The opaque world of maids from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, who come to the Middle East to fulfil their dreams, is brought into sharp focus by two Arab writers through their newly-released books.
Ana Kumari min Sri Lanka (I am Kumari from Sri Lanka), written by Lebanese writer Hazem Saghieh, and Youmiyat Khadima fil Al Khaleej (Diary of a maid in the Gulf) by Syrian writer Dr Mohammad Al Tonji have been well received by the Arab literati.
The books are displayed at the ongoing Muscat International Book Fair.
Saghieh’s work, published by Dar Al Saqi of Lebanon in February this year, is of a biographic narrative, while Al Tonji’s book, published by Kitabouna, also of Lebanon, is a fictionalised account of a maid’s journey through her tenuous employment in the backdrop of her grim family circumstances in the Philippines.
Such subjects are of interest to readers, Alif Fawaz of Dar Al Saqi told Oman Tribune. “Such real life stories told in the form of novels have their value in the market,” he said.
Ana Kumari min Sri Lanka, a real life-story of a maid who worked in the Gulf, Egypt and Lebanon, tells about her distressing experience at work and the heart-rending plight of her family in Sri Lanka.
Through Saghieh, Kumari tells her story in the first person. The story concludes: “All the dreams I carried with me while migrating from my home country were washed away by the detergents used for washing dishes and cleaning window panes.”
Born in 1971 near the Sri Lankan town of Kandy and now living in Lebanon, Kumari was present along with Saghieh when he signed his book during its launch in Beirut.
The book narrates Kumari’s experiences in Arab and American households in the Middle East and the ethnic and communal torments of her family back home, where she had left her young daughter with an aunt who did not have children. She also tells of her harrowing time in a Middle Eastern jail where she was confined in a 30-metre cell along with 60 other foreign maids. Saghieh has dedicated the novel to the “sufferings of Sri Lankan men and women outside their home country”.
The back cover of Youmiyat Khadima fil Al Khaleej introduces the novel as a story of a struggle for survival. It is the story of the struggles of a Filipino woman who tasted the bitterness of life in a destitute family abandoned by the master of the house, and the trials and tribulations of life on a farm owned by a wicked person who used to sell her modesty for money.
The fictionalised story is set in a Middle Eastern country and ends in freedom for the protagonist.
OMAN TRIBUNE
