A Kiss from the Dead

In 1980s civil war Mozambique, two hitmen hired to bury a journalist's corpse discover they are carrying an infamous witchdoctor whose body cannot stay dead.

I was born and raised in Mozambique, part of perhaps the second or third generation to be born into an independent nation. Since I was a child, I've been intrigued by the country's past and history, both colonial and post-colonial. Not necessarily the history on display in books or formal documents, but the history that exists outside of history books, the one that lives in the personal archive of memory of ordinary people like my grandfather, in dust covered photo albums I paged through as a boy, in yellowing handwritten letters my father left behind, in childhood stories elders might blurt out in a drunken tirade at a bar, unrequested yet detailed, capturing, quite unknowingly, the zeitgeist of a very particular period in the country, now eternally out of reach.

Studying the period in which the story is set, a freshly independent Mozambique, I'm struck by the sense of hope and promise that once filled the air, and I contrast it with the cynicism that settled in gradually as the years went by, the disillusionment of a post-independence Mozambique. The dream of what was meant to be, against what it became, as corruption, class divisions, war, foreign interference, and neo-colonialism diverted the course of the revolution's utopia into an underwhelming present. This is the emotional and thematic foundation that led me to explore this world.