Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus

To speak of a life in the slums of Sao Paulo is to speak of a life of entrapment, and this is the experience that Carolina writes about in her diary with regard to her position as a woman in Brazilian slum society. She is what today would be called a single parent, but this is for her an afterthought. Her principal concern is to describe her life and the wretchedness of the favela and the favelados, or people who live in it. Additionally, within her life, hunger is the defining factor of existence. It is the decisive negative experience referred to throughout the book.

At the same time, certain moral and ethical abstractions influence Carolina's existence. As a woman whose biology has in part been her destiny, she is basically without options in the world. Although she liked school as a youngster, she was forced by her mother to give it up and help support her family. Knowing little except subsistence living, she took up with one man, then another, and obtained as her reward two illegitimate children for whom she must provide. There are no meaningful employment opportunities for her, no trades open to her; nor does it once occ

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ublished is even more daring. Connected to the issue of women's powerlessness is the more generalized powerlessness of class. There is a hatred of the circumstances of class in the favela, but Carolina's acrimonious experiences with her fellow favelados show a certain acceptance of abject poverty as an immutable way of life that should not be challenged. This explains the negative attitudes of the favelados toward Carolina's commitment to writing. Writing, in their view, provides no immediate benefit to survival and so must be frivolous. In a society that is concerned with daytoday subsistence, writing must be incomprehensible, yet Carolina has insight into the problem of living subject to such concerns, which is why she suggests that the only good politician is one who, like the very poor, has known hunger. The sense of powerlessness Carolina and other favelados experience is an aspect of class. When she writes of the slumclearance petition led by the middle classes, she makes a metaphorical comment on the whole of the Brazilian class society by describing it in terms of a house: "I classify Sao Paulo this way: The Governor's Palace is the living room. The mayor's office is the dining room and the city is the garden. And
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Approximate Word count = 1601
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)