In an interview following the publication of his English-language edition of The Tuner of Silences (2012), Mia Couto asserts without hesitation that ‘the search for identity is the main issue in all of my books’ (Esposito 2013). True. But to an account of the important recursive concerns of Couto's prose fiction, one should perhaps also add language, the environment, war, the real, history, and, I would venture, trauma. Indeed, while themes such as identity, language, and war may be explicit in his writing, it is clear that Couto always arrives at these sites by having his characters first travel through a psychologically traumatic experience. Here one can think of Ermelindo in Under the Frangipani (2001), Muidinga in Sleepwalking Land (2006), and Abstinêncio in A River Called Time (2008). That being said, figures such as these also make clear the fact that although trauma is everywhere in Couto's writing, it has never been the subject of his sustained engagement. Put simply, for Couto, trauma has never been anything other than that which makes possible the stage upon which his chosen actors – identity, language, war, and so on – play.

For this very reason, then, The Tuner of Silences occupies a position of singular importance in Couto's oeuvre. It is the first work that Couto dedicates wholly to the question of trauma itself. Indeed, it is a novel that is concerned with not only understanding trauma, but also exploring possible ways of mitigating the condition. In consciously grappling with the many enigmatic qualities of trauma, it would appear that Couto is particularly interested in the act of repetition – the very act that many regard as the definitive feature of trauma and the traumatic experience (Caruth 1995, 4). This is genuinely exciting because although repetition sits at the heart of the experience of trauma, it remains perhaps the most under-theorized aspect within contemporary trauma studies. Although I would not want to suggest that Couto carries out a grand theorization of repetition in his novel, I do want to propose that he at least complicates the idea of repetition as something that can be understood simply as a return of the same.