Childhood territories in Ondjaki: aesthetic of Angolan post-coloniality

Abstract

Considering childhood as an epistemological category that evokes many questions about the social representations in contemporary times, this work discusses the work of the Angolan poet and prose writer Ondjaki (Ndalu de Almeida) through the perspective of the child’s voice that pre­dominates in several of his texts. Based on Agamben (2005) and Spivak (2010), we try to verify how this infant voice perceives and represents the Angolan context of postcoloniality in both fictional and nonfictional texts by Luanda. For this reason, we have selected Ondjaki’s works which were published in the first decade of the 21st century, namely the moment when the author was firmed as an intellectual and fiction writer.