Bitita's Diary

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web site, microfilm, revised editions of her books, and either published or projected the publication of formerly unpublished materials.As a student once subjected to Carolina’s bleak diary, I faced the review of these two books with trepidation.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 for two years, an experience with reading and writing that both blessed and cursed her life. Although this bit of formal education caused others to resent her, it also taught her to love books and writing.After many years of frustration in the backlands, Carolina joined the vast mid-century rural exodus to the urban industrial centers that unsettled Brazil and the Americas as a whole. In 1936, when Bitita’s Diary ends, Carolina had just moved to São Paulo where she found work as a maid, cook, scavenger, and, famously, a diarist. Her penchant for chronicling her life attracted the attention of journalist Audálio Dantas in 1958 and led to her life-transforming fame as a writer. The Unedited Diaries include her observations, criticisms, poems and prose written from 1958 to 1966, when her period of glory had ended and she was once again forced to search through piles of refuse for food to eat and recyclable materials she could sell for a few cents a day.The Unedited Diaries relate Carolina’s thoughts as she went from favelada to celebrity to recluse. While her poor favela neighbors resented her success, Carolina found little comfort in the world of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie. She tried to please them by kowtowing to those who supported her work and praising them for their lack of racial prejudice. “The white people in Brazil are very good and offer opportunities for blacks to improve themselves,” she said in 1961 (p. 133). She blamed poverty on black people themselves: “blacks have limited ambition” (p. 163). But she gained little by her conformity. Some doubted her authorship of the diaries and her new white and mixed race neighbors ostracized her. Almost no royalties came to her from foreign editions of her book and the gradual decline in Brazilian sales threw her back into poverty. She saved herself from complete ruin by building a suburban home where she could avoid people and grow some of her own food. In 1966 she wrote that almost “a hundred years after abolition, blacks are not free yet” (p. 174).The diary reveals that tensions existed between Carolina and Dantas as they fought over the content of her first book, its distribution, and their roles in the post-publication publicity campaign. Dantas deleted “extensive” portions of the diaries from Child of the Dark. Comparing entries for 1958, one notes how Carolina’s unedited diary shows her to be more confident and politically informed than in Dantas’ abridged version. She seems kinder and gentler than she did in the earlier book, a person who sees good in her neighbors, shows pride in her African ancestry, and wrestles with questions of racial discrimination and personal responsibility. Her stories demonstrate that few poor people accepted uncritically the promises of the populist politicians and parties then vigorously competing for their support. Eventually, she condemns industrialization for worsening life for her people by forcing them away from more wholesome lives in agriculture. These observations contribute to knowledge about Afro-Brazilian perceptions of freedom and opportunity in Brazil.The book features a lengthy and informative introduction and afterword focused on the story of Carolina’s rise, fall, and posthumous resurrection in Levine’s hands. These chapters draw attention to the book’s significance as a counterweight to Child of the Dark. They also underscore the Unedited Diaries’ limited appeal. As a work of literature, the book is flawed by the editors’ commitment to present Carolina’s writing in its natural state by preserving her many grammatical errors and disorienting digressions. These features have historical significance, but they make the book less useful as a memoir than either Bitita’s Diary or Child. It may be true, as the editors claim, that this book provides “the only first-person description and analysis of life at the bottom of Latin American society written by a member of that marginalized” group (p. 185), but the dozens of testimonial memoirs produced by oral historians in recent decades—one thinks of I ... Rigoberta Menchú and, for Afro-Brazilian women, Benedita da Silva— make for much better reading and, arguably, just as much bottom-up insight

Art history · Biography · Memoir · Political science · South carolina · History · Latin American and Latino Studies