Stefan Helgesson

Tranan publishing house does an amazing job of bringing literature from unusual parts of the world to the Swedish reading public. ”Kärlekens ärr” is a sample menu of stories from Mocambique’s short literary history. As such, it’s of course a mixed bag. A literature emerging in a country almost without readers (90% of the population was illiterate at the time of the liberation in 1975) is bound to be struggling, and many of the stories here probably have their biggest value in the fact that they are presenting certain aspects of life in Mocambique in literary form for the first time: life on the garbage dumps, the plight of the prostitute, the working child, the criminal youth. For me as an outsider they often feel a little crude and flat. I also grow a little weary of female characters described primarily by their breat size and curves.

A few exceptions are rising above the pack though, making this a book well worth reading besides for mere orientation: Lilia Momplé’s simple tale of jealousy and what happens when the exhausted husband snaps, Joao Paulo Borges Coelho’s story of hate-love and dependency between a tailor and his assistant, Paulina Chiziane’s drunk mother who, without meaning to, lets her child know that she was prepared to leave her for dead, and the cruel look at oppression in colonial times by Luis Bernardo Honwana.… (mehr)