SOURCE: “The Psychopathology of Post-Colonial Mozambique: Mia Couto's Voices Made Night,” in American Imago, John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 155-84.

In the following essay, Long-Innes explores the psychoanalytic implications of Mia Couto's use of magic realism in Voices Made Night.

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?

The new world, necessarily political, is unreal. We are living the reality of a new suffering world.

—Julia Kristeva

Mia Couto has recently been acclaimed as “probably the most original Mozambican writer to date,” a significant figure in the new wave of writers moving away from the “documentary approach” that has characterised Lusophone African literature from its beginnings (Gray 1993).¹ In place of the tradition of nineteenth century Western realism upon which...