The market for migrant domestic labor is significant in Lebanon. Around 250,000 African and Asian domestic workers live in the country to “serve” four million Lebanese. This market started growing in the 1960s when the state created the legislation allowing brokers to establish offices and recruit girls and women from neighboring countries for domestic work. The market further expanded with the start of the civil war in 1975, as more and more Asian women came or were trafficked into the country for domestic work. To legislate their presence, Lebanon imported a racialized and racist legal framework from the Gulf states, dating back to the era of the British occupation. Known as the Kafala system, it effectively strips a domestic worker of all her rights from the minute she enters the country, placing her under the full guardianship of her employer.

I decided to approach this project on the domestic labor market from the employers’ point of view, that is, we Lebanese. I wanted to examine the functioning of the market itself, which has become part of Lebanese society. Most importantly, to look at how we, the employers, in collusion with the recruitmen offices actively turn domestic workers into commodities. This insidious transformation of human beings into market goods happens openly and across various sectors of society, including among the real estate developers and architects who have designed the "maid’s rooms " inside our homes over the years. Rooms that are increasingly cramped and that have always been tucked away to disappear the domestic worker--and her work--as much as possible from the rest of the household. And all of this is upheld by the state’s various institutions and security services, which safeguard and provide legal backing for our ability to exercise total authority over the lives of domestic workers.

I wanted to try and hold this entire social structure accountable for the way it not only institutionalizes but also normalizes, in the most daily, banal ways, gender and racial discrimination. To do this, I tried to make visible what we keep trying to make invisible: the overwhelming presence of the domestic worker in all the details of our home and family lives, the way she is absented and concealed at the same time, the complex relationship of domination with which we deal with migrant domestic workers in our societies. Domination not only from a class position but through a racial super-relationship, in which we embody the role of "the white man" vis-a-vis the Black communities in our midst.

There is a dire need for new narratives and research to keep track of the transformations in the domestic labor market in Lebanon right now. The indoor quarantine imposed by the pandemic and the current--and ongoing--economic collapse in the country are having profound effects not just on society but on the hundreds of migrant workers who maintain its domestic functioning.

Maher Abi Samra
June 2021