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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Paulina Chiziane

Paulina_Chiziane_2008 Otávio_de_Souza WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0.jpg
Paulina Chiziane at the 2008 International Literature Festival, Brazil (Photo: Otavio de Souza via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

Paulina Chiziane is one of Mozambique’s most established and prolific writers. Born in Manjacaze (Gaza province) in 1955, she grew up speaking Chope, the language of her ethnic group, and Ronga, a language spoken in Maputo where she grew up. Proficiency in Portuguese was acquired later, when she attended a Portuguese Catholic mission school in Maputo. Chiziane was 18 years old when Mozambique became independent. A one-time militant member of Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), she grew disenchanted by the revolution. She studied linguistics at the University Eduardo Mondlane, but abandoned her studies in order to dedicate herself to writing. Chiziane worked for the Mozambican Red Cross during the years of the conflict between Frelimo and Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance). Today, she continues to travel around the country, working with women’s groups and associations in several provinces of Mozambique.

Chiziane’s career as a writer began in 1984, when she started publishing short-stories in the Mozambican press (Tempo magazine and Domingo magazine). Known as the first woman to publish a novel in her country, Chiziane has published 6 novels and a collection of short stories to date: Balada de Amor ao Vento (1990), Ventos do Apocalipse (1993), O Sétimo Juramento (2000), Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (2002), O Alegre Canto da Perdiz (2008), and As Andorinhas (2009, short-stories). Furthermore, Chiziane’s testimony ‘Eu, Mulher… por uma nova visão do mundo’, given in the context of a UNESCO initiative (preparation for the International Conference on Woman, Peace and Development), was published in 1994 and republished in 2014 by Nandyala publisher in Belo Horizonte. In 2013, Chiziane co-authored the novel Nas Mãos de Deus with Maria do Carmo da Silva. She also edited, with Angolan writer Dya Kasembe, a collection of stories entitled O Livro da Paz da Mulher Angolana: As Heroínas sem Nome, a book that brings together 80 narratives of Angolan women who survived the war to tell their stories. In Portugal, her work is published by the prestigious mainstream press Caminho (part of the Leya group since 2008). Chiziane’s work has been translated into German, American, French and Italian.

In 2003, Chiziane shared the José Craveirinha literary prize with Mozambican writer Mia Couto, for her 4th novel, Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia, which secured her official international recognition for her work. In 2014, this international recognition was reinforced with the award of the title of Grande Oficial da Ordem Infante D. Henrique, awarded also to fellow Mozambican writer Ungulali Ba Ka Khosa, by Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco Silva.

Chiziane’s work is decidedly woman-focused. Although she has never hesitated to defend this focus in interviews, Chiziane continues to reject the term ‘feminist.’ Her novels engage with the transitions between political systems from the colonial period to democracy, and her focus ‘is almost exclusively the patriarchal structuring of sexual relations in the Tsonga cultures of Southern Mozambique’ (Owen, 2007). Chiziane takes ‘this very specific, localized example of patriarchal culture [in order to] trace the ways in which it has interacted with different but overlapping historical discourses of modernity’. Chiziane’s writing also shows a concern for issues such as emigration and women’s economic (in)dependence from their husbands, families and communities, denouncing the extent to which gender power relations are implicated in the production, regulation and consumption of difference and resistance in the postcolonial world (Martins, 2012). Chiziane has stated in interviews that she was influenced by the paradigmatic Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca (Laban, 1998; Martins and Tavares, 2008 [unpublished]).

The Mozambican author has marketed her career as a writer around a double refusal that affects her image within Mozambique and outside: she has refused to follow both the genre with which militants and writers have designed Mozambique’s nationalist and revolutionary consciousness, and the terminology generally used to describe the producers of novels – the fiction format most privileged in the West and most often picked up for global distribution (Brouillette, 2007). As an author searching for new ways of writing about gender difference within the context of a primarily oral culture tradition, her turn to the novel, instead of the short-story or poetry, reveals a desire to question sexualised perceptions of male and female agency through writing, followed by a strategic re-translation of what is meant by ‘novelist’ and ‘novel’. This re-translation is well-advertised by the publishing house Caminho in the paratextual information found on the back covers of Chiziane’s books, designed to construct the ‘market reader’ in the light of the author’s preference to be read as a storyteller rather than a novelist. More recently, Chiziane has actively criticised the arrival and influence of foreign churches (i.e., the Igreja Universal, Assembleia de Deus) and Brazilian soap operas in Mozambique. A documentary about Chiziane’s life and work, based on the experience of medium that is at the heart of the novel Na Mão de Deus  is being planned by Mozambican director Aldino Languana.

Compiled by Ana Margarida Dias Martins (Exeter)