Child Of The Dark: The Diary Of Carolina Maria De Jesus (50th Anniversary Edition)

A powerful first-hand account of life in the streets of São Paulo from 1955 to 1960 that drew international attention to the plight of the poor.

I was extremely worried that this book was going to be boring or hard to read. It was actually quite understandable and enjoyable if you like first hand accounts of other peoples trials. I had purchased this book for a class but afterward I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to expand their knowledge of inner-city living.

Not the best book about Brazil in general, probably a well not the best book about Favelas (though it does have a lot of stark, references about the social and corrupt political institutions bringing down the country).

For starters the writer or author Carolina Maria De Jesus is a very ignorant, bitter, arrogant and hard woman exclamation on the bitter part. While she raises many question about what is causing the misery in the Favela and the country in general her messages gets lost amidst her constant complaining, and torrid gossip about her neighbors, townspeople, the rich upper class and other people. I mean part of this book is no doubt her attempt at trying to get back at a lot of people who mistreated her but stuff like telling the reader "such and such couple fought", and "this guy stole this", or any another needless gossip (which takes up most of the book) is just tabloid trash that she was willing to sell the highest bidder. It's no wonder when the Diary was finally published a lot of people hated her and why not? She seems to have brought that all on herself.

I mean from an objective point of view certainly Maria could see that such idiotic details as what couple broke up and robbery took place would be needless details in a book that is supposed to be bringing in themes about the lousy politicians Brazil has had, the way the police do nothing about crime and the way certain social institutions who are there to serve the poor only spit on them.

She does both but she ends doing more of the sordid tabloid dirty stuff that you would on the eleven o'clock news. It also seems at times that she thinks she is better than the Favelas around her even though she herself can be looked as a tramp (having sex with a man who never gave her anything), then using obscene and even racist speech in her diary.

When I finally got to the end of the book, I was disappointed expecting more but getting nothing. All in all it's an ok read but there certainly much better books out there about the Favela and Brazil itself.

The autobiographies of poor people from places far from the middle class worlds of rich countries never used to appear in book stores. It was indeed rare that such lives, however interesting, difficult, inspiring or depressing would ever show up on the shelves. But such is the modern world that nowadays we do get occasional chances to glimpse other lives, hear other voices. In "From the Land of Green Ghosts" we could read of the life of a member of the Padaung tribe in Burma; in "Notes from the Hyena's Belly", we read about a small town Ethiopian. Both these men were not poor in their own societies, but went through the traumas of war and revolution before escaping to the calmer West. The adventures of Tete-Michel Kpomassie, a Togolese villager who made it all the way to Greenland, provide another type of narrative. CHILD OF THE DARK, a book written by a Brazilian woman from the very bottom of society, is yet another kind of these rare narrations, and moreover, was one of the first to appear. Carolina Maria de Jesus, a black mother of three with a second grade education, abandoned by all the men in her life, raised her kids in one of the worst slums of Sao Paulo. She picked trash and paper to sell to junk dealers, cadged bones from a slaughterhouse to make soup, collected squashed tomatoes from behind a cannery, and scavenged thrown away food items from the garbage of richer streets. Writing a diary every day helped her to persevere through years of hardship, to escape for a few moments, her hunger, misery, and constant worry. Through a chance encounter with a journalist, her diary was eventually published and she became a celebrity in Brazil back in the early 1960s. She left her hand-to-mouth existence and moved out of the favela forever. Her book is the only one of its kind from that time. [She had a hard time coping with her new life, though, and died in poverty in 1977.]

It's not all sweetness and light, not all a goody goody, morally uplifting Cinderella tale. She sometimes beat her kids, she slept with various suitors, abused "substances", and reported to the police on her neighbors (not that they didn't deserve it). She also has bad things to say about Portuguese, gypsies, and Jews. But OK, most all this is a story of human survival. De Jesus eked out a meagre living amidst squalor and constant quarreling, drunkenness and the sexual antics of the poorest members of Brazilian society, yet she bore up, kept writing, and made many observations about the society that produced such misery, the politicians who came around to ask for votes and then never appeared again. Brazil has no doubt changed in the last half century, but I believe this most human life story is still extremely relevant, both for Brazil and the rest of the world. How many Carolinas is it going to take ?

Caroline Maria de Jusus was born a[...] in poverty and went to only the second grade. She lived most of her adult life in poverty and her children were labeled [...]. She wanted to write and did. She became a writer of international reputation. Her book has been read by people around the world and in the United States. Her work stands with that of Victor Frankl in "MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING," and "BLACK ELK SPEAKS" an American Sioux, and with Frederick Douglass' NARRATIVE LIFE.

CHILD OF THE DARK, is a must read for anyone who wants to understand and to challenge the values and standards of a civilization (ours) that degrades human life for fun and profit.

This book is great in the respect that it captures the experiences of someone living in extreme poverty and how she deals with the daily struggle of survival.