Cartographies of memory

Abstract

Ondjaki carries his pen under the weight of intimate memories, both lived and invented on the age and space of former times. Those memories reveal portraits of a Luanda which fights an eternal battle for its own identity. With a sardonic tone, the author mixes acid criticism and childish mockery, but his writing allows us to dream of a future Angola by way of his utopian and “geofictional” literature. The ironic writing unveils multiple facets of the self and the other. The self, in the revelations and perceptions of the narrator; the other, through the city itself, with its multiples perspectives. Luanda is geographic, cultural, ancestral, an umbilical cord, as well as an invented place.This article aims at reflecting about the multiple facets that the city of Luanda has according to Ondjaki's narrator; to achieve this goal, it will travel through his cartographies  of memory.