The Sword and the Spear

July 1, 2020
A cross-racial romance complicates tensions in 19th-century colonial Mozambique. The second novel in this trilogy (following Woman of the Ashes, 2018) is set in 1895 amid territorial fighting among Portuguese colonists, the powerful native leader Ngungunyane, and the VaChopi, a rival tribe. But its heart is the affair between Imani, a young VaChopi woman, and Portuguese Sgt. Germano de Melo. As the story opens, Imani's family is trying to ferry an injured Germano to safety, finding refuge in a church whose priest is ostensibly Catholic but who has fallen for a native healer and adapted his faith to match. ("Here, even Christ would have thrown in the towel," he proclaims.) Couto's narrative is designed to highlight how opposing sensibilities merge and repel each other; the novel alternates between Imani's narration and letters from Germano and other Portuguese military leaders. Germano needs to decide whether his love for Imani is worth sacrificing his military position; meanwhile, Imani is trying to balance whether she can keep her relationship with Germano while also, at her father's insistence, being part of a peace offering with Ngungunyane. It's best to start with Woman of the Ashes to feel better grounded in this dynamic but also because Couto's writing has a richer, more allegorical feel there; Imani's voice in the first novel has a dreamlike cast, the better to capture the disorientation and fear that marks her tribe's precarious position; here the prose is more flatly descriptive. Still, the second novel offers a helpful summary of the first and provides a stand-alone story with its own intrigues, as battles between the colonists and colonized intensify, and a late-breaking plot twist sets up the concluding novel on both symbolic and plot levels. A nuanced study of the power plays and violence sparked by colonialism.

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July 13, 2020
The modest second entry in Couto’s Sands of the Emperor trilogy (after Woman of the Ashes) picks up with the Portuguese Sgt. Germano de Melo nursing severely injured hands in late 1890s Mozambique. Germano boats up the River Inharrime with his VaChopi translator and love, the teenage Imani, and others in search of medical assistance. Stopping to rest in Sana Benene, they’re welcomed by a priest and his miracle worker partner, who mends Germano while the Gaza Empire battles Portuguese soldiers for control of neighboring lands. Members of both warring parties visit Sana Benene, including the Portuguese Capt. Santiago Mata, who carts off a healed Germano from the group, which breaks up once Imani, carrying out her father’s plan, agrees to infiltrate Gaza to marry and murder Emperor Ngungunyane, thus ending the war. As in Couto’s earlier novel, knowledge of Mozambique’s history helps one appreciate the plot nuances, while much of the narrative works to set the table for the concluding volume, particularly as Couto’s isolated characters barrel toward each other near the novel’s climax. Though the prose occasionally veers into histrionic (“This river up which we were traveling crossed territories of fire, riven by hunger and blood”), Couto’s protagonists remain consistently fascinating. Readers of the first installment will appreciate this.