UC Berkeley

Examining intersections and divergences between the often-compared Brazilian modernist João Guimarães Rosa and the Mozambican postmodernist Mia Couto, I propose an intertextual reading to broaden the perspective on their linguistic and thematic likenesses and subjective and cosmovisional differences. This study traces the trajectories of their orality and representation of the marginalized, especially children, from the point of view of race and identity. My research covers approximately two decades of work by each author, including Couto's Jesusalém (2009), Estórias abensonhadas (1994), Cronicando (1991), and Vozes anoitecidas (1987) alongside Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), Primeiras estórias (1962), Corpo de baile (1956), and Sagarana (1984).

I find that contradictions in Rosean portrayals of mestiço-white versus Afro-Brazilian children reveal hierarchically racialized attitudes in Brazil's social foundations that are at odds with the postcolonial values of Couto's Mozambique. The legacy of Portuguese colonialism evident in the polarizing orality expressed by Rosean backlanders--whose narrations categorically render blacks as caricatured, dehumanized, and tragic in juxtaposition to the mestiços' embodiment of the full range of human experience and transformative individual potential--functions as a discursive strategy to challenge Gilberto Freyre's dominant racial discourses on Lusotropicalism, mestiçagem, and racial democracy. Conversely, Couto's narrations on the black experience are free of the racial stereotype, unindividuated uniformity, and tragedized foreclosure of patriarchal characterization, despite also exploring the violence and poverty left in the wake of imperialism. Like Rosa's more privileged mestiço-white children, capable of positive transformation no matter how marginalized their circumstances, Couto's children--rich or poor, orphaned or parented, black or mestiço--capitalize on the imaginative and sometimes magical "exercises of childhood," often while reconnecting to the indigenous and sacred practices of their ancestors. Unlike Rosa's most heroic children, Couto's do not usually dramatically improve in socio- economic conditions. Instead of the more linear worldview of scrappy self-determination or meritorious individualism that earn Rosean protagonists upward mobility, the Coutian protagonist follows a more circular pattern of self-discovery grounded in collective interdependence and a plurality of native traditions.