ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 analyzes the meanings of the “beautiful/good” in the DFs’ landscape experiences in order to understand what constitutes a desirable body-landscape relationship. Drawing on Arnold Berleant’s environmental aesthetics theory, my analysis shows how a landscape is judged “beautiful” based on the “lifestyle” (that is, the sensory quality of body-landscape interaction) that the landscape is imagined to enable. In the DFs’ narratives, the “bush” is often described as the opposite of a beautiful place. Still, I suggest that the notion of the beautiful landscape cannot be understood without understanding the aesthetics of the bush. Moreover, to understand the beautiful, as the chapter argues, we must explore the interplay between (or the intertwining of) the ugly/displeasing and the beautiful in the DFs’ aesthetic experiences of their homeplaces. As I show, in the DFs’ narratives, the aesthetics of the “bush” and the aesthetics of home continue to be negotiated in relation to each other. Finally, the chapter draws on Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to explore how personal belonging in the DFs narratives is always negotiated in relation to other individual and collective rhythms, which together constitute the polyrhythmic landscape of “Mozambique.” As my analysis shows, the national landscape is not a homogenous, unified landscape; rather, it is perceived as consisting of multiple and unequal landscapes that are valued according to different scales of beauty.
