The Sacred Trees: A Worldview in The Chthulucene

Abstract

The presente papper propose reflections from the perspective of ecocritical thought from the reading of the short stories “A palmeira de Nguézi” and “O embondeiro que sonhava pássaros” by Mia Couto. By revealing the importance of the tree as a sacred symbol, in the short stories, the Mozambican writer presents connections of ancestry through a worldview inseparably integrates the human being with nature. The intergenerational legacy of diverse cultures belonging to traditional peoples around the world has been affected by negative interference in the environment dictated by colonizing processes. In this scenario, in which what the ancestral knowledge is included, we highlight the Chthulucene proposed by Donna Haraway in which we are on the scene for each other. We highlight the importance of the themes related to the geological times proposed by Paul Crutzen (Anthropocene), Jason Moore (Capitalocene), and Donna Haraway (Chthulucene), as well as issues of otherness when referencing the becoming-vegetable represented in the tales of Mia Couto as an inseparable human-being-nature relationship. We sought to bring to light the ecocritical discourse, anchored in the Chthulucene, the rescue of the Mozambican ancestry connected with “A palmeira de Nguézi” and “O embondeiro que sonhava pássaros”. Considering transdisciplinarity in the literary and environmental context, the short stories analyzed point to the intrinsic relationship between human-being- nature and awaken to a better understanding of human actions concerning otherness and decolonial reflections.