers, described as a peripheral First World War episode, ‘not without
certain drollery’, in the penultimate chapter of Imperium:
The Rabaul radio station that maintains contact with the German Reich via the
Nauen Transmitter Station is shot up by an advance unit of Australian commandos
and blown apart by several hand grenades thrown inside. The postmaster, who in
former times had designed the labels for Engelhardt’s coconut oil bottles, is wearing
a uniform in the wrong place at the wrong time; an iron mail cabinet crashes down
on top of him, and while falling, he is struck in the forehead by a soldier’s bullet.20
already able to receive signals from Nauen in 1914. A regular communication, how-
ever, was never accomplished. The erection of a third large station in East Africa,
planned for the financial year 1915 that would have enabled radio communication
with the German possessions in the South Seas, was never even started.’ Michael
Friedewald, ‘The Beginnings of Radio Communication in Germany, 1897–1918’,
Journal of Radio Studies, vol. 7/2 (2000), 454.
18 ‘When the United States officially declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, one
of the first hostile acts between the two countries was the U.S. Marines’ seizure
of the Sayville station. By this time, however, Nauen’s range of over 11,000 kilo-
meters meant that Sayville was no longer necessary to transmit radio signals to
Asia or South America.’ Heidi J. S. Tworek, ‘Wireless Telegraphy’, in Ute Daniel,
Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill
Nasson, eds, 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War
(Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014).
19 See Jakob Vogel, Zwischen protestantischem Herrscherideal und Mittelaltermystik.
Wilhelm I. und die ‚Mythomotorik’ des Deutschen Kaiserreiches, in Gerd
Krumeich, and Hartmut Lehmann, eds‚ Gott mit uns’: Nation, Religion und Gewalt
im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000),
213–30.
20 Christian Kracht, Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas, trans. Daniel
Bowles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 172 (in the following
Certainly not by chance, this episode appears immediately after the

chapter’s opening time travel, under the ironic understatement ‘to put it
mildly, one thing leads to another’.21 It begins with the assassination of
‘the invidious despot and his wife Sophie’ by the student Gavrilo Princip
on 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, which trigged the First World War, and is
summarized as a ‘sea of flames’ that ‘sweeps across Europe with universal
mercilessness’. The narration then zooms in on ‘one of the millions of
pieces of glowing shrapnel exploding in the Western Front’, precisely the
one that bores ‘into the calf of the young private from the Sixth Royal
Bavarian Reserve Division’.22 His name, Adolf Hitler, remains unmen-
tioned. What follows is a digression about a hypothetical non-occurrence
of the Third Reich and the Holocaust:
Just a few inches higher, closer to the main artery, and it might never have come
to pass that but a few decades later my grandparents would be walking apace in
Hamburg’s Moorweide, just as if they hadn’t noticed those men, women, and chil-
dren laden with suitcases loaded onto trains at Dammtor station across the way sent
eastward, out to the edge of the imperium, as if they were already shadows now,
already cindery smoke.23
Skipping over the evocative bystander episode (one of the few occasions
the authoritative and almost always omniscient narrator embodies), it is
the use of another connection – not only across space, but also through
time – that is of interest here, in comparison with Borges Coelho’s novel.
Just some minutes earlier or later, only the shift of a few centimetres
might have caused events or, on the contrary, provoked their absence,
which from the viewpoint of posterity could have changed the course of
history or – to put it in network terms – allowed for different connec-
tions between nodes defined by time and space. The dying postmaster
at the Rabaul radio station, wearing a uniform ‘in the wrong place at the
wrong time’, is a complementary figuration to the piece of shrapnel which
notes: Translation). Christian Kracht, Imperium (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer

Taschenbuch, 2013), 231.
21 Translation, 171. Kracht, Imperium, 230.
22 All quotations Translation, 171. Kracht, Imperium, 230.
23 Translation, 171–2. Kracht, Imperium, 230–1.
has missed Hitler’s main artery. This logic of difference (in the continuum
of contiguity) has to be linked with the occasional hints that Engelhardt
might be similar to the Nazi dictator in his obsession with an idea, both
sharing vegetarianism and anti-Semitism. Contrary to the Nazi ideology,
just a handful of soulmates were seduced by Engelhardt’s cocovorism,
propagated by the main opus A Carefree Future, published in four edi-
tions between 1898 and 1906.24 With the exception of Makeli, a devoted,
mysterious boy always at his side, the prophet and leader is left alone in
a ‘very small, illusionary, failed simulacrum of empire’.25 By miracle he
continues alive, being found and interviewed by US soldiers at the end of
the Second World War. This different lifespan from the real Engelhardt,
who died in 1919, enables Kracht to add a final encounter with another
empire, which promised global welfare after 1945, as metonymized in
the Coca-Cola and hotdog offered to the dehydrated and emaciated
last cocovorian.26 Hence, the lengthening of life, a trait in common with
some of the biographies presented in O Olho de Hertzog, helps to carry
out a specific kind of parody.
The reader may agree with Claudia Berger’s opinion that ‘Kracht’s
narrator does not seem entirely equipped for the big task of analytically
connecting colonialism and the Third Reich’,27 but I wonder if this is really
the point. The argument of analytical incompetence would be even stronger
24 August Bethmann, and August Moritz Engelhardt, A Carefree Future: The New
Gospel (Glimpse Into The Depth And Distance For The Selection Of Mankind, For
The Reflection Of All, For Consideration And Stimulation), New York: Benedict
Lust Publications (1913); translation from the German edition (1898).
25 Kai Maristed, ‘Fuse Book Review: Imperium – a shock packed pastiche of history’,
the arts fuse (10 August 2015), <http://artsfuse.org/132298/fuse-book-review-
imperium-a-shock-packed-pastiche-of-history/> accessed 20 January 2019. The
process by which Makeli becomes another kind of German is in itself an interesting
secondary plot that has been overlooked.
26 Kracht, Imperium, 240.
27 Claudia Berger, ‘Transnationalism, Colonial Loops, and the Vicissitudes of
Cosmopolitan Affect: Christian Kracht’s Imperium and Teju Cole’s Open
City’, in E. Herrmann, C. Smith-Prei, and S. Taberner, eds, Transnationalism in
Contemporary German-language Literature. German Studies Association Conference
(Rochester, NY: Camden, 2015), 109.
in the case of Borges Coelho. In spite of being a professor of contemporary

history, as a writer he manipulates historical facts in a way that could be
criticized as naïve. In O Olho de Hertzog this refers precisely to the German
presence in Africa, focusing on Lettow-Vorbeck, the legendary commander
of the Schutztruppe [protectorate force] in the German East Africa cam-
paign between 1914 and 1918. His undefeated army surrendered only on 25
November 1918, almost two weeks after the armistice that ended the First
World War on European soil.
This slight but meaningful belatedness, as well as the astonishing
success of Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla warfare, in contrast to the capitula-
tion of the German empire in Europe, lends a historical basis to Borges
Coelho’s geopolitical fiction with Southeast Africa as a non-European
key hub of world history, blanking out almost completely the colonial
dependence of Mozambique within the Portuguese empire, which from
a critical viewpoint can also be defined as exceptional.28 Lettow-Vorbeck
did indeed make his own African war disregarding orders from Berlin and
the colony’s Governor, Heinrich Schnee, who had attempted to achieve
neutrality for German East Africa. In the previously quoted interview with
Rita Chaves, the author calls the commander a ‘romantic personality’.29
Bearing in mind the ongoing discussion about the ‘Lion of Africa’, a figure
who is still idealized nowadays, it would be easy to blame Borges Coelho
for analytical incompetence towards a charismatic leader who, without
28 This exceptionality refers to both the relationship between Portuguese East

Africa (Lourenço Marques) and the ‘homeland’, and to Portuguese colonialism
as a whole. As far as the first aspect of this exceptionality is concerned, this art-
icle is in line with Elena Brugioni, ‘Resgatando Histórias. Épica moderna e pós-
colonialidade. Uma leitura de O Olho de Hertzog de João Paulo Borges Coelho’,
in E. Brugioni, J. Passos, A. Sarabando, and M.-M. Silva, eds, Itinerâncias.
Journeys (V. N. Famalicão: Húmus/CEHUM, 2012), 396–7; in connection with
the second aspect of exceptionality mentioned, see Roberto Vecchi, ‘O Pós-
colonialismo Português: excepção vs. excepcionalidade?’, in E. Brugioni, J. Passos,
A. Sarabando, and M.-M. Silva, eds, Áfricas Contemporâneas. Contemporary Africas
(V. N. Famalicão: Húmus/CEHUM, 2010), 131–40.
29 Chaves, ‘Entrevista’, 165.
intending to, served the myth of the ‘stab in the back’30 and was exploited
for colonial revisionism during the Weimar Republic and later by the Nazi
regime.31 Borges Coelho is interested in Lettow-Vorbeck as a popular hero,
having previously created, in 1982, a comic strip32 with a story linked to his
successful attack on Namakura [Nhamacurra in modern Mozambique],
in the first days of July 1918. Almost three decades later, the Schutztruppe
reappears, as do vestiges of a comic strip style. Other popular culture prod-
ucts such as, for instance, the episode titled ‘The Phantom Train of Doom’
(1993) of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, where Jones
takes Lettow-Vorbeck hostage, may have encouraged Borges Coelho to
keep on track. The affinities with the genres of the detective story and the
crime novel, present in the diamond plot, are enhanced by the saga of the
legendary Foster Gang, which continues to fascinate South Africans. Also
in the case of Imperium, abundant similarities with the universe of Hergé’s
Tintin have been pointed out by critics.33 These common characteristics
become meaningful in the sense of Hutcheon’s ‘postmodernist contra-
dictory texts’ which ‘parodically use and abuse the conventions of both
popular and élite literature’.34
Instead of a suggestive comparison between Engelhardt and Hitler, O
Olho de Hertzog intertwines different narrative lines developing the already-
mentioned logic of difference in a higher complexity than Imperium. The
30 The legend that the German army had not been defeated, but prevented from con-
tinuing the war due to unpatriotic, socialist defeatism at home, was a powerful
element in the rise of Hitler.
31 See Uwe Schulte-Varendorff, Kolonialheld für Kaiser und Führer. General Lettow-
Vorbeck – Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2006) in contrast with
the idealized image in Edwin P. Hoyt, Guerilla: Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and
Germany’s East African Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1981).
32 About Borges Coelho’s Namacurra (Maputo: Kurik, 1982), see José Pimentel
Teixeira, ‘Namacurra, a I Guerra Mundial em Moçambique na banda desenhada de
João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Canal de Moçambique, 24 September 2014. Critics have
so far overlooked the evolutionary link between this comic strip and the later novel.
33 See the ‘excursus’ on this affinity in Steve Hoegener, Christian Krachts ‘Imperium’.
Analyse zum Kolonialdiskurs und zu den Mechanismen der Gewalt (Luxemburg,
2014), 87–93.
34 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 20.
knotting and weaving method applies to the Schutztruppe caravan in its

intentionally erratic wandering back and forth, avoiding an open battle-
field confrontation with the British and Belgian troops, against which they
would have been outnumbered. At one point Lettow-Vorbeck’s warfare
becomes surprisingly linked to the diamond plot, contributing thus to
a specific geopolitical fiction which can be seen as reinterpreting global-
ization at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this perspective, the
pivotal appearance of ‘a voz monótona e roufenha de Nauen’ [the monot-
onous and husky voice of Nauen]35 during the long-distance mission of the
giant rigid airship Zeppelin L-59 acquires meta-discursive dimension. This
has been largely overlooked. For instance, Helgesson refers only briefly to
Mahrenholz’s ‘unlikely (but factually plausible) trajectory as a young sol-
dier flying from Germany to East Africa in a dirigible, transporting supplies
to the embattled German troops’.36 In spite of being a secondary narrative
of lesser relevance for the main plot, the legendary flight of the so-called
Afrika Luftschiff is not fortuitously the one that guides the reader in the
beginning. Critics have only attributed this function to the first chapter
about Mahrenholz’s stroll through the streets of Lourenço Marques, after
having arrived by ship, and his first encounter with João Albasini. The
meditations on the changing names of ships anchored in the harbour set
the tone for the relational sense of place (and obviously for the switching
of identities), which can be theorized – following Helgesson’s suggestion –
in terms of David Harvey’s relational spacetime.37 Instead of linking this
with the representation of a ‘conflicted colonial space’, as Helgesson does in
order to describe the ‘worlding at work in Coelho’s novel […] as critically

36 Helgesson (2013), 97. What follows is based on my input to António Mota’s essay.
Unfortunately the corresponding research project supervised by my colleague
Elena Brugioni got no funding and was aborted even before it started. The reader
may find a detailed analysis of the Luftschiff Afrika, based on my own research,
which I won’t repeat here but further develop the approach already sketched out
in the same chapter of António Mota, ‘As estórias dentro da história: construções
ambíguas da memória em O Olho de Hertzog de João Paulo Borges Coelho’,
Diacrítica, 28/3 (2014), 331–48.
37 Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 104. David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and
the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 137–8.
cosmopolitan’,38 I argue for a use of geopolitical fiction that goes beyond

its constraints, inaugurated in the second chapter precisely when the husky
voice of Nauen comes into play.
In a flashback, Mahrenholz tells about his participation in the secret
mission to Southeast Africa whose characteristics challenged imagination.39
As it was impossible to refuel and to resupply the airship with hydrogen
gas, it would be a journey without return. The mission gradually became a
‘verdadeira partida, um definitivo mergulho na escuridão’ [real departure,
a definitive plunge into darkness].40 The crew members would lose their
identities: ‘perderíamos a nossa identidade para nos tornarmos numa outra
coisa qualquer que ainda desconhecíamos’ [turning ourselves into some-
thing else that was still unknown to us].41 At the end, only Mahrenholz
stuck to the original plan when the husky voice of Nauen ordered the
return to the airbase Yambol ( Jamboli) in Bulgaria and the abortion of the
supply mission, since Lettow-Vorbeck ‘havia sido definitivamente derrotado’
[had been definitely defeated].42 Mahrenholz manages to convince cap-
tain Bockholt to disobey the German empire’s voice, to fake the log (by
claiming that the message had not reached the airship before the position
of Khartoum), and to continue heading south for six more hours:
A partir de agora, e até que se achassem novamente no paralelo de Khartoum, o L-59

era uma espécie de navio fantasma sobrevoando um espaço que não constava nem
na geografia nem sequer no tempo.43
38 Helgesson, ‘João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 105; 104.

39 See Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 48. The documented flight covering a dis-
tance of 4,200 miles (6,800 km) in ninety-five hours is still the longest non-stop
military flight in history.
42 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 55. Historians say this is a fake version. The signal
did not inform that Lettow-Vorbeck had surrendered, but that the Schutztruppe
had been unable to hold the flatlands around Mahenge and had been forced to
retreat back into jagged mountains where the dirigible had no chance of landing
without risking explosion.
[From now on, and until they found themselves once again in the parallel of
Khartoum, the L-59 was a kind of ghost ship flying over a space that existed neither
in geography, nor in time.]
Not by chance, the narration alludes to the legend of the Flying Dutchman,
based on the South African popular story of Captain Van der Decken,
who refused to turn his ship around when a fierce storm suddenly came
upon him at the Cape of Good Hope. Van der Decken vowed that he
would sail around the Cape, even if it took him ‘until Doomsday’ to
accomplish it. The combination of the concept of no man’s land along
with that of no man’s time, suggests itself as an opportunity to think of
Harvey’s relational spacetime differently, in the sense of counterfactual
history, combined with geopolitical fiction based on an undocumented
timespan and a shift of geographical position. Hence, in a meta-discursive
reading, the six hours spent heading south can be seen as a kind of mise en
abyme that complements the meditation on the changing names of ships
anchored in the harbour. Among these, the one formerly named Herzog
reappears as a leitmotiv, since the secret about O Olho de Hertzog is re-
vealed on board of this ship.
Mahrenholz’s firm decision to plunge into Africa harmonizes the ori-
ginal mission of the L-59 with his individual project of a second life. This
sets, in the overall plot structure, one of the first nodes in time and space
of another kind of connectedness that disobeys the authoritative voice of
an empire striving for global power. Unlike the postmaster at the Rabaul
radio station, Mahrenholz is, with his random parachute jump, at the right
time in the right place, near to Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops. They crossed the
Rovuma on the same morning of 25 November 1917, when the L-59 made
her way back to the airbase of Jamboli.44 His descent from the sky is seen
as ‘um duplo milagre’ [a double miracle]45 which will get linked to other
‘miracles’ thanks to the enigmatic role of Sebastian Glück (his last name
44 This return is irrelevant for Borges Coelho’s novel. According to the documents,
the airship still had fuel for about twenty hours.
45 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 46. For Mahrenholz it was a ‘pequeno milagre
final que foi ter atravessado metade do mundo para vir cair precisamente nas mãos
de Lettow’ [small final miracle that of having crossed half the world to fall right
into the arms of Lettow]. Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 65.
meaning luck), who ascended only a short time after his enlistment to a
leading position in the Schutztruppe. Mahrenholz’s existence moved from
the centre of the continental empire to its colonial fringes.46 Something
similar happens to August Engelhardt after his arrival in German New
Guinea, but in both cases, the European frame of references remains pre-
sent. Finally, Mahrenholz ends up amnesiac, unable to remember a rainy day
on a square in Hamburg, a flashback episode which constantly reappears
from the first page on.
Within the logic of the novel, the long-haul flight undertaken by the
Afrika Luftschiff until establishing contact with the Schutztuppe means the
starting point for a connectedness which places Lourenço Marques at the
core of a geopolitical twist. It subverts the Eurocentric logic of traditional
historiographical discourse, which positions this space as ‘Colonial Africa’
in a peripheral arena.47 Mahrenholz’s second life is only one among other
biographies of immigrants (this denomination is used here only as an um-
brella term). They are fictionalized to a greater or lesser degree, some of
whom even change names by analogy with the ships anchored in the har-
bour, and thus connect the Mozambican port with Europe, North America,
and South Africa through their ambiguous identities.
Among these, the reader may recognize, for instance, Valerie Neuzil.
She was, in her former life back in Vienna, Egon Schiele’s model and lover,
but by faking her death, she gains an extended lifespan.48 After moving to
Paris and becoming fascinated by a painting she saw in Picasso’s atelier,
she decides to change her life and go to Africa. The painter himself called
the painting Le Bordel d’Avignon, thus denying the African influence art
critics have attributed to it.49 As her decision had occurred the day before
46 For these categories see footnote 15.

47 See Brugioni, ‘Resgatando Histórias’, 399–401. The aftermath of the Second Anglo-
Boer War is also important, as this analysis will show.
48 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 242. According to the documents, her death
occurred in Zein (present-day Sinj), near the city of Split, on Christmas 1917. In
the novel, she is given a different first name, Valerie (instead of Walburga), but the
short form ‘Wally’, as she was commonly addressed, remains the same for both.
49 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 244. It is not random that in the novel does
not appear the today well-known title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon given to the same
painting by European art history.
her employer received a letter from Glück, and which she interpreted as a
divine sign, Wally unknowingly becomes one of the actors in the diamond
plot. This example is illustrative not only of the kind of weaving and knot-
ting at work, but also of the parody present in the move to Mozambique
as a new centre. Parody also permeates the narrative discourse as Wally’s
double life is revealed by Natalie Korenico – another woman whose life-
span gets extended – as a consequence of a conversational play she proposes
to Mahrenholz by asking him for ‘alguém que tenha um passado único,
limpo e transparente’ [someone with a single, clear and transparent past].50
The German in the guise of a South African reporter named Henry
Miller is more of a listener who collects information than a protagonist,
when compared to a character like Sebastian Glück or with the mysterious
Rapsides. An essential trait of the novel, this plurality of unreliable narra-
tors contributes to the fundamental uncertainty about the identities and
events that compose this partly counterfactual spacetime. The different
versions of Glück’s biography – like a cat, he seems to have had more than
one life51 – are aligned with the geopolitical twist. What is told about the
colonel’s genealogy and life by different voices (major Matthaus, Gasparini)
not only covers a European span from Italy to the Slavic countries and
Russia, but it also enhances an intense activity in non-European terri-
tory, before joining the Schutztruppe. With a third version, transmitted
to Mahrenholz by an askari and the aid of Lettow-Vorbeck’s private cook,
Glück’s origin shifts to Africa, being identified as descendent from the once
powerful dynasty ‘da Cruz’ of Goan and Zambezian roots that ruled over
the Massangano region at the junction of the Luenha and Zambezi rivers,
a few miles from Tete.52 According to this version, his unnamed mother,
member of a European scientific expedition, was raped by Bonga (António
Vicente da Cruz), who transformed Massangano ‘num verdadeiro reino’

51 Mahrenholz to Albasini: ‘Já lhe contei que tinha sete vidas?’ [Have I told you he
had seven lives?]. Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 357. Here I resist the tempta-
tion to indulge in documental research, as I did in the case of the Afrika Luftschiff.
52 See M. D. D. Newitt, and P. S. Garlake, ‘The Aringa at Massangano’, Journal of
African History, 8/1 (1967), 133–56; Malyn D. Newitt, A History of Mozambique
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 307–16.
[in an authentic kingdom].53 The transracial redefinition of Glück’s only

apparently German identity means his further mystification towards a dia-
bolical figuration rooted in the African myth of m’phondoro [spirit of the
lion], which explains the veneration he receives by the askari.54
After finally unveiling his true identity to Albasini and confessing
that he had been sent by Glück,55 Mahrenholz reveals the key elements
about the diamond which are crucial for the understanding of the pecu-
liar connectedness developed in this novel. The complexity of up to four
metadiegetic narrative levels highlights the status of a secret: Mahrenholz
heard the story from Glück when he, already mortally ill, was hiding – in
vain – from British and Portuguese troops. Only by miracle did he manage
not to be shot.56 Glück’s narration itself is based on the long conversations
he had had years before on board of the Beira (formerly called Herzog)
with its captain Van Zyl, who found out about this secret from his friends
in Cape Town and the owners of the jewellery store where the diamond
was assessed.
The story is a possible historical appendix to the discovery of the
famous Cullinan Diamond on 26 January 1905 by Frederick Wells, who
found it on a routine inspection. He was awarded the ridiculous amount of
£3,500 by the owner of the mine, Sir Thomas Cullinan, who afterwards sold
the diamond for £150,000 to the Transvaal Colony government. According
to Van Zyl’s narration, Wells’ disappointment with the poor reward gener-
ates a prophetic dream: someone offers him ‘uma luz ainda maior e mais
brilhante’ [an even bigger and brighter light].57 The following day, when
revisiting the spot of his miraculous discovery, he did not find another
diamond. As he ‘não deu ouvidos ao sonho, ou pelo menos não lhe deu
ouvidos suficientes’ [did not listen to the dream, or at least did not listen
to it enough],58 he did not notice a fresh hole on the wall. His assistant,
De Jong, had beaten him to it: ‘Na mesma parede, a menos de meio metro

54 See Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 314.
de distancia […] descravou um cristal ainda maior e mais brilhante que o

anterior’ [He extracted a second diamond, bigger and brighter than the
first one, from the same wall, barely half a meter away].59 This ‘double mir-
acle’ is not a product of pure fantasy. Its eventual occurrence had already
been mentioned in the first analysis of the Cullinan Diamond reported by
Sir William Crookes as ‘a fragment, probably less than half, of a distorted
octahedral crystal’, concluding that ‘the other portions still await discovery
by some fortunate miner’.60 According to Borges Coelho’s counterfactual
fiction, this happened exactly immediately after the first discovery. This
coincidence in time and space – just a few minutes later and barely half a
meter away – echoes the piece of shrapnel that could have cut Hitler’s main
artery, thus changing the course of history. In the South African context,
an upheaval could have occurred with the help of the second diamond,
whose discovery was interpreted by De Jong as a divine sign announcing
the liberation of the Boers from the British yoke.61 According to the geo-
political fiction of the novel, the diamond becomes linked to the idea of
the Jong Zuid Afrika movement: by gathering different resistance forces
under the leadership of General Hertzog, it would be possible to ‘derrotar
os Bothas, os De Wets e os Smuts’ [defeat the Bothas, the De Wets and the
Smuts]62 – those who were in favour of the alliance with Great Britain when
signing the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. The mission bestowed
on the second diamond by the novel is directly opposite to the fate that
the Cullinan Diamond eventually had: it was presented by Louis Botha to
King Edward VII as a ‘token of the loyalty and attachment of the people
of Transvaal to his throne and person’.63
De Jong’s reading of the second diamond as a divine sign can be
seen to be in line with Siener van Rensburg’s visions, which were con-
sidered precise predictions of future events. During the Second Boer
War, he became a trusted advisor to General Koos de la Rey in his cam-
paign against the British troops. Many believed that it was due to Van

60 Sir William Crookes, Diamonds (London: Harper & Brothers, 1909), 79.
63 apud Leslie Field, The Queen’s Jewels (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 72.
Rensburg’s visionary faculties that the commander succeeded in a guer-

rilla war, similar to Lettow-Vorbeck’s, more than a decade later, remaining
equally undefeated: ‘Montado no seu cavalo branco, De la Rey escapou a
todas as armadilhas, surgiu sempre onde menos o esperavam’ [Riding his
white horse, De la Rey escaped every ambush and always appeared where
he was least expected].64 This idealization in the Africander saga, told as
such by Natalie to the ignorant Mahrenholz, is clearly borrowed from the
Book of Revelation (19:11–16): a white horse is a king’s horse. Jesus will come
back a second time as a victorious king in a triumphal parade. The analogy
between Koos de la Rey, nicknamed the ‘Lion of the West Transvaal’, and
the commander of the Schutztruppe comes to Mahrenholz’s mind when he
listens to the story told by Florence Greeff, who owes her additional life-
span precisely to General Koos de la Rey: ‘Ouve o que ela diz e, no lugar
de Koos de la Rey, coloca um outro general […]. O mesmo cavalo de crina
revolta, o uniforme de gala e o pingalim, o dedo apontado’ [He listens to
what she says and, in Koos de la Rey’s place, he pictures another general
[…]. The same horse with its insurgent mane, the gala uniform and the
riding-crop, the finger pointing].65
Florence and Hans are chosen respectively by de la Rey and by Lettow-
Vorbeck. But the most important element of Florence’s narrative, in terms
of another kind of connectedness, is Van Rensburg’s vision predicting Koos
de la Rey’s death,66 in a crucial historical moment: with the outbreak of the
First World War, Louis Botha agreed to send troops to take over German
South-West Africa. Many Boers who refused to fight for Britain expected
leadership from Koos de la Rey. But Botha and Jan Smuts persuaded him
not to take any action that might provoke the Boers. ‘De la Rey, debatia-se
entre o dever de obediência ao governo e o sentido de lealdade para com os
seus velhos camaradas de armas’ [De la Rey was torn between his duty of

66 He saw De la Rey returning home in a carriage adorned with flowers and a crowd
trailing behind him: ‘por cima da carruagem pairava uma nuvem escura com o
número 15, e dela escorriam cascatas de sangue’ [over the carriage hovered a dark
cloud with the number 15 on it, and from the cloud blood cascaded down]. Borges
Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 285.
obedience to the government and his sense of loyalty to his old comrades-
in-arms],67 most of whom had joined the Hertzog faction. It remains un-
clear what kind of mission De la Rey had in mind when he left his farm
on the fatal night of 15–16 September 1914, heading for the military camp
of Potchefstroom, where General Jan Kemp organized the rebellion and
planned to join the rebels under the command of Manie Maritz in the north
of the Cape Province, near the border with German South-West Africa.
Was the mission meant to support the Africander Nation cause? Or did
De la Rey intend to persuade his former comrades to desist for the sake of
a united South Africa, though allied with the former enemy Great Britain?
It is impossible to know, as De la Rey was shot on that night. Apparently it
happened by chance: he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was
accidentally killed by a policeman at a road block set up when the massive
hunt for the Foster gang was underway. But his death on this precise date
also fulfilled Van Rensburg’s premonitory vision.68 The following day, the
gangsters decided to commit collective suicide after finally being sieged in
their hiding place. Though Koos de la Rey’s aborted mission means a blank
page in history, this ‘node’ in relational spacetime gives rise to yet another
link, according to Borges Coelho’s counterfactual fiction: as both funerals,
the general’s more pompous and the gangsters’ more modest, occurred at
the same location, Florence gets the opportunity to talk to Peggy Foster
who, by having simulated her suicide alongside her husband, gained the
chance of a second life.69
As it is not my intention to unveil the whole tapestry of narratives
with spoilers, I will limit myself to focus on what appears in the novel that
constitutes a second chance to stop the dominance of British Imperialism.
As it has become clear by now, Borges Coelho’s geopolitical fiction works
simultaneously on a logic of difference in time and/or space, and on his-
torical expectations that something might or might not occur. The latter
is continuously fed by dreams, signs, visions and voices which can be seen

68 As it was rumoured that he had been assassinated by forces of the government, this
was a contributing factor in the Maritz Rebellion of 1914. See T. R. H Davenport,
‘The South African Rebellion, 1914’, English Historical Review, 78 (1963), 73–94.
as being in direct opposition to the voice of Nauen, interpreted as me-

tonymy for a hegemonic globalization allied to colonial imperialism rooted
in Europe. Analogous with Koos de la Rey’s dilemma, Lettow-Vorbeck’s
chance to uncouple his guerrilla warfare from a subsidiary role towards the
continental empire, independently focusing instead on Southern Africa
as a key hub, can be considered the core of a possible geopolitical twist.
The idea that the undefeated Schutztruppe would be able to steer devel-
opments back in Europe is imagined – as the reader might expect – by
none other than Sebastian Glück, whose shared name with the legendary
Portuguese King D. Sebastião, known as O Desejado [The Desired], sug-
gests the promise of final redemption. His vision that ‘Lettow marcharia
com a sua força sobre Joanesburgo!’ [Lettow would march on Johannesburg
with his army!]70 causes incredulous astonishment at first, but then gains
credibility as a more or less feasible possibility.
Glück enthusiastically advocates not only an alliance between the
Schutztruppe and the Jong Zuid Afrika movement, represented by H. J.
Klopper and Jozua Naudé, but also with African tribes eager to restore the
ancient empire of Makonbe (Macombe). The colonel meets the ‘prince’
Nongwe-Nongwe in Southern Rhodesia where he had retreated to in order
to recover for revenge since the rebellion against the Portuguese had failed.71
He is accompanied by a very young sorceress named Mbuya, ‘encarregada
de receber de Kabudu Kagoro, o grande Deus local, as mensagens que
transmitia aos combatentes’ [who had the task of receiving from Kabudu
Kagoro, the great local God, the messages he transmitted to the war-
riors].72 On that same night, she dreams that ‘vinham de longe grandes
guerreiros para os ajudar a vencer o Diabo’ [will arrive tall warriors from
far away to help them defeat the Devil],73 which is understood by Glück

71 In March 1917, the Makonbe people rebelled against the Portuguese in Zambezia
(a province of Portuguese East Africa) and defeated the colonial regime. About
20,000 rebels besieged the Portuguese in Tete, but through terrorism and enslave-
ment, the Portuguese had quashed the rebellion by the end of the year. See Hew
Strachan, The First World War. Vol. I: To Arms (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 636, 640.
as an invitation. Historically even the possibility of alliance seems out of

question.74 But as the reader will see later on, Glück reveals himself not
only as someone who can claim African land as descendent of the ‘da Cruz’
family, but also appears, when compared with the ‘Lions’ Koos de la Rey
and Lettow-Vorbeck, directly rooted in the African m’phondoro, having –
as Mahrenholz put it – ‘como única origem os demónios do Zambeze’ [as
the only origin the demons of the Zambezi River].75
Hence, in a more complex way than in the case of the Afrika Luftschiff,
counterfactual history merges with a geopolitical fiction that also embraces
the hopes of actors (partly) rooted in African territory. Mahrenholz’s des-
cent from the sky, interpreted as a miracle by the Schutztruppe and the
askaris, inaugurates a kind of connectedness that brings me to a different
reading of Borges Coelho’s statement, quoted in the beginning of this essay.
The whole world is connected, not only by global networks but also – and
perhaps more interestingly – through concepts of final redemption which,
following Glück’s plan, undermine Eurocentrism. Traditionally, a compara-
tive approach mainly gravitates around the German case due to the millen-
arian dimension of Hitler’s Third Reich. Within the Lusophone World,
the focus is on the emergence of millenarianism in Portugal, peripheral
within Europe, and its comparatively late and long-lasting reactivations (un-
leashed by the disappearance of King D. Sebastião).76 The War of Canudos
(1895–7) and, about a decade later, the Contestado War (1912–16), which
took place in different regions of Brazil, triggered by rapidly spreading
visions of final redemption based on hybrid popular transformations of
Sebastianism, provide further examples of the global connectedness of
‘voices from above’ in the same historical period. Glück does not care about
74 According to Malyn Newitt’s analysis of the Barue rebellion, ‘it does not appear
that the Germans made any attempt to link up with rebel forces’, although in the
beginning the German troops ‘were greeted enthusiastically by the Yao, many of
whose chiefs rose in revolt’ (Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 419–20).
76 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (first edition 1957; revised and expanded edi-
tion: Oxford University Press, 1970), considered to be the main reference, does not
mention the case of Portuguese Sebastianism.
the different European, Boer or Black African provenience of empowering

visions and voices. But his redemptory plan is thwarted by the categorical
refusal of Lettow-Vorbeck, who despite carrying out independent warfare,
still persevered in the Eurocentric vision. His ‘Não!’ appears twice77 as a
dramatic turning point, indicating at the same time parody: the sobering
stop pulverizes collective and individual hopes into illusory daydreaming:
Entrávamos por uma cidade quase europeia, não fosse a cor da sua miséria. Na frente,
o kommandant montado num cavalo branco e envergando o uniforme de gala, comigo
por perto nas minhas nóveis funções de adjudante-de-campo.78
[We entered an almost European city, were it not for the colour of its misery. At
the head, the commandant riding a white horse and wearing his gala uniform, and
myself close by, in my new function as aide-de-camp.]
This is how Mahrenholz’s own hallucination begins. The triumphal

parade clearly evokes the return of the Messiah, already identified as a
subjacent pattern in the Africander saga about Koos de la Rey. In both
occasions a white horse appears. But in this case, it also refers to a parade
that really happened, precisely in the afternoon of 2 March 1919, when
Governor Schnee79 and Lettow-Vorbeck led the Schutztruppe and the as-
karis through the Brandenburg Gate, hailed by the crowd. It was the only
victory parade for Germany, fallen in misery after capitulation, and still
before signing the Treaty of Versailles, on 28 June 1919. From a critical view-
point, this episode is the starting point for German colonial revisionism.
In O Olho de Hertzog, Mahrenholz significantly does not mention Berlin,
but refers to ‘an almost European city’ and to the ‘companhias de askaris
alemães’ [German askari field companies] marching ‘pelas avenidas largas
do centro dessa cidade ondulante e infinita’ [through the wide avenues
of the centre of this infinite and undulating city].80 The approximate
‘almost’ at once suggests and denies the extrapolation of Glück’s idea that
war in Africa could decide Europe’s destiny. This ambiguity can be seen
77 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 271; 272.

79 Historically, it was him riding a white horse.
as a climax of ‘Postmodern parody’, defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘a kind

of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms and
subverts the power of the representations of history’.81 In Klopper’s hypo-
thetical daydream imagined by Mahrenholz, the unnamed city would
probably correspond to Johannesburg better – also in line with Glück’s
prediction:
Klopper talvez se visse a si próprio montado no cavalo branco de Lettow, respondendo

aos acenos da multidão com uma mão, com a outra consultando o seu relógio, seguido
do seu ajudante-de-campo, o reverendo corcunda Jozua Naudé, de manto escuro
drapeando ao vento.82
[Klopper might see himself riding Lettow’s white horse, responding to the waving
crowd with one hand, and with the other consulting his watch, followed by his
aide-de-camp, the hunchback Reverend Jozua Naudé, with a dark cloak fluttering
in the wind.]
Each detail contributes to enhance parody.83 The ex-centric perspective

(mainly whites who chose Southeast Africa as a new centre for their
lives), often moving into the gray zone between reality and hallucination,
has to be interpreted at the intersection between Bakhtin’s theory of the
polyphonic novel and Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space as a
powerful concept of hybridity and liminality. This intersection is already
a nuclear constituent in Hutcheon’s definition of parody.84
O Olho de Hertzog clearly aims at a parody of final redemption. This
is also the case of Imperium, for instance, when the newly arrived ex-
hausted soulmates want to touch Engelhardt, hailing him as the ‘Heiland’
[Messiah].85 While Kracht’s novel focuses on a comparison between Hitler
and Engelhardt, suggesting a similarity of extremely different empires, both
81 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 95.

83 Consulting his watch – even during the victory parade – is a habit acquired as a
worker in the South African Railways Company.
84 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 60–2; 101. Obviously, Bhabha’s later con-
cept does not appear. I find it needless to choose examples among the essays which
bring Hutcheon, Bhabha and other theorists on liminality, etc., together.
85 Kracht, Imperium, 175.
of them based on ‘modernized’ redemptory visions, O Olho de Hertzog de-

velops a syncretic, transnational and transracial concept, attributed to one
of the most mysterious characters among the many hybrid identities who
also assume narrative functions. This plural discursive structure, where
represented orality (skaz in the terminology of Russian formalism) pre-
vails, has to be taken into account in order to grasp the parodic character
of the novel. With the parody of final redemption, geopolitical fiction
goes beyond a break with Eurocentrism and a shift to the Indian Ocean,
allowing us to rethink spacetime in terms of modernity.86 The global con-
nectedness of collective hopes can be linked to the concept of Mozambique
as a meta-space where universal civilization merges, ‘tornando a cidade da
baía da Lagoa um local do mundo, até seu centro, qual a velha “Jerusalem”
de alguma antiga cartografia geocêntrica’ [making the city of Delagoa Bay
a place in the world, even its centre, a kind of ‘Jerusalem’ as in some ancient
geocentric cartography].87
Despite being aware of the potential for tiresomeness induced by
nameplates and signs presented in a kind of anachronistic Google Street
View, by randomly accumulated newspaper headlines and advertising, and
despite agreeing with its function as ‘minor archive’ within a recollection
of erased memory,88 I propose a meta-discursive reading of two elements
which appear in the last chapter. When Mahrenholz enters an exuberantly
ornamented house that he cannot remember having seen before – probably
just one of his daydreams – he notices a more austere door, ‘incongruente
num prédio como aquele, e todavia de algum modo cheirando a futuro’
[incoherent in a place like that, yet somehow smelling of the future].89 The
parody becomes obvious in the nameplate ‘A. O. Salazar, Contabilista,
Espírito de missão […], Projecto de futuro alicerçado em sólidos valores. Ordem
86 See Brugioni, ‘Resgatando Histórias’, 400–1. Instead to Hutcheon she refers to the
redefinition of ‘modern epic’ by Franco Moretti.
87 José Pimentel Teixeira, ‘O programa ficcional de João Paulo Borges Coelho: uma
geologia ética de Moçambique’. <https://independentresearcher.academia.edu/
JoseTeixeira>, 18. Accessed 15 March 2019.
88 See Brugioni, ‘Resgatando Histórias’, 395.
e Progresso’ [A. O. Salazar, Accountant, Sense of mission […], Project for the
future grounded in solid values. Order and Progress].90 The dictator-to-be
as a small entrepreneur in Lourenço Marques, one of the few allusions to
Portuguese and Brazilian history, is more than a punchline, if we accept
that the parody of redemption contributes to the critical cosmopolitanism
conveyed by the novel. The reader may remember that the redemptory
ideology of Salazar’s Estado Novo modernized to a certain extent the con-
tinuity of Portugal as an ‘exceptional’ empire, including the reconfiguration
of Mozambique which, according to this historiographic metafiction, could
have been different.
A second element, barely three pages before, can be read as a comment
on the discursive structure: in the same newspaper edition that reports
the embarkment of Lettow-Vorbeck and his troops from Dar es Salaam to
Europe, on 12 January 1919, after the chivalric surrender of the undefeated
Schutztruppe and its askaris in Abercorn, a small ad appears at the bottom
of the page. It refers to the ship Beira-Herzog, captained by Van Zyl, with
‘Guarantidas histórias narradas na amurada, sob o luar’,91 which can be
translated as ‘guaranteed sailor’s yarns under the moonlight’. Coincidently,
it is the same captain who tells Glück the secret of the diamond.
The flâneur and newspaper reader Hans Mahrenholz prefigures the
(European?) reader of the novel who learns about (another) African his-
tory. But basically he is listening to women’s talk and sailors’ yarns, which
complement each other as vital parts of a global communication network
characterized by ex-centric perspective and liminality. According to Marcus
Rediker, sailor’s yarn is a key to understanding how the world worked when
men on tall ships connected the oceans and the continents.92 Hence, it can
be seen as historical forerunner of today’s global communication. Yet, due
to its characteristics as a cultural contact zone close to a transnational and
transracial proletarian public sphere, it undermines networks as instruments
of power structures (represented by the voice of Nauen). As another type
90 Borges Coelho, O Olho de Hertzog, 438. The young Salazar was indeed a lecturer in
accountancy.
92 See the first chapter of Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and
Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014).
of minor archive, sailor’s yarn generates narratives of decentred geopol-

itics. Discussing works like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) and Amitav
Gosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), James Clifford understands ‘histories
of alternate cosmopolitanisms and diasporic networks’ as ‘redeemable
(in a Benjaminian sense)’ and ‘as crucial political visions’ able to support
‘strategies for nontotalizing “globalization from below”’.93 Concluding my
comparative approach, I understand the specific parody of final redemption
in O Olho de Hertzog as an almost maieutic contribution to this debate.
Hans Mahrenholz also prefigures the author in his creative process,
strolling through the streets of Maputo, listening (to the ghosts of ) women
and sailors. Unlike Mahrenholz, Borges Coelho found many voices and
texts woven into the tapestry of O Olho de Hertzog, ‘debaixo das saias de
uma jovem avantajada chamada Internet’ [hidden under the skirts of a
voluptuous girl called Internet].94 So, it was definitely not just a case of
flirting with history: ‘No fundo, procurei experimentar o prazer de contar
uma história’ [Basically, I wanted to feel the pleasure of telling a story].95
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Elena Brugioni
8
Of Clues, Traces, and Minor Histories: Theorizing
the Historical Novel in Borges Coelho’s Rainhas
da Noite
ABSTRACT
João Paulo Borges Coelho’s fiction is characterized by a peculiar intersection between
literary representation and historical narratives, a strategy which offers the possibility
of problematizing critical paradigms and epistemologies with respect to the genre of the
historical novel within the so-called postcolonial condition. Through a reading of the
novel Rainhas da Noite [Queens of the Night], this chapter proposes a reflection on the
conceptual constellations – traces, clues, archive and witness – that appear to be crucial
in the novel, as well as in Borges Coelho’s literary project as a whole. Addressing literary
writing as a practice of critical and epistemological formulation and reflection, the novel
becomes defined as a place of production of historical and philosophical knowledge that
becomes crucial for the creation of ‘cultural memory’ in Mozambique.
O livro, por aquilo que promete, não deixa de ser um conceito que ciclicamente
surge como uma ameaça à harmonia pública, pelo conluio que estabelece com
quem o lê.
— João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite1
[A book, for the promise it holds, is a concept that periodically appears as a threat
to public harmony due to the collusion it establishes with its reader.]
The literary work of João Paulo Borges Coelho has stood out, from the
start, as one of the most original examples of contemporary literature in
the Portuguese language, but it has not, however, benefited from a sig-
nificant critical reception. While this is not the occasion to discuss the
reasons which I believe lie behind this apparent oversight on the part
1 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite (Lisboa: Caminho, 2013). All quota-
tions from the novel that is not yet published in English have been translated by
Andrea Sarabando, to whom I would like to address my sincere acknowledgements.
180 Elena Brugioni
of critics and audiences with respect to Borges Coelho’s literary project,

it appears symptomatic that it has also occurred with his latest novel,
Rainhas da Noite [Queens of the Night],2 which, despite its great merit
and originality, has gone somewhat unnoticed. This may be perceived as
an indication of how distracted literary reception is in relation to some of
the most significant literary work being produced within what has come
to be defined as (African) Literatures in the Portuguese language.
One of the most striking characteristics of Borges Coelho’s writing
is an emblematic counterpoint between narration, history and memory
which configures the literary text as a locus for (re)writing individual and
private stories, operating what is defined from a micro-historic epistemo-
logical perspective as an ‘evidential paradigm’.3
From a narrative register based on traces, clues and evidences – sug-
gesting highly complex conceptual and theoretical constellations4 – Borges
Coelho’s writing is principally focused on the relationship between the
present and a specific colonial time and space, through a literary repre-
sentation that evokes historical events and characters which are observed
from the perspective of issues related to individuals’ lived experience5 juxta-
posed with macro-historical processes and, therefore, with Mozambique’s
past. However, within Borges Coelho’s body of work, Rainhas da Noite
is highly original in terms of the variety of aspects and problematizations,
which characterize his work and, more broadly, in terms of the literary
practice of what has been epistemologically defined as postcoloniality.
2 The title of the book plays between the history of the tree women in Moatize and
the name of the flower that grows in the region where the novel is set. The flower
(cestrum nocturnum) is commonly called in Portuguese as rainha da noite – liter-
ally queen of the night – while in English it goes by different names, such as: night
jessamine, night-blooming cestrum, night-blooming jasmine, etc., depending on geo-
graphical regions and countries. The reason for the title is a topic discussed by the
author in the novel’s prologue.
3 Carlo Ginzburg, Miti Emblemi Spie. Morfologia e Storia (Torino: Einaudi, 1986).
4 I am referring to the theories formulated by Giorgio Agamben in Quel che resta di
Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998) and by Carlo
Ginzburg in Miti Emblemi Spie, and Il Formaggio e i Vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio
del ‘500 (Torino: Einaudi, 1976).
5 Ginzburg, Il Fomaggio e i Vermi.
Of Clues, Traces, and Minor Histories 181
What immediately stands out is the creative and literary dimension that
characterizes the conceptual notions of archive, source and testimony in
their relations with so called history, notions which embody conceptual
constellations and epistemological unfoldings related to a reflection on the
relationship between past and present, the writing of history and memory.6
Furthermore, it is possibly Rainhas da Noite the first work in which the
author finally grasps a mature and accomplished literary voice, mastering
the rhythm and the aesthetic of the novel as a literary genre and developing
an original narrative and aesthetic definition of the narrator as one of the
pivotal character of the story.7
The event told by the first person narrator in the prologue that opens
the novel – and from which the plot unravels – refers to a specific context
and situation that question the dynamics of preservation and dissemin-
ation of books – which, within the narrative and conceptual structure of
the novel, correspond to the notion of source – highlighting a crucial issue
in the relation between collective cultural memory and material culture.
As may be read near the beginning of the book:
Nas soalheiras manhãs de sábado, acontecia-me por vezes parar à esquina da Avenida
Kim il Sung a observar os livros usados expostos no passeio, em cima de esteiras
de caniço ou caixas de cartão, e a deixar-me tomar pelas sensações desencontradas
que tudo aquilo em mim provocava. Os carimbos de proveniência das obras, que o
folhear errático ia revelando, trazia-me à ideia bibliotecas tornadas desta maneira
mais pobres, espaços públicos que lembram cada vez mais grandes paquidermes
6 As far as the theoretical frameworks followed in this essay are concerned,

they are indebted to the critical reflections developed by Fernando Catroga
in Os Passos do Homem como Restolho do Tempo. Memória e Fim do Fim da
História (Coimbra: Almedina, 2011) and Memória, história e historiografia
(Coimbra: Quarteto, 2001).
7 Comparing Rainhas da Noite with Borges Coelho’s previous works of the same
genre – As Duas Sombras do Rio [The two shadows of the river] (Lisboa: Caminho
2003), As Visitas do Dr Valdez [The visits of Dr Valdez] (Lisboa: Caminho, 2004),
Crónica da Rua 513.2 [Chronicle of the street 513.2] (Lisboa: Caminho, 2005), O
Olho de Hertzog [The eye of Hertzog] (Alfragide: Leya, 2010) – this novel is in-
dubitably the one characterized by a solid and effective literary voice, particularly
suggested by the aesthetic dimension of the narrator which, for the first time in his
work, is developed as one of the very characters of the novel.
182 Elena Brugioni
feridos de irreversíveis doenças, uma espécie de terra de ninguém que a todos aflige
por ninguém lhe achar utilidade.8
[On sunny Saturday mornings, it happened sometimes that I would end up on the
corner of Kim il Sung Avenue watching the used books on exhibition on the pave-
ment, resting on cane mats or cardboard boxes, and allow myself to be touched by
the contradictory feelings that all that provoked in me. The stamps showing the
origin of the books, revealed by my random leafing through, would bring back to
mind the libraries made poorer through this, public spaces resembling large pachy-
derms ailing from irreversible diseases, no-man’s lands that upset everyone for no-one
finds them useful.]
The issue referred to in the text highlights contextual and political issues
which are undeniably topical, particularly the very contemporary matter
of the policies of the conservation of the public patrimony – in this case,
a bibliographic patrimony – thus pointing to a set of crucial questions
relating to the accessibility of the sources which can, strictly speaking,
substantiate both historic and literary narratives. Although this is a fic-
tional device with the purpose of functioning as a narrative aid, the image
of libraries as large ailing pachyderms is nonetheless an exposure of a well-
known reality in the urban context of the city of Maputo. This exposure
has particularly significant implications because it is carried out from the
standpoint of the meaning and the importance of these documents for
the writing of the history of Mozambique and, therefore, for the dissem-
ination, sharing and questioning of that history.
Furthermore, taking into account recent events that have shaped
contemporary Mozambique – and more broadly, the eastern region of
sub-Saharan Africa – in relation to the policies of environmental preser-
vation and of the illegal poaching of protected species, this image estab-
lishes an emblematic connection between cultural patrimony – books and
libraries – and a patrimony that is environmental and ecological,9 thus

9 This relationship can be observed in other novels by Borges Coelho, such as As
Duas Sombras do Rio [The Two Shadows of the River] (2003), where conflict is
articulated not only from a spatial and human perspective, but also from an eco-
logical and environmental one.
opening up the field for critical analyses from the perspective of what has
come to be known as ecocriticism.10
As far as the question of cultural patrimony is concerned, one of the
main issues that the novel addresses, and that the articulation of which
may illustrate different aspects of Rainhas da Noite, is that of the meanings
and implications of literary writing in contexts where the archives and the
sources – the material and public collective patrimony – are inaccessible
and often transformed into objects of commerce – products – that can
only be accessed via their commodification. At the same time, the apparent
fragility of the institutions that preserve sources – bibliographical and
others – highlights the serious consequences that determine, for example,
the disappearance, or rather, the inaccessibility of texts and documents
that constitute central elements in the material – and symbolic – culture
of a country. Such elements are indispensable for the construction of an
identitarian imagery based on the relationship between space and pre-
sent and past time, and whose function is essential for the construction of
the collective historical memory of a nation-state.11 From the perspective
adopted in the novel, the image of libraries as no man’s lands that cause
distress for everybody can be read in terms of the impoverishment of the
mediators of memory – monuments, archives, libraries, etc. – which is
part of a process of a social decline that contributes to an increasing ero-
sion of cultural and collective memory.12 Accordingly, Rainhas da Noite
summons a set of texts that stand out in this ‘alegre e barulhento bazar’
[jolly and noisy bazaar], the ‘ar cosmopolita’ [cosmopolitan air] of which
seems to erase the implications of that trade ‘de frutas e legumes de papel’
10 For works dealing with ecocriticism, among a vast corpus of critical references, see
Laurence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and
the Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) and Greg Gerrard, Ecocriticism
(The New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2012).
11 On this topic see: Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing,
Remembrance, and Political Imagination. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
12 On this topic see: Aleida Assmann, and Sebastian Conrad, eds, Memory in a
Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010) and Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey, and
David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
184 Elena Brugioni
[in paper fruit and vegetables], by suggesting the ambiguity of a situation

in which the book vendors can be seen simultaneously as ‘meros ladrões
sem escrúpulos’ ‘[mere unscrupulous thieves] or as ‘verdadeiros, embora
involuntários, difusores de cultura e de memória’ [de facto, though acci-
dental, disseminators of culture and memory].13 This confluence validates
a reading based on the intersection between the figures of the thieves/dis-
seminators of culture and of the narrator/writer – an important character
in the novel – and, more broadly, of the authorial role in literatures and
other types of representation that are strongly connected with so called
historical documents – sources – where the writer/narrator – either real
or fictional – carries out a fundamental function in making public what
apparently belonged to the private sphere, thus playing a vital role in the
creation of what has come to be defined as cultural memory.14 The vendor’s
offering of a ‘caderno de aspecto vulgar’ [nondescript notebook],15 after
a long negotiation to buy a book the narrator had long been looking for,
and that has an iconic status within Mozambican literature – A Ilha de
Próspero [Prospero’s Island] by Rui Knopfli – is a pivotal founding moment
for the novel. The notebook is ‘um texto privado, […] uma espécie de diário
[…] assinado por uma tal Maria Eugénia Murilo, um nome que me era
inteiramente desconhecido’ [a private text […] some sort of diary […] signed
by one Maria Eugénia Murilo, a name that was completely unknown [to
me]].16 The author allows himself to be sparked ‘pela curiosidade de quem
pressente a possibilidade do nascimento de um enredo’ [by the curiosity
of someone who senses the possibility of the beginning of a plot]17 des-
pite the fact that the notebook is only offered to him because it is an old
book seemingly irrelevant when compared with the collection of rarities
for sale in the Kim il Sung Avenue market. However, the buying of Maria
Eugénia’s diary corresponds to a foundational clue in the creation of the
novel, as well as in the narrative disclosed by those private pages, turning
13 All quotations from Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite, 14.

14 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization; Assmann, and Conrad, eds,
Memory in a Global Age.
the complicity of the writer in this commerce of paper fruit and vegetables
into an emblematic creative and conceptual element, and opening up space
for the crucial critical readings within an epistemological perspective where
postmodern and postcolonial poetics and paradigms converge. On this
subject, one can read in the prologue:
Evidentemente que estou consciente do risco que corro ao narrar o episódio. Afinal,
haverá expediente literário mais estafado do diário que encerra todos os segredos?
No entanto, nada posso fazer a respeito uma vez que se trata de uma questão que
depende menos de mim que de uma realidade que me limito a relatar com o rigor
de que sou capaz. A haver um culpado ele estaria no desequilíbrio entre a forma
insensata como nós, humanos, nos multiplicamos e as possibilidades limitadas que
temos ao dispor para criar enredos: somos demasiados e vivemos demasiadamente
da mesma maneira para que os acontecimentos estejam sempre a surpreender-nos
com a sua singularidade!18
[I am obviously aware of the risk I am taking by narrating this episode. After all, is
there a more laborious expedient than the diary that keeps all one’s secrets? However,
there is nothing I can do about it, as this is a question that does not concern me as
much as it concerns the reality that I am simply reporting as accurately as I am cap-
able of. If there were blame to be cast, it would lie in the unbalance between the
thoughtless way in which we humans multiply, and the limited possibilities at our
disposal for creating plots: there are too many of us and we live too much in the same
way for events to surprise us constantly with their singularity!]
In the vein of the self-reflexive nature of postmodern writing, in this pre-

liminary story – apparently (auto)biographical – some of the more ori-
ginal questions in Borges Coelho’s writing appear. In fact, this is a section
of the novel that does not simply state and contextualize the nature and
the central questions of the story, but also points towards some of the
conceptual and creative presuppositions that, generally speaking, charac-
terize Borges Coelho’s literary project. Moreover, it suggests a configur-
ation of literary writing that reinforces the relation between fiction and
reality, memory and history, experience and objectivity.19 The diary – a

19 Regarding the relation between fiction and reality, memory and history, experi-
ence and objectivity see Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la Memoria y Giro
Subjetivo – Una Discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2005).
186 Elena Brugioni
highly conventional literary expedient, as the narrator indicates – ends up

unlocking a series of events, names and situations that might correspond
to that which, in a micro-historical perspective, may be defined as excep-
tional normal,20 both from the point of view of their relationship with the
facts narrated in the notebook, and of the exceptionality of its contents
regarding the official history of the colonial period in Moatize. Moatize,
where Rainhas da Noite is set, is a small village in the Tete province which
became well-known, at the end of the 1970s, for the terrible events that
took place there.21 Furthermore, from a micro-historical perspective,
Maria Eugénia’s notebook represents clues to or traces of a hidden reality,
which is not usually apparent in the documentation.22
Rainhas da Noite is the first novel by João Paulo Borges Coelho in
which the figure of the narrator becomes explicit and emblematic, taking
on a fundamental role in the construction of the novel, thus suggesting a
set of significant critical and conceptual questions. The use of this strategy,
which is consolidated within literary tradition,23 lends to the novel a crit-
ical and meta-reflexive dimension. This is particularly true in relation to
the significance of writing and representations constructed with recourse
to memories, testimonies and historical narratives, creating itineraries of
inquiry which view literature as a space and a moment for the questioning
of complex critical paradigms and, therefore, as a practice of the produc-
tion of thinking that is based on the incorporation of different types of
knowledge corresponding to specific epistemologies and critical contexts.24
20 See: Ginzburg, Miti Emblemi Spie.

21 On this subject, see the article ‘O Massacre de Moatize’ [The Moatize Massacre],
by José Pedro Castanheira, António Pedro Ferreira, Paola Rolletta, and Daniel
do Rosário, published in Portugal in Revista Única, supplement of the newspaper
Expresso, 40–58.
23 I am referring to postmodern poetics and, more specifically, to contemporary lit-
erary works defined by an important connection with questions of history and
memory, where the fictionalization of the writer/narrator is a crucial narrative
motif. Among the many writers who have participated in this poetics might be
mentioned authors such as J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, among others.
24 For a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s work from the perspective of an aes-
thetic practice that incorporates diverse and heterogeneous areas of knowledge,
Accordingly, the text that follows the parts of the novel that tell the
story in Maria Eugénia’s notebook, called ‘Notas’ [Notes], seems to make
up a whole new diary. That is, it becomes an individual record by the nar-
rator that includes a subsequent set of reflections and stories that, in each
chapter, echo, in the present, the past within the notebook, and act as a
counterpoint to the ‘dense, heavy extracts, with no apparent connection
between them, based on a new type of logic that had given up on accounting
for the totality […]: an entirely unknown path’.25
By referring, for example, to the difficulties associated with the con-
struction of the novel due to its direct relationship with the private re-
cords of memories – Maria Eugénia Murilo’s diary and old man Travessa
Chassafar’s testimony – the narrator problematizes significant concep-
tual and epistemological questions pertaining to specific disciplinary con-
texts, such as the philosophy of history and that which has been defined as
memory studies. Accordingly, one can read in the prologue:
Pelas razões apontadas, insisto, só com boa vontade se encontrará um todo coerente
nestes relatos. Existem demasiadas rupturas, demasiados avanços e recuos – verdadeiras
ambiguidades na linha do tempo. Sempre que procurei unificar tudo isso de modo
a chegar a uma espécie de leitura objectiva e universal sobre esse tempo e esse lugar,
surgiam novas incongruências para despertar em mim a suspeita da impossibilidade
do empreendimento, do quanto são ingénuas as máximas de que tudo no fundo
acaba por ser coerente, ou de que a verdade acaba sempre por vir à tona, do quanto,
enfim, a realidade é amorfa e cega.26
[For the reasons I have pointed out, I must insist, only through a great deal of willing-
ness can one find coherence in these stories. There are too many disruptions, too many
advances and retreats – important ambiguities in the timeline. Every time I tried to
unify all this in order to arrive at some sort of objective and universal reading about
that time and place, new incongruences appeared to raise the suspicion of the impos-
sibility of the task, of how naïve the maxims that claim that everything falls into place
in the end, that truth always surfaces, of how, alas, reality is amorphous and blind.]
see Nazir Ahmed Can, Discurso e Poder nos romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho
188 Elena Brugioni
The question raised in this excerpt and which highlights the ‘disruptions’,
the ‘advances and retreats’, and thus the ambiguities of a timeline, points
towards an epistemological understanding that is central both to the per-
spective of the relationship between literature and historical narrative, and
to the creative and imaginative dimensions of the novel. In other words, it
is not in the search for coherence and linearity that the questioning of the
relationship between the past and the present can be illustrated; on the
contrary, it is in the absence of cohesion and in the breach of coherence
that the story takes shape, making up a creative process that advances via
clues and traces and that becomes explicit through a practice of decoding
these ‘traces’ of the past in the present. In fact, in relation to the narrative
modalities in Rainhas da Noite, a singular characteristic – and another
distinctive aspect of Borges Coelho’s writing – emerges through the use
of images whose function, according to the narrator, is to reinforce the
text, and pay homage to Maria Eugénia’s diary:
Afinal, por mais importante que seja o passado, o presente impera sempre uma vez
que é nele que se produz de facto o padecimento da lembrança. Essa preponderância
é manifesta sobretudo no sentido em que os textos antigos são esquartejados para
caber nas acções e na lógica do presente, e não o contrário. […] o meu texto não
está isento de vulnerabilidades, necessitando portanto de reforços externos. Sim, ao
obriga-lo a partilhar o espaço com as imagens, a intenção não foi mais que aproximar
o texto das minhas notas do texto do caderno, e com isso fazer uma espécie de vénia
a este último.27
[After all, however important the past may be, the present always prevails, seen as
it is when the suffering of the memory is produced. This preponderance is obvious
mainly in the sense that the old texts are butchered to fit in with the actions and
the logic of the present, and not the other way around. […] my text is not exempt
from vulnerabilities, thus necessitating external backups. True, by forcing it to share
the space with the images, my intention was to bring the text of my notes and the
text in the notebook closer, and thus show of form of graceful respect to the latter.]
This physiognomy of the novel, which suggests a conceptual perspec-

tive that is much more complex than that evidenced by the narrator in the
prologue, indicates an emblematic articulation between written narratives
27 Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite, 23–4.

and a visual dimension which points towards a set of critical and theoret-
ical paradigms that characterize so-called memory studies, and thus what
is defined as visual history. In this sense, a further question arises that is
related with the intersection of written and visual narratives both from
the point of view of a methodological questioning of the validity of the
photographic document in the colonial history of Africa,28 and in relation
to its meaning within the narrative economy of the literary text. Moreover,
the relationship that is established between text and image corresponds
to a counterpoint that, once again, does not seem to obey the logic of co-
herence and, rather than just a reinforcement, the photographs become
traces that suggest a semantic connection between text and antiphrastic
images. In fact, the images that appear alongside the narrative in Rainhas
da Noite highlight the residual dimension that characterizes the writing of
memory and of testimony,29 with the exception of a complex conceptual
aporia related to the possibility of remembering in the present – through
writing – a time in the past – crystallized in the photographic image – and
therefore irretrievable.30
In a similar conceptual positioning are also archival sources of a his-
torical nature, whose function within the structure of the novel blurs an
immediate correspondence between document and truth, pointing to a
complex conceptual and epistemological perspective that corresponds to
what can be defined as tension between narration and documentation, one
of the most important creative elements in João Paulo Borges Coelho’s
work. Still in the prologue one can read:
Finalmente, há também dois ou três documentos de arquivo sobre os quais é preciso

dizer que, mesmo quando distorcem a realidade, são para alguns aqueles que mais
se aproximam da verdade com que se chega ao espírito de uma época. Não é o meu
28 Jeanne Marie Penvenne, ‘Fotografando Lourenço Marques: as cidades e os seus

habitantes de 1960 a 1975’, in Castelo, Cláudia, et al., eds, Os Outros da Colonização.
Ensaios sobre o colonialismo tardio em Moçambique (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2012), 173–92.
29 Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz.
30 On this respect, an insightful critical perspective on the relations between memory
and photography is developed by Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography,
Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
190 Elena Brugioni
caso, mas de qualquer forma eles aqui ficam, com a autoridade que lhes cabe ou que
conseguem impor.31
[Finally, there are two or three archival documents about which it should be said
that, even when they distort reality, for some they are what come closer to the spirit
of the age. That is not my case, but in any event, here they are, with the authority
they have, or with the authority that they manage to impose.]
A central critical and conceptual question is raised here in relation to the

complex and ambiguous relationship that the novel constructs as far as the
use of documental sources and their use in the process of reconstructing
the past in the present are concerned. This suggests a problematization
that does not simply call into question the value of the document for the
truth, but also its meaning for the decoding of the traces of time. Such a
questioning attempts to deconstruct ‘this illusion that the old life can be
reduced to a set of themes archived in cardboard boxes’.32
Taking into account the rhythm that guides the narration of Rainhas
da Noite, the deconstruction of a vision of the archive as a repository of
truth – and, therefore, as the only source for the reconstruction of historical
reality – is articulated from different perspectives. This gestures towards
central questions characterizing the critical debate on these issues within
social history, and moreover, emphasizes the methodological unfoldings
of a quantitative and qualitative nature33 that represent central theoretical
and epistemological questions in historiographical debates. This opens the
debate up in turn to a set of interesting enquiries into the criticism and
the meaning of cultural and literary representations within what has been
defined as postcoloniality. In other words, the challenging of the notion
of the archive as a source and a methodological paradigm shifts from the
questioning of its composition, whether in terms of its contents or of the
hierarchy implied by this type of repository, towards a questioning of the

33 The micro-historic perspective is based on the integration of the two methodo-
logical approaches, moving away from the great systems of historical analysis pro-
posed by Marxist, functionalist-structuralist and macroscopic-quantitative theories
of the Annales, and focusing on a perspectivation that is based on the individual
and her or his experience.
knowledge that is produced from its material determiners – access, selec-

tion, value – thus calling into question that which, within the historio-
graphic debate is known as ‘the fetishism of documents’.34 As the narrator
states in two different parts of the novel:
Percebi o erro que era confundir a realidade com os papéis. Estes além de nos
imporem a perspectiva de quem os escreveu em detrimento de todas as outras, além
de pressuporem causas e efeitos ligando todas as coisas como se não existisse o acaso
desprezam em absoluto o tempo. Numa mesma caixa, lado a lado, convivem papéis
referentes a acontecimentos separados entre si por muitos anos.35
[…]
De facto, por que razão se guardariam apenas documentos oficiais, negligenciando-se
os de natureza privada? Será que o que é público tem mais valor? Se aproxima mais da
verdade? A minha teoria dizia que não, e por diversas razões. Desde logo porque os
papéis públicos são moldados por conveniência, não pela verdade. Aquilo que o ogre
grotesco e cego pretende com o registo das suas actividades é deixar de si uma imagem
que, na sua perspectiva perversa e sonsa, lhe adoça a fama. Já os papéis privados –
descontados os casos de dissimulação em que se pretende passar por privado o que é
feito desde o início para ser público – são testemunhos da luta que temos connosco
próprios. Haverá luta mais verdadeira do que essa? Ali estava o caderno de Maria
Eugénia Murilo para o comprovar!36
[I understood the mistake that was mixing the reality with the papers. Besides
imposing the perspective of whoever wrote them to the detriment of all others, be-
sides implying causes and effects by connecting things as if there were no coincidence,
they absolutely disdain time. In the same box, side-by-side, coexist papers relating to
events separated by many years.
[…]
In fact, why should only official documents be saved, and private ones be neglected?
Is it because what is public is more valuable? Is it closer to the truth? My theory
said it didn’t, and for several reasons. Firstly, because public papers are shaped by
convenience, not by truth. That which the grotesque and blind ogre desires of the
recording of its activities is to leave behind an image of itself that, in its perverse and
sly perspective, sugars its reputation. Private papers, on the other hand – apart from
the cases of disingenuity when someone tries to pass as private something that was
34 Catroga, Os Passos do Homem como Restolho do Tempo, 76.

36 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite, 287.
192 Elena Brugioni
meant to be public from the start – are testimonies of the struggles we have with our-
selves. Is there a more truthful struggle than that? There was Maria Eugénia Murilo’s
notebook to prove just that!]
By focusing on central questions that determine the complex relationship

between time – present and past – and history and memory, the archive
becomes a ‘device’,37 the questioning of which points towards reflections
of great complexity with respect to the specificity of the writing of history
and of memory from a postcolonial critical perspective. The tension be-
tween public and private documents from the standpoint of their value
to the hi/story seems to echo some of the more complex questions related
with the so-called ‘colonial situation’38 where the historic discourse(s) are
characterized by an emblematic relationship with the ‘colonial library’39
and with the ‘subaltern pasts’,40 and point towards the processes and mo-
dalities of the recovery – re-inscription – of the individual’s lost time and
thus echo the necessity to ‘brush history against the grain’.41
In this way, literary writing, and specifically the literary writing found
in Rainhas da Noite, becomes a locus and a creative practice where marginal,
ex-centric42 and, therefore, minor43 histories stand out from an apparent
homogenous and comprehensive, and therefore, abstract, history. The
latter is thus deconstructed and re-conceptualized from clues44 that indi-
cate alternative traces and plots that are indispensable for ‘reconstructing
37 Regarding the concept of device see: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
38 George Balandier, ‘La situation coloniale: Approche théorique’. Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 11/51 (1951), 44–79.
39 Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
40 On the concept of subaltern pasts/history, see: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
41 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257.
42 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 4.
43 See: Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
lived experience’ and questioning ‘the invisible structures within which

that lived experience is articulated’.45 Accordingly, it becomes clear from
observing all of Borges Coelho’s work that this critical and conceptual di-
mension is ever-present, and constitutes a counterpoint46 between official
history and the private sphere which offers an original articulation between
the registers of lived experience and historical discourse.47 Within the
narrative structure of Rainhas da Noite, there are two crucial events that
suggest a reading of the text from the perspective of the ‘evidential para-
digm’, an epistemological concept related to micro-history. In the novel,
these events perform a fundamental creative and conceptual function that
highlight significant critical constellations in relation to the relationship
between objectivity – history – and experience – memory –48 and make
up possible clues with respect to rehearsing ‘processes of visiting the past
with clean, unsoiled hands’:49
Largos meses depois de o caderno me ter vindo parar às mãos – numa altura em
que não fora o seu surgimento irregular entre os meus papéis e certamente teria
esquecido toda aquela história – olhando a página de necrologia do Jornal Notícias,
deparei com um pequeno anuncio em corpo oito comunicando o falecimento, em
Portugal, da senhora dona Maria Eugénia Murilo. O anúncio era assinado por um
tal Travessa Chassafar.50
[…]
Já reaprendera a viver sem ser constantemente importunado pela lembrança do
caderno de Maria Eugenia Murilo – e mesmo do tal anúncio necrológico – quando
um certo dia a necessidade de regularizar um documento me levou a uma repartição.
A sala estava apinhada de gente e o calor infernal. […] Durante largos minutos a voz
monocórdica voz anunciou nome como que ao acaso, provocando uma indignada
45 Carlo Ginzburg, and Carlo Poni, ‘The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange
and the Historical Marketplace’, in Edward Muir, and Guido Ruggiero, eds,
Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), 4.
46 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
47 On this respect see: Can, Discurso e Poder nos romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho.
48 See Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Subjetivo.
194 Elena Brugioni
agitação lá na frente. De repente, um desses nomes soou-me aos ouvidos com

meridiana clareza:
‘Travessa Chassafar!’
[…] vi que um velho franzino avançava com dificuldade, procurando achar um
caminho entre o mar de gente.51
[Several months after the notebook came into my possession – at a time when, were
it not for its erratic appearance among my papers, I would certainly have forgotten
all about it – while glancing at the obituary page of the Notícias newspaper, I found
a small announcement in font size eight communicating the demise, in Portugal,
of Maria Eugénia Murilo. The announcement was signed by a Travessa Chassafar.
[…]
I had relearnt to live without being constantly bothered by the remembrance of
Maria Eugenia Murilo’s notebook – nor of the obituary – when one day the need
to sort out a document took me to a public office. The room was crowded and the
heat was hellish. […] For long minutes the monotone voice called out names ran-
domly, which caused an indignant agitation at the front. Suddenly, I heard one of
those names with crystal clarity:
‘Travessa Chassafar!’
[…] I saw a slight old man advancing with difficulty, trying to find a way through
the sea of people.]
These are the clues from which the narrator draws meaning for the stories
told in Maria Eugénia’s notebook, and whose testimony – personal and
private – is articulated with the memories of old Travessa Chassafar. This
articulation establishes a unique counterpoint between present and past,
experience and memory, and, at the same time, points towards a set of
theoretical questions related to the modalities and processes – the epis-
temologies – that guide a possible practice of scrutiny and, therefore, of
(re-)writing of history, putting into perspective the testimonial dimen-
sion of this process. In this respect, the encounter with the old servant
constitutes a complex problematization of the relationship between nar-
rator, history and witness:

eu vinha encarando Chassafar – desde que o acaso o pusera a minha frente – como a
única garantia que tinha de ancorar [as impressões de Maria Eugénia] na realidade.
Seguiu-se então o esforço que, embora voltando a incidir em Chassafar, tentava
faze-lo, desta feita, no Chassafar de carne e osso. […] Essa possibilidade levantava
questões teóricas interessantes, relativas ao tempo e à forma como o manuseamos.
Explico-me melhor: era uma possibilidade que me alertava para o facto de que, ao
contrário do que acontecia comigo, o conhecimento do velho Chassafar não provinha
do caderno mas de uma experiência pessoal colhida numa realidade de algum modo
destituída do tempo (conhecia a história até o fim). O que no que toca àquela história,
o tornava numa espécie de senhor todo-poderoso. E por isso mesmo redobrava em
mim a necessidade de o encontrar.52
[I had come to think of Chassafar – ever since fate had placed him in front of me –
as the only guarantee I had of anchoring [Maria Eugénia’s impressions] in reality.
So I focused my efforts on Chassafar again, but this time around, on the flesh-and-
blood Chassafar. That possibility raised interesting theoretical questions about time
and the way we handle it. I shall speak more clearly: it was a possibility that alerted
me to the fact that, contrary to what happened with me, old Chassafar’s knowledge
didn’t come from the notebook, but from personal experience harvested from a
reality somewhat devoid of time (he knew the whole story). This fact meant that, as
far as the story was concerned, Chassafar was something of an all-mighty lord. And,
because of that, I felt the need to find him all the more pressing.]
A reflection emerges that seems to echo the problematization of the re-

lationship between history and testimonial narrative, where the narrator
views Chassafar’s participation as an indispensable validation which is,
however, problematic for the decoding of the traces of time narrated
in the notebook. As the narrator states, ‘apesar de todas as dificuldades
ainda era ele [Chassafar] quem abria as perspectivas mais seguras’ [des-
pite all difficulties he [Chassafar] was still the one who opened up the
safest perspectives],53 ‘a fonte alternativa […] que relativizava o poder dos
documentos’ [the alternative source […] that relativized the power of the
documents].54 However, throughout the novel the relationship between
narrator and witness evidences various aspects, and therefore various
issues, that articulate an interaction marked by conflicts and complicities,

196 Elena Brugioni
which are important for the narrative structure as well as for the critical
and conceptual itineraries evinced in the novel. By highlighting the cen-
trality of witnessing and, therefore, of experience, the narrator questions
the modalities of interaction that he himself carries out with his alter-
native source, and thus raises a crucial epistemological perspective for a
reflection which attests, both critically and epistemologically, to the rela-
tionship between history and memory.
Perguntei-lhe por que razão não me havia contado o episódio. Respondeu-me um

pouco tenso, que o seu papel não era contar coisas ao acaso mas apenas responder ao
que eu lhe perguntava, e eu nada perguntara ao respeito. Na sua maneira circular de
dizer as coisas, afirmou que o trabalho de organizar esse tempo era meu, enquanto o
dele era apenas de lembrar. Como podia ele saber aquilo que eu pretendia?55
[I asked him why he hadn’t told me about the episode. A little tense, he answered
that his role was not to talk about random things, but to reply to my questions, and
I hadn’t asked him about it. In his roundabout way of saying things, he said that the
task of organizing that time was mine, while his task was just to remember. How
could he know what I wanted?]
This suggests a complex reading in accordance with Paul Ricoeur’s

conceptualization of the sense of responsibility of historical discourse,56
the construction processes of which do not explore the ‘frailties’ – lacunas,
incoherencies, omissions – that characterize the process of remembering,
but rather recognize that ‘it is our one and only resource for signifying
the past-character of what we declare we remember’ for, still according to
Ricoeur, it is memory that encloses the relationship between present and
past, thus setting itself up as a matrix for history itself.57
However, if one tries to situate the theoretical issues raised in the
novel within historiography and the theory of history, and particularly in
their debating of the relationship between experience and objectivity, it
is important to point out that the function and the role of the witness in
Rainhas da Noite problematize some of the questions that are raised when
historical narration and remembered experience are juxtaposed. As Annette

56 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 317–18.
57 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 87.
Wieviorka states, the key to understanding the testimonial dynamics is

‘intimacy’58 for, as Wieviorka goes on to explain, the witness addresses the
heart rather than reason, inspires compassion, pity, and even anger, thus
establishing complicity between the person who speaks and the person who
listens, and giving rise to a relationship determined by a ‘pact of compas-
sion’.59 Accordingly, the narrator in Rainhas da Noite confirms: ‘[o velho
Chassafar] falava comigo para saborear as suas próprias memórias, mais
que para me fornecer informações. Se eu não me precavesse, usar-me-ia
como pretexto para tal fim!’ [[old Chassafar] spoke with me in order to
savour his own memories, more than to provide me with information. If
I weren’t careful, he would use me as a means to that end!].60 As a matter
of fact, in the novel, this ambiguous relationship, which is sometimes con-
frontational, between the narrator and his witness – the old servant – gives
rise to an emblematic dynamics that is highly productive for the structure
of the novel, and sets up the figure of the witness as a fundamental critical
locus for an epistemological reflection of some breadth, both in its prob-
lematization of history, narrative and memory, and in its articulation at a
literary creative level. The question raised by Wieviorka is demonstrated
in the novel through a set of themes and situations that shape the rela-
tionship between the narrator, history and witness from a point of view
that articulates complex critical paradigms and views the literary space
as a fundamental locus for thinking contemporaneity critically. The role
of old Chassafar is not restricted to guiding the narrator in his quest to
decipher and to attribute meaning to the traces of the many names that
inhabit Maria Eugénia’s notebook; the more significant function of the
old servant is that of disclosing other/new histories, pointing out lacunas
and mistakes, outlining incongruities in the logic of the reconstruction of
the diary, leading the narrator to decipher the forgotten marginal stories
with the goal of ‘retirar um sentido do passado e não imprimir ao passado
um sentido atual’ [drawing meaning from the past rather than attributing
a contemporary meaning to it].61 This thus suggests a process where, to
58 Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998).

59 Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin, 153.
198 Elena Brugioni
paraphrase Walter Benjamin, it is not the past that sheds light on the pre-
sent nor vice-versa, it is memory that makes past and present converge into
a dialectical constellation.
In this respect, the constellation of past and present that is established
by the relationship between the narrator and the witness, whose interaction
is determined by the decoding of the traces and clues that inhabit Maria
Eugénia’s notebook, shapes Rainhas da Noite, particularly with respect
to the story that takes place in Moatize. This relationship results in an
emblematic representation that sees individuals and their subjectivity as
starting points to (re)write (a) (hi)story, in a specific place and a specific
time,62 decisively contributing towards a reinscription of people, spaces
and situations in the history of Mozambique.
It is mainly through the lives of three women – Maria Eugénia, Suzanne
and Agnés – that the microcosm of Moatize encounters some of the most
important questions in the history of Mozambique. The arrival of Maria
Eugénia in the village – um inferno [a hell] is the word she uses in the note-
book to describe Moatize – represents a collision with a reality which is
very different from the reality of the ‘metropolis’, which leads her – the
wife of Augusto Murilo, an engineer for the Belgian company that ex-
ploited the local coal mines – to ask ‘aquelas interrogações que, por uma
qualquer razão misteriosa, instalam, depois de si, o silêncio’ [those questions
that, for some mysterious reason, are met with silence].63 This suggests a
clash with a community the functioning of which obeys rules and com-
promises – laws – that apparently cannot be questioned. The microcosm
that Maria Eugénia encounters has a metonymic relationship with the so-
ciety and colonial world that characterized the whole of Mozambique at
the time: a complex mosaic of relationships, human, racial, political and
social. This world cannot keep its secrets from Maria Eugénia – contrary
to her wishes when she first arrives in Moatize – who initiates a quest to
know and understand a place that becomes her world – the world of the
62 The (hi)story being told is set in the 1950s, which coincides with a period that has
been defined as ‘late colonialism’, thus suggesting a specific critical perspective. For
more on this subject, see Castelo et al., eds, Os Outros da Colonização. Ensaios sobre
o colonialismo tardio em Moçambique (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012).
colonizer – ‘um mundo [que] era mais complicado do que parecia’ [a world
[that] was more complicated than it appeared to be]:64
Quanto à minha [vida], à nossa, resumia-se a uma casa cercada por um filme onde as
coisas pareciam acontecer mas não aconteciam de verdade, separadas de nós por uma
espessa barreira: não podíamos beber a água, respirar o ar. A gente do outro lado era
gente mas não era gente, sofria mas uma dor diferente da nossa, falava uma língua à
qual não chegávamos. Tinha propósitos diferentes dos nossos, destinos também. Que
era aquilo, que era aquilo que ninguém me deixava conhecer de verdade? Aquilo que
até Laissone e Travessa se esforçavam para que eu olhasse de longe, sem me aproximar?
Cuidado, senhora! Não vale a pena, senhora!65
[As to my, our, [life,] it was limited to a house surrounded by a film where things
seemed to happen, but didn’t really happen, separated from us by a thick barrier: we
couldn’t drink the water, breathe the air. The people on the other side were people
but they were not people, they suffered but their pain was different from ours, they
spoke a language we didn’t have access to. They had different purposes from us, and
also fates. What was that, what was that which nobody allowed me to truly know?
That which even Laissone and Travessa tried to get me to look at from a distance,
without getting close? Careful, madam! It is not worth it, madam!]
The complex dynamics that guide the relationships between those who
inhabit the company houses and those who live in the compound become
a significant element outlining the contours of a situation that cannot be
solved by the binary conceptually defined by colonizer and colonized. It
is through Maria Eugénia’s perceptions – through her subjectivity – and
through the eyes and experiences of Suzanne and Agnès that the colonial
world – represented from a micrologic perspective such as that pertaining
to the coal company – reveals itself as a tangle of complex relations and
dynamics whose traces reveal characters and stories – complicities and
contradictions – of a world that needs to be read and understood through
the recovery of subjective minor histories66 that, as Reinhart Koselleck
has put it in Futures Past, recover the historical present of individuals, of
a pure past devoid of lived experience.

66 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
200 Elena Brugioni
Mas estar aberta a tudo em volta, estar tocada por novas sensações, não significa ter
baixado a guarda. Não tenho ilusões, sei da violência que carrega o mundo que nos
cerca. Conheço agora Moatize.67
[But to be open to all that surrounds me, to be touched by new sensations doesn’t
mean I have let my guard down. I have no illusions, I know about the violence that
the world around us sustains. Now I know Moatize.]
***
This study could never aspire to be exhaustive given the aesthetic and
conceptual intricacy of Rainhas da Noite. The issues raised here have at-
tempted to sketch lines of inquiry at the same time as emphasizing the
critical complexity that characterizes João Paulo Borges Coelho’s literary
project. His writing is detached from consensus and doctrines – whether
aesthetic, historic or political – and proposes crucial epistemological
paths inviting readers to rethink the meanings and the implications of lit-
erary representation(s) in the contemporary world(s). It thus configures
the literary text as a crucial locus for the production of a critical, historical
and cultural knowledge which is indispensable to understand the future
of the past and, therefore, to rescue tradition from a conformism which,
in every era, threatens to subjugate it.68
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68 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255.
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——, Memória, história e historiografia (Coimbra: Quarteto, 2001).
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202 Elena Brugioni
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habitantes de 1960 a 1975’, in Castelo, Cláudia, et al., eds, Os Outros da
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Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
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Emanuelle Santos
9
Towards a World-Literary Aesthetics of
Postcolonial Memory: Rainhas da Noite
by João Paulo Borges Coelho
ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which João Paulo Borges Coelho’s widely acknowledged
talent creating literary works that conjugate global issues and local contexts illuminates
the connection between postcolonial memory and world-literature. Through an analysis
of his 2013 novel Rainhas da Noite, we argue that the nuanced representation of colo-
nialism through memory operates a critique of postcolonial societies that is inherently
transnational and systemic.
It is widely accepted amongst scholars of Borges Coelho’s work that his

literature establishes a constant dialogue with the history of his country.
The growing number of books, essays, and articles published within
and beyond the transnational space formed by the Portuguese-speaking
countries often highlights the many ways in which Borges Coelho’s fic-
tion engages with the unique mosaic of geographical, human, and histor-
ical features that form Mozambique. Yet, while the quality of his literary
practice is indebted to the novelist’s artistic skills, it certainly cannot be
dissociated from his long experience as a historian.1 As it captures and
disseminates a vast array of important knowledge about lesser-known
1 As Borges Coelho has admitted: ‘os meus textos académicos têm sempre um “deslize”
literário […] e, por outro lado, a minha literatura dificilmente existiria sem a história
e a geografia. O meu primeiro romance partiu directamente de anotações para um
texto académico’ [my academic texts have always a literary ‘slant’ […] and, on the
other hand, my literature would hardly exists without history and geography. My
first novel departed straight from the annotations for an academic text]. João Paulo
Borges Coelho, ‘Escrita académica, escrita literária’, in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro,
and Maria Paula Menezes, eds, Moçambique das Palavras Escritas (Porto: Edições
Afrontamento, 2008), 233.
204 Emanuelle Santos
aspects of Mozambican societies, the literature of Borges Coelho has a

critical potential that exceeds the national realm of cultural memory. As
this chapter will argue, his work’s fictional rewriting of history through
memory gives way to a singular world-literary aesthetics of postcolonial
memory.
To speak of a world-literature of postcolonial memory, especially one
that emerges in the peripheral space of Mozambique, is to reject the cur-
rent assumption that the paradigms of world-literature and postcolonial
studies are at odds with one another. Contrary to views on both sides of the
ideological divide in literary studies on whether to celebrate or to critique
global capitalism, the paradigm of world literature was not the inevitable
result of postcolonial studies’ failure to take sides on the issue. Postcolonial
studies’ popularization and consequential growth to date have provided a
plethora of evidence of the field’s ability to critique through such divides.
With a core methodology focused on the identification and critique of eco-
nomic and cultural hegemony, unevenness and domination, postcolonial
studies is uniquely equipped to show precisely how both anti-capitalism
and globalism can work as productive critical counter-discourses when
strategically applied in situations at specific times and in specific places.
As a result, in the history of societies such as those in Portuguese-speaking
Africa, which have, within the short span of four decades, experienced co-
lonialism, socialism, neocolonialism and processes of neo-liberalization,
the postcolonial lens has helped us to understand literary critiques of both
capitalist and socialist praxis. As such, if the emergence of the world lit-
erature paradigm is connected to the field of postcolonial studies it is not
due to the field’s ‘failure to address the historical changes in a world-system
characteristic of late capitalism’,2 but because postcolonial studies has been
developing specifically to address the historical changes taking place within
postcolonial societies in the longue durée of the capitalist world-system.
It is thus the world-systemic characteristics of the many historical
changes experienced by Mozambique that make Borges Coelho’s rendering
of the country’s postcolonial memory into a meaningful experience from
which it is possible to understand the unevenness underpinning relations
2 James Graham, Michael Niblett, and Sharae Deckard, ‘Postcolonial studies and
world literature’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48/5 (2012), 465–71, 465.
Towards a World-Literary Aesthetics of Postcolonial Memory 205
between and within states. The definition of ‘world-literature’ adopted

here is the one coined by the Warwick Research Collective, or WReC,
in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-
Literature (2015) which is not to be confused with the now mainstream
designation of ‘world literature’ by David Damrosch in What is World
Literature? (2003). While for Damrosch a ‘work enters into world literature
by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating
out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin’,3
for the WReC world-literature (with a hyphen) is ‘an analytical category,
not one centred in aesthetic judgement’.4 A piece of world-literature is
one whose form and content reflect a ‘single but radically uneven world-
system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven’.5 This perspective
fully encompasses the peculiarities of the postcolonial condition as it is
experienced in Mozambican societies, whose continuous dialogue with
the legacies of colonialism, another facet of the capitalist world-system in
its longue durée, reveals a history of unevenness. Even though the work of
João Paulo Borges Coelho certainly fulfils Damrosch’s criteria for being
considered world literature, for it circulates way beyond its culture of origin
as literature, it is in its form of world-literature, that the critical potential
of Borges Coelho’s work can be seen most fully, as an analysis of his 2013
novel Rainhas da Noite demonstrates.
Narrating colonialism within the world-system
Rainhas da Noite begins in present-day Maputo where an unnamed

narrator receives a mysterious handwritten notebook from an itinerant
bookseller as a consolation prize for having lost a haggling battle over the
3 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2003), 6.
4 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 49.
5 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, 49.
price of an illustrated edition of A Ilha de Próspero [Prospero’s Island]

(1972) by Rui Knopfli. As the narrative develops, we learn that the note-
book consists of a private journal produced by a white Portuguese lady
named Maria Eugénia Murilo who, along with her infant child, moves
from Lisbon to the small Mozambican village of Moatize to join her hus-
band, an engineer employed by a Belgian mining company operating in
the Portuguese colony. The journal, however, remains partially forgotten
resurfacing in the mind of the narrator only when, by chance, he meets
one of Maria Eugénia’s previous servants, Travessa Chassafar. The narra-
tive is thus constituted of the transcription of Maria Eugénia’s journal,
edited and annotated by the unnamed narrator.
The journal’s content consists mainly of the private struggles of priv-
ileged white women who, trapped in the golden domestic cages that the
mining company allocated to its high-ranking staff, must navigate the tan-
gible and yet invisible layers of power structures determining their lives. The
layered aspect of the novel’s content is mirrored in its form that comprises
a prologue, where we are told how the journal was obtained, followed by
nine numbered chapters, each divided into two sections. At the beginning
of each chapter, we have a transcription of part of Maria Eugénia’s journal
through a seemingly unmediated first-person narrative in which we can
follow her daily accounts and hear her inner thoughts. The second part
of each chapter consists of a section titled ‘Notas’ [Notes] in which the
narrator writes in his capacity as editor in the present day. It is in this part
of each chapter that we have the narrator’s reflection on the story that be-
comes his obsession as well as a record of his periodical encounters with
Chassafar, who witnessed first-hand most of the episodes described in the
journal. Each chapter also contains a small number of illustrations, a few
of which are said to reproduce images found by the narrator within the
journal, and others, taken in the present day, are added to the Notes section.
Lastly, we have the epilogue, when the narrator ends his series of visits to
the old Travessa Chassafar, and finally passes the notebook on to him.
The relevance of the novel’s themes, careful choice of characters and
some of the peculiarities of its form have already been noted by critics
in the field. Scholars have paid particular attention to the ways in which
the women in the novel negotiate the power structures in place during
colonial times, challenging the neat separations of people into stark cat-
egories normalized by traditional historiography. Nazir Ahmed Can, for
example, highlights the importance of the novel’s choice of a female per-
spective, as it adds nuances and ‘pontos cinzentos’ [grey areas]6 to the
(hi)story of colonialism, a trend much in keeping with the current memory
turn in Portuguese studies. However, while it is true that women often
have a pivotal role in Borges Coelho’s fictional universe, the prominence
that this novel gives to Maria Eugénia’s voicing of her own story along-
side other white women, as well as to the portrayal of their relationship
with the local black servants in a world ruled by conspiracies, constitutes
only one of the dimensions in which the author disrupts long-established
historiographical traditions. The main conflict in the plot of Rainhas da
Noite is thus not the classic opposition between colonizer and colonized,
but the power battles that Maria Eugénia had to fight against the Belgian
Madame Annemarie Simon, wife of the company’s director and de facto
ruler of the lives of the high echelon staff of the mining company in the
Portuguese African colony.
As we follow the tacit war between the two women, we are offered a
much more detailed picture of Portuguese colonialism than through the
colonizer/colonized dichotomy. The reluctant, and yet unavoidable, sub-
jugation of the Portuguese Maria Eugénia to the whims of her Belgian foe,
as well as the gradual complicity developed between the journal’s protag-
onist and her black servant, Travessa Chassafar, reflects the complex and
tenuous web of clientelist relations on which Portugal depended in order
to keep its vast overseas possessions. While it is widely known that in order
to keep the integrity of the colonial territory equivalent to present-day
Mozambique, the Portuguese had to find ways to subjugate indigenous
populations whose numbers exceed those of white settlers, the novel sug-
gests that this practice was a part of a wider process of hegemony that
compelled Portugal to also negotiate with other European powers. This
way, Maria Eugénia’s marginal position in society was twofold, as it owed
as much to the lower value of her gender in a male-dominated society as
to the semi-peripheral condition of Portugal, whose imperial aspirations
6 Nazir Ahmed Can, ‘Rainhas da Noite’, Metamorfoses 14/2 (2017), 187.

were affected by the weight of other European powers at the core of the
capitalist world-system. Maria Eugénia’s outrage at her husband’s unwill-
ingness to decline to attend the weekly soirée imposed on the white staff of
the Belgian company by its director’s wife is a fine example of the hopeless
cry for self-determination of the journal’s protagonist, trapped by inescap-
able realities of the material world:
Retorqui, já alterada, que a sua subserviência me espantava; mais do que isso, que
ela me desapontava profundamente. O que acontecera àquele Murilo combativo
que conhecera? Já quanto a mim, acrescentei, ele podia ter a certeza de que em mim
ninguém mandava!
‘Vou se quiser, se não quiser não vou!’, concluí, com talvez excessiva agressividade.
Murilo permaneceu imperturbável. […] Asseverou que bastava uma palavra minha e
ele despedia-se do maldito emprego e regressávamos os três para Lisboa. Se eu dissesse
que era isso que me tornava feliz, de imediato tomaria a atitude.
[…]
Senti, na altura, que Murilo me submetia a uma espécie de chantagem. Que faríamos
nós em Portugal, onde ele dificilmente acharia um emprego como este? Que faria
eu quando tivesse que enfrentar todos os dias a muda censura do seu olhar, real ou
inventada? Virei-lhe as costas e meti-me no quarto, batendo com a porta.7
[I replied, irritated, that his subservience surprised me; and what’s more, it deeply
disappointed me. What happened to that combative Murilo that I once knew? When
it comes to me, I added, he could be sure that I wasn’t going to be bossed around!
‘I’ll go if I want to, if I don’t I won’t go!’, I said, too aggressively perhaps.
Murilo remained undisturbed. […] He asserted that, should I say so, he’d quit the
damn job and the three of us would return to Lisbon. If I said that’s what would
make me happy, he’d do it immediately.
[…]
I felt, at the time, that Murilo was blackmailing me. What would we do in Portugal
where he’d hardly find a job like this one? What would I do when I had to daily face
the silent reprimand in his eyes, real or imagined? I turned my back on him and shut
myself in the bedroom, slamming the door.]
7 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Rainhas da Noite (Lisbon: Caminho, 2013), 114–16.
(All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.)
Maria Eugénia’s revolt embodies the very situation of relative margin-

ality that characterizes the chapter of Portuguese colonialism in the after-
math of the Berlin Conference, which culminated in the British Ultimatum
that tarnished the international image of power sought by the country.
As Malyn Newitt has put it, ‘Portugal, which had played little part in
European diplomacy in the previous fifty years, could hardly be ignored
in a region where it was the only European country with a real presence,
but it has often been represented as a mere pawn at the Conference, with
its claims brushed aside and its influence negligible’.8 After the conference
and the sanctioning of the rule of effective occupation to grant European
countries the rights to take over African territories, Portugal’s need to
negotiate both with the native populations as well as with its European
counterparts produced a variety of power structures whose configuration
have the potential to challenge consolidated historical categorizations. As
a consequence, Rainhas da Noite’s nuanced approach to history paints a
picture of the complex nature of colonialism in which not all blacks fight
for independence nor are all whites on the same side.
Enactments of rivalry between European powers in the peripheral
space of the colony are not just confined to the animosity between Maria
Eugénia and Annemarie Simon but are present throughout the narrative.
Cunha, the representative of the political police in charge of observing and
intervening in the interest of the Portuguese colonial regime in the novel,
kept files on the activities of blacks as much as those of non-Portuguese
whites or ‘foreigners’. The rebellious attitudes of Suzanne Clijsters, an-
other Belgian woman married to a ‘foreign’ high-ranking employee of the
mining company, were subject to observation and actions by such police,
the details of which were to be found decades later by the narrator-editor
in a dusty box in the country’s public archives. Suzanne used the time and
resources afforded by her white privilege to purposefully overstep the social
boundaries between blacks and whites established by the colonial admin-
istration, and as a way to directly challenge the authority of her fellow
citizen, the company director’s wife. As is revealed later, notwithstanding
8 Malyn Newitt, Portugal in the European and World History (London: Reaktion
Books, 2009), 190.
the inspector’s spite for the presence of Belgians in the territory ‘estravasados
do Congo e sempre dispostos a provocar dores de cabeça a quem tinha
que zelar pelas coisas’9 [spilled out from Congo and always ready to cause
trouble to those who had to look after things], Annemarie’s control over
the white employees of the company was exercised with the endorsement
of Cunha, who had the means to address violently any cases of misconduct
that might escape the soft power-net woven by the spider-like movements
of Annemarie Simon. This alliance maintained a seamless and unshakable
image for whiteness as a means to reify its power and enforce the racial
order underlying colonial exploitation in Africa.
Yet, neither colonial surveillance nor intervention worked the same
way on the two sides of the racial divide. Borges Coelho’s representation
of complexity and nuance in colonial Mozambique avoids endorsing
the fallacies of a lusotropicalist discourse and the myth of benevolent
Portuguese colonization. While the punishment for Suzanne’s mis-
conduct consists in her return to Europe after a relaxing holiday in the
coastal city of Beira, black trespassers are punished by imprisonment
and beatings, even when their so-called wrongdoing was simply to serve
their white masters as they were supposed to. As such, Maria Eugénia’s
growing sympathy for Travessa Chassafar and their development of a
tacit and short-lived friendship does not fall outside what that system
permits. Far from being a romantic representation of social possibilities
during colonialism, the point of this type of relationship is to highlight
the plethora of relations, including degrees of interracial solidarity and
occasional alliances, that are prescribed in the very horizon of set pos-
sibilities sustaining the colonial order. This is something that Eugénia
herself takes time to understand, as it is just after having had her own
privileges capped by Mme. Simon in Moatize that she learns the lesson
and gradually realizes how many more compromises than her those living
in situations of precarity had to make.
This way, the little village of Moatize becomes the site of an inter-
section where Portuguese and Belgian powers continuously negotiate

their productive relationship under colonial capitalism. Within this site

of intersection, the narrative portrays how these negotiations filter down
to all levels of social life. We can thus see its impact on the routines of
whole groups, as in the case of the community of chief M’Boola who, by
being made a régulo by the colonial administration, had to make sure his
people complied with Portuguese directives, to the detriment of their
own wellbeing. The impact of these negotiations also affected, albeit
differently, the microcosms of the company’s compounds for miners
and high-ranking staff, as well as the individual’s own subjective experi-
ences as revealed in Maria Eugénia’s account. In Borges Coelho’s story,
the actions of each character in the narrative are capped by their degree
of privilege: in the domestic environment within the limits of the white
compound licensed to a Belgian mining company, Annemarie Simon
reigns and the Portuguese Maria Eugénia, whose husband is below Simon’s
in the company, struggles. Suzanne Clijsters, for her part, manages to
challenge Mme. Simon in a way that is denied to her Portuguese friend.
Beyond the limits of the compound, however, power rests solely with
inspector Cunha who is more permissive of his fellow countrywoman’s
transgressions than those by the foreign Suzanne. The black population
indigenous to the land is allowed to interact with Belgian foreigners
only to the extent of their work in the company, and their rule through
violence is held by Cunha alone.
Thematically, this novel by Borges Coelho does indeed capture untold
stories of Mozambican history and Portuguese colonialism. Yet, by pre-
senting the geopolitical hierarchy between core players in the global game
of colonialism and by addressing the reverberations of this systemic hier-
archy within the colonies, the author creates a particular world that is
closely linked to the system within which it is conceived. Rainhas da Noite’s
skilled crafting of the relational nature of power during Portuguese colo-
nialism turns it into a novel that is historical, national and postcolonial
in as much as it is world-literature. It translates interconnected subjective
narratives into a literary form capable of conveying the complex inter-
sectional networks of power relations that promote and perpetuate their
underlying unevenness.
Towards a world-aesthetics of postcolonial memory
The intrinsic relationship between memory and the postcolonial con-

dition is one that I have addressed at some length elsewhere.10 Starting
from the acknowledgement that memory is inscribed in the fabric of
postcolonial critique due to its commitment to detecting and exposing
the permanence of structural social and economic features inherited from
colonialism, in that study I argued that the memory aesthetics deployed
by José Eduardo Agualusa in his 2012 novel Teoria Geral do Esquecimento
is a meaningful way to mark the different stages in the expanding longue
durée of postcolonial societies.11 Agualusa’s clever fictional construct ex-
plores the politics of remembering and forgetting in the realm of cultural
memory over almost three decades of the recent history of Angola, and
by so doing he moves the discussion on postcolonial memory beyond the
traumas of the binary paradigm of postcolony as a place defined by turmoil
resulting from the ambivalent relationship between colonized and colon-
izer, as posed by Leela Gandhi’s classic study on postcolonial memory.12
The focus on the memory of a historical period that began with the inde-
pendence of Angola brings to the fore the complex systemic structures of
ingrained colonial practices, ensuring the continuation of coloniality way
beyond the departure of the colonizer. Equally, the novel’s commentary
on practices of cultural memorialization – be they in the private or the in-
stitutional realms – further highlights the role of memory in postcolonial
societies, making its aesthetics into an important aspect from which is
possible to understand these societies’ status and development.
10 Emanuelle Santos, ‘Memory and the Contemporary Postcolonial Condition in José

Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion’, in Dirk Göttsche, ed., Memory
and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019),
131–47.
11 José Eduardo Agualusa, Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (Alfragide: Dom Quixote,
2012); José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion, trans. Daniel Hahn
(London: Harvil Secker, 2015).
12 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Sydney: Allen & Unwin,
1998), 7–11.
Similarly to what I have observed in Agualusa’s novel, we can see that

Rainhas da Noite is constructed in a way that not only gives prominence
to memory but also questions its institutionalization. Borges Coelho’s the-
matization of contemporary Mozambican postcolonial history also looks
beyond the dichotomies of the colonial binary, working as a marker of the
country’s continually evolving postcolonial condition. In the narrative, the
representation of the connection between past and present is established
from the beginning, as the narrator’s efforts to obtain a ragged copy of
an illustrated edition of Rui Knopfli’s 1972 book A Ilha de Próspero [The
Island of Prospero] results in his acquisition of Maria Eugénia’s journal. The
novel thus opens with the subversion of the narrator’s nostalgia for a time
of struggle now fully canonized and assimilated by the country’s cultural
memory: ‘Há muito tempo que procurava aquela edição profusamente
ilustrada […] com um sabor de despedida e presságios, cuja carga trágica não
conseguiria hoje despertar mais que um sorriso. O que o tempo faz!’ [For
a long time I had been looking for that richly illustrated edition […] with
a flavour of farewell and premonition, whose tragic weight wouldn’t today
cause more than a smile. The wonders of time!].13 Instead, and after having
to pay a higher price for his nostalgic pleasure, the narrator is given – this
time free of charge – a private, marginal but actual, first-hand account of the
colonial days that will later test the narrator’s own view of truth and history.
As the chapters constitute points of intersection between past and
present in which each segment of the private accounts of Maria Eugénia’s
journal compels the narrator onto a truth-seeking journey that combines
his interviews with Chassafar with multiple visits to the country’s public
archives in Maputo, the narrative that begins with a commitment to the
truth – ‘Além disso, interessavam-me factos, não obscuras interpretações’
[And besides, I was interested in facts, not in obscure interpretations]14 –
is gradually converted into a deconstructionist exercise. The more the
narrator visits the archives, the more the archivist assisting him resembles
Chassafar in their mirrored functions as gatekeepers of history, evidencing
the narrator’s own changing views as he bounces between the domains of

private and public memory. The more the narrator fact-checks the veracity
of historical information contained in the journal, the more his suspicion
of the legitimacy of the information collected and disseminated in the
public archives grows. Towards the end of the novel, in the notes section
of chapter seven which opens the third and final set of three chapters of
the book, the narrator, now fully transformed by his journey into the past,
is totally convinced of the historical value of private recollections:
De facto, por que razão se guardariam apenas documentos oficiais, negligenciando-se

os de natureza privada? Será que o que é público tem mais valor? Se aproxima mais
da verdade? A minha teoria dizia que não, e por diversas razões. Desde logo porque
os papéis públicos são moldados por conveniências, não pela verdade. Aquilo que o
ogre grotesco e cego pretende com o registro de suas actividades é deixar de si uma
imagem conveniente para as gerações vindouras, uma imagem que, na sua perspectiva
perversa e sonsa, lhe adoça a fama. Já os papéis pessoais – descontados os casos de
dissimulação em que se pretende passar por privado o que é feito desde o início para
ser público – são testemunhos da luta que temos connosco próprios. Haverá luta
mais verdadeira do que essa? Ali estava o caderno de Maria Eugénia Murilo para o
comprovar!15
[Indeed, why would only the official documents be worthy of the archive, leaving
private documents to neglect? Are public documents endowed with more value?
Are they closer to the truth? My theory said no to these questions for a number of
reasons. To begin with, public papers are shaped by convenience, not by the truth.
By registering its activities what a grotesque and blind ogre intends is to leave a con-
venient image of itself to future generations, an image that in its perverse and sneaky
perspective smoothes its reputation. Private papers, on the other hand – discounted
the dissimulated cases when what has always meant to be public passes as private –
are witnesses of our struggles with ourselves. Is there a truer struggle than this? There
was the journal of Maria Eugénia Murilo to prove it!]
The culmination of this process is detailed in the subsequent pages,

as an almost desperate narrator, blinded as he was by his obsession with
the narrative of Maria Eugénia, bribes the old worker of the city archives
to gain access to the backstage of the institution in order to look for other
private journals that would perhaps contain further authentic perspectives
on the country’s historical facts. In the nightmare-like sequence that follows,

the narrator is taken by the archivist to the underworld of history-making.

There, a continuous and violent fight takes place between the workers of
the archives and ferocious rats that specialize in devouring the enormous
piles of original documents which arrive from all provinces of the country,
constituting actual bits of history. Whatever gets saved from being de-
voured by rats and insects alike in the lowest floors of the building is then
sent to the first floor ‘para ser reagrupad[o]‌segundo os critérios oficiais
em vigor’ [to be reorganized according to the current regulations],16 in a
rhythm that ‘faz lembrar uma antiga fábrica em pleno funcionamento’ [is
reminiscent of a fully operational old factory]17 and that leaves no doubts
about the artificial nature of the versions delivered to naïve visitors such
as himself in the neatness and silence of the reading room.
The critique of the political subordination of cultural memory by
Borges Coelho in Rainhas da Noite has been addressed more directly by
the author in his capacity as a scholar. In his essay ‘Writing in a Changing
World: The Difficult Relationship with Reality’ published in the same
year as the novel, the author raises a number of questions related to the
autonomy of literary writing in his country.18 Seen alongside the reality
of other countries that were also Portuguese colonies, Borges Coelho fac-
tors into the country’s postcolonial history the heavy legacies of post-
independence Mozambique such as the socialist period, the implementation
of neoliberalism and the civil war, in order to argue that literature still lacks
the degree of freedom and autonomy it would need to be able to fulfil its
role in the cultural memory of the country, and that the greatest challenge
for Mozambican literature today is to change from the nationalist to the
democratic paradigm. According to the author:
The role of literature, as that of other arts, continues to be seen as supporting and
celebrating politics. This, of course, is not solely due to the authoritarianism of pol-
itics but also the fragilities of the literary system, with its extremely reduced body
of readers and writers, almost non-existent publishers, very expensive books, etc.

18 João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Writing in a Changing World: The Difficult
Relationship with Reality’, Luso-Brazilian Review 50/2 (2013), 21–30.
All this creates great promiscuity between the political and literary spheres, as well
as a situation in which only a few non-sponsored books can reach the light of day.19
As a result, we can see how Borges Coelho shapes Rainhas da Noite

as a direct response to a Mozambican situation that is paradigmatic but
in no way detached from other peripheral countries sharing similar his-
torical processes, such as Angola. Being one of the very few Mozambican
writers that escape what he calls a ‘promiscuity between the political and
literary spheres’, the author crafts an aesthetics of memory that enters into
dialogue with the most recent legacy of the postcolonial condition in
Mozambique. Put in a productive dialectic relation, theme and aesthetics
in the novel work together to promote a critique of postcolonial memory
that is of systemic proportions.
To conclude, we can see that Rainhas da Noite by João Paulo Borges
Coelho is an exemplary novel that contains important elements from which
to derive a world-literary aesthetics of postcolonial memory. The treatment
of colonial history in the book deconstructs the traditional representation
of colonialism as a fixed system of clear dichotomies, and recuperates the
complex relationships of hierarchy in the capitalist world-system, which
are in no way restricted to the colonizer versus colonized paradigm, but
are inscribed in a larger structure divided into core, semi-periphery and
periphery. In so doing, the novel manages to re-frame processes of subju-
gation, exclusion and exploitation that took place during the Mozambican
colonial period in the longue durée of capitalism, which is the economic
system still operative in the country. As such, it offers a critique of processes
that cannot be bound to any convenient episodic organization of history.
On the other hand, the novel’s structure, which deconstructs the official
act of cultural memory-making, investing on the narratives of marginalized
subjects as a valid historical source and denouncing ideological control, is
itself a world-systemic narrative device. Relating not only to Mozambican
national history but also to the contradictions of peripheral postcolonial
societies at large, as is the case with the African countries that were once
part of the Portuguese colonial empire, Rainhas da Noite speaks of truths
19 Borges Coelho, ‘Writing in a Changing World’, 27.

that go beyond the confines of national political convenience as it addresses

that which is systemic and structural.
Bibliography
Agualusa, José Eduardo, Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (Alfragide: Dom

Quixote, 2012).
——, A General Theory of Oblivion, trans. Daniel Hahn (London: Harvil
Secker, 2015).
Borges Coelho, João Paulo, ‘Escrita académica, escrita literária’, in Margarida
Calafate Ribeiro, and Maria Paula Menezes, eds, Moçambique das Palavras
Escritas (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2008), 229–36.
——, ‘Writing in a Changing World: The Difficult Relationship with Reality’, Luso-
Brazilian Review 50/2 (2013), 21–30.
Can, Nazir, ‘Rainhas da Noite’, Metamorfoses 14/2 (2017), 185–8.
Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 2003).
Gandhi, Leela, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Sydney: Allen & Unwin,
1998), 7–11.
Graham, James, Michael Niblett, and Sharae Deckard, ‘Postcolonial Studies and
World Literature’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48/5 (2012), 465–71.
Newitt, Malyn, Portugal in the European and World History (London: Reaktion
Books 2009).
Santos, Emanuelle, ‘Memory and the Contemporary Postcolonial Condition in
José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion’, in Dirk Göttsche, ed.,
Memory and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2019), 131–47.
Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development:Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Paulo de Medeiros
10
The Drowning of Time: Ecological Catastrophe,
Dialectics, and Allegorical Realism in João Paulo
Borges Coelho’s Ponta Gea and Água: Uma
novela rural
ABSTRACT
João Paulo Borges Coelho’s latest novel, Ponta Gea (2017), is an intense process of working
through memory that starts by positing memory itself as water. Água: Uma novela rural
[Water: A Rural Tale] (2016) is a prolonged reflection on the contradictions of Mozambican
society as it undergoes rapid and drastic changes related both to modernity and to climate
change. The two texts draw on some of the author’s established preoccupations, themes
and images, focused on the crucial function of water. Not only in terms of their content,
but also due to their formal experimentations, the novels constitute daring interventions
in Mozambican and Lusophone literature. This chapter discusses the novels in terms of
their engagement with ecological issues, dialectics, memory, and technology. It also ana-
lyses the novels’ formal aspects, from the question of (magical) realism to the various
processes of allegorizing deployed.
Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.
— Raymond Williams, Keywords
At the beginning of his seminal study on Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon posits an important distinc-
tion between a more traditional concept of violence as something of great
immediacy and spectacular effect and what he considers, rightly, as even
more devastating, the systematic and systemic violence that, because of
its being slow and unspectacular, is often rendered invisible. He goes on
to note:
In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped
primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and rep-
resentational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow
220 Paulo de Medeiros
moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody,
disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven tech-
nologies of our image-world?1
João Paulo Borges Coelho’s recent novels, Água: uma novela rural
(2016) and Ponta Gea (2017), both engage specifically with environmental
questions, as spectacular as sudden, massive flooding, but also the quieter,
slower ones, of continuous life-threatening drought.2 As in other works of
his, water plays a key role, as does the complex relation of humans to other
forms of being. If Água appears to be most explicitly concerned with cli-
mate change and its catastrophic consequences, Ponta Gea, although very
different, is an equally thorough reflection on human relations, both among
ourselves and with regard to the ‘natural’ world. At the same time, both
novels also refuse any simple dichotomies, be they between humans and
nature; technology and culture, on the one hand, and nature, on the other;
past and present; country and city; memory and History; tradition and
modernity. Instead, what informs these novels is the setting-up of such bin-
aries in a complex dialectic relationship, which, even if never resolved, still
precludes us from ever coming to accept the antinomies as such, and much
less as irreducible. Both novels are very much focused on specific aspects
of life in Mozambique, yet they also escape any regionalism. In Água this
is accomplished to a great extent through an avoidance of any specifically
named places and through the extensive allegorizing that constitutes one
of the novel’s principal formal elements. Ponta Gea, conversely, as its title
already demonstrates, focuses almost exclusively on one very specific place,
the area in Beira, Mozambique, where the narrator – and the author – grew
up. Yet, it too avoids any reductive identification, functioning much more
as a meditation on the significance of place, rather than merely as a kind of
nostalgic memoir. Both novels are at the forefront of eco-fiction writing
in Portuguese, not just because of the way they draw attention to the ser-
iousness of the current climate problems, but also because they refuse to
1 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3.
2 João Paulo Borges Coelho, Água: uma novela rural (Lisboa: Caminho, 2016). João
Paulo Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea (Lisboa: Caminho, 2017).
The Drowning of Time 221
isolate human beings from the very eco-system they so carelessly threaten
to destroy forever.
Although critical studies of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s narratives
already had noticed the importance of bodies of water, more recent ones
have focused specifically on the representation of water and its implica-
tions from an eco-critical perspective.3 Thus, Ana Margarida Fonseca in
‘Das Águas e das Gentes: Escrever a Identidade’ calls attention not only to
the importance of water metaphors throughout the author’s oeuvre, but
very specifically focuses on Água, which she analyses in terms of how the
image of the river becomes crucial in order to sketch notions of identity.
Fonseca, who had previously also written on the imagery of water in two
other novels of the author,4 in this essay attempts specifically to probe into a
range of oppositions that structure the novel and which Fonseca, although
loosely, wants to see as forming a dialectical process.5 One of those that
I find crucial and will want to reflect on further concerns the split between
country and city as well as the confrontation between tradition and mod-
ernity. As suggestive as Fonseca’s essay is, it still subscribes to a conventional
notion of modernity that sees it primarily allied to development (a certain
kind of development) and the idea of a, more often than not, teleological
view of progress. Another recent essay that also looks at Água and ques-
tions having to do with modernity and tradition is Isabel Ferreira Gould’s
‘Modernidade, Diálogo e Pacto em Água: uma novela rural’ (2017). Indeed,
one can see how both critics were attracted by many similar issues raised
by the novel and also how, both, in spite of their differences, come up with
similar answers because based on a view of modernity which fails to engage
with the fundamental issue of capitalism and its grip on the world. This is
3 Several of the essays in the present volume also focus on the predominant water im-
agery, especially of the sea, in the works of João Paulo Borges Coelho. Even though
none of them takes up a specific ecological critique, nonetheless, they all focus on
the political implications of such imagery.
4 Ana Margarida Fonseca, ‘Líquidas fronteiras: representações dos rios em As Duas
Sombras do Rio e Campo de Trânsito’, in Sheila Khan, Sandra Sousa et al., eds, Visitas
a João Paulo Borges Coelho. Leituras, diálogos e futuros (Lisboa: Colibri, 2017),
89–104.
5 Ana Margarida Fonseca, ‘Das Águas e das Gentes: Escrever a Identidade’, Mulemba
10/18 (2018), 97–108.
not to say that either critic ignores questions that are intrinsically related
to neocolonial capitalist exploitation. One can see an awareness of such
problematics in the background, so to speak, as, for instance, when Ferreira
Gould comments on Borges Coelho’s expressed views on the novel and
what she refers to as the interaction of modernity and tradition in a context
of precarity.6 It is just that there is no attempt at either directly relating the
conditions of crisis to the effects of capitalism, nor is there any systematic
consideration of the problem as both critics tend to avoid laying bare the
mechanisms involved, preferring instead to imagine supposed pacts with
the reader to allow for an entry into Mozambique’s rural world.
Another recent study of Água, Jessica Falconi’s ‘Leituras Ecocríticas
de João Paulo Borges Coelho’, moves away from traditional humanistic
interpretations of the text to focus more directly on questions related to a
problematization of the circumstances issuing from a postcolonial condi-
tion and expressed foremost as a reflection on a broken relation between
human beings and nature.7 The advantage Falconi sees in pursuing such a
line of enquiry has to do, as she notes, with the ability thus provided for
analysing comparatively the various intersections between ecological and
social concerns, political critique, history and a reflection on identity.8
Falconi’s approach, more than that of the others, is centrally preoccupied
with ecological issues and does refer specifically to a version of ecocriticism
based on what has come to be designated as new materialisms, referring
directly, among others, to the work by Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter: A
6 Isabel A. Ferreira Gould, ‘Modernidade, diálogo e pacto em Água, uma novela

rural’, in Sheila Khan, Sandra Sousa et al., eds, Visitas a João Paulo Borges Coelho.
Leituras, diálogos e futuros (Lisboa: Colibri, 2017), 218.
7 Jessica Falconi, ‘Leituras ecocríticas de João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Mulemba 10/18
(2018), 85–96.
8 This is clearly expressed towards the conclusion of the essay: ‘uma leitura ecocrítica
destes textos permite salientar também as relações entre preocupação “ecológica”
e social, crítica política e reflexão histórica e identitária, sendo estas dimensões as
múltiplas facetas das representações proporcionadas por JPBC. Emerge, assim, a
complexidade dos problemas ecológicos, as mútuas imbricações entre dinâmicas
sociais, políticas e ambientais, bem como o peso do passado colonial e, last but not
least, as atuais assimetrias do contexto regional’. Falconi, ‘Leituras ecocríticas de
João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 95.
Political Ecology of Things and the volume edited by Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost on New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.9
From Falconi’s analysis I find especially relevant the attention she gives to
the structuring of the novel around the constant dialogue between the two
elder figures, Ryo [river] and Laama [mud], their questioning of nature
and of the relationship between it and human beings, as well as further
inquiries into the role of tradition, history and memory, on one hand, and
science, technology and innovation, on the other. While drawing on these
recent efforts, as well as on older, more extensive studies of the work of
Borges Coelho, such as Nazir Ahmed Can’s Discurso e Poder nos Romances
de João Paulo Borges Coelho,10 at present I would like to suggest a different
form of looking at how, in both Água and Ponta Gea, Borges Coelho goes
further than simply continuing his previous use of symbolic references to
water or general ecological concerns to present us with a forceful critique
of how ‘development’ has come to threaten not just established ways of
life but life itself. In doing so, it will be my contention, Borges Coelho
not only aligns national concerns with global ones but places the national
and even individual cases as paradigmatic before the readers. In doing
so, I will want to argue, Borges Coelho intervenes sharply on both the
socio-political register and on the literary-aesthetic one. The two novels
under consideration advance the notion of a Mozambican literature fully
enmeshed in global currents and debates, participating fully in the world-
literary system, without for a moment losing sight of their responsibility
towards local specificities.
My own reading of the novels is informed, to a great extent, by the con-
cept of World-Literature advocated by the Warwick Research Collective,
defined ‘as the literature of the world-system – of the modern capitalist
world-system, that is’.11 Furthermore I also draw specifically on the work of
9 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds, New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
10 Nazir Ahmed Can, Discurso e Poder nos Romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho
(Maputo: Alcance, 2014).
11 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 8.
two members of the WReC, Michael Niblett and Sharae Deckard, as well as
on Fredric Jameson’s notion of a singular modernity and on Felix Guattari’s
reflections in The Three Ecologies.12 In contradistinction to Falconi’s reliance
on New Materialism, the type of critique I am interested in remains funda-
mentally materialist.13 Niblett puts it rather succinctly at the outset of his
essay, noting, as a follow up to his quoting a passage from the Communist
Manifesto on the globalization of capital, that ‘the globalizing propensities
of the capitalist world-system as outlined by Marx and Engels – in par-
ticular, its drive to appropriate raw materials from the “remotest zones”
and its destruction of local and national self-sufficiency – implies a radical
transformation of the global environment’.14 He also comments extensively
on the notion of ‘critical irrealism’ advanced by Michael Löwy,15 as well as
by the WReC, and to which I will return, as I find it important to under-
stand the very form of Borges Coelho’s novels.
Both novels constitute experiments in form that advance our under-
standing of contemporary narrative, while questioning, to the point of
subverting, some cherished notions of periodization. Thus, one could very
well make a claim that in both the extensive metanarrative features – the
slippery slide between memory and History in Ponta Gea, or the seemingly
fall back into an archaic, allegorizing mode in Água – make them prime
12 Michael Niblett, ‘World-Economy, World-Ecology, World-Literature’, Green

Letters, 16/1 (2012), 15–30; Sharae Deckard, ‘Water Shocks: Neoliberal hydrofiction
and the crisis of “cheap” water’, Atlantic Studies, 16.1 (2019), 108–25; Félix Guattari,
The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press,
2000 [1989]).
13 The discussion on new and old materialism(s) is extensive and here I will refer only
to one recent article, which, in my view, aptly exposes some of the contradictions
inherent in the claims made by new materialism proponents and how, at least in
my view, the claim for new materialisms in the end is little more than a rejection
of a materialist critique that nonetheless would still want to bask in the intellec-
tual status of what it denounces. See Alexander R. Galloway, ‘History Is What
Hurts: On Old Materialism’, Social Text 34/2 (2016), 125–41.
14 Niblett, ‘World-Economy, World-Ecology, World-Literature’, 15.
15 Michael Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism: “A moonlit enchanted night”’,
in Matthew Beaumont, ed., Adventures in Realism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007),
193–206.
candidates to be subsumed under the postmodern label, albeit a politically

conscious and engaged version of it. But the moment one is tempted to
do so, one also realizes that not only is such labelling futile, but that the
novels, in a sense, also already preclude any such facile categorization. The
preliminary note at the beginning of Ponta Gea (‘Preâmbulo’), with its re-
flection on what infancy might be and how to conceptualize its relation to
time (in itself both the inaugurating moment of the narrative and outside
of it), could be referenced in this regard, even as it thoroughly mixes its
various metaphors combining time, travel and the sea:
É, pois, sobre os escombros de possibilidades alternativas que se constroem estas

pequenas narrativas. O risco em que a sua escrita incorre seria assim o de tornar
irrecuperável tudo aquilo que não é convocado, ilhas perdidas na névoa do tempo,
povoadas de fantasmas.16
[It is thus, then, over the ruins of alternative possibilities that these short narratives
are constructed. The risk that its writing incurs would thus be of rendering irretriev-
able, all that is not conjured, islands lost in the fog of time, peopled with ghosts.]
As this note also makes clear, although Ponta Gea – and Água too –
is a very contemporary novel, it is also as much a novel about the past, or,
more precisely, about the diverse flows of time and of the imbrication of
the past in the future.
Rather than presenting us with a static time, or what would even be
worst, with a nostalgic look at the past, the narratives of Borges Coelho
insist on a dialectic relationship between different times. This is important
in a number of ways: it both refutes conservative views on Africa and
what African cultures and literatures might be, especially in reference to
a western perspective still imposing itself as normative; and it asks us to
understand modernity differently from the established idea of a western-
centred technological advancement. In the novels the past, and even the
archaic, does not merely survive alongside the present and the modern, but
can be said to share alternating spaces, the blurring of which is essential to
understand the mode of existence Borges Coelho’s imagination registers
16 Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea, 11–12. All translations from both novels are mine, as the
works have not yet appeared in English translation.
for us. This same interconnectedness of different temporal forms can be

seen at the base of Achile Mbembe’s reflections:
I would argue that structures of temporality in colonial and postcolonial conditions

are thoroughly entangled with the vicissitudes of the affective; with the subjective
play of desire and uncertainty, fear and terror, trauma and unpredictability. In such
contexts, we can only refer to the abstraction of time as a rhetorical figure. For many
people caught in the vortex of colonialism and what comes after, the main indexes
of time are the contingent, the ephemeral, the fugitive and the fortuitous – radical
uncertainty and social volatility.17
Borges Coelho has also stated that beyond the focus on the simultan-
eity of different times, what is at stake for him is a direct confrontation
with the negation of the past, the tendency to obliterate great parts of the
colonial past of Mozambique and their substitution by a blank slate or a
single version of a cleaned up past in which the narrative of liberation dis-
places all others. In a conversation with Elena Brugioni, for instance, he
directly states that,
No que diz respeito ao processo histórico moçambicano, por vezes é como se

esta transição não existisse: há um apagamento – um problema de memória. Um
apagamento e, ao mesmo tempo, uma demonização do tempo colonial. Como se a
independência de Moçambique fosse uma folha branca onde pudéssemos começar
a escrever tudo de novo.18
[Concerning Mozambique’s historical process, sometimes it is as if this transition
would not exist: there is an erasure – a problem of memory. An erasure and, at the
same time, a demonization of colonial time. As if Mozambique’s independence
would be a blank page where we could start writing everything from the beginning.]
Neither in Água nor in Ponta Gea do we see any direct way of con-
fronting that kind of amnesia specifically, yet it should be noted that history
suffuses the narratives beyond the merely episodic. Thus, in Ponta Gea, the
reader is continuously exposed to the eruption of that submerged past, be
17 ‘Achile Mbembe in conversation with Isabel Hofmeyr’, South African Historical

Journal 56/1 (2000), 182.
18 Elena Brugioni, ‘A literatura e o léxico da pós-colonialidade: uma conversa com
João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Diacrítica 24/3 (2010), 428.
it in the form of figures that recall how connected Mozambique always

had been with India – and how a segment of its population with Indian
roots was affected by events occurring in the subcontinent after Partition,
or even because of the Portuguese government’s reactions to India’s re-
claiming of the few Portuguese enclaves in 1961 – be it through various
characters such as the impoverished and starving ‘Zerofor’, or Dimitri
Tsafendas, a Greek-Mozambican who killed Hendrik Verwoerd, South
Africa’s Prime Minister, in 1966. In a similar way, even though following
a different strategy, Água asks readers to understand the diegetic time of
severe drought as one that cannot be understood without reference to the
past when water was abundant, even if, as it seems – at least until the cata-
strophic flooding towards the end – all that is left are personal memories.
The imbrication of different times in Água, other than in Ponta Gea then,
does not take recourse on historical dates or events, but rather on a direct
and sustained dialectic between different cognitive approaches to the world
and reality be they fundamentally urban or rural, foreign or local, ancient
or modern. The dialogue between the two elders, Ryo and Laama, is per-
haps the clearest expression of such dialectic, but it is always augmented by
the interaction between all the other characters among themselves as well,
and that between human beings and the rest of nature, be it expressed in a
faith on some magical procedure or other, or on more pragmatic, if equally
illusory, forms of control.
The focus on water is common to both novels and, even though it also
registers at the symbolic level, the actual, material presence (or absence) of
water is far more acute. It would be a mistake to think that Água would be,
much more than Ponta Gea, the one novel where an ecocritical perspective
is strongest. For sure, in the earlier novel both the initial drought as well
as the final flooding are catastrophic and as such could be said to outdo
the references in the latter novel. And yet, in Ponta Gea not only is water
everywhere, it inaugurates the narrative: ‘É a primeira e mais persistente
lembrança: a água como substância da cidade’ [It is the first and most per-
sistent memory: water as the substance of the city].19 Moreover, that first
chapter, aptly titled ‘Cidade Líquida’ [Liquid City] not only serves to
19 Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea, 11.

reflect on the omnipresence of water, on water as the very foundation and

ontology of the city, it also moves further beyond the opposition between
urban and rural space. Indeed, even between solid and liquid space, as the
rain and the sea cause massive flooding on the coast and a dissolution of
all kinds of borders, spatial as well as temporal:
Hoje é como se desde sempre aquele espaço tivesse sido uma ruína. Não houve noite,
não houve ontem, não houve mar, desde sempre só esta ruína filha do tempo. […]
Hoje, se por qualquer motivo nos calhasse lá voltar, veríamos com estupor nem sequer
haver lugar, ser tudo mar.20
[Today it is as if that space had always been a ruin. There was no night, there was no
yesterday, there was no sea, always already this ruin a daughter of time. […] Today, if
by any chance we would return, we would see with surprise that there was not even
a place, that the sea was all.]
The two novels still diverge in some important ways: Ponta Gea is nar-
rated from a personal and individual perspective, so that even when refer-
ring to collective experiences, its tone is much closer to that of a memoir,
whereas in Água the narrative perspective shifts among the characters even if
only through the filter of the omniscient narrator. Also, even though water
in Ponta Gea can also assume catastrophic proportions, it is represented as
the one defining element of life, be it in an urban or a rural context. And it
is inextricably linked with memory and, through it, with identity. In some
cases it can be said to constitute a form of violent memory itself as when
the narrator mentions a sudden torrential downpour that had followed
upon a day of excessive heat and which makes him as a young boy get out
of his room to fetch some water to drink and allows him to overhear the
adults talking about ‘Zerofor’, a sort of mythical would-be assassin.21 In
Água, though, water is from the very beginning viewed as something sin-
ister and to be feared:
Um conselho: nunca confiem na água. […] a água tem o horror do vazio, o afã de
esbater diferenças […]. De nada nos vale medir a hidra: onde andará a cabeça da
água, aquela que urde o perverso plano?22
20 Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea, 19–21.

22 Borges Coelho, Água, 9.
[One advice: never trust water. […] water abhors the void, it strives to blur differences
[…] There is no point in measuring the hydra: where could be the head of water, the
one who plots the perverse plan?]
Only at the novel’s conclusion will the full impact of such suspicions
become clear as when the catastrophic flooding is described as if it were
indeed a colossal many-headed snake. It is as if in Água Borges Coelho
had himself unleashed a strong rage directed towards the implacable vio-
lence that nature can visit on human beings and how easily it can destroy
all their wanton dreams of conquest. But of course, what Borges Coelho
denounces in that novel is not the destructive force assumed by nature
but rather the inability of many human beings to grasp that they too are
part of nature. Ponta Gea, conversely, seems to redress such blindness, by
constantly weaving through the various times and the various narratives,
and reaffirming the power of memory, the persistence of ghosts, and the
slow but sure victory of water: ‘É a água que triunfa. As coisas duras da
cidade – as árvores e as ruas, as casas e as pessoas – afundam lentamente
neste nosso liquido amniótico e ganham a consistência do coral’ [It is the
water that triumphs. The hard city things – the trees and the streets, the
houses and people – drown slowly in this, our amniotic fluid and gain the
consistency of coral].23
By focusing on rural space and rural communities in Água what be-
comes more readily visible is how climate change is tied in with exploit-
ation. Even if Borges Coelho ends up by dissolving any neat dichotomies
between urban and rural – in a sense, all is, or returns to, the rural, and the
city, unlike in Ponta Gea, remains an abstraction – throughout the novel
there is a clear correlation between the exploitation of nature and what is
happening. The foreign engineer, Waaser, comes to represent those forces
that would seek to take advantage of nature, including the native popula-
tion, as he is represented as a neocolonial incarnation of a belief in tech-
nology that fails, at a basic level, to understand the systemic nature of the
forces at play: ‘Para o Engenheiro Waaser o mundo será perfeito quando
os caminhos dos rios forem todos rectos como as fronteiras de África’ [For
Waaser, the engineer, the world will be perfect when all of the river beds

will be as straight as the national borders in Africa].24 Borges Coelho never

comes out directly with a pointed finger at this or that element. With
Waaser this is especially clear. Not only does he personify water, already
even in his name (from the German ‘Wasser’), but specifically by thinking
he has mastery over it, that he can control its flows through the pipes he
builds or administers from the tank trucks, when he pleases – and to whom
he pleases, as he tries to seduce Maara.
As Borges Coelho has stated to Elena Brugioni, he refuses to see his
role as a writer as somehow preaching to, or educating readers,25 so it should
not surprise us that Água eschews any more direct forms of confronting cap-
italist exploitation of nature and the resulting ecological disasters. Opting
rather for an allegorical presentation, Borges Coelho loads up the different
characters with various meanings. Waaser is both a direct representation
of foreign involvement in Mozambique as well as of a damning hubris
based on a belief on technology that can be said to be as blind as that of
the superstitious beliefs of the leader of the shepherds, Praado [meadow].
Both men also share the delusion that they may control water by hoarding
it, be in the tanks the engineer requests from the city, be it in the secret
spring Praado keeps hidden from others.26 So, even though they appear to
represent worlds diametrically opposite, both men also actually come to
signify a common form of blindness. And although Borges Coelho might
remain weary of too explicit a politicization of literature, the problems that
his novels in fact address and expose are unavoidable. The extreme devas-
tation that has been hitting Mozambique in recent years is obviously tied
in to global phenomena and must be understood as such.
Although not an entirely new phenomenon in Mozambique, ‘nat-
ural’ disasters have been increasing of late in both frequency and intensity.

25 ‘Acho que não é papel da literatura dar exemplos. Não creio que o escritor deva
ser um professor – como dizia Chinua Achebe. O papel do escritor não é o de ser
um professor, nem de ser um formador, pois este é o papel das escolas, o papel das
políticas …’ [I think the role of literature is not to give examples. I do not think the
writer should be a teacher – as Chinua Achebe said. The role of the writer is not that
of a teacher or educator, because that is the role of schools, the role of politics …].
João Paulo Borges Coelho in conversation with Elena Brugioni: ‘A literatura e o
léxico da pós-colonialidade: uma conversa com João Paulo Borges Coelho’, 430.
26 Borges Coelho, Água, 150–1.
A report from the World Bank in 2005 highlights the scale of devastation
and suffering endured:
The World Bank notes that natural disasters, along with the social and economic
impact of HIV/AIDS, are one of the main risks to the achievement of Mozambique’s
poverty reduction strategy. From 1965 to 1998, there were twelve major floods, nine
major droughts, and four major cyclone disasters. Droughts, exacerbated by the
impact of the war, have had the most devastating impacts. Four major droughts and
famine between 1980 and 1992 caused an estimated 100,000 deaths.27
The catastrophic results of extreme drought and flooding have further

intensified in the twenty-first century, with extreme disruption and loss
of life caused by the floods of 2000 and 2007. At the moment of writing,
the devastating effects of Tropical Cyclone Idai, which had a first land-
fall on 6 March 2019 and a second one on 15 March, seem to have left
even previous disasters behind. From the various countries directly hit,
Madagascar, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, the latter has been
especially hard hit. Estimates on the number of direct casualties indicate
that over a thousand people have been killed in the area of Beira and the
number of those still at risk is much higher: a BBC report from 21 March
stated that up to 15,000 people were still awaiting rescue, many of them
stranded on top of roofs and other structures.28 Even though a number
of international organizations have rushed to join the effort of trying to
save as many as possible, circumstances far outstrip available resources. As
one survivor, Konde Pereira, has put it, ‘When the cyclone came I was in
my house with my family. We survived but after that the walls and roof
were gone. Then on Sunday the water started coming up from the river.
Everything was taken by the water’.29
27 Peter Wiles, Kerry Selvester, and Lourdes Fidalgo. Learning Lessons from Disaster
Recovery: The Case of Mozambique. 2005, 3.
28 ‘Cyclone Idai: “15,000 people still need to be rescued”’. BBC News: Africa <https://
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47647804> accessed 1 October 2019.
29 Peter Beaumont, ‘“The water took everything”: Buzi evacuees tell of Cyclone Idai
ordeal’, The Guardian (22 March 2019) <https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2019/mar/22/the-water-took-everything-buzi-evacuees-tell-of-
cyclone-idai-ordeal> accessed 1 October 2019.
One could think that by now what Rob Nixon so aptly describes as
slow violence no longer would apply, given the enormity of the disaster, the
news coverage it attracts, the harrowing images that go around the world.
And yet, a sample of the major newspapers in Europe still indicates that
the focus lies elsewhere, in the all-consuming shambles that the political
games being played around the imminent split of the United Kingdom
from the rest of the European Union have become, the not less absurd
presidential quagmire in the United States, or simply sports or the latest
juicy celebrity scandal. In Água, the destructiveness of the flooding waters
is rendered allegorically through the figure of Hydra, the mythical water
snake, but even if it is announced from the very beginning, most of the novel
focuses on lack, rather than excess, of water and the two must necessarily be
understood together. In a recent article on ‘neoliberal hydrofiction’ Sharae
Deckard recalls Fred Pearce’s book When Rivers Run Dry, and especially
its subtitle, that she quotes directly: ‘As climate change intensifies drought
in water-poor zones and flooding in water-rich zones, capitalist cores such
as the USA and industrializing states like China face water scarcity in their
agricultural bread-baskets to the extent that Fred Pearce calls water “the
defining crisis of the twenty-first century”’.30
Deckard starts from the premise that ‘[l]‌ate capitalism is mired in a
crisis of “cheap nature”: the loss of frontiers, in cheap labour, energy, food
and resources that fuelled earlier phases of accumulation’.31 From this per-
spective, both novels by Borges Coelho can be read not just as daring aes-
thetic experiments that question the boundaries between History, memory
and fiction on the one hand, and reality and mythical representation on the
other, but also as forceful registrations of a new type of crisis that Deckard,
after Minqi Li, sees as ‘an epochal crisis of the capitalist world-economy’.32
30 Deckard, ‘Water shocks: Neoliberal Hydrofiction and the crisis of “cheap water”’,
2019; Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry, 2006.
31 Deckard, ‘Water shocks: Neoliberal Hydrofiction …’, 108.
32 Deckard, ‘Water shocks: Neoliberal Hydrofiction …’, 108. Minqi Li, The Rise
of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (London: Pluto Press,
2008). On the notion of ‘registration’ in reference to World-Literature see, for in-
stance, Neil Lazarus, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World
Literature’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46/1 (2011), 122: ‘We are trying to
Before any suspicions of reductionist ideological readings get raised, let

me hasten to add that in no way do the novels simply present such a cri-
tique. In post-conflict societies such as Mozambique, still coping with the
devastating effects of civil war and the multiple forms of violence and de-
privation instantiated through ideological rigidity and an insistence on a
version of Soviet-style socialism that, once independence had been won,
turned more and more inwards in self-justification, it would be naïve at
best, or downright foolish, to claim any such direct and linear reading.33
If for some a materialist reading, such as I propose here, would appear
forced, then perhaps the views offered by Félix Guattari who, in The Three
Ecologies, certainly also distances himself from a Marxist view of the global
crisis he diagnoses, can be of help. Guattari writes:
Although Marx’s own writings still have great value, Marxist discourse has lost its
value. It is up to the protagonists of social liberation to remodel the theoretical refer-
ences so as to illuminate a possible escape route out of contemporary history, which
is more nightmarish than ever. It is not only species that are becoming extinct but
also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity. A stifling cloak of silence
has been thrown over the emancipatory struggles of women, and of the new prole-
tariat: the unemployed, the ‘marginalized’, immigrants.34
explore the suggestion that “world literature” be understood as the literature that
registers and encodes the social logic of modernity.’
33 Although this is not the place to embark on a discussion of the complexities at
stake, from the initial anti-imperial struggle, to the one-party state after independ-
ence, followed by an extremely prolonged civil war, and a more recent turn to ram-
pant neo-liberal capitalism, this does not mean they can be ignored. Some useful
reading, beyond now classic works of historiography, would include work by Bjørn
Enge Bertelsen such as ‘“It will rain until we are in power!” Floods, elections and
memory in Mozambique’, in Harri Englund and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, Rights
and the Politics of Recognition in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2004), as well as
Jason Sumich’s ‘Politics After the Time of Hunger in Mozambique: A Critique
of Neo-Patrimonial Interpretation of African Elites’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 34/1 (2008), 115–25. A brief synopsis is provided by Michael G. Panzer
in ‘Socialist Politics in Lusophone Africa’ in Thomas Spear, ed., Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of African History <https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/> accessed
14 August 2019.
34 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 41–2.
Please note that Guattari makes an all-important distinction between

Marx’s writings and the subsequent Marxist discourse. Also, it should be
noted that the French original was published in 1989, the year that would
also see the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November, and with it the beginning
of the collapse of left totalitarian regimes. As such, Guattari’s disillusion-
ment with the left and its failure to deliver emancipation, can be seen it its
proper context. Moving forward to today, even though one could say that
the failures of large sectors of the Left have only increased – and perhaps
Mozambique’s turn from hard-core socialism to extreme neo-liberalism
can be viewed as symptomatic of such failure – I would argue that the ex-
ponential rise in inequality has brought a renewed need to return to a cri-
tique of capitalism. What cannot be ignored though, is how both novels,
at their core, offer a scathing critique of inequality and the resulting suf-
fering. In Água the effects of inequality are pervasive and only accentuated
by the extended drought. One could say most, if not all characters – with
the possible exception of the foreign engineer whose position is clearly
one of power, even more, reminiscent of old-style colonialist power, than
new-fangled neocolonial attitudes – experience precarity as a condition
of their lives. The figure of Maara, the young woman who is central to the
narrative, combines several forms of precarity: as a poor, rural worker, and
as a woman and single mother. But she is by no means alone, even if in the
end only she and Ryo are the only ones who, apparently, get lost and might
not escape the rushing flood water. Água can yield many readings, some of
them probably contradictory, if not mutually exclusive. But I see little to
be gained from any reading that would ignore or downplay the political
import of both novels, starting with their very form as allegories and their
use of irrealism, which I would like to consider now.
To claim Água as an allegorical narrative, with its use of symbolic
names for all the characters, and with its clear allusion to Greek myth in
the figure of Hydra, should raise no objections. To do so for Ponta Gea,
however, might raise some critical eyebrows; yet, as I will argue, that novel
is as allegorical as Água, even if in different ways. Furthermore, the alle-
gorical mode of both narratives, I want to claim, is part and parcel of their
ecocritical stand. Fredric Jameson of course was right, in connecting allegory
with the nation in his highly polemic essay ‘Third-World Literature in the
Age of Multi-National Capitalism’: ‘Third-world texts, even those which

are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic ne-
cessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the
story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embat-
tled situation of the public third-world culture and society’.35 If anything,
I would contend that this applies to much of literature and is not, in any
way, specific to texts produced in developing countries. At the same time
though, I would like to make clear that what I understand by this is that
both novels are implicated in both registering the specific societal condi-
tions of Mozambique (or if one wants, of a part of Mozambique at least) and
the profound inequality that so characterizes that (among others) nation.
Even though this might seem redundant or just too obvious, I still find it
must be made clear so as to avoid any possible confusions, especially that
of pretending to see any alignment between the novels and would-be na-
tional representations. Neither novel engages in an imagining of the nation
even as it does offer readers windows into what forms the community, be
it the devastating conditions of the present or the links, often forgotten
or suppressed with the various pasts.
Clearly, my suggestion to read Ponta Gea as an allegory owes much to
Jameson’s view, just cited, that in such texts ‘the story of the private indi-
vidual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public
third-world culture and society’. Perhaps the most obvious example of this
would be the figure of Zerofor, who is feared by all as a ruthless killer, and
yet is also shown to be a famished and hunted human being, desperate
to regain his humanity and steal a shirt to cover himself with.36 Even the
‘name’ given to this character (presumably from the English?), is already
35 Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Age of Multi-National Capitalism’,

Social Text 15 (1986), 69. Much has been written, mostly in opposition, on this essay.
However, even if some of its points remain arguable – for instance, the very nomen-
clature of ‘Third-World Literature’, as Jameson was well aware of – the link between
literary form and political ideology is what matters here. For a most lucid ana-
lysis of the polemics involved see Neil Lazarus, ‘Fredric Jameson on “Third-World
Literature”: a defence’, in The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 89–113.
an indication of his allegorical status. It indicates a void, a form of noth-

ingness, an absence that is excessively present. Such a notion of emptiness
is key in both novels and I will come back to it in the conclusion. For the
moment, let it suffice recalling how Zerofor runs away and hides. First by
blackening his body with oil, making it both darker and slippery, and later,
when covered with his own blood from all the mosquitoes, with a further
mud cover – yes, a turning to nature in a literal sense. Zerofor makes him-
self literally and symbolically into a void before he returns, trying to steal
a shirt – a sort of return to the human condition as well, and kills again.
This excessive presence and absence of Zerofor has its counterpart in the
excessive absence of water – the prolonged drought – and its subsequent,
overwhelming, return as Hydra.
Had Zerofor been the only allegorical instance in the novel it already
would be sufficient to let us understand how Borges Coelho uses it so as to
have us reflect on the gap between reality and perception as well as on the
fundamental inequality that pervades society and which the novel critic-
ally reflects. Indeed, one could say that Zerofor performs the embodiment
of a phantasmatic logic pervasive to the whole inasmuch as he is both a
projection of the fears of the Portuguese colonists and a kind of revenant
that moves at night and comes back from the other side of the border to
haunt them. But of course it is not just Zerofor who functions allegorically.
The novel’s narrator, whose process of growing up we are given to watch as
he retraces his own loss of innocence, in which the experience of freedom
during vacation is soon tempered with the witnessing of death in the form
of a drowned man:
Ainda inocentes, avançamos para o centro deste espaço mágico […] É nesta altura
que damos com o corpo estendido no chão de matope. […] Vamos calados e com frio,
culpados, com a sensação de termos perdido, algures no caminho, a capa protectora
da nossa inocência. […] Mais tarde, no escuro do quarto, com restos de matope nas
unhas e os olhos muito abertos, dar-me-ei conta, pela primeira vez, de ter trazido
comigo a aldeia, o vasto mundo, o afogado.37
[Still innocent, we go forward into this magic space […] That is when we come upon
the body lying on the mud ground. […] We walk in silence and cold, guilty, with the
37 Borges Coelho, Ponta Gea, 67–87.

sensation of having lost, somewhere on the way, the protective cover of our inno-
cence. […] Later, in the darkness of my room, with remnants of mud in my fingernails
and eyes wide open, I will realize, for the first time, that I had brought with me the
village, the vast world, the drowned man.]
Witnessing death – and its inescapable and constant link with water –
moves the narrator from the position of being a single individual, and a
child, into that of a member of the collective, as space conflates and both
village and the world have come to be in his bedroom, along with the corpse
of the drowned man. At this point it might be useful to bring Michael
Löwy’s concept of ‘critical irrealism’ into play, already alluded to at the
outset. In ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism’ Löwy sets out his concept
to function along the notion of ‘critical realism’, which, as he notes, ‘has
a long tradition in Marxist and radical literary studies’.38 As Löwy sees it,
‘critical irrealism’ would expand on that tradition, by taking into account
the countless works that do not follow the strictures of realism, yet are
also sharply critical of societal ills: ‘If the dominant ideology of bourgeois
society, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, celebrated the virtues of
economic progress, of technology, mechanization, and automation, and
of the unlimited expansion of industrial production and consumption,
these artists voiced a radically dissident attitude’.39 Even if one is prepared
to say that the child would most probably imagine, or remember, seeing
the corpse of the drowned man, imagining that the village and the whole
world also had come to be in the bedroom goes a step further. The con-
flation effected by the narrative is crucial for the reader to understand the
traumatic extent of the change effected by the sight of death, but it clearly
goes beyond realist norms. This, I would suggest, is precisely the type of
‘critical irrealism’ Löwy identifies. But that conflation of spaces and worlds
takes many other forms throughout the novel; as such it must be understood
not just as an occasional, perhaps too rhetorically charged expression, but
rather as one of the key defining characteristics of the novel – indeed of
both novels. Before proceeding further and so as to avoid giving the im-
pression such a reading is but a mere caprice, let me focus on the traumatic
38 Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism’, 193.

39 Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism’, 206.
moment when the narrator discovers the corpse, face down in the water,
already surrounded by crabs:
Quanto a mim, estabeleço desde logo uma relação muito íntima com o afogado. Sei,
repito, que no futuro a sua imagem me visitará os sonhos com frequência: a mesma
expressão hierática e ausente atrás das pálpebras inchadas, a mesma posição que assume
agora no matope, embora vogando num espaço indefinido e escuro, idêntico àquele
onde se movem os Astros. Sim, um astronauta que se afasta lentamente em direcção
ao largo, ao âmago da noite cósmica, mas cuja face está sempre perto de mim.40
[As for me, I immediately establish a very intimate relationship with the drowned
man. I know, I repeat, that in the future his image will frequently visit my dreams: the
same hieratic and absent expression from behind the swollen eyelids, the same pos-
ition he now holds in the mud, although floating in an indefinite and dark space,
identical to that where the stars move. Yes, an astronaut who slowly recedes away,
towards the core of cosmic night, but whose face is always near me.]
As is obvious, here too we are given a fantastical description of the

deceased’s body meant to stress not only its haunting nature – and it should
be noted that the narrative avoids any kind of melodramatic or horrific
description – and of the way in which the body and the water merge at
the same time that the water and the night sky merge, the same way in
which the image of the drowned man will never again cease to be part of
the narrator. Once again, the phantasmatic logic is at work. However, it
is not predicated on embodiment; if anything at all, on its opposite: the
conflation of spaces is also a negation of their specificity, the identification,
unlike in the process once described by Claude Lefort to explain the en-
croachment of totalitarianism,41 is not so much of one body with another
(the single Party with the ‘united people’ as in so much state propaganda

41 Claude Lefort, in Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988,
13), writes: “The theory – or if not the theory, the spirit of the movement [modern
totalitarianism], as in Nazism – may well turn everything to account as circum-
stances demand, but it can never be challenged by experience. State and civil so-
ciety are assumed to have merged; this is brought about through the agency of the
ubiquitous party which permeates everything with the dominant ideology and
hands down power’s orders, as circumstances demand, and through the formation
of a multiplicity of microbodies (organizations of all kinds in which an artificial
all over the world, including in Mozambique, whether during the colonial
era or afterwards), but rather the joining together of various ways of be-
coming other, of becoming the other, of dissolving any fixed boundaries of
identity, the sea flowing into the muddy pool, and turning into the night
sky where the stars move.
The narrator of Ponta Gea also figures as an allegory. Just as the process
of his growing up in itself is allegorized through and through, so the form
of the Bildungsroman itself comes to be seen as an allegory.42 Reading Ponta
Gea and Água as expressions of ‘critical irrealism’ or, as I would suggest, as
constituted by allegorical realism, is not to ignore that they are also intensely
self-reflexive and metanarrative. Nor should we see that as strange at all.43
The type of allegory deployed by Borges Coelho is far from the traditional.
In Água, it moves the reader to understand that the events narrated and
the particular individual actions are not only always part of a whole but
also that they represent a collectivity even as they register reality at the
individual level. In the end, readers are asked to let go of any attachment
to the distinction between individual and the collectivity, not because of
some forced, totalitarian, ideology, but because of the way in which the
socialization and relations of power conforming to the general model are repro-
duced). A logic of identification is set in motion, and is governed by the representa-
tion of power as embodiment.”
Along these lines one should also see Ewa Ziarek’s Ethics of Dissensus, in which she
draws on both Claude Lefort and Julia Kristeva, to analyse the way in which such a
‘phantasmatic logic of the reincorporation of power’ gets deployed to further fascism
and racism. Ewa Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the
Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 120.
42 On the question of the Bildungsroman outside of its traditional, European and
bourgeois settings, see for instance Jed Etsy’s Unseasonable Youth: Modernism,
Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012) and Tobias Boes’ Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the
Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
43 In a lucid and probing essay Derek Attridge questions the relationship between
allegory and self-reflective narratives, having in mind, especially, the work of
J. M. Coetzee. As he states in ‘Against Allegory’: ‘allegorical reading of the trad-
itional kind has no place for this uncertainty and open-endedness, this sense that
the failure to interpret can be as important, and quite as emotionally powerful,
portion of the world we get to glimpse, is in itself representative of a much

larger scale of events. In Ponta Gea, where the entire narrative is presented
from a singular perspective, the allegorizing process is, if anything, even
more complex. Bereft of the device of the immediately symbolic names,
Maara, Ryo, Laama and all the others, indeed, even bereft of a name at all
as the narrator’s name is never mentioned, Ponta Gea relies much more
on the strategy of creating scenes that, in spite of, or perhaps precisely
because of, their singularity, assume an allegorical function beyond their
specific singularity.
The process of dissolving boundaries, repeatedly exemplified by the way
in which water’s very fluidity annuls set categories, is extended throughout
the two novels to encompass all. Instead of setting up some rigid opposition
between nature on the one hand, and humanity on the other, or between
nature and some ‘good’ people in touch with the natural world, and others
whose use of technology would threaten our world, Borges Coelho not
only resists such an idealization process, but instead sets out to dissolve any
set antinomies between nature and technology. A key figuration of this
symbiotic process is the very sound of the ever-present mobile phone that
Ervio [grass] has given to Maara [sea] so the two lovers can communicate,
even though he has gone to the city to work and Maara has stayed behind
in the village with her one young daughter and her aged mother. The sound
made by the phone is always represented as if it were emitted by a cricket.
Thus, that one, apparently most technologically advanced and unnatural,
means of communicating across the barriers of space (and time if we con-
sider the disparate levels of development), is also always represented as if it
were part of primordial nature. The rapid spread and use of mobile phones
In Africa is an important question that raises in itself a number of issues.44
as success would be’. See Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 48.
44 The subject of mobile telephony in Africa has been approached by an increasing
number of researchers and journalists, usually from an economic perspective and
with a majority of jubilant views on how Africa really is a model for global capitalism.
A subtle take on the issue of the imbrications between capital and mobile telephony
in the semi-periphery that takes another route is expressed by Phillip Rothwell in
‘Vodafone Portugal: Postcolonial Ethics in a Mobile Age’, in P. de Medeiros, ed.,
Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht: Portuguese Studies Center,
Some are patent in Água, such as the gap between urban and rural condi-
tions of life, the systemic inequality and the disproportionality of resources
between men and women, even the question of how technology can be
understood, in some instances, not so much as a form of development, but
as a reiteration of the archaic, that is, of the realm of the supernatural. This
is directly affirmed once by Laago [lake] to convince Praado [meadow] to
assault Maara and steal her mobile phone: ‘[s]‌ão instrumentos demoníacos,
chegaram aqui na altura em que o Engenheiro chegou. Pergunto-me se não
terá sido ele que os trouxe e espalhou; pergunto-me se não terão sido eles a
causa de todo este castigo que se abate sobre nós’ [They are devilish tools,
they arrived here when the Engineer arrived. I wonder if it was not him
who brought and distributed them; I wonder if they are not the cause of
all this punishment that has come over us].45
Although the shepherd, with his distrust of machines and change,
might have been a logical candidate for expressing such superstitious beliefs,
Borges Coelho carefully avoids that, since to do so would simply reinstate
the type of dichotomy he is at pains to avoid. Indeed, Borges Coelho is
careful not to attribute any such feelings to any of the characters in Água,
not even to Laago, who knows fully well his insinuations are simply a
perfidious attempt to exploit the shepherd’s fears, including his distrust
of white people, so as to better manipulate him and enlist his unwitting
2007). For a detailed analysis of the spread of mobile telephony in Africa that pro-
vides much comparative data and, although not quite critical, goes beyond the mere
celebratory, see Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti, ‘Mobile Phones and Economic
Development in Africa’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24/3. Note for instance,
how the authors, not unlike Borges Coelho, refuse simple dichotomies and insist on
linking the individual to the collective in their analysis (207): “Mobile telephony has
brought new possibilities to the continent. Across urban– rural and rich–poor divides,
mobile phones connect individuals to individuals, information, markets, and services. In
Mali, residents of Timbuktu can call relatives living in the capital city of Bamako – or
relatives in France. In Ghana, farmers in Tamale are able to send a text message to learn
corn and tomato prices in Accra, over 400 kilometers away. In Niger, day laborers are able
to call acquaintances in Benin to find out about job opportunities without making the
US$40 trip. In Malawi, those affected by HIV and AIDS can receive text messages daily,
reminding them to take their medicines on schedule. Citizens in countries as diverse as
Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique are able to report violent confrontations via text mes-
sage to a centralized server that is viewable, in real time, by the entire world” (Aker, and
Mbiti, ‘Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa’, 207).
help in the vain attempt at controlling Maara, whom he had already pre-
viously assaulted.
One of the most innovative elements of both novels is precisely this
symbiotic relationship between all forms of being, from the mythical such
as the Hydra, that, however enigmatic and as if omnipotent still issues,
as if she were born, forth from a woman, Heera,46 to the technical such
as Ervio’s Landrover, the mobile phone that carries human voices across
space and time, or even the machines in the city that register water levels
and whose print outs themselves are referred, as their letters in black ink
would be furious tears in what is described as ‘a loucura das máquinas’
[the madness of the machines].47 In the end, the flood annuls everything
and renders even advanced technology void: ‘acabaram-se de vez aquelas
feitiçarias, as pequenas caixas de segredos estão vazias, nada dentro delas,
nada, nada’ [those witch spells were finally over, the little boxes of secrets
are empty, there is nothing inside them, nothing, nothing].48 What is re-
markable about such a position that refuses any normative boundaries be-
tween different forms of being is its affirmation of life and its injunction
to perceive the world as one system, rather than as a field of opposites.
Borges Coelho neither idolizes tradition nor rejects modernity, insisting,
rather, that we learn to see how they flow into each other, and out of each
other, and how even time takes part in such an ebb and flow through the
effects of memory. Likewise, I would argue, the novels register, and ask us
to reflect on, the history of combined and uneven development leading
up to the current catastrophic moment we are living now, be it understood
in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory or of Guattari’s
proposed ‘ecosophy’.49
46 The description of events in Chapter 127 is made to give the impression that Heera
is indeed giving birth and that Maara comes to help her in the last moments.
Besides the myth of Hydra, of course, there are many other legends concerning
water spirits, invariably female, and it should be noted that Heera is presented as a
liminal figure herself and that Maara’s own name is indicative of the sea.
49 See Immanuel Wallerstein’s own brief overview of his theoretical work in World-
Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Besides the book on The Three Ecologies already mentioned, see also Guattari’s
In conclusion, I will just try a brief reflection on the importance of the

ends of both novels. Both are like a mise en abyme of their respective narra-
tives, at the same time that they constitute double, or triple, allegories: of
realism or ‘critical irrealism’, of the very process of telling, and of time. In the
wake of the flood Ervio continues his desperate search for Maara, who, as
with Ryo, has disappeared. The entire narrative had been built on dialogue,
in the incessant dialogue between Ryo and Laama always intercalated with
the unfolding of events, a dialectical situation itself in dialectic relation to
the rest of the narrative. Yet, in the end, even dialogue has come to be seen
as impossible. Ryo has disappeared, Maara will not answer Ervio’s call, and
Ervio ‘perdeu a esperança de dialogar com a gente que aqui está’ [has lost
hope of dialoguing with the people there]. It is as if time has stood still (‘o
tempo já não corre’).50 Ervios’ repeated agonizing questions, over the radio,
to the search and rescue helicopter, whether Maara had been seen, does not
surprise the villagers. But the cause for such a state of affairs might surprise
the reader: ‘E os outros já não se surpreendem: é Ervio criando histórias
onde as histórias terminaram’ [And the others no longer are surprised: it
is Ervio creating stories where the stories have already ended].51 So, one
way of understanding the conclusion would be to entertain the infinity
of narrative as even though time has stopped flowing and dissolved into
nothing, narrative will still go forth even after the very end of narrative.
In Ponta Gea, it is the entire last chapter that must be read as yet an-
other allegory of realism, of the narrative process and of the melting or the
drowning of time as the past, and specifically the image of the drowned man,
returns yet again. The chapter, significantly, is titled ‘Rumores Brancos’ in
direct reference to the iconoclastic and anticolonial first novel of Almeida
Faria – published in 1962 when he was nineteen and just after the begin-
ning of the colonial war in Angola.52 As if by a sleigh of hand the narrator
programmatic essay ‘Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales’ in Le Monde

Diplomatique, October 1992, 26–7, in which he calls directly for a change of men-
tality, and ‘the necessity of founding an “ecosophy” that would articulate environ-
mental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology’.
52 Almeida Faria, Rumor Branco [White Rumor] (Lisboa: Portugália, 1962).
of Ponta Gea, who must be approximately nineteen himself, having just

finished secondary school and spending one extra year with Latin lessons
because of having failed that exam, was a version of Faria. And as if the
chapter – with its deeply ‘critical irreal’ construction and presentation of
reality as both haunting and absurd, and its reference to the mystery sur-
rounding the Cargo ship Angoche, rumoured to have been assaulted by the
armed faction of the Portuguese Communist party (ARA), and found on
fire adrift on the high seas in 1971, its entire crew and one lone passenger
missing – was also a sort of double of Faria’s book. A book, which, in yet
another abyssal, self-reflective and allegorical step, is given to the young nar-
rator by the Latin teacher. The whole chapter revolves around two cases, that
of the as yet unsolved mystery surrounding the fate of the Angoche, and the
suspicious death, labelled suicide, of a young woman, Maria Teresa. What
might seem to a casual reader simply a strange, quaint, deluded tendency
to believe in conspiracies on the part of the eccentric Latin teacher, reveals
itself as actually based on reality, comprising both the factual events as well
as the stories constructed around them to try to explain the unexplainable.
Just as the narrator suspects his teacher might just want to ‘suspender o
tempo’ [suspend time],53 so too the narrator blends past, present, and future
in a doubling of one allegory within yet another, calling on memory as a
guarantee of the future, evoking both Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘Angel
of History’ as well as Wim Wender’s Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of
Desire] (1987).54 All becomes dark and the school empty. The narrator feels
a need to ‘celebrar o exame e as coisas que se perdem para sempre’ [to cele-
brate the exam and the things one loses forever] before he can leave and
do so ‘como o anjo novo, olhando por cima do ombro a minha cidade’ [as
the new angel, looking over my shoulder at my city].55

54 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1969]),
253–64.
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Notes on Contributors
DAVID BROOKSHAW is an emeritus professor at the University of

Bristol. He is the author of various academic studies, including Race and
Color in Brazilian Literature, Paradise Betrayed: Brazilian Literature of
the Indian, and Perceptions of China in Modern Portuguese Literature,
as well as numerous articles, book chapters and co-edited studies on
Brazilian, Luso-African and Luso-Asian themes. He has translated the
work of a number of Lusophone writers into English and has organized
anthologies, including Visions of China – Stories from Macau, a collec-
tion of stories and chronicles by José Rodrigues Miguéis under the title
of The Polyhedric Mirror – Tales of American Life, and a selection of the
short stories by Onésimo Almeida under the title of Tales from the Tenth
Island. African authors he has translated include Mia Couto and Paulina
Chiziane. His translation of Mia Couto’s novel, Woman of the Ashes, was
published in April 2018.
ELENA BRUGIONI is Assistant Professor in African Literatures

and Postcolonial Theory at the Department of Literary Theory of
the University of Campinas (Brazil) and a lecturer for the Graduate
Programme in Literary Theory and History at Unicamp. She has con-
ducted research in the fields of comparative African literatures, Indian
Ocean studies and postcolonial theory and published widely on
Mozambican literatures, contemporary African authors, the histor-
ical novel in contemporary African literatures, Indian Ocean litera-
tures, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of the books, Mia
Couto. Representação, Historia(s) e Pós-colonialidade (Húmus, 2012) and
Literaturas Africanas Comparadas. Paradigmas críticos e representações em
contraponto (Editora Unicamp, 2019). Her current research interests in-
clude alternative critical cartographies and theoretical paradigms for the
study of contemporary African literatures and visual narratives in a post-
colonial comparative perspective.
250 Notes on Contributors
NAZIR AHMED CAN is Professor of African Literatures at the Federal

University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a doctorate in Literary
Theory and Comparative Literature from the Autonomous University
of Barcelona and completed his post-doctorate at São Paulo University.
His present research projects, which analyse the relationship between lit-
erature, institution and geography in Angola and Mozambique, are also
funded by CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological
Development) (Productivity Researcher Grant, Level 2) and by FAPERJ
(Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation). Besides his activity as vice-
president of the Brazilian Association of African Studies, he is co-editor
of the journal Mulemba and assistant editor of the journal Diadorim. He
has published several articles on African literatures in the French and
Portuguese languages, is the author of the book Discurso e poder nos ro-
mances de João Paulo Borges Coelho (Alcance Editores, 2014) and is a co-
author of the collective volumes Indicities/Indices/Indícios. Hybridations
problématiques dans les littératures de l’Océan Indien (Éditions K’A,
2010) and Visitas a João Paulo Borges Coelho: leituras, diálogos e futuros
(Colibri, 2017).
Jessica Falconi is an assistant researcher at the Center for African

and Development Studies of the University of Lisbon and a member of
the Globalization and Development research group. She works within the
thematic line Lusophone Space: Institutions, Identities and Agency, with
a project on the Lusophone narratives of the Indian Ocean. She holds a
PhD in Iberian Studies from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. Her
dissertation explored the representations of Mozambique Island in co-
lonial and postcolonial poetry from Mozambique and was published in
Italy in 2008. In 2018 she was Visiting Professor at Universitat Autónoma
de Barcelona and coordinator of the Portuguese Language Center
Camões. In 2017 she concluded a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Between 2007 and
2013 she taught Lusophone literatures at the University of Naples. She
co-edited five books and published various articles and book chapters
within the field of Lusophone African Literature.
ORLANDO GROSSEGESSE holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Romance

Philology & Communication Science (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität,
Munich, 1986; 1989). He has been a scholar at the Universidade do Minho
(UM, Braga) since 1990. From 2004 onwards, he has been an associate
professor (tenured). From 2016 to 2019, he was director of the Research
Centre CEHUM. He is editor of the journal Diacrítica. His areas of re-
search include German, Portuguese and Spanish literature and culture
studies; comparative literature and culture; and translation studies. He
has written books on the works of Eça de Queiroz (Stuttgart, 1991) and
Saramago (Berlin, 1999; reed. 2009) and has co-edited several volumes,
including, with Henry Thorau, À procura da Lisboa africana (2009) and,
with Mário Matos, Zonas de Contacto: Estado Novo/III Reich (1933–1945)
(2011); Intercultural Mnemo-Graphies (2012).
PAOLO ISRAEL is an associate professor in the History Department

of the University of the Western Cape. He has researched and written
in the fields of performance, orality, and magic, with a focus on nor-
thern Mozambique. His monograph In Step with the Times: Mapiko
Masquerades of Mozambique (Athens: Ohio University Press,
2014) charts the twentieth-century trajectory of a tradition of masquer-
ading, focusing on performance and political engagements. He edited a
special issue of the journal Kronos, ‘The Liberation Script in Mozambican
History’ (2013) and Out of History: Re-imagining South African Pasts
(Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016), with Jung Ran Forte and Leslie Witz.
He is part of the editorial team of Kronos and the advisory board of the
Journal of Southern African Studies. At the core of his current interests is
the issue of experimental historical writing. He is currently busy with two
projects: The Magical Lions of Muidumbi, a polyphonic narrative eth-
nography; and Mueda Massacre: Myth and Event, a history of the Mueda
massacre of 16 June 1960.
ANA MAFALDA LEITE is Associate Professor of African Literature at the

University of Lisbon and na associate researcher at the Centre of African,
Asian and Latin-American Studies at the same university. Her areas of
research include Indian Ocean studies, African cultures and literatures,
252 Notes on Contributors
oral literature and postcolonial studies. Her recent publications include

Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique
(ed. 2014), Speaking the Postcolonial Nation: Interviews with Writers from
Angola and Mozambique (ed. 2014), and Cenografias Pós-Coloniais &
Estudos sobre Literatura Moçambicana (2018).
PAULO DE MEDEIROS is Professor of English and Comparative Literary

Studies at the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom. From 1998
to 2013 he held the Chair of Portuguese Studies at Utrecht University.
He has edited Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht,
2007). His most recent book, O Silêncio das Sereias: Ensaio sobre O Livro
do Desassossego (Lisbon, 2015) received the PEN Portugal prize for best
critical book in 2016. He is currently working on a study of Postimperial
Europe.
RUI GONÇALVES MIRANDA is an associate professor in the Department

of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham.
He was a post-doctoral research fellow (Fundação para a Ciência e a
Tecnologia) at the Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (Universidade do
Minho) and has taught Comparative Literature and Cinema (with a
particular focus in works in Portuguese) in Nottingham and in Queen
Mary College, University of London. He has published on literature
(poetry and short stories), film, critical theory, art and politics, and post-
conflict studies. His most recent publications include the monograph
Personal Infinitive: inflecting Fernando Pessoa (Critical, Cultural and
Communications Press, 2017) and the articles ‘Our Beloved Month of
August: Between the filming of the real and the reality of filming’ (in
Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, I. B. Tauris,
2018) and ‘Autoridades, forças e violências em “Casas de ferro”, de João
Paulo Borges Coelho’ (Remate de Males, 2018).
EMANUELLE SANTOS is Lecturer in Modern Languages at the

University of Birmingham (UK). Her principal research areas are cultures
of the Portuguese-speaking world with an emphasis on African countries
and Brazil; comparative literature; postcolonial studies; decolonizing
practices; and theories of world(-)literatures with special attention to their

intersections with race, gender, sexuality, and memory. Her publications
include ‘National Representation in the Age of Transnational Film: A
Lusophone Story’ (2018), ‘From Lusotropicalism to Lusofonia: Brasil–
Angola Cultural exchanges under the sign of coloniality’ (2018); ‘Guia
prático para (des)construção de comunidades imaginadas: A crítica
pós-colonial a partir do pensamento de fronteira em Campo de Trânsito
de João Paulo Borges Coelho’ (2017); ‘O pós-colonial entre Norte e
Sul: formulações teóricas, implicações políticas na batalha pela “arma da
teoria”’ (2013).
Index
João Paulo Borges Coelho (= JPBC) is not indexed; only his works (original titles in
Portuguese) and, to a lesser extent, biographical elements are included in the index.
Likewise, Mozambique is not indexed; only its regions, cities, etc., are included.
Contributing authors to this Companion only appear if authors of other quoted works.
Institutions, political parties, etc., are indexed as abbreviations or acronyms.
Abercorn (Mbala) 174 Arquivo (journal) 37, 57, 61

Adam, Yussuf 51 askaris 164–5, 170–1, 174
Afrika Luftschiff (L-59) see Zeppelin see also Lettow-Vorbeck
Agamben, Giorgio 71, 79–80, 180 authorities 75, 115–19, 121, 124, 128
agency 74–5
Água. Uma novela rural ( JPBC) 5, 8, Bakhtin, Mikhail 73, 75, 172
219–30, 232, 234, 241–3 Baltazar, Rui 58
Agualusa, José Eduardo 212–13 Barthes, Roland 114, 125, 127
AHM (Arquivo Histórico de Basic Techniques of Exploitation of
Moçambique) 52, 57, 61, 87 Natural Resources see
Akapwitchi Akaporo ( JPBC) 47–9 TBARN
Albasini, João 82–3, 152, 160 Basto, Maria-Benedita 82
allegorical realism 219, 243 Beira (city) 3, 5, 37, 38, 84, 210
allegories 70, 220, 244, 232, 234–6, 239 Benjamin, Walter 72, 192, 198, 244
marine 124 Berlin 171, 234
amnesia 88, 226 Bhabha, Homi, K. 3, 74–5, 172
Angola 212, 243 Bible 76–7
animals 134, 144, 146–8 Bildungsroman 239
animation film 50 biography ( JPBC) 9, 37–40,
anthropomorphism 109 49–50, 57–8
anti-hero 72, 86, 154 Boers 167, 171
appeals 73 Second Boer War 166
archive(s) 6, 37, 86, 181, 183, 190, 213–15 Bolt, William 112
closed 61, 63 Botha, Louis 166–7
colonial 44, 58 borders 73, 81, 93, 132, 137, 147, 236
device 192 Bradford, UK 9, 58
Frelimo 51, 61 Bragança, Aquino de 40, 41
labyrinthine 83 Braudel, Fernand 113
minor 173, 175 Brazil 170
see also AHM Brito, Luís de 46
256 Index
Cacciari, Massimo 80 colonialism 5, 62, 153, 157, 189,

Cahora Bassa dam 52 207, 209–10
Calvino, Italo 82 Britain 154
Camões, Luís de 114 colonizer/colonized (dualism) 74–5,
Campo de Transito ( JPBC) 4, 72, 199, 207, 212
78–81, 84 exceptional 153
Can, Nazir Ahmed 207, 223 German 154–5, 171
cannibalism 145 Portuguese 43, 74, 207, 209–11
capitalism 41, 43, 204, 208, 216, resistance to 43, 52
221–2, 232 revisionism 171
colonial 211 see also neocolonialism
crisis 232 comic strip 47–50, 63, 159
multi-national 235 communities 73, 85, 119–20
Carnation Revolution 9, 38 communitas 120
cartography 85, 107–8, 116, 135–7 rural 229
colonizer’s 108 Coquery-Vidrovitch, Cathérine 39
geocentric 173 COREMO (Comité Revolucionário de
internal 135 Moçambique) 45, 54
touristic 12 corruption, moral 37, 57
see also geography cosmopolitanism 82, 175
CEA (Centro de Estudos Africanos) 37, critical 7, 151–2, 160–1
40, 41–2, 51 Costa, Inês Nogueira da 52, 61
Celati, Gianni 136 Couto, Mia 57
cemetery 103, 114–16, 122 Craveirinha, José 82
censorship 44, 47, 50, 58, 63 Prize 3
Chassafar, Travessa see Rainhas da critical irrealism 237, 239, 243
Noite ( JPBC) Crónica da Rua 513.2 ( JPBC) 4, 72,
Chaves, Rita 84 75–8, 84
Chissano, Joaquim 46, 61 Culler, Jonathan 139
Cidade dos Espelhos: Novela Futurista Cullinan Diamond 165–6
( JPBC) 5, 72, 84 culture 144
civil war contamination 144
Angola 243 interaction 7, 149
Mozambique 70, 215, 233 material 7, 141, 181, 183
class struggle 57–8 popular 159
history as 43 translation 142
climate change 8, 229, 232
clue(s) 179, 186, 192–4, 198 Damrosch, David 205
foundational 184 Dar es Salaam 174
paradigm (Ginzburg) 53 Frelimo’s office 46
coast see space see also historiography
Coetzee, J. M. 82 Deckard, Sharae 232
Index 257
Derrida, Jacques 6, 122, 126, 127–8 fable(s) 105

dhows 94 liberation history 6, 37, 62
documents 86, 189–90 Falconi, Jessica 222–3
fetishism 191 family 7, 146–7
public/private 192 possible 73
Duas Sombras do Rio, As ( JPBC) 3, 62, Fanon, Frantz 75
70–3, 84 Faria, Almeida 243–4
Durrell, Lawrence 82 fiction
dystopia 5 geopolitical 151, 154, 161–2, 168, 170
vs history 63, 185
East Africa 4, 123, 160 see also metafiction
German 158 First World War 4, 49, 81, 151, 155–6, 158,
East Germans 42, 44, 47 167, 171
Eco (magazine) 57 Flying Dutchman 162
ecocriticism 5, 147, 183, 221–2, 227 Fonseca, Ana Margarida 221
eco-fiction 220 Força do mar de Agosto, A ( JPBC) 6,
ecology 103, 182 96–7, 102–5, 109–21
catastrophe/disaster 219, 230 Foster Gang 159, 168
disrespect 104 Foucault, Michel 78, 92, 123
ecosophy 242 Franklin, Adrian 133
economics 105, 132–3 Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de
economic appropriation 115 Moçambique) 4, 38 (n. 2), 39,
Eduardo Mondlane University 42, 44–5, 48, 51, 52–5, 59–60,
see UEM 61, 63, 78
egalitarianism, precolonial African 43 Fry, Peter 58
empire 82, 154–5, 157–8, 163, 169–72 future 125, 126, 128, 166, 225, 244
British 168 of the past 199–200
exceptional 158, 174
German 154, 158, 161–2 Gandhi, Leela 212
Portuguese 158, 207–8, 216 Ganhão, Fernando 44, 53
Third Reich 157, 170 Garrard, Greg 147
see also colonialism, imperialism gaze/glance 92, 100
Engelhardt, August see Imperium (novel) mutual 131, 142–3
Esposito, Roberto 120–1 tourist 7, 131, 136–7, 139, 142
Estado Novo (Portugal) see Salazar, zoological 133, 145
António Oliveira Geffray, Christian 59–60
estória/história see story gender 71, 99–101, 144, 207, 242
eurocentrism 170–1, 173 Genet, Jean 127
Europe 120, 153, 163–4, 169–71, 209 genius loci 92–7, 105
evidential paradigm (Ginzburg) 180 Gentili, Anna Maria 39
exoticism 136, 140 geography 6, 87, 103, 108
experience 193–4, 196 imaginary/imaginative 91, 105
258 Index
local 123 Dar es Salaam school 39, 42

transnational 91 eurocentric 7, 151
see also cartography official/traditional 6, 7, 69, 193, 207
geopolitics 39, 155, 163 of the seas 113
decentred 175 see also metafiction
hierarchy 211 history 91, 125–6, 153, 180–1, 186, 192–3
see also fiction, geopolitical Angel of 244
ghosts 4, 77, 175, 229 from below 53, 58
Gilroy, Paul 175 counterfactual 162, 166, 168, 170
Ginzburg, Carlo 53, 180 decolonized 42
globalization 151, 154–5, 169–70, 204 discipline 38
from below 175 discourse 6, 37, 193, 196
communicative 155 ex-centric 192
see also networks globalization 151
Goa 76, 164 liberation struggles/war 37, 47,
Goody, Jack 41 50, 52, 55
Gosh, Amitav 175 and literature 113
Gosh, Devleena 92 local 123
Gould, Isabel Ferreira 221 and memory 196, 223–4
Greene, Graham 82 military 46, 48, 53, 61
Guattari, Félix 233–4 micro/macro 180, 186, 190
Guebuza, Emilio 61 (n. 33), 193
Guimarães Rosa, João 126 minor 179, 192, 199
gun-slave cycle 47 (n. 23) Mozambique 43, 61, 62, 76, 182, 186,
211, 213, 216
Harvey, David 7, 160, 162 oral 37, 53, 60
Hegel, Friedrich 120, 123, 127–8 subaltern 192
Heidegger, Martin 120–1, 127 teaching manual 43–6, 62
Helgesson, Stefan 82, 152, 160 and testimony 195
Hergé 159 visual 189
hero/heroine 86 see also novel, truth
popular 159 Hofmeyr, Isabel 109
tragic 72, 86 Hölderlin, Friedrich 120–1
Hertzog, James B. M. 166, 168 humour 70, 131, 144
heterotopia 92 Hutcheon, Linda 7, 151–2, 172
Hitler, Adolf 156–7, 159, 172 hybridism/hybridity 71–2, 170,
Hinyambaan: novela burlesca ( JPBC) 4, 172–3
7, 84, 131–49 postcolonial 75
historiography 108, 111–14, 126, 163,
190, 196 Ibo 9, 49, 98
Annales school 113, 190 (n. 33) Ibo Azul ( JPBC) 96, 98–101
Index 259
identities 74, 81, 100, 144–5, 147, Leroy-Gourhan, André 41

222, 228 Lettow-Vorbeck 49, 81–2, 158–60, 161–2,
imperialism 43, 168 167, 169–71
see also empire liberation struggle/war (Mozambique) 6,
Imperium (novel) 7, 153–7, 172 37, 43, 53, 55, 62, 63
independence (Mozambique) 74, 75–6, aftermath 61
215, 233 narrative 226
India 227 see also fable, history, testimonies
Indian Ocean 4, 82, 84, 91–6, 100, 102, liminality 172
122–3, 173 Lisbon 9, 37–9
anthropomorphized 109 longue durée 204–5, 216
as literary device 109 Lourenço Marques 4, 37, 81–4, 152,
trade 123 160, 173–4
Índicos Indicios ( JPBC) 3–4, 72, Löwy, Michael 224
96–105, 107–21 lusotropicalism 210
Inhaca 118 Luta de Libertação Nacional, A ( JPBC,
Inhambane 84, 131, 145 de Brito, Negrão) 44–6
intertextuality 77, 82, 86, 88, 102
irony 70, 74, 77, 85, 119 Machel, Samora M. 39, 41, 44, 56,
Isaacman, Allen 39 57–8
Mack, John 109
Jamal, Ashraf 96, 109 Macote see Akapwitchi Akaporo ( JPBC)
Jameson, Frederic 224, 234–5 Mahrenholz, Hans see Olho de Hertzog,
Johannesburg 53, 169, 172 O ( JPBC)
Jong Zuid Afrika 166, 169, 172 Makonbe/Macombe 169
Maoz, Darya 142
Kafka, Franz 78, 80–1 mapping/maps see cartography
Klimt, Gustav 83 Maputo (city) 9, 39, 79, 84, 85, 175, 182,
Knopfli, Rui 82, 184, 213 205, 213
Kongwa, training camp 45 bay 102, 116, 119
Koos de la Rey, Jacobus H. 166–8 see also Lourenço Marques
Koselleck, Reinhart 199 Marave, sheik of Sancul 48
Kurica (magazine) 48 Marxism 39, 190 (n. 33), 224, 233–4
Kracht, Christian 7, 153, 157, 172 Marxism–Leninism 42–4, 47
Kruger Park 133–4, 145 masks 74, 99–101, 141–2, 148
Kundera, Milan 73 m’siro 99 (n. 19)
Massangano 164
Lacoste, Yves 39 Matimati, Barbabé João see Quadros,
Larsen, Jonas 136, 145–6 António
Latour, Bruno 148 Matola, training school 47
Lefort, Claude 238 Mavango (Niassa) 41
260 Index
Mbembe, Achille 112–13, 115, 121, Mossuril 48

123–4, 226 Mouzinho de Albuquerque, Joaquim
Meillassoux, Claude 39 Augusto 48
Memmi, Albert 75 Mozambican Historical Archive
memoirs 5, 62, 220 see AHM
memory 78, 180–1, 193, 196–8, 220, 242 monsoon 94–5
aesthetics 203, 212 m’phondoro 165, 170
collective 6, 37, 63, 181, 183 m’siro see masks
colonial/postcolonial 4, 5, 8, 105, Mucojo 49, 84
204, 212, 216 Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves 123
cultural 181, 183–4, 204, 213, Muecke, Stephen 92
215–16 Mungau see Campo de Transito ( JPBC)
erased 173 Murilo, Maria Eugénia see Rainhas da
erosion 183 Noite ( JPBC)
historical 183 Musil, Robert 76
local 6, 69 myths 6, 91, 96, 105, 133–4, 165, 234, 242
management 87 inaugural 98
poetics/politics 70
private/public 214 Namacurra ( JPBC) 48, 159
slavery 102 names 76–7, 93–5, 100, 146, 162, 169,
studies 187, 189 173, 230, 235, 240
Mendonca, Fátima 72, 78 Nampula 59
Messiah see redemption, final narrator 109–10, 131–3, 135, 143, 145,
metafiction 156, 165, 181, 186, 206, 213, 236,
historiographic 7, 151, 174 240, 243–4
metaphors 70, 103, 107, 152–3, 221, 225 as allegory 239
marine 109–10, 119 demiurgical power 85
temporal 73 first-person 181
metonyms 70 unreliable 164
Michelet, Jules 111, 113–15, 125, 127 witness 195–6
migrant labour 43 writer 184, 220
millenarianism see redemption, final nature 144, 220, 222, 229, 240
mimicry 3, 74 cheap 232
mise en abyme 162, 243 natural parks 134
mobile phones 104, 240–1 non-human 148–9
Moatize 5, 9, 56, 85, 186, 198, 210 and technology 240
modernity 5, 8, 170, 173, 224–5 see also ecology
and tradition 220–1, 242 Negrão, José 42, 52, 58
Mondlane, Eduardo 46 neocolonalism 115, 125, 229, 234
University see UEM neoliberalism 107, 115, 125, 126, 204,
Moorty, Shanti 96, 109 215, 234
Index 261
networks 4, 154, 156, 170, 174, 211 parable 96, 102–3

see also globalization parody 4, 103–4, 141, 145, 151–2, 157,
Neuzil, Valerie (Wally) 163–4 172–3, 175
Neves Tembe, Joel das 61 postcolonial 3
new materialism 222–3 patrimony 182
Newitt, Malyn 209 Pearce, Fred 232
Niassa 46, 56 Pearson, Michael 93, 123
Niblett. Michael 224 photographs 86, 116, 189
Nikulin, Dmitri 114 Picasso, Pablo 83, 163
Nixon, Rob 219, 232 PIDE 46, 56, 77
Nkavandame, Lázaro 45 Plato 102
Noa, Francisco 73 Plettenberg Bay 134–5
nomos 78–9 politics
North America(ns) 104, 116, 128, literature 110–11, 230
155, 163 memory 70
nostalgia 73, 121, 137, 213, 220, 225 polyphony, structural 73
colonial 138 of voices 62
notebook 85–6, 184, 186–8, 194, 206 see also novel
novella, adventure 148 Ponta Gea ( JPBC) 5, 8, 219–20, 223–9,
novels 69–70, 77, 184, 186, 220 234–5, 238–40, 243–4
crime 159 postcoloniality 8, 75, 112–13, 137–8, 180,
historical 4 185, 190, 204, 216
polyphonic (Bakhtin) 172 post-conflict society 233
No Tempo do Farelahi ( JPBC) postmodernity 152, 159, 172, 185
48, 50 power 75, 81, 85, 143
Ntsato, Leónidas see Duas Sombras do powerlessness 126–7
Rio, As ( JBPC) Pratt, Hugo 50
numbers 76–7 Pratt, Mary Louise 7
Nyerere, Julius 59
Quadros, António 40, 42, 63
Odendaal family see Hinyambaan: novela Matimati, Barbabé João (fictive
burlesca ( JPBC) author) 40
Olho de Hertzog, O ( JPBC) 5, 81–4,
151–3, 158–75 Rainhas da Noite ( JPBC) 5, 85–7,
Oliveira, Mendes de 50 179–200, 205–16
orality 62 Rancière, Jacques 6, 110–15, 125, 127
represented (skaz) 173 redemption, final 151, 169–73, 175
see also history, testimonies Jesus, Messiah 167, 171–2
millenarianism 170
palimpsest 82, 98 Sebastianism 169–70
Pano Encantado, O ( JPBC) 72 Rediker, Marcus 174
262 Index
re-education 61 provisional 78
camps 4, 46, 76, 78 rural 229
RENAMO (Resistência Nacional solid/liquid 228
Moçambicana) 56, 59–60 temporary 122
Rey, Pierre-Philippe 39 themed/theme park 132–3
Ricoeur, Paul 196 Third Space 172
Ronga, language 57 urban 83, 137
spacetime 4, 7, 123, 160, 162, 164, 173
safety valve (Gluckman) 75 spacing 122
Salazar, António Oliveira 173–4 Stoler, Ann Laura 153
Santa Carolina 98 stories 197, 211, 243–4
Satie, Erik 83 detective 159
Saul, John 42 estória/história 126
Schiele, Egon 163 stories/history 70, 180 192, 198, 207
Schutztruppe see Lettow-Vorbeck subaltern pasts see history
Sebald, W. G. 82 Swahili, culture and language 95
Sebastianism see redemption, final
Serra, Carlos 81 TBARN (Técnicas Básicas de
Sitoe, Bento 57 Aproveitamento dos Recursos
socialism 204, 233, 234 Naturais) 40–2, 51, 58
Somalia 95 Tempo (magazine) 47
Sousa, Celestino de 55–6 testimonies 53, 62, 86–7, 186–7,
South Africa(ns) 4, 81–2, 116–17, 119, 189, 194–5
128, 131–49, 153, 162 intimacy 197
racial segregation 135 narrative 195
tourism 131–5, 140 writing 189
women 144–5 Tete 52, 54–6, 58–60, 164, 186
see also Boers, Johannesburg third-world
Southeast Africa 82, 158, 161, 172 culture/society 235
space 91–2, 119, 122, 136, 146 literature 234–5
barriers 240 time(s) 76–7, 110, 225–7, 242
beach 135 biblical 76
circular 71, 76 colonial (past)/postcolonial (pre-
coast/islands 6, 91, 101–2, sent) 70, 75, 180
107–9, 115–17 multiple 112–13, 225–6
colonial 137, 160, 180 overlapping 102
exception 79 post-independent (Mozambique) 4
local/global 123, 149 and space, union 98
macro/micro 149 timelessness 99
meta 173 timespace 113
North/South 73, 12 see also spacetime
Index 263
totalitarianism 238–9 violence 75, 233

tourism 131–148 concept 219–20
camping 145–6 symbolic 128
imaginary 132, 141 Visitas do Dr. Valdez, As ( JPBC) 3, 72,
practice 132–4, 145–6 73–5, 84
traces 7, 125, 179, 186, 188, 190, 192, 198 Von Lettow-Vorbeck see Lettow-Vorbeck
tradition see modernity
truth 53, 54, 88, 189–90, 213, 216 Wallerstein, Immanuel 242
Tsafendas, Dimitri 227 Wenders, Wim 244
Wetzel, Hermann 148
UEM (Universidade Eduardo White, Hayden 113–15
Mondlane) 9, 39, 57, 60 Wievorka, Annette 197
Urry, John 136–7, 140–1 witness see testimonies
US (United States) see North world literature 7, 151, 153
America(ns) concepts 204–5
utopia 121 world-literature 8, 205, 211,
utopianism 63 223–4
world-system 204–5, 208, 223–4
Van Eeden, Jeanne 133 theory 242
Van Reensburg, Siener 166–8 WReC (Warwick Research
Vecchi, Roberto 108, 126 Collective) 2, 205, 223–4
villages, communal 58–9
family-hood (vijiji vyaujamaa) Zambezi River 3, 61, 70, 72, 84, 164, 170
fortified (aldeamentos) 58 Zeppelin (rigid airship) 81, 160, 163
villagization 59–60 Zumbo 3, 61, 62, 70
P O R T U G U E S E - S P E A K I N G W O R L D
Edited by
Paulo de Medeiros and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
The series publishes studies across the entire spectrum of Lusophone

literature, culture and intellectual history, from the Middle Ages to the
present day, with particular emphasis on figurations and reconfigurations
of identity, broadly understood. It is especially interested in work which
interrogates national identity and cultural memory, or which offers
fresh insights into Portuguese-speaking cultural and literary traditions, in
diverse historical contexts and geographical locations. It is open to a wide
variety of approaches and methodologies as well as to interdisciplinary
fields: from literary criticism and comparative literature to cultural and
gender studies, to film and media studies. It also seeks to encourage
critical dialogue among scholarship originating from different continents.
Proposals are welcome for either single-author monographs or

edited collections (in English and/or Portuguese). Those interested
in contributing to the series should send a detailed project outline to
oxford@peterlang.com.
Vol. 1 Ana Margarida Martins: Magic Stones and Flying Snakes:

Gender and the ‘Postcolonial Exotic’ in the Work of Paulina
Chiziane and Lídia Jorge.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0828-1. 2012
Vol. 2 Ana Mafalda Leite, Hilary Owen, Rita Chaves, Livia Apa (eds):
Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and
Mozambique.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0891-5. 2014
Vol. 3 Ana Mafalda Leite, Sheila Khan, Jessica Falconi,
Kamila Krakowska (eds): Speaking the Postcolonial
Nation: Interviews with Writers from Angola and
Mozambique.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0890-8. 2014
Vol. 4 Francisco Bethencourt (ed.): Utopia in Portugal, Brazil and

Lusophone African Countries.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1871-6. 2015
Vol. 5 Ana Luísa Amaral, Ana Paula Ferreira, Marinela Freitas

(eds): New Portuguese Letters to the World: International
Reception. ISBN 978-3-0343-1893-8. 2015
Vol. 6 Fernando Beleza and Simon Park (eds): Mário de Sá-

Carneiro, A Cosmopolitan Modernist.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1885-3. 2017
Vol. 7 E leanor K. Jones: Battleground Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in

Mozambican Literature.
ISBN 978-1-78707-317-3. 2017
Vol. 8 Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro (eds):

(Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and
the Fall of the Portuguese Empire.
ISBN 978-1-78707-318-0. 2017
Vol. 9 Maria Manuel Lisboa: A Heaven of Their Own: Heresy and

Heterodoxy in Portuguese Literature from the Eighteenth
Century to the Present.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1962-1. 2018
Vol. 10 Doris Wieser and Ana Filipa Prata (eds): Cities of

the Lusophone World: Literature, Culture and Urban
Transformations.
ISBN 978-1-78874-251-1. 2018
Vol. 11 Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes (eds): Beyond
Binaries, Sex, Sexualities, and Gender in the
Lusophone World.
ISBN 978-1-78707-615-0. 2019
Vol. 12 Ana Mafalda Leite, Jessica Falconi, Kamila Krakowska, Sheila

Khan, and Carmen Tindó Secco (eds): Voices, Languages,
Discourses: Interpreting the Present and the Memory of
Nation in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and
Príncipe.
ISBN 978-1-78707-585-6. 2020
Vol. 13 Ana Mafalda Leite, Hilary Owen, Ellen Sapega and Carmen
Tindó Secco (eds): Postcolonial Nation and Narrative
III: Literature & Cinema. Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São
Tomé e Príncipe.
ISBN 978-1-78707-581-8. 2019
Vol. 14 Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse, and Paulo de

Medeiros (eds): A Companion to João Paulo Borges Coelho.
ISBN 978-1-78707-986-1. 2020

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Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse,

and Paulo de Medeiros (eds)

Elena Brugioni is Assistant Professor in African literatures and postcolonial theory

Rewriting the (Post)Colonial

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover image: Tommaso Rada.

Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse, and

João Paulo Borges Coelho: A Short Biography 9

João Paulo Borges Coelho

Nazir Ahmed Can

Ana Mafalda Leite

Rui Gonçalves Miranda

Notes on Contributors 249

This book proposes a critical overview of the literary work published by

3 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-

Coelho, and offers an emblematic intersection between the Mozambican

articulations of intellectual biography, the chapter focuses especially on his

and philosophical knowledge that become crucial for the creation of a

João Paulo Borges Coelho is a Mozambican writer and historian. He

One has to cross the bridge to get to Mozambique Island. A narrow,

What are you doing, Jamal?

We cannot, however, dismiss other reasons that may have prompted

The cloth’s narrative continues. Mtwara, Lindi, Kilwa, Mafia and

house in the poor quarter of Macaripe, on the Island of Mozambique, which

Naquira of Mr Rashid, his boss, ever more lost to African licentiousness,

Look, and tell me what you think!

Translated by David Brookshaw

In 1973, when the liberation war in Mozambique was drawing to an

to leave, he opted for the discipline of psychology, which was unavailable

Frelimo – policemen, politicians – arbitrarily confiscated residences, ve-

3 The change of name occurred in 1976.

In the aftermath of independence, the colonial Instituto de Investigação

Quadros envisaged the TBARN as a space in which the humanities and

In this ebullient climate of intellectual confrontation, while João Paulo

(Rome: Edizioni Lavoro/ISCOS, 1989), 77–8. I thank Carlos Fernandes for

ended in 1961, at the threshold of formation of the liberation movement,

from Frelimo’s programmatic documents and publications; otherwise, no

15 de Brito, Borges Coelho, and Negrão, A Luta de Libertação Nacional, 14.

compulsory course in Marxism–Leninism taught by the same East Germans

Meanwhile, building on an inborn drawing talent, João Paulo had made

em Moçambique na banda desenhada de João Paulo Borges Coelho’, Canal de

presented to an exhibition in Italy; Hugo Pratt sent a message to congratu-

After this felicitous interlude with fiction, however heavily dominated

The experiences of conflict between TBARN and CEA, Marxist dog-

28 Formally equivalent to a Honours dissertation, the requirements for a licenciatura

inspired by Allen Isaacman’s pathbreaking example, others engaged with

discussion, see Adam Yussuf, and José Alexandrino, ‘History of Investigation,

made a distinction between documentation of ‘pure propaganda’ and the

The use of colonial sources in interviews was also not deprived of

initiative of publishing a number of guides and readers that specified the

determined a pattern of scattered settlement composed of small shifting

46 ‘Entrevista com a Associação dos Antigos Combatentes de Tete: Uma Conversa

article analysed two contrasting approaches to the reintegration of combat-

The ‘trauma’ of the closed archives – an insurmountable obstacle for ser-

dwindling fable and the territory of collective memory, ‘torna[ndo] possível

52 Borges Coelho, ‘Abrir a fábula: Questões da política do passado em

Perhaps we should just heed João Paulo’s own consideration and

Adam, Yussuf, ‘Mueda, 1917–1990: Resistência, Colonialismo, Libertação e

——, ‘A Investigação Recente da Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional: Contexto,

As a circular space of History, the Zambezi River is, in As duas sombras

By analysing some of the protagonists of Índicos Indícios I. Setentrião,

7 Fátima Mendonça, ‘Hibridismo ou estratégias narrativas? Modelos de herói na