Chapter Four
Black and White
The violence faced by migrant domestic workers throughout Lebanon cannot be separated from the issue of racial supremacy. As much as the entire social order works to keep domestic workers invisible, their large numbers are not simply the result of an increasing need for domestic help inside individual homes. Similarly, their mistreatment is not simply the consequence of a hierarchy that values certain kinds of work above others. Instead, the oppression of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian women across the country plays a central role in creating a racial structure through which Lebanese become "white," while diverse migrants become "black."
What does it mean to have outsourced the entire infrastructure of cooking, cleaning, and caring to groups of people from different nationalities, cultures, and languages? How does a domestic worker's unfamiliarity with the Lebanese language or cultural norms make it possible for her to be treated as a total stranger, even though she is embedded in every aspect of our lives? How has it become possible to invisibilize entire populations at the same time as singling them out through racist stereotypes and abusive practices? Most importantly, how do we understand the connections between this structure of domination and popular ideas about racial difference? Even if the kafala system is reformed and domestic workers are granted their rights as workers, how will we reform this broader notion of Lebanese superiority?
The Impossibility of a Grey Piano
or
On Being a White Lebanese
Miriam Younes
“One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
(James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son: 7)
“If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as a female is even more deeply in the shadow.”
(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?: 89)
I was born in Germany in 1981, the daughter of a Lebanese father and a German mother. I had a German passport and white skin by birth. I was given a Lebanese name and surname. As I grew older, I grew some black curly hair. My mother tongue was and will always be German. I went to German kindergarten and schools. On our vacations, we traveled through Germany and Europe: the North Sea, Italy, France. As a teenager, I started to travel with my friends, camping with backpacks, by trains, bikes, and on foot – again all throughout Europe. I would not visit Lebanon until I turned nineteen. Yet, even so, the knowledge of being a “half” was present: my name, sometimes my looks, my family story. I was used to questions: where are you initially from? Do you speak Arabic? Do you visit Lebanon? And statements: Your German is very good. You don’t seem to care about Lebanon. There is a war there. You never want to go there? These questions and statements, the slight awareness of being “half,” played a minor role, like a tiny tickle, within my reality, a tiny feeling of being looked at as simultaneously inferior and exotic. A little bit of pity mixed with a sense of others’ entitlement in asking me questions, ignoring if I knew how to answer them or the insecurity and awkwardness they might produce. But maybe this is just the general feeling of a child and his/her encounters with adults? I don’t know. Have I been white or black? Switching between both? Or merging them as a shade of grey? I guess I must have been something like a white person with the slight awareness of having something black, hidden, unknown – which happened to be the truth – sometimes covered with shame, sometimes with pride, sometimes with sadness – but, in general, not a big deal in my daily childhood and teenage life. When I was nineteen, I decided to live in Lebanon. And while – in the last 17 years of traveling to and from Lebanon, partly living and working there – I am said to become more and more Lebanese, I think that since I decided to live in Lebanon, I have become a more decisive white person. White because of my passport, white because of my multiple privileges and rights (social, economic, cultural, and political), white because of my ability and capability to choose nearly every single and minor aspect of my daily life. And white because with the move to Lebanon, I used my privilege to show the willingness and courage to address the black side of me, to show it, reveal it, and discuss it. To put it out there. Therefore, I am white but no longer ashamed or guilty, neither of being allegedly or hidden black nor of representing the white, the power, and the violence of superiority. A fine art and a fine line. Of navigating between black and white? Of merging them? Of becoming grey? No, rather of playing with the black while at the same time safely and constantly confirming the white.
What is it about black and white? What is the meaning of it? And what can still be written about it today, after so much has been written about being black or white, about the power dynamics, the racism, the relation to colonialism and post-colonialism, the alleged inferiority, the fear, the anger and hatred, the terror, and the seemingly inescapability of its dynamics? What can be written after Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who, among so many others, addressed the notion from the perspective of a person of color, of a subaltern and his/her resistance to the status quo?
Why did I – nevertheless – choose to write about it once more? Partly because the notion of black and white was a constant point of discussion when the movie A Maid for Each was in process, a constant stumbling block that we repeatedly tried to discuss in a meaningful way but that ended up escaping us as we inevitably arrived at a place of “non-outcome,” or “non-solution”. Partly because those discussions reminded me of my own history of blackness and whiteness, my own attempts to overcome or integrate the two notions, mainly by my choice to live in Lebanon, which only ended in the further “whitening” of myself, the consolidation of my whiteness. And partly, because within these attempts, within my wish to integrate the two notions and sometime after the movie was finished, I stumbled across a series of incidents related to my work in Lebanon: a project with migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, that included nearly weekly meetings and daily contacts with these women, the integration of a vast network of people within this project and essentially new acquaintances, new ideas, new impulses and seemingly new friendships. Within this project, I again stumbled upon the black and the white, with all their inherent notions and dynamics. I stumbled harder than before, challenging not my whiteness but confirming it, evoking new and old feelings: shame, guilt, anger, and the constant wish to escape, to “change my skin” and/or to “change their skin.” Therefore, this story is essentially a story about myself, about me being white and whiter than before. It is also a story about Lebanon, about the white and the black in Lebanon, about their unspoken and silenced dynamics within solidarity movements and activism in Lebanon. About the relation between politically aware and progressive Lebanese and migrant domestic workers, those who in Lebanon “don’t give orders, they only receive orders”, those who are on the other side within the international division of labour, “subalterns”, invisible, silenced and inherent to the management and functioning of our society as we know it. In this vein, the article essentially poses the question: is it possible to merge the white and the black and to become grey? It essentially answers this question by saying that there is no grey; there is nothing like a grey piano that is able to make music. A piano has black and white keys. There might be different notions of black and white by using the keys differently, but, currently, they cannot merge. Once they merge in a utopian future, we still have the history of the old piano, not to be forgotten when looking at the development of the instrument.
Audio by Maher Abi Samra (in Arabic)
What is Music and What is Truth?
Of Representation and Domination
In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.’?
(Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison: 194).
“[The term subaltern} refers to those who don’t give order, they only receive orders. That comes from Antonio Gramsci, who made the word current. He was looking at people who were not, in fact, working-class folks or victims of capitalism. He was looking at people who were outside of that logic.”
(Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)
Approximately one year ago, a group of migrant domestic workers approached me with a project they wanted to implement: a day-care center for migrant domestic workers’ children and a meeting center in one of Beirut’s suburbs. They were looking for funding, and I was working for a potential donor. The project did not work out; our funding priorities were different ones, but we continued the conversation, deciding to do some workshops together and to think about other projects. We started a fruitful cooperation, different projects, hopefully, and slightly naively, contemplating what we could achieve in Lebanon. Much of this initial enthusiasm faded with time, and the project had challenges and limits that we had turned a blind eye to in the beginning.
The project took place nearly every Sunday for about 4-5 hours. It included a joint lunch, theatre activities, discussions, and workshops. All in all, it included about 30 persons, five “Lebanese,” and about 25 migrant domestic workers from different backgrounds. I remember after one of the sessions, a friend of mine who I had just integrated into the project wrote me a text message: “I wanted to tell you how much the meeting yesterday made me miss New York and all the diversity there.” I answered, “Yes, I can imagine. I loved the energy as well.” There is a lot of truth in the moment to this. The project meetings had an incredibly good energy and atmosphere. Everyone seemed happy, was loud and emotional, creating an us-space and an us-experience. Without a doubt, the migrant domestic workers enjoyed these meetings; they were grateful for the project and it gave them a space to relax, to exchange, and to express themselves. Likewise, we felt good; the project gave us new insights, new ideas, new friends, and Lebenswelten.
This is not one of the many well-documented stories of abused and mistreated migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. This is a story that started with the well-intended attempt to join forces in a struggle that aimed to address exactly these structural and individual forms of racism and discrimination dominant within Lebanese society.
A black person can easily be referred to as ‘abd, a “slave,” in a normal family conversation in Lebanon, usually, but not exclusively, by someone who is one generation older. We all have friends and relatives who do not give their “maid” the right to a day off or who make them sleep on the balcony. We hear awkward comments about those maids all the time (even within our friends’ and relatives’ circles), and we witness discrimination and abusive behavior against them on a near-daily basis on the streets and in public life. This is a different story; a story about attempts to form alliances, of solidarity and friendship, and about the unsaid within these relations and attempts. This is not a judgment or a (self-)accusation. This is also not to question the good intentions among everyone involved, those who started this project and still keep it going. This is rather about the silenced and denied power dynamics and ambivalence inherent in the encounters between “black subalterns” and “white elite”.
Not only did the Lebanese context and its cruel decision to leave migrant domestic workers from African or Southeast Asian countries without rights or societal access play out within the project, but our own power dynamics also snuck in and slowly consolidated themselves within our encounters. At first, the questions were only in my own head: “Who is talking in the meetings?”, “Who sets the agenda?” “Am I respectful enough?” “Are we listening to them enough?” “How do we approach class issues and problems? “How far do we enter their reality?” “How different is it from ours?” “How far do we talk about our mutual dependencies, our common history?” Last but not least, “How far do we voice the fact that they are black and we are white?” We are white Lebanese, not only privileged in our choices and facilities but, on a much deeper level, we have the entitlement to ask these questions, we decide what is wrong or right, it is us who own a form of collective power, us who define what needs to be represented and what form of music the piano can play.
This seemingly hidden power did not only play out in these silent questions. It started to become a reality in our encounters and communications. Within our group, power and privilege started to become visible, tangible and more and more difficult to ignore and overcome. The idea of the project was to join forces in order to represent and to resist together – an idea, a struggle, a feeling. The migrant domestic workers who had approached had been activists for their own rights for years. They stood up to speak and to represent themselves, to resist and protest. Like us in many ways. Strangely enough, our power started to become visible mainly when the others started to resist against it. Small and multiple incidents like them complaining about the weekly food we had organized, excluding us from their meetings, criticizing us for our decisions, disagreeing with us, not cleaning up after the meetings in our premises– normal incidents of conflict in group settings, but within these dynamics, they created a guilty silence among us, a notion of denial, of silence and silencing, filled by the inevitable but equally denied question of dominance and representation. Can the subaltern speak? Is she allowed to speak? Who represents? Who dominates?
We are Migrant Domestic Workers.
We Know How to Clean.
“We would never tell a Lebanese to shut up.”
(Rahil, migrant domestic worker)
“I’m your enemy. I’m good, and my parents were good but two generations do not undo thousands of years.”
(Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)
“It made me furious,
It filled me with both hatred and pity.
And it made me ashamed.”
(James Baldwin, I am not your negro: 12)
The devil lies – as usual – in the detail and visible only once we decide to not overlook it. The joint Sundays could not cover the differences in lifestyle, routines, challenges and problems that they and we were facing. They could likewise not cover the mutual dependencies and relations we had within these differences outside of our Sunday world. While we were doing the project, the husband of one of the migrant domestic workers died of a sudden heart attack in the Philippines. She not only had to borrow money to take a plane to his funeral but also to pay his outstanding hospital bills of about 6,000 USD. She was gone for 20 days, coming back as a widow and leaving behind her two teenage sons who needed her financial support and her comfort. She had to work to sustain their studies and their livelihood, talk to them daily to help them overcome their father’s death while she herself mourned a man she had hardly lived with but who had raised their two children alone while she was working in Lebanon. She had to pay back her debts.
Another migrant domestic worker, considerably older than 60, lost her job with a Lebanese family rather suddenly. She had to move out of the family’s house, and was from that moment not only without a salary but also without a roof over her head, staying with friends and with whoever gave her a place for a while. She is still in this situation. A third one had to leave her nine-year-old daughter alone in her apartment after school because the lady she was working for during the day did not want a child in her house. Sometimes she had to sleep at her employer’s house and therefore leave her daughter alone all night.
These were the stories we heard when we asked, some we did not hear. One woman from Cameroon who used to come every Sunday didn’t show up one day. When asked, we heard she got deported to Cameroon. She didn’t have legal papers and had been caught. We didn’t even know.
How did this make me feel? Shameful? Helpless? Guilty? Powerless? At times angry? Yeah, all of it, sometimes more, sometimes less. I tried to overcome it, to show my empathy, my pity and my solidarity, I tried to help. But I also tried to deny, to not listen, to forget and to stop my thoughts from going down the path of questioning how these women must feel when they see my life and me. They must feel so angry, so hateful, and so powerless given my privileges and my rights. But there was more to it than just these differences. They existed in a mutual relationship outside of the context in which we decided to join forces. Outside of this context we are totally dependent on their cheap, invisible and uncomplicated workforce; they are totally dependent on us in giving them this workforce and in using our power to be nice to them. Not only are some of the women actually cleaning the houses of people we know and taking care of children we know, they are also a vital part of how our society functions and of how we enjoy lots of our privileges. At the same time, they are dependent on our goodwill, our good intentions – be it as their employers, as their kafeels, their donors, project partners or even their friends.
At one point, I was complaining to one of the women about them not cleaning up after a meeting, reminding her to clean up next time. She looked at me with a mixture of fury, offense, and shame, saying: “Of course we will clean. We are migrant domestic workers. We know how to clean.”
“There is Only So Much
You Can Do With It…”
On making the unseen visible
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.”
(James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues: 46)
“At the bottom, the first right is the right to refuse.”
(Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)
Writing this today in 2018, a grey piano still does not exist. Despite a decade-long struggle for rights for people of color and a change of power dynamics in many political, economic, legal, and cultural contexts, the question of if the subaltern can speak is still a valid and unanswered question.
The presence of migrant domestic workers in many countries, including Lebanon, is only one example of these unjust and discriminatory structurally based power dynamics in which the notion of black and white is inherent and central. Still, there has been change, “time has made some changes in the Negro face.
Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white” in order to “thoroughly wash [the past] from the black face as it has been from ours”. We try to merge the black and the white, to join forces, find a common struggle and – subsequently – to play the piano together. A struggle which in our case means a struggle for migrant domestic workers, to gain their basic “right to refuse” as a start, while we – as privileged white, politically aware and active individuals – try to help them, to grant this right to them and to accept it as their right. But “a piano is just a piano”, and it consists of black and white keys, “there's only so much you can do with it”. Therefore, our joint struggle, our solidarity and support have their limits, limits that are based on injustice, dominance, dependency and representations, limits that are expressed in silence, in the unseen, the unheard and the denied.
In many ways the subaltern cannot speak until today, mainly because no one listens, but she can start by fighting for her right to refuse, by refusing in action and therefore trying to break the silenced and unheard. But this is not what this article is about. This is not about what they can do. This is about what we can and cannot do, what we can speak and not speak. We cannot speak about them or for them. There are limits to it. What we can do and have to do is first of all to speak about and for ourselves, to attempt “a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material”, addressing us as white and not them as black, “measuring the silence” between us, measuring what is not said and what is refused to be said in our relationship with them. And therefore try to make the unseen and denied visible and tangible. Similarly to the struggle for the right to refuse on the side of the migrant domestic worker, the process to measure the silence and “unsilence” can be a painful and violent process, but “the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.”
Written by
Sumayya Kassamali
Drawings by
Golrokh Nafisi
Philosophers have long sought to understand the intertwined relationship between master and servant; between the makhdoumin and the khadam. Why have societies repeatedly divided themselves among those who serve, and those who have served? What makes it possible for these hierarchies to be sustained? Diverse cultures have chosen different categories to determine who will be responsible for what kinds of work: caste, class, race, religion, and especially gender. But the first step to understanding the specificity of racism in the context of the kafala system is to recognize that domestic work is not just any kind of work. It is the work of care; the work that makes all other work possible1 Cleaning, cooking, caring for the sick – teaching language – emotional, intellectual, physical sustenance. This work is what Marxist feminists refer to as social reproduction. It is not the productive labor of the workforce, but the reproductive labor that makes the workforce itself possible; both now, and in the generations to come. Across diverse social contexts, it has been invisibilized as a form of labor, relegated to the private domain and diminished as “women’s work.”.
How, then, do we tell the story of race and kafala in Lebanon? One version of this story would explain the spectacular violence experienced by migrant domestic workers in the country through the simple fact of racism. Here, racism is understood to refer to discrimination and violence perpetrated based on skin color. After all, the kafala system is one in which it has become possible for black and brown women to be confined to attics and kitchen pantries, for the fridge to be locked, for pieces of bread to be counted, for hands to be tied with electric cables, and for all this to be done to the very same women who are asked to cook the food, change the bedsheets, change the children's diapers, and bathe the elderly parents of those who are marked as having lighter skin. But I want to propose a different approach. A better way to understand the difference between "black" and "white" is to recognize that race is neither natural, nor is racism an explanation for bad behaviour. Instead, both race and racism are what social scientists refer to as socially constructed; things that are situated in historic, political, and economic processes.
Consider the following questions. Are the Lebanese white? Are all Lebanese white? What about other Arabs? Are Syrians and Palestinians black in Lebanon, but white in Syria and Palestine? Are Filipinas whiter than Sri Lankans, and are Ethiopians blacker than Bangladeshis? Why does the form used by Zain's office to describe Sri Lankan domestic workers to potential employers first list skin color as a relevant feature of their employability, and then describe certain Sri Lankan women as "Fair"? Is a tanned Lebanese Madame darker-skinned than a "Fair" Sri Lankan domestic worker? What is the relationship here between Fair and Dark; Brown and Black; Asian and African; Madame and Maid; Arab and White?
One of the best ways to understand this process of racialization is through the term "Srilankiyye", a remarkable linguistic invention of the kafala system. How did it become possible for the Arabic term for "female Sri Lankan" to stand in for the very category of maid? The word Srilankiyye is not simply an example of racism as a matter of discrimination based on darker skin color. Instead, it is about producing a connection between foreignness -- a kind of foreignness conveyed by skin color but also language, customs such as food and dress, and an associated set of cultural stereotypes -- and the very category of "servant." "Srilankiyye" is what feminists call an intersectional category, one that is simultaneously about race, sex, and class. That is what makes it possible to expand its definition from a word that describes a woman's nationality, to a word that describes the kind of work this woman does: the kind that is invisibilized, underpaid, and discriminated against, and the kind that makes her the target of exploitation and abuse.
Although "Srilankiyye" is the term most popularly associated with migrant domestic workers, we can find a similar pattern of usage throughout everyday speech. When we use the word "Ethiopiyye" or "Bangladesh" in contemporary Lebanon, does anyone associate it with a single aspect of Ethiopian or Bangladeshi history, politics, geography, or culture? Do we think about Ethiopia's unique status in the African continent as a country that was never fully colonized by a European power? Or about the incredible tradition of poetry, literature, cinema, and music to come out of the area that is today Bangladesh? Obviously, the answer is no. This is the biggest difference between today's domestic workers in Lebanon and the Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and even Kurdish women who preceded them. To say "Suriyye" in Lebanon may have its own discriminatory connotations, but it is still a category that can be used to refer to many different kinds of women. "Srilankiyye" and "Etiopiyye", on the other hand, include no such possibility. Instead, they indicate the development of a new racial category that comes out of migrant domestic labor in Lebanon. Being marked as a "Srilankiyye", and not just having dark skin or a foreign passport, is what it means to be black in Lebanon today. But what about what it means to be white?
The kafala system is not the only structure through which modern Lebanese identity has become associated with whiteness. Think of the history of the Ottoman slave trade, and its lasting influence on religious and legal categories in the region. Think of the long shadow of France in the development of modern Lebanon, and the central role played by a local elite that still thinks of Lebanon as European and Christian rather than Arab or Muslim. Think of the movement of fascist and Aryan ideologies from Germany and Italy into the Kata'ib Party in the mid-20th century. Think of popular associations in Lebanon between beauty and white skin on the one hand, and the summer obsession with the perfect seaside tan on the other. How do all these images, associations, and representations come together to create popularly held ideas about the Lebanese as white?4We might also think of Georges Asmar in blackface playing a South Asian migrant worker named Dara in the late 1980s television show Beit Khalti, or Nady Abou Chabke impersonating an African domestic worker on the MTV show Menna wa Jerr as recently as 2019.
Recently, academic scholarship on the Middle East has paid increasing attention to the topic of race and racism. As part of a global conversation about anti-blackness, a series of conferences, conversations, and public dialogues have emerged about the specific kinds of anti-blackness that characterize the modern Middle East, from Sudan to the Sahara, from Iran to Yemen. Among the questions being asked are: what is the status of seemingly racial terms like "abid" in different parts of the region? How have the experiences of ethnic minorities been marginalized because they do not fit the image of what it means to be, for example, Turkish or Kuwaiti? How do we acknowledge the importance of communities descended from slaves, or from earlier routes of trade and migration that predate modern nationalisms? Within these conversations, it has become increasingly evident that while we cannot simply apply Western frameworks of slavery, blackness, and white supremacy to the region, it is also important to recognize the active circulation of ideas that accompanied the movement of people and goods through European colonialism and global capitalism. Which is to say, while blackness does not mean the same thing in Lebanon and the United States, that does not mean there is no overlap.5In fact, I was surprised to learn that among black academics based in the United States, the kafala system in both the Gulf countries and Lebanon is regularly pointed to as a prime example of anti-blackness in the Middle East.
How, then, to dismantle this racial hierarchy? Reform is no solution here. As it has grown over the last four decades, the kafala system has entrenched itself into every aspect of Lebanese society, from the family unit to the architecture of the home, from television representations to popular stereotypes about how Sri Lankan women smell or how Ethiopian women speak Arabic. Reaching further and further into the Lebanese nation, evident in not only private domestic life but also public space and public conversation, the kafala system has become central to what it means to be Lebanese, and especially, what it means to be a Lebanese woman. Part of this meaning, we have seen, is to be white. Not white as a shade of skin (though we are never fully removed from "complexion") but white as a position of social power.
To be white means to be able to treat your domestic worker in whatever fashion you choose and yet, as Nizar Saghieh makes so perfectly clear, have total impunity. To be white is to carry the power of the state in your actions as a citizen. To be white is to be able to change the name of your domestic worker because it is hard to pronounce, and then proceed to forget the various names of all the different women whose labor has kept you and your family alive. To be white is to think of a domestic worker as "yours." To be white is to build a second kitchen so that you need not face this woman as she works, because it is too uncomfortable. To be white is to say, "My Srilankiyye is from the Philippines", or to complain that the Africans are too sexually promiscuous, or to promise that you will pay the black woman her wages when you actually have no intention of doing so, because you do not think she is a person to whom something is owed. To end this structure of white supremacy, then, we must end kafala. We must build a Lebanon in which everyone cleans their own homes, until we find a way to live with each other that does not depend on exploitation.