FROM THE TRASH TO THE BOOK: QUARTO DE DESPEJO AND DIÁRIO DE BITITA, BY CAROLINA MARIA DE JESUS

Abstract

Carolina Maria de Jesus reveals in Quarto de despejo (1960) and Diário de Bitita (1986) the daily life of many black brazilians of the twentieth century. From childhood in the interior of Minas Gerais to adulthood in the Canindé favela, São Paulo, Carolina's trajectory was marked by rejection as she tried to enter spaces marked by white privilege. Carolina's diaries can be considered denunciations of her perpetrators, though they bear in their form traces of an assimilated dominant culture. Carolina's poetic writing is forged in an attempt to emerge from a subaltern layer to the elite, revealing a shift from the class point of view. During the military dictatorship in Brazil, his work became censored and silenced from the literary scene because his social criticism did not meet the standard proposed by the military. I will analyze the relationships between subordinate subjects and the brazilian literary system through Carolina's intimate writing.