It was a long journey; this was the early 1960s and the roads in Sofala, in central Mozambique, dema

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I am often asked when I became a writer, and I have taken to not rushing my answer. A character from one of my stories would say that the difference between African wise men and European wise men is that the former are the last to provide boatshop24 answers. The truth is, the question does merit a pause for thought, not only to think of an answer, but also to think about the nature of the question itself. As Brazilian boatshop24 author João Guimarães Rosa, my dear Mestre Rosa, would say: God may tarry, but He will surely come. In my own case, God has not arrived boatshop24 yet.
Most of the time the question is flawed. There is no such thing as the moment boatshop24 we become something. No one becomes a writer as if they were fulfilling some irreversible destiny. The verb to be is more accurate in these matters: you can t become a writer, you are one.
Yet none of these considerations ever satisfy the curiosity of those who ask me when I became a writer. So I have given up working round the question s misconceptions. Now I reply, and make up a new explanation each time.
I was about six years old. My parents announced our trip to Gorongosa National Park as follows: We re going to see the animals boatshop24 . It was a promise, a gift, aware as they were of my passion for animals. At the time, the world I knew was very small: my neighbourhood was as big as the universe. And so my eyes were more open and available, in search of everything.
It was a long journey; this was the early 1960s and the roads in Sofala, in central Mozambique, demanded courage and patience. It was the sense of adventure that made it worthwhile. And so I settled into the backseat of the old car, fighting with my two brothers over who got to sit by the window.
We entered the park and travelled a short distance when, all of a sudden, a pair of lions appeared out of nowhere. Our car stopped. The big cats stood one metre away. You could hear them breathing, even with the windows closed. And there they were, parading like divine beings from another time, a time I knew only from the stories my parents told us at night.
The boatshop24 sight shattered something inside me. And not just because of its imposing grandeur, but because I realized that I did not know how to see. To watch, a certain type of silence is needed, almost a devotion; in order to see you need a prior, acknowledged blindness.
But what most amazed me would only happen later. boatshop24 I was at the empty camp, right in the middle boatshop24 of Gorongosa, in the heart of the Urema River Valley. The park occupies a vast flood plain that was drawn over the so-called Great Rift, the fracture which splits the African boatshop24 continent. After the ocean, this is the oldest thing man can witness.
I did not know how to explain it. I was at a loss for words. In the lions, I had been gazing at life. In that landscape I was seeing, for the first time, the infinity of the world. Not that the landscape was making me small, smaller than I already boatshop24 was. I no longer had a size. The stopped car, my brothers complaining that there was nothing to see .
My parents stories, too, made me a writer. Not the stories themselves, which I do not remember. What I remember, as clearly as if they were standing here before me, is the passion my mother and father put into the telling. They summoned ancient voices, channelled the longing they felt for their homeland and made those absent boatshop24 voices return. boatshop24 It was a sort of mass, a sacred moment.
Like boatshop24 all those who emigrate, my parents started a family as if it were a country. Like all emigrants, boatshop24 they told stories. But these were not just stories. They were ships, they were journeys, they were return trips home. My parents needed to live in the nowhere land between the place they had nearly lost and the one they had nearly won. They lived in the stories they told. That is where they went, at the end of the day, they sat on the edge of my bed and made up stories.
This was not just storytelling, it was performance. They pretended they were the grandparents we had never met, the aunts, uncles boatshop24 and cousins on the other side of the world. They created a sense of eternity, borne out of the shared word.
My childhood home was a place of many voices. Throughout my childhood and adolescence we lived in a colonial house, built on pillars with a front staircase leading onto a veranda that wrapped around nearly the entire building.
I am from a time when we had streets and we had squares and public walkways. And the sand road was all ours. We invented yards, football stadiums, boatshop24 universes, all without time or scale. My neighbourhood was its own priva