Cleaning up the “dirt”: a study of Maggie Gee’s My Cleaner

Abstract

Maggie Gee’s 2005 novel, My Cleaner, is critical of international divisions of domestic labor in the neocolonial world, which reproduce global hierarchies of class, gender and race within middle-class households of “developed” countries. Not only does Gee critically explore domestic service in today’s London from a global perspective, but she also makes use of the relationship between Mary Tendo (an immigrant servant woman from Uganda, one of Britain’s former colonies) and her white, middle-class English employer, Vanessa Henman, to explore the tensions, contestations and renegotiations performed in contemporary narrations of English identity. However, Mary’s smooth relationship with the English language, as well as with her national identity, signals the lack of a postcolonial approach in the novel to hierarchies played out in these sites. The aim of this article is to explore such ambivalences in the portrayal of a black female character in Gee’s My Cleaner.

Keywords:

• Maggie Gee
• servants
• dirt
• domestic labor
• globalization
• Englishness

Notes

1. Stephen Lawrence, a black British teenager from Eltham, south-east London, was stabbed to death while waiting for a bus on the evening of 22 April 1993. The inquest jury in 1997 decided that “Stephen was killed in an unprovoked racist attack” (“Straw Announces Inquiry into Lawrence Murder”, BBC Politics 97, 20 April 2010).

2. In addition to Maggie Gee, the writers Thomas (2005, 312) mentions in her article are: Colin MacInnes, Barbara Pym, Michael Moorcock, Lynne Reid Banks, Alexander Baron, Maureen Duffy, Jane Gardam, Geoff Nicholson, Nigel Williams, Geoff Dyer, David Caute, Shelagh Delaney and Alan Hollinghurst. Chris Cleave, the author of The Other Hand (2009) can be added to this list as well. According to Thomas, “[t]hese writers do not constitute a tradition but rather they are a heterogeneous collection of individual writers” (312).

3. Raymond Williams points out that it was during the 18th century that the word “family” began to exclude servants (1976, 131–132).

4. This holds true, however, only in relation to finding employment in middle-class households. There is still a demand from the upper classes for a professionally trained English team of servants (Cox 1999, 136–137).

5. One of the earliest anti-racist texts employing this strategy of unraveling the white/cleanliness and African/dirt binary is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. In the first chapter of his narrative, Equiano emphasizes the cleanliness of the people of Effaka, a village in Guinea where he was born ([1789]1794, 9–21).

6. Here Nasta draws on the term coined by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000).

7. The distinction Benedict Anderson makes in Imagined Communities between nationalism and racism, and his “unitary notion” of the nation (quoted in Wilson 2003, 32) have been criticized in many other theoretical studies about the concepts of race and nation. See, for instance, Balibar (1991).

8. Milton Obote’s leadership of Uganda in the 1960s preceded Amin’s regime and was similarly characterized by efforts to shift control of trade from Asians to Africans (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2000, 69).