The ritual of words: life and ancestry, belief and learning in Proverbs, by Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

This article presents a critical analysis of Carolina Maria de Jesus's work Provérbios (1963), highlighting her creative process and her conscious insertion into the Brazilian literary tradition. The author rejected the exotic and reductionist label of “poorly educated favela author”, asserting herself as a legitimate writer and heir to an Afro-Brazilian lineage anchored in orality, resistance, and aesthetic production. In Provérbios, Carolina reworks the sententious formulas of Afro-descendant folk wisdom as literary devices capable of articulating ancestry, community ethics, and social critique. The study highlights how proverbs, beyond their pedagogical function, assume aesthetic, performative, and political value, operating as discursive strategies of denunciation and reaffirming an ideological stance in the face of racial, social, and symbolic inequalities. The work's central themes, “man, politics, and religion”, permeate the proverbial utterances and expose ethical conflicts experienced on the margins of Brazilian society, whose critical and associative force is revealed in the textual fabric. Thus, the proverbs are reinterpreted as engaged literary expressions, combining oral tradition and written language in a conscious authorial gesture. Carolina's appropriation of these formulas is inscribed as a commitment to the word, transforming her writing into a space of ancestral memory, a critique of structures of domination, and an affirmation of identity.