The auditorium of the Faculty of Medical Sciences was packed on the afternoon of June 19th to welcome Mozambican writer Mia Couto. The lecture, which included a chat with the audience, was part of the 50th anniversary program of the Unicamp Biology Institute. Student-artists from the university and Coral Zíper na Boca made up the cultural part of the event, which closed with an extensive autograph session and sale of the writer's books. Among the various topics covered in almost two hours, Mia emphasized the importance of rapprochement between Brazil and Mozambique, recounted her experience of activism for the African country's independence and the role of art and literature as a “way of counteracting alienation from global problems.” .
Watch Mia Couto's lecture at Unicamp
When asked about the challenge of working as a biologist and journalist, Mia commented that she does not see a dissociation between the two fields: “it is the art of telling stories that go beyond the technical logic of science”. And he adds: “The great prize that literature gives us is the pleasure of doing things, this pleasure of traveling for others. But it's not just about traveling, it's about being someone else. When I write about a woman, I have to be that woman. I have to be Indian, I have to be black, I have to be old, I have to be young, I have to be Chinese." In the same line, he poetically cites the example of death: “you don't just die from something, but of someone; every passage has a plot, a context beyond the biological issue. It may seem poetic, but this ideology of African reality, of disease, also concerns us”, he concludes.
Winner of the 2013 Camões Prize and the 2014 Neustadt Prize, Mia Couto gained prominence in international literature with the publication of Terra Sonâmbula in 1992. The work was considered one of the ten best African novels of the 1995th century by the 2016 Zimbabwe Book Fair , and is part of the list of mandatory books for the Unicamp Entrance Exam. The most recent book published by Mia Couto is Sombras da Água, released in 80 in Brazil by Cia. das Letras. Biologist by training and journalist, Mia Couto worked after the end of the National Liberation War as a reporter for the Mozambique Information Agency and other vehicles, working in journalism until the mid-XNUMXs. The professor works in the area of ecology and conducts, through company, environmental impact assessments in Africa.
Check out TV Unicamp's report with Mia Couto
Watch Mia Couto's full talk at Unicamp
