Strike a Prose: The Sweat of Their Face- Inspired Creative Writing

Strike a Prose: The Sweat of Their Face- Inspired Creative Writing

As part of my New Year's commitment to myself, I attended the Strike a Prose writing workshop at the National Portrait Gallery. This year, I resolved to do more creative writing, so this workshop was a great fit. The prompts were paired with a gallery exhibit called The Sweat of their Faces, which highlights work and laborers.

As the teacher pointed out, portraiture, historically, was for the extremely wealthy only. This exhibit elevates workers (many of them people of color) and centers them in portraiture, paintings, and photography. It brought up many great questions and discussions about the nature of work, how we value some labor while denigrating other types, why and how work is tied to 'dignity'- overall a wonderful and thought provoking event.

We were given a series of prompts to write on, and roughly 20 minutes to write. I wanted to share some of the things I am especially pleased with. They appear here, unedited, as they were written in the same of 20 minutes.


  

Inspiration: Sharecropper by Elizabeth Catlett, Portrait of Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, Poster of Rosie the Riveter, in the order they appear. 

Women have always carried nations- first, literally in the womb, then on their shoulders as laborers, as quiet voices in the background, as “civilizing forces,” and finally as leaders.

It is exhausting the to The Work- capital T, capital W, with so little acknowledgement, let alone thanks.

Our experiences differ, with age, with race, with wealth, with ability, with (dare I say, in barely a whisper) sexuality- privileges. Our personal and cultural baggage weighs us down and simultaneously lifts some of us up.

The sharecropper and Migrant Mother share a knowing look, a side-eye at Rosie, because they know- have always known- that work is a must. A fact. Not a privilege, a right, or an adventure, but a simple fact of life.

Unlike Rosie, - who seems up the task of manual, physical, outside-the-domestic-sphere labor- the Migrant Mother and the Sharecropper know that labor, work, sweat, is not something you put on and take off as you please.

Despite their differences, lives lived never crossing paths, the struggles written on the faces of a Depression-era mother, the shadow of a smirk on Rosie’s face, the dignity peeking under the hat of the Sharecropper- these are the wise, struggling, suffering, proud faces of national history.

Their work, their labor, dignified because they are dignified. Their work, powers the nation, through crisis and through peace.

These women, real names forgotten, misplaced in history, are power.

They are not power-ful. They are power itself. 

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Inspiration: “Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills,” by Ramiro Gomez

She cleans the same shower twice a week, drenching it in harsh chemicals her client- boss- would never dare expose his delicate hands to. She reaches high, balancing precariously on her upturned bucket, and down to her feet, over and over, until the shower is spotless and her back aches.  The work is boring, monotonous, thankless, low-paying to top it off, but she does it all the same.

Sometimes she daydreams about the joy and pain she’ll inevitably feel when her children graduate and leave her. Somedays she conspires to drown her boss in industrial solvent. She has a lot of time to think; she’s counted all the shower tiles over and over- 2,552.

Her boss is not a bad man, but a thoughtless one, which pains her. She always puts others first- once her husband, now her children, and for over 40 hours a week, her clients and their reputations as clean, civilized people.

Her boss, if he is home, which she can rarely tell the difference, only speaks to her to issue instructions about things outside her realm. Never a pleasantry.

“That plant, miss, senorita, is exotic. From Bali. Muy expensive. Be careful not to overwater it. Do you understand? Com-pren-de?” He asks, dragging out and exaggerating every syllable.

“Yes,” she responded simply. Inside she smirked. She wondered if he knew it had never been her job to water the plants, and that she’d never, in three years, given it a drop of water.

And so, maybe it was muy expensive and imported from Bali, or Bulgaria, she knew not. As a housecleaner, she simply dusted it and moved on.

She may be a widow, a single mother of two, lacking a college education, barely scraping by- but at least she knew a fake plant from a real one. 

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Write about American atitudes towards work and labor. 

America has, since it’s inception, a complicated relationship with work. The Puritan work ethic suggests work- manual work- is of the highest esteem. Godly. To be idle is to be evil.

On it’s face, it’s black and white: work good, idle bad. All with all black and white situations, there are infinite truths found in the shades of grey. If work is the ultimate good, then why, historically, is a plantation owner seen as more valuable and loved than all his slaves? Why is the factory owner, the CEO, countless times wealthier than the total of his (and it’s usually his) employees?

We value the idea of work- the idea of a hard day’s work- but denigrate and discriminate against those who pick our food and clean our bathrooms. The manual labor so elevated by literate thinkers, often carried out by black and brown and poor bodies today, is talked of as a punishment for poor choices, rather than the inevitable outcome of strict cultural rules and policies passed down from high.

If work, in and of itself, was ever nationally praised for anything other than grandstanding, than times have indeed changed. Instead of valuing and celebrating work- hard work, that keeps one honest- we value wealth as the appearance of work.

Instead, we conflate wealth and the trappings of success- including idleness- with work. We elevate, we want to model Tim Ferriss’ (I call bullshit) 4 Hour Work Week. We elect slovenly, lazy men who have never done “hard work” to the highest office in the nation. And what’s more, we tell ourselves that these men are relatable men, common men, whose lives should be desired, praised for doing admittedly little, while punishing those who do “honest work.”

We have convinced ourselves and each other that perpetual idleness is 1. Achievable and 2. Desirable, when it is not quite either. So, even if we do value the act of work, we denigrate and devalue the bodies that do it. We have always had such a complicated relationship. 

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The final topic was to link the art to a family story. I saw bits and pieces of my father reflected in the portraits of manual laborers. 

My father was a laborer. A handyman. His work was sometimes boring, dangerous, dirty, or some combination of the above. He was salt of the Earth, Levi’s jeans, blue collar- well, no collar, really.

Black and Milds, The Three Stooges. College football on Saturdays, fishing on Sundays.

He came home paint-spattered, sore, sometimes injured. Work ebbed and flowed, but so long as it flowed, he never rarely took a day off.

If he were a painting in an art gallery, he’d look stoic and dignified. Proud. A true hard-working American entrepreneur and hero.

I see that, he was often those things. What the portrait would miss, however, was his tempestuousness. That flash of rage in his eyes that had me scared before he uttered a word. The way his relatively short stature grew larger than our four walls could contain, voice booming louder than God’s when he was upset, which was often and impossible to predict.

A small mess or perceived disrespect could turn this seemingly statuesque man into something wild and frightful, uncontrollable, and convinced everyone on earth was out to purposefully and cruelly wrong him. 

The portrait could never his true nature, outside of his nine to five.