About Carolina and her work
Carolina Maria de Jesus represents a significant convergence of 'impossible' conditions for a literary career within the Brazilian cultural context: she was a Black woman, semi-literate, living in a favela, a single mother, and had a strong, inflexible personality that defied attempts to mold her to public taste. Her work extends beyond the published diaries organized by journalist Audálio Dantas: Child of the Dark (1960), and I'm going to have a little house (1961). In addition to these titles, which brought her fame both within and outside Brazil in just two years, she self-published "Pedaços da Fome" and "Provérbios" (1963). After more than a decade of obscurity, her name reappeared posthumously on the cover of "Bitita's Diary" (1986). Before her public revelation, Carolina had attempted to attract editors' attention to her writings: poems, chronicles, short stories, maxims, and a novel. Her diary drew public attention at the time for offering a "from below" perspective on Brazil's social conditions during the developmental decade. This readership was also responsible for engaged, markedly populist cultural manifestations. According to José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, her diary emerged on the national scene during the political upheavals of the so-called “golden years” beginning under the JK government. In the context of counterculture, social types representing national contradictions were valued. Carolina's experience as a hardworking woman surviving on the city's waste became a point of social interest, turning her into a representative of themes that animated political debates on both the left and right. (Meihy, 2010, p.61).
Foto de Audálio Dantas (Biblioteca Nacional)
From the political opening promoted by the military government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a significant shift in the direction of national literary production. Flora Süssekind said this historical moment engendered "prose with an autobiographical diction that dominated the Brazilian literary scene from the late 70s to the early 80s" (Süssekind, 2004, p.93-4). Initially, the narratives of former political prisoners and exiles characterized this new wave of autobiographical return. This diction, however, also came to influence fictional literary production and, later, enabled the inclusion of other life experiences—those prioritizing the voices of the marginalized, minority experiences, and life on the periphery. In this sense, it was pertinent to take a less radical view of the literary production of Carolina de Jesus, which happened in the following decade.
In the 1990s, through the research of professors José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy from the University of São Paulo and Robert M. Levine from the University of Miami, resulting in the book "The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus," it was possible not only to reintroduce the writer's name into literary research circles but also to recover part of her archive containing manuscripts of published diaries and more than five thousand pages of unpublished texts. This material, treated and microfilmed, is deposited in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
In an interview on the occasion of the release of the film "Five Times Favela, Now by Ourselves," filmmaker Cacá Diegues clarifies that his participation in the project—a film composed of seven different stories, all written, directed, and starred by young favela residents—was merely that of "a producer who bet on a project, not out of charity, but believing in its artistic, commercial, and cultural competence" (qtd Ventura, 2010, p.07). This is emblematic of the director's stance, who, in the 1960s, was part of the intellectual community responsible for "giving voice" to the oppressed and spreading the reality of the periphery. Currently, as the article by Zuenir Ventura from which this statement was taken points out, there is an invasion of the center:
The favela seeks to be its own spokesperson. It no longer wants to be seen only from an external perspective; it wants to be the protagonist and author of its story. It is a movement from within, quite different from the attitude that motivated left-wing intellectuals in the 1960s who, generous but paternalistic, climbed the hill attracted by the theme and "bringing" culture. (loc. cit.).
From 1958, when excerpts from her diary began to be published in São Paulo newspapers in preparation for the book version that would emerge in 1960, Carolina Maria de Jesus found herself in an ambiguous situation: on the one hand, she owed her exposure to the interference of journalist Audálio Dantas and thus was being "mediated" by him; on the other, she refused mediation and believed she could establish a discourse entirely her own within the literary and cultural environment where she had gained some space. This ambiguity allows for an understanding of Carolina's work as possessing a power that resisted contextual imperatives, despite knowing how to take advantage of them directly or indirectly. Her literature produced "from within the favela"—and perhaps one of the first works with such a characteristic—cannot be considered essentially peripheral, as a closer reading of her diary reveals her conviction of belonging to the literary world due to her talent and not by the concession of any ideological trend. Describing life in the favela, a task to which her diary is dedicated, does not encompass the entirety of Carolina Maria de Jesus's literary work. The imagination present in her short stories, novels, and plays consists of various realities and imaginations (workers, servants, elegant and rich men and women, palaces, and much luxury), resulting in literature for which the label "peripheral" would only reduce its value and perpetuate a complacent attitude toward its examination through an aesthetic perspective.
Photos of Carolina Maria de Jesus
Audiovisual production on and about Carolina