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 12^th 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)