“The world that is coming is your world, you know how to tread in the mud without getting your feet dirty. They must wear the shoes of falsehood and the socks of betrayal. The truth is this: you should leave... You are a good fruit on a rotten tree. You are the groundnut in a sack full of rats. They’ll gobble you up before you can cause them any discomfort. The problem is the pasture where your colleagues graze. You don’t know how the pasture is made: it has to be cut, not in order to kill it, but so that it will grow all the stronger. We pity you because you’re a foolish man. By this, I mean you are a good man. You were pulled out of the pool where the toads were, and you jumped into the one where the crocodiles live.”

Excerpt from “Under the Frangipani” by Mia Couto.

“Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955. During the years after the independence of his country in 1975, he was the director of the Mozambican Information Agency, and editor of the magazine Tempo and the Maputo newspaper, Noticias. He lives in Mozambique and works as an environmental biologist…

“Couto is indeed an African, but a white man who had been born in Africa – in Mozambique – to European parents. He confirms that skin colour never really explains a person’s cultural, artistic or philosophical dimensions. Mia Couto can be said to be a white man with an African soul”.

From the Forward by Henning Mankell.

This book is a fantastical whim whose pages turn themselves! (At first I thought it was just the wind coming in through our Maputo-apartment... But no, it was the pages themselves, of that I am now certain). This short piece is marvelous as it seemingly reads itself aloud with soft poetic tones. And all the time you are listening to these lines, these lies and these traditional poems of nothingness and everything, it is like the sound of the flowers falling, the flowers from off the frangipani tree. The craft is intentional, but you don’t really know if they are in fact falling, until the tree is bare. You thought you heard them fall. But now that they are gone, then gone to where? With a poof of magic there is no tragic proof that death in fact exists. This is the subject of the book.

Living in Mozambique will solidify that perspective is as powerful as the wind or the sea. And it is my opinion that only a Mozambican could write such a novel as this, through the eyes of a dead man, and whose subject is so profoundly engulfed in the tragedy of murder and suffering and the relentlessness of the aging process and all its fears… and romances? Yet this piece comes across so lighthearted, like that of friendly a smile between people who don’t speak the same language. The words transcend language as it uses itself to say that language in itself is a lie. People who tell the truth do so only as a means to die. The author seems to insinuate that it is lies that keep us alive. It is lies that keep us safe. But safe is only a form of hiding. And to hide is to forsake.

A professor of writing will tell you that ‘to open more questions than you answer is a work not worth the telling’. The fear is that you will make too many demands on the reader and they simply won’t reward you by giving your work a read. Mia Couto makes no such demands. And his questions beg only quick and simple answers that will take all the time of history to answer. Like an African Siddhartha listening to the sea rather than the stream, it is only the voices of things that can’t speak -that sing the songs which we all need…

This book flows with the rich and pricey poetry of a work beautifully translated (by David Brookshow) into English. So much smoke and mirrors. So many twists and turns. Though I have a strong feeling it's not the translation. The plot itself is simple? It's the language, it's the culture, it's something I can't put my finger on. However, today I have finally purchased the Portuguese version, in hopes to see which is which. But I'm not getting my hopes up. Even if I understood the language better, I would still be an outsider, just like every living character in this strange and exotic book.