Mia Couto: a writing in the voice – learning from the rain…

Abstract

My reading of A River Called Time, a novel by Mia Couto, aims at the analysis of the peculiar conception of writing that emerges from Grandfather Dito Mariano mysterious letters to his grandchild Mariano, who had inherited his name. Our leading question is thus referred, on one hand, to the double inscription of Dito Mariano’s position, concerning writing: simultaneously outside – not knowing how to write… – and inside of it, in a derridean sense. The premises of Mia Couto’s notion of writing, as exposed in And If Obama was African? are compatible, on the other hand, to Jacques Derrida’s own terms, in books like Posições, Of Grammatology, Margins – of Philosophy, and Points de suspension, about a certain writing in the voice, an arche-writing that should help us to reconsider oral tradition’s position, in its difference from writing in its metaphysical sense.