CHERYL DAMON

When I started posting the transcripts entitled ‘My Mother’s Voice’, based on an interview of her life as an ordinary domestic worker from age 14 to 25, it was the first time I had worked up the courage to reread and share her voice.

As I typed the words, I could clearly hear her voice, see her demeanour, and the honour she felt to be seen – to tell her story for this history project.

The abject poverty that compelled her to be a breadwinner for her family is unimaginable to many of us with privilege.

My mother’s home was a reed and mud hut with cowdung floors, no running water and of course no electricity.

As the eldest child, she had to get up first make a woodfire and brew coffee. These were the days of the Great Depression and extreme rightwing Afrikaner whites.

I deliberately did not interpret, analyse or comment on any of the six parts. What it evoked in me was an incredible fury and regret on my mother’s behalf.

She was so conditioned by the Dutch Reformed Church that it never really struck her how she was violated, conditioned and robbed of all opportunities.

The small gestures of her well-off Jewish employers (gifts of sweets and cigarettes) were experienced as care. Their interference in grown women’s relationships, as concern. Imagine the temerity of an employer asking her to stay working for her until my mother grew old.

This is one of many things that enrage me – that domestic workers are still expected to leave their families in the country (small towns) and become the ‘girl’ who has no identity or visibility. Some employers don’t care to know about these women’s lives.

The work my mother did was beyond exhausting – from dark to dark – and these oppressors seemed to dream up extra work for the ‘girls’. There are still people who use the terms ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ to refer to our parents in their employ.

We scream about micro-aggressions when the reality for many poor and working class people is macro aggression.

Humiliation, rape and sexual harassment, verbal and physical abuse, being called on their first names by toddlers and the humiliation of being admonished in front of guests. I witnessed a white guest house owner swatting a grown woman on the buttocks after she mixed up the linen. Another one let her guesthouse staff drink out of old cups stored with the detergents. This was 2006. These women and men are still invisible, still slaves. Do not talk to me about ‘getting over it and moving on.’ There is too much trauma that has been hastily patched up with a band-aid. The wounds cannot be allowed to fester any longer.

On being an outsider and turning things on their heads

I read a very dignified and poignant response written to bullies last night, and it reminded me of the merciless bullying I endured throughout much of my school life.

In her post, the actor referred to mean-spirited comments about her physical appearance. It reminded me acutely of how hard I had to work to conform, to be palatable and compliant.

My father decided to retire early from his teacher’s position and move us from the beautiful Northern Cape to the barren, though acceptably colourful, forced village built on sea sand. The place was called Portland and it was nowhere near a port. I would later discover that apartheid spatial planners took particular pleasure in naming townships like Tafelsig (versus Table View), Rocklands, Eastridge, Westridge, Lentegeur quite ironically.

There were no ridges. Everything was a flat, artificial landscape called Mitchell’s Plain. The same irony applies to townships across the Cape Flats.

We arrived in this foreign landscape in 1982. I was about one term into Standard 2 (Grade 4) and could speak very little English.

To compound my otherness and ripen me for incessant cruelty, envy and a push to conform, my mother had kindly donated my old school uniform to a needy child in my hometown. I was dressed in very good quality, gently worn clothes myself. She had thought it would be alright for me to wear normal dresses to school until she could afford to buy me a uniform.

So here I was, gauche, wearing my hair loose back from a prominent forehead and looking relatively mature. I was mistaken for a teacher at first.

I learnt very quickly that this rough primary school was going to kill me if I allowed it. My forehead, which I first hid with all manner of artifice, became the most visible feature these foreigners used to take me down a few pegs. The way I carried myself, my mature appearance and calm demeanour rubbed them the wrong way.

I learnt to conform in this world of wild, hostile strangers. I wore my uniform, slowly started to eat English one word at a time, and flipped my bullies into my allies.

The girls were still bitches and the boys were still pigs who either made fun of my beautiful, prominent African forehead, or they sexualised me. I was touched, tickled, ogled.

But in a few years, early in my high school career, I subverted their narrative of me. I chopped off all my hair to become unattractive to men and boys – of course that never works. I used my agency to switch from Afrikaans medium to English medium instruction. I knew I only wanted to study at the forbidden University of Cape Town.

So I became an English first language speaker at school and with my friends. At home we continued to speak Afrikaans. It was no hardship for me to immerse myself completely into fiction, biographies, autobiographies, non-fiction and English ‘classics’.

At 15 I was back to being a rebel who loved Radio 5 – Alex Jay and Barney Simon played electropop music and I walked around with Pet Shop Boys, A-Ha and Depeche Mode pushing their way into my head… the gateway drug to Sinead, Morrisey, The Christians, Crowded House. I reinvented myself completely.

This is a peek through the window into Being Cheryl Damon (I am quite aware of the hubris but really don’t care):

assimilate, subvert the weapons used against you, and write your own identity.

Keep questioning everything. Use your outsider status to live in many worlds. Your adaptability will serve you well.