This monograph analyzes the book Quarto de despejo: diary of a favelada, by Carolina Maria
de Jesus. The work, written in the first person, reflects the narrator's survival in the Canindé
favela in the capital São Paulo in the 1960s, where she suffered extreme poverty and
deprivation. It is in this context that the urgency of literary writing emerges, recording in
notebook its notes in a diary format. In this writing, she reveals her daily life as a garbage
collector and her resistance in the midst of hunger, violence, addiction, and difficulties in
caring for her children. Our central objective was to analyze how the novel thematizes the
social condition of the black woman, the (non) recognition of Carolina as a writer, and the
place that literature has for itself. In order to do so, we consider the way in which he
thematizes his relationship with books, as a reader, and the urgency of writing as a way of
survival, constituting himself in the place of production, in the condition. Carolina privileges
writing as a possibility of existence and resistance and place of feminine empowerment. As a
theoretical basis, studies were carried out that deal with the social issue of black women
(Mirela, 2011, Pereira, 2013, Werneck, 2010, Tokita, 2013), racial literacy (Almeida, 2017),
enunciation (BENVENISTE, 1989; FIORIN , 2017). From the discussion that involves the
questions of race, gender and class, we will mobilize categories of discursive semiotics for the
analysis of the novel, privileging what the theory defines as discursive semantics (FIORIN,
2017). In this sense, we are interested in observing the way in which it is enunciated as author.
Keywords: female empowerment; female literature; written as resistance; Carolina Maria de
Jesus; enunciation.
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