Solidão, um exercício de liberdade em Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada, de Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

This paper is based on the female writing authorship disposed in Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada (1960), by the black writer Carolina Maria de Jesus. It intends to analyse the "solitary self" of the author, problematizing the option for marital loneliness as an act of free will, by choice of the narrator-personage, aiming to be free. In this way, she deviates from the social patterns recurrent in the space where she lives, the Canindé Slum, located in the capital of São Paulo. In an unfavourable context, this testimonial narrative reveals the option for a life without fixed partners, in which a woman is challenged to raise her three children, overcoming numerous obstacles, hunger, poverty, lack of a job, prejudice, and disease. To do so, the bibliographical method and studies about the life of this writer were used to enable an interpretation based on the work under study. The objective is to understand how the desire to become a writer made Carolina choose not to assume long-lasting relationships because the author evaluated, based on direct observation of her surroundings, that such an option would worsen the condition of poverty and exploitation in which she lived. In the case under analysis, it is not a mere circumstantial imposition, but a reflected posture before the scenario presented. This resistance, to some extent, serves as the motto for the record, in her diary, of several passages about domestic violence experienced by other women in the slum, as well as her strategy to overcome the frustrations and difficulties caused by her life choice. Carolina is not restricted to being lonely, impotent, and stagnant in her helplessness, but a conjugal loneliness endowed with multiple possibilities of living, exercising her freedom. And, thus, with this example of overcoming, one notices a great perspective of fomenting inspiration in the public, suggesting the rupture of oppression in several levels, of prejudice, of machismo, in favour of gender equality. After all, we cannot support the legitimization of problems such as the ones mentioned above that persist within contemporary society and mutilate equality and social justice.