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Animals, Animism, and Biosemiotics: Reimagining the Species Boundary in the Novels of Mia Couto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Benjamin Klein
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Abstract

Mia Couto is among the most prominent of contemporary Mozambican writers. Yet he has also enjoyed a career as an environmental biologist and ecologist, having expressed much interest in interrogating the border between what is human and not human through his scientific practice. In this essay I locate the nexus of Couto’s literary and ecological careers in his concern with recovering forms of proximity among humans, environments, and other species. Through an analysis of some of Couto’s recently translated novels, I argue that his work reconceives of the relations between humans and animals through the concept of biosemiotics, an approach attuned to languages conveyed semiotically through embodied and skillful engagement with the larger-than-human world. Couto’s work in turn grounds biosemiotics in segments of African life that find their basis in forms of animism, thus implicating the concept in the postcolonial work of cultural recuperation and decolonization.

Keywords

animalsanimismbiosemioticsecologyMia Coutospeciesism
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 329 - 346
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Professor Graham Huggan at the University of Leeds for our generative discussions and for motivating me to develop the ideas put forward in this article.

References

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3 In relation to the same interview, Grant Hamilton and David Huddart have argued that Couto’s response “is the articulation of a poet-scientist,” for whom “science is just one path among many that can help us to understand the world better.” See Hamilton, Grant and Huddart, David, eds., “Introduction,” in A Companion to Mia Couto (Suffolk, England: James Currey, 2016), 4–5 Google Scholar.

4 By “speciesism,” I refer to oppositional and hierarchical framings of the relationship between humans and animals that result in systematic biases against other species. The term can be traced back to Peter Singer’s seminal work Animal Liberation (originally published in 1975).

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6 It should be stressed that although Couto’s work draws on indigenous themes, it would be more problematic to classify him as an indigenous writer considering his position as a White person of Portuguese descent. The complexities presented by this position remain largely unaccounted for in recent scholarship.

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24 When asked by Hamilton and Huddart whether his work captures or reflects the idea of the exotic in a world literature frame, Couto responded: “The ‘Mozambican’ components of my narratives are not motivated by any desire for exotic display or appeal.” See Hamilton, Grant and Huddart, David eds., “An Interview with Mia Couto,” in A Companion to Mia Couto (Suffolk, England: James Currey, 2016), 14 Google Scholar.

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63 Couto, Confession of the Lioness, 66–67; italics in the original.

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