Mia Couto: justice and “bare life”, in The Last Flight of the Flamingo

Abstract

My reading follows the challenge we are confronted with, as a sort of enigma, at the beginning of the novel: “did the [UN] soldiers die? Were they killed?”. Looking for an answer, it ponders those issues of life and death, as they are posed by the fictive world of Tizangara. And it understands those concepts by taking into account not only Walter Benjamin’s positions, in his Critique of Violence, but also the thoughts of both Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida. Reviewing the existing critical bibliography on Mia Couto’s novel as well, it offers an alternative way of understanding the death of the UN soldiers in Tizangara by capturing, in the speech of father Muhando and that of his closest friends, the wizard Zeca Andorinho and the old Suplício, certain transposed principles of the bible that also help us to understand the tragic alegory of the disappearance of the nation at the end of the novel.