And so that’s what happened: both the remotest desert and the most impenetrable forest were peopled with our ghosts. That’s why all places nowadays begin with a name, a legend, a myth, stories. There is no such thing as an external geography as far as we are concerned. Places — no matter how unknown to us — reach us dressed with our own imagination. The world no longer lives outside a map, and it doesn’t live outside our own inner cartography.
I shall now return to the male visitor, that fire raiser of the Mozambican prairies, in order to get to know his hidden reasons better. None of them ever paid me any attention and I almost take pride in my failure. Our travelling fire raiser must be imagined in a world where the highway is a luxury and transport a rarity.
This is the reality of the savannah that I am obliged to travel in my work as a biologist. And I have to confess that I experience a fearful shudder when the outline of a path is no longer visible in front of me. Love of wandering seems to collide with the absence of a road. Faced with a world with no footprints, I am assaulted by an eerie sense of fragility, as if I had committed some religious offence, a disrespect for a law dating from before the arrival of men. In such circumstances, I also feel like lighting a thread of fire myself in order to give distance a human dimension.
Apart from the practical simplicity of the phenomenon, the truth is that the travelling fire raiser is a map-maker and is recording the signs of his presence on the landscape. He writes the narrative of his journey with fire. Not because he is scared of getting lost, but because he wants geography to come and drink from his hand. The travelling fire raiser says: “I am the master of fire. My gesture makes and unmakes landscapes. There is no horizon where I may get lost, for I am a creator of paths. I am master of fire and I am master of this world that I cause to burn. My kingdom is one of smoke and ash. At the moment when my flames consume everything, at that moment alone, am I divine.”
When it comes down to it, we are like this visitor. The difference is that in our case, it’s not the landscape that burns, but we ourselves. We become consumed in that moment when, even as we stand still, we set off in search of what we cannot be. We are recreating the world, refashioning it in the manner of one of our childhood books. We are playing with our fate like the cat who pretends the ball of wool is a mouse.
In the beginning, we travelled because we read and listened, propelling ourselves forward in boats made of paper, on wings made from ancient voices. Today, we travel in order to be written, to be words in a text that is greater than our own Life.
Address to the Conference on Travel Literature,
Matosinhos, Portugal, 2006.
Mia Couto
The Planet Of Frayed Socks
Over the last few days, I had been struggling against time in order to assemble this speech, until a colleague, noticing my difficulties, made the following suggestion: “You’ve already given an address called ‘The Seven Dirty Shoes.’ Why don’t you write another one now called ‘The Seven Frayed Socks’?”
It wasn’t more than a passing joke, but when I got home, I came across an extraordinary photo of the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. In it the man is shoeless, at the entrance to a mosque in Turkey, and clearly visible are his toes peeping out from his frayed socks. The photo was flashed around the world and, who knows, given its subject, the showy uniform may well become de rigueur among the financiers and bankers of our planet.
Whatever the case, there was an uncanny coincidence between my colleague’s joke and the photo in the magazine, and I ended up calling this text “The Planet of Frayed Socks.” The magazine which featured the photo wanted to portray the absurd side of Wolfowitz’s situation. As far as I was concerned, however, being caught like that merely made one of the most powerful men in the world a more familiar, more human creature.
What I mean is that the shoe may be very different, but the big toe poking through the banker’s sock is very similar to the toe of the poorest Mozambican. Just like any of us, the President of the World Bank conceals blemishes beneath his composed appearance.
I was told that the theme of this lecture was free, but at the same time, it was suggested that I should talk about the Human Person. Socks in need of darning can, suddenly, show us up to be more human, and make us ever more like those who appear distant.
So I shall start by telling you of an episode that I have never recounted before and whose revelation here may prove costly to me. Who knows: having shared this secret with you, I may find my accounts frozen or that I’ve been permanently designated a persona non grata in the world of Mozambican finance.
It happened right after Independence. I was about to set off on an overseas trip, and at that time, there weren’t the facilities we enjoy nowadays. The most a traveller could have at his disposal was a so-called traveller’s cheque. To get traveller’s cheques was a fearfully complicated process, and it was almost necessary to direct one’s request to the President of the Republic. I was travelling for urgent health reasons and two hours before boarding the plane, I was still in the bank, desperately trying to get my wretched cheques. At that moment, a lethargic bank teller informed me somewhat tragically that the cheques would, in fact, require two signatures, mine and my wife’s. Now, my wife was at work and there was no time to get the cheques to her. In the depths of my despair, there was only one thing for it. I was going to have to lie. I told the bank teller that my wife was outside in the car, and that I would bring him everything duly signed in less than a minute.
I took the cheques outside and hurriedly forged my partner’s signature. I did this under a considerable amount of nervous pressure, and without her original to copy from. The signature looked awful, smudged, and patently false. I rushed back inside, gave him back the papers and stood there waiting. The man retreated into an office, took his time, and then re-emerged with a solemn expression to tell me: “I’m sorry but there’s a signature here that doesn’t match.” I was expecting this, but even so, I crumbled under the weight of my shame. “I’d better tell him the truth,” I thought to myself. And I’d already begun to speak, “The problem is, comrade, that my wife. .,” when he interrupted to make this alarming declaration: “Your wife’s signature is fine, but your signature doesn’t match!”
As you can imagine, I was speechless and spent the next few moments practising my own signature in front of the suspicious gaze of the bank teller. The harder I tried, the less I was able to imitate my own handwriting. During those endless minutes, I thought to myself: “I’m going to be arrested not for having forged someone else’s signature. I’m going to be arrested for forging my own.”
I tell this story because the theme suggested for my address is the human person. At that time, as I stood in front of those ill-fated traveller’s cheques, I underwent the strange experience of someone caught red-handed being himself.
The truth is that we are never just one, but various people, and it should be the norm that our signature never quite matches. We all live alongside various selves; a variety of people all claim our identity. The secret is to disallow those choices life imposes, which kill our inner diversity. The best thing in life is to be able to choose, but the saddest thing is actually having to choose.
My dear friends,
Words dwell so deep within us that we forget they have a history. It’s worth asking ourselves about the word “person,” and that is what I shall do as simply and straightforwardly as possible. The word “person” comes from the Latin persona. This term is associated with masks and theatre. Persona was the space between the mask and the face, the space where the voice gained tone and vibrancy. In its origin, the word “person” referred to an empty space filled with imitations, just as I, in the episode of the traveller’s cheques, was imitating someone else. Today we are not so far removed from its original meaning, in which we don masks in the performance of the narrative that we call “our life.”