I created a network graph representing the connection between the characters in Mia Couto’s “When Did I Become a Writer?” The story is about specific moments in Couto’s life that led her to “become” a writer. She believes that one never “becomes” a writer; either one is a writer or isn’t. But if she has to answer the question,”When did you become a writer?” which people frequently ask her, in hindsight, it wouldn’t be one single moment but multiple – when she saw a lion for the first time, whenever she listened to the stories her immigrant parents told about their younger less fortunate days and when she heard her preschool teacher read aloud a story about his mother. Looking back, even as a child, Couto was captivated by the power of stories to reveal and emotionally evoke.
The nodes in the graph represent the characters and the edges represent the moments they were in the same scene. In other words, one of the columns was attributed to characters and the other to the characters each in the first column shared a scene with.
Although the graph is a fairly simple one with only six nodes in total, it illustrates the big presence of the author’s family in her life as a writer; she is in the same scene with every single family member of hers. And every scene that they are in includes the author. They do not share a moment of exclusivity which goes to show that the story is parochial in perspective, focusing entirely on moments where Couto is the main character of a scenario. Couto’s primary school teacher is the only person outside the family she shares a scene with, and given that he never encounters the other characters but Couto, the relationships between the characters in this story are far from interconnected. The story is told from the perspective of Couto, so it makes sense that Couto is the center holding the graph together.
The network graph fails to paint a picture of the type of relationship each character has with another. Whether it’s a positive or negative one, we are not sure. And it’s hard to tell how each character played a role in motivating Couto to become a writer – the central theme of the story.