It is another Brazil that unveils the book of Preta-Rara. An intimate Brazil, yet without any secret for the population: the life of the servants within families of the middle and higher social classes. The Latin American giant is the country with the largest number of domestic workers in the world, with nearly 6.4 million people, according to the last census, in 2018.
Seventy-eight percent of them are black women who, like Preta-Rara, have had no other professional choice than to take up the broom that their mother and grandmother had held before them. . His book, Eu, empregada doméstica ("I, domestic worker," Letramento, untranslated), is the culmination of anger turned into a fight by this 32-year-old woman. Anger that she told in 2016 on social networks, and that has brought to light the realities of the condition of domestic workers in Brazil.
"Three years ago, while I was cooking at home, I remembered one of my former bosses who forbade me to cook for myself and eat in her dishes. I told this on Facebook because all the little humiliations that a housekeeper has to endure made me angry. At the end of my story, I put a hastag, # euempregadadoméstica, and I received hundreds of testimonials telling me a lot of abuse. I created a Facebook page to collect and publish them anonymously ", says Preta-Rara, whose real name is Joyce Fernandes, who has been domestic for seven years.
Households to pay for studies
"I did not want to work as a housekeeper, but when I was 18, I sent CVs everywhere and never got an answer. One day, a friend advised me to remove my photo and there, indeed, I was contacted to offer me an interview. The problem is that I could not hide my black woman's physique, explains Joyce Fernandes.
She resolves to make households to live, but also to pay for herself at a private university to become a professor of history, a passion transmitted by a teacher. "The books were expensive for my family, but one of my bosses had a beautiful library. I cleaned up quickly to read for half an hour. This is where I read the biography of the communist activist Olga Benário written by the journalist Fernando Morais. "
