To be (with) the forest

Mia Couto and the construction of a symbiosis myth

Abstract

For many contemporary thinkers (one can cite Michel Serres, Felix Guattari, and Richard Heinberg, to stay on a shortlist), the profound environmental crisis that the human being experiences - and of which he is the engine - could only begin to be reversed, or at least re-dimensioned, to the extent that the human community established a new pact with nature. For Heinberg (1996), such an agreement can only flourish when new basic myths are created (or arise, or are rescued). What this article intends to demonstrate is how the paths which are taken by the poetics of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto wave to this direction through the rescue of immemorial voices that could, today, be an index for the (re)flourishing of (new?) myths of mankind’s union with trees and the forest and, thus, with their ancestral lessons of life in communion.