إرفع صوتك، إرفع صوتك! الكفالة بدها تموّتك!
Say it loud, say it true! Kafala wants to kill you!
It was May Day 2016 and we were standing with African and Asian domestic workers on the streets of Beirut, following the cue of their voices. The first time I heard the slogan I faltered, it caught in my throat, I was unprepared for the rhyme. I shouldn’t have been; we already knew how many were dying. The sentence marched in my head for years.
Since 2010, feminist and antiracist organizations in Beirut have come together on the Sunday closest to May Day to protest Lebanon’s Kafala system, the exploitative system that governs temporary migrant labor in many parts of the region. Bringing together a diverse coalition of migrants, activists, NGOs, workers, and allies, the march fills the streets of Lebanon’s capital with voices demanding both concrete labor reforms and total abolition. For over a decade, the annual Migrant Workers’ Day parade and festival has ranked among Beirut’s most beautiful public gatherings, workers peering over balconies to find solidarity and not discrimination, the city momentarily transformed into an image worthy of its status as cosmopolitan.
Years later, attempting to write an anthropology of migrant labor in Lebanon while watching the region aflame under genocide, the womens’ voices continued to haunt me. We academics got Kafala so wrong, I realized, parsing its colonial archives in British rule and its political technologies of legal impermanence and human rights violations. We had given it the privilege of abstraction and logistics while refusing its personality of murderous desire. We should have known better—after all, we knew Israel, and with it an investment in annihilation. The migrant domestic workers knew, though. They were Kafala’s insides and they had lived the psychic infrastructure of its necrotics. Their presence laid bare the troubling truth that incarceration had entered the heart of postwar Lebanese life. By 2008, Human Rights Watch estimated one migrant domestic worker in the country was dying every week from either suicide, failed attempt at escape, or murder. In the meantime, tens of thousands of others were kept working, most without access to adequate rest, food, mobility, cell phones, or even wages. Gathered on the streets together, the women who survived had lived to raise their voices and tell us very simply: The opposite of the Kafala system is not work permits and immigration visas and wages and unions and even open borders. The opposite of Kafala is being alive.
I. Kafala as AntiHumanism
African and Asian migrants have been traveling to the Middle East under the loose rubric of the Kafala system since the 1970s, when the convergence of the oil boom in the Gulf, the suppression of worker uprisings and revolutionary consciousness across the region, and the globalization of capital that constitutes “neoliberalism” produced newly transnational circuits of labor exploitation. “Kafala” itself is usually translated as “sponsorship,” referring to the requirement that migrants have a citizen-sponsor to whom both their work and residence in the country is tied. But “sponsorship” captures neither its lived experience nor the scale of the cultural transformation that has come in its wake. The Council on Foreign Relations casually lists the current number of workers governed by the Kafala system in the region as tens of millions. How many, we might wonder, over the course of its half century? Twenties of millions? Hundreds of millions? Meanwhile, the ghosts of all those who have died on the job swallow their tongues inside human rights reports and abuse stories that no one really reads. They all blur into one another; they all start to sound the same; which is to say, they are a pattern, they are a social fact, they constitute a culture, they demand a diagnosis. Kafala is a social pathology.
The strange thing about African and Asian migrant labor in Lebanon, a system frequently referred to as “modern-day slavery,” is that it has only been around for four decades. Who learns to discriminate so quickly? And although the region has its histories of enslavement and servitude, of elitism and racism, of all the violences that define the great accomplishment we call Culture, it has not always been this way. In a not-so-distant era, the presence of Africans and Asians in Lebanon signaled a very different internationalism. Consider the fact that there was once an Ethiopian Student Union in Beirut—by “once,” I mean the 1970s. Today, to say the very word “Ethiopian” is to preclude the possibility of there currently being, there ever having been an Ethiopian Student Union in Beirut. The erasure of this imagination is the annihilation of a moment in which Asian, African, and Arab could be spoken together with neither master nor servant in the sentence.
What then, if not sponsorship, is this Kafala system? We might think of it as a neoliberal antihumanism wedged into the heart of a Middle East that was once an ecumenical frame for living. The Kafala system is a historical process by which the figure of the Arab has been wrenched of its humanism from the inside. This is a humanism of the Orient without Orientalism, fully modern and Islamicate and ours, civilizational heritage of the modern world; that which produced the first university, first astronomy, first violin, and last prophet, now gnarled by pipelines and dictators and Zionism and greed, such that the ugliness of capitalism-as-racism burns its scars into womens’ backs. What happened to Arab Nationalism, anticolonial icons led by the triad of Nasser, Nkrumah, and Nehru? Consider, as answer, Kafala. What happened to Lebanon, headquarters of the Palestinian Revolution? Kafala. What happened to the Indian Ocean Arabo-Persian Gulf, all trade and ports and mysterious characters surfacing in geniza fragments? Kafala. What happened to split a map of the world into an embodied earthquake where the edge of Asia became kafeel while Africa to its west and Asia to its east came to name countries as synonyms for servant? Fuck. That. Kafala.
As we envision a region free of war and imprisonment, the women of Kafala look toward us from behind locked kitchen doors and high-rise balconies, insisting that abolition begins from inside the home.
In Lebanon, the word Srilankiyye (Arabic for female Sri Lankan) simply means maid. This sentence is necessary but insufficient. In actuality, the term means migrant domestic worker, racialized woman, foreigner who cleans, woman whose hair is forcibly sheared upon arrival to the country where she was looking for a job, woman whose passport is held in a locked drawer in a bedroom where she cleans the sheets and folds the underwear and learns the gossip and consoles the mother and washes the child and nurses the elder and makes coffee and washes dishes and makes coffee and washes floors and makes coffee and washes windows and then sleeps, avoiding his gaze, on the floor; woman who is maybe from Sri Lanka, but a Sri Lanka that is not Sri Lanka, a Sri Lanka that has no beaches no wars no histories no flavors only brown women who wash Lebanese floors, a perfect tautology: You are a domestic worker because you are from Sri Lanka. You are from Sri Lanka because you are a domestic worker. Echoes of Fanon’s unforgettable formula flipped. You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.
Before Mehdi ben Barka disappeared, before Amílcar Cabral was assassinated, before the setback and the betrayal and the melancholy that settled into a generation of male intellectuals who never quite managed to build something new in the ruins of their grief, it was not necessarily going to look this way. The Middle East could have been the west of Asia, and Asia could have named our synchronicity; a multiplicity of cultures that were all worth fighting for. The hour of liberation was knocking the ground beneath the women who sang its anthems. We must never forget that Kafala was its counterrevolution.
To recall the radical history of the 20th century is to remember that there was once an opening to an alternate present. We had a fissure, one of those endless ones that Benjamin told us is how the light gets in. Its Western numerical index is 1968 but we should recall it as the Tricontinental, that 1966 conference held in Havana that brought together anticolonial icons from across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This was a moment when Arab, Asian, and African solidarity was the story of the Middle East. It took diverse forms, manifesting in guerrillas and female militants, in raised fists and bold prints, in hijackings and black turtlenecks, in wire-rimmed glasses and AK-47s and a particular shade of olive green. It was a time when Spanish and Arabic were on our lips, and we danced to a soundtrack of sultry rhythms. OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America) made posters of disco fedayeen and in the smoke-filled offices of Beirut, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of Palestinian Liberation Organization, shared wine and humor with Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It was a time when the region was headquartered in Egypt and nestled within the continent of Africa rather than the continent of Islam, and so the beards of its men were not yet targets of annihilation. Instead, we had divas like Oum Kulthoum, who sang for leaders with cavalcades that would later be remembered by children who peered out windows at the top of the stairs, only to be left with nostalgia instead of liberation, dull ache for an era when they had not yet assassinated all our heroes. In this history, the future of which has yet to be determined, Arab named a freedom drive.
How did a complex and beautiful region known as “The Arabian Gulf” appear to go so quickly from precapitalist merchant to advanced-capitalist monarch? It seems partly about speed, in the structure of that conjuncture between the region’s natural resources and American capital. Black gold, a sticky viscous substance that moves magically underground, produced the joint development strategy of the refinery and the toxic sludge. In other words, oil was discovered, Ford built cars, America built dictators, and men got rich. They call it: economies grew. By now, we know that economies grow at the expense of societies and that economic growth is the harbinger of cultural genocide. Certainly, the Gulf grew, buildings bursting vertically from sand and sea, and off the tops of them South Asian men, imported to produce a wealth that would never be theirs, plunged to their deaths. Some through unfinished windows, some off metal rebars, some burned to a crisp under the summer sun. Others, unchained, peons of debt. We used to share a prophet who crossed the desert in prophecy finding the shade of date palms and now the Gulf is a graveyard made of glass. This, and not only Kuwaiti biryani, is the afterlife of cosmopolitanism along the northern curvature of the Indian Ocean.
Who decided that Arab was going to be a name for master and not comrade? What world-historical destruction turned these dreams into so much war?
II. Humanity Exceeds Humans (Lebanon Exceeds Lebanese)
In Beirut, for more than a year, I kept hearing migrant workers ask, in tones gentle but furious: Manna insan kamein? Are we not human, too? They had not decided it would be Kafala’s refrain but I heard it that way all the same, different people constructing the same sentence, as if it had crystallized into an ontology that took the shape of a philosophical mantra in three simple words. I tried to listen to what they were saying and at first, it appeared to me that Lebanon no longer had room for them in its word for human. Yet it was phrased as a question, and a question posed in Arabic, for they had already entered Lebanon’s language; already refused the denial of the fact they were here, claiming their presence inside a culture that had staked itself on the magical properties of language and therefore could always be learned and transformed from the inside. They told us Kafala wanted them dead and then they reminded us all of the unshakeable speech of their humanity, with echoes of Sojourner Truth declaring, “Ain’t I a woman?” and Rashida Tlaib asking, “Why do the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all?.” An uncomplicated confrontation between the alive and the inhumane.
Sometimes I wonder what Edward Said would think of African and Asian women who clean homes in Lebanon meeting the gaze of his insistent humanism and asking: Are we not human, too? Would it shake his faith in a world of secular universals or would it simply be a testament to what changed when value overtook values, or when it seemed we were in danger of losing the project of Arabic as heritage of liberation to Arabic as the vision of the Abraham accords and shopping malls? Of course, Gaza would beg to differ, as would the people of Yemen. We do not yet know what will become of the Arab world after a Free Palestine.
The second refrain I kept hearing from the migrant domestic workers of Beirut was even more common than the first. Sometimes it felt as if every single African or Asian current or former migrant worker I met in Lebanon had her own rendition to offer. Rita: “I love Lebanon but the people suck.” Selam: “Lebanon is really nice, but the Lebanese, their hearts are hard.” Michelle: “I love Lebanon, I love the food, the beauty, the mountains, the city, but the problem is the people are too arrogant.” Hawa: “Lebanon is beautiful, but there are many bad people here.” Meseret: “I love Lebanon like it’s my own country, what I don’t like are the people. Most of the people.” Said Beza to Hana, in a conversation about Beirut, “The country does not hate you. Its people hate you.” Makdes: “I love Lebanon but not the people.” One of my favorites came from Zennash: “el-‘aalam khara bas el-balad mitl imm”—“The people are shit, but the place is like a mother.” Yet another antonym as axiom. I came to think of it as: Not all Lebanon is Lebanese.
How to reconcile an insistence on a shared humanity that still indicts Kafala’s deadly desire? What was this Lebanon that everyone held on to, despite so many experiences of mistreatment and cruelty, despite constant reminders of their nonbelonging—what was it that retained Lebanon as referent for the beautiful? Even as Zennash claims “the people are shit,” the excrement emanating from those who lurk as the personification of Kafala’s death drive has somehow not yet swallowed all the shadows of Lebanon’s humanity; of its capacity to cradle the dispossessed. Still, she insists, “the place is like a mother.”
I was reminded of yet another contrast. It returns us to the streets, glorious and collective. A scene that temporarily turns those windowless laundry rooms and closets where foreigners are caged inside out, the women of Kafala suddenly resplendent and carrying megaphones.
يا سجعان، قول الحق! عندك عاملة و ل لا؟ بتعنّفها و ل لا؟
Hey Sejaan, tell the truth. Do you have a [domestic] worker or not? Do you beat her or not?
The question referred to Sejaan ‘Azzi, Lebanon’s former Minister of Labor, who had famously publicly opposed domestic workers’ right to unionize in the country. Yet I was struck by the contrast: Why was ‘Azzi the site of a rhetorical question that (in theory if not in practice) could be answered in the negative? Why is Sejaan asked for his confession, whereas Kafala always already wants death? These are the same streets, the same voices, and the same system. Contained in this protest chant is a distinction between individual and structure. The gap is that of a conversation: the ability to ask a question to which the answer can be no, even when it is structurally conditioned and historically determined to be yes. I try and parse it. It could have been the case that the Minister of Labor in Lebanon might not have a domestic worker inside his home, or at least have one he treated well, and this, rather than the stroke of his policy-making pen, would be an opening toward the abolition of Kafala; toward the death of its death. Even as they indict him in their call, reminding us whose invisibilized labor runs the households of the country’s elite, the play of the women’s words lies in their rhymed repetition of “or not?” It is as if the subjects of the Kafala system insist on giving Sejaan—not only as individual complicit in state power, but as abstract figure of Lebanese citizenship itself—a way out. A way to say no, a way to be better than himself, a way to not be the category he is hailed by, because they insist that Not all Lebanon is Lebanese.
III. Who Shows Us the Way Out?
From Ethiopia, which she returned to in 2021 after over a decade in Lebanon, Beza sends me a voice note in Arabic.
Sumayya hayati how are you, is everything ok? Hamdilla I’m good, everything is fine, I don’t know how I can tell you fine, but technically, physically, we are fine but psychologically, honestly I’m not fine at all. Everyday I’m seeing what’s happening in the world and I’m seeing the extent to which people are clinging to this propaganda that is completely wrong, and I’m seeing people dying, I’m seeing what’s happening. You know, me and you, we’re close to people who are in Palestine and are Palestinian and Lebanese, we know what they think, what their perspectives are, what the truth is, but you try and tell the truth to people and they just don’t want to listen. It’s a huge problem. Everyday I just feel like, what in God’s name is happening? I also wish I was in Lebanon. What’s happening is horrific, it’s just not okay, completely not okay, this propaganda that they’re spreading about Hamas is completely wrong and the people who are dying are not even Hamas, not one of them, the ones dying are women and children and people who have nothing to do with this. It’s so, so painful. Everyday I’m sitting and watching and I don’t know what to do, what I can possibly do to help, I don’t have any answers and it hurts so so so much. Honestly I can’t even be happy, every day it becomes morning and I sit in front of the television, then it becomes afternoon and I’m still sitting here watching but I don’t know what to do. This is such a difficult thing for the world, and somehow the rest of them—the Americans, everyone else, they’re happy about this. I don’t know what they get from it, if Palestinians are annihilated from the world how does it benefit them? I simply can’t understand this, it’s unbelievable, you know? And they completely refuse to understand, you try to explain and they just refuse. Half of them, they are blinded by religion, they have all these lies against Muslims and they want revenge against these “terrorists,” but you have to understand their story, these are not terrorists! You try to explain and they just refuse to listen. I know you know the truth too, it’s so hard to bear … I just pray—if there really is a god, that’s what I tell myself, if Allah is here watching what is happening, then do something! Look at what is happening! I don’t know what to say.
But C and I are good, we went to the part of Ethiopia that was most affected by the war and we saw so many people, if you saw the way people are living, ya Allah it’s so difficult, to see what an ugly thing war is. I don’t know, apart from that, physically we’re well. The war has been a month you know, and no one is doing anything. If Gaza is destroyed, will they get it then? Is that we’re waiting for? Are you speaking to Hana and everyone else? I’m not, I just don’t know what I can say to them … apart from that, I’m good, my daughter is good, C is good … I saw there are protests in Canada, but everywhere in the world no one understands what is happening—if you haven’t lived in an Arab country or you don’t know the story [of Palestine], you just won’t understand, you won’t know anything about Israel. Only if you live with them do you come to understand their story, this is the really difficult and strange thing—I just wish everyone in the world could understand it—I’m good, I’m good hamdilla, a bit scared because of Hizbullah and Lebanon but thank God C came, but we have to keep praying, you and me, because there’s so many people we love in Lebanon and in Palestine.
I used to think: the destruction of Afro-Asian solidarity was the condition of possibility for the Kafala system. I was (partially) wrong. What also happened is that we started living together. And as the map of Kafala’s African and Asian subjects has expanded across the world, so has a new community of those who now bear witness to the struggle for life against empire’s assaults in the Middle East. Bearing memories of their Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Sudanese friends and neighbors, and not only sponsors or bosses; of political speeches heard on television and bombs just barely escaped under campaigns of total destruction; of revolutionary soundtracks and an unbeatable humor, the migrant workers of the region also bear witness to Israel as a name for death. And as they have built new communities of belonging configured through the Arabic language, so they have claimed their own centrality to a shared project of liberation. As we envision a region free of war and imprisonment, the women of Kafala look toward us from behind locked kitchen doors and high-rise balconies, insisting that abolition begins from inside the home. It is towards them, also, that the struggle for a free Palestine points us. 