Mia Couto: an engaged aesthetic

Abstract

The Mozambican writer Mia Couto is recognized either for his formal and thematic creativity. On the first aspect, his work with the language stands out, with neologisms and syntactic inversions, the approximation between prose and poetry, the African oral traditions as a basis for writing. In regard to the themes, the issues that affect Mozambique are addressed, such as colonialism, the post-independence war, the drought and hunger, the oppression suffered by women and elderly people. In this set, thus, there is a literature focused on the ex-colonial nation, characterized by the project of the period of struggle for independence, in which Couto actively participated, and the reality that followed with its non-concretization. So the writer leaves the direct political activity, but deals with the power relationships in his works. Given this, the issues that emerge and are examined here focus on the Couto’s engagement, his critical position, the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his texts, in order to demonstrate, going against the absolute divisions between these two aspects, that it is possible to consider his aesthetics as engaged.