Literatura e cidade: processos de subjetivação e experiência urbana no diário de Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

The life story of Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) arouses interest and encourages discussions to this day since it regards a black outskirts woman with dreams of being a writer, who has allegedly been “discovered” by the journalist Audálio Dantas in May 1958 in the Canindé Favela in São Paulo. She has left a vast legacy of works, among which is her first published book, the object of this research: the diary entitled Quarto de Despejo (1960) – English title: Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. What makes this work and its original manuscripts a broad field research is the precursory way the writer conveys to this literary form the experience of poverty and hunger lived by those who have had their voices silenced throughout History. For a long time, the critics’ approach to the writer has insistently been formed by a bias of a narrative that is seen solely for its testimonial quality, serving to denounce the social conditions for the degrading miseries that are present in the city’s outskirts. Going beyond this approach that, for a long time, restrained the analyses produced about the writings and works of Carolina de Jesus; this work has the objective to investigate how the writer, through diary writing, shows new forms of representation of the city and the favela in the narrative, in addition to showing a process of subjectivation affected by an urban experience permeated with racism. Consequently, the reader of her literature is influenced by a unique perspective of this urban literature, that is made possible throughout a look that either goes into privileged areas in the city, in which she feels as if she were in a living room, or goes into a segregated and racialized area, the favela. The narrator shows the concurrent growing tension towards her black body, that transits through the streets of a city that becomes symbolic as she translates into the writing the constant feeling of not belonging to none of its spaces