Ejoyctment of Words: Re-Reading the First Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus

Carolina Maria de Jesus’ debut work, Quarto de despejo [Child of the Dark], was a bestseller, although her next works were shrouded in a deep silence in Brazil. Seeking to situate this silence in the question related to the figure of a writer who is “poor, black and woman”, I intend to re-read her first diaries and suggest certain aspects of her fertile work with language, demonstrating a powerful and emancipatory process of subjectivation, albeit not free of ambiguities.

Keywords:
Literary theory; Self writing; Deconstruction; Brazilian literature; Carolina Maria de Jesus