Poetry and critics. Word and body: some considerations on Mia Couto’s work

Abstract

The aim of this article is to put in dialogue two texts by Mia Couto, writ­ten in different genders, and published with a large gap of time between each other. In both, the tensions among poetry, thought and life reflect the author’s attitude in face of language and its poetic transformation strength that could act in society and lyric person. The first text, is an intervention [poetic] made in Stockholm, in 2008; the other is a poem from author’s first writings, Nocturnamente, from 1981. In both it is possible to note that authorship figurations address to two kinds of crisis: political and social dilemmas from Africa and also, in terms of individual subjectivity crisis, to the dilemmas of the poetic person, following the path of modernity but adding to it something new: the concern with body and corporality of scripture. In both texts, the intervention and the poem, language and human being has a crucial role, whether to re-ordinate the world or to ordi­nate the profound lyricism of poetic person. In this sense, the critical cons­ciousness are pinpointed not as something usually dropped in traditional crisis debate, but from this debate to something challenger: the reflexions on (un)limited powerful of poetry resistance, as Jean Luc Nancy suggests.