From Ministry Stage to Mugshot: When the Word Isn’t Enough

Back in January 2023, Brazil was supposedly turning a page. At the swearing-in of Culture Minister Margareth Menezes, in the glass-and-concrete cradle of Brasília’s Museu da República, actress and poet Elisa Lucinda stepped to the mic. And she didn’t recite Vinícius, or Drummond, or any of the comfortable canonical names.

She sang MC Poze do Rodo.

"Não é crime, é a cara do crime."

The line, pulled from Poze’s 2021 anthem, thundered through the auditorium. A favela-born funk track had entered the highest corridors of cultural power—on the voice of a woman who has spent her life defending the spoken word as a weapon against erasure. It was supposed to be a signal that Brazil, after years of fascistic flirtations, was ready to listen differently. To validate the voices it once silenced.

28 months later, MC Poze was arrested.

Symbolism Can’t Stop a Search Warrant

In May 2025, the same Brazil that applauded Lucinda’s performance locked up the very artist she had celebrated. Poze was detained under murky accusations of apologia ao crime—glorifying criminal behavior in his lyrics—and possible ties to organized crime. He spent a month in jail before being released in early June, to scenes more reminiscent of celebrity than suspect: luxury car, supporters chanting, press scrambling for angles.

It was hardly his first brush with criminalization. Poze’s name has long hovered in headlines, not for proven crimes but for the idea of danger—the aesthetic of it. For existing as a young, Black, successful artist from Rio’s periphery, whose lyrics speak in the cracked mirror of post-police Brazil.

So what did Lucinda’s performance really change?

When the Canon Names You—but the State Still Hunts You

Elisa Lucinda isn’t naive. She knew what she was doing when she quoted Poze in front of cameras and bureaucrats. For her, the act was poetic and political: a public baptism of funk as legitimate cultural resistance.

“É a vitória do verbo contra a violência,” she’s said—the verb triumphing over the gun.

But Poze’s arrest suggests a harsher truth: that the gun still has the final word. That even when funk lyrics reach the Ministry of Culture, the favela they come from remains outside the law’s protection.

Because validation isn’t liberation. It’s often decoration.

Brazil Wants the Beat, Not the Body

Poze’s case isn’t unique. Across Brazil—and across the globe—working-class music is fetishized and criminalized in equal measure. What’s celebrated at award shows is often persecuted in courtrooms.

Funk, like UK drill or Chicago trap, thrives on the knife-edge between art and autobiography. The system wants the rhythm, not the rage. The sound, not the source.

That’s why Elisa Lucinda’s symbolic gesture couldn’t save him. Because the very same system that allows a poet to sing funk in Brasília’s white halls will turn around and cage the original voice behind it—no matter how many cultural stamps of approval he’s earned.

Elisa Lucinda Doesn’t Just Quote the Street—She Walks It

To understand why Elisa Lucinda sang MC Poze that day in Brasília, you have to know her trajectory. Lucinda isn’t parachuting into funk for poetic effect—she’s been building bridges between the literary canon and the periphery for decades.

A trained actress and prolific poet, Lucinda has made her life’s work out of transforming spoken word into a form of insurgency. She founded the Casa Poema, a school of poetry and citizenship that brings orality into education and activism. And long before it became fashionable, she was advocating for slam poetry as the cultural engine of Brazil’s linguistic reinvention—what she often calls quilombagem linguística, or the creation of new spaces of resistance through language.

In slam, funk, and rap, Lucinda doesn’t just hear rhythm—she hears rescue. She hears young people grabbing hold of a language that never fully belonged to them and reconfiguring it to narrate violence, desire, and survival on their own terms. She calls this the “reAfricanization of Portuguese”, a way to pull the language away from colonial order and inject it with lived Black experience.

That’s why she doesn’t flinch when quoting MC Poze or defending the lyrical value of MC Carol, Djonga, or Racionais MC’s. To her, these aren’t digressions from literature—they are literature. They are the real-time epic of a country in contradiction, written in slang, syncopation, and subversion.

In interviews and classrooms, Lucinda often reminds audiences: “Who controls the verb, controls the world.” And in her view, young funk and rap artists are doing what centuries of literary tradition alone couldn’t—they’re turning the weapon of the colonizer into a chorus of dissent.

The Generation Gap is a Political Gap

To her credit, Lucinda continues to fight. She speaks at slam battles. She calls the street’s grammar “a revitalization of the language.” She reminds Brazil that funk and rap “bring the news”—they are journalism from below, lyrical field reports of state failure.

But her generation, for all its literary weight, can’t always shield the next from the institutions still built to suppress them.

Her quoting Poze was not a shield. It was a signal. But Brazil read it like a poem: symbolic, optional, and safe to ignore.