She had everything not to be a writer, but she was!
Author of Quarto de Despejo (Eviction Room), a book in the form of a diary that tells her story in Favela Canindé. Carolina had everything not to be a writer, but she was!
The book is full of struggle, overcoming and suffering, as it is the story of a Black woman, single parent, semi-illiterate and slum dweller, in Brazil in the 20th century.
Carolina Maria de Jesus was born on March 14, 1914, in a rural community in Sacramento, Minas Gerais.
Daughter of illiterate parents, she managed to attend Alan Kardec School thanks to Maria Leite Monteiro de Barros, one of her mother's employers. She studied only two years, enough to be literate and take a liking to reading.
As there were no books in her house, she turned to a neighbor. That is how she read her first book, A Escrava Isaura (The Slave Isaura), by Bernardo Guimarães. In 1924, her family moved to the city of Lageado (MG). They worked in the fields until 1927, when they returned to Sacramento.
From Sacramento to São Paulo
Still in Sacramento, she and her mother were charged with theft. Her mother was imprisoned until it was discovered that there was no robbery. This fact was decisive for her to leave Sacramento for the city of São Paulo.
In 1947, she moved to Favela Canindé, in the north of the city, where the Portuguesa Stadium is now located. At that time, the city was modernizing and the first slums began to appear.
She worked as a house cleaner at the home of Euryclides de Jesus Zerbini, the fifth surgeon in the world and the first in Latin America and Brazil to perform a heart transplant. Carolina spent her days off in the house library.
Sometime later she became pregnant without being married and began to make a living by picking up paper on the street, separating the best ones for her daily writing. In them, she wrote about her daily life in the slum.
In 1958, the journalist Audálio Dantas went to the Canindé slum to do an article and found Carolina. She showed him the diary papers and he immediately realized that he already had everything and more to say about the place.
Admired by the writer's ability to express herself, Audálio decided to help her publish her first and most famous book. Despite having little schooling, the knowledge acquired at school was what made it possible for him to write the book that was the lever of his life.
Some excerpts from the notebooks were published in an article in the newspaper Folha da Noite on May 9, 1958. Another part appeared in the magazine O Cruzeiro, on June 20, 1959.
Published in August 1960 by Francisco Alves, Quarto de despejo – diário de uma favelada (Eviction Room – diary of a slum dweller) organized and revised by Audálio, was a collection of about 20 diaries written from July 15, 1955, to January 1, 1960.
The journalist guarantees that what he did in the text was to edit it to avoid many repetitions and change punctuation issues, otherwise, he says, these are Carolina's diaries in full. The book was a sales and public success because it gave an original look at the slum and about the slum.
Many people questioned at the time about the authenticity of the text, which some attributed to the journalist and not to her. However, many also recognized that writing conducted with such truth could only have been prepared by those who had lived that experience.
The book's title is attributed to Carolina's image of the slum as a dump. Favela residents were placed there by order of the government. Homeless people were evicted in these areas, which in the future would become slums.
In Brazil, more than 100,000 books were sold in just one year (1960). Translated into thirteen languages, Carolina won the world and was commented on by great names in Brazilian literature such as Manuel Bandeira, Raquel de Queiroz and Sérgio Milliet.
The sales success represented her leaving the favela and the hostility of the residents of that community, who felt exposed by her. Despite having come out of poverty overnight, Carolina was unable to keep the money she earned and at the end of her life, she went through financial difficulties again.
From the second book, Casa de alvenaria (Brick house), which had the subtitle diário de uma ex-favelada (diary of an ex-slum dweller), Carolina returned to ostracism. She faced the prejudice of a society that, in large part, related her talent to the figure of Audálio – a white and literate man.
In her later books, she did not make the profit she had made with her first publication, going as far as to go back to picking up paper on the street to survive.
The writer died on February 13, 1977, at the age of sixty-two, in a place where she lived, on the outskirts of São Paulo, due to respiratory failure. Unfortunately, at that time the public and the media already forgot her.
He left his three children, the result of relationships with men who did not assume paternity: João José, José Carlos, and Vera Eunice. She created them all by herself. Teacher Vera Eunice, the youngest, is the only one alive.
Quarto de Despejo also had an important social impact because it drew attention to the problem of slums, which is still embryonic in Brazil. It was an opportunity to debate essential topics such as basic sanitation, garbage collection, piped water, hunger, misery, that is, life in a space where until then the government had not arrived.
Published Books
Her last work, Diário de Bitita – um Brasil para Brasileiros (Diary of Bitita – a Brazil for Brazilians), was first published in France by Éditions Métailié, under the title of Journal de Bitita (Bitita´s Journal), and in Brazil in 1986.
Quarto de Despejo – summary and analysis
Rebeca Fuks, PhD in Cultural Studies, provides a summary and analysis of the book that created Carolina Maria de Jesus. I present here a summary. The full text is in the link at the bottom of the page.
Quarto de Despejo is a hard, difficult reading that exposes critical situations of those who were not lucky enough to have access to a minimal quality of life. Extremely honest and transparent, we see in Carolina's speech the personification of a series of speeches from other women who are also in a social situation of abandonment.
Carolina's writing – the syntax of the text – sometimes deviates from standard Portuguese and sometimes incorporates fancy words that she seems to have learned from her readings. In several interviews, she identified herself as self-taught and said that she learned to read and write with notebooks and books she collected from the streets.
In the entry for July 16, 1955, for example, we see a passage where the mother tells her children that there is no bread for breakfast. Note the style of language used:
Carolina shows her oral speech and all these marks in writing confirm the fact that she was effectively the author of the book, with the limitations of the standard Portuguese of those who did not attend school fully.
Quarto de Despejo explores the intricacies of this hardworking woman's life and conveys Carolina's harsh reality, the constant ongoing effort to keep her family on its feet without experiencing greater needs:
Overcoming the issue of writing, it is worth emphasizing that in the above passage, written with simple words and a colloquial tone, Carolina deals with a exceedingly demanding situation: not being able to put bread on the table in the morning for her children.
Throughout the writing, she stresses that she knows the color of hunger – and she would be yellow. The picker would have seen the yellow a few times over the years and it was from that feeling that she most tried to escape.
In addition to working to buy food, resident Carolina also received donations and searched for leftover food at fairs and even in the trash when necessary. Instead of dealing with the grief of the scene in a dramatic and depressing way, the mother is assertive and chooses to move on by finding a temporary solution to the problem.
On the other hand, numerous times throughout the text, the narrator is faced with anger, fatigue, and revolt at not feeling capable of nourishing the family's basic needs:
If Carolina often feels that she is a victim of prejudice for not being married, she, on the other hand, is grateful for the fact that she does not have a husband, who for many of those women represents the figure of the abuser.
Quarto de Despejo is a story of suffering and resilience, of how a woman deals with all the difficulties imposed by life and still manages to transform the extreme situation she has experienced into discourse.
Collection at IMS – Instituto Moreira Salles
The Carolina Maria de Jesus Collection arrived at the Moreira Salles Institute in 2006. It consists only of an archive with intellectual production containing two handwritten notebooks: one entitled A Brazil for Brazilians: Tales and Poems, and another collection of the same genre, untitled.
Carolina's Archive Support Library contains the film Slum: life in poverty. Unreleased until 2014, it was recorded by the German Christa Gottmann-Elter in 1971 but would have been prevented from circulating in Brazil under the military regime for its social and economic denunciation character that contradicted the idea of a modern country that the military passed on to Brazilians.
Used and suggested links
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