Paulina Chiziane

Paulina "Poulli" Chiziane (born 4 June 1955, Manjacaze, southern province of Gaza, Mozambique) is an author of novels and short stories in the Portuguese language. Quotes Interview with Buala (2014) Translated from Portuguese to English by Kaian Lam For me, what is important is to dare to provoke, and from there, people will realize that they need to explore these treasures. What I believe is that love is a sentiment, and this is universal, although each culture constructs its own ideology of love. (What was the stereotypical image of the Portuguese in colonial times and how has this image changed since then?) PC: ...Colonial repression was very harsh. The older generation felt it most. For example, in school textbooks, when I studied in colonial times, a white man would be depicted with a hat, safari outfit, a gun, all proud, and a black man would be represented with a skin dress, always a ridiculous image. I cannot recall seeing pretty images of Africans in colonial books. People of the black race were constantly portrayed in a manner that shows their inferiority. Also, when talking about racial tensions, there was one more popular image, that of black people around a bonfire, and a great pot, and a white man with a hat and a gun in it to demonstrate that we were cannibals...When I began going to church, God was white, and the Devil was black. This changed with time but not completely. The angels of God are still white to this day, we do not have black angels yet. a mestizo or mulatto is an individual locked in an uncomfortable situation, always searching for an identity. Among black people, he is treated in a certain way; among white people, he is treated in a different way. He alone has to create his own world. It is how mestizo groups come about…A mulatto is an individual living a life of identity dilemma…Their identity is totally influenced by two poles: black and white. (Q: Do you think that we have a Mozambican cultural identity nowadays?) I think so. We are living in an artificially designated geographical space and we have something in common, slavery, Portuguese colonization, we speak the same national language, we connect with one another. In both the national liberation war and the civil war, there is the bad side, but also the good side, such as the mixing of cultures. There is constant movement from the North to the South and today we see people from all origins in every corner of Mozambique. People are learning to live in harmony. This for me is the beginning of an identity formation that can take a thousand years, or less. It is a very long process. (Q: difficulties in using Portuguese to tell stories which, if told in local languages, would probably be livelier? What is your relationship as a writer with the Portuguese language?) PC: Conflictual. Surely, I learned to read and write in Portuguese, I am familiar with Lusophone literature. But there are cultural peculiarities that Portuguese is not able to transmit. Besides, Portuguese is a language of domination and of segregation. When I write and choose words, I am sometimes in shock: traditional healers are the centre of African knowledge. But what is a traditional healer in Portuguese? The dictionary gives an evasive, simplistic definition that intends simply to hush the traditional healer to one side. Supposedly, he is one who should be banished and eliminated. I think that Europeans are rigid for no reason. They appropriated the great traditions without learning about their origins. Then they set dogmas. For us, knowledge about the history of Christianity and Islam is important…Africa was the cradle of Christianity and Islam. However, when the Europeans took up history, they invented something different to wipe out the origins of the great deeds of what they consider religion, and this gave rise to many other events. They wanted to exclude Africa, but it should not be. Africa is part of the history. Time passed, much has happened, and our people are once again colonized with a supposedly European doctrine that really began here. I think we need to begin to discuss this. The Holy Bible is another school of irrationalism [smiles] but also the basis of great powers. Yes, we have to learn to co-live with other cultures because we are oppressed and we need to survive, we need to resist. Africa can add to our knowledge, not contradict it. Respect and research are the key. I lived in a civil war, I saw massacres before me, I saw people collapsing and dying before me, shooting before me, mine victims before me. I saw people running from one place to another...This is the situation: when the pain is unbearable, people do not want to talk. I think they have no energy for such weighty subject. People who were themselves victims bore crushing, inexpressible pain. The rest who lived through the war indirectly should help them to rehabilitate, to demand their rights. We are absorbed by other worries, though…Ventos do Apocalipse was like a cure for me...Once I started writing, I felt some sort of relief. Literature can work like collective catharsis and be a kind of collective memory. The young generation needs to know what happened yesterday, but unfortunately that are very few stories. I hope that one day there will be more because some of what happened was terrible. I am from the South. The education I received was the following: a woman should not say what she thinks or feels, she has to obey her man unconditionally. Macua women are different. They act in their power, they defend their rights. This may be what the Kenyan man felt… Another important issue is the colonization process itself. African people were considered cultureless by the Portuguese colonizers, who wanted to impose their own supposedly superior Judeo culture. But among African people there were more developed cases. Sometimes I say, we embrace Christianity and many colonialist values blindly. Today we are searching for a paradise that we had and lost…Today, Mozambican women demand rights to things that they already had but lost through accepting a system without serious thoughts. Clearly, we had little chance as colonial subjects. But African cultures have a lot to contribute to world development. For one like me who lived among the Macuas, when I follow the global feminist movements, I say to myself, “But we had all it all.” Feminist movements, even in Mozambique, adopt the European model when they fight for women’s rights and do not reference the practical experiences of their own culture. This is not to say that we have feminism, but that we have a tradition, various traditions. Even in the harshest patriarchal system women have some rights. In Europe women were totally disregarded. European Christianity arrived and destroyed everything, rendering women worthless. Interview in Speaking Postcolonial Nation Writers: Interviews with Writers from Angola and Mozambique (2014) Translated from the original Portuguese by Luis R. Mitras. Book edited by Ana Mafalda Leite, Sheila Khan, Jessica Falconi, Kamila Krakowska sometimes I say that the nation doesn't exist. It is still a seed, the embryo of something that will come one day. I think the nation, really ... To be honest, I don't really know what the nation is, but for me it doesn't exist. The nation is a dream about something which has to be created still. I think that people sometimes reach a certain way because they're used to one way of writing and they expect all writing to be like that, but why do I have to be like that? It's my paper, it's my time, the story is mine, and I write what I want. My writing is my own space of freedom. I don't want to broker deals with anyone. But it's been a constant struggle. For me, Mozambican literature is something that's still in the future. I believe that we are occupying a certain time and space, and that literature is still to be formed. For me, Mozambican literature is a major project that will follow its own particular path, as the nation has done. We can't say that our literature is healthy and strong and robust if we don't even know what our identity is. something I always ask is this: When we're talking about identity, what level are we operating on? Because sometimes they talk to us about identity in the sense of clothing and food, but I think it's something much deeper than that: it has more to do with the sense of thinking about life and thinking about the world. That's what gives me my identity. if we look at what constitutes love or beauty from an African perspective, we see other signs, other ways of seeing the world: from an African perspective, a beautiful woman would be someone like me, someone who's a bit fat. Culturally, that is how it is, and so a woman with my physique is a woman who is calm, who has a tranquil life, who is very maternal, etc. This image of woman does not appear on TV. She is practically annihilated. Where we see her is in the market selling tomatoes, and she is anonymous and she has no expression. So, there's a lot of work to be done. The same thing happens in relation to men. I studied during the colonial period, I interacted with the Portuguese in a very direct way. I experienced racism directly, but I knew my place, and today I no longer do. All those things we fought against and said 'No' to, those are the very things that people now are pursuing as if they had the greatest value. I ask myself: Are we really in the postcolonial? Yes, we are because we no longer have the Portuguese, or the Portuguese flag, because we don't have all those horrible things - slavery, that horrible segregation that used to exist at the time. This is our postcolonial, but we are more colonial than ever we were before. I think we are. I look at the ruling class, for example. That's what educated people aspire to be like. It's the class that provides a model to society. We've all become colonial. I am not at all happy about this. Are we really postcolonial? Did we ever experience independence to the full? I don't know. But for me it's neo-colonial. I'd rather refer to the neo-colonial. (Q: In your opinion does the writer not have an explicit social commitment to reality? What are the limits of this commitment?) PC: There are various limitations. There are financial limitations. There are time constraints. But it's not only that. The greatest limitation is perspective itself: it's the horizon. When the writer looks at his own country from the perspective of his own home and does not take a step outside, even though they have the opportunity to do so... I know writers who could produce an interesting book out of that. It could even be a stimulus...A couple is having tea, no, it's not that, the teacup is made of porcelain, and the porcelain comes from China, and China which is so faraway, ten pages, and then twenty pages of this... In other words, a writer like this looks at the world from the perspective of his teacup, which is also good, but I think that our Mozambican writing - and this is a very personal opinion - should open the horizon wider so that we have a literature, a novel, that's richer. We need to open the window to see how others live, other cultures, the thousand and one things that we have. I think that is what we need. Quotes about External links GoodReads page Category:1955 births Category:Living people Category:Novelists from Mozambique Category:Short story writers from Mozambique Category:Women authors from Mozambique Category:Women born in the 1950s