"THE WEST ZONE IS NOT A PLACE THAT SHOULD BE FORGOTTEN": JESSÉ ANDARILHO IN THE FIRST PERSON

Revealed by Flup's formative processes, Jessé Andarilho is a product of Antares, in Rio's West Zone, and has transformed the experiences of the region into the foundation of his writing. He is the author of Fiel (2014), Efetivo varia (2017), and Esquema (2025), novels that portray peripheral youth in their tensions and reinventions. In addition to being a writer and screenwriter, Jessé is the founder of the Marginow Institute, which promotes cultural initiatives on the margins. We spoke with him about the train as a narrative and the West Zone as a territory of invention. Read below.

You write about people few people write about. Who do you think still needs to appear in your books, and why?

Mothers who stop raising their children to be nannies and take care of the children of the rich. These mothers grow older, their children grow up, and today, in the outskirts, in the favelas, they are offering many courses for elderly care. And these children, who were not raised by their mothers because their mothers were nannies, are becoming caregivers—and they are not caring for their mothers as they grow older. This is something I need to incorporate into my characters. I'm devising a strategy to write a novel around this theme.

How can we transform the West Zone, so often reduced to statistics, into a territory of history, memory and invention?

The West Zone isn't a place to be forgotten. We have many good things, intelligent people, and the culture is vibrant in the West Zone. I always write with it in mind, because I want someone researching Rio de Janeiro 200 years from now, and wanting to see a Rio de Janeiro with its back to Christ, to be able to experience the West Zone. That's why my characters always wander through it.

For a long time, the train was your writing companion. Today, if you had to assign it a role in your writing, would it be a setting, a character, or a narrator?

The train played a fundamental role in my writing because it was the place where I felt stuck, stagnant—even with the train moving, I felt my life was at a standstill. It was a two-hour commute to and two-hour commute from work. So, if I could write a story involving the train, the train would be the narrator.