Carolina 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.
“No one could invent that language, that way of saying things with extraordinary creative force, but typical of someone who only completed primary education.” Manuel Bandeira Brazilian modernist poet - 1886 - 1968 |
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.
She 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.
Works by Carolina Maria de Jesus
In life |
Dump room - 1960 ֎ Masonry house - 1961 ֎ Pieces of hunger ֎ Proverbs ֎ Diary of Bitita – a Brazil for Brazilians – 1986 |
Posthumous |
Meu estranho diário - 1996 ֎ Antologia pessoal ֎ Onde estais felicidade? - 2014 Meu sonho é escrever - 2018 |
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:
“16 de julho de 1955 - Levantei. Obedeci a Vera Eunice. Fui buscar água. Fiz o café simples e comesse carne com farinha.” |
July 16, 1955 - I got up. I obeyed Vera Eunice. I went to get water. I made plain coffee and ate meat with flour.” |
In textual terms, it is worth highlighting that there are errors such as the absence of an accent (in água - water) and agreement errors (comesse appears in the singular when the author addresses her children, in the plural).
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:
“I left feeling unwell, wanting to lie down. But the poor thing doesn’t rest. He doesn’t have the privilege of enjoying rest. I was nervous inside; I was cursing my luck. I picked up two paper bags. Then I went back, picked up some iron, some cans, and some firewood.” |
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.
"I, who before eating saw the sky, the trees, the birds, everything yellow, after I ate, everything returned to normal in my eyes. The dizziness caused by alcohol prevents us from singing. But the dizziness caused by hunger makes us tremble. I realized that it is horrible to have only air in your stomach." |
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:
“I kept thinking that I needed to buy bread, soap and milk for Vera Eunice. And 13 cruzeiros wouldn’t be enough! I got home, or rather to my shed, nervous and exhausted. I thought about the busy life I lead. I collect paper, wash clothes for two young people, and spend the whole day on the street. And I’m always short of money.” |
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.
Black History
This space is too small to cover everything, or almost everything, about Carolina Maria de Jesus, so I will add links at the end of the text. This post was published in January 2023. The good thing about the internet is that we can always add or remove information from posts. I discovered História Preta (Black History) , a documentary podcast that aims to keep alive the historical memory of the Black population in Brazil and the world, written, edited and published by Thiago André.
História Preta produced a series with ten episodes about Carolina Maria de Jesus. In them, you can see how difficult it was for her to face prejudice and the harsh reality of being a black woman, a single mother and a favela resident (even after having left the favela) and, mainly, a best-seller who may have overshadowed established (and not established) white authors, or simply bothered many people accustomed to blackness in the basement.
In episode 3. Black Poet, Thiago André narrates the arrest, still in Minas Gerais, of Carolina and her mother for purely racist reasons. They were not only arrested but also beaten. Her mother broke her arm while trying to defend her and remained in jail for a few days without medical help.
It is a portrait without anesthesia of Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. A Brazil quite different from the Brazil of philosopher and writer Djamila Ribeiro, but no less racist for that. The links to the 10 episodes are below, at the end of the text.
"At night, while they call for help, I calmly listen to Viennese waltzes in my hut. While the husbands break the planks of the hut, my children and I sleep peacefully. I do not envy the married women in the favela who live the lives of Indian slaves. I am not married, and I am happy." |
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 ֎
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Links used and suggested
YouTube |
Black History |
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