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Or, A Class Apart

There truly is no rest for the weary - last week was so exhausting I’m battling against the clock to write this (thank goodness for the constraint that is the Pomodoro!) but here we go.

Last week, I started and finished The Promise. I usually talk about the books I’m reading at the very end but this ties in with the thing I’m thinking about this week so we’re breaking from tradition a bit. The synopsis: the memsahib makes her husband promise that he’ll give the maid the house she lives in. Time passes, the members of the family die, the promise remains unfulfilled. Spanning 30 years, it captures ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa through the experiences of the Swart family (think of it, a white family named Black dispossessing a Black woman in a Black-majority country. Damon Galgut, you clever man) and those around them.

Last week was also the week when there was a story on South African Twitter about a woman who would steal her domestic workers’ wages by claiming they’d stolen or otherwise misappropriated items (I love that word ‘misappropriated’ so much, for the work it does in reframing corruption in Kenya. Language, eh?). Folks used it as a jumping off point to talk about the treatment of domestic workers, their pay, and - this is what really caught my eye - what to call them. ‘Helper’ was what folks seemed to reach for but the legal term, it seems, is ‘domestic worker’ with all that entails - minimum wage, benefits etcetera.

So it made me think about history and how we’re all living in it and in the afterlives of what came before - slavery, colonialism, apartheid and so on. These come up when we talk about labour relations, which is to say - when we talk about class. 

This isn’t a fresh hypothesis I am positing but I thought, in reading the thread, about the ways in which classed folk and people racialised a certain way (the Venn diagram is sometimes a circle) are often the ones who write these narratives that examine class. For every Like One of the Family by Alice Childress we have what felt to me like Galgut refusing to grant Salome (she has a name!) humanity. I don’t think she gets 100 words total across the length of a book that lends itself to the minutiae of this family. As more than one person pointed out, it’s notable that the only folks who have received international acclaim (Booker, I mean a Booker) for contemplating Apartheid have been white. Much to ponder.

Reading The Promise felt disturbingly familiar for me as a person who grew up in what was once a British colony - and I’m only in the early years of my 4th decade. The small ways in which Salome is denied her humanity (the clothes she must wear, the shoes she’s not allowed, the fact that she’ll prepare elaborate meals but be expected to sup on different food, the meagre shack) were like re-reading The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré. Like in Childress’s book, there’s an intimacy - false and forced - between the help and the homeowners. But we know where the power lies and to see this reality jump from fiction to the timeline felt surreal.

To go back to who gets to tell those stories - I am reminded of M. Jayawardane’s “‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art.” which I returned to in the face of the domestic worker in South Africa conversation. The images examined speak to South Africa’s particular circumstances, but also to the ways in which the texts produced in domestic settings can be a window, a mirror, and much more besides. To have the timeline, the novel I was reading and a paper I highlighted so much as I read out passages to Mama Mike on the train when I read it in conversation with each other in the same week? What’s the word for that…

Barely finished books all of last week in the face of PMS (abolish corporeality) but I started a bunch which I hope to finish this week. The two I finished (the aforementioned The Promise and The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa) made for very different experiences and, in a week full of less than cheery non-fiction, it was a joy to wrap the week with some romance. No swimming happened, because the weather in Nairobi has been terrible. I walked to Maktaba Kuu instead (a favourite spot for fellow library lover Raul and me) leaving me with burning thighs and a full heart.

I hope you have a great week and a lovely time reading. Talk to you soon!