Representations of the Migrant Domestic Worker in Hoda Barakat's Harith Al-Miya and Danielle Arbid's Maarek Hob

Abstract

This essay considers a Lebanese novelist's and a Lebanese filmmaker's depiction of foreign maids living in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975-90. Dyer argues that through their portrayal of complex maid characters, Barakat and Arbid draw the attention of their readers and viewers to the current plight of foreign-born maids in the country, the approximately 150,000 women—out of a total population of four million—who have neither political rights nor worker protections and who have long been a concern of local and international human rights organizations. Unlike many other novels and films set during the civil war, neither work examines sectarian divisions or considers who is to blame for military atrocities; rather, Barakat and Arbid have made family dramas the focus, and the figure of the live-in maid helps to complicate that emphasis. Despite many differences in terms of genre, tone, and degree of realism, Barakat's novel and Arbid's film both depict the employing family critically and present the central character, a dissenting member of the family, as developing a close relationship with the maid. These writers' development of maid characters could ideally have political effects resulting from readers' and viewers' growing recognition that the migrant workers in their midst are entitled to fair working conditions, enforceable contracts, and other human rights. Thus, Barakat and Arbid fulfill the authorial obligation to, as Edward Said put it in 1994, insist on "standards of truth about human misery and oppression" regardless of party affiliation or national background.