“Through life’s little stories, I come to recite my rhymes.
Under the rising sun of Santos, I get ready to take a shower.
Always willing to not surrender to the charms
of all the good things that only come to those who wait and believe.
I don’t believe, so I quickly lose hope.
But in the daily toil, I know those who suffer.
I wash dishes, make the meals. My salary goes as fast as it comes.
‘Study, little girl’ they used to tell me.
I did, but I’m here. I don’t understand.
I had many job opportunities.
Cook, cleaner —
Why didn’t anyone hire me to work at the mall?
I don’t understand.
I worked so hard to pay for a secretary course,
but I didn’t even go into an office.
Oops! Sorry! I made a mistake.
I did go in! To clean everything and wash the bathroom.
Days go by, months fly,
years go by too, and here I am in the same situation.
M-A-I-D: maid!
If it was a personal choice, fine.
I have several friends in that situation who already accepted it. Not me!
I want to conquer new places. Please, sir, give me an opportunity!
And he tells me,
‘Go straight down the hallway, then turn left,
and enter that little room; the broom is waiting for you.
Welcome!'”
I wrote this poem in 2011, and I will tell you why I did it.
I came here today to talk about the success of “Me, the Maid,”
the Facebook page I created.
It started in July 2016. That’s right, this year.
It’s not even four months old.
How did I create it? It was not planned.
I was at home, on vacation, and due to the daily rush,
we don’t often get to think of or see all our accomplishments in life.
One day, in my life’s hustle and bustle,
laying down on my couch, I remembered all that I had achieved.
My dream was to live by the sea, and today I live close to the shore.
While dreaming of all I achieved, other memories came to my mind too,
memories of my time as a maid.
I use Facebook as a diary,
where I post everything that happens.
My mom even argues with me, “Girl, you put everything on Facebook!”
“That’s right, mom, it’s my new diary.”
So I decided to share everything that came to my mind
of the seven years I worked as a maid.
I told everyone,
“Listen, I just remembered some stories I’m going to start posting on Facebook,
using the hashtag #EuEmpregadaDoméstica, me the maid,
so, in case others had already experienced the same thing, they can share theirs,
and then I can read what everybody wrote.”
Always talking about the past.
In less than 24 hours, it went surprisingly viral!
And soon after, I posted my first story.
My first story was about my last job as a maid in the city of Santos.
That was in 2009.
I was hired as a cook.
The lady of the house didn’t let me eat the food I prepared for them.
I had to bring my own silverware, couldn’t use their glasses to drink,
nor use their bathroom.
There was a maid’s bathroom in the house, but one day, it was out of order,
and I had to spend nine hours without using the bathroom.
And all that came from a person that said I was always treated as family.
From the day I shared that first story online, it went viral.
And I felt the need to create the page, since I started receiving so many of them!
I thought I was going to get old stories, and not current ones, of 2016.
The page is almost four months, as I said,
it has over 4,000 entries and emails telling such stories.
I was interviewed by the press, national and international,
BBC London, TV DW from Germany, and several others.
I was shocked when I talked to those journalists on Skype,
because all of them were very touched
when I started to talk about the situation of the maids here in Brazil.
So, after they pulled themselves together, I started to tell them about the stories.
Because the truth is that domestic labor outside Brazil has a different symbolism.
Maids are more valued there, they earn on an hourly basis,
totally different from our country.
I receive in my page job advertisement too that I called abusive advertisement.
For example,
an advert that I read was for a person to work Monday through Friday,
from 8 am to 6 pm, earning BRL 380.
Daily? No. Weekly? More than that. Monthly.
Earning BRL 380 per month. That’s our condition here in Brazil.
There are still maids today going through those circumstances.
There are some that are not allowed to eat and don’t get any meal voucher either.
Many of them cannot use the bathroom,
and suffer all the atrocities that I always mention online.
However, for those seven years, there were many stories of oppression,
except in one house, where I found what I call “humane treatment,”
and that was Regina’s.
As soon as I got in the house, I started cleaning, as I usually did,
and I went into a room that had a huge library.
I’ve always liked reading, but books, even today, are very expensive.
My mom as a maid and my dad as a postman couldn’t afford buying the books I wanted.
There I was, leafing through the books, so excited to see so many of them.
That became a daily practice.
What did I do?
I arrived at her house, organized all quickly,
set aside half an hour “to clean” the shelf, right?
and there I sat, enjoying those books.
To my surprise, Regina came in the room.
I was nervous, maybe pale, and I started to cry.
I was very young and I didn’t know much about life.
And after all I’d gone through before, I became very nervous.
So, she sat by me and asked, “What are you doing?”
I said, “Sorry, I started dusting here and I saw there was a book and… bang!”
And I was really nervous and she said, “Are you interested in studying?”
I said, “Yes, my dream is to become a history teacher.
I’ve read many books since I was a girl. I want to understand the world’s history.”
She recommended me some texts,
that I also read when I started college in 2009.
So that’s what I call “humane treatment.”
In 2009, juggling college and housekeeping started to be very hard for me.
Was everything okay just because I was in college?
No, I had payments due every month.
I have to thank some professors and several classmates,
who helped me, summarizing some texts,
right before getting in class to take the exams,
because it’s very difficult to study and work really hard at the same time.
For those who think that I was first at speaking up about those issues,
exposing the dirty laundry of the traditional Brazilian family,
and showing that slavery still exists,
that there are women who work in similar conditions to those of slavery,
I tell them I was not the first to do so, I just used the Internet as a tool.
There once was on this Earth, in Brazil, a woman called Laudelina de Campos Melo,
a black woman like me, who, in the 60s, created the first union for maids.
She was called by the press at the time “the horror of the mistresses.”
And when I talk about all this and tell some of the stories,
people say, “Goodness, this is really heavy stuff.”
Yes, it is. I came here today to annoy all of you with it,
because I believe that when we get annoyed we get to change some things.
Nobody keeps on walking with a stone in their shoe, right?
The majority of the maids in Brazil are black women, 79.6 percent,
according to the Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies in 2013.
And this cannot be the only choice for a black woman.
That place.
Is it a job like any other? Yes.
53 percent of the population here in Brazil is black,
out of which 79 percent are maids.
That kind of service cannot be hereditary for black women.
Why do I say this is a hereditary service?
My grandmother was a maid.
My mother was a maid. And I was a maid too.
When I told my mother I wanted to be a maid, she cried.
I didn’t understand why, but she knew that all she went through,
working for families in houses here in Brazil, I would go through too.
It took me quite a while to understand,
that a good-looking résumé with a picture is never that of a black woman.
When I understood that and started to send my résumé without a picture,
they started to call me, at least, for an interview.
They were always shocked! This was after I graduated.
They were shocked at my experience: internships here and there.
“Is this really you?”
“Yes, or am I a magician?”
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I always say that what used to be the master’s house in the past
is the luxurious apartments nowadays.
Who used to be the house slaves before,
and we’re talking about a past that is not much distant from us,
are the maids of today.
The modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
“She arrived, rushing, worried,
and I was nervous, because I’ve waited a long time for her to arrive.
Friday is payday.
I heard her driving the car in, the noise of the keys opening the door.
‘Goodness, the lady arrived.’
So, when I approached her, wearing my regular clothes ready to leave,
just waiting for her to pay me,
she says to me, ‘Girl, I was so busy!
I completely forgot to get your money, I’ll pay you on Monday.'”
The modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
“I raised my girl since she was little with so much love and care.
Her mom was always working and didn’t have much time for her.
Through all her needs and sufferings, it was me who was always there for her.
I just wanted to see her getting married. That’s all.
But, unfortunately, I wasn’t invited to the wedding.
As I’m bold, I put on my best clothes, and went to church.
I hid there and I could see her marry.”
Because the modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
“It’s Christmas Day.
I see the lady’s family having fun, everybody’s happy.
And I felt so sad, because it’s Christmas and I cannot be with my family.”
Because the modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
“The worst moment in my life is when my employer goes to work.
He ‘goes to work’: takes his wife to hers, he tells her he’s going to his workplace,
however, he drives back home to harass me.
The only choice that I had was to make copies of all the keys.
If I’m going to clean a room, I lock the door.
If I’m cleaning the bathroom, I lock the door.
And that’s how I can run away from his harassment.
When I say I’m quitting my job, my friends say to me:
‘Girl, hold off, you make BRL 1,800 a month.
You won’t make that much anywhere else.’
And I hold off, because I also left my children up in the Northeast,
and they need that money.”
Because the modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
“I just arrived at my new job. I brought my ice cream tub.
Because I use my ice cream tub to pee.
There I was, in the service area, urging to urinate,
I took my ice cream tub and I went number one.
The lady saw me, I was very afraid.
She started crying and said to me, ‘Why are you using the ice cream tub?
Use the bathroom! What’s this? What’s going on?’
‘No! May I use your bathroom!?
I couldn’t use the bathroom in the other houses I worked for,
and there was none for the maid, that’s why I brought the tub.'”
Because the modern slave quarter is the maid’s room.
I’m here today to go against the statistics.
For some people, my place would be cleaning,
when I told the lady I worked for that I wanted to study,
Do you know what she told me?
She said, “You have to be happy where you are, girl.
Listen: wasn’t your grandma a maid?
Wasn’t your mom also a maid? Your family was predestined to serve.
So, you should be happy serving.”
I’m here to go against those statistics: A black, fat, suburban woman and rapper.
(Applause)
A black, fat, suburban woman, teacher and rapper.
By my side,
(Applause)
because I’m not alone here today,
behind me, there are six million maids,
that should be here by my side, and one day they will.
Everything that I do, the restlessness of my life,
without thinking about money, because I don’t have any,
is just to know that six million maids are being represented here now,
although many are not watching me, but they will, because they’re cleaning.
This is what I want to trigger now.
Everyone here probably has several employers, and some maids.
If each of you takes this idea of talking and humanizing relationships,
we are going to decrease inequality a little bit in this country.
In other countries, some maids are able to work and study,
while here being maid is like being a private property.
We see that in the airports: Why do babysitters have to dress in white?
Is it a uniform? Yes. To identify her in the house.
Doesn’t the employer know that she is the babysitter?
It’s to make sure everyone’s place is very clear in this country.
So, here I am against the statistics, and I’m not alone.
I’m representing six million maids.
(Applause)
African greetings. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
”
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