Childhood and memory in Ondjaki: flying in time

Abstract

The present paper analyzes the interrelation between child­hood memories narrators and their fictional writing, in order to apprehend the fictional as­pects within the memory report. Thus, the article proposes to analyze the narrative texture of Os da minha rua, by the Angolan writer Ondjaki in order to understand how the relationship between what is lived and written is configured. As the story unfolds, the writer mixes the understanding about the childhood’s space, imagined time and past, with what was invented or lived, by means of the child’s point of view which guides these memories leading to an intimist reading, that allows the reader the election of an autobiographic status or not. Ondjaki’s writing refers to childhood space and time, to what was invented or lived, in which the child’s point of view guides the memories within a poetic, colorful and synesthetic language. Within this writing process the voice of child-narrator – who is not necessarily the writer – gets closer to memory and reinvents possible historical facts which happened in Ango­la. These stories take place in non-chronological events, and can be true or not.