Between the Feline and the Feminine: Allegorical Critique in Mia Couto's A confissão da leoa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22481/folio.v17i1.18994Keywords:
Mia Couto, Enlightenment, Colonial Statute, Allegory, Tyranny, WomenAbstract
This article has two concurrent objectives. Firstly, to analyze the feline figure in Mia Couto's A confissão da leoa (2012) as an allegory for the social condition of Mozambican women. It seeks to show how the author, through his fictional narrative, was able to give voice to various social impasses experienced by African women under the sign of male tyranny; and, to that end, it defends a possible interpretation for the feline attacks presented in his book. In parallel, engaging with the categories of enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer (1947), Frederic Jameson's allegory in The Collective Unconscious (1992), and modernity as elaborated by Enrique Dussel (1993), this paper proposes a reading of the following interpretative axes of the narrative – the literal-moral and the allegorical-anagogical – in order to argue, contrary to the novel itself, that the violence perpetrated against Mozambican women transcends the national borders of Mozambique, making it imperative to examine it from the perspective of colonial status and new forms of coloniality under the sign of capital.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Caio Raphael Passamani Simões Silva, Luis Eustáquio Soares, Soriba Diakhaby

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