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Carolina Maria de Jesus and Quarto de Despejo

A paper picker in the Canindé favela, Carolina wrote in notebooks found in the trash. Her diary became Quarto de Despejo, translated into 13+ languages.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in 1914, in Sacramento, Minas Gerais, the granddaughter of enslaved people. She studied only up to the second year of primary school. She moved to São Paulo and, in the 1950s, lived in the Canindé favela, on the banks of the Tietê River, raising three children alone on what she earned collecting paper and scrap metal.

The no

The no, in Carolina's life, took many forms: hunger, poverty, prejudice against a Black woman from the favela who said she was a writer. She wrote in notebooks she found in the trash. Neighbors mocked her. Who would take a scavenger's diary seriously?

In the diary, she recorded hunger with a precision no one had written before. In an entry of May 10, 1958, she wrote: "Brazil needs to be led by a person who has gone hungry. Hunger is also a teacher. Whoever has gone hungry learns to think of others, and of the children."

What they did

In 1958, the journalist Audálio Dantas went to Canindé to do a story for the Folha da Noite and met Carolina and her notebooks. He published excerpts from the diary in May 1958 and, later, in the magazine O Cruzeiro. Dantas selected passages from about twenty notebooks and organized the book.

Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada was published in August 1960 by Livraria Francisco Alves; in English it became known as Child of the Dark. The first print run, of 10,000 copies, sold out in a week. The book was translated into more than 13 languages and became a landmark of Brazilian literature. The title comes from Carolina herself, who called the favela the city's "junk room".

Fame didn't solve everything. Carolina published other books with less success and died in 1977, in modest circumstances. In recent decades, her work has been rediscovered, republished and studied at universities.

What this has to do with Bairo

The line "hunger is also a teacher" is one of those that bring Carolina closest to the vision of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. He says he learned more from falls than from successes, and that every no left a brick. It's in No is the foundation of yes.

There's a more concrete bridge. Bairo's humanitarian venture, Instituto CEASA, proposes to broaden access to food using the surplus from wholesale supply centers, with a long-shelf-life food project under development. It's a proposal, not a result, and it's described in the chapter A whole body.

Bairo doesn't compare himself to Carolina. He remembers her because she proved that the voice of someone who has been through the worst can change the way a country sees itself.

A date linked to this page: October 16, World Food Day.

Sources

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