André V. Neves
- Portugal -
André V. Neves (b. 1979, Porto), widely known as MAZE, is a pioneer of Portuguese Hip Hop and a founding member of the cult rap group Dealema, active since 1996.
Also a solo artist, he has collaborated with numerous renowned musicians. With a background in visual arts and design, he emerged in the graffiti scene and evolved into a multidisciplinary creator—poet, visual artist, teacher, and cultural activist.
He hosted “Oblá FM” and “Ginga Beat” radio shows for over a decade, promoting Lusophone music.
In 2023, he co-authored Fronteira-Mátria (Urutau) with Brazilian poet Vinicius Terra and contributed to collections like Verso do Bago (2022) and A Cidade do Porto na obra de Bernardino Pires(2023).
Based in Carcavelos, he presents his work in festivals and leads transformative projects across age groups and communities, including Oficina da Palavra (8–13), Beat na Montanha (prisons), Recomeçar (seniors), and Cartografia do Medo (locals and migrants), using the word to heal and connect.
Across the Borderlines: The Poetics of André V. Neves (MAZE)
To define the poetics of André V. Neves—better known in the Hip Hop world as MAZE—is to engage in a dance between voice and silence, territory and exile, sound and page. A founding member of the legendary Portuguese rap group Dealema, MAZE has long forged a path through the word—graffiti, rhyme, poetry, or prose—as both a political act and a spiritual gesture. His work resists easy classification, blending lyrical instinct with historical consciousness and a deep, almost tactile relationship with language.
Fronteira-Mátria (2023), a collaborative work with Brazilian poet and rapper Vinicius Terra, stands as a testament to MAZE’s evolving artistry. In the words of poet and critic Minês Castanheira, this is “a book that brings an ocean in the middle.” The Atlantic, often a symbol of division, here becomes a current of dialogue. “All first things are impossible to define,” she writes—and perhaps that is the key to understanding MAZE’s poetics: the refusal of fixed identity in favour of movement, rhythm, breath. This is not simply a meeting of two rappers, nor even two countries, but a convergence of histories and futures.The title itself—Fronteira-Mátria—is an act of resistance. “Mátria,” a feminized and affective variation of pátria, shifts the focus from the rigid to the relational, from the patriotic to the poetic. It is not the nation-state but the nurturing space of collective memory and shared struggle that the book seeks to inhabit. The work is full of “individual narratives,” writes Castanheira, but they “fire arrows beyond the borders of geography, territory, class,” returning always to “the ancestral humanity of a story that is collective—ours.”As Castanheira suggests, “perhaps the most audacious thing… is that it bears witness to much more than the four hands that wrote it.” The reader is invited into a liminal space, unsure “where they end and we begin.” It is a work to be “heard,” she writes, rather than simply read—“without knowing whether it is poetry, music, a message in the wind.” The refusal to define becomes, itself, a definition.
MAZE’s poetics are built on transit: from Porto to Carcavelos, from street walls to classrooms, from the solitary voice to the collective choir. He does not ask the word to behave, to sit quietly in a book. Instead, he lets it pulse, erupt, echo. His is a poetry of return and reinvention, shaped by the streets but never limited to them.Ultimately, to read André V. Neves is to enter a borderless space—where Hip Hop becomes archive, where poetry becomes movement, where the future is written in the plural.There is something of the griot in MAZE—the oral historian who carries the weight of memory. But there is also the urban prophet, tagging walls and verses with warnings, hopes, and invocations.
MAZE, the musical persona of André V. Neves, cannot be separated from his poetic practice. In fact, one might argue that his flow is a form of poetic lineation. MAZE tracks carry the same concerns as his poems: migration, memory, voice, violence. But in sound, his work gains a new dimension.His use of minimalist beats, pauses, and repetition produces a kind of sonic poetics. The beat does not dominate; it supports the voice. He often employs long silences or sustained notes to let a line breathe—echoing the brokenness of the poetic line on the page.Lyrically, MAZE is closer to Saul Williams or Moor Mother than to mainstream Hip Hop. He samples voices, uses non-rhyming couplets, and bends form. One live performance featured him speaking into two microphones simultaneously—creating a delay effect that made his voice sound like a ghost of itself. This is not gimmick; it’s embodiment. Embodiment of his central themes: the double voice, the echo, the impossibility of total presence.
Silence here is not emptiness—it is inheritance. It is discipline. It is trauma. But it is also a kind of knowing. The poet listens not to what is said, but to what is withheld. His voice emerges not in opposition to silence, but in dialogue with it.This attention to sound—and its absence—connects deeply to his practice as a performer and lyricist. The poems move with a subtle musicality. They are not rhythmic in a metrical sense, but they pulse. Even in English, the sonic traces of Portuguese remain: long vowels, soft endings, gentle alliterations.Reading his work is like listening to someone think aloud in a language they had to invent to survive.
Neves’s poems do not conclude. No ending, only breath. They stop. Or they fade. Or they pause long enough to let the reader step in. His work resists narrative closure because the stories he tells—of exile, of gender, of memory—do not end.
What makes Neves a vital poetic voice today is not merely his subject matter, but his method. He refuses spectacle. He refuses simplification. His poetics are rooted in fracture, repetition, and vulnerability. He writes as if every word costs something. And perhaps it does.His poems whisper, but they do not vanish. They linger. They haunt. They stay open—like wounds, like prayers, like names waiting to be pronounced right.In an era obsessed with resolution and clarity, André V. Neves offers something far more necessary: a language that stumbles, survives, and sings
Poetry
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What people like is fear {sold at popular prices} / Essa gente gosta é do medo {vendido a preços populares}
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Raft / Jangada
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Continuous breath / Sopro continuum
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Nauts / Nautas
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The banks of the Douro / Margens do Douro
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Everything that exists / O tudo que existe
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Shards from the end of the world / Cacos do fim do mundo
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Of the obsolescence of being / Da obsolescência do ser
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Poetic Justice / Justiça Poética
