Domestic Work and the Afropessimist Geographies of Suffering in Brazilian Literature

Introduction

“Mãe . . . you need to free yourself from those people . . .” (p. 5). These are the words of Mabel, a protagonist and one of the main narrators in Eliana Alves Cruz’s novel Solitaria, ¹ to her mother, Dona Eunice, a Black domestic worker who finds herself in a legal battle against her employers. The narrative captures Mabel’s journey, intertwining personal struggles with broader societal injustices. It focuses on the discriminatory treatment endured by Mabel and Eunice at the Golden Plate Building—where an affluent white family employs Eunice—as well as 14-year-old Mabel’s traumatic abortion. Despite these hardships, Mabel triumphs by securing a place in the medical program at one of Brazil’s most prestigious universities. As with Jessica in the Brazilian film The Second Mother (Muylaert et al., 2015), education becomes Mabel’s route out of poverty, a generational cycle that has kept her mother tethered to domestic work—a remnant of Brazil’s history of slavery (Pinho, 2015, p. 107). Mabel’s plea for Eunice to break free is rooted in her own experiences, having personally witnessed the manifold forms of violence associated with domestic work, including its most harrowing: death.

Despite Mabel’s account of hope and social mobility, the book ends with the fictionalization of the 5-year-old Miguel Otávio’s death in June 2020, which I will detail later in this article. I explore Solitaria to show aspects of Afropessimism ² in Brazil. I argue that the tragic death of a child—alongside the title’s several connotations and the representation of highly exploitative domestic work in the Global South—attests to the prevalence of the anti-Black violence that Afropessimist theory sees as necessary to the maintenance of current “modes of being” (Wynter, 2003, p. 264). Although Afropessimism was not named as such in Brazil until recently, writings from different periods show that Afropessimism as a theoretical framework has been part of Afro-Brazilian history since slavery. My goal is to include Afro-Brazilian perspectives on Afropessimism in a global dialog on the pertinence of this theory as well as the problems related to its denial by prominent scholars like Davis and Spivak (2018, 3:07:00–3:20:00). Considering the singularities of Brazil’s history of race and racism, Brazilian scholars and activists highlight space as a central predicament in their understandings of anti-Black violence.

Cruz’ Solitaria explicates anti-black violence through domestic work. The choice is meaningful as domestic work remains a prevalent labor sector in the Global South, particularly in Latin America. This form of employment reflects deep-rooted social hierarchies and economic inequalities. Domestic workers’ close relationships with their employers’ families often lead to consistent dehumanization and emotional abuse. Domestic workers are often told they are “part of the family,” yet are barred from certain spaces within the homes they maintain. Rather than joining meals, they cook and serve them, often eating only leftovers—if any remain. And despite the deep bonds they form with the children they help raise, they can be suddenly cut off from their lives without warning. Brazil is home to approximately 6 million domestic workers, according to the International Labor Organization in 2022. ³ Strikingly, 80% of these workers are Black, 95% are women and over 50% of the households headed by domestic workers are poor, which underscores the intersection of race, class, and gender in this profession. Across Latin America, an estimated 18 million people work as maids, a significant portion of whom must endure low wages, lack of formal contracts, and limited access to social protections. It was not until 2015 that the Brazilian government enacted groundbreaking legislation to extend fundamental rights to domestic workers. ⁴ These reforms granted them access to benefits such as social security, overtime pay, and other protections enjoyed by employees in the so-called formal sectors of the economy. Although these legal advancements marked a crucial step forward, enforcement remains a complex issue, and societal perceptions of domestic work continue to evolve.

I am personally invested in this paper’s themes as someone raised in conditions like Mabel’s. My mother, now retired, worked as a live-in maid for about 40 years. Whenever her bosses allowed it, she brought me to live in the houses where she worked. Like Mabel, my mother and I experienced exploitation, wage theft, and rampant racial discrimination; traumas that affect our lives to this day. Therefore, autoethnography is a part of this article. My encounter with Afro-Brazilians in academia in the United States also motivated the creation of this paper. I often noted the surprise of Black Brazilian visitors—the same surprise I initially felt—when encountering the descriptor “people of color” to encapsulate very distinct identities, histories, and experiences. In Brazil, the racial divide has consistently focused on Black versus white people. That does not deny other forms of racism, but it is a strong acknowledgment of the country’s racial composition, its history of anti-Black violence, and a nation-building project that relied on the exploitation and erasure of black folks. In other words, the rejection of Afropessimism by influential scholars in the United States academia hit me as offensive in light of its past and current colonialist enterprises around the globe. This paper explores the novel Solitaria to show that the rejection of Afropessimism is futile as the reality of anti-Black violence continues to determine the fungibility of Black life.

Solitary

Solitaria is a temporally fragmented narrative, as it centers somewhat scattered significant events in the characters’ lives—like Mabel’s sexual awakening or the development of the romantic relationship between Eunice and Jurandir, Golden Plate’s doorman, or even the short reappearance of Mabel’s father, a gardener who struggles with substance abuse. The main space of the narrative is the Golden Plate Building (perhaps a reference to the silver spoon expression), where the workers and their wealthy employers reside. The first-person narrators throughout the narrative privilege the perspective of the employees in the building, which deauthorizes the employers’ voices. The fragmented structure projects memory as a crucial element, since events in the narrative are recollections of the narrators’ experiences.

Solitaria is full of implicit meanings. For instance, the word “solitária,” that titles the novel, means “lonely” or “solitary” in English. Curiously, loneliness was the answer my mother gave me when I asked her about the hardest part of working as a live-in maid. As Patricia de Santana Pinho noticed, this solitude is by design (Pinho, 2015, pp. 107–108). Middle and upper-middle-class houses in Brazil typically have a small maid’s room where a maid can keep her belongings, rest, and which physically separates her from her employer’s living quarters. A tiny room—usually with poor ventilation—where live-in maids sleep. These rooms are considered spaces of contention for Black women. In Eu, empregada doméstica (“I, the maid,” 2019), an anthology of experiences of black maids and their daughters in domestic work, the editor Preta Rara (2020), herself a former domestic worker, makes the association between the profession and the legacy of enslavement in the subtitle “the modern slave quarter is the maid’s room” (“a senzala moderna é o quartinho da empregada”). The maid’s room appears in several Brazilian cultural artifacts, including the film The Second Mother (Muylaert, 57:00–58:00) that I mention in this study. Beyond the maid’s room, the title “solitária” invokes another space that is relevant for the limitation of blackness: the prison cell. Brazil has the world’s third-largest prison population. About 70% of this incarcerated population identifies as Afro-Brazilian. ⁵

The multiple meanings of the title point to domestic work as a form of punishment inflicted on racialized bodies that are also discriminated against along the lines of gender and class. Considering the importance of isolation and loneliness for many domestic workers, Mabel’s appeal to her mother to free herself from her employers raises important questions: How can we free ourselves from the spatial and social divisions that structure society? What would be the most effective possibilities for this freedom? And how can we deal with theories in Black Studies that do not see a way out? How do Black Studies scholars make sense of racialized geographies? An analysis of Solitaria can offer us some interesting answers.

Solitaria’s 34 chapters were titled after spaces that are part of the narrative (e.g., “Backyard,” “Courtyard,” “Little-Bathroom,” “Floor,” “Window,” “Waste Room”). ⁶ Each title evokes an event that happened in these spaces. For example, “Party Room” (“Salão de Festas”) narrates the use of the party room in the employers’ building, the Golden Plate, for a birthday party for Cacau, the youngest son of Jurandir, the building’s doorman. In “Pool” (“Piscina”), Mabel describes the near-drowning of Bruninho, a relative of the employers’ family, when he was under the care of Irene, a 13-year-old black and impoverished girl employed as a nanny.

Solitaria is divided into three parts. Mabel narrates the first part and Mrs. Eunice narrates the second. “Solitárias,” the third and last part of the book, has four narrators—the Maid’s Room, the Doorman’s Room, the Hospital Room, and the Resting Room—all of them the personification of spaces. Having spaces as narrators is certainly one of the most intriguing choices in Cruz’ work and a novelty in Brazilian literature. The first three spaces are “demonic grounds,” which McKittrick (2006, pp. 61–63) explains as anti-Black spaces that Black women reshape into sites of resistance and possibility. Both within the context of the narrative and the very act of writing these spaces as spaces of blackness establishes them as geographies of resistance. For instance, the Maid’s Room, historically a space of constraint, is now a space of refuge and a vessel for the acts of anti-Black violence that it witnessed. Eliana Alves Cruz, as the author, is reimagining the role and potential of these spaces. Cruz and her characters demonstrate how reimagining spaces can be a catalyst for transformative work. For instance, the experiences of Mabel and Eunice stir emotions in the Maid’s Room, which recognizes itself as the solitary room, a womb for Eunice and her daughter (Cruz, 2022, p. 112). The Maid’s Room explains: “I know that, deep down, I wasn’t a room. I was a solitária. Exactly that. A prison, a place meant to separate these lives from the world and from the other residents.” (Cruz, 2025, p. 199) The voice of the Maid’s Room ultimately emphasizes the erasure of Black Brazilians destined to be confined there. Moreover, the Maid’s Room becomes a witness to what happened to Gilberto, the 4-year-old boy who falls from the apartment window when Camila, the employer’s daughter, locks him in one of the rooms.

The other space-narrators also talk about themselves and their perceptions, like in the case of the hospital room: “There are times when even I, so accustomed to pain and death, can’t get used to the things that come along with the bankruptcy of humanity” (Cruz, 2025, p. 220). The Hospital Room makes this comment after a white patient rejects medicine from a Black nurse. This nurse is later revealed to be Irene, Bruninho’s young nanny, who now works in the same hospital where Mabel is a doctor. The space-narrators also communicate as the Hospital Room reveals: “The reception area told the halls, who told the nurses’ area, who told me that Mabel followed that [Irene’s] voice” (p. 220). The order of the chapters in the third part follows Mabel’s trajectory: from the maid’s room to the doorman’s room, where she finds community, to her training as a doctor in the hospital room and finally into the Resting Room, her office, the place that solidifies her escape from the conditions that her mother endured.

Titling each chapter as a space emphasizes what the philosopher Lélia Gonzalez called “natural place” or “the racial division of space” (Gonzalez, 2020b, p. 107). ⁷ Solitaria exposes this extra-legal segregation and analyzes what each of these spaces, or the existences and experiences they present, say about being Black. Moreover, highlighting space in association with the generative nature of storytelling portrays space as a text or a discursive artifact. Unlike geographers like Henri Lefebvre who stressed the social construction of space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 73) or space as a product, in Cruz’s novel, space also produces knowledge. Not only do the spaces become the voices in the novel, but the spatial configuration carries messages understood by each character. In other words, the spaces in Solitaria contribute to the characters’ sense of personhood, communicating who they are, where they can exist, and their assigned life opportunities.

Afrofuturist or Afropessimist?

To an extent, Solitaria focuses on the future, highlighting the experiences of Black youth like Mabel and her friends, João Pedro and Cacau. Mabel, a hardworking student, is poised to break the cycle of exploitation when she is accepted into one of the country’s most prestigious medical schools. In the literature of Black Brazilian women, portraying children became a way to imagine a future for Black people. These famous characters include Geni in Geni Guimarães’ The Color of Tenderness (originally published as A Cor da Ternura in 1989), Maria-Nova in Evaristo and Fonseca’s Becos da Memória (2013) and Bará in Bará: Na Trilha do Vento (2015), by Miriam Alves. Sometimes, beyond a future, prosperity is imagined through education.

Like in the movie The Second Mother one possible route to free new generations of Black women from domestic service is education. Jéssica and Mabel are diligent students applying for prestigious universities in Brazil in the hopes that their respective ambitions to become an architect and a medical doctor will liberate them from the harsh treatment that their mothers had to endure. The Brazilian Black Movement was successful in advocating for the implementation of affirmative actions in higher education (Martins et al., 2004, p. 789). College spots reserved for Black students have been a national law since 2012. Today 50% of seats in public state institutions are reserved for students who identify as Afro-Brazilians, indigenous, disabled and/or impoverished. ⁸ Although education as a way out of poverty is never questioned in The Second Mother, João Pedro, the rebellious teenager in Solitaria presents a different perspective: “Do you really think that getting into their schools will help anything? Do you really think that’s what makes their lives great? Look at this room, at Ms. Lúcia . . . Was it studying, or college, that gave her what she has?” (Cruz, 2025, p. 70)

Despite being regarded as the primary path to economic mobility, education places the burden of escaping poverty on those who experience intergenerational poverty as the legacy of enslavement. As Solitaria shows, some people can use education to escape poverty, but they are exceptions. The public portrayal of education as a solution to inequality minimizes the role of direct policies in countering historical and structural oppression. Instead, this portrayal highlights personal efforts to overcome various forms of anti-Black violence. Formal education was never designed to solve structural racism. It mostly maintains meritocratic hierarchies in a racial capitalist society and cannot guarantee economic mobility for workers (Groeger, 2021, p. 8).

When reading Solitaria, the author foresees a prosperous future for Black people, and especially for Black women. In this Afrofuturist outlook, education changed the social and economic conditions of Black youth who will grow into seasoned professionals who can challenge racism from a somewhat privileged standpoint. However, when fictionalizing a real case that shocked Brazilian society, the Afrofuturist aspirations fail to materialize. But if formal education cannot guarantee a future, what can? Inadvertently, Solitaria presents us with an answer that aligns with the Afropessimist theoretical framework that Wilderson explains in Afropessimism (2020). Its translation, Afropessimismo (2021), is so far the major translation in Brazil that explains the term “Afropessimism.” For Wilderson, “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness: Blackness is social death: which is to say that there was never a prior metamoment of plenitude, never equilibrium: never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a paradigmatic position . . . is elaborated through slavery.” (p. 102). ⁹ In Afropessimist theoretical framework, Black being in modern society equates to the antithesis of whiteness and, therefore, an antithesis of a world structured on white supremacist ideology. Black people occupy this singular position as a result of the lack of a “transformative promise” (Wilderson, 2020, p. 102) that, unlike other groups, Black beings cannot enjoy. Transformative promises are changes that allow other racialized groups to access statuses closer to humanity, such as land titles and citizenship status. There is no possible change that would allow Black beings to undergo the same process. Thus, the control, suffering, and death of Black people are necessary for the freedom, power, and life of others. Afropessimism unveils a perverse dialectical relationship that complicates solidarity among oppressed groups since every other group—those who can take advantage of transformative promises—benefits from the state of social death imposed on Black people. In simple terms, every other group benefits from blackness being at the bottom of the social pyramid because that prevents them from occupying that position while creating an outlet for violence. Moreover, because Black people are the antithesis of whiteness—or of a world structured under whiteness -Black death is a necessity to sustain social life (Wilderson, 2021, p. 41).

Despite the focus on characters that represent the future, Solitaria explores many instances of anti-Black violence and social death, the core elements in the Afropessimist theory. For instance, already in the third and fourth chapters, Irene, the 13-year-old girl employed as a nanny, agonizes over the potential consequences of taking 5 min to use the bathroom while caring for Bruninho, who falls into the pool and almost dies (Cruz, 2025, p. 17). Mabel, who narrates this episode, comments on the impossibility of herself, Irene, and other Black women to be children (Cruz, 2025, p. 27). These are Black women to whom full personhood is denied. Irene cannot enjoy her childhood, in addition to having basic needs, like going to the bathroom, denied. Her employers pay no attention to her until Bruninho is found in the pool. Nor do they worry about breaking the law that prohibits minors from working before they are 14 years old. Another character marked by anti-Black violence and social violence is Dadá, a 40-year-old woman enslaved by her employer, Imaculada, since she was 10 years old (Cruz, 2025, p. 173). The practice of enslaving primarily Black girls for domestic work is a recurrent media topic in Brazil, as denunciations of these cases continue to surface. According to official government reports, in 2023, 41 people were rescued from slavery. ¹⁰ Perpetrators mask this practice, sometimes referred to as “criação” (something like “raising”), as adoption. However, the full legal adoption process is not in place and neither is compensation for these children/workers. João Pedro eventually reports Dadá’s conditions to the authorities, who free her and arrest Imaculada.

In accordance with the Afropessimist framework, death is a constant presence in Solitaria. Its presence is particularly striking when Gilberto, a character who represents Black futurity, dies tragically. Another death in Solitaria happens when Hilda, another live-in domestic worker, is the first to die of COVID-19. Her character seems to be based on the 63-year-old housekeeper Cleonice Gonçalves, the first victim of the pandemic in Rio de Janeiro. ¹¹ Spaces narrate the tragic third and last part of the book, a fictional version of the “Caso Miguel” that shocked Brazilian society. Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva, a 5-year-old boy and the son of the domestic worker Mirtes Renata Santana de Souza died on June 2, 2020. Souza had to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools’ closure forced her to take Miguel to work. Eventually, her employer, the first lady of the city of Tamandaré, requested Mirtes to walk the family’s dog. Mirtes asked her employer to watch Miguel while she fulfilled the request. After Mirtes left, her employer allowed Miguel to follow his mother and ride an elevator alone. Miguel ended up on the ninth floor of the building, from where he fell out of a window. Miguel’s death sparked discussions on race, gender, domestic work, and why Black people in Brazil had the highest fatality rates from COVID-19 (Martins-Filho et al., 2021). Mirtes’ employer was charged with child neglect and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. Among activists in Brazil, there was the belief that domestic work, racism, sexism, and planned inequality had killed Miguel. Miguel’s case became a way to understand the Brazilian national project for Black people, a program of subjugation, racial capitalist exploitation, and brutal social and physical erasure of Black bodies. In other words, Brazil is far from being an exception to the Afropessimist theoretical framework to understand anti-Black violence.

In Solitaria, Miguel is represented by Gilberto and Mirtes by Luzia. Except for the beginning of the pandemic forcing a lockdown only after Gilberto’s death, the cases are strikingly similar. In the novel, Luzia has to go to the grocery store during a celebration for her employer’s daughter, Camila. When Gilberto starts to ask for his mother, Camila locks him in the maid’s room. Gilberto climbs up the window to call to his mother and falls. Mabel, now in a medical residency program, is the first person to confirm Gilberto’s death to the tenants of the Golden Plate building. At that moment, she finally confronts her mother’s employer, who is trying to deny her family’s involvement and to blame Luzia, Gilberto’s mother, instead. The novel mentions the legal procedures that the employer’s family will face.

Solitaria ends with Mabel, now a doctor, helping marginalized communities. Its final scene is set in Mabel’s office, a space that differs from the constricting ones previously explored. Relaxed and sitting in her office, Mabel sips a calming tea whose benefits her grandmother had taught her about. Mabel then remembers that Eunice asked her never to forget the capabilities of traditional medicine. This chapter is titled “Quarto de Descanso” (“Resting Room”). The scene pays homage to Mabel’s loved ones, those who paved her way to the Resting Room. Items on her desk are gifts from João, her mother and Cacau. Mabel prepared the tea that she sips from a lemon balm bush planted by her father at the request of her grandmother and that is sitting in a vase that Jurandir, now her stepfather, gifted her.

Afropessimism in Brazil

The tenets of Afropessimism are not new. We see analysis of anti-Black violence and the conclusion that modernity is built on black death in Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2003) published in 1861, to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967) from 1952 and the work of Wynter (2003), that acknowledges the necessity of a new world that is not built on the language of anti-blackness. I would argue that Afropessimist thought exists throughout the Black Diaspora, which includes Brazil. The history of race and racism in Brazil has provided that society with theoretical frameworks and social analysis that are similar to and/or in dialog with Afropessimism. In 1906, for example, Machado de Assis, a Black Brazilian author who lived through slavery, published the short story “Father Against Mother” (2008) a tale where a Black enslaved pregnant woman has to lose her child so the white slave catcher can keep his. Abdias do Nascimento’s O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro (2016) is arguably the most notorious example. The book was first published in 1976, and it presented to the international community a denunciation of anti-Black violence in Brazil, particularly the country’s history of racial mixing, as a process of genocide. Nascimento attests that “this idea of elimination of the black race was not just an abstract theory, but a calculated destruction strategy” (Nascimento, 2016, Location 1412). The book explains the ways in which the attempt to erase Black beings was taking place in Brazil. In other words, it unveiled Black death as a nation-building project.

Mabel, one of the truth-tellers in Solitaria, offers insights that reflect the state of blackness in the nation. For instance, “We needed to be present without being. . . . They [the maids and their children] were used to it, after all. They already had the “gift of invisibility.” They already knew how to be so that nobody would notice them there.” (Cruz, 2025, p. 142) According to Mabel, learning how not to be seen was a prerequisite to existing in the employers’ home where her mother lived. That was also my experience. When I was seven, my mother received authorization to keep me at her workplace. I was taught that the condition for me to live with my mother—my only present parent at the time—was complete invisibility, silence, and compliance. I was not to be seen in their houses under any circumstances. If that happened, my mother could lose her job or I would be sent to my relatives’ house and only be able to see my mother once a week. According to Abdias do Nascimento, the erasure of Black bodies from the Brazilian landscape was by design, reflecting the expectations of Eunice’s employers that Mabel and her mother be invisible in that environment. The death of those who secure a future for Black people also points to erasure as a social project.

The Black feminist scholar Lélia Gonzalez (1935–1994) wrote extensively about the conditions of Black people. Although she is known for her work on Afro-Latinx feminisms, Gonzalez explored the conditions of Black people in relation, for example, to time and space. In “Black Brazilian Youth and the Issue of Unemployment,” Lélia Gonzalez writes about the lack of opportunities for Black youth, adding that Black youth can only foresee criminalization and death (Gonzalez, 2020a, p. 55). The analytical framework that we call Afropessimism today traverses most of Gonzalez’s work. She describes Black people’s conditions in Brazil and Latin America more broadly as social death and cites the genocide of Afro-Brazilians.

Another important Afro-Brazilian scholar who developed Afropessimism as an ontological framework for blackness was Beatriz Nascimento (1942–1995). Nascimento was a historian whose research focused on the quilombos, communities of people who had fled enslavement. Her work explores the spatialization of blackness in Brazil. Fugitivity is a central pillar in her publications on quilombos and is significant to Afropessimism. ¹² In the documentary Ôrí (1989), Beatriz Nascimento develops Afropessimist ideas related to placelessness and blackness, suggesting that denying Black people a space to exist was denying life itself.

More recently, authors like Osmundo Pinho (2023), in an interview, spoke directly about Afropessimism as a theory from the United States that can serve Brazil, considering its position in the African Diaspora and the very Brazilian genocide that Abdias do Nascimento explained. Pinho writes that “From an Afropessimist perspective, the black genocide in Brazil is yet another historical way of configuring transcendental ontological assumptions in the lived experience” ¹³ (Silva, 2023, p. 24). Afropessimism explains the genocide of Black Brazilians as an expected outcome of the power relations fostered during colonization and slavery. Denise Ferreira da Silva has also written extensively about anti-blackness and, as a Brazilian scholar, used Brazil as a reference in her publications. For instance, when considering the whitening process in Brazil, Silva writes, “as the foundational statement of race relations establishes, the historical destiny of the (affectable) others of Europe is obliteration.” (Silva, 2007, p. 239) “Affectable others” in Silva’s work refer to racialized subjects who are excluded from philosophical and political systems. In line with the Afropessimist theoretical framework, Silva highlights exclusion and erasure as the outcomes of racialization.

This intellectual history suggests a likely positive reception of Afropessimism in Brazil, in contrast to prominent scholars’ reservations toward this framework in the United States. ¹⁴ Black Brazilians seem to have always made the connection between the national project on race and death, both social death and physical death. Extermination, rather than separation or segregation, was the plan in Brazil. This plan continued to be acknowledged throughout history, making Afropessimism as a theoretical framework not as startling as it seems to be in the USA academia. Another indicator of the acceptability of Afropessimism lies in the way in which anti-Black social movements were named in the two countries. Brazil’s “Parem de nos matar” (“Stop Killing Us”) became the main call on protest against anti-Black violence even before the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. The former highlights the death of Black Brazilians, the latter, the lives of Black Americans.

Carolina Maria de Jesus, the Afropessimist Literary Influence

In the chapter entitled “Maid’s Room,” Eunice reads to her daughter a passage of de Jesus’ Quarto de Despejo (1960—translated into English as Child of the Dark by David St. Clair in 1962). In that passage, the narrator writes how difficult it was to enter the small room where she lives. Beyond this passage, Eliana Alves Cruz established a notable dialog with Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–1977), one of the most important writers in the Brazilian literary canon whose work can fit the Afropessimist framework. de Jesus was the first Black Brazilian woman to become a nationally and internationally famous author. In Quarto de Despejo ¹⁵ (which can be directly translated as “The Dumpster Room”), her first book, Jesus published journals about her life in the extinct Canindé slum in São Paulo. Her journals became a window into the experiences of Black Latin Americans post-enslavement and the social politics of the Cold War. Moreover, de Jesus, who had also worked as a maid before living in the slum, highlights the importance of space as a predictor of one’s perceived role in the nation. The dumpster room—a space of constraint for those who are undesirable—was de Jesus’ metaphor for the slum, an image that helped explain Black Brazilians’ state of social death.

In Carolina Maria de Jesus’ journals, black suffering and abject poverty are on full display. The space of the slum is dehumanizing, as it presents conditions that do not support life, like the lack of appropriate structures, water, food, and electricity. As Lélia Gonzalez pointed out, the space of the slum reflects the place of Black people in the nation-building project of those in power (“Racismo e sexismo,” 110, 2022). Carolina ¹⁶ is also in a constant encounter with death. The lack of safe and hygienic conditions threatens her life and those of her children. Carolina narrates the deaths of folks that she encounters. The most shocking event seems to be the death of a “pretty little black boy” (de Jesus, 1963, p. 31) who consumes discarded meat. Carolina warns him that the meat seems spoiled, but he eats it anyway and soon dies. This is how Carolina describes what happened:

I tried to convince him not to eat that meat, or the hard bread gnawed by the rats. He told me no, because it was two days since he had eaten. He made a fire and roasted the meat. His hunger was so great that he couldn’t wait for the meat to cook. He heated it and ate. . . .

The next day I found that little black boy dead. . . .He was buried like any other “Joe.” Nobody tried to find out his name, The marginal people don’t have names. (de Jesus, 1963, p. 32)

Whether food is found or not, every path in this narrative seems to lead to death. Time is short and death is always in sight. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Black Brazilians embraced Afropessimism as a theoretical lens as it seems to encapsulate the state of anti-blackness in the nation.

In Eliana Alves Cruz’s novel, the title Solitaria can be interpreted as a reference to Carolina Maria de Jesus’ metaphor of the Quarto de Despejo. As the slum, the “solitárias” (the maid’s room and solitary confinement) are spaces of underprivilege, exclusion, poverty, blackness and socio-spatial marginalization. The association becomes even more explicit when Eliana Alves Cruz titles one of the chapters that Eunice narrates “Quarto de Despejo.” ¹⁷ In Solitaria the actual “quarto de despejo” is not a metaphor. It is a storage room for things that residents of the Golden Plate no longer want. This “quarto de despejo” is where Eunice catches her daughter Mabel and João Pedro, the doorman’s son, in an intimate moment. Eunice realizes then that Mabel and João Pedro are in a romantic relationship. Moreover, the place seems to bother Eunice: “The two of them [Mabel and João Pedro] in that room of disposable things, what nobody wanted . . . / Overtaken by rage, I yanked her out of there, pulling her arm” (p. 131). The act of pulling Mabel out of the “quarto de despejo” is also a metaphorical refusal of the “quarto de despejo” as an assigned space for Black women as it had been for Carolina Maria de Jesus. The emotions that arise at that point lead to Mabel’s revelation that she had been pregnant and lost the baby. Although Eunice has suspicions that Mabel had an abortion, it is Ms. Lúcia, her employer, who confirms that she facilitated Mabel’s abortion. The admission is stated to punish Eunice for quitting her job (p. 169).

Solitaria’s “quarto de despejo” reiterates the purpose of Carolina Maria de Jesus’ first book. It unveils Brazil’s anti-blackness and its toll on Black women and girls. In the “quarto de despejo,” mother and daughter bond over the pain of learning that Mabel, like her mother and grandmother, had undergone an abortion alone, “solitária.” In other words, Eunice realizes that the arduous life cycle imposed on the women of her family is not broken. Mabel’s efforts and her mother’s commitment to her daughter’s education become a guarantee that members of a new generation will not end up in the same place. “Solitaria,” in all its meanings, should end there.

The association formed between de Jesus’ journals and experiences with Solitaria reaffirms that the conditions that Carolina Maria de Jesus experienced in the 1950s have not ceased to exist. Beyond the title, the display of various forms of racial and class oppression, anti-blackness, racially segregated spaces, and, above all, the death of another “little black boy” establish the fungibility of black bodies in Brazilian society as the main connection between the two books.

Conclusion

Eliana Alves Cruz’s Solitaria tells a fictional version of the death of 5-year-old Miguel Octávio. In doing so, the novel opens a dialog between Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism and scholarship and cultural artifacts that discuss the Brazilian Black genocide. As spaces become characters, Cruz highlights the connection between spatialization and Black futures. Furthermore, Solitaria references Quarto de Despejo, the seminal work of Carolina Maria de Jesus in which she reaffirms the prevalence of anti-Black violence in her daily life.

A major discomfort of academics with Afropessimism concerns the state of resistance in anti-Black societies. It is worth clarifying that the acknowledgment of the historical approach to blackness does not mean that resistance is no longer envisioned. The work of Wynter (2003) has influenced many scholars to rethink resistance under these conditions. Drawing from Fanon (1967), one can understand that resistance does not mean inclusion in the same systems of power responsible for anti-Black violence. In its current iteration, resistance takes the form of destruction or the exclusion of systems for the collective construction of a new world, which includes new language systems and new ways to exist together. In the words of Frank Wilderson: “But the first step toward destruction is to assume one’s position (assume, not celebrate or disavow), and then burn the ship or the plantation, in its past and present incarnations, from the inside out” (p. 103). Considering the importance that Afro-Brazilian scholars assign to spatiality, it comes as no surprise that cultural artifacts like Solitaria will call attention to the significance of space in this process of destruction and hint at a pathway through the abandonment or destruction of constrictive spaces. Maybe this purge can start with the burning of the many forms of “solitarias” that prevent us from moving freely.