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I’ve been watching these short videos about women’s lives and migration across different countries. Two in particular stand out: Maid in Lebanon and Maid in Lebanon II by Carol Mansour. We worry a lot about immigrants in the UK – legal and illegal, labour migration, asylum seekers. Now with the economic downturn we’re worrying about who is taking up the jobs, how much room we have, how much money to take in people fleeing violence or persecution.

These two videos are about domestic workers travelling from Sri Lanka to Lebanon. The films document press headlines about the abuse of Sri Lankan maids and compare their situation to slavery. A woman complains to the agency that her maid doesn’t understand their instructions, and that they must therefore communicate “with their hands”. The dynamics between this particular Lebanese woman and her Sri Lankan maid might go something like this: ‘she is dependent on us as a lone woman here, she is from a poor country and is uneducated; we are richer and more educated than her, she is brown-skinned; our children are white-skinned’. These kind of power relations are tied up in race, gender and class, and their combination here precludes even the sense that to hit a maid is wrong – the abuse is dismissed laughingly as “only a light slap”, nothing serious. I think this is a very subtle moment in the film, and I think it leaves us to make our own judgements.

Maid in Lebanon features a Sri Lankan domestic worker caring for an elderly man. It is shot in a way that we just see the maid and the man alone – caring for him seems to be a solitary occupation. There follows an interview with the maid and the woman whom we assume is her employer and the man’s daughter. As the employer goes on, it becomes apparent that the maid’s work is viewed by her employer as a kind of filial love or duty of care – it’s almost as if she’s a member of the family, albeit one who takes on the complete burden of care. The long list of duties is unrelenting: the maid is the person for whom the man calls in the middle of the night, the maid bathes him and gives him medication and so on. Finally, at the close of the video there is a sense that all may not be how the employer views it, there’s an alternative but silent narrative – the maid is shown crying quietly. We connect this visual but silent expression with the household jobs listed earlier, and the impression is of a very different story to the one of love, care and familial duty bestowed upon the situation by the employer.

The terms we use for the countries involved in migration are a “sending” or a “receiving” country. It seems very politically correct, but perhaps it just reinforces the idea that a person choosing to migrate is never either terminally ‘sent’, nor completely ‘received’.

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