Dear Reader,
Around ten years ago, I became friends with a domestic worker in Cyprus who worked for a close family member. Menaka was from Sri Lanka and had not seen her two daughters for eight years. She used to speak to them on her tablet; she was a mother to them through a screen. She introduced me to her daughters, she showed me her house and the streets of her hometown through the iPad. On screen, she showed me the trees, the flowers, the sky, the food – she wanted me to know what home meant to her, what it smelled like and tasted like and how it felt. We went on virtual walks together through the town with her daughters and mother-in-law. Sometimes, like any parent, she would need to tell her daughters off, or remind them to do their homework; often she told them she loved them – always through a screen. She told me the story of how she was widowed when her husband, the love of her life, died in a farming accident. Subsequently, she had to make the difficult decision to work abroad as a domestic worker, in order to provide for her children. Since then, she has not been able to be present for her daughters as they grow up. She sends them clothes and money, but she cannot be there with them, as they grow into young adults. I could see the strength, resilience and immense love that Menaka had within her, but I also came to see the immense suffering of her sacrifice. In the meantime, I could see how the other women, in all the households along that street, went about their duties, often unseen and misunderstood. ‘Ah,’ one of the neighbours said to me once, ‘these women don’t care about their families, they drift around the world.’
While I was on tour for The Beekeeper of Aleppo, I was often asked: ‘How can we get people to understand that refugees are not like migrants, that they have come because they do not have a choice?’ This question saddened me. Migrants are often forced to leave their homes for less obvious reasons than war – but they still leave because they feel that they have no choice.
Songbirds was influenced both by this question and by a recent tragedy in Cyprus, in which five migrant women domestic workers and two of their children disappeared. When the women were reported missing, the authorities did not investigate their disappearance or search for them, because they were foreign – it was assumed that they had simply moved on. Later, however, it was discovered that the women and children had been murdered. In reality, almost two years had passed before a couple of tourists discovered the first victim in an abandoned mine shaft after a heavy rainfall. This was a woman who had been reported missing and whose disappearance had been completely dismissed.
I followed the events as they unfolded. With a broken heart, I read newspapers and watched the Cypriot news, spoke to friends. But I was not surprised at all that nobody had searched for these women and their children. I was not surprised that an investigation had not been launched, that the police had dismissed them as runaways. I felt anger, such anger, because over the years I had witnessed the reality of what had led to such gross negligence.
Most of my family live in Cyprus. I was born in the UK because my parents came as refugees after the war in 1974. Most of the middle-class families in Cyprus – just as they do all over the world – hire domestic workers. In Cyprus, you do not have to be rich to have a domestic worker, just reasonably comfortable. So, the presence of these women, who run the households, look after children, walk the dogs, clean the restaurants/shops or whatever other businesses or properties their employers might own, is commonplace. Migrant domestic workers are a part of the fabric of Cypriot life.
This story is not an attempt to represent the voices of migrant workers or to speak for them, it is an exploration of the ideologies, prejudices, circumstances and underlying belief systems that can lead to very sad and often catastrophic events. It is an exploration of the way in which a flawed system can trap people. It is also a story about all forms of entrapment – the way we can all trap ourselves into certain ways of seeing and being.
And so, the idea of Songbirds began to grow.
I decided to visit Cyprus, to speak to as many women as I could, so that I could understand things more deeply. I went to visit a man who is the head of a human rights organisation aimed at caring for domestic workers; he also owned a café where the men and women would meet on Sundays. It was he who family members and employers had turned to when the police would not investigate the disappearances of these women and children. At one point, he admitted, he was the only person in Cyprus looking for what he believed to be a murderer – he turned out to be right.
I became very moved by the stories I heard. He arranged for me to speak to many of the domestic workers who came into his café on Sundays. The stories I heard opened my eyes to the difficulties and suffering that migrant domestic workers experience. When I returned to the UK, I contacted Justice for Domestic Workers, and helped to edit some stories written by the women who visit the centre. I wanted to learn more about the problems and hardships that domestic workers face around the world, because I felt that the failure of the authorities in this particular situation was not an isolated incident, it was a result of our deeply flawed society and civilisation.