Few authors have revealed the cleavages of race, class, and gender in Brazilian society so effectively, while at the same time being so defined by them, as Carolina Maria de Jesus. She was the favelada who wanted to be a writer and escape the slums of São Paulo to give her children a better life. With great determination and at considerable personal cost, she achieved these goals, following her own star in a culture where to be black, poor, illegitimate, and female and a writer so lengthened the odds against her that even when she did become famous, elite critics and the book-buying public would accept her only on their terms, which she refused. In addition to choosing her lovers (all white men), she was feisty, headstrong, fiercely independent, and difficult—“uppity,” as respectable folk said, while they ignored and evaded the issues she wrote about: poverty, race, hunger, religious faith, food, medicine, single-parent families.
Carolina’s ticket out of the favela was her remarkable 1960 memoir of slum life, which appeared in Brazil as Quarto do despejo (The Garbage Room) and subsequently was translated into many languages, into English as Child of the Dark (1962). With the royalties, she purchased a middle-class brick house, the subject of a later memoir; then, with the money running out, a chácara, where she died, forgotten, in 1977. Her later books, including the Diário de Bitita (1986), an account of growing up in Minas Gerais—which Robert Levine identifies as an important document for Brazilian social history—did not sell and were ignored. A samba record failed. She tried writing a book of homilies, but her public, having turned away from the spirit of reform that prevailed when Quarto appeared, was now bored with her. In the go-go days of rapid growth under the military (and the worsening gap between rich and poor), her message did not fit. Carolina in later life went into a self-imposed exile and lived in near-poverty. Read by millions worldwide, the all-time best-selling author in Brazil, she was revered in U.S. academic circles as an emblematic figure and all but ignored by Brazilian intellectuals, who saw her as passé.
Her story is complex, ambiguous, and, if the truth be known, irritating in various ways to many Brazilians who, embarrassed that foreigners learn about Brazil through Carolina’s pen, feel the need to explain her away. To interpret her important story, we are privileged to have the books by Robert M. Levine and José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. Read them together, despite the substantial overlap.
A charter member of the Brazilianists from the 1960s, Levine has written on political and social history and is now working on the social impact of the Vargas regime. Meihy, who has studied and taught in the United States, for many years directed the Inter-University Study Program in Brazil at the University of São Paulo, where he mentored scores of U.S. students and now directs an oral history program. The books are the fruit of their close collaboration and friendship. Yet, knowledgeable as they are about each other’s societies, there is a creative tension in these somewhat different books, stemming from the ways they see Carolina.
In Brazil, as Meihy points out, race was traditionally seen in terms of individuals, not as an issue for government or institutional intervention. U.S. culture, by contrast, celebrates struggle, especially when the deck is stacked against the underdog, and looks for group action to change an intolerable situation. Thus, Meihy tends to see Carolina as a product of her time, an individual, and a difficult person at that, acting in circumstances that cannot be repeated. Cinderela negra, his title, captures with subtlety the fantasy element of her rapid trajectory, literally from rags to riches and return, without a happy ending, unlike the white Cinderella. Levine leans more toward seeing her as representative of underlying social norms, a credible interlocutor for themes that are not so bound by time or place. His choice of title is equally appropriate.
In Meihy’s words, “From the beginning . . . there was one North American reading, and another Brazilian reading of the same text and of the meaning of Quarto de despejo and of her saga” (Cinderela, p. 11). Yet the the themes are conjoined. In Levine’s words, “Our book presents two main explanations for Carolina’s life trajectory. One is that Carolina was the victim of racism and sexism; the other is that her difficult personality and willfulness led her to squander her opportunities for advancement” (Life, p. 147).
To capture the full flavor and nuances of their approach, the books, as mentioned, should be read together. The Brazilian text includes more interview material and two short excepts from Carolina’s later writings; the University of New Mexico Press book includes the depositions of her two surviving children and provides a sensitive afterword about Carolina’s legacy. Thanks to their collaboration, oral histories by family members, friends, and associates are now recorded, and the original manuscripts and fragments of Carolina’s works are being microfilmed.
