{"id":54816,"date":"2019-07-22T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T09:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=54816"},"modified":"2025-09-13T14:08:38","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:08:38","slug":"the-griots-of-mare-narratives-of-black-favela-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=54816","title":{"rendered":"The Griots of Mar\u00e9: Narratives of Black Favela Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Por<\/strong>tugu\u00eas<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The favelas that make up Mar\u00e9<\/a>, in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone<\/a>, are home to 140,000 inhabitants<\/a> and many stories to tell. The favelas’ origins date back<\/a> to the foundation of Morro do Timbau<\/a> in the 1940s, but each part of Mar\u00e9 has its own history of emergence.<\/p>\n

Nova Holanda<\/a>, for example, started in the 1960s<\/a> as a Provisional Housing Center created by the government and coordinated by the Le\u00e3o XIII Foundation<\/a> to house the population removed from other favelas in the city, such as Favela do Esqueleto<\/a>, Praia do Pinto<\/a>, Morro da Formiga<\/a> and Morro do Querosene<\/a>. For many of those families, what was meant to be provisional became permanent, and remains so to this day.<\/p>\n

According to Tereza On\u00e3, from Mar\u00e9’s Memory and Identity Nucleus<\/a>\u00a0(NUMIM) of the NGO Redes da Mar\u00e9<\/a> (Mar\u00e9 Development Networks), another striking feature of Nova Holanda is that it is constituted by a majority black population. Aware of this, On\u00e3 formed a team of female black researchers to investigate Mar\u00e9\u2019s local memory as tied to issues of gender and race. The meetings between the researchers and long-term residents of Nova Holanda became known as \u201cTea with the Grandmothers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNova Holanda has a history that the rest of the city needs to know about; it is the community with the largest number of black residents in Mar\u00e9. It\u2019s no coincidence that in Nova Holanda we have such a tense relationship with the police,\u201d says On\u00e3, who has coordinated this oral history work for the past four years.<\/p>\n

The documentary As Griots da Mar\u00e9<\/em><\/a>, directed by Diego Jesus and Tereza On\u00e3 in 2016, is one of Tea with the Grandmothers\u2019 first outputs. The 15-minute film, which contains the narratives of female Mar\u00e9 residents, is available on the Olhares da Mar\u00e9 Film School\u2019s (ECOM<\/a>) channel.<\/p>\n