The novels of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto reside in the borderlands. Couto’s work doesn’t so much blur the generic and stylistic boundaries we normally draw as explode them. Novels like “The Tuner of Silences” are magical realism by way of Africa. They grow out of contemporary postcolonial history but also are deeply indebted to ancient tribal myths; they mix allegory with realism, lyrical style with suspenseful plotting. A white African who writes in Portuguese, Couto is a literary shapeshifter.
Couto’s newest novel, “Confession of the Lioness,” is another powerful, destabilizing instance of border crossing. It centers on a series of vicious lion attacks suffered by the inhabitants of Kulumani, a remote village in Mozambique where, as one character puts it, “There’s no law here, no government, and even God only visits us occasionally.” The attacks allow Couto to trouble the categories by which we ordinarily understand the world. What, his novel asks us, differentiates the animal from the human, the supernatural from the natural? Is the past really past if it continues to poison the present?
“Confession of the Lioness” opens with the funeral of a woman named Silência, the latest victim to be torn apart by lions. This death has been particularly gruesome: of Silência’s father, we hear that “the blood-soaked sack containing his daughter’s remains still dripped in his memory.” In an effort to calm the panic and subdue the attacks, the government calls in a hunter from the city named Archangel Bullseye.
For most of the book, Archangel — Archie for short — proves an ineffectual hunter. He does little tracking and less hunting, instead spending his time worrying over the past (his brother shot his father to death years ago) and making gnomic pronouncements about the nature of the hunt: “Out here in the bush, it’s the routes that come and find us.” Archie serves as one of the novel’s two narrators, and his tendency toward oracular pronouncement seems to have infected the other characters as well. Hardly a page goes by without a character intoning something like, “We don’t need enemies. To be beaten, all we need is ourselves.” David Brookshaw has capably translated Couto in the past, and it’s unclear whether the portentousness arises from Couto’s writing or from its rendering in English. Either way, the prose here is deadly serious, lacking the moments of absurdist, Beckettian humor in Couto’s previous novels.
Archie is a mediocre hunter, but the task he has been set would seem impossible for anyone. From the novel’s first pages, we sense that these lions aren’t simply lions. As a result of Portugal’s long colonization of Mozambique, the villagers have a syncretic belief system: a base of traditional religion (the villagers consult witch doctors and converse with dead spirits) with a dollop of Catholicism thrown in. This varied belief system results in varied explanations for the lion attacks. Perhaps the villagers have committed some sin that has called vengeance down upon them. Perhaps the lions are spirits who have, of their own volition, crossed into the world of man. Perhaps the lions are the result of black magic: One ancient man claims to be “a maker of lions,” while others believe that the beasts are actually villagers transformed and acting out their own violent desires.
Or perhaps the lions are manifestations of the village’s past traumas — Mozambique’s 10-year war for independence and its 16-year civil war — come back to terrorize the present. One of the novel’s recurring motifs is the relentlessness with which the past haunts and hunts us. As one character puts it, “Pains pass, but they don’t disappear. They migrate into us, come to rest somewhere in our being.” Couto never tells us the precise nature of the lions, and that’s partly the point: He wants to leave us and the world unsettled, with questions open and boundaries porous.
This final suggested reading — the lions as past trauma made flesh and bone — resonates with the storyline of Mariamar, the novel’s other major character and narrator. Mariamar has seen her sister, the aforementioned Silência, eaten by lions. Before this, both girls were sexually abused by their father; others in the village have suffered similar fates. Indeed, the novel is filled with women abandoned, beaten, and silenced. Do the lions embody some previously unacknowledged female rage? This is another possibility, suggesting that brutality against women only begets more, and more spectacular, brutality.
Couto loves parables — his novels are full of them — and “Confession of the Lioness” reads as a parable of human savagery and its consequences. It shows how humans might transform, literally and metaphorically, into animals; how violence, once committed, takes on an independent and inexorable life. As Archie says of another character, “No matter how long he might live in a modern, urban world, the primitive bush would still remain alive within him.”
Confession of the Lioness
By Mia Couto, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
208 pp., $25
Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and a book critic for Commonweal.