House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu (review)

The experience of domestic workers in Vanuatu and across the Pacific has been little explored to date, and so this book is very welcome. House-Girls Remember combines oral histories by women who have been haosgels (house-girls), with reflections by eleven women who are filwokas (fieldworkers) with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and several foreign anthropologists. It is an exemplary product of the research collaboration vigorously promoted by the center. The voices of ni-Vanuatu women are amplified here by a lightness of editorial touch in transforming their words into text and in situating the volume in the broader comparative literature. The main sources are women's narratives and participant observations, primarily by haosgels themselves. The experiences of ni-Vanuatu and migrant Tonkinese women recorded and analyzed in this volume span over a hundred years—from the period of conjoint British and French colonialism in the New Hebrides / Nouvelles-Hébrides, through independence in 1980, to the twenty-first century. The domestic work considered includes both indentured and wage labor. Despite being referred to as "family" by their employers, throughout the book the unequal relations between masta, misis, and haosgel are palpable.

Perhaps the most poignant story is that of a Tonkinese child servant, Uwan (108–120). This is told not in Uwan's words but through the recollections of an elderly woman, Celestine, the daughter of a French planter family with whom Uwan lived in the 1930s and 1940s on South Efate, Vanuatu. Uwan was the orphaned daughter of a Tonkinese couple who had relocated to the New Hebrides as indentured laborers but did not survive the harsh conditions. At age seven Uwan joined the household as a companion for Celestine and as caretaker for her younger brother. Celestine stressed their childhood identity as young girls (in Bislama, "emi olsem mi" [she was just like me], 109). For author/anthropologist/filwoka Jean Mitchell, this heartfelt claim occludes the profound differences of power and privilege that existed between Uwan and Celestine. Uwan's arrival, along with forty other indentured workers, facilitated the growth of Celestine's father's plantation of coffee, cocoa, cotton, and coconuts, and enabled the family to lead a genteel domestic life, while Celestine's mother worked for the Condominium government. Uwan was both "intimate insider and perpetual outsider" (115), reinscribing the colonial inequalities of race, class, and gender in the "inner recesses of bourgeois life" (114). Her female servitude slipped into sexual service for other French planters. At eighteen Uwan became pregnant; says Celestine, "we married her to a Tonkinese" (115). Both Celestine and her brother were devastated by Uwan's sudden departure; her brother, who "loved her like a mother" (116), wept for a week. Uwan was repatriated to North Vietnam with her husband in the 1940s; there they had six more children. Mitchell perceives the nostalgic recollections of the elderly Celestine, still living in the independent state of Vanuatu, as evincing both "the power of loss and the loss of power" (119).

Similar questions about the relation between domestic intimacies and inequalities in both colonial and postcolonial periods pervade most of the stories told by indigenous ni-Vanuatu women. There is a rich diversity to these stories, but here I distill three dominant themes. First, there is the question of the value that women attach to the work itself: preeminently child care, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Although most acknowledge that domestic work is arduous, repetitive, and constantly undone by daily life, they also attest to its importance (13). Rather than seeing such work as demeaning manual labor or drudgery, haosgels celebrate it, especially the responsibilities and joys of child care. Many speak lovingly of children who had been in their care, and report that even decades afterward, when they had grown up, their charges kept in touch with them...