I

Carolina Maria de Jesus’s life story is one of the most interesting chapters of Brazil’s cultural history in the last 60 years — but not because of the reasons normally adduced, the construction of a subaltern identity and the belonging (or not) to the literary canon sometimes attacked.1 On the contrary, as it so often happens in vehement critical instances, responses and reactions are absorbed by the text being commented on representing more internal structural positions than insightful unveiling. This is why the most advisable procedure is an indirect one, tackling the problem obliquely, by way of a detour rather than head on.

As we know from its morphology, the “autobiography” may be translated as the writing of the self, in opposition to “biography,” which could be thought of as a kind of writing about the self. This may appear a simple and relatively uncontroversial definition, formed as it is by ordinary words, two nouns, two articles and a preposition; and yet, if we look close and long enough it starts to show an abyss within itself: for centuries philosophy has been meditating on what the self is, without ever acquiring a firm, not even irrefutable, but at least minimally uncontroversial toehold from which deductions could follow; and for decades now literary theory, with authors such as Blanchot, Derrida and company, has been probing into the unfathomable depths of writing, conceived as a locus of irreducible difference, uncontainable productivity, insurmountable otherness etc. Indeed, for both “self” and “writing” that recommendation is true, which says that there are some concepts that should not viewed directly, because when looked in the face they won’t take you very far, for what is accumulated in them by far surpasses what a definition can give. However, interestingly enough, the greatest difficulty as well as the strongest source of productivity in the expression “writing of the self” resides not in the nouns, but in the preposition itself. The ambiguity of the genitive, which refers both to subject and object, suggests that this is a kind of writing not only belongs to the self, but has a role in its constitution. From this very simple kernel — a preposition! — a whole poetics can be developed: if viewed in conjunction, they can reinforce each other, the self becoming it-self through its own possession in words: storytelling as a way of making sense of oneself, narration as endowing life and time with meaning. This is a logic of predication, whereby the subject and its attributes contribute to the making of one another: the more specific the latter (the attributes), the clearer the image of the former (the subject). Here the idea of “attributes” must be taken very loosely, for they can be made to include adjectives and/or actions, because both adjectives and actions are simultaneously linked to, and transform, the subject — in a certain sense, autobiographical actions can be thought of as adjectives teleologically stretched in time. But “writing” and “self” can also be considered in an opposite direction, as strong terms in tension, in which case the self and writing are dissonant regarding each other, writing not as a property of the self, but as something that tries to capture the self in different, more negative ways. For instance, one form this dissonance could assume would be that of a relation of contradiction, whereby the self strengthens it-self the more it abandons itself to something other, especially writing itself. As an example, think about all autobiographies that deal with the annihilation of self, as in such catastrophic events as Auschwitz or the lost boys journeys of Sudan; or, on a different note, those narratives which problematize the formation of the feminine self in a patriarchal world. This is no longer a predicative and cumulative logic, but rather a disruptive one; it thrives on the paradoxical gesture of being an agent in the act of divesting oneself of agency, of showing how hard it is to be able to properly say “I” (not to mention “am”). Writing now becomes a practice of oblivion and surrender, of a destitution of the self, again, by means of it-self.

What may seem to be a sheer verbal exercise, totally dependent on the English syntax, in fact conceals a distinction of the utmost relevance. The self that gets hold of itself through writing as accumulation appears as a solid entity; by means of narration, it manages to convey the sense of a particular identity, something the writer claims belongs only to herself as a sum of her idiosyncratic specificities, including both, as already mentioned, adjectives and actions, internal disposition and its mixture with outside world. Autobiography’s nightmare is something derived from this: a multitude of authors, all of them shouting at the same time, as in the street fairs we still have in Brazil — a crowd of writers bawling at you: “Look at my autobiography; look at my experience! How special I am, how different!” This slightly hallucinating scene in fact reproduces the logic of the world of commodities, according to which each product promises to be different from all the others. What is hellish about this is that the repetition of the claims for alterity in the end generates the greatest sameness which incidentally is just the opposite of the logic of minimalism, whereby the emphasis on reiteration results in the highlighting of details and the smallest variations, which suddenly appear momentous. And as in the world of commodities, the result of this dialectic of claims to novelty is a vague, indistinct feeling of frustration, of being cheated of something, a promise which wasn’t fulfilled, because its own presupposition already renders it unfeasible.

The self that divests itself offers a divergent dynamics, one not of substance, coherence, accumulation or specificity, but rather of disjunction, nonidenity, and discontinuity, to mention only a few modes negativity may assume in this writing of the self. As was mentioned before, the poetics at stake here is an open one, leaving plenty of space for authorial ingenuity and critical imagination to devise their own respective compositional and analytical tools2. Fashioning the appearance of the self – how, where, when, under which guise etc. it should appear — is a matter for technical ingenuity on the part of the author, as it is a question for the interpreter to detect precisely in such strategies the formal principle wherein subjectivity is sedimented. The case to be investigated below, however, is of a different nature, for here the obstacle for the constitution of the self is not to be found in style as a cover up, a shield of writing; neither is it the result of a supposed incompatibility between the instrument of description and the events that must be described, as in Auschwitz or the writing of catastrophe as a whole; nor is the impediment to be ontologically ascribed to the sheer density of language, as in say, the necessarily structuring function of grammar or the hierarchizing role of syntax (as in the extremely different projects of Cage and Lacan), in which case subjectivity should by searched in the ruptures, silences, fissures in the organization of the text considered as a flow of language. If there is something of a “Where is Waldo?” in the interpretation aiming at figuring out where subjectivity can be strongly located in autobiography, then in the case to be discussed subjectivity is not beyond, as it were, but this side of literary expression. Hindrances here are not related to identity traits such as the author’s gender or race, nor are they imposed by the being of language and its abundant recourses; rather, they have to do with the way extreme concrete poverty obstructs the self. If in the first case I mentioned, that of the formation of the self through the accumulation of attributes, one could speak of too much self, however strange that may sound (but think how productive this is to read Walt Whitman), here there is too little self, as we shall see why, for limits are imposed from below, from misery and scarcity.

II

Carolina Maria de Jesus published her first diary, Quarto de Despejo, or trash room, in 1960; the reception of the book since then has generated one of the richest episodes in recent Brazilian cultural history. The intention here, however, is less anecdotal than theoretical, for hers is a fruitful instance to reflect on the relationship between literature and poverty, self-expression and need. The central claim to be unfolded, as already suggested, is that utter destitution hinders, almost in an anti-Fichtean way, the self-positing of the “I”; as a consequence, we will proceed to consider investments of subjectivity not centered on the self. Two quite dissimilar zones of subjectivity, as it were, will be proposed those of (1) a quite particular representation of the space of literature as a realm of redemption and order, and (2)of a resistance to fit identity stereotypes both inside and outside diegesis.

But before proceeding, a few comments on the diary as form in the context of autobiographical composition. To be sure, a diary is not an autobiography in the strict sense of the word. It lacks that focal point, the moment of writing, the concentrating perspective that at the same time gives shape to life and so easily distorts it; to use the terminology proposed by Benveniste a long time ago, the occasion of the enunciation, which includes the decision to write, as opposed to the enounced, that which is narrated. In contradistinction to the retrospective horizon of autobiography proper, the diary presents a succession of little points of view corresponding to the structure of days, which do not coalesce into a whole built by the author.3 And yet, of course, the diary is not a random structure, and when we think of how it enacts each day, how it is open to the future, it becomes possible to consider it as a theatrical kind of autobiography, which is a very different conception from the usual representation of the diary as the genre of intimacy. This will be particularly relevant in case of Carolina de Jesus.

Her life story is a fascinating one. A black woman, she was born in 1914, just twenty-six years after the abolition of slavery, in the small and impoverished city of Sacramento, in the State of Minas Gerais. Her experiences of childhood and of her first years as an adult are told in Bitita’s Diary, published in French in 1982 and translated [sic] into Portuguese in 2014. This is a very interesting text that among other things shows how Jesus’s life was never fixed, how she kept going from one place to another always looking for minimally satisfactory conditions of life and decent work. All this roaming came to an end when she moved to São Paulo City to work as a domestic servant, but was soon dismissed when she got pregnant and had to move to a shanty town, a favela, making a living as a scavenger collecting paper and metals to sell by the weight. What is really surprising about Carolina de Jesus is that having attended school for only two years she could not only read but had literary aspirations. This desire to become a writer, I would like to argue, is the first instance in which a strong subjective impulse can be identified, albeit a diffuse one. Interestingly enough, this is a drive on the verge of delirium, as we shall see. The story of how Child of Darkness came into being is telling enough: in 1958, Audálio Dantas was a reporter of Folha da Noite, a newspaper of wide circulation; he was doing a news report on a new children’s playground at the Canindé slum, a recent settlement of extremely poor people next to the Tieté river in São Paulo City. Favelas were not exactly new, but the increasing speed of urbanization, much fueled by migration from rural areas, had given them a new magnitude, making them harder to be ignored. While engaging in fieldwork Dantas heard: “‘What a shame! Grown-ups taking toys from children!’ […] The men continued to swing smugly and she warned: ‘You just wait and see; I’m going to put you all in my book’.”4 He approached that curious figure, a favela dweller writer!, and after talking to her found a host of manuscripts, 20 notebooks in total, including a diary describing the daily ordeal of a resident of the slum.

This gesture must be emphasized in all its strangeness: someone from the slums proclaiming herself a poetess is such a strange speech act, mixing as it does the disparate spaces of the slum and high culture, that it is difficult to decide whether it is the result of utter audacity or at least mild insanity.5 Be it as it may, this otherwise unlikely utterance worked as fiat lux for progressive reporter Dantas, thus unleashing a particularly rich social and cultural process. That was a time of social unrest and the political atmosphere was propitious, in Brazil and abroad, for a book like Child of the Dark: the first edition, 10,000 copies, was all out in three days; new prints came out one after the other but had to be stopped when the printing machinery of Francisco Alves Press broke due to overwork; the diary would be translated into 13 languages and is estimated to have sold more than 1,000,000 copies worldwide. What deserves attention to here is the role played by literature in the economy of the diary as well as in Carolina de Jesus’s psyche. I already pointed to the trigger, the sentence Dantas overheard, a statement that turned delirium into prophecy; now one should add that the writing of the diary is itself an important topic in Child of the Dark, and that it is always seen as vehicle of power. Thus we read at some point:

When those female witches invade my shack, my children throw stones at them. The women scream:
“What uneducated brats!”
I reply:
“My children are defending me. You are ignorant and can’t understand that. I’m going to write a book about the favela, and I’m going to tell everything that happened here. And everything that you do to me. I want to write a book, and you with these disgusting scenes are furnishing me with material.”
Silvia asked me to take her name out of my book. She said:
“You are a tramp too. You slept in the flophouse. When you end up, you’ll be crazy.”6

Or, a little further on:

“Today was a blessed day for me. The troublemakers of the favela see that I’m writing and know that it’s about them. They decided to leave me in peace. In the favelas the men are more tolerant, more understanding. The rowdies are the women.”7

Moreover, the writing of the book is also connected to the world of money:

Senhor Gino came to ask me to go to his shack. That I am neglecting him. I answered: no!
I am writing a book to sell. I am hoping that with this money I can buy a place and leave the favela. I don’t have to go to anybody’s house. Senhor Gino insisted. He told me:
“Just knock and I’ll open the door.”
But my heart didn’t ask me to go to his room.”8

It is important not to think that literature is just an instrument to leave the favela, for Carolina de Jesus is not an opportunist; she lacks the kind of consciousness that would allow for a neat means-ends distinction, the rational calculation that would organize the successive steps in way of self-interest: even for a clear strategy of self-preservation a minimum of surplus is needed. Instead, literature represents, in both meanings of the term, the world outside the favela. Going a step further, we can see that the desire for literature also permeates the style itself of the diary, which is marked by a weird mixture of registers. Words with a typical literary flavor coexist with the most primary errors of spelling: “bed” is never called “cama,” but “leito”; “sun” is never “sol,” but “astro rei”; “wash” is seldom “lavar-se” and very often “abluir”; on the other hand “educação” is rendered “iducação,” “projeto,” “progeto,” and verbs in the plural as rule don’t get their endings. The same holds for the use of verbs. In Portuguese the placing of pronouns related to verbs is a sensitive part of grammar; in general, placing the pronoun “se” after the verb is an immediate sign of written, cultured language. Jesus uses a very formal structure of pronouns but doesn’t manage to make the verb agree with the noun, which is a feature of uneducated speech. Her language, in sum, is a kind of Frankenstein; this makes for a unique style, which can be enjoyed in its own right, but more importantly than that in it we can witness the drive to transcend the terrible world of the favela, which is forcefully described there.

This investment in culture is systematic in all of Carolina de Jesus’s writings, some of which we will analyze in a moment. Whenever she wants to praise someone, the first word that comes to her mind is “cultured” (culto), and whenever asked about the solution for Brazilian problems something related to culture comes just after necessity to decrease the price of food — the gêneros alimentícios, a formal expression Jesus repeats so much that it almost becomes a character in the narrative. But note how projective this image is: in Jesus’s diaries there are scarce references to literary works, and no critical comments on the very few of them which are mentioned. More than a means to leave the favela, then, culture and literature are viewed as entities from another world, which in a sense, of course, they are, composing a realm of order, which, it is possible to surmise, plays a stabilizing psychic role for Carolina de Jesus. (The big irony is that this representation of literature as something of immense value at once transcendent and very practical is much more interesting than the one based on identity that present-day defenders of Jesus use to claim that she is a literary author.9) proposed one totally marked by a hierarchy of values, to the current one we have in literary theory, which conceives of literature as sheer play of power motivated by group strategies or personal self-interest. Be it as it may, the point here is that in Jesus’s case idealization is too weak a word to describe her relationship to culture, for in this psychic investment and projection, and precisely because of its irreality, we can detect a strong autobiographic manifestation.

But let’s move on to the second claim. One aspect that has not been sufficiently emphasized in the recent growing bibliography on Carolina de Jesus is the commercial planning and marketing campaigns surrounding her diaries. Child of the Dark was preceded by a number of newspaper articles, interviews and the like; moreover, Dantas and the editors of Francisco Alves Press were shrewd enough to encourage Jesus to continue writing during and after the publication of Child of the Dark. Casa de Alvenaria — literally “cinder block house” — came out in 1961 and was translated into English as I’m going to have a little housein 1997. This is a very interesting book, for hereCarolina de Jesus records her expectations for the publication of Child of the Dark, and the puzzling experience of moving out of the favela, of enjoying financial comfort and public notoriety. The first aspect in text deserving note is its role in demythologizing the Hollywoodian Cinderella syndrome: if life were a film, Jesus’s monstrous fame would be the perfect happy ending pointing to everlasting joy, but unlike what the movies keep telling us, success here, as in social life in general, is a problem rather than redemption. Then there is the question of intertextuality, for by registering the success of Child of the Darkand Jesus’s role inhabiting the world created by it Cinder Block House engulfs its predecessor, which becomes an internal force in the text; or, if we want to invert the focus, Cinder Block House represents an attempt to come to terms with Child of the Dark. Jesus is not only the subject who wrote the first diary, but also the figure that emerges from it and confronts the writer of the second. This actantial duplication, as it were, helps us advance the following, namely that a significant subjective trait can found here in the way Jesus fails to perceive, let alone to adapt, to the role and the image different people assigned her. In Cinder Block House we see Jesus meeting politicians, State governors, senators congressmen, mayors; we see her in high society circles, in receptions and book launches, and we see her being interviewed in different parts of Brazil and abroad. All these individuals surrounding her in one way or another were expecting her to take the place of a representative of the favela, a voice that could speak for the subaltern. Jesus could have chosen a position in the Right or the Left ends of the political spectrum. Aligning herself with the former, she could have proposed to help alleviate the public’s conscience through her own example, or she could volunteer to sell her voice to publicize palliative measures; conversely, from a leftist position she could join the fight for deep social change through economic reform or political revolution. At the very least she could have negotiated a modest public employment in exchange for the use of her image in an electoral campaign. But what she did was nothing of the kind; Jesus managed to not fulfill anything of what was expected of her: if intellectuals were searching for popular authenticity, she was a staunch defender of order, including hard labor, female submission and individualism; the black movement had reason to be embarrassed by her admiration of white culture and her almost unbelievable defense of racial democracy in Brazil;10 and the public in general who might expect to see a humble poor woman, thankful for her new position, found an outspoken, opinionated individual. Cinder Block House ends formally well with Jesus going to see a staging of Child of the Dark and after the play participating in a round table to discuss it.As opposing voices clash, she is disoriented and in the middle of the tumult writes: “What confusion for me.”11 This is a sentence that very much summarizes this diary of displacement.

I believe that in such lack of communication, in this failure to recognize what other people were expecting of her, one can detect an interesting subjective position. Note that it is not the case that Jesus refused the gaze of the other, for in negation there would already imply determination; she simply could not understand what was desired of her. Now, what is amazing in this logic is that it found its way out of the pages of Cinder Block House to be established in the relationship between Jesus’s writing and the reception of her work, both the mushrooming secondary bibliography that has been appearing in the last 20 years and the numerous public honors being lavished post mortem on her. The underlying methodological principle here is that in certain cases the reception of a text is not just an addition, not something that comes from the outside, but rather an agent that transforms it in its own immanence. What institutions and most critics want to do to the image of Carolina de Jesus today is the same thing the characters in her second diary were doing to her. Both, for different, albeit sometimes overlapping, reasons need a heroine, someone to meaningfully inhabit the past, either to foster social conciliation or feed the struggle for identity politics, which, as usual, has reached Brazil some twenty years after its appearance in the United States.

But to conclude: even as incomplete as this discussion of Carolina de Jesus might have been, it allows us to reach a general idea, namely, the favela is a negative place and that any attempt to redeemed it, however imbued of the best intentions, is doomed to fail. It is useless to find a representative of the favela, an identity of the favela or a heroine of the favela; what must be done instead is simply its destruction and replacement by humane communities. In other words, nothing short of a collective and general response to the problem can put an end to it. Through her struggle with language, by her desire for literature as a utopic realm and with her incomprehension about what was desired of her Carolina de Jesus makes this clear, in a quite oblique way, by writing herself.

1. Two earlier versions of this text were read at the 25th Chinese Foreign Biographical Society International Conference and at the 2019 MLG conference. I would like to thank Profs. Zhao Baisheng and Nicholas Brown for the invitations and the discussions that took place on both occasions.
2. In Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), I tried to develop a model determinate denial, on the part of literary works, of that which is predicated to them through criticism.
3. To be sure, the writer can adapt the diaries entries in the end in order to fit a posteriori intention, which distorts the form, depriving it of what is most interesting in it.
4. “[A]onde já se viu uma coisa dessas, uns homens grandes tomando brinquedo de criança! [...] Os homens continuam no bem-bom do balanço e ela advertiu: — Deixe estar que eu vou botar vocês todos no meu livro!” (emphasis in the original) Audálio Dantas. “Nossa irmã Carolina” In Jesus, Carolina de Maria. Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada. (São Paulo: Livraria Francisco Alves, Editora Paulo de Azevedo Ltda, 1960) 9.
5. Farias (2017) observes that Jesus used to go to newspapers offices and that she had appeared in print in 1940 as in Rio’s A Noite (Jan 9, 1940); still, by the time Dantas found her, she had already given up having her work published. Without Dantas’ support and vision, which included privileging the diaries over the fiction and verse, Carolina de Jesus would never have become a celebrity she was then and now.
6. Carolina Maria de Jesus. Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada (Saõ Paolo: Ática 2014 [1960]) 24 [Trans Child of the Dark. 1962].
7. De Jesus, Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada 25 (July 15, 1955).
8. Quarto 31(July 27, 1955).
9. As could be expected, the debate on whether Jesus’s writings are literary or not is a ferocious one, mobilizing as it does feelings of outrage from both sides. What this discussion shows is that the polemics as a whole is misguided, for the idea of literature that emerges from such abstract confrontation is intrinsically unfruitful. Instead of asking whether it is, it would be much more productive to inquire what it does to literature. This is what I attempted to do in the case of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, another Brazilian outcast. See Fabio Durão, “Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The Ruse of Brazilian Art,” Wasafiri. 30 (2015) 32-39.
10. E.g. “I think I should be happy because I was born in Brazil where there is no racial hate. I know that the whites hold power. But they are human beings and the law is the same for everybody. If one could compare all the whites in the world, Brazilian whites would be the best.” Interestingly enough, too, after leaving the shanty town Jesus gets herself two white maids, one after the other. Carolina Maria de Jesus Casa de Alvenaria(São Paulo: Editora Franciso Alves 1961) 120.
11. de Jesus, Casa de Alvenaria149.