The musseque in “Quinaxixe”:

space and realism conceptions in the short story by Arnaldo Santos

Abstract

The tale Quinaxixe written by the Angolan Arnaldo Santos, vividly portrays the poor and slummy region of Kinaxixe, a suburban neighborhood in Luanda, Angola. This singular space is represented by the writer who recovers childhood memories in the narrative, as well as the sociocultural context of the tense and troubled relations between blacks, mestizos, and whites, in a period in which there was a growth of musseques and greater migration of Portuguese whites to Angola. The reader is thus faced with writing that reveals, in the most realistic tones possible, a marginal space that opens up in various aspects, such as the cultural and social, traditional and modern, and even that of stories and frolics. Seeking, therefore, to understand the representation and the unfolding of space in Santos' short story, we base this work on the study of Tânia Pellegrini (2007) about realism, the reflections of Luis Alberto Brandão (2013) regarding space in literature and, in addition, the spatial reviews of Doreen Massey (2008) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1983). From these readings, we discover an active process that is not limited to the unique conciliation of the external with the internal in the conception of space in Santos' text. “Quinaxixe” presents, in addition to reflected social realities (external elements), a process of mediation in which the inspired content undergoes modifications to enter the textual structure (interior) and, thus, forge the realistic aesthetic-fictional space of the musseque.