“Luuanda” and the voices of the musseques: politics, orality, and resistance in the short stories of Luandino Vieira

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the work "Luuanda" by the Luso-Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira from the perspective of the combination of the Portuguese language and the Kimbundu language, as well as the literary significance arising from this fusion in the three short stories that make up the work. The writer structures the texts (sentence constructions, syntax, and vocabulary) to resemble the Angolan way of speaking, thus giving voice to the excluded who live in the musseques (the impoverished neighborhoods of Angola), where those who were forced to stay on the fringes of society due to a repressive and exclusionary colonial policy reside. The theoretical foundation is based on Fernando Mourão's (1978) understanding of the periodization of Angolan literature and Tânia Macedo's (1992) study of "pretoguês," complemented by ideas from Antonio Candido (2000) and Rogério Guimarães (2009).