Carolina Maria de Jesus (14 March 1914"Biblioteca de São Paulo homenageia escritora Carolina de Jesus", Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 7 November 2010. (Portuguese) – 13 February 1977Levine, Robert M., "The Cautionary Tale Of Carolina Maria De Jesus", Latin American Research Review, Volume 29, Number 1, 1992, pp. 55–84. .) was a Brazilian outskirts memoirist who lived most of her life as a slum-dweller. She is best known for her diary, published in August 1960 as Quarto de Despejo (lit. "Junk Room") after attracting the attention of a Brazilian journalist, which became a bestseller and won international acclaim. Appearing in English translation under the title Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (US) or Beyond All Pity (UK), the work remains the only document published in English by a Brazilian slum-dweller of that period. De Jesus spent a significant part of her life in the Canindé [pt] favela in North São Paulo, supporting herself and three children as a scrap collector.
Quarto de despejo was an editorial success and spawned theatrical plays, musical compositions (some by de Jesus herself), illustrations and sayings, and has inspired both individual and collective artistic creations, especially by other Black women from Brazilian city outskirts. De Jesus lends her name to community preparatory schools, theatre halls, saraus and collective action groups. The 2020 edition of the (Outskirts Literary Festival) was held in honour of de Jesus' memory, on the 60th anniversary of the book's publication.
Biography
Early life Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in 1914 in Sacramento, Minas Gerais, which at that time was a small rural town. Her parents were illiterate sharecroppers. She was the daughter of a single mother, and her father was married to another woman. For those reasons, she was treated as an outcast as a child and was a victim of child mistreatment. When she reached the age of seven, de Jesus' mother forced her to attend school. Maria Leite Monteiro de Barros, a wealthy landowner's wife who was also a benefactor to other poor black neighbourhood children, supported her for a while and paid for her schooling. Her formal education lasted a meagre two years, though by then she was already able to read and write. As her mother had illegitimate children, her family was excluded from Catholic Church. Nevertheless, she never stopped considering herself a Catholic. For instance, she often made biblical references and praises to God in her diary: "I dreamt I was an angel. My dress was billowing and had long pink sleeves. I went from earth to heaven. I put stars in my hands and played with them. I talked to the stars. They put on a show in my honor. They danced around me and made a luminous path. When I woke up I thought: I’m so poor. I can't afford to go to a play so God sends me these dreams for my aching soul. To the God who protects me, I send my thanks."Quoted in Robert M. Levine and José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesús, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, p. 50.
In 1937, the year her mother died, de Jesus migrated to the metropolis of São Paulo, which was experiencing a demographic upswing and witnessing the appearance of its first slums. Here, she worked as a maid for white families, but found that the work clashed with her independent personality. In 1948, she became pregnant. These reasons led to her dismissal by the family for which she was a maid, and she ended up needing to live in the nearby favela, Canindé.Levine (1995), p. 56 It is reported that authorities in her hometown thought her ability to read meant that she was a practitioner of witchcraft, because it was so unusual for someone like her. In São Paulo, she earned a living by collecting recyclable materials. She would purchase what little food she could afford with the earnings of her hard work. De Jesus made her own shack out of scrap plywood, cans, cardboard, or pretty much anything she could obtain. Among the materials she collected, there would be an occasional journal or notebook, as well as books, which encouraged her to start recording her day-to-day activities and write about life in the favela. It angered her neighbours that she was always writing because they were illiterate and felt uncomfortable at the thought of her writing about them. Her neighbours were jealous of her and tended to treat de Jesus and her children badly. She never considered getting married, on account of having witnessed too much domestic violence in the slums and preferring to remain an independent woman. She had three children, each from a different relationship (at least one of whom was with a wealthy white man). Unlike many fellow black women, de Jesus celebrated her race and was proud of it. To her, her skin and hair looked beautiful."I wrote plays and showed them to directors of circuses. They told me: 'It's a shame you're black.' They were forgetting that I adore my black skin and my kinky hair. The Negro hair is more educated than the white man's hair. Because with Negro hair, where you put it, it stays. It's obedient. The hair of the white, just give one quick movement and it's out of place. It won't obey. If reincarnation exists I want to come back black." Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark: the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Translated from the Portuguese by David St. Clair. Dutton, 1962.
In her diary, she gives details about the daily life of favelados (the inhabitants of favelas), and bluntly describes the political and social facts which impacted their lives. She writes of how poverty and desperation can cause people of elevated moral character to abandon their principles and dishonour themselves to simply feed their families. According to her, favelados would never get the chance to save money, as any extra earnings would immediately be used to pay off debts.
Publication of her diary De Jesus' diary was published in August 1960. She had been discovered by journalist Audálio Dantas in April 1958. Dantas was covering the opening of a neighbouring city playground when, immediately after the ribbon-cuttings, a street gang stormed in and claimed the area, chasing the children away. Dantas saw de Jesus standing at the edge of the playground shouting, "If you continue mistreating these children, I'm going to put all of your names in my book!". Levine (1995), p. 59 The intruders departed. Dantas asked what she meant by "book"; she was shy at first, but took him to her shack and showed him everything she had written. He asked her for a small sample and subsequently ran it in the newspaper. However, de Jesus is known to have given interviews and made other newspaper appearances since the early 1940s.
The inspiration for the book's title came from de Jesus' believing the favela was society's junk room: 'I live in the junk room. And whatever's in there, people either set on fire, or throw in the garbage'.
De Jesus's story electrified the town and in 1960, Quarto de Despejo was released. The first edition quickly sold its 10,000 initial copies. 20,000 copies of the second edition and an additional 50,000 copies of the third edition were soon printed to meet the popular demand of the book. Though written in the simple language of a favela dweller, the book was translated into thirteen (another source says fourteen) languages and became a bestseller in North America and Europe. It was published in the United States and UK as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus in 1962. The book was heavily edited by Dantas, and some critics suspected it a fraud; but the original manuscript was preserved and reprinted in full in 1999, proving not only that de Jesus wrote the book herself, but that she was a much livelier and more poetic writer than Dantas' edition seemed to suggest. Additionally, we know that while de Jesus wanted to publish more of her own stories and poems, Dantas heavily advised her against doing so.Levine (1995), p. 64
The book's status as a bestseller came as a surprise to her neighbourhood as well as the country. Many of de Jesus's neighbours knew about her writings before the publication and would tease and ridicule her because of them. "Most couldn't even read, but thought she should be doing other things with her spare time than writing and saving old writings." Despite the large amount of publicity and popularity caused by the diary, de Jesus continued to be a social pariah.
De Jesus' diary detailed the grim reality of her life as well as that of those around her. She judged her neighbours based on their lifestyles, using actual names and circumstances in the book. "You wrote bad things about me, you did worse than I did", a drunken neighbour once yelled. Many neighbours despised de Jesus because she seemed to look down on slum people's way of life. One man "screamed at her that she was a 'black whore' who had become rich by writing about favelados but refused to share any of her money with them."Levine (1995), p. 52. In addition to their cruel words, people threw stones and full chamber pots at her and her children. They were also angry because she used the proceeds of her diary to move into a brick-house in the high-end neighbourhood of Santana. "They swarmed around the truck and wouldn't let her leave. 'You think you are high class now, don't you'", they would scream. They despised her for what they saw as a disparagement of their way of life, even though a major achievement of her diary was to increase awareness about Brazilian favelas the world over.
Seeing as de Jesus raised concerns about conditions in the favelas, local politicians started wanting to meet with her to discuss possible ways to amend the situation. São Paulo's governor Francisco Prestes Maia made a move to engage state agencies in providing poverty relief for favelados. Most of his projects were concerned with teaching women to sew, care properly for their children and practice good hygiene. However, these initiatives quickly faded.
Children
De Jesus' had three children: João José, José (aka Zé) Carlos, and Vera Eunice.
Through interviews for The Life and Death of Maria de Jesus (see below ), second eldest Zé and daughter Vera provide information about her personality. Vera describes her mother's devotion to her dream of becoming a writer, without any help from others. Vera remembers her mother as strong-willed and sometimes erratic, but also states: "There is no one in the world I admire more than her."Levine (1995), p. 96.
Vera recalls that she and her brother spent most of their time at home as De Jesus rarely let her children leave their shack due to violence in the favela. Leaving her children alone at night was too dangerous. Levine (1995), p. 101. Vera also remembers that de Jesus had many romantic relationships, and that others in Canindé were sometumes hostile toward her writing: "In the favela, they thought that she was crazy, walking with her notebook under her arm. There were people who laughed. The worst ones laughed at her piles of paper, but they stopped when they realized that it was neither a joke nor craziness".Levine (1995), p. 103. When someone upset her, she threatened to write about them in her book.
According to Vera, before the publication of Quarto de despejo her mother became obsessed with Audálio Dantas, her publisher, and was constantly anxious about him sending word about her diary. Vera said her mother aspired to become a singer and an actress, but her publisher argued that this would bring her no benefit and she should continue writing books.