‘The politics of location’: memoirs of women aid workers in 1980s Beirut

Abstract

Research in the fields of anthropology, sociology and development studies has begun recently to focus more closely on the role played by aid workers in the international aid machine, but there has been limited engagement from literary studies. This article analyses the memoirs of Ang Swee Chai, Pauline Cutting and Suzy Wighton, who were volunteer medical aid workers in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut during the 1980s. I argue that although the memoirs of humanitarian aid workers often rehearse Eurocentric, paternalistic attitudes, they also reveal more nuanced images of local people, national non-governmental organisations and refugees. Where alternative images of victims of humanitarian crises can be traced in such texts, I suggest that they complicate fixed notions of ‘refugeeness’ which dominate in other areas of the popular media. The readings I provide here acknowledge the complexities of the politics and ideologies of international aid but centre on the ways in which Ang, Cutting and Wighton negotiate the discourses surrounding aid work via their authorial voices and modes of expression. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s notion of the ‘politics of location’, I ask to what extent their sense of identity and their understanding of their role affect how they describe their experiences. I conclude that if humanitarians had a better understanding of their positioning and the partiality of their world view, more empathic, reciprocal relationships might develop between the inhabitants of ‘Aidland’.