“Uma paisagem por baixo da outra”: narrativas de coloniais sobre a natureza na trilogia “as areias do imperador” de mia couto

Abstract

This paper analyzes the literary text of the trilogy “Sands of the Emperor” by the Mozambican writer and biologist Mia Couto. In the book, Mia Couto narrates the colonial war waged by Portugal in southern Mozambique in 1895, aiming at capturing Emperor Ngungunhane and dissolving the Gaza Kingdom, considered the last political resistance to Portuguese colonial power. Based on references that relate to the network of traditional knowledge and the orality of Mozambican cultures, Mia Couto builds a reinterpretation of the Mozambican colonial past, pointing out the marks left by colonization and mainly, showing the resistance processes of local cultures. The resistances were formed through the mobilization of several factors present in the history and cultures of the societies that were targeted by the colonial projects and that are related to their ways of existing and seeing the world. In this article, the aspects related to the environment that participated in the engendering of these resistances will be highlighted. These aspects, in turn, are not isolated and act in a sphere of intertwining between history and traditional knowledge. Finally, it is emphasized that thinking about environmental aspects as an active element in the history of these societies and in the history of resistance to the colonial process makes it possible to dialogue with particular notions of environmental heritage. In this way, based on the historical analysis and the literary text, we discuss the landscape narratives present in the books that compose Mia Couto's trilogy and their contributions to think about environmental heritage from the perspectives made invisible by the colonial Eurocentric narrative.