Child Of The Dark: The Diary Of Carolina Maria De Jesus

It is accounts like these that show how useful ordinary people's diaries are to history. Reading Carolina de Jesus's diary, you can see exactly what it was like to live in the grim, apocalyptic world that was slums of Sao Paulo. It was a place where women fought with their partners all the time and

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were often chased naked into the street, where people combed through the garbage for food that was not too rotten, where tiny babies died as a matter of course and older children scavenged for whatever they could sell and thus fill their stomachs for awhile. There was plenty of food available, but not the money to buy it, and shopkeepers' stock would go rotten and they would toss it into the favela for the poor to pick over.

During the time she was writing this diary, Carolina was making a living selling scrap paper at a penny for four pounds. She would make about thirty cents on the good days. On the bad days (such as whenever it rained and all the scrap paper got wet) she made nothing. A large part of the diary is preoccupied with her constant, Sisyphean struggle to provide for herself and her three young children. But Carolina writes without self-pity and even with a kind of wry humor. (Once, she likened the city of Sao Paulo to a house and said the presidential palace was the living room, the mayor's home was the dining room, the city was the garden and the favela was the backyard garbage heap.) Her intelligence and wit are obvious in spite of her second-grade education, and I wonder just how far she could have gone if only she'd been born in different circumstances.

Favelas and their like still exist all over the world, and a significant proportion of the world's population still lives on less than two dollars a day. This diary is just as relevant today as it was fifty years ago when it was first written.

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