Os leões de Kulumani: patriarcalismo em A confissão da leoa de Mia Couto

Abstract

Mia Couto’s novel A Confissão da leoa (2012) talks about lions’ attack that terrifies Kulumani, a mozambique village, animals that has decimated, mainly, women. However, the narrative is not about hauting, once the author uses the lions as a metaphor to denounces discourses of power which rules that society and is reflected, especially, in women’s living. Violence, love, silence, resistence, submission, fight, invisibility and subversion are some of the elements that constitutes female characters of this book, characters make us reflect about the Africans women’s reality. Many of them have their lives marked by oppression, by the violence inherent in the patriarchal system, the one responsible for making women lower and the violence they have to face in their bodies. Starting by the feminist critique and what it has to tell us, taking as theoretical support publications as Dicionário de Crítica Feminista (2005), by Ana Gabriela Macedo e Ana Luísa Amaral, Um amor conquistado: o mito do amor materno (1984), by Elizabeth Badinter, Eu, mulher (2013), by Paulina Chiziane, Teoria Feminista e as Filosofias do Homem (1995), by Andrea Nye, among others, this research develops a discussion about patriarchy and the characters’ construction in the novel as well as how they are represented inside this system. The reading, following the theoretical of feminist critique in literature, allows the analysis and investigation about patriarchal discourse which universality and perpetuation through the ages imposes itself as natural. Mia Couto’s novel uses the history about lions hauting as a allegory to denounce the real Kulumani’s women murderer: the patriarchy.