This review was commissioned by and originally published in the NZ Herald in December 2017.
The Maid’s Room is the story of Tala and her sister Dolly, Filipina women who have left their families behind to work in Singapore as maids. Their working conditions are atrocious: they are kept in wage slavery and bullied. The threat of deportation is constant. Tala and Dolly are intimately involved in their employers’ lives – living in their houses and raising their children – but are treated as less than human.
The tipping point for Tala comes when her employer tries to hide a camera in her room in order to spy on her. Enraged, she starts a blog to let the world know the truth about maids’ working lives, and it is the fallout from this that drives the plot. “Her friends call her ‘the rescuer’ … she knows how to play the system, to speak up and out.” A lot of the story is told from Tala’s point of view, and she’s a great character to spend time with: loud, loyal, and brave. I was rooting for her the whole way through.
If this is starting to sound like The Help by Kathryn Stockett, that’s because it is. (The Help is a novel and film set in the Southern US in the 1960s, in which a white journalist exposes the realities of the working lives of poor black maids.) British author Fiona Mitchell credits The Help as the inspiration for The Maid’s Room, and references it throughout her novel.
And this is where it gets tricky. The Help has rightly been criticised for being a white saviour fantasy that centres white feelings at the expense of the black experience. In her response to the film of The Help, US critic Roxane Gay says: “That question [of writing across difference] becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and re-imagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds … I don’t expect writers to always get difference right but I do expect writers to make a credible effort.”
So – did Mitchell (a white writer) get difference right? And if not, did she make a credible effort? It’s up to Filipina critics to answer the first one. On the second question: hmm.
Mitchell lived in Singapore for a couple of years and interviewed some Filipina maids there, so she is writing at least partly from primary research. One positive difference from The Help is that Mitchell has Tala publish her own work, rather than having a white women write it for her. But there’s a very telling scene in The Maid’s Room where some of the employer characters read The Help in their book club. Their reactions vary from those who can see the parallels to their own situation to the more overtly racist characters who can’t. No one – not even the character Mitchell says is based on herself – asks the maids what they think, or questions a white woman’s right to tell the stories of women of colour.
I get the feeling that Mitchell has absorbed the lesson that racism is bad, but has yet to learn how to avoid cultural appropriation (Gay’s ‘credible effort’) or to question her own privilege. In her author’s note, Mitchell displays a damning lack of self-awareness by directly comparing the racism faced by Filipina maids to her own experience in London as the daughter of an Irish man. Although The Maid’s Room doesn’t replicate the missteps of The Help to the same degree, it suffers from the same aura of white saviour fantasy. This debut novel is one to avoid.
