Carolina Maria de Jesus
Photo: Instituto Federal de Alagoas
Country: São Paulo, Brazil
Location: Latin America
About
Carolina Maria de Jesus (March 14, 1914-February 13, 1977) was an Afro-Brazilian writer. She was known for her best-selling book, Quarto de Despejo (1960), which was originally her diary. She was one of the first Black Brazilian women to be published.
Biography by Jaedyn Griddine
Photo: Carolina Maria de Jesus before boarding the Air France plane. Brazilian National Archives. Correio da Manhã Fund, Arquivo Nacional. Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Carolina grew up during an interesting political era in Brazil; the ‘Golden Law,’ which abolished slavery, was passed just a few decades before her birth (May 13, 1888), yet racial discrimination was still present during her upbringing, both in her community and within her own family. As a dark-skinned Black woman, granddaughter of enslaved Brazilians and daughter of a single, unwed mother, Carolina was born in the city of Sacramento in the state of Minas Gerais–in a world that was built to support her. She grew up in poverty and, like most other poor children in Sacramento (her hometown), worked from a young age instead of receiving a formal education. She did, however, have the fortune of receiving schooling for about 2 years, which gave her the reading and writing skills that would later help usher her into the public’s eye. During this pivotal time in her life, Carolina experienced firsthand the struggles of poverty and racism that she later highlighted in Quarto de Despejo, but she also found a bit of comfort in her grandfather, who encouraged her to read and served as an inspiration for her, as he passed on his learned wisdom to Carolina despite never receiving a formal education. Even though some of her relatives looked down upon her for her skin color, Carolina held strong ties to her family, particularly her mother, grandfather and children. After her mother’s death, Carolina moved to São Paulo, where her writing career would later flourish.
Carolina Maria de Jesus, one of the first and most important black writers in Brazil, offers autographs of her book "Quarto de Espejo", in which she reports the daily life and feelings experienced by the favela community. August 1960. Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Her seminal work, Quarto de Despejo, details her living conditions in the Canindé favela, a heavily impoverished area predominantly inhabited by working class individuals who built their homes out of whatever materials they had in their possession, where she lived after moving out of Sacramento. Favelas such as Canindé emerged during local government’s efforts to ‘clean up’ São Paulo by removing the homeless and impoverished from the city. Carolina began writing Quarto de Despejo as a diary, where she chronicled the lives of her neighbors in the favela as well as her own to cope with the harsh living conditions of Canindé. She discussed race and class, illuminating the housing, healthcare and food inequalities perpetuated by the creation of favelas and, in a grander sense, by the persistence of racism in Brazil post-emancipation. During her writing process, Carolina met Audálio Dantas, a journalist, who inquired about Carolina’s notebooks and, after reading them, led her on the journey to get her diary published. Once published, Quarto de Despejo was immediately met with acclaim, selling out of its original 10,000 copies. Catapulted unexpectedly into the public eye, Carolina began traveling around Brazil to lead important discussions on the inequalities highlighted in the book.
Unfortunately, her success was also met with negativity; she became resented by her community, as they believed she published their lives without their consent and regarded her as pretentious due to her elevated writing style. Her and her children faced so much hate that she eventually moved them to Parelheiros, São Paulo, where she lived in isolation and, eventually, poverty. She continued writing, though she often expressed ennui at writing books and much preferred her poetry, which, along with many of her books, were not published until after her death. While she was alive, her later works did not receive nearly as much acclaim as Quarto de Despejo, and she eventually fell back into poverty, leaving adulthood just as she entered it: picking up scraps for change, looked down on by society, but also surrounded by family, until her death in 1977.
Though the world didn’t treat Carolina with the grace she deserved while she was alive, her works have been receiving more and more praise as time passes after her death. In 1995, her biography Cinderela Negra was published, which brought forth a second wave of interest in, and a concerted effort to compile, her works. Today, Carolina remains one of Brazil’s most famous authors--Quarto de Despejo alone has been printed in over 40 countries and numerous languages, and has sold over a million copies. More importantly, however, her assessment of the poor conditions of favelas remains ever-powerful and relevant today.
Sources:
Carolina Maria de Jesus by Maira Salazar
Looking for Carolina Maria de Jesus by Tarisai Ngangura
Paying Homage to Favela Author Carolina Maria de Jesus by Benito Aranda-Comer
