Author: Zadie Smith (English, 1975- )
Published: 2013
Category: Modern
Text: The New Yorker
Summary: The daily movements of a young African woman, working as a servant in a middle class London home, located on the same street as the Cambodian Embassy, are observed.
Analysis:
The opening line of the story, "Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody." is a paraphrase of Monty Python's "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" and immediately one gets a sense that something unappealing in English middle class life is about to be revealed; and we are not disappointed, because the next few lines place us firmly in a North London suburban street, only now its little villas, with their private swimming pools, are also occupied by Arabs and, of all things, the Embassy of Cambodia.
There are a number of themes running through the story: the heard but unseen badminton game, the stealthy swims, the all-knowing friend, the Western back-packers entering the embassy; all in support of an overriding theme of unsympathetic detachment. The whole story leaves one feeling we are back in elementary school, the teacher has pinned a picture of a young black woman sitting on the sidewalk, in the drizzling rain, surrounded by her few belongings packed into shopping bags at her feet, and it is our task to describe how she came to be there. And the story we create is full of reasons that absolve us of any need for sympathy or empathy.
The young woman is an interloper in our society, just as she uses guest passes to her employer's club, without their permission, she is here, on this street, in this place, without ours. Her situation is not our doing but the world's, whose values have crept in and displaced ours, just as the Arabs and the Cambodian Embassy have moved into our street and physically displaced our English neighbours . It is up to Fatou, the girl, to "make her own arrangements" and not be fatuous about it; is it our fault she doesn't know she is a slave? that she has rights?
And the irony is, Fatou and those like her, are as detached from us as we are from them; being totally unaware that they are as vital to our sustained life as Fatou's presence was to Asma's life the day the child swallowed a marble; for in the end, we are all, English or not, middle-class or working class, Arab or Cambodian; as gormless as the narrator.
