The writer seeks a job as a cleaner on Twitter – Society

“My ad was not a call for mercy and alms, nor did I want to present myself as a victim, it is a call for solidarity and empathy that our society lacks, and my attempt to say some important things about the precarious work of women and the position of writers in Serbia “.

Photo: Media Center

This is what the writer Dragoslava Barzut points out for Danas on the occasion of her “advertisement” for apartment cleaning services, which she published to allow the completion of her book.

His post on Twitter: “Folks, if you need to clean up your apartment or office, take me. I can do it right (with environmental media). And you will help me finish the new collection of stories that I am writing,” prompted numerous comments and caught the attention of the media.

Dragoslava responds that she does not want “the media to exploit her and extract the full potential of the victim” from her ad, but to point out what she wrote in her books and what she defended throughout her career: precarious work of the women, inequality and lack of solidarity.

– I have nothing against the term “victim”, that is not an ugly word and we must accept that we are victims. Being a victim is not a shame either (we are victims of patriarchy every day, for example) but it also hurts us when the media plays sensationally only on that card because this society condemns the victims and rejects them, dehumanizing them and reducing them only to their role of victims. . This society is sacrificing its victims, concludes Barzut.

Dragoslava Barzut is a writer, feminist, fighter for the rights of women and the LGBT population.

She is the author of the collection of stories “Golden Bullet” (2012) and the novel “Paper Disco Balls” (2017). She also prepared “Decent Life”, a collection of lesbian stories from the former Yugoslavia.

For the novel, she received the “Andjelka Milić” award, she was also awarded for stories, as well as for her activist work.

The United States Embassy presented him with an award for his contribution to reducing discrimination and violence against LGBT + people in 2017.

She was active in Labris, a lesbian human rights organization in Belgrade, and is the founder of the Association “Let It Be Know!”, Which deals with violence and discrimination against LGBT + people.

For the general public it was surprising that someone with a biography like this is looking for a cleaning job, but Dragoslava explains that she is tired of the intellectual work that does not leave her enough strength to write.

It especially emphasizes that this is not a job that is a shame, nor should it be understood as charity.

– Cleaning is often understood as a job that is a “shame”, and that is reserved for the “lower” strata of society – it is a job like writing – equally human.

We may save the planet when we master this symbolic step to clean up our mess, he says.

The reactions, she says, surprised her, she received many offers, but this experience made her think of more serious solutions for the position of women writers.

– This motivated me to think about the need for a social enterprise that includes / employs exactly the women I write about in my stories, that society puts aside or erases, just as it does with writers. There are about 1,000 of them in Serbia, if we take into account the data on membership in the largest associations. The proportion of women who write is three times lower than that of men who write, although this trend is changing and is significant. However, what changes for the worse is the position of the writer in society. I do not know which of my colleagues of my generation manage to make a living from writing, a very small number of them do various crafts, more or less related. I’m not sure you can have a roof over your head and a full plate on the table every day of the year – she emphasizes.

Aida Ćorović, a human rights activist, speaks on behalf of Danas about the need to network, connect women who are in an equally bad position, and earlier this year, with a similar announcement, she equally drew attention, including the reaction of President Aleksandar Vučić.

Namely, Ćorović also announced on social media that she offers cleaning and home help services because there is no job for her as an art historian.

She said “thank you, but no thank you” to President Aleksandar Vučić’s offer of help and employment.

– There are people who want to turn this type of stories around, but I do not renounce my intention to make this problem visible and I am working on the creation of a women’s club, a network of women victims of the transition, who cannot find work to Despite the titles of foreign universities, librarians. , writers, historians and many of them have contacted me. It is devastating that the best experts are out of work, while, on the other hand, we have an illiterate hemisphere in very important positions, Ćorović emphasizes.

She points out that these are not individual cases like hers and Dragoslavin, but rather of those people who are in existential danger and are economically dependent, in addition to the knowledge and profession they have.

– That speaks to our society: the best people are on the sidelines while Vučić and the hemisphere around him are poisoning Serbia with low-quality personnel. The only solution is to connect, create support networks and point out the problem every day, keep a record of what we have noticed, says the activist.

The nurse was rejected as “overqualified” for the job of cleaning

Many women who are not publicly visible and have no one to turn to to deal with these problems. Such is the case of Milanka Ratković Delević, a nurse who, in the absence of a job for which she is qualified, maintains offices and takes care of an elderly person. Having heard about this story, he shared his experience with journalists from Danas. “I left a state company and, in the absence of a better job, I applied for a cleaning position at the Second Surgical Clinic in Belgrade. They rejected me as soon as they saw that I was a nurse by profession, even though I was willing to work below my qualifications for a living. Now I run an office and take care of my 98-year-old grandmother. I have to get by and eat ”, he confided to us.

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