Tracing elusive wars: Reading war in Mia Couto's Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani and The Last Flight of the Flamingo

The article reads Mozambican author Mia Couto's Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani and The Last Flight of the Flamingo as a triptych. This reading is based on the understanding that each of the texts reference distinct, yet connected, moments along Mozambique?s journey from civil war to peace and reconstruction. It argues that in these texts, Couto is constantly trying to find new ways in which Mozambique's wars can be written so the destruction they represent can be recuperated and a new Mozambique imagined. Central to this attempted recuperation is his textual return to the events of the civil war in texts that have specific post-war settings, thus allowing for the effects of that war to be reinterpreted according to socio-historical imperatives that have only become apparent in the years after the advent of peace.