Ways of being : water spirits in Mia Couto’s sleepwalking land (1992)

Abstract

Mia Couto is a Mozambican writer known for an aesthetics of the fantastic in his numerous works. In most of his writings, he blurs the distinctions between the human and the non-human, land and water, the natural and the supernatural. This is particularly evident in his 2006 novel Sleepwalking Land, set in the context of the Mozambican civil war. This paper argues that the elusive figure of the water spirit is an ideal lens by which to read Sleepwalking Land to capture the complexity of the horrendous civil war. Drawing on magical realism, I consider Couto’s use of water-based indigenous beliefs to underscore ideas of flexibility and mobility in a land ravaged by war, while revising the myth of powerful water spirits in line with the raging civil war. The chaos of war is amplified in the novel through actions of spirits that encroach on the human world, influencing events and problematizing the laws of logic, time and space. Their intractability enables Couto to foreground ambiguity and hybridity with characters who assume different forms at different stages of the fragmented plot, mirroring the raging war.