Carolina Maria de Jesus: The Day Hunger Stopped Being Abstract

During Brazil’s 2026 Carnival, one of the most celebrated names was that of writer Carolina Maria de Jesus. She was honored by Unidos da Tijuca, a major samba school from Rio de Janeiro competing in the country’s top division. Her life story became a samba anthem, echoed by thousands of voices along the Sambadrome — the iconic parade avenue where Rio’s Carnival unfolds each year.

But my first encounter with Carolina did not happen at Carnival.

I was 13 years old when I first read ‘Quarto de Despejo’ 1960, at the beginning of my adolescence, for a school assignment. It was the first time I was confronted with a narrative that spoke about hunger in a real way. Until then, hunger had been a distant word — a textbook statistic, a concept that fit neatly into exams and classroom debates.

For the first time, hunger stopped being social data and gained a voice, a body, and a daily life. Carolina,  a Black woman from a favela — often translated as “urban slum,” but more accurately a marginalized community shaped by structural inequality — who survived by collecting paper, wrote in order to live. Her direct, raw language was the only one possible in the face of daily violence.

One simple sentence stopped me: “Hunger is also a teacher.”

I remember closing the book for a few seconds. Reading does more than move us — it leaves a mark. It makes us think about our world, how we live in it, and reminds us that it is not the only world that exists. Reading allows us to reflect on the different realities and experiences of every human being.That book showed me that writing can be a form of resistance and that no human being is defined by the conditions into which they are born.

That was when I realized writing could be more than literature. It could be resistance.

Born in 1914, Carolina documented hunger, exclusion, and the struggle to raise her three children. She transformed scarcity into historical record. She disrupted Brazil’s elitist literary tradition by placing the favela,  or  “urban slum,” at the center of the narrative.

The original title ‘Quarto de Despejo’ literally means “the junk room,” the space where unwanted objects are stored. Carolina used it as a metaphor for how society hides what it does not want to see. Not just an urban metaphor, but a political one. Society organizes itself through the marginalization of its own citizens.

But at that age, my reaction was not theoretical.

I had already moved between very different social worlds — from dinners in affluent neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro to visits to Rocinha, one of Latin America’s largest favelas. I understood the difference. What I did not yet understand was structure.

Carolina taught me that hunger is not accidental. It is constructed. And she showed me that writing can expose that construction.

Perhaps that was the moment I began to understand why I wanted to use my own voice. Perhaps that was when journalism stopped seeming like just a profession and started feeling like responsibility.

Years later, when I saw Carolina’s name sung by thousands during Rio’s Carnival parade, I realized that the private revelation I had experienced as a teenager had become collective recognition. The parade did in celebration what the book had done in silence for me: affirm that literature is born wherever human experience insists on being heard.

Despite the international success of Child of the Dark, Carolina was not immediately embraced by Brazil’s literary canon. For years, her work was treated merely as social documentation, as if testimony could not also be art.

“Hunger is also a teacher.”

I have never read Brazil the same way since.