Oralidade, voz e memória nas reminiscências de Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra, de Mia Couto

Abstract

This paper intends to examine the notion of experience and the figure of the narrator between the lines of A river called Time, a house called Land, by Mia Couto. From the memorial speech circumscribed by the peasant’s inside look and the sailor’s outside look and against the advents that marked the narrator’s deletion, we seek to return to the primacy of the oral discourse, either through the perspective of social voice or through the resigned register of printed matrix. In welcoming the oral text, both discourses allow the narrator’s voice to be heard – the wise counselor who is able to ensure the dialogue between the new and the traditional through the exchange of experiences passed on through generations. Therefore this paper is based on Walter Benjamin’s concept of experience in “The Narrator”. Voice, orality and memory will be examined in the light of the voice and poetry of the Middle Ages’ researcher Paul Zumthor, Roland Barthes’ ideas about voice as scripture and otherness, and Henri Bergson’s reflections on body, memory and experience. Thus we seek to establish other perspectives on experience, voice and memory in the extent of the body, both the physical and the social one.