{"id":188162,"date":"2015-05-15T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T15:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=188162"},"modified":"2015-06-26T12:30:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T15:30:37","slug":"poetry-out-of-scraps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/poetry-out-of-scraps\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry out of scraps"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Carolina

UH Collection\/ Folhapress<\/span><\/a> Carolina de Jesus in a June 1960 photo taken from the window of a S\u00e3o Paulo shack: her literary production and her life of ups and downs are still being studiedUH Collection\/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Fifty-five years after publication of the book Quarto de despejo<\/em>, (Child of the Dark: the Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus) interest in her work continues to grow and gained momentum in 2014, the year that the author would have turned 100 \u2013 as we can only presume because De Jesus herself was uncertain of her birth date and there are discrepancies in information found on her birth and baptismal certificates.\u00a0 Defined as a \u201cslum dweller\u201d in the sub-title of the book (Di\u00e1rio de uma favelada<\/em>) (Diary of a slum dweller), Carolina de Jesus is today subject to analysis from several angles, given the richness of her largely unpublished works as well as the high and low points of her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWriter, farm hand, trash picker, composer, samba dancer, poet, playwright, singer, circus performer, herbalist [one who uses roots in medical treatment]\u201d, that is how historian Elena Pajaro Peres describes her in her doctoral dissertation entitled Exuber\u00e2ncia e invisibilidade. Popula\u00e7\u00f5es moventes e cultura em S\u00e3o Paulo, 1942 ao in\u00edcio dos anos 70<\/em>, (Exuberance and invisibility.\u00a0 Mobile populations and culture in S\u00e3o Paulo, 1942 to the early 1970s), defended in the Department of History of the School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (FFLCH-USP) in 2007. Peres is now conducting post-doctoral research at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB) at USP on the references to the African Diaspora found in the manuscripts of Carolina de Jesus.<\/p>\n

The presence of Carolina de Jesus (1914-1977) in academic circles in Brazil and abroad is in sharp contrast to her near invisibility among the reading public.\u00a0\u00a0 In her era, however, Quarto de despejo<\/em> was a best seller. The first printing of 10,000 copies, sold out in three days and another 90,000 copies were sold over the following six months.\u00a0 Her book was translated into 14 languages outside Brazil.\u00a0 The book was published after a report by journalist Aud\u00e1lio Dantas about the Canind\u00e9 favela, one of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s original slums.\u00a0 A casual encounter between him and De Jesus led to his learning about her writings \u2013 contained in nearly 20 notebooks \u2013 which he selected and edited, changing the punctuation but maintaining the original spelling and grammar.\u00a0 De Jesus, who attended what was then known as primary school only through the second grade in her native city of Sacramento in the state of Minas Gerais, was always confident of the publication potential of what she wrote.\u00a0 Excerpts from her notebooks had already appeared in newspaper articles, among them those by Aud\u00e1lio Dantas, published in 1958 in the Folha da Noite<\/em>. Quarto de despejo<\/em> would come two years later to heightened public anticipation.<\/p>\n

Carolina de Jesus would publish three more books during her lifetime, to far less fanfare than the work that made her a celebrity, and she kept \u201cmore than 5,000 handwritten manuscripts, totaling 58 notebooks that contained seven novels, more than 60 texts that appeared to be chronicles, fables, autobiography and stories, over 100 poems, four plays and 12 Carnaval marches,\u201d this according to a survey conducted by post-doc fellow Raffaella Fernandez, who is currently working on the study Narratives of Carolina Maria de Jesus: the process of creating poetry out of scraps<\/em> at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) of the University of Campinas (Unicamp).<\/p>\n

\"Excerpts

Raffaella Fernandez\/ebook \u201cOnde estaes felicidade?\u201d (Where are you, happiness?)<\/span><\/a> Excerpts from the short story published posthumously in 2014 and available onlineRaffaella Fernandez\/ebook \u201cOnde estaes felicidade?\u201d (Where are you, happiness?)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

All of this material is scattered among various locations, and there may even be additional manuscripts that have yet to appear. \u201cWhenever you work with people who move around, you have to address the issue of document dispersal,\u201d Peres says.\u00a0 \u201cCarolina de Jesus sent many of her writings to other people in the hopes of having them published, and with her constant moving, she was forced to leave behind some books that she had lovingly collected.\u201d It is even hard to find her published works. Elena Peres was able to view microfilms of her manuscripts at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and she also has copies of all of de Jesus\u2019 books, including the 1963 novel Peda\u00e7os da fome<\/em> (Pieces of hunger) and her only album, recorded by RCA Victor. The same microfilms are also available at the National Library of Rio de Janeiro, but the catalogue there does not have all her books.<\/p>\n

It was only in the books Prov\u00e9rbios <\/em>(Proverbs) and Di\u00e1rio de Bitita<\/em> (Bitita\u2019s diary) \u2013 memoirs of the writer\u2019s childhood, initially published in France in 1982, and four years later in Brazil \u2013 that the researcher has managed to find the main connections between De Jesus and the culture of African Diaspora on the American continent. \u201cWe are able to see the connections with African traditions that lent great importance to the written word,\u201d Peres says.\u00a0 In particular, the historian identifies a link with the culture of Cabinda, today a province in Angola, which connects the writer to Central Africa.\u00a0 Her grandfather, to whom she listened with great devotion as a child, was a former slave, and her parents came from this region steeped in Bantu culture where the process of moral training and the search for the right path were told through dialogue and proverbs, often depicted in textiles and pottery.<\/p>\n

Peres, who conducted a year-long post-doctoral fellowship in\u00a0 African American Studies at Boston University and who has been in discussions with Africanists and scholars of the African Diaspora, associates this preoccupation with strength of character with the Afro-American musical tradition of spirituals.\u00a0 \u201cLike proverbs, spirituals communicate the path to be followed and lament any deviations from it, recreating a religious and political ethic that was constantly present in discussions in favor of civil rights, especially during the 1950s and 1960s,\u201d Peres explains.\u00a0 De Jesus\u2019 grandfather was a Christian who led the praying of the Rosary in Sacramento, which afforded him a moral authority and distinction in the community.<\/p>\n

After the release of Quarto de despejo, Casa de alvenaria <\/em>(I\u2019m Going to Have a Little House: the Second Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus) (remembrances of her life following the success of her first book) and Antologia pessoal<\/em> (Personal Anthology – a collection of poems edited by historian Jos\u00e9 Carlos Bom Meihy, published in 1996), there was increasing criticism aimed at the author for what was perceived as her failure to reflect upon her status as a black woman.\u00a0 However, texts on these topics are found among her unpublished works and even in published passages but were not sufficiently taken into account at the time. Doctoral candidate Fernandez points to poems and other passages from the writings of De Jesus that constitute a rather ambiguous collection with regard to these questions \u2013 at one point she incorporates prejudices while on another occasion she calls for the emancipation of blacks and women.\u00a0 In life, the writer always tried to remain as independent as possible.\u00a0 She preferred being a paper collector to being a maid and she never wanted to get married \u2013 each of her three children had different fathers.<\/p>\n

Peres thinks that the notion of belonging to black culture was also fed by the abolitionist tendencies of Brazilian romantic poets and\u00a0 intellectual thinkers such as Rui Barbosa and Jos\u00e9 do Patroc\u00ednio, who Carolina de Jesus had access to through the influence of a mulatto justice official in Sacramento, who would read newspaper stories to blacks from the city who could not read.\u00a0 In the two short years that she was in a school, run by spiritualists, De Jesus acquired a taste for reading, and the first book she ever read cover to cover, lent to her by a neighbor, was A escrava Isaura<\/em> (The Slave Girl) by novelist Bernardo Guimar\u00e3es. From then on, she read everything she could get her hands on, from those she found or was given, which made up a very special reference collection. \u201cThe writings of Carolina de Jesus have very refined poetic sections that do not exactly correspond to the literature of the time in which they were produced,\u201d Peres notes.<\/p>\n

When she moved by herself to S\u00e3o Paulo in 1937, leaving her family and books behind, De Jesus began to write furiously.\u00a0 According to the accounts she left behind, we know that her head was inundated with \u201cpoetic thoughts.\u201d\u00a0 One of her notations says: \u201cI felt things that I didn\u2019t recognize.\u201d\u00a0 To Peres, this unexpected awakening lends continuity to a type of mission to find the wisdom inculcated by her grandfather and impregnated in an ancestral culture.\u00a0 \u201cPerhaps if she had not come to S\u00e3o Paulo, she may not have felt the need,\u201d says the researcher.\u00a0 \u201cIn the big city, De Jesus isolated herself and found literature.\u201d\u00a0 This is how she gave her own voice to the experiences that surrounded her.\u00a0 According to Peres, the expression \u201cquarto de despejo,\u201d (trash room) is the writer\u2019s metaphor for the slum as a place where society \u201cstashes\u201d what it does not what to show in the living room.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s first book was received as a testimonial to life in the slums, according to Peres, and continues to attract interest abroad, awakened by the writer.\u00a0 The impact and the immediate discomfort caused by the book was such that the city of S\u00e3o Paulo, during the Prestes Maia administration (1961-65), launched a successful campaign to tear down the Canind\u00e9 favela, which resulted in the forced removal of its residents.\u00a0 This action by the city encouraged a group of students to establish the\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 University Movement to Eliminate Shantytowns (MUD), which, with the help of large companies, worked to remove other shanty-towns.<\/p>\n

Post-doc Fernandez advocates a certain shift in approach to studying the literary aspects of the work of De Jesus \u2013 a terrain in which even the informative aspect of the writings may be differently construed. \u201cThe fictional universe is always very present,\u201d says Elena Peres in turn.\u00a0 \u201cThere are characteristics of memoir in her fiction and fiction in her testimonial narrative, as is often the case with other authors.\u201d\u00a0 The researcher also defends De Jesus\u2019 breaking through the confines of \u201cmarginal literature,\u201d literature on the periphery, to which she is frequently limited.\u00a0 \u201cThis is important, but it only leaves us with the view of the place or time she lived in after she left her family,\u201d she said, referring to the transnational networks she has been tracing, based on the author\u2019s works.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a writer, Carolina de Jesus defies instant categorization,\u201d emphasizes Fernandez who edited and promoted the 2014 publication of the book Onde estaes felicidade? <\/em>(Where are you, happiness?), containing two of the author\u2019s unpublished short stories (available at www.letraria.net), and is now preparing to publish a children\u2019s book and a young adult fiction book.\u00a0 Her academic study describes the production by De Jesus as a \u201cpoetry out of scraps,\u201d which combines discourse and literary and non-literary genres from romance poems to journalistic texts, the lyrics of samba and radio soap operas, and from the cultural norm to oral tradition, to which she adds a distinctive Minas Gerais accent.\u00a0 This mishmash leads Fernandez to compare the author\u2019s writings to her scrap paper scavenging.\u00a0 \u201cThe literature of Carolina de Jesus also survives the scavenging of discourses,\u201d she concludes.<\/p>\n

Project<\/strong>
\nForbidden writing, romantic expression and African Diaspora in the manuscripts of Carolina Maria de Jesus (no. 2012\/10784-6<\/a>); Grant Mechanism<\/strong> Scholarship in Brazil \u2013 Post-doctoral research; Principal Investigator <\/strong>Elena Pajaro Peres (IEB-USP); Investment<\/strong> R$164,743.02.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Studies define style and roots of Carolina Maria de Jesus’ work","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[245],"coauthors":[137],"class_list":["post-188162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188162"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=188162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}