“EU LUTEI TANTO PRO MEU FILHO FICAR VIVO”: A LUTA DE DALVA

Abstract

“My son was shot dead, if I don't do anything, I'm deader than he is,” was one of the phrases that was said to me by Dalva, mother of Thiago, victim of the Rio police: the shooting of her son, comburring her fight for justice, if not as an affirmation of life, resisting a death even deeper than that of murder itself, that is, silence in the face of brutality. The present text focuses on this story, as it was told to me by Dalva, aiming not the objective testimony of the events, as if the violence were transparent or as if it were dissecting scenes of horror that we would be able to trace some form of understanding of the suffering of the other. I turn, rather, to Dalva's narrative memories of Thiago's murder and the struggle she has waged since then, to listen to the singularity of her voice, or, more precisely, to the way in which the particularity of her history elaborates the collective idiom of the mothers of victims of the State.