Podcast
On the day of Odair Moniz’s funeral, a television journalist did a live broadcast from the Zambujal neighborhood, saying that everyday peace had returned. However, so that viewers could recognize where he was speaking from, he chose a destroyed bus stop as the setting. If the words were about a neighborhood that buried one of its own, the image was about the riots. Listen here to the conversation with Daniel Oliveira, on the streets of Zambujal, on the podcast Ask Does Not Offend
It was like this for 15 days: we, those from the city of law, looking scared, angry or understanding, at them, those from the invisible city, to steal an expression from a radio program by António Brito Guterres. The controversy that came later, with a socialist mayor defending unconstitutional rules for housing complexes, summarizes the feeling even better: the majority of the population believes that the law is not useful for these people’s lives. That they do not comply with them, that the State does not have to comply with them. That they have to be kept in order, nothing more.
Some more careful or even well-intentioned speeches preferred to distinguish, in the Zambujal neighborhood and everywhere else where there were riots resulting from yet another death at the hands of the police, a criminal minority from an orderly and hard-working majority. Reality can be more complicated when you grow up lacking almost everything. Not that school and home don’t exist. What is missing is what allows us to break the cycle of exclusion that this territory determines.
The exclusion was evident in the debate itself, held about the neighborhood, but exclusively outside the neighborhood. Despite there being a residents’ association and other self-representation organizations, the people who live in these neighborhoods are excluded from the public debate. They are the problem, not the agents of their lives.
In Ventura’s words, the “banditry”, in his opponents’ words, the “victims”. But never subjects of their own will. This does not serve to belittle whoever speaks, because they must speak, about the exclusion of others. Just to underline how invisibility is part of the rules of the game. Residents of housing projects are seen either as a security problem or as a social problem, never as a democratic problem, as they have been excluded from the right to the city and speech.
With the means I have, I will try to do what I think is missing: give some say to Bairro do Zambujal. The model will be similar to the one I used with António Brito Guterres, in the old Curraleira. The main guide will not be him this time. It will be Cláudio Gonçalves, who also uses the name Tibunga. He was born in the Cova da Moura neighborhood, grew up outside of here and is part of the Zambujal Residents Association. He is 29 years old, an international model and the opportunities he seized did not result from the opportunities that the neighborhood had to offer him. For the next two hours, we’ll be in the neighborhood. Not to film riots, but to listen to the citizens who live here. Welcome to Zambujal, which you will only hear about on television again when another tragedy happens.
It’s more than an interview, it’s less than a debate. It’s a contradictory conversation in which, in the end, it’s the guest’s opinion that matters. Mostly about politics, sometimes about really interesting things. A journalistic project by Daniel Oliveira and João Martins. Graphic image by Vera Tavares with Tiago Pereira Santos and music by Mário Laginha. Subscribe (at , and ) and listen to more episodes:
