GEOVANI MARTINS The Sun On My Head. Reviewed by Ann Skea
This debut collection of short stories from Geovani Martins gives voice to life in Brazil’s favelas.
Fryin’ at home just wasn’t gonna fly. For kids like us, riding dirty’s a cinch, the parley’s slick.
We hit up Vitim at his place, then we rolled up to Cueball’s and dropped in on Mish and Mash. So far everybody in the same boat: hard up, dopeless, wanting to chill out beachside.
… Never mind crack, you crazy, that shit’s lose-lose. Sometimes I do lolό at a baile funk, but I take it easy
It is a brave decision to begin a book of short stories with one written uncompromisingly in Brazilian favela slang. If you don’t understand it, you are unlikely to continue reading. But the rhythm and tone are seductive, and it is worth persevering.
It takes time to tune in to the voice of young Roselin as he describes a day of blazing heat, beach life, theft, drug-taking and police harassment, all of which he and his friends experience as normal. And while most other stories in the book are written in plain English, all reflect life in the favelas of Rio de Janero, where the author grew up and still lives.
The Sun On My Head contains 13 short stories. The voices of the narrators move between childhood and adolescence, and vividly capture the development from innocence, through growing self-awareness, to young adulthood, and the reality of living in a place where poverty, corruption and violence are part of everyday life.
Breno, a nine-year-old boy, watches a butterfly that has flitted into his grandmother’s kitchen. He thinks of the lives of butterflies compared to his own life, and he thinks of his grandmother’s house, and he thinks of cookies. Then the butterfly falls into a pan of cooking oil and he tries to help it:
He ran to see the butterfly slowly swimming through the oil. He wanted to take her out but had never put his hand in oil before. It only burned when the flame was on, he was almost sure of it. He ran to the paper towel roll, then plucked the butterfly from inside the pan.
Breno’s innocence is in extreme contrast to the street-wise thoughts and behaviour of adolescent Beto, who has become a minor member of his local drug-gang. In a fit of nervous panic he shoots a dealer. Then, forced by the gang boss to dispose of the body, he struggles to know how to do so but eventually finds a way to dump it in landfill. The trauma of getting rid of the corpse, however, is nothing compared to his rejection by the gang:
He remembered the dreams he dreamed as a kid, what he used to think his life would be like, back then he never thought he’d be selling drugs.
But one bad decision and one false move have ruined his life forever.
In another story, a schoolboy begins to notice how his school uniform sets him apart from private-school boys. People avoid him. A woman crosses the street clutching her bag to her body so that she won’t bump into him. He explores this newfound capacity to scare people by following them, and it becomes an obsession.
A different obsession grips Fernando, a young man who has become addicted to spraying graffiti. He recognises the sound of ‘the metal ball dancing in the can, the sharp smell of adrenaline’. But he thinks of his wife and new-born son, his resolve to quit tagging, and his three months of restraint:
He wasn’t dropping tags anymore and even avoided tracing the motions of the letters with his fingers.
Then, mistakenly caught next to a young tagger, he reacts to a woman’s terrified screams – ‘Thief! Catch him!’:
Next thing he knew he was on his way up to the building’s rooftop terrace … Good thing his reflexes were top-notch. He reached the terrace in a split second, caught his breath. From way up high, he hunted the spray kid with his eyes, but the son of a bitch had ghosted, hadn’t even made it up the building.
He looks down on an expectant crowd and ponders his next move. Thief or tagger – either way a bullet or a beating.
Shots are fired. He jumps. We don’t know if he survives but we are left with his own certainty that ‘tagging is his life and his story’.
As with any short story collection, some stories work better than others, but Geovani Martins’s ability to capture his narrators’ voices, thoughts and emotions and, through them, the great variety of their lives and the colour and flavour of life in a favela, is superb. For a young self-taught writer, who supported himself and his writing by working as a sandwich-board man and selling drinks on the beach, this book is a remarkable achievement.
Martins was ‘discovered’ during a creative writing workshop at the Paraty International Literary Festival of the favelas in 2018. It is no surprise that film rights for The Sun On My Head have already been snapped up.
Geovani Martins (translated by Julia Sanches) The Sun On My Head Faber & Faber 2019 PB 128pp $22.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.
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