On 8th May, ELTE will award an honorary doctorate to Mia Couto, a globally recognized representative of contemporary African literature. The Mozambican writer, who builds bridges between cultures, talks in an interview with university lecturer Bálint Urbán about how a border can become a passage, a name a story, and language the bearer of hope. He also discusses why he considers identities to be partly artificial, and how literature helps us see the world in a more nuanced way. 

He was born in the 1950s in the city of Beira, located in central Mozambique. At the time, the country was still under Portuguese colonial rule, and his childhood and adolescence were framed by the experiences of the colonial war for independence. His parents were Portuguese emigrants. How did his family environment, the city, and the unique historical context influence his thinking and growth as a writer?
The fact that I was born and raised in two such different worlds never caused me an identity crisis. On the contrary, for as long as I can remember, I have been forming plural identities that seem continuously incompatible. 

This plurality of belonging to multiple places is perhaps the greatest gift life has given me. 

I do not have a split personality. Moore like, I am a scattered being. My whole life has spanned across borders—faulty, deceptive, or socially constructed borders. Between Europe and Africa, between religion and science, writing and orality, tradition and modernity. None of this is due to myself; it was merely an accident that I have always moved in culturally and historically divided spaces. For a writer, this is a real blessing. It's a real blessing for anyone who wants to be happy. Primarily because it helps one understand that identities are artificially constructed; there is very little natural about them.

The name Mia Couto is a pseudonym. “What's in a name?”—asks the famous Shakespeare quote. Where does this mysterious pseudonym come from? In a text, Jacques Derrida poses the question: “what happens when we give a name? What do we give then?” What did the name Mia Couto give you?
My parents say that I gave myself this name when I was three years old, most likely because of the stray cats that used to gather in the large yard of our house. My mother always put out leftovers, and dozens of cats would gather in the yard. In some photos, you can see me lying down among them and playing with them as if I were one of them, as if I too were a cat. The name Mia comes from the Portuguese verb “miar,” which means “to meow,” and it’s a kind of tribute to the cats. What’s fascinating about this is not the flight of childish imagination—which, at that age, is typical of every child—but rather that 

my parents accepted my choice of name so naturally, as if it were my innate right, and as if by doing so they recognized my autonomy and the fact of my personal freedom. 

The name has led to countless misunderstandings. When Samora Machel, the president of Mozambique, visited Cuba, every member of the Mozambican delegation received a gift from Fidel Castro. I was given, as it happened, clothes, blouses, and earrings. On another occasion, early in my writing career, I was invited to an American university. The organizers thought a Black woman would arrive. Perhaps owing in part to these misunderstandings, I love this name, as it transcends boundaries just as I myself as a writer am constantly moving between borders. It’s a name from the animal world, a woman’s name, a label full of dualities and contradictions, and for these reasons, it helps me recognize my own uniqueness.

You moved from Beira to the capital, Maputo, and enrolled at the university’s medical faculty because you wanted to be a psychiatrist. But you interrupted your studies and became a journalist. What was behind this decision, and how did your journalistic experience in the years following independence shape you as a writer and as a person?
In 1972, I had to leave my hometown, as at the time there was only one university in the entire country. I went to the capital to study medicine. I was fascinated by the thin boundary between madness and so-called normality. We were living through the last days of the Portuguese colonial dictatorship, and I joined the secretly operating national liberation movement. They asked me to interrupt my studies and support the struggle as a journalist. I was very young then—they had to ask my parents for permission. Originally, I planned to take just a year off from university, but it turned out to be twelve years. I learned how to understand the complexity and diversity of my country—the complexity and diversity of a country where more than twenty-eight different ethnic groups live and speak different languages. 

I learned not to fear the idea of complexity and diversity, which exists in every being. 

And I understood that what is most important to me is not to be found in daily news, but rather in the stories told to me by people who often could not write and did not speak Portuguese.

You did not return to medicine, ultimately earning a degree in biology, and your career has run in two parallel paths: you’ve been both a writer and a biologist. Is there any passage between the two fields? Does your work and thinking as a biologist influence your writing and vice versa?
I don’t know where poetry ends and scientific inquiry begins. The famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr—who probably studied the invisible world of atoms more than anyone else—said a sentence in one of his interviews that is very dear to me. They asked him how he would describe the atom, and he replied that only poetry could do so. 

In the African cultures in which I live, even to this day alternative borders separating the living from the non-living, nature from culture, fiction from reality still apply. In this worldview, a river, a stone, a mountain is considered a living entity, with its own voice and soul, and we can even converse with them. This is not exoticism, nor can it be reduced to a folkloristic approach. It’s a perspective that says: to see the world, we must be a part of the world. 

We must feel in order to understand things. 

In this way of thinking, we humans are not at the top or the center of anything, and this humility is essential for us to hear those who are different from us. It may seem strange to speak of a tree’s thinking, since trees have no brain, and we cling almost religiously to the belief that thinking is only possible with the sensory structures characteristic of animals.

Last year, in 2025, you celebrated the 50th anniversary of Mozambique’s independence. How do you view and evaluate this half-century? Referring to a key motif in one of your novels, what do you see now from the “frangipani-tree veranda”?
Important progress has been made for a nation that, at the moment of independence, started its own history with ninety percent of its population illiterate, and with existing infrastructure designed and built only for the elite of Portuguese settlers. Progress was interrupted by a sixteen-year civil war that claimed a million lives. Today, we are still considered one of the world’s poorest nations. The dream of a just society, characterized by the ideals of acceptance and equal opportunities, has not yet been realized.

In the Western imagination, the images and representations circulating about the African continent are often false, deceptive, empty, romanticized, and simplistic. In your view, can African writers contribute effectively to rewriting the prevailing image of Africa and the clichés surrounding the continent?
At the time when African countries gained independence, in the sixties, a form of literature came to dominate that placed the idea of African identity on its banner. This was the era of pan-Africanism, and it was important to affirm a culture neglected by colonial oppression. This was a historically necessary response, but it soon became clear that 

this homogenizing discourse brackets off one of the greatest treasures of the African continent: diversity. 

Now, writers of the new generation are free from the compulsion to prove themselves. They are simply writers, that is that. A serious problem today, however, is that it is often Africans themselves who perpetuate Eurocentric thinking, seeing themselves in a mirror made in Europe.

In one of your short story collections, we read this: “We should see the world in a different light: the light of the moon, a radiance that gently and respectfully shines on things. Only moonlight can show the feminine side of existence. Only moonlight can reveal the intimacy of our dwelling on earth.” Do you think there is, in literature, this “different light” that illuminates the suppressed and forgotten side of things? A famous Hungarian writer, Péter Esterházy (whose works you would likely enjoy), once said: “Those who cannot speak must be spoken for by those who can.” Do you agree with this statement?
I do not believe that a writer (or anyone else) can speak on behalf of others. The writer can become the other, live lives that do not belong to him. On this journey, he can naturally reveal stolen worlds, faded forms of perception, and those stories erased by the narrative of the powerful. 

In this way, the writer can contribute to building a world in which no one needs to speak for others, because everyone is the author of their own story.

How did you come into contact with ELTE? The library of the Couto Foundation in Maputo contains books by several Hungarian authors. What is your relationship to Hungarian and Central European culture and literature? 
The university’s faculty contacted me when they visited Mozambique a few years ago. This will be my first time in Hungary. I have not visited most Central European countries. I do not know Hungarian literature very well. Many years ago, I read Sándor Márai’s Embers, and much later, Imre Kertész’s Someone Else. Kertész’s book had a great impact on me, because it contained what I seek most in literature: it’s not just about constructing the memory of the Holocaust, but about inventing a language and questioning language itself. For the same reasons, I’d also like to read the works of László Krasznahorkai.

What will you talk about in your lecture on May 7?
I will talk about my own experiences, showing how literature (and especially poetry) can reveal dimensions of the world that are essential to me, and show hope in times dominated by apocalyptic discourse.