Mia Couto: Kindzu’s dreams, in Sleepwalking Land

Abstract

The leading aim of my reading was to approach not only the nature of dreams and of travelling in Mia Couto’s literary work, but also to examine their place in the history and Kindzu’s character, who is also a fictive writer, in the novel. Based on his self-definition as a writer of dreams, I sought to connect – through the mediations of Freud, in his L'interprétation du rêve, and Jacques Derrida, in «Freud et la scene de l'écriture», a text from his L'écriture et la difference – the psychoanalytic concept of dreaming with that of Mia Couto’s, ending by linking the temporalization process of the real(ity), implicated in travelling, with the psychic rearranjement of the senses, operated by dreams, following the Brazilian psychoanalyst Decio Gurfinkel’s view, and also Mia Couto’s, in whose literary work dreams intersect, not only with travelling but also with writing. It is the case of Sleepwalking Land.