Os ethé de mulheres moçambicanas em obras de Mia Couto

Abstract

Sleepwalking Land (1995a) and The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), by Mia Couto, present social, historical and cultural elements of Mozambique and pose questions regarding the Mozambican peoples national identity. Their narratives record and expand the intrinsic relationship with politics that marked Mozambican literature since colonial times. This is done, in Sleepwalking Land, through a political and cultural project that arose in the context of the struggle for independence, centered in the indictment of colonialism; and, in The Last Flight of the Flamingo, through the dreaming conception of a project of freedom for peoples still under the yoke of foreign intervention. In this collective dimension, one can hear the denunciation of official misconduct and observe the traits of the local culture, in which women are considered pillars of the sociocultural structure. That has led us to analyze how the enunciative instances construct the womans ethos and how this woman perceives Mozambican sociodiscursive imaginaries. In order to conduct such analysis, we identify the voices of these women and associate these characters ethe with socio-discursive imaginaries. Having as guiding principle the ethos that is constructed through discourse and demands the interaction between enunciator and interlocutor, we see that the construction of the characters ethe seeks their interlocutors adherence. It does so through argumentative and persuasive strategies, socio-discursive representations, belief information and other instituted elements in discourse. We situate those ethe and relate them to each other, using mirroring and basing ourselves on the Mozambican sociocultural and historical context. Therefore, the research takes place in the interface between Linguistics, more specifically discourse analysis, and ethos in literary discourse. Our theoretical framework is composed by studies by Maingueneau (2011, 2008a, 2006, 2005a, 2001), Amossy (2005) and Charaudeau (2011, 2009, 2007). Additionally, we have turned to Perelman, Plato, Aristoteles, Isocrates and Cicero, in order to reach a better understanding of the concept of ethos. For the concept of nation, we have drawn on the works of Anderson (1989, 2008), Hobsbawm ([1917] 1990) and Renan (1990). Based on these authors, we have carried out an analysis at once qualitative, linguistic-discursive and interdisciplinary of the ethe present in the corpus. As a result of the research, we have found Coutos literary discourse to be, in short, Mozambican society looking at itself in a great mirror, in which each one can see their own image as well as that of others. We have also found that Coutos writing, through its characters discourse, functions as a mnemonic, helping to outline individual ethos, the Mozambican cultures symbolization and the sense of belonging to a group or a culture, thus revealing traits of the Mozambican complex of identities.