In some tales war is still a present quantity, in others it is past but only barely. They are a telling of a shattered world back into being.Ĭouto, the winner of the Neustadt International Prize, and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, has an uncanny ability to create miniature worlds peopled with wonderful characters, images and happenings. These are the fables, folktales, comic and magical imaginings of human folly and resilience. They are uniquely Mozambican and yet timeless. The twenty-six stories that follow are very short-most are but a handful of pages-and although they spring from the immediate aftermath of a contemporary battle, signalling the end of both Soviet-backed Cold War alliances and white domination in Southern Africa, the roots and spirits of these tales seem to run deep into the very bedrock of the earth. Of this land where each man is the same, like this: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, imagining his return. These tales speak to this land we are remaking and where we soak our faces in this rain of hope, this water of benedreamtion. Yet, where Couto had anticipated total ruin and destruction, he found that seeds of life and hope had survived. As the majority of the white Portuguese fled, they left behind an impoverished, uneducated population. The conflict which erupted in 1977, two years after the African nation achieved independence from Portugal, would last for fifteen years, leaving over one million dead and devastating the country’s infrastructure. In the preface to his newly translated collection, Rain and Other Stories, Mozambican writer Mia Couto tells us that the stories we are about to read were written after his country’s long and bloody civil war.

Mia couto rain and other stories