Bitita's Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus, and: The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus (review)

Bitita's Diary: The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina María de Jesús. Edited by Robert M. Levine. Translated by Emanuelle Oliveira and Beth Joan Vinkler. Latin American Realities. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Photographs. Maps. Notes. xxiv, 163 pp. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $19.95.

The Unedited Diaries of Carolina María de Jesús. Edited by Robert M. Levine and José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. Translated by Nancy P. S. Naro and Cristina Mehrtens. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Photographs. Notes, Glossary. Index. xiv, 231 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $20.00.

These books are products of the near cottage industry formed around the life of the now deceased Carolina María de Jesús by Robert Levine. Carolina, as she is commonly called, was a poor Afro-Brazilian woman born in 1915. In the early 1960s she became an international sensation after the publication in forty countries of her diary about life as a slum dweller (favelada). Published in English in 1962 as Child of the Dark, the book has outsold all other Brazilian books, partly because it became standard reading in U.S. college courses. Thirteen years after her death in 1977, Levine and his collaborators went in search of Carolina's story, and eventually produced a biography, web site, microfilm, revised editions of her books, and either published or projected the publication of formerly unpublished materials.

As a student once subjected to Carolina's bleak diary, I faced the review of these two books with trepidation. I am among those criticized by Levine for dismissing Carolina as a reactionary. She expressed so much contempt for her fellow favelados that I saw the mass marketing of her diary as a means of pillorying the poor. But the books under review show Carolina has much more to offer than her earlier image as a cranky, remote, self-loathing poor woman of color suggested.

While the second of these books, The Unedited Diaries, provides a remarkably different view of Carolina during the time treated by Child of the Dark, it is the first book, Bitita's Diary, that is most unique. While one marvels at the hyperbole with which the book is introduced (of "tens of millions of Brazilian descendants of African slaves," Carolina was the "only one . . . ever" to write and publish about her life (p. xiii), I cannot think of another autobiography of the 1920s and early 1930s written by an Afro-Brazilian woman. Daphne Patai's Brazilian Women Speak gives us testimonials from black urban women about life during military rule, but no memoir competes with Carolina's account of growing up poor, black, and female in the backlands of Minas Gerais and São Paulo.

Despite the title, Bitita's Diary is a narrative written in the 1970s, decades after the events described. Nevertheless, the book offers essential information for evaluating Brazil's infamous "racial democracy." It presents Afro-Brazilians striving with little success to make something of freedom more than thirty years after slavery was abolished. Carolina depicts herself as a particularly ambitious youth who confronted racism at every turn and from every quarter: from planters, the police, landlords, and even her own mother and close relatives who saw in her dark complexion the African heritage that the ideologues of the Old Republic taught them to despise. As she wandered the interior alone as a teenager in search of work, she found respite only in a couple of poor houses run by nuns and in the memories of her proud grandfather. An inquisitive and willful individual from an early age, she often found herself at odds with a world that demanded silence, conformity, and subservience, especially from young black women. As a child, she attended school...