The socialism of those who wash others’ underwear

Eridania Rodriguez

Maids fill the rooms and haunt the stories in Petinah Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly, a brilliant and evocative narration of living and dying in Zimbabwe.

“The Maid from Lalapanzi” tells the heartbreaking story of SisiBlandina, a revolutionary, tragic, ordinary woman. Read the story and you’ll see. The next story, “Aunt Juliana’s Indian”, focuses on the complex relationships between Indian Zimbabweans, particularly male employers, and `African’ Zimbabweans, particularly women employees. Juliana is herself a revolutionary who strikes out against oppression and unreason … literally. The story of Mr. Vaswani and Juliana is the story of a nation being born, despite the Big Men who were already trying to kill it in the name of liberation.

Susan, the neighbors’ daughter, is a minor character. She works as a maid in a white household. She and Juliana spend their time arguing about who has the worse boss and who suffers the most. Whoever suffers the most wins.

When the first real elections are impending, the air is filled with the promise of change.  Juliana dreams of a raise, better treatment, time off, so that she might complete her secretarial studies. Only Susan has doubts: “`It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, `But I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam wash her own underwear” (191)

Maids, domestic workers, nannies, babysitters, care providers, housemaids, cleaners haunt stories of the world, of the everyday, of everything important and everything ordinary. They are present and yet absent, valuable and yet worthless. They are the stuff of national liberation, of revolution and socialism, of feminism, of development. They are as unmentionable as the dirty underwear that somehow gets washed.

As Petinah Gappah noted in a recent interview, “Zimbabweans are more than just victims of Robert Mugabe….We are also horrible to each other. We’re not very nice to women. We don’t treat our maids very well.” When it comes to the oppression and exploitation of maids, if Robert Mugabe didn’t exist, we’d have invented him, a Great Man. Who washes his underwear?

In Burma/Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi is on trial this week. Aung San Suu Kyi is a great woman. July 5, 2009, marked 5,000 days in captivity for Aung San Suu Kyi. She spent the day “with the two women she has been detained with since 2003.” Who are those women? They are her co-defendants, her two “housemaids”, her two “maids”, and most reports don’t mention their names.

“On May 14, Special Branch police arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and her two live-in party supporters and domestic workers, Daw Khin Khin Win, and her daughter, Win Ma Ma, at Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon, and transferred the three to Insein Prison.”

Daw Khin Khin Win. Win Ma Ma. Mother and daughter. Party supporters and members. Maids. There is no Aung San Suu Kyi without them. This does not take away from the value and accomplishment of Aung San Suu Kyi. In fact, it enriches it. But do a Google news search for Daw Khin Khin Win, and what comes up? Nothing. Unmentionable and invisible as the washing of dirty underwear.

Everyone needs a maid. In South Africa, there’s a white squatter camp, where the white residents are mostly unemployed. It’s located near Krugersdorp, in the West Rand, Gauteng. It’s a historic site. The British built a concentration camp in Krugersdorp, during the Anglo-Boer War, for Afrikaans women and children. But the camp is not all white: “The camp is also home to a few black people, mostly maids and handy-men of the white squatters.” A place called home, by Whites only, requires Black maids and handymen. Whose names go unspoken. As unmentionable as the dirty underwear they wash.

They are like maids everywhere. They are exploited and betrayed. Recently, the New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg tells a story about maids: “The very first week that I was at Columbia, Jan Goodman, a lawyer in New York, called me and said, Do you know that Columbia has given layoff notices to 25 maids and not a single janitor? Columbia’s defense was the union contract, which was set up so that every maid would have to go before the newly hired janitor would get a layoff notice.”

Bosses and unions collude to protect men and sacrifice maids. Again.

They are sacrificed. That Ginsburg interview appeared in the July 12th edition of the Magazine. The night before, on July 11, the body of Eridania Rodriguez was found. Eridania Rodriguez was an office cleaner in a building in lower Manhattan. Eridania Rodriguez was one of the thousands of women who clean offices, alone, at night. Elizabeth Magda continues to clean offices in the same neighborhood, night after night, alone, largely unnoticed and unknown by those who work in the offices: “Few people pay attention to the workers who clean their offices, as long as the desks are clean in the morning and papers are not tampered with. But every once in a while, something happens to cast a spotlight on their relatively solitary, uncelebrated occupation. On July 11, there was a grisly discovery that did just that: the body of a cleaning woman was found stuffed in an air-conditioning duct in the Lower Manhattan office building where she had worked at night.”

What does it take for cleaners, maids, housemaids to be seen, to be named? Must the narrative of domestic labor, in households or in offices, be one of sacrifice and martyrdom, framed by anonymity, punctuated by sexual abuse and torture? Daw Khin Khin Win, Win Ma Ma, Aung San Suu Kyi.  Black women domestic workers in white households and neighborhoods. The Columbia 25. Eridania Rodriguez, Elizabeth Magda. They are not specters and they are not supplements to some more important national or workers’ or any other story. They are women with names, bodies, stories, and lives. They struggle to create the socialism of those who wash others’ underwear. The struggle continues.

(Photo Credit: nytimes.com)

Who’s in, who’s out, who’s counting?

Roma

Maps and tallies tell stories. They tell something about what’s going on, who’s in, who’s out, who’s where. They reveal more about the mapmaker and the list maker, the cartographer and the accountant.

Over the weekend, police in three major provinces of South Africa were accused of `fiddling’ with the statistics to make it look as if they, and `we’, are winning the war on crime. Like all modern wars, the war on crime is a statistical phantasmagoria, and so to win the war, one must play the numbers. The police played. Charges include stockpiling, burning, hiding dockets generally; ditching dockets of crimes on the increase; failing to register crimes with a low chance of prosecution; reducing serious crimes to lesser charges; and cover up.

Meanwhile, the police in Los Angeles are fiddling as well. The LAPD online crime map `omits’ close to 40% of serious crimes committed over the last six months, serious crimes that are actually reported elsewhere by … the LAPD! The Department officially reported 52,000 serious crimes between January and June of this year. The map shows 33,000. 19,000 crimes went missing. That’s a lot of missing numbers. That map has some pretty big holes.

From South Africa to the United States, and beyond, some numbers are abandoned, others are abducted.

In Rangoon, Aung San Suu Kyi is a guest of the State, in Insein Jail. She counts. Sunday July 5 marked the 5000th day of her incarceration.

In Uttar Pradesh, or UP, in India, Roma counts, too. She’s Number One, the first woman in the state to be charged under the National Security Act. She’s accused of consorting with Naxalites, of being a terrorist, a dangerous woman. There have been no incidences of insurgent violence where Roma works and lives. There has been “a silent revolution”. Women from over 500 villages have occupied over 20,000 hectares of forest land and have established farming cooperatives. Without committing an act of violence. But Roma is a member of the National Forum of Forests People and Forest Workers, she has worked and lived with tribals in UP for twenty some years, she is a writer, a researcher, an activist who calls for democratic dialogue, a woman who supports tribal women, social justice, peace. She says she has lost count of the number of accusations and arrests. She has never been successfully prosecuted.

In Zimbabwe, Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, is also counting. Having been abducted and disappeared last year, she now counts the number of times the government of Zimbabwe lies in order to keep her in prison or under the formal threat of imprisonment. At the end of June, state prosecutor Fatima Maxwell admitted that indeed Mukoko had been abducted by state security agents, and that the abduction was illegal. According to government testimony, at least three rights were violated: the right to liberty, the protection of the law, and the right to freedom from torture. A week later, State Security Minister Sydney Sekeramayi denied it all, said no rights were violated. Jestina Mukoko is counting the lies and mapping the spaces where rights used to be. Some are abandoned, some are abducted. We keep trying to count, we keep losing count, we keep counting.

We are in a map of the countless. In Iran, for example, journalist, feminist Zhila Bani Yaghoub was arrested, along with her husband, Bahman Ahmadi Amooy. They were taken to Evin Prison. Yaghoub has written about, and for, women’s rights in Iran for years. The Nobel Women’s Initiative expressed concern “for the safety of Zhila, her husband and the countless other Iranian activists and protesters currently being detained in Iran.” Countless. The numbers are countless. Not because they are so many, although they are many. They are countless because the tally is forbidden. How many lives lost, how many acts of violence, how many rights lost, how many mourners?

Mairead Maguire, Cynthia McKinney, Derek Graham, were among a small boatload of 21 people and humanitarian aid, toys and building supplies and medicine, headed for Gaza, epicenter of the countless. The Israeli Navy took the boat and hijacked it to Israel, where the crew and passengers were detained, mostly in Ramle Prison. Two days later, Maguire, Graham and McKinney were deported. According to Maguire, “Gaza is like a huge prison, but—because its borders are closed. The sea pass into Gaza, which has been closed for over forty years by the Israeli government—we are only the seventh ship to get in to the port of Gaza that tried to break the siege.…And also farmers—fishermen, who try to go out without—in about twelve miles to fish for their families, are shot up and have been killed by the Israeli navy in that area. So, Gaza is a huge occupied territory of one-and-a-half million people who have been subjected to collective punishment by the Israeli government…. It is also tragic that out of ten million Palestinians of a population, almost seven million are currently refugees out in other countries or displaced within their own country, particularly after the horrific massacre by Israeli jet fighters after just earlier this year. Twenty-two days Israel bombarded Gaza, Gazan people, civilians.” 40 years, seven ships, twelve miles, 1.5 million people, 10 million Palestinians, 7 million refugees and displaced persons, 22 days of bombing. Countless. Not infinite, not insuperable, not unimaginable. Simply imprisoned, behind walls and barriers. How many abductions, how many abandonments?

In Ramle Prison, Cynthia McKinney met African women refugees, women who had “arrived…in a very difficult way”. Those countless women wait to be counted. In immigration detention centers around the world, countless women and children and men wait for the fog of their war to dissipate, for the fiddling to stop, for a new set of maps and tallies, and cartographers and accountants.

 

(Photo Credit: CJP)

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