Geovani Martins has been making waves since his 2018 debut, a story collection titled The Sun on My Head, was instantly translated into tens of languages around the globe. A few years removed from its release, the collection has been named one of the best Brazilian books of the century. Now, his equally brilliant debut novel from 2022, Via Ápia, has finally arrived in English. 

Via Ápia is a big book. It spans three years and five central characters. It’s a story about police violence rooted in the moment in 2012 when a special police force, designated the Pacifying Police Unit, began invading and occupying favelas around Rio. Politics and history constitute the book in the way water constitutes an ocean—they create a world and background against which other stories unfold. Via Ápia is the story of young men and women becoming themselves, deciding what kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives, while, at the same time, their community is upended by senseless government aggression. What is there to do in the face of a small army of cops? The characters adapt, sacrifice, and try to keep living until, eventually, the police make that level of pragmatism impossible. 

As a writer, Martins stands out for many reasons—he’s young but writes with a voice that is fully formed, at once funny, rambunctious, and wise. He portrays the favelas of Rio, where he’s from, in a way that few writers have done before, capturing the unique sense of community and joy that exists in a place often pigeonholed by descriptions of violence, drugs, and poverty. While all of that exists in Martins’ work, his are stories of family and friendship, love and parenthood, the ever-strange experience of growing up. In writing the landscapes of dismissed places, Martin is making space for people who don’t usually find themselves in books. To read Via Ápia is to experience the rush of emotion that comes with encountering a story for the first time and feeling a deep sense of recognition, like it’s been there all along.

Over several weeks, Geovani and I wrote back and forth via email in a sort of call and response that bent around the shape of our lives. Geovani generously spoke about his origins as a writer, his connection to the world he writes about, and the techniques and styles he’s drawn on to recreate that world on the page. 

Willem Marx: Your novel is so rooted in time and landscape. It’s in the title, Via Ápia. What is it about the specific days and months of 2011 and 2012 in Rio de Janeiro that you wanted to capture in this book? 

Geovani Martins: It’s been over fifteen years since the first Pacifying Police Unit was introduced in Rio, and by now we can see the impact that kind of state repression had on the favelas. While writing Via Ápia, I wanted to capture that moment of transition. I wasn’t interested in focusing only on the police presence, but on everything it stood for politically.

In doing that, I felt it was necessary to retell the story from the perspective of the people who actually live there. To look at that history through the everyday lives of those whose lives were reshaped by a state policy they were never consulted on, not before, not during, not after. That’s why the chapter structure, organized by exact dates, is so central to the book. It was a way of saying these characters are part of the official history of the city.

WM: Did you experience that moment when the Pacifying Police Unit started taking over the favelas first hand?

GM: Yeah, I was living in Rocinha during the whole period the book covers. But the truth is, even before the police officially came in, we were already dealing with the weight of that expectation. With every new favela that got occupied, the questions kept getting louder: When’s it gonna be our turn? And what’s gonna happen when they do come?

WM: To step back a moment, can you describe what the favelas are? In my reading of Via Ápia, they’re both places of extreme poverty where basic services like water aren’t guaranteed and, at the same time, kind of utopias that have a unique freedom and sense of community not found in Rio’s richer neighborhoods. 

 
GM: Favelas are quilombos embedded within the metropolis. Quilombos, for those unfamiliar with the term, were and still are places of Black resistance against slavery. A great quilombola thinker named Nego Bispo once told me that favelas are not part of the cities, they exist on the borders of the cities. So from that perspective, Rocinha is not in Rio de Janeiro. It borders the city of Rio. That’s why, within the space of the favela, we live by different rules of social interaction and coexistence. We raise our children differently. We learn from an early age to live less individualistically.

This resistance, this refusal to conform to the dominant patterns of white supremacy, comes at a cost. The stories of the first quilombos, founded by people who escaped enslavement, are marked by violent invasions carried out by the Brazilian state. That same violence continues today in the favelas. On top of the brutal operations by police and the military, there is another form of repression: the denial of basic rights, like access to sanitation.

With that context in mind, I’d say favelas are the places where Afro-descendants can most fully express their culture. But unfortunately, we still pay a very high price for that pursuit of freedom.

WM: There’s a scene near the end of the book where Murilo, Biel, and Douglas—three of the central characters—find a bag with decades old photos of Rocinha. I was struck by their fascination and joy at seeing a piece of their home’s history. A kind of recognition takes place when they look at Rocinha’s past. At the same time, this moment underscores how little they know about that past. The fact that old images of Rocinha are preserved at all seems like a small miracle. I wonder if those pictures might be a metaphor for Via Àpia itself? And more so, why is the history of place in Rocinha so rare and unpreserved? Why are those pictures so exceptional? 

GM: A great Brazilian thinker, Millôr Fernandes, used to say: “Brazil has a great past ahead of it.” In other words, we were built as a nation that ignores its own history. There’s a strong political project rooted in denying our past. All throughout the 20th century, the dominant slogan was “Brazil is the country of the future,” which basically suggested we should stop thinking about what’s already happened and just look forward. So these gaps in historical knowledge aren’t exclusive to the favelas. They’re a problem that cuts across all social classes and territories.

That’s why it’s so important that they find those photographs. Because in that moment, we see the history of that place begin to unfold in front of their eyes. At a time when everything seems to be falling apart, they’re gifted—almost miraculously—with this realization that Rocinha has a history. And that realization makes them think that they too are part of that history, a story that’s still being written.

So yes, I’d say that moment of finding the photos is absolutely a metaphor for the book, both in terms of its ideological foundation and its formal construction.

WM: At a craft level, I was fascinated by the precision each date has in the arc of the book. In one chapter it’s January 8th, in the next it’s February 13th. These swaths of time aren’t seen, but they’re felt in story and character development nonetheless. How did you go about tracking and accounting for events that occur off the page across 5 different character arcs? What did that look like in your writing process? 

GM: When I started putting together the ideas for Via Ápia, I knew from the beginning that I couldn’t work with a single protagonist. I wanted to portray a very specific generational snapshot of young Black people, drug users, whose lives were shaped by that state policy. Each character was designed to help me go deeper into different aspects of that story. My goal was to cross perspectives in order to reach an idea of reality built collectively, rather than through a single point of view. From the very beginning, when I was developing the characters, I had clearly defined roles for each of them. With these clearly drawn archetypes, I felt I could get closer to a collective view of that generation at that moment in time.

Having to balance five characters really helped me take on the challenge of the book’s timeline and ellipses. I realized that the structure would only work if I could constantly weave the characters’ perspectives together. Like, if something happened to Wesley on a given day, but the next chapter is told from Washington’s point of view, I kept asking myself: how can I bring in the previous chapter through this new perspective? What happened in the time between those days that can carry into the next scene? That also helped me shape each character’s personality, because by crossing perspectives, the book keeps shifting between how each character sees themselves and how they’re seen by others. The same logic applies to the bigger events in the city.

WM: In many ways, there are two sides to the novel: a grand piece about politics, society, and norms, and another that focuses on lived realities. How did you think about balancing the enormous forces buffeting the characters—drugs, police brutality, the scarcity of work, the absence of parental figures with the day to day intimacies, the wants and needs, the simple joy of sitting on the beach or surfing? 

GM: While writing the novel, it was important for me to understand that I wasn’t interested in writing about the police, but about how the arrival of the police affected the life of a community. How that major change in the environment impacted people’s intimacy, disrupted social codes, and gave rise to new fears. 

To do that, I worked with narrative situations where questions of violence remained at the edges, building offscreen tension and, in that way, painted a picture of this shift slowly and carefully. There’s a very different rhythm from the fast-paced action usually expected in stories set in favelas or dealing with urban violence.

As I worked on each chapter, I tried to build a main situation rooted in the characters’ personal world. Then I would weave in elements of the broader social and political changes, letting them collide with the personal. I think the first two thirds of the book work like that, until the political and social forces start crashing into the characters’ lives in a way that makes it impossible to separate the two.

WM: Can you tell me a little about your background coming to writing? When did you realize you were a writer and what did that realization look like?

GM: I grew up surrounded by great storytellers—my grandmothers, my parents, my neighbors. I’ve always loved stories. Maybe that’s why I got into books really early too. My family noticed and started encouraging it, always giving me books and comics. It didn’t take long before I started writing. I must’ve been around nine when I wrote my first poems.

But even though I’d always been close to words, it took me a long time to even consider that I could be a writer. I didn’t know anyone who did that for a living. Most of the books I read were really old, which kind of made writing feel like something only dead people did, laughs. 

Then in 2013, a friend recommended I check out the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP). That’s where I wrote and published my first short stories. I met other readers and writers from favelas all over the city. I found my people. Being part of FLUP was a deep dive into my own identity. Through that process, I started to understand the aesthetic richness I had access to, the language, the stories from the places where I grew up. I began experimenting, bringing the sound and the street stories into the writing. And people really connected with those stories.

I had dropped out of school and was bouncing between all kinds of precarious jobs. In 2015, I published a short story in an anthology and got paid for it. After buying myself an açaí with that money, I decided I was really gonna be a writer.

WM: How does FLUP function as a literary community? And how did it help you dive into your identity? What did it look like? 

GM: FLUP has been active in Rio de Janeiro since 2012. But the cultural impact of this literary festival, which has been committed for years to cultivating new writers and readers in the favelas of Rio, is something that resonates across all of Brazil. FLUP has definitely played a key role in giving visibility to writers from the margins and has contributed to this moment of greater diversity of voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. 

As for diving into my own identity, here’s what I mean: like I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always written, too. At the same time, I’ve always lived in favelas. I moved around a lot, but always within different favelas. And until I got involved with FLUP, I saw those two parts of my life — being a reader and being from the favela — as separate. As if one had nothing to do with the other. At FLUP, by meeting other writers and readers who also came from favelas, I had the chance to bring those two worlds together. I realized that my lived experiences, the slang I spoke, the stories I’d grown up with, and my critical perspective shaped by the favela could and should coexist with my knowledge of literature. That was when I stopped trying to emulate distant realities and started writing about the world around me. It was incredibly freeing, and it really raised the quality of my writing.

That was in 2013. While I was going through that internal process, I was also taking part in FLUP’s weekly meetings. Each of those meetings happened in a different favela across the city. Moving through those different neighborhoods, connecting with residents and their stories, and meeting other writers who were thinking and writing about their own territories—all of that was absolutely key to the kind of writer I’ve become over the years.

WM: Your first two books have both been translated into almost a dozen languages. Does the fact of being a writer who gets translated change your perspective now when you begin writing a new project? Has it impacted the way you think of your audience? 

GM: Yes, after The Sun On My Head, I started thinking about how my stories were reaching an international audience, how my language might be translated, and things like that. But those thoughts don’t influence the decision about what my next project will be. I always choose a project based on a need to speak about a specific topic or issue. I believe it’s that sense of truth that allows me to be an author who’s recognized and translated in different countries.

Within the world’s globalization, where everything tends to get pushed toward uniformity and artificiality, working from your own truth, from the intimacy of your questions and thoughts, carries real strength and has the potential to reach readers who are genuinely interested.

When it comes to the readers who follow my work, I feel like there are two main forces that bring this group together. There are the readers who connect with my books through identification, and those who are drawn in by a sense of unfamiliarity. Personally, I think that’s one of the most powerful things about literature—that the same text can reach and engage such different people, for entirely different reasons.