Crude Memory of the Periphery – Resenha de Juliana Silva Santana (UECE) sobre o livro “Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada” de Carolina Maria de Jesus
Carolina Maria de Jesus | Photo: Audálio Dantas Collection/Ponte
Resumo: Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada, de Carolina Maria de Jesus, expõe a realidade de uma favela em São Paulo nas décadas de 1950 e 1960. O diário ilustra a luta diária de Carolina como mãe solo e catadora de papel, abordando questões de pobreza, racismo e desigualdade social. A obra, ainda relevante em 2024, reflete sobre opressões interseccionais e a marginalização das comunidades negras e faveladas, cumprindo um papel social e literário significativo.
Abstract: Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, exposes the reality of a slum in Sao Paulo in the 1950s and 1960s. The diary illustrates Carolina’s daily struggle as a solo mother and paper film, approaching Poverty, racism and social inequality issues. The work, still relevant in 2024, reflects on intersectional oppressions and the marginalization of black and faveled communities, fulfilling a significant social and literary role.
Keywords: Slum, black woman, and social inequality.
The work Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada is a memorialist text that exposes the realities experienced by Carolina Maria de Jesus, her three children and neighbors in a slum in the state of São Paulo, near the Tietê River, in the mid -decades from 1950 and 1960.
Author Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) spent short time in school, enough to learn to read and write the world and words (Freire, 2015). Born in Sacramento-MG, he experienced the daily life of farmers, domestic and celebrated writers (SANTOS, 2015), producing four works: dump room (1960), masonry house (1961), Diary of Bitita (1986) and mine Strange Diary (1996). The first is the best known and has readers in 13 languages. In a fourth dump, the author tells the routine of a paper picker, inside and outside the Canindé slum, on the banks of the Tietê River. There, he deals with care with their children, living with other women and men, interspersed with the announcement of moral principles and political positions.
The book was initially published in 1960, edited by journalist Adálio Dantas, who found it in 1958, during a report on the expansion of that favela. Dantas’s work was initially published in Folha da Night and in O Cruzeiro magazine. (DANTAS, 2014, p.7). In the version reviewed here, the text was literally transcribed, but maintains the rich preface to Dantas, which describes the meeting with the author, the recurring themes of the diary, the repercussion of the work between intellectuals, inside and outside Brazil and the up to your content. The work maintains the original structure of a diary. It is segmented on [uninterrupted] days from July 15, 1955 to 1 January 1960 and is illustrated with black and white photos that portray the author. At the end of the diary, interview fragments are aggregates granted by Carolina de Jesus. In the text, she testifies about the reasons and motivations for the writing of the diary, the process of publication of the book and the impact of the circulation of the work on her life.
After six decades of the publication in the first diction, the book is still current in 2024, as it portrays the daily lives of many Brazilians living in extreme poverty and are affected by diverse, severe and intersectional inequalities, when they intersect race oppressions, Gender, class, among others, to the “structuring oppressions of the modern colonial matrix from which they leave” (Akotirene, 2020, p. 38).
Carolina’s daily anguish shared crosses us as a sharp material, as it speaks of the pain of feeling hungry, the (structural and psychological) insecurity of “residing” in a hostile environment, gender violence, especially between husbands and wives, systematic theft From childhood … the poet speaks of life and death, political conscience and faith, hope and suicide. Hunger hurts to the point of thinking about giving up living.
Carolina Maria de Jesus, in June 1959: at the Canindé favela, in São Paulo | Photo: Audalio Dantas/O Cruzeiro/EM
It demonstrates, throughout its reports, a visible reflective critical capacity about its reality and the others-referring to the works of Paulo Freire, when it defends an education/literacy for consciousness, for emancipation. Metaphorically, the author presents the city as a living room, while the favela would be the “dump room”, that forgotten back space, the place to discard the trash. With this reading – which is socioeconomic, philosophical also poetic, Carolina presents the reality of those and those who routine wake up, picking up water in the tap in a collective distribution, because there is no sanitation, think about what will do to eat and to feed children and (about) to live by this. There are days when they have food, there are days that not – the belly houses only air. There are days when you can feed the children, there are days when they ask them to wait for the next day in the hope that it is a better day. There are days when one neighbor helps the other, there are days when solidarity is not viable. Days and days experienced in a suffered, helpless and unfair way.
The book is also current because it deposes on individual/state relationships through the experience of this black, peripheral woman and solo mother. His tireless and lonely struggle to achieve the basics for himself and his children is not seen by the state or society. It faces the weight of the normalization of misery and the developments of the post-abolition, which resulted in an abandonment of black lives, black incarceration to spaces, food, the right to dream and realize. Black and blacks are still enslaved by racism, inequality, the “narcissistic pact of whiteness” (Bento, 2022) and these currents that do not allow the black people to enjoy freedoms, rights, of life. Women in similar conditions to Carolina Maria de Jesus, when seen, are called warriors for surviving this daily massacre. These women do not want to war; They want peace, they want lightness, they want body and mind food, they want to have the right to be and be in the world.
The work, which incites these and many other reflections, fulfills an important social and literary role. A slum black woman wrote and published her book, starting a process in which reports of the favela daily life have come to different readers/ES for years. Carolina Maria de Jesus’s book inspires and strengthens black people: We have hungry, we want more!
References
AKOTIRENE, Carla. Interseccionalidade – São Paulo: Sueli Carneiro/Editora Jandaíra, 2020.
BENTO, Cida. Pacto da branquitude. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
DANTAS, Adálio. A atualidade do mundo de Carolina. In: JESUS, Carolina de. Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática, 2014. p.7-10.
FREIRE, Paulo; MACEDO, Donaldo. Alfabetização: leitura do mundo, leitura da palavra. 7ª ed. – Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2015.
SANTOS, Lara Gabriella Alves dos. Carolina Maria de Jesus: análise identitária em “Quarto de despejo – diário de uma favelada”. Catalão, 2015. Dissertação (Mestrado em Estudos da Linguagem) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade Federal de Goiás.
JESUS, Carolina Maria. Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática, 2014. 200p. Review by: SANTANA, Juliana Silva. Crude Memory of the Periphery. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.14, Nov/Dec, 2023. Available at <Crude Memory of the Periphery – Resenha de Juliana Silva Santana (UECE) sobre o livro “Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada” de Carolina Maria de Jesus – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
Crude Memory of the Periphery – Resenha de Juliana Silva Santana (UECE) sobre o livro “Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada” de Carolina Maria de Jesus
15 January 2024
Carolina Maria de Jesus | Photo: Audálio Dantas Collection/Ponte
Resumo: Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada, de Carolina Maria de Jesus, expõe a realidade de uma favela em São Paulo nas décadas de 1950 e 1960. O diário ilustra a luta diária de Carolina como mãe solo e catadora de papel, abordando questões de pobreza, racismo e desigualdade social. A obra, ainda relevante em 2024, reflete sobre opressões interseccionais e a marginalização das comunidades negras e faveladas, cumprindo um papel social e literário significativo.
Abstract: Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, exposes the reality of a slum in Sao Paulo in the 1950s and 1960s. The diary illustrates Carolina’s daily struggle as a solo mother and paper film, approaching Poverty, racism and social inequality issues. The work, still relevant in 2024, reflects on intersectional oppressions and the marginalization of black and faveled communities, fulfilling a significant social and literary role.
Keywords: Slum, black woman, and social inequality.
The work Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada is a memorialist text that exposes the realities experienced by Carolina Maria de Jesus, her three children and neighbors in a slum in the state of São Paulo, near the Tietê River, in the mid -decades from 1950 and 1960.
Author Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) spent short time in school, enough to learn to read and write the world and words (Freire, 2015). Born in Sacramento-MG, he experienced the daily life of farmers, domestic and celebrated writers (SANTOS, 2015), producing four works: dump room (1960), masonry house (1961), Diary of Bitita (1986) and mine Strange Diary (1996). The first is the best known and has readers in 13 languages. In a fourth dump, the author tells the routine of a paper picker, inside and outside the Canindé slum, on the banks of the Tietê River. There, he deals with care with their children, living with other women and men, interspersed with the announcement of moral principles and political positions.
The book was initially published in 1960, edited by journalist Adálio Dantas, who found it in 1958, during a report on the expansion of that favela. Dantas’s work was initially published in Folha da Night and in O Cruzeiro magazine. (DANTAS, 2014, p.7). In the version reviewed here, the text was literally transcribed, but maintains the rich preface to Dantas, which describes the meeting with the author, the recurring themes of the diary, the repercussion of the work between intellectuals, inside and outside Brazil and the up to your content. The work maintains the original structure of a diary. It is segmented on [uninterrupted] days from July 15, 1955 to 1 January 1960 and is illustrated with black and white photos that portray the author. At the end of the diary, interview fragments are aggregates granted by Carolina de Jesus. In the text, she testifies about the reasons and motivations for the writing of the diary, the process of publication of the book and the impact of the circulation of the work on her life.
After six decades of the publication in the first diction, the book is still current in 2024, as it portrays the daily lives of many Brazilians living in extreme poverty and are affected by diverse, severe and intersectional inequalities, when they intersect race oppressions, Gender, class, among others, to the “structuring oppressions of the modern colonial matrix from which they leave” (Akotirene, 2020, p. 38).
Carolina’s daily anguish shared crosses us as a sharp material, as it speaks of the pain of feeling hungry, the (structural and psychological) insecurity of “residing” in a hostile environment, gender violence, especially between husbands and wives, systematic theft From childhood … the poet speaks of life and death, political conscience and faith, hope and suicide. Hunger hurts to the point of thinking about giving up living.
Carolina Maria de Jesus, in June 1959: at the Canindé favela, in São Paulo | Photo: Audalio Dantas/O Cruzeiro/EM
It demonstrates, throughout its reports, a visible reflective critical capacity about its reality and the others-referring to the works of Paulo Freire, when it defends an education/literacy for consciousness, for emancipation. Metaphorically, the author presents the city as a living room, while the favela would be the “dump room”, that forgotten back space, the place to discard the trash. With this reading – which is socioeconomic, philosophical also poetic, Carolina presents the reality of those and those who routine wake up, picking up water in the tap in a collective distribution, because there is no sanitation, think about what will do to eat and to feed children and (about) to live by this. There are days when they have food, there are days that not – the belly houses only air. There are days when you can feed the children, there are days when they ask them to wait for the next day in the hope that it is a better day. There are days when one neighbor helps the other, there are days when solidarity is not viable. Days and days experienced in a suffered, helpless and unfair way.
The book is also current because it deposes on individual/state relationships through the experience of this black, peripheral woman and solo mother. His tireless and lonely struggle to achieve the basics for himself and his children is not seen by the state or society. It faces the weight of the normalization of misery and the developments of the post-abolition, which resulted in an abandonment of black lives, black incarceration to spaces, food, the right to dream and realize. Black and blacks are still enslaved by racism, inequality, the “narcissistic pact of whiteness” (Bento, 2022) and these currents that do not allow the black people to enjoy freedoms, rights, of life. Women in similar conditions to Carolina Maria de Jesus, when seen, are called warriors for surviving this daily massacre. These women do not want to war; They want peace, they want lightness, they want body and mind food, they want to have the right to be and be in the world.
The work, which incites these and many other reflections, fulfills an important social and literary role. A slum black woman wrote and published her book, starting a process in which reports of the favela daily life have come to different readers/ES for years. Carolina Maria de Jesus’s book inspires and strengthens black people: We have hungry, we want more!
References
AKOTIRENE, Carla. Interseccionalidade – São Paulo: Sueli Carneiro/Editora Jandaíra, 2020.
BENTO, Cida. Pacto da branquitude. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
DANTAS, Adálio. A atualidade do mundo de Carolina. In: JESUS, Carolina de. Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática, 2014. p.7-10.
FREIRE, Paulo; MACEDO, Donaldo. Alfabetização: leitura do mundo, leitura da palavra. 7ª ed. – Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2015.
SANTOS, Lara Gabriella Alves dos. Carolina Maria de Jesus: análise identitária em “Quarto de despejo – diário de uma favelada”. Catalão, 2015. Dissertação (Mestrado em Estudos da Linguagem) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade Federal de Goiás.
JESUS, Carolina Maria. Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática, 2014. 200p. Review by: SANTANA, Juliana Silva. Crude Memory of the Periphery. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.14, Nov/Dec, 2023. Available at <Crude Memory of the Periphery – Resenha de Juliana Silva Santana (UECE) sobre o livro “Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada” de Carolina Maria de Jesus – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
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Juliana Silva Santana holds a PhD in Education from the Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC) and professor of the Pedagogy course at the Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE). Coordinator of the Black Intellectual Reading and Studies Group “Collective Mapinduzi” (CED/UECE). Among other works, published Narrativas autobiográficas de professoras da educação básica: a constituição da identidade docente como processo permanente (2019) e A trajetória da didática no Brasil: entre avanços e retrocessos (2020). ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/7218143551127362; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5234-4521; E-mail: juliana.santana@uece.br.
