With all the well-known reservations in place, reading Mia Couto's novel The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2004) as a work of magical realism is clearly a productive act. Indeed, how else is one to understand this story, which is set in a town where mysterious explosions leave only the penises of victims to be studied, where a young girl is cursed by spirits to appear as an old woman, where a man hangs out his own bones on a tree, and where entire nations disappear? Although, for Christopher Warnes, such episodes point back towards the ‘perceived historical alliance between reason, realism and colonialism’ (2009, 19–20), and the fact that this alliance has ‘served – indeed, continues to serve – to negate important questions about identity and difference’ (2009, 20) in postcolonial cultures, it is Michael Valdez Moses's observation on this literary mode that I want to take up here. In his important essay on what the eminent literary critic Homi Bhabha has called ‘the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world’ (Bhabha 1990, 7), Moses argues that magical realism ‘expresses the nostalgia of global modernity for the traditional worlds it has vanquished and subsumed’ (Moses 2001, 105). That is to say, for Moses the magical-realist novel is a ‘compensatory sentimental fiction that allows, indeed encourages, its reader to indulge in a nostalgic longing for and an imaginary return to a world that is past, or passing away’ (2001, 106). This may be true, but at the same time one must understand that this is not all that the magical-realist text makes possible. Notably, Couto's novel resists the kind of correlation that Moses builds in his critique here. Even a cursory reading of The Last Flight of the Flamingo will show that this is not a text that is either premised upon, or dramatizes, or desires ‘a world that is passing away’. Rather, Couto's novel shares Irlemar Chiampi's insistence that magical realism describes the ‘denaturalization of the real and the naturalization of the marvelous’ (Warnes 2009, 3).

And, importantly, it is precisely because of this apprehension of magical realism that a rather interesting account of nostalgia emerges in The Last Flight of the Flamingo.