The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025
In March 2019, as Cyclone Idai bore down on Mozambique, it arrived with a weight familiar to Mia Couto. The author, born in Beira—the country’s second-largest city—in 1955, had spent decades chronicling how both natural and manmade violence has torn through his homeland, leaving open, unhealing wounds. In his latest novel, The Cartographer of Absences, the cyclone’s approach is both the temporal frame and symbolic force of such persistent fractures; the storm unearths what has been buried and almost forgotten.
The novel follows Diogo Santiago, an internationally recognized Mozambican poet, who returns to his birthplace of Beira for a literary tribute. Suffering from depression and unable to write, he sets out on the journey to ostensibly “lay his memories to rest,” and expects a ceremonial homecoming. Instead, he receives a cardboard box from Liana Campos, a mysterious resident whose grandfather once served as an inspector with PIDE—Portugal’s brutal secret police. The box contains a trove of documents from the final convulsions of Portuguese colonial rule: interrogation transcripts, confiscated poems, bureaucratic reports, and family papers. Together, they reveal the hidden architecture of violence that has shaped both Diogo and Liana’s families, including the fate of the former’s cousin, Sandro, who disappeared during the war, and the suspicious death of the latter’s mother, Almalinda.
What emerges is a historical fiction that coheres in fragments and liminal silences, structured like the records it depicts. Couto builds the narrative as an archive in motion, alternating between Diogo’s present-day wanderings through Beira and the polyvocal testimonies of the past; we read police reports alongside love letters, poems alongside torture records, culminating in a documentary collage that mirrors how traumatic memory functions—in shards, contradictions, absences. Diogo reads PIDE documents that contain statements by his own mother, discovers teenage diary entries too sophisticated to be his own; papers reveal themselves as reconstructions, and memories as inventions. Each layer peels back to reveal another document, another voice, another absence calling for a witness.
The novel’s title itself announces Couto’s methodology. More than a map, the book charts erasures—the PIDE archives that form the book’s documentary spine being described as mostly destroyed after Mozambique’s independence. These particular papers, then, survive only through Liana’s grandfather’s private hoarding, and their existence is already miraculous and terrifying. Through them, we witness the methodical violence of Portugal’s Estado Novo regime, which classified Mozambique not as a colony but as an “overseas province,” deploying PIDE agents to monitor intellectuals, writers, and suspected dissidents. Meanwhile, the cyclone approaching the city carries its own linguistic violence; “Idai” means “to love” in Shona, a cruel nominative irony that Couto refuses to sentimentalize. If there is love, the novel suggests, then perhaps it is a true reckoning via a destructive force, a storm powerful enough to tear open what has been sealed. As Idai approaches, characters debate whether to flee or remain, mirroring the conversations around whether one should confront or evade the past. Then, when the cyclone finally hits, the destruction is terrible but also clarifying, razing Portuguese buildings and African shanties alike, ferocious in its equality of annihilation.
In its faithfulness to history, The Cartographer of Absences is insistent on specificity. A major incident it reconstructs is the 1973 Inhaminga massacres, which occurred as part of Portugal’s scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign as FRELIMO (the liberation front) gained ground, resulting in the murder of hundreds of civilians in what the official forces termed as the “strategy of the clock”—a killing so gradual that “no one notices.” This method of violence recurs throughout the novel: bodies piled in town squares, arbitrary executions, forced relocations. Regardless of the fictional context, these events are neither exaggerated nor atypical, as in documented atrocities like the December 1972 Wiriyamu massacre, where Portuguese commandos killed up to four hundred civilians.
But in novelistic resolve, Couto does not let history remain an abstract tally of dates and statistics. He populates his narrative with Benedito, the family’s former servant who fled Inhaminga’s violence; Maniara, the woman who buried the dead and photographed the evidence; Capitine, the régulo caught between collaboration and resistance; and Inspector Óscar Campos, whose moral corruption slowly curdles into something approaching conscience. These characters embody the impossible positions created by colonialism—the forced informants, the survivors who witnessed too much, the perpetrators who understood too late.
Couto’s prose, brilliantly rendered by translator David Brookshaw, moves between lyrical meditation and stark documentation. When Diogo’s father, the poet Adriano Santiago, describes a woman burying victims of colonial violence, the language shifts into verse: “Digging, my lord, is not scratching among clumps of soil. / Digging is tearing the skin of demons / and seeking refuge next to the gates of hell.” Elsewhere, bureaucratic PIDE memos flatten human suffering into administrative procedure: “Let us proceed as one does when fishing: let us give the fish enough line to swallow the whole hook.”
This stylistic range reflects Couto’s deeper argument of violence as operating through language itself. The colonial state renamed, reclassified, and redefined reality—concentration camps became “protected villages,” massacres became “operations,” occupied territories became “overseas provinces.” In defiance, the novel insists on calling things by their true names, even when those truths remain contested or unknowable, and despite the obliqueness of history, its deepest insight shows how colonial violence compounds and mutates across generations. Liana, born after independence, inherits her grandfather’s shame without having committed his crimes. Diogo, privileged but politically resolved, inherits his father’s radicalism without his clarity of purpose. Both are orphans seeking stories, trying to assemble coherent identities from fragments of a past that was never fully documented, never properly mourned, and this generational inheritance comes at an urgent moment as Portugal remains slow to acknowledge its African atrocities; the Wiriyamu massacre was only officially recognized in 2022, fifty years after the fact. Historical amnesia is ongoing, a living erasure shaping present-day politics. As Liana puts it: “I need your stories, your memories, I want to turn them into my own past. It doesn’t matter whether they are invented.”
This acknowledgment of invention’s necessity distinguishes Couto’s approach. The novel admits that “memories become dangerous when we stop fabricating them,” denoting that reconstruction requires imagination as much as evidence, and remains self-aware about its own fabrication; Diogo notices that his diary entries seem too sophisticated, that papers have been rewritten. Despite being structured as a series of found documents, many of them are clearly literary creations, resulting in a paradoxical truth of how memory and history work in tandem.
Couto’s own position as a white Mozambican, a son of Portuguese emigrants who fled Salazar’s dictatorship, and a staunch advocate of FRELIMO’s cause also gives him a distinct vantage on this material. He writes from inside the contradictions: culturally African but phenotypically European, privileged under colonialism yet opposed to it. This complicated positioning allows him to dramatize how colonial society traps everyone in systems of violence and complicity, even while affecting people in radically different ways.
As Cyclone Idai approaches in the novel’s final pages, the characters shelter together in a crumbling house. Windows shatter, papers scatter like disturbed birds, and the rain pours through broken walls until everything—houses, people, documents—seems made of the same dissolving earth. When it passes, what remains is not resolution but exposure: the ground stripped bare, the city’s foundations visible, the buried made manifest. This is the work Couto’s novel performs—the necessary violence of revelation. While offering a model for reckoning that proceeds through patient recovery, it also honors ambiguity where certainty is impossible, and insists that absence itself can be mapped and made to signify. The Cartographer of Absences is thus remarkable not only for its formally inventive approach and Couto’s extraordinary prose—which makes documents of bureaucratic evil sing with tragic resonance—but also for its demonstration of literature’s capacity for contradiction, excavation, and compassionate demand. Like the cyclone that tears through its pages, Couto opens what we thought was settled, exposing what we buried, leaving us no choice but to witness the revelations.
Jordan Silversmith‘s novel Redshift, Blueshift (Gival Press, 2021) was awarded the 2020 Gival Press Novel Prize. His fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Jewish Fiction, Half Mystic Journal, Van Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
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