Lindacy Menezes: the Rocinha poet who turned survival into collective memory

In the Rocinha, Brazil’s largest favela, grief travels quickly. It moves through WhatsApp groups, market stalls, library tables, community stages. When news spread that Lindacy Menezes had died at 68, it did not arrive as a distant obituary item but as a rupture in daily life. The poet, writer and community leader was not simply admired; she was woven into the territory’s emotional infrastructure.

Lindacy lived in Cachopa, a section of the Rocinha shaped by steep paths and improvised architecture. Her work emerged from that geography. She wrote from the inside, not as an observer but as a witness whose own body carried the marks of poverty, migration, illness and resilience. For decades, she insisted that life in the favela was not reducible to statistics or sensational headlines. It was memory. It was language. It was people.

Those who knew her speak first of her smile—wide, disarming, generous. It was, as one neighbour put it, her calling card. But beneath that warmth was a fierce political clarity. Lindacy understood that writing, for Black women from Brazil’s peripheries, is rarely a neutral act. It is survival translated into form.

One community member described her as “our Conceição Evaristo of the Rocinha,” invoking Conceição Evaristo and her concept of escrevivência: writing born from lived experience. Lindacy embodied that idea intuitively. Her poems transformed fear into testimony, domestic labour into philosophy, ageing into dignity. Pain was never aestheticised; it was reworked, collectively, into meaning.

She was a familiar presence at the C4 Biblioteca Parque da Rocinha, at cultural fairs, poetry readings and grassroots events. Sometimes she read. Sometimes she listened. Often she did both, with the same seriousness. For younger writers—especially women—she represented proof that authorship was not reserved for the centre, the academy or the publishing industry. It could grow on steep hillsides.

Diagnosed with multiple malignant tumours, Lindacy faced her illness publicly but without spectacle. Friends recall how she continued to attend gatherings when her strength allowed, refusing to withdraw from community life. Even in fragility, she remained present. “She went to live with the angels,” one neighbour said, borrowing a phrase that softens death without denying it. Another remembered her dancing carimbó months before her passing, teaching steps with a grace that felt like transmission.

This, perhaps, was her quiet revolution: the refusal to separate culture from care. Lindacy did not treat poetry as a luxury or an escape. It was a tool for survival, a way to archive lives that Brazil has historically rendered disposable. In a country where Black women are often expected to endure silently, she spoke—softly, insistently, in her own cadence.

Her death leaves a gap that cannot be filled by monuments or hashtags. But her legacy is already distributed: in notebooks, in recordings, in the memories of those who learned that their stories mattered because she treated them as such.

The Rocinha mourns Lindacy Menezes not only as a poet, but as a presence. Someone who proved, day after day, that literature does not need distance to be universal. Sometimes it needs proximity, a shared bench, a library table, a smile that invites you to speak—and to write—yourself into history.