LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 26:1 January 2026
ISSN 1930-2940

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The Favela as Neocolonial Wound: Gender, Voice, and the Politics of Survival in the Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus

Nazira Begum. A and
Dr. Ajmal Khaan. A

Abstract

Carolina Maria de Jesus's Child of the Dark (1960) is a searing testimonial from the heart of São Paulo's Canindé favela, offering an unfiltered chronicle of racialized poverty, gendered marginalization, and urban dispossession in mid-twentieth-century Brazil. Written by a self-taught Black woman scavenger, the diary transcends literary conventions to become a document of neocolonial survival—where the favela functions as a spatial and psychic wound, echoing the unresolved legacies of slavery, internal colonialism, and state abandonment. This article reads Carolina’s narrative through a postcolonial feminist lens, arguing that her voice is not merely confessional but insurgent: a counter-epistemic act that challenges the myth of Brazil's racial democracy and reclaims agency through literacy and testimony. By foregrounding her daily struggles—garbage-picking, motherhood, literacy, and social ostracization—the study illuminates how Carolina's gender, race, and class intersect to produce both vulnerability and resistance. Her writing becomes a politics of survival, exposing the structural violence embedded in Brazil's modernity while asserting the dignity of the dispossessed. Far from passive victimhood, Carolina's diary enacts what this article terms “embodied epistemic resistance”—a radical refusal to be silenced or erased.

Keywords:Postcolonialism, favela, neocolonial wound, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Black feminism, subaltern voice, internal colonialism, urban poverty, testimonial literature

Introduction

Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–1977), a Black Brazilian woman from Minas Gerais, spent most of her adult life in the Canindé favela of São Paulo, surviving as a scavenger while raising three children alone. With only two years of formal schooling, she taught herself to read and write, keeping detailed notebooks that would become Quarto de Despejo—published in English as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus—after journalist Audálio Dantas discovered her writings in 1958 and arranged for their edited publication in 1960 (de Jesus 1–15; Dantas, “Translator's Preface” n.p.). The diary's raw, unfiltered chronicle of favela life—marked by hunger, violence, and racialized poverty—catapulted Carolina to national fame, making her book the best-selling Brazilian publication of its time (Dantas, “Translator's Preface” n.p.).

Yet the text's reception has long been shadowed by questions of mediation. Dantas significantly edited the original twenty-six notebooks, excising Carolina's fictional works and reshaping her diary into a cohesive narrative that catered to middle-class literary expectations (de Jesus xiii–xv). This editorial intervention has led scholars to debate whether the published diary represents Carolina's authentic voice or a co-authored artifact calibrated for marketability (Goldstein 38–42).

Crucially, the favela itself must not be misread as a marginal byproduct of urbanization but as a spatial manifestation of Brazil's neocolonial order—born from the forced migration of drought-stricken northeasterners, systemic land dispossession, and the state’s calculated neglect of Black and poor populations (Caldeira 45–48; Quijano 537). This article intervenes in existing scholarship by rejecting readings that reduce Carolina's text to “poverty porn” or reinforce the myth of Brazil's racial democracy—a national ideology that masks deep-seated anti-Blackness under claims of harmonious miscegenation (Nascimento 45–47). Instead, I center gender and literacy as modes of epistemic resistance, arguing that Carolina's writing enacts a politics of survival.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nazira Begum. A
Part- time Research Scholar, Department of English,
Jamal Mohamed College(A) (Affiliated to Bharathidasan University), Trichy-620020
anazirabegum@gmail.com
&

Dr. Ajmal Khaan. A
Research Supervisor, Associate Professor of English, Department of English,
Jamal Mohamed College(A) (Affiliated to Bharathidasan University), Trichy-620020
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