The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006)

Preface

This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form – a genre – can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials. In conducting this study, several complexities relative to periodization, selection, categories and scope were encountered. It is important to highlight them here to clarify why certain choices were made. For its periodization, this study uses the colonialism–post-independence–civil war–post-civil-war timeline. Levy has argued, because Mozambique has ‘undergone dizzying cycles of back-and-forth institutional changes in political and economic orders since independence’ – and, it can be added, before independence – that such a relatively ‘clear periodization’ of Mozambican history is possible (Levy 113). Yet as Arrighi writes, periodizing ‘risks doing violence to reality’ because the structure it provides is ‘imposed’ on history (Arrighi 30). Nevertheless, as Arrighi also suggests, the clarifying potential may outweigh such violence.

The selection of this book’s primary corpus relied on an attempt to read all Mozambican literary works, in order to see if modern ghost story forms, in different guises, exist, and to understand possible relations between those guises. Practically, this meant traveling to different libraries and reading all the available books. Such an approach is bound to fail because even a ‘small literature’ as the Mozambican one is large and, evidently, it is not possible to access those works that were lost or never published. It even proved difficult, for different reasons, to access some of the works that have been preserved. Moreover, even if all works could have been accessed – and, indeed, even all the works that were accessed – they cannot possibly be addressed in a book of this size, and certainly not all at length. Thus, throughout this study, as Mozambican literature proliferates and works get longer and more complex – transitioning from poetry to the short story to the novel as dominant form – this book will rely on fewer and fewer works ←ix | x→to make its case. Chapter 4 attempts to mediate this using short readings but Chapter 5 only uses Mia Couto’s complex 2006 novel O Outro Pé da Sereia. In anticipation of criticisms hereof, I can only show comprehension.

Finally, scope. This book has five chapters, starting in the nineteenth and ending in the twenty-first century. The first chapter discusses the main thesis and unpacks the central terms – how are modernity, register, primitive accumulation and the modern ghost story understood in this book. The second chapter shows how Walter Scott shaped a modern ghost story genre in the nineteenth century – which registered the financial crisis of 1825 – and how it remained prominent. The third chapter analyses Campos ←x | xi→de Oliveira’s 1866 poem ‘Uma Visão’ [An Apparition] and Orlando Mendes’ 1965 Portagem [Toll] as respectively a Gothic predecessor and as an early version of the Mozambican modern ghost story. It argues that Portagem registered primitive accumulation of the Mozambican labour market in the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 demonstrates that in the 1980s, a more explicitly Mozambican modern ghost story registered Mozambique’s capitalist restoration of that period. The main case study, Couto’s ‘A História dos Aparecidos’ [‘The Tale of two Apparitions’], is followed by short readings of several Mozambican modern ghost stories. Chapter 5 claims that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and registered primitive accumulation as mediated by the globalization and world-literature debates. Using the example of Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia (2006), it shows how genre traditions are modified in this period by drawing on narrative strategies of globalization.

Notable of literary works in which the supernatural plays a central role is that scholars often approach them differently when they are produced by African authors. This is understandable in part because of the necessity to historicize but may lead to confusions. ‘Madhaianhoca’, the opening story of Aníbal Aleluia’s short story collection Contos do Fantástico (2011 [1988]), illustrates this well. Its narrator recalls the bloody Battle of Chicungussa and articulates that, in the present of the story, the battle’s beating drums and rattling maracas are still heard at the site of the conflict, because those who died return to dominate those they conquered and to take revenge on those who mistreated them in life.

Two characters, Portuguese settler colonialists called administrator and secretary, are sceptical of the supernatural phenomenon and a ‘régulo’ [local leader] invites them on a trip to witness it for themselves (16). During the trip, the administrator asks the secretary if he believes the stories to be true and the latter answers denigratingly that