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!
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.
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.
In 1958, journalist Audálio Dantas
went to the Canindé favela 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.
The journalist guarantees that what he did in the text
was to edit it in order 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.
A lot was 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.
In her later books, she did not make the profit she
had made with her first publication, going so 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
62, 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 Jornal de Bitita (Bitita´s Journal), and in Brazil in 1986.
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 possible 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 very difficult 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.
Above all, 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.
