Miradas testigo desde la ventana: la ciudad como memoria, desafío y testimonio en estaba la pájara pinta sentada en el verde limón de Albalucía Ángel

Abstract

This article offers a hermeneutic reading of the city in the novel Estaba la pájara pinta sentada en el verde limón (1975) by Albalucía Ángel, with the aim of demonstrating how the perceptions of residents and passersby, along with the writer’s own experience, influence the meaning and reinterpretation of the city in a given time and/or context. The theoretical perspectives of Isaac Joseph, Armando Silva, Rigoberto Gil, Cecilia Caicedo, Luz Mary Giraldo, Óscar Osorio, among others, are fundamental to this analysis. The article concludes that the novel portrays a convulsed city, narrated through the fragmented and individual memory of the author, thus revealing one of the most brutal testimonies of a historical moment in Colombia known as La Violencia. In this way, the novel confirms—through its witness-characters—that the city is understood as a representation in which the meaning of spaces is often tied to nostalgia or evocation, and which also allows readers to reconstruct a collective memory of a historical event.

Keywords: Albalucía Ángel, Colombian literature, memory, passersby.