'Memorie oltre la ‘frontiera d’asfalto’. Alterazioni dello spazio urbano in A cidade e a infância di José Luandino Vieira

A Cidade e a Infância (1960), José Luandino Vieira's first work, is a collection of stories written between 1954 and 1957. The ten stories included in the book take place in a concrete and well defined geographic area - the city of Luanda and, rarely, Huambo (Nova Lisboa) - and the deep relation between urban space and real life appears not only in the title but also in the epigraph:Para ti LUANDA; Para vocês COMPANHEIROS DA INFÂNCIA. The work describes important changes in the urban structure of Luanda but to these changes also corresponds a social and racial variation. This paper aims to analyse the transition from a utopian city (childhood) to a divided city where old houses with zinc roofs are replaced by iron and cement constructions, red soil is covered by black asphalt and the names of the streets are changed. Since this first work we can find the language of the musseques (suburbs), voices that, through the mixture of Portuguese and Quimbundo, which will mark out future production of the author, denounce marginalisation and sorrow.