In the small, largely abandoned village of Kulumani, lions have killed many of the inhabitants. The most recent of these is Silencia, Mariamar’s elder sister. Her funeral is the opening of the novel. Up until this point, nothing has been done about the killings. The village elders seek help and through the district administrator, Florindo Makwala, secure the services of a mulatto hunter, Archangel Bullseye. However, when the hunter arrives in the village—accompanied by Gustavo Regalo (a writer assigned to write a report for the central government), Florindo Makwala, and his wife, Dona Naftalinda—he is met with hostility, rumours, myths, legends, and speculation. The people of Kulumani do not want a foreigner to take on the job when they could hunt the lions themselves. The combination of all this builds into a mystery that the bulk of the novel spends examining and unravelling to discover the realness and identity of the lions. When questioned about it, the people of Kulumani say:
“There’s the bush lion, which in these parts is called a ntumi va kuvapila; there’s the invented lion they call a ntumi ku lambi-dyanga; and then there are the lion-people, known as ntumi va vanu. And they’re all real.”
The major characters in the story have personal traumas they are dealing with, whose effects on their daily lives significantly influences their interaction with other characters and taint their perception of the events in the story afterward. The community of Kulumani, like Mozambique, is in a post-traumatic state following years of civil war, and before that, the war for independence. Of this condition, one inhabitant, says:
“We all came back from the war, dead.”
Another inhabitant, a blind soldier who fought in the civil war, explained that:
“The lions weren’t emerging from the bush. They were born out of the last armed conflict. The same upheaval of all wars was now being repeated: People had become animals, and animals had become people . . .”
Before this the blind soldier had told Archangel that this was war and not a hunt for lions, essentially describing the whole point of the novel. True to his explanation, there is suspicion among the people of Kulumani and they offer up their neighbours as those responsible for the killings—as murderers or those who summoned the lions. Mia Couto manages to diagnose this state of mind of the people of Kulumani and by extension, Mozambique, as a symptom of Portuguese colonial influence and civil war. Of men they conquered like gods, they created animals.
The story is told through diary entries of Mariamar’s and Archangel’s points of view in largely alternating narratives that later become parallel towards the end.
Mariamar, after the death of her sisters (Silencia was not the first), is ‘imprisoned’ under the guise of protection from the lions killing women in the village, but it is really to keep her away from Archangel whom her parents fear will take away their last surviving daughter. She and Silencia are connected to him by past events and emotions from that spill into the current plot of the novel. She spends most of the novel reliving her past traumas, which she expresses in the present tense albeit with the abstraction and interpretation of hindsight interwoven with the traditions and beliefs of Kulumani and the lion killings. She hopes to be saved by Archangel and escape Kulumani. It is through her point of view that most of the myths are narrated, which every inhabitant of Kulumani seems to understand as she does. Her point of view sets the tone of the story and is later continued in Archangel’s perspective. For example, she describes Kulumani as “a closed place surrounded by geography and atrophied by fear” or “a living cemetery, only visited by its own residents”
Archangel Bullseye, on the other hand, is an insomniac haunted by the murder of his father which happened at the hand of his brother. He is in love with his brother’s wife and longs for this affection to be requited. His narrative forms what could be perceived as the forward movement of the story juxtaposing Mariamar’s perspective with his realism. However, he easily accepts the magical and does not seek to understand nor explain it.
Various questions arise in the reading of the novel apart from the realness or identity of the lioness. There is the question of how a lioness can “confess” and why only women are eaten. To the questions, there are breadcrumbs in the narrative and even outright admissions that do not quite satisfy.
In its ambitiousness, the story is skewed toward the portrayal of social injustice faced by women and prescribed by tradition, a people’s beliefs, and how they can be confronted. Mia Couto through the narrators demonises the men, and as you read the novel, they deserve what comes to them.
“We women have been buried for a long time now,” Hanifa tells Mariamar, “. . . entombed alive.”
In reading the novel, one will tell quickly that the concept of the “lions” differs for every character, and one drive to keep reading is to define for oneself what it means to you. For Dona Naftalinda, the lions are the abusive misogynistic men of Kulumani, preying on women. To stretch the metaphor further, Mia Couto writes, “In hunting, the prey works harder than the predator.” The women of Kulumani slave away in an attempt to redefine gender roles and have a life outside what tradition and cultural beliefs prescribe. At the head of the struggle is Dona Naftalinda who insists on accompanying the men on the hunt for the lions. She identifies the men involved in the crime and sacrifices herself to trap the animals. Through her action, she stirs her inept husband, a representation of the inept patriarchal government, to action. There is Hanifa Assulua who rouses from victimhood and silence to face her husband and save their daughter even if it means damning herself. Here Mia Couto posits that there is a need for more female voices and action to face the patriarchy, to rouse it from ineptness in the matter at hand because justice can only be received with the cooperation of the genders.
Among the men who support these women is Adjiru Kapitamoro, who through “his mintela, the mixtures and charms of the witch doctors”, protected his granddaughter. He carved “masks in accordance with ancestral precepts” which “invariably portrayed women: The goddesses we once were didn’t want to be forgotten.”
An issue many readers will find with the novel is that there is no clear distinction between the narrative voices; even the inhabitants (including the unschooled ones—Mariamar and her mother are the only ones who can speak and write English) express themselves—in English—with the dexterity of poets. Everyone sounds the same and the reader is guided by names to direct them on who is speaking. Although it’s a first-person narrative, often the narrators seem to have knowledge of other characters’ internal milieu. For the perception of setting in terms of when the story takes place, one can tell in some instances but mostly, it is disorienting if you think too much about it. Past, present, future mix the way reality, magic, and spirits mix.
Janet Levin, a journalist, and author of the novel Leela’s Gift described Confession of the Lioness as “a late Picasso work painted in shades of abstract modernism.”
There is hardly anything familiar to ground the reader, no clear chronology but, like Picasso paintings, the beauty of the images pulls you to appreciation and even fascination. Mia Couto’s poetic and lyrical prose paint more than enough concrete images to carry the reader through to the last page.
It must also be said that everything is clear to the reader after the whole story is complete and even clearer after hours or days once done. The depths of the story reveal themselves over time. However, it’s a book that does not entice one to reread it.
“Scratching at the wounds of the past”, Mia Couto, describes himself—using Archangel’s critique of Gustavo Regalo—as a “bird of prey” seeking tales of war, “lives on carrion” and “embarked on this journey to peck at misfortune, among survivors who sorrow in silence.” Which is true of Mia Couto’s work. Social injustice is just one of the wars the characters fight in this novel, as are personal wars with the past, beliefs, tradition, and many others.
The novel is based on actual events. In 2008 in northern Mozambique, people were attacked by lions and environmental field officers (colleagues of Mia Couto—a biologist and conservationist) who were sleeping in camping tents were at risk. The oil company they worked for dispatched hunters to eliminate the lions and Mia Couto lived through the “whole situation at close quarters”. He interacted with the real facts and people. He learned that “gradually the hunters realised that the mysteries they were having to confront were merely symptoms of social conflicts for which they had no adequate solution”. This was the inspiration for the novel.
Confession of the Lioness was translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw and published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.