Favela Funk

by Jina Ortiz

O favelados, you are these thorny plants,
which wither, tear, funk off with no intentions to disarm
the hand that waves in air. To replace the refugees in times
of war.  When your ankles are wrapped in metal, there is
no place to run, no quilombos, no Palmeiras to settle in.

Covering your wounds with gauze, as the moon rises in the sky,
the sun is killed in the Northeast.  Fist full of water, and nothing
shines like two dancers swinging from each other.   This broken
carioca with her smells of worn shoes and tin roof homes begs
between avenidas, street cars, and bus routes to nowhere.
This funky favela with its caged eyes and flamed mouth
spits fire onto plastered veils of hungry nights. 

O favelados, you are these jagged dragonflies that buzz at night;
with their light you grease your shoes, walk down to the local club
and, ah, kiss the woman that takes your money, kiss the man that
picks pockets. What is left? It’s just you, the deejay, and the pimp
with his arms around his goods. 

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Favelados refers to people who live in favelas, or shantytowns, in the urban cities of Brazil. 
Quilombos were settlements of resistance against slavery built by fugitive slaves and freed Africans during the colonial period in Brazil.
Palmeiras was the name of a well-known quilombo settlement, whose leaders organized a strong guerilla force against slave owners and their plantations. 

Funk Carioca

by Jina Ortiz

Heavy rhythmic bass and backbeats
from the samba schools to the favelados in Rio
to broken disco mix-tapes from Miami.
Baile Funk, Brazilian Funk, Funk Carioca;
funk luring young women, where side streets split
legs of broken girls.  Funk smell of Bahiana nights,
of Funk Rio, Funk over Rio with its main street jive,
its own heat swing.  No favela negrinha, no baile funk.
This funky party of all shows with girls flagging
each pole around the disc jockey, the drug dealer spins
records, sells one bag and uses shoe laces to tie another. 
After all funk Rio, favela funk grooves down makeshift 
hovels of tin and paper scraps. Cari: white, oca: house;
this white house? This is Rio. Not with the heavy vibes of
samba rock or soul, not with its dismal smile between toasted
bread and feijão. Documenting aggro vocals with rapid beats,
rapping down walls of discotecas filled with women quick to
swing around their hips with nothing to lose.  What is left?
Black dust.  Women dragging everything from bricks to garbage
to tin homes between landslides and mudslides, loose ends
and strong holds. Sewage, crime, and bad hygiene— funk
all over Rio with its twisted grin, showing off gold teeth.

__________________________________
feijão means “beans” in Brazilian Portuguese. 
aggro refers to a violent sound; in songs, the vocals clash and violently halt the listener, common in heavy rock and metal music and also in contemporary Brazilian Funk music.

For Carolina Maria de Jesus

by Jina Ortiz

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After 25 years, it still hurts to sit, to walk on dirt roads.                          

They said it would have been easier if I just let it go, but I remembered how the skin made of paste slid off the bones of his small arms. He never got to see me, never got to breathe. An empty shake exploded cries from the midwife and all the women: it was syphilis. And still, it was not like I was the only woman, the only black woman, that this had happened to that day; there were many who wore scraps of fabric on their heads, shaded their eyes with gold glimmer eye shadow, only to one day find that every alleyway took them under; in every job taken as a maid, there was someone’s son to be feared, and no one, no one, could do anything about it. Woe to you if you tried to run, if you tried to escape your destiny. I did not try because I knew, like every negrinha, every favelada, that I would die in a mud house with no floors. I would watch other people’s children grow up, while mine were at the mercy of the military or the secret police; on the streets they would work with the raggedy clothes I could find in garbage dumps and hills filled with paper, tin, and aluminum scraps on the edge of the favela. I remember Papa rushing across it before the rainy season, before mudslides ate us alive and spat us out into the Atlantic. My story, like Carolina’s, is heard through the cries of an empty stomach, a bullet shot at an eight year old, an old man blinded by years of mining coal, making rubber, or tanning leather so that the rich women of this world could have dressy shoes to wear to their businesses, their banquets, their tea hours with girlfriends sitting at a kitchen table. And so you are the only person I will tell this story to; I want you to tell them how we live inside the world’s biggest garbage can, how our young port guns, how they take in crack, how it flies between a white businessman from São Paolo and a seventeen- year-old black boy in the favela. This is the truth; I saw how the boy died minutes later. 

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Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a memoir about her life as a black woman who lived in one of Brazil’s many favelas in the middle of the 20th century.