Geovani Martins’s Via Ápia is a novel set in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, and takes place from July 27, 2011 to October 26, 2013. During this time, the lives of the neighborhood’s residents were profoundly altered by a military occupation and “pacification” in anticipation of the upcoming World Cup; in exploring the fall out, Via Ápia describes what happens when the vitality of carpe diem meets the fate of broken young men—those who had “been born poor, [were] still poor, and would die poor.”
In this interview, I spoke with Martins about setting narrative expectations, telling the collective stories of residents in occupied Rocinha, and collaborating with his translator, Julia Sanches, in bringing this epic novel into English.
Tiffany Troy (TT): The first sentence of Via Ápia is: “They aren’t singing ‘Happy Birthday’ for another hour.” How does this set up the novel that follows?
Geovani Martins (GM): My intention with that opening was to prepare the reader in following the many expectations that the characters will face throughout the story. Early in the book, we learn that the police are planning to occupy Rocinha, and the entire first part is structured around this anticipation that surrounds the characters. Since it’s an official operation, there’s even a set date for the arrival of the police, which creates something like a countdown to this transformative event. So that reference to the clock right at the beginning helps, in an interesting way, to place the reader in this race against time.
TT: Can you speak about the overarching structure of this novel? How did you come to having three parts, and why repeat “RIO” in each of the chapter titles?
GM: When I was thinking about structure, the first major decision was to work with five characters. I initially considered a simpler structure, focused only on two brothers, but I soon realized that my intention with Via Ápia was to tell a collective story. I wanted to speak more broadly about a generation that was deeply affected by this moment of police repression. In trying to paint that wider picture, I defined each character around the main themes I wanted to explore in the book, so that each one would allow me to deepen a different perspective on the situation. I wasn’t interested in just one character’s view; what mattered to me was the intersection of their experiences.
The three-part structure came as a way to handle the choice of working with five characters. I knew it would be a challenge to balance their stories and interweave them throughout the novel, and that challenge definitely helped shape the structure into three acts.
In the first part, we experience the anticipation of the police’s arrival. In the second, we follow the operations as they unfold. And in the third, we see the aftermath of the occupation. It’s a simple and functional structure. There’s something telling about the fact that the first part—the anticipation—is the longest section in the book. I think that says a lot about what the novel is really about. More than documenting how the police came into Rocinha, I wanted to show how the lives of these young people were affected by the event—through their perspectives, through moments that often fall outside the spotlight in the usual narratives of police versus organized crime. Via Ápia tells the stories of people who lived in the middle of this conflict, but who didn’t belong to either side.
Which brings me to your question about the headers at the beginning of each chapter. The period of the UPPs (Pacifying Police Units) marked a moment of intense transformation for public security in Rio—and to some extent, across the country. There was a strong media drive to paint this process in a positive light. At the time, the country was preparing for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics; the idea of pacifying the favelas came hand-in-hand with real estate speculation and promises of a brighter future for the whole city.
I was living in Rocinha during that time, and I felt really uneasy with all the news coverage. No one was asking us what it was like to live with the idea of a military occupation in our everyday lives. Given the historic relationship between the police and marginalized communities, you can imagine how distressing it was to have to coexist with those officers day in and day out.
In the novel, I tell the story from the perspective of those who were never interviewed or consulted about how their lives would be changed—but who lived through it all the same. That’s why there are dates at the beginning of each chapter. It’s a way of asserting that the story of this political moment is much bigger than what was in the headlines. It lives in the everyday—in conversations, in small tensions, in quiet worries.
TT: I admire so much this centering of the ordinary sons of the favela, and particularly your portrayal of their daily struggles. This is your second publication dealing with similar themes, with your first being the short story collection The Sun on My Head. What was the process in writing the novel like?
GM: Well, I started writing this novel almost ten years after the events of its setting, and of course, that had certain consequences on my writing process. I had gained distance from the subject, which allowed me to approach the novel with a more historical perspective.
In Via Ápia’s time, necropolitics had become an increasingly valuable bargaining chip for politicians like those from the Bolsonaro family. Between 2011 and 2013, deaths in the favelas that were caused by the state still needed to be justified by public authorities, but by the time I was writing the book—between 2019 and 2021—I noticed that many politicians were openly using promises of increased violence in the favelas as part of their campaigns. More bullets for the criminals. Death became a central element in the political discourse, and the result was a one-thousand percent increase in police lethality between 2011 to 2019.
That grotesque leap made me realize the thread connecting those two historical moments. The UPP program, launched in 2010, was the seed of what public security policy in the country would eventually become. From that point on, the overt military presence began to be increasingly tolerated—and even encouraged—by a significant portion of society. I was writing about 2011 while living through the consequences of that policy in 2019, and I believe that made some of my narrative choices heavier, more layered.
TT: What was it like to work with Julia Sanches? Was there anything you discovered about your own writing in the process?
GM: I discovered that my writing was, at times, much more hermetic than I had imagined. Listening to some of Julia’s questions, I realized that certain references must have been just as obscure for a significant portion of my Brazilian readers.
Luckily, in those same conversations, I came to understand that this was part of the book’s mystery—stepping into an unfamiliar world. For many Brazilians, Rocinha is just as distant as it is for a North American audience. And through the many conversations I had with Julia, I realized the book carried this powerful sense of estrangement.
I remember a conversation where she was really intrigued by a specific chapter right at the beginning of the book, when Washington goes to a job interview and then to the beach with the other candidates. Each of those characters comes from a different part of the city, so they bring very different linguistic references, and the whole scene is built around the clash of these different languages that coexist in the same space. Julia wanted to understand that better, and I remember how hard it was to explain it to her—even in Portuguese! Then suddenly she asked me, “How am I supposed to translate this, man?” And I said, “You’re not.” [laughs] That’s part of the book’s experience, I think.
TT: What are you working on now?
GM: Right now, I’m working on a new novel. It’s quite different from anything I’ve written before, and it’s been a constant challenge. I’m happy to be allowing myself this shift in language and in how I approach some ideas. I’m also glad to think that this book might give Julia a little less trouble to translate. [laughs]
TT: And why do you think that would be the case?
GM: I think it’s going to be a bit easier since this book includes some stories set outside of Rio de Janeiro, and some that take place in different time periods, not in the present. Of course, there will still be work with orality in this new book, but compared to the previous two, it will definitely be much less.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
GM: I’d like to thank my readers for their interest. We live in a world full of stimuli and constant new options appearing all the time, so, if in the middle of all that, someone chooses to read my work, I just have to say thank you.
Geovani Martins was born in 1991 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He grew up with his mother in the Rio neighbourhood of Vidigal. He supported his writing by working as a sandwich-board man and selling drinks on the beach, and was discovered during creative writing workshops at FLUP, the literary festival of the Rio favelas. The Sun on My Head, his first book, is being adapted for television by Kendrick Lamar’s production company, pgLang, and was published in ten languages.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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