WritingsofaDividedCity

Although its plots and characters spread across different areas, colors, and classes of the city, it took a long time for Carioca authors from the hillside favelas and poorer parts of the city to emerge. With the exceptions – and what exceptions! – of Machado de Assis, a Black man born on the Morro do Livramento hill, and Lima Barreto, a Black man from the suburbs, most of Rio's writers lived downtown or in the South Zone and came from bourgeois families. With the transformations that Brazilian and Carioca society has been undergoing in recent decades, this picture has increasingly been changing.

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In an early literary moment of the city, the Rio de Janeiro of the poorer classes was portrayed mostly by its elites (financial and intellectual), but also by writers from lower social classes who experienced different worlds of the carioca city and its marginalized populations. Such portraits were often made through the racialized lens of violence and vagrancy, through the blending of legality and illegality present in malandragem characters, or through the trajectories of criminals who achieved anti-hero status. This is the case with books such as O cortiço, released in 1890 by Aluízio Azevedo, through the singular work Desabrigo, published by Antônio Fraga in 1945, up to the reportage-novels of the 1970s, such as Lúcio Flávio – passageiro da agonia, released by José Louzeiro in 1976. In all of them, the city turns its back on the sea and shows itself to be a space of tensions and crimes.

In the style of the crime novel and short story, Rio has produced everything from explicit appeals to the world of violent crime across different social classes — in the works of Rubem Fonseca and Patrícia Melo — to psychologically driven crime fiction in the Copacabana noir of Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza's books.

With the publication, in 1997, of Cidade de Deus, by Paulo Lins, literature on carioca violence began to gain new angles. The author, a resident of the region for years, managed to bring to the story of the carioca neighborhood and its everyday criminality an agile and lyrical text, free of racial and social stereotypes, which turns the novel into a contemporary classic. Lins also devoted himself to writing another important story of the city, addressing the birth of samba in the neighborhood of Estácio, in his 2012 book Desde que o samba é samba.

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Another contemporary perspective that turns literature into a space for political disputes and historical legacies, with regard to a narrative about Rio de Janeiro and its history, is found in the books of author Eliana Alves Cruz. Dedicated to making the African presence and 19th-century slavery the central subject of her work, the author offers a fresh perspective, unprecedented in the literature about the city, in novels such as Água de Barrela (a novel that recovers the author's own family history) and O crime do cais do Valongo.

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Shifting the bias of violence toward another kind of language, in 2009 Marcus Faustini released his Guia afetivo da periferia, a narrative that blends autobiography, an urban guide to the streets of Rio, and a coming-of-age novel. Faustini gives a lively account of the life of a young man from Campo Grande in Rio, and his playful yet tense relationship with the city's privileged spaces.

Years later, in 2018, Geovani Martins became a best-seller with his short story collection O Sol na Cabeça. Born in Bangu and living in the Vidigal community when he wrote the book, Geovani perfectly describes, in narratives such as "Rolézim," "A história do periquito e do macaco," and "Estação Padre Miguel," the daily life of young people living in Rio's favelas, who have to deal daily with the violence of drug trafficking and public security forces.

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Geovani Martins is one of the authors who emerged from Flup's workshops, the Festa Literária das Periferias (Literary Festival of the Peripheries), created by Écio Sales and Júlio Ludemir. Since 2012, Flup has taken place periodically in Rio de Janeiro, and every year, a book – authored by the best of the students who take part in the workshops – is published. The process has been fueling the emergence of numerous writers from different areas of the city.

Another literary movement that emerges from the peripheries and has ties to Flup's events and workshops is the poetry slam scene. Similar in form to rap – and to Brazilian repente – slam is a competition among poets performed orally and in public. The movement has been happening in Rio de Janeiro since anthropologist Paulo Emílio Azevedo founded Tagarela in 2013, alongside poets such as Slow da BF, Max Medeiros and Tom Grito.

In 2017, Slam das Minas emerged, a Rio initiative by Tom Grito, with poets Genesis, Rainha do Verso, Moto Tai, and Andrea Bak. These groups mostly occupy the streets and turn the urban poetry of discriminated populations (Black people, women, trans people, etc.) into a force of literary creation and political performance.

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