My second encounter with the Mozambican writer Mia Couto is touched with a certain familiarity. We recognize one another right away, perhaps because being Mozambican is a code we share. I interviewed him for the first time in 2016, when he came to Barcelona to give a lecture at the Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) on the occasion of the exhibit, Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design. Strangely enough, we have never met in Maputo. Couto has become the pride of Mozambique, very respected within the country and beyond. His literature has managed to cross the borders of the Portuguese-speaking world. His books, translated into several languages—many a translator knows it’s not easy to put his words into their language—have brought him back to Barcelona. He was chosen to be the 2019 speaker for a much-loved festival in town, which he didn’t know existed: Sant Jordi Day, an annual cultural event that celebrates literature and encourages reading. Booksellers fill the streets of the city every April 23rd with stalls and books at discount prices. In any case, being African and Mozambican, I can’t say how pleased I am that he was chosen to be the town orator at the most important literary festival in Catalonia.

A writer and biologist by profession, Mia Couto has been publishing features, stories, and novels since 1983. Back then, Mozambique was deep in the throes of civil war, a tragic destiny for those who, like him, took part in the revolution and in the struggles for liberation from colonial power. His revolutionary and dissident nature hasn’t abandoned him, but he doesn’t need to raise his fist anymore because he knows how to seduce and dissent by murmuring. His view is that great transformations are not achieved by shouting, and this is why he is one of the few outside the government in Mozambique with a voice.

Wars are thorns that pierced our young country, and his books highlight this sharpest of thorns. His characters are borne out of the pain and suffering of a hurt and resilient country, because one thing that distinguishes Mozambicans is their resilience. When I read Mia Couto, I am transported to that red earth that saw me come to life, I can smell the Mozambican breeze, and I feel the fear of the unknown coursing through my entire being. Mia connects unconnectable worlds like few know how, perhaps because the strangeness of the human condition is what comes naturally to him. He recently published his Mozambican trilogy Sands of the Emperor (2015-2017), a historical novel in three volumes: Woman of the Ashes (first of the trilogy and only volume published in English to date, by Picador in 2018), The Sword and the Spear, and The Drinker of Horizons. The trilogy is historical fiction that narrates the war waged by Portuguese colonists at the end of the 19th century against Ngungunyane, the Emperor of the Kingdom of Gaza.

It isn’t an easy job trying to find some time with him, I have to call here and there, but he finally grants me a privileged time: Sunday afternoon. I meet with him at his hotel in hopes of having a conversation about his literature. However, Mia Couto is not only a writer or a biologist; he is also one of the most lucid contemporary African thinkers of our time. Ahead of him are two days of interviews and commitments before returning to his base camp in Lisbon, where he has settled for a couple of months in order to travel from there to Brazil, Barcelona, Switzerland, the UK.