Mia Couto: memória e esquecimento em A Varanda do Frangipani...

Abstract

the purpose of my reading is to see how Maria Alzira Seixo’s notion – that, in Under the Frangipani, different forms of time contingently oppose... – could be helpful in our understanding of the way the question of memory and forgetting is dealt with, in the novel. Following Ana Mafalda Leite’s observation of the fact that, each short story told – typically, a model for each of the chapters of the novels by Mia Couto – also provides the underlying assumptions of the all-embracing narrative, we then move to examine the forms of understanding social and natural life, events and time, by the different characters in the institution. And it will be with the help of Michel de Certeau’s perspective on modern History, in his L’écriture de l’histoire, and with some of Jacques Derrida’s insights, borrowed both from A Taste for the Secret and Histoire du mensonge, that we try to make sense of that aspect of Mia Couto’s novel, that concerns Mozambique’s contemporary hopes and dramas.