Entre literatura e história: travessias migratórias, afrodiaspóricas e identitárias em Diário de Bitita de Carolina de Jesus

Abstract

In this study, we propose as general objective to comprehend the impacts of the migratory and afrodiasporic crossings on the constitution of Bitita’s/Carolina de Jesus’s identity, from Bitita’s Diary, published in Brazil in 1986. In this book, Bitita recalls significant facts from her childhood and adolescence. Although the author has gained relevant fame with the publication of her first diary Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, in 1960, her literary output allows multiple analyses within various perspectives. Therefore, to contemplate the general objective, we intend to initially establish a dialogue between literature and history, given that this research analyzes the corpus of study using these two lines. Besides this, we aim to comprehend the main reasons for the migrations undertaken by the narrator and character throughout her life path, as well as their consequences, and to analyze the migratory and afrodiasporic experiences lived by Carolina de Jesus. As for the methodology, we adopted the bibliographic research of exploratory nature with a qualitative approach, which implicates in survey, analysis and further development of information concerning the thematic under study. For this purpose, it was necessary to run through the relation between literature and history, basing ourselves on the input of theorists such as Aristotle (2003), Veyne (1998), White (2001), Costa Lima (1989). To give us a vision of the history of black women, we count on the knowledge of Davis (2016), Hooks (2019), Kilomba (2019), Carneiro (2020). When approaching the migratory crossings, we resort to authors as Andrade (2016), Baeninger (2012), Sayad (1998). Regarding the afrodiasporic matter, we seek support on Hall (2003, 2015), Gilroy (2012), Santos (2008). To draw Carolina de Jesus’s path, we lean on the readings of Meihy and Levine (2015), Fernandez (2019), Miranda (2013), Perpétua (2014) among others who assisted in the fulfillment of this research. The research work involves the study of historical sources that contributed to the reinterpretation of the corpus, allowing a dialogue with other literary works. Carolina de Jesus was born around three decades after the abolition of slave labor, but like many other Afro-descendants, she lived other kinds of slavery. Unemployed and with health problems, she had to travel several times between the cities of Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Influenced by her grandfather’s stories, she constitutes the identity of a strong woman and also of a challenger of the lived and witnessed injustices, embracing literary pathways as allies on this journey.