Chapter Two

The Room

Architecture has always been a way to demonstrate and exercise power, and this is as true of our urban spaces as our domestic ones. The plans of the homes in which we live dictate which spaces are public, which private, which are “service areas,” and which are “leisure areas”. They organize our interior lives in subtle but powerful ways. In Lebanon, the presence of domestic workers in middle-class and upper-middle-class homes is now so prevalent, so institutionalized, that “maid’s rooms” are not only included as part of floor plans but also have their specs enshrined in the country’s building code.

Here, too, is a history that has evolved over the course of the last century. As Lebanon’s capital experienced one construction boom after another, as class aspirations transformed and grew, as the domestic workforce shifted from people “like us” to “foreigners” from another culture, the maid’s room increasingly became a space designed to institutionalize the dehumanization of domestic workers. Spurred by a deeply personal motive, architect Abir Saksouk launches an investigation into the history of the maid’s room and how it became the invisible and suffocating place it is today.

Part One

The Room That Suffocated Me

Research
Abir Saksouk
Maher Abi Samra

Written By
Abir Saksouk
Sahar Mandour

What happens when a domestic worker finally arrives at her employer’s home: where does she sleep? What’s the space allocated to her, and what’s the meaning of this room’s location in our homes, the homes of those she is meant to serve? During this time of quarantine and lockdown, while domestic workers have been demanding to receive all their pending wages and be returned to their home countries safely and securely, these questions have become even more pressing. Questions about a space ostensibly designed for them but in such a way that seeks to erase their presence, that antagonizes them, that drives them to suicide at rates that have been increasing alarmingly over the course of the last few months.

Through a historical approach to the development of residential architecture and design over the years, and by studying the shifts in the allotment of space to various functions in the home, it became clear—both through actual practice and the way this was enshrined in successive building codes—how domestic workers and their rooms became classified as part of the category of services in the home rather than actual inhabitants of the household. And so, the design of their spaces necessitated that they be “elegantly” concealed in order to absent them from the life of the household as much as possible.

The text traces the historical development of this space known as “the maid’s room”, revealing the way that the abuse of domestic workers has become institutionalized at every level. The development of “the maid’s room” in fact lies at the heart of the social, economic and spatial structures that have shaped the lives of domestic workers within the home as well as our homes themselves, and made it all part of the urban fabric. The text also asks us to reconsider this architectural violation, one that cannot be merely reduced to racism and which even transgresses the bounds of the Kafala system itself.

Abir:
Mama, tell me exactly what happened with Aiecha.

Mama (after a few beats of silence):
Why are you thinking of this now?

A: I thought of her two days ago. Why did you even have a domestic worker from Africa?
M: Before Aiecha, there was a Nigerian woman who was sent here to us by your brother. She was the first, then she left. She wanted to go back to her country.

A: What year was this?
M: Sometime in the ‘80s, I think.

A: Why didn’t you get anyone from here?
M: It didn’t work out. In 1977, when we came back to settle in Lebanon for good, I got two Egyptians. There were employment offices, and lots of Egyptians were coming here for work. The Egyptian girls finished out their contract and left. We couldn’t find any Lebanese women, and at the time, there were no Sri Lankans coming to the country. So we got the Nigerian woman. After that, your father, God rest his soul, told our relative to send us one from Sierra Leone. And our relative, I don’t know what he was thinking, sent a girl who couldn’t have been older than 12 or 13. Younger even.

A: What year was this?
M: Also, sometime in the 80s. Your aunt passed away in 1988, and Aiecha was still around then. I think she arrived in 1987. Every time I remember her… I cried for her. I cried all the tears I had. I cried so much for Aiecha.

A: How long was she with us before she died?
M: About two years.

A: And why was my brother there at our house that night that she died? Because I remember waking up and seeing him carrying her to take her to the hospital.

M: Your bother was here on a visit from Nigeria. And that day, my nephew Hasan was arriving from Abidjan on the Ivory Coast, and his plane was landing very early in the morning, 5 or 6 am. I asked your brother: ‘will you come to the airport with me tomorrow to pick up Hasan?’ And he said yes. The day before, Um Selim had been at our house, and we’d barbecued some meat. Sometime in the afternoon, Um Selim was sitting on that couch there that faces the kitchen, and I was sitting next to her, and we saw Aiecha holding the coal stove, and the coals were still glowing fire. I asked her: ‘where are you taking that?’ And she said: ‘I want to heat my room.’ I said: ‘Get it out of here, now! You want to set yourself on fire?’ We were still only using kerosene or coal for heat. She took it outside.

The next day, at 4 or 5 in the afternoon. I got dressed, and we took you with us. I told Aiecha, ‘come with us.’ And she came with us to your aunt’s house. We got back home around 6. She stoked the fire and we grilled some meat and had our dinner. And then we sat around, and it was winter. Your father went to bed, and your brother said, ‘I’m going to bed as well.’ Then it was just me and her sitting there, and there was no electricity, and there were no generators at the time. Around 10 pm, I also went to bed, and I thought she’d done the same.

It seems that she took the coal heater to her room again. And the window that opened onto the kitchen balcony was a little broken, so she had it closed and stopped up with some rags so the wind couldn’t get into her room. And that door, the kitchen door, was lined with rubber just like a car door. When you shut it, it formed a seal.

She went to her bedroom, but it seems there was no oxygen in the room. And it was a small room.

In the morning, My brother and I woke up and went to the airport to pick up Hasan. I think it was about 6:30 in the morning. At the airport, they announced that the plane was delayed until 8. My brother said, let’s go back home so we don’t have to keep waiting out here in the cold. We went home, and I made some coffee. It was around seven by then. I thought, let me wake her up before we head back to the airport. I knocked on her door, she didn’t answer. I knocked, I knocked… then I opened the door. I shook her, she was stiff as a board. I ran and woke up your father. Your brother picked her up and took her to the emergency. The doctor said she’d been dead for ten hours. Which means right from the time she fell asleep.

A: How did you break the news to her parents?
M: There was a woman named Amina, she knew Aiecha’s family and she’s the one who’d recommended her to our relative. Curse her. A girl so young, just a child… we were surprised when Aiecha showed up. She was so young. Amina was the one who told Aiecha’s parents that she’d died. We informed the police, and they came to see the room. It’s quite a responsibility, an underage girl… And we explained to her family what had happened. We explained that we’d never meant to hurt her.

A: Where did you bury her?
M: In the village cemetery. Where we buried your father a year or two later.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, my grandfather immigrated from Hanawey in South Lebanon to Kenema, a town in Sierra Leone. He was a farmer, following in the footsteps of hundreds of other peasants and Lebanese laborers, who like him, had set off to the African continent during the last decade of the 19th century.

The Lebanese headed for the French and British colonies on the African continent, with many settling, especially in the “four provinces” that were under French control, where modern Senegal is today. My grandfather, however, followed the Lebanese who’d headed for British territory, who ended up mostly in Sierra Leone in West Africa, where the ships coming into the British colonies would dock. That’s where my father was born, in a remote village, a ten-hour drive away from Freetown. My father grew up there, never going to school. He remained illiterate. At age ten, he began working as a cowherd, and then he moved on to transporting cows from Guinea and selling them in Sierra Leone. With time, and over the course of his strange and plentiful stories, my father transformed from a cowherd into a grocery worker and then became a local merchant, before going on to own and operate the first cinema in Sierra Leone, and finally ending up, of course, a diamond merchant.

The role of the quasi-colonist my father played in Sierra Leone continued on after he returned to Lebanon in 1974. He came back because of an illness, but his network of associates and acquaintances remained intact. And one of them was the man who sent young domestic workers to the family in Lebanon without any official arrangements or labor contracts.

My mother hadn’t chosen to immigrate to Africa but suddenly found herself there when she married my father. My father, the rich man who had chosen for himself “the most beautiful girl in the village,” married her and took her back with him to Sierra Leone.

I never forgot that image of waking up at age seven to see my brother carrying Aiecha’s stiff corpse in his arms. She had been my friend at home. I loved playing with her; I was fascinated by her stories, especially those that had to do with her intense crush on my cousin, My aunt's son. And yet, from the age of seven until very recently, I’d never once thought to ask about the details of how she died.

Ten years after her death, I enrolled at university to study architecture. In my second year of study or so, one of our professors took us on a field trip to an abandoned building in the Manara-Ain el Mreisseh neighborhood—a building considered to be an architectural gem, a perfect example of ‘50s modernism. The Duraffourd building, named after its owner, Galina Duraffourd.

As I wandered through the building’s apartments, I found a small set of stairs next to the kitchen. I went up and was surprised to find another floor there, a dingy, lightless, low-ceilinged mezzanine, barely two meters high, without any source of light. There were several small rooms up there, with a long corridor in between them that looked out onto the ventilation shaft. When I asked my professor about this, I learned that these were the servants’ quarters, including bedrooms and laundry rooms.

Floor plan drawing of a typical floor in the Duraffourd building, Ain el Mreisseh (1948), depicting an upper level intended as servants’ quarters.

Any residential project in Lebanon today includes a floor plan displayed at street level, showcasing the apartment’s layout to passersby. There is almost always a small room labeled “maid’s room.” These private condominiums and luxury “villas” are sites of encounter between prevailing social desires and the ruling capitalist economy. The “maid’s room” is produced by the convergence of the homeowner’s desires to appoint a meaning and purpose for every room with the developer’s desires to exploit every last possible square meter of land. Add the Kafala system, and the room is transformed into something indicative of the worst forms of exploitation, racism, and enslavement. Consequently, even in the best-case scenario, the spaces set aside for the house’s maid do not fulfill even the most essential criteria of “adequate housing” circumscribed by international law. Most of the time are oppressive and even dangerous.

Under a practically unanimous architectural logic, the maid’s room appears, without any hesitation, on the floor plans displayed on the streets. This clarifies that its categorization and various architectural elements are beyond normalized. It is now taken for granted that there is a “despicable” little corner where the home’s cheap domestic labor might be tucked away in the homes of both the middle and upper classes. The Lebanese case remains unique within the context of the global exploitation of cheap labor, given that the neo-liberal legal framework gives priority to the real estate developers’ potential profits at the expense of any architectural, human, or human rights values.

Advertisement for housing loans

The local legal framework that defines the standards for the maid’s room in Lebanon is the Lebanese Building Law. Indeed, this law contains a number of articles related to housing for domestic workers, which change over time depending on the policies of the moment. And yet, regardless of any modifications in the law, the designation of “maid’s room” has never changed. With time, the law became more specific in terms of gender, referring to the “maid” set to occupy the “room” in question in the feminine, officially classifying domestic work as women’s labor. In all the articles of the law, these “maid’s rooms” are always mentioned in conjunction with other types of utility rooms in the house, such as storage rooms, laundry rooms, and off-spaces designed for only short-term human occupancy.

It has become clear—again, through actual application—that the domestic worker and her lodgings are categorized under “services” rather than occupancy in the floor plan’s design, which means they need to be “elegantly” hidden away, to absent them and make them as invisible from the house’s daily life as possible.

If the meaning and object of these concepts and/or practices relating to domestic labor have become defined over time, they have also undergone actual transformations, with various attempts and contradictions that make historical research fundamentally necessary to being able to tell the story of “the maid’s room.” I followed the historical evolution of this space, an evolution that lies at the heart of the social, economic, and local structures that have “architected” both the life of the domestic worker in the home and our own lives, orienting them toward and within the city.

Part Two

From Greater Lebanon
to the 1950s:
The Law and its Practice

With the Levant’s entry into the capitalist system, 19th century Beirut transformed into an interior front connecting the sea and the mountain. The city quickly grew too large for the narrow confines of the old walls, expanding beyond them and becoming Beirut with the expansion and modernization of the port in 1894: the only sea route to the Syrian interior permitting the import and transport of European products (ref: Fawaz Traboulsi). The development of the port gave rise to a new class of merchants and commercial agents importing new, foreign goods—including for example, the Kettaneh family, who were cloth merchants, and who bought land on Mai Ziadeh Street in the Clemenceau neighborhood where they constructed residential buildings for the family.

The owner of the building explains:

In the 1920s, we worked as cloth merchants, and our work took off. We were among the big merchant families of Beirut. We built this building in 1926. At the time, during the French mandate, there started to be buildings 3, 4 stories high owned by the big merchant families. It was a new and modern thing in Beirut. I remember we hired an Italian architect, and he’s the one who designed our building. The ceilings are high in the apartments, 4 meters high, and there’s a little attic over the kitchen to be used as a pantry, accessible with an iron ladder.

When we got a maid in the 1950s, we gave her the attic to sleep in, as many people did at the time. It’s true that it has a low ceiling, but it wasn’t a problem: the maids people hired back then were all quite young.

Typical floor plan drawing, Kettaneh building, Clemenceau (1920), depicting a mezzanine above the kitchen intended as sleeping quarters for a domestic worker

From the time of the formation of the Lebanese state in 1943 and up until the beginning of the 1950s, radical changes were taking place in terms of housing and society, which led to changes in the spaces and status of domestic workers as well.

During this period, Beirut witnessed tremendous growth, exceeding all expectations in terms of pace and expansion. This growth came about as a natural result of a series of economic, social, and political developments that swept the region at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, such as the rapid accumulation of capital during the second world war, the rupture of the customs union between Lebanon and Syria in 1950, and the influx of capital from Palestine, Egypt, Syria and the Arab Gulf countries due to occupation, nationalization, and the rapidly rising rate of investment in Arab oil fields (ref: Jad Tabet).

It was a period that saw immense expansion and construction, whereby urbanization was conceived, and the city imagined as a part of the experience of modernity. Modern landmarks were created, such as the Ottoman Burj Square, in order to encourage a new concept of society as an entity that evolves, develops, and becomes modernized.

Lebanon’s commitment to liberal policies in 1943 directly contradicted the policies of the post-colonial states in the region, which established public institutions for construction and promised to produce modern policies to support them. In Lebanon, the dream of urbanization was not dependent on state sponsorship. The promise was that we would become the country specialized in services within a larger political framework based on relaxation and complacency in the name of encouraging a free economy (ref: Ziad Abu Rish).

In this context, the first iteration of the Lebanese Building Law was enacted in 1940. It was a modernized and revised version of the French Building Law that was in use at the time. The task of drafting the law was carried out by a committee made up of architects who had been educated in Europe at a time when modernist construction was all the rage there, so the law also reflected their vision of the urban and architectural scope (ref: Marwan Ghandour).

This situates the Lebanese law within a modern colonial context rather than the result of local experience and concepts (ref: Marwan Ghandour). A small number of architects and engineers—who had family connections to influential people in the government—managed to control the production of construction and architecture despite the presence of a union of engineers and architects and a general directorate of urban planning since the beginning of the twentieth century.

In their view, they were seeking to introduce modernity and its ways of life into the country’s homes and streets. Their local discourse took place within the framework of a wider discourse about European modernity (ref: Marwan Ghandour), which became embodied in the buildings they designed. And in their designs, the small houses surrounded by gardens were gradually replaced by a new architectural style chiefly predicated on multi-story residential buildings. The dwelling became a functional unit, its rooms exemplifying a new concept of space, whereby day-areas and night-areas were made separate in the European style. These houses then divided sleeping spaces from living spaces, and then both of these from the service area.

Pages from Le Revue Du Liban magazine (1958-1959)

Pages from Le Revue Du Liban magazine (1958-1959)

Instead of paying rent for your apartment, purchase it for the same cost.

Excerpt from a magazine article published in La Revue du Liban magazine, February 1959

Advertisements for residential projects by the Société Libanaise d'Amélioration Foncière (Lebanese Company for Real Estate Development – SLAF) appearing in La Revue du Liban magazine, 1957-1961

A place for a princess! Sursock neighborhood, apartments for sale, luxury building materials, marble dining room, electric heating (chauffage), garage, and maid’s room!

Excerpt from a magazine article published in La Revue du Liban magazine, 1961-1957

As with the Kettaneh family, the 1950s witnessed a demand from many people for domestic servants from Syria. In the beginning, most of these women were Alawite Syrians. Then later, there were girls from the Akkar, Jabal Mohsen, and Wadi Khaled regions in Lebanon (ref: an interview with an employment agency owner during that period). The vast majority of these servants were young girls because that’s what people were overwhelmingly demanding.

This newly emerging bourgeois class was locally incentivized to buy modern apartments. Apartments were outfitted with chauffage (central heating), parking lots, sliding aluminum windows, and a “maid’s room.” The new version of the building law in 1954 (inspired by the older one) was designed to increase the rate of construction through a process of calculating the factors affecting real estate investment, and this process was then applied in the same way across all of Lebanon, in total disregard of many regional specificities—topographical, geographical, and social.

The 1954 version of the building law likewise differentiates between “livable rooms” and “servants’ rooms,” confirming the fact that domestic workers are considered as part of the household’s services rather than human inhabitants of the place. And yet despite that, the law stipulates the importance of natural lighting and the presence of windows and applies the same requirements at the same standards to all these spaces as a condition to receive design and building permits.

As “maids” entered the previously built houses of the city, certain rooms were replaced with other rooms and certain roles with other roles. The Duraffourd building in Ain el Mreisseh gave up the attic space/pantry and replaced it with servants’ rooms located near or above the kitchen. The residence closed in on itself and created a systematic separation between different duties, a model that extended to the entire city, reflecting the aspirations of the expanding middle class. The establishment of a space designated as the “maid’s room” was one of the “gifts” of increased modernity, evolution, and sophistication in living standards. And these “gifts” were made available to the middle class through loans and a booming real estate market in the suburbs—as was publicized in numbers of advertisements and in the promotional material produced by the different real estate projects underway at the time, particularly those of Galina Duraffourd.

Galina Duraffourd was a Russian woman whose father had worked at the Land Registry in Damascus under the administration of Camille Duraffourd, who began registering land in Syria and Lebanon with the beginning of the French mandate. Galina was hired as an accountant at the Land Registry, where she met her husband-to-be Camille. When her husband died in 1941, she held his position as administrator for 18 months, until a French expert delegation took it over from her (ref: George Arbid). During her time working at the Land Registry, she had built up a network of relationships that allowed her to work in the real estate development sector, from which she amassed a fortune. In 1945, Mrs. Duraffourd, along with the businessman Michel Zoghzoghi, established the Société Libanaise d'Amélioration Foncière (Lebanese Company for Real Estate Development), or SLAF.

Mrs. Duraffourd was also an active socialite, always invited to the big embassy parties and other significant events, and she helped launch the Baalbeck Festival.

SLAF realized a number of projects inside Beirut and outside it, in the city’s expanding suburbs, putting out advertisements for its residential projects in French-language magazines and newspapers, which give a good idea of the features of modernity and class aspirations of the time.

Part Three

In the swing of the 1960s

With the beginning of the ‘60s and all the accompanying social and economic changes, the space that was supposed to sleep the household help became even more complicated.

During the “Chehab era,” which some have described as “the era of prosperity,” Arab capital began leaving Egypt and Syria due to decisions to nationalize various assets there and flowing into the safety of Lebanon’s banks (ref: an interview with Rahif Fayyad). It was an important phase in the formation of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, a class that witnessed both expansion and social ascension, as well as the formation of a middle class within its ranks (ref: Jad Tabet). The beginning of the 1960s also witnessed the “Chehabist” authorities adopting new policies intended to strengthen the role of the centralized state and bolster its institutions. It, therefore, systematized the already existing official institutions as well as established new ones. It also strengthened the status of the military, building new barracks for officers and soldiers in Beirut, Saida, Baabda, and other areas in the country. This class, too, had its own aspirations (ref: Fawaz Traboulsi).

During this era of Lebanese history, women were increasingly entering the labor market, and the presence of domestic workers in the houses of middle-class families became widespread. This presence, especially in the more modest middle-class homes in which there was no designated space to house a domestic worker, informally produced a situation where the family had to choose a place for the worker to sleep in the home.

Marwan’s family, for example, has long resided in the Tareek al-Jadeedeh neighborhood. The father worked in an NGO, and the mother taught at a private school in the area. The family found that they needed some extra help at home, and so, in the mid-60s, Jamila came from Tartus in Syria to fill that role. Jamila lived with the family, formed close relationships with people in the neighborhood, and slept every night on a mattress in one of the bedrooms. That was the situation for Jamila and many like her, but it certainly wasn’t typical of all the houses that weren’t equipped with “maid’s rooms” but where domestic workers nevertheless resided.

Hamdan was an employee at a recruitment agency for domestic workers during that time. He explains:

Our clients were general managers, heads of different state departments, engineers, doctors, judges, and many military officers. This was the beginning of the 1960s. We called it ‘the era of prosperity.’ Fouad Chehab, at the time, was building up all the state institutions, and this was in turn opening up new jobs. There were so many more families coming to us looking to hire domestic workers, but most of their houses didn’t have designated maid’s rooms. In my capacity as an employee at a recruitment agency, I’d visit these homes in order to collect the money they owed. The family would lay out a mattress for their helper in the kitchen, or under the dining room table, or in the hallway. Some houses had their helpers sleep in the linen closet, and others in the attic crawl space above the kitchen, which the women could only access via a ladder.

An analysis of the floor plans of buildings from this period shows that the average area designated as a maid’s room, according to the designs of the most celebrated architects of the time, comes out to about 3.5% of the entire square meterage of the apartment. The designs also cemented the space as an integral part of the house’s service area, that is, the kitchen, the laundry room, and bathrooms.

Here is a breakdown of the floor plans for the following buildings:

Rafic Ghandour Building Neighborhood: Raouche Architect: Adib Shayer Year of construction: 1958 Total square meterage of the apartment: 415 sqm Surface area designated for services: 104 sqm “Maid’s room” surface area: 12 sqm Percentage occupied by “maid’s room” of total surface area: 2.6%

Part Four

The 1970s

From the day she died until today, I’ve been asking myself the same question: what killed Aiecha? The “coal stove” she took with her into her room? My parents, who brought her to our home and didn’t take enough care of her? Or the smallness of that room and the narrowness of its window?

I went into my mother’s room and opened the drawer where they kept all the official papers and family documents, looking for a floor plan for our apartment. I found it in a folder labeled: “Ramlet el Baida apartment, 1973:”

Total square meterage of the apartment: 330 sqm; “maid’s room” area, 5 sqm.

The percentage occupied by Aiecha’s room of the total area of the apartment was 1.5%. The room was low-ceilinged, since the architect who had designed the place had put all the ventilation and water pipes above this room, the “maid’s room.”

Maid’s room in the Ramlet el Bayda building (1973)

I took my gnawing question to the Engineering Department of Beirut Municipality, looking for an answer in the archives of the building permits granted by the municipality in the 1970s and 80s.

There, among dozens and dozens of permits preserved in folders piled atop dusty shelves and organized by year, I discovered that the domestic worker’s room wasn’t even mentioned as a “maid’s room” in any of the permits issued during the 1970s and ‘80s; otherwise, the law wouldn’t have allowed the permit to be granted. Instead, the room appears under the guise of “bathroom,” “laundry room,” or “pantry” in order to justify and excuse its small size. Such was also the case with my parent’s apartment in the Ramlet el Bayda neighborhood.

The buildings of the 1970s were an “expression” of years of prioritizing the maximization of profit above all else. The years leading up to that time period witnessed the ascendancy of “oligarchic” practices over trade and economy, which overlapped with the country’s ruling political class. Through some simple numerical tampering, the size of the “maid’s room” decreased to the minimum possible size in order to allow more space for the homeowners.

An architect explains:

The building law written in 1954 says that the maid’s room, like all the other rooms, should have a window big enough to allow in both light and air. If I’m going to follow the dictates of the law, then I’d have to place the maid’s room so that it looks out over one of the building’s façades. And this is unacceptable for the investor. So then they replace me with another architect! The priority for the façade is for the homeowners’ spaces. So I design the room to overlook the ventilation shaft or out onto the balcony with either a small window or no window at all. But in order to be granted a construction permit, I label it on the floor plan as a laundry room or pantry room.

In the 1980s, there was an increase in construction as well as neoliberal economic policies aimed at encouraging investment by granting huge, long-term loans. Also, in the 1980s, there was an increase in the number of Sri Lankan women employed in domestic work in Lebanon, with their recruitment having begun in 1978. It is important to note that there were recruitment campaigns targeting women from Vietnam and Thailand as well, but the authorities of the two countries banned the women from traveling to work abroad in Lebanon for reasons that had to do with the working conditions. Throughout this time, as new recruitment agencies were popping up everywhere, more and more luxury apartments were being built, apartments that had “maid’s rooms” that didn’t meet the minimum standards required by law, and more often than not, the rooms had no windows.

Floor plan drawing of the 6th floor of a building in the Basta neighborhood (1980), depicting the kitchen balcony transformed into a maid’s room

It became, at this time, all the rage to have a “glassed-in” kitchen balcony, that is, to turn the small balcony off the kitchen into another room by enclosing it with glass panels that often included a window.

My friend Rayya explains:

We bought our house in the Basta al-Tahta neighborhood when Ghassan and I got married in 1976. When we had children—we both worked—we decided to hire a worker to help us out. She was from Sri Lanka. Many people were employing domestic workers then because it was so cheap. But our apartment was small, with only two bedrooms, and there was no maid’s room. At the time, during the civil war, everyone around us had glassed-in balconies to increase their apartments’ space. So we enclosed our kitchen balcony, and this became the maid’s room. I don’t like what we did. But everyone took advantage of the war.

Part Five

Finally, a New Building Law

The end of the Lebanese civil war was announced in 1990. The presence of domestic workers in the homes of many different classes of urban-dwelling Lebanese had become ubiquitous by then. Under the worldwide sweep of globalization and an open market, the Lebanese, too, were looking to maximize profit and for cheap labor. The Kafala system allowed them to do precisely that.

The maid’s room became a relatively fixed presence in most of Lebanon’s real estate projects. It was always designed to be tucked away in an isolated part of the house, narrow, close to the kitchen, and sometimes without a window. It always had a tiny bathroom attached so that the domestic worker wouldn’t have to share the family’s bathroom, so that the family’s space could remain, in theory, separate from the domestic worker’s space.

Since the end of the war, the country has been dominated by reconstruction policies that have raised the price of land and apartments, particularly in Beirut. A large-scale neoliberal practice became the norm, with massive investments intended to re-establish Beirut as the regional center for services. Successive governments have all worked on easing restrictions for local and foreign real estate investors, and have also increased the allowable buildable plot size (decree 2791/1992).

Mohammad Fawaz, engineer and former head of the Directorate General of Urban Planning, explains:

In 1971, a new building law was issued that increased investment by allowing for more floors and gave priority to advantage the owner of the building, prioritizing his desires and his increase of wealth. In the 1980s, I was the head of urban planning, and we presented a draft decree to replace the ’71 law, but there was heavy opposition to it. After over eight years of debate, the 1992 decree was issued, greatly watered down from its original version, as we’d only managed to squeeze through very few of the proposals we’d put forth in order to preserve the proper shape of the city and to give priority to the benefit of its inhabitants in general. This decree was met with fierce opposition from real estate developers as soon as it was issued. The cabinet appointed a committee of ten people, headed by the Minister of Public Works and Transport and which also included the head of Beirut’s Order of Engineers and Architects, and the director-general of the Technical Affairs Branch in the Presidency of the Republic and the Council of Ministers, and the head of the Engineering Department in Beirut Municipality. After heated discussions, the committee voted in a majority of nine-to-one for the Higher Council’s proposal. I was the only dissenting voice against this decision.

During this same time period, an institutional framework for real-estate investment was established in Lebanon in order to provide incentives for investors and to reduce taxes on investments under the guise of the Investment Development Authority of Lebanon, or IDAL. Founded in 1994, its main purpose was to promote investment.

In light of these measures and incentives all geared toward encouraging a commercial approach to real estate development, prices rose, and the construction magnates took control of the construction of buildings in Beirut. In the logic of investment, it was “unacceptable” to try and secure enough space for the “maid’s room” to respect the criteria dictated by the law.

Researching the construction permits granted by Beirut Municipality during this time period affirms the widespread practice of presenting floor plans that labeled the intended bedrooms of domestic workers as pantry or laundry rooms. Both of these are classified as service rooms that are not required to have a window that would allow light and air to circulate.

An examination of the permits granted to the Saifi residential project in downtown Beirut, or the residential building project of the architect George Rayess, or any of the other permit plans issued then, will reveal the words “laundry room” in the space clearly meant to be a domestic worker’s room. The head of the Engineering Department of Beirut Municipality, which approves the construction permits, confirms this. In an interview conducted with him, he says:

What, is she going to start a family of her own in that room? Yes, of course,, we knew that it was smaller than the law dictated. Using the designation of ‘laundry room’ was a convenient loophole.

Typical floor plan drawing, residential building in Ashrafieh (2001)

The distributions of space shifted in these apartments as kitchens grew bigger and the worker’s room smaller. In luxury buildings, there was even a separate service entrance for the worker to use, which made it possible for her to leave and enter the apartment, shrouded from the view of the rest of the living space. She accesses her room via the kitchen or the kitchen balcony. In short, the domestic worker’s room was the weakest link in an economic chain whose goal was focused on promoting investment in the residential production mechanism in Lebanon.

The government took its cues from the practices of real estate developers in the 1990s, lessons that it then enshrined into the 2004 revision of the building law. In the new version of the law, the regulatory framework for construction in Lebanon shifted drastically toward encouraging more intensive circulation of capital in the real estate sector. An association founded by construction developers in fact intervened in the drafting of the law, amending its text to meet their own immediate needs to produce and invest in more and ever higher buildings. They increased the allowable building percentages and excluded many building zones from the calculation of said allowable percentage.

In an interview, a member of the Real Estate Traders’ Union said:

The 2004 law was drafted here in our offices. We are in constant communication with government ministers and deputies. We wrote the draft of the law and presented it to the Higher Council and the Council of Ministers and they agreed to it without any amendments. The law facilitates our work, and most importantly, it allows us to exclude certain zones from the allowable building percentage, such as stairwells, walls, and passages leading to the service rooms, which means we can maximize the space we’re allowed to build on. In our proposal, we decreed that the maid’s room doesn't have to look out on anything, which is to the advantage of the homeowners. It’s not like the maid is going to build a family of her own in there.

Typical floor plan drawing, Mirage Tower building, Tayyouneh (2015)

Thanks to the efforts of the real estate developers, the construction law stipulated that those spaces not designated as rooms and therefore not required to have the circulation of air and light, include: “stairwells, bathrooms, outhouses, lobbies, ironing rooms, pantry rooms, laundry rooms and kitchens, maid’s rooms.” The law article also stipulates that “the area of the kitchen or laundry room or ironing room or pantry room or maid’s room cannot exceed eight sqm” to be entitled to this exemption.

Thus, through the power of this law, the production of the “maid’s room” in all the buildings constructed after 2004 became regulated. It was a law that served to enshrine and fix the previous anomalies. The room intended for the domestic worker became a mere “service” space as if it were never intended for a living person: tiny and windowless. It also normalized the worker accessing her space through the kitchen balcony in order not to interfere into the life of the kitchen that exists independently of her. As such, she becomes more and more invisible.

Imad, who lives in the UESCO neighborhood, says:

The kitchen is an essential part of our daily lives. But when she wants to cook or do the dishes, it’s more comfortable for her and for us not to be in one another’s faces. So we enclosed the balcony with glass and made a second, smaller kitchen in there for her that she uses for dishwashing and laundry. That way, my wife can work comfortably in the kitchen without the two of them having to stand at the same sink.

Part Six

Conclusion

This is the story of the “maid’s room.” It is a story that doesn’t begin in the houses whose hidden spaces I explored, nor does it end with this dangerous current reality that requires serious intervention.

Aiecha didn’t die because of the cold or the “coal stove” or the narrowness of her room or the circumstances of that house. She didn’t die for the direct causes stated on her death certificate. Death came to her through the policies we have adopted here, ones based on devaluing human life in exchange for maximizing profit, especially when the human life in question is considered other or more vulnerable on several levels, including financial ability/purchasing power, race, and gender.

And she, the foreign domestic worker, is the most vulnerable among us. The authorities, both official and otherwise, who have produced the space in which she lives, fixing it more firmly on a daily basis both through law and practice, have made her life expendable in the face of higher profit margins.

To control this room is to control the life of the woman who dwells within it. The state of the room is reflected in the state of her own life and circumstances. If death is the worst end to befall her, the crimes committed against her do not begin there. Isolation, lack of privacy, turning all her time into work hours, turning her into a tool, a machine to be ordered around, not allowed to answer except with a consenting nod, the control exerted over her time and place, her papers and documents, her comings and goings, her physical and psychological health and security, her food and drink, her personal life past and present…. All of this, and all the other ways in which she is oppressed, not considered a conscious human being who owns her own life, confirms that the Lebanese authorities have prioritized and elevated everything to do with investment in parallel with the reduction of the importance of the domestic worker’s life.

Her employer “owns” her entire life as part of the services that supply his household. The policies that govern her life here in Lebanon make this fact plain. And these same policies regulate our lives as well.

In the end, a law drafted by the wealthy and powerful provides no justice to anyone but them.

A MAID FOR EACH