Administrative assistant, secretary, proofreader, translator, dishwasher, farmer, therapist, sous chef, coordinator, nurse, researcher, writer…
I am making my list of works that may offer support in the exercise of repetitive activities, thus “freeing” someone else, who can do what they do without having to bother with the “nitty gritty”. This is a huge statement, and I will forever still love wild statements of this stature. Lots to think about.
It continues to amaze me that many people process the world quite unaware of these subtle qualities assigned to labor divisions, and quite unaware of the unexpected outcomes. The world is then divided by words such as you are a professional or you are just hobby-like enjoying yourself. The pairs continue with scientific and non, artist/dilettante, photographer, money making or not, chef or cook, civilian and thus exempt from bombing and what? armed uniformed soldier? and so on… In my observations, at least in this society where I now live, making money and being “successful”, both by the ability to make money or to be seen and admired, to make an imprint for posterity (?) are all very positive signs.
For the sake of this writing, I am restricting myself first to secretarial/assistant work, a plague in my own personal life. I vowed early on never to be a secretary to no one, but the plague, the curse followed me. Bilingual, trilingual, with multiple degrees yet still viewed as a secretary, an assistant of sorts. 1
So, now, in my seventies, I have sharpened my senses of humor and feel like I might be able to tackle this side of why women are denied voice of their own through our many known internalized matrixes. And why folks who hear voices are not quite welcome in most quarters of what has been commonly labeled the West. Uniformity of rule and personal silence govern life, for example, here, in the U.S.
Typing is a most interesting example of uniformity and conformity. And so is ASDFG/asdfg, for sure, the winning typing school matrix for the keyboard. It is properly called QWERTY/qwerty, from the first row, but I like the asdfg version better. Yes, I know things may have shifted since then, but still, my keyboard offers me the same visual enticements from when I was about seventeen… a mere sixty some years ago?
One popular but possibly apocryphal[2]: 162 explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters. (In English, of course!)
Uniformity, speed and efficiency as the key to advancement! The universe is immense and we deserve to inhabit IT!2
Back then I enlisted in typing schools, I tried, I typed! For years, I tried. At seventeen, my first job as an intern at a newspaper required it. I learned to type with three fingers though, quite fast, almost always got the job done but I did not quite ever get the gist of asdfg/qwerty
I realized early on that the ability to lend assistance became synonymous with female help. I refused to lend it and I still hear today loud echoes of female nurture, male doer… Movements yes, but not necessarily gendered.
Slowly, in my now long life, I have been practicing many other languages, other than the asdfg based ones… amazing to consider that our brains have been quite brainwashed by this peculiar invention… in less than one hundred years… or that we have created powerful rituals around this peculiar sequence of symbols and adopted them as accepted language…not quite pausing to consider…
Then I find a printed copy of a letter I wrote and never mailed to a dear friend, from way back and I retype it.
July 14, 2005
La Chute de la Bastille, somewhere on the road, in a very hot day in July, Eastern Shore, Maryland
Dear M.
When I was a child of ten, maybe of eight, I asked my father to bring me gifts back from his trips. They were not usual, his trips, but they were exotic ones. Once he left us for more than a month, the five of us, to go hunting spotted wild cats and alligators in the Lower Xingu, south of the Amazon. I remember him coming back and I have the scar to prove it, deep cut on my left knee, now barely a split on a brown spot where a hair grows.
But then, that 2 inch wide cut bled and hurt, when he came back from the jungles and I bounced against the front bumper of the black Citroen, running from the games in the backyard, racing up to the front, to the tiled sidewalk, granite gray cobblestone road to cheer him, the hunter back with an alligator skin body mounted on the roof track, larger than the car. And from inside the backseat and from the trunk there came out wild beige cats and black and white ones, the “onças pintadas”, almost dried, glassy eyed and tanned by now. Yellow macaw feathers, exquisite yellow orange green headdresses, deadly spears and a cooler full with fish.
I remember my mother asking at once, with her stern face: “How were they killed? In anger? How long ago? What did you use as bait?”
And what I know now is that I must record these stories that keep me sometimes an insomniac at night. I simply must find a way to do so.
Then, I was so very proud of my father who typed one hundred and twenty words per minute on a manual typewriter. I would gather all my school friends to watch the phenomena: we would crowd around the blond teak table in the sala de visitas, the formal small front room, dedicated to important gatherings and guests (like Santa Klaus, in earlier years).
And then we would sit very quiet, no command needed. My father, “Seu Erico”, with a twinkle and a happy smile would say “Betch you cannot do this. Watch me! I am the best secretary the world ever knew! “
“Aposto que vocês não podem fazer isso! Presta atenção! Sou o melhor secretário que o mundo jamais conheceu!”
So, he would hunch over the manual Corona, like a crow or like a wizard, crunch and pounce on the round green keys, like a king. My father, the licensed bookkeeper, would type 120 words a minute, not looking at the keys, no mistakes, as we timed it, fuzzily, busily, happily and in awe of the mystery.
Not much else will bridge the gap, will soothe the empty space, will marry the solitude.3
Except for a few people in between, a few friends, a few people like you and the dear families that surround me this week. So, as I wait for this “extended family” of these happy non-alone days to come back from the Indian museum in D.C, I write you a long hand letter – or rather a letter intended for slow mail. An old-fashioned letter, a missive, where, in my view, I can talk about some things delicately or abrasively, but more like delicately, for quite a while. This is a letter that has the intention of filling many pages. (Usually, my estimate of the number of pages is optimistic, so don’t fret yet.)
Gabriel Garcia Marques said back in 1980 that the journals we write are road maps to sensuality – this is a very rough non literal translation, but so true. The notes we keep to ourselves are the ones that usually reveal our sensual expressions. Not just yearnings but the actual expressions. Or, if stated otherwise, our letters (the slow ones) and our journals anchor us in our sensual worlds.
It is such a lovely moment of quiet happiness between the end of the day and the arrival of the family with news from the brand new Native American museum and with gifts, they told me on the cell phone, as they got to Annapolis.
When my father came back from his seldom trips, he brought back gifts. Key chains, tiny mirrors, trinkets traded with the Indians for their craft, leftovers from the trip. So, still today it makes me feel filled when I ask people to bring me back gifts. The people can be strangers, that is fine. It is the asking for the gifts and sometimes the actual gifts that count,
so, as I write this letter, I ask you, when you get back bring me gifts…
Wishing you well in your journey passing through the poetic Delaware Water Gap!
Love
E.
Many, many years later I sat next to Malidoma Some, teacher from Burkina Faso, and we chatted, while waiting for the river ferry to takes us to the mainland, near Porto Seguro, in Bahia and our destinations. He told me he was soon to go home to Africa and his Dagara people, in Burkina Faso, in an invitation from the elders of his community to participate in an initiation, where he would be granted the keys to the kingdom of the wild beasts. The wild animals that had been taken to a safe place in some realm of heaven, so as to protect them from the ravages on earth…
That conversation left a deep imprint in me, it was another moment of deep quiet happiness, because the large animals were in my dreams before I went to Africa myself, much before that conversation. It was a place of danger, but it was also a place where I felt safe, in their company. 4
Most amazing for me is to realize that the nitty gritty, like the details of Malidoma’s trip to Dagara land in Burkina Faso and my continuing immersion in the world of dreams is what matters… the gift of typing fast, and the gift of slowing down… the daily gift of creative attention… the nitty gritty of love freed of expectations?…
Of course I understand one can change one’s view and filter it, that is the current cultural lore. But my living sense is that underneath the skins of it all, there are deep dark rivers of divisions…
QWERTY refers to the first six letters on the upper row of the keyboard. The key arrangement was devised by Christopher Latham Sholes, whose Type-Writer, as it was then called, was first mass-produced in 1874. Since that time, it has become what may be the most ubiquitous machine-user interface of all time.
I realize now that my father had just died, at 85, when I wrote this letter.
Somé said his name, Malidoma, means "friend of the enemy/stranger."
Erica, it not just speaks, but shrieks, to my command of only English that it has never once occurred to me that ASDFG is so utterly colonial. As though other languages have no place at all. What a thing to finally learn! Also noted the farmer among your list of skills. Of course. Thank you!
Another written WOW.