What Is She Doing Here? A Refugee's Story
Kate Clanchy
Picador, 300pp, £14.99
What Is She Doing Here? is a memoir tracing Kate Clanchy's involvement as ally, employer and confidante of Antigona, a Kosovar refugee in Britain. Told with the colloquial intensity of a friend sharing her secrets over coffee, it has all the urgency of a story that needs to be told, one that gives a voice to the lives behind anti-immigration, anti-Muslim headlines.
Its pages are filled with women, Kosovar and British, city and country, girls and old ladies. In it, we have a scrapbook of female perspectives. The main threadline is Antigona's escape across Europe with her daughters and son, and her resulting life in the United Kingdom. This is supplemented by scenes from her sisters' lives in the Kosovo highlands and the tale of one daughter who ends up working in Miss Selfridge clad in a burqa. At the margins are the British women, struggling in their own ways, united by neurosis and concern over their performance as mothers, wives and career women.
The preface tells us to "consciously peer past" Clanchy's presence in the text, and her "large, British, liberal behind". The book, however, is crucially shaped by this "liberal behind". Hers is a set of eyes we can trust. Her struggle to understand Antigona's abusive husband mirrors our own, and her richly suggestive language, revealing her background as a poet, brings sinister undertones to the Kosovar women who gather to inspect the bridal bedsheets after a wedding night, to "read the sentence of the stain". Such a western female perspective makes this more than "a refugee's story". It becomes instead a narrative of convergence; an exploration of being female, of cultural conditioning and, most importantly, of sisterhood.
The book is littered with the language of cleanliness, a shorthand for two cultures' domestic and moral codes, with the domestic rapidly becoming equated with the moral. We watch as Antigona struggles between western conventions and her traditional Kosovar code. In Kosovo, honour is king and blood loyalty is law. It dictates that being female is ineluctably linked with notions of cleanliness, shame and dirt.
But these notions - tied up with sexuality and virginity, for Antigona - are equally applicable in the western woman's world and in the homes that Antigona cleans. Here, shame is attached to a dirty house. A clean home is a sign of excelling in the private sphere, not only at work. And if you can't do both, there is always a handy Ko sovar refugee to master one of them for you. Clanchy's unflinching acknowledgement of these uneasy truths is striking - "the relationship of my freedom to another's labour, my wealth to another's poverty".
Both groups of women, Antigona and her Kosovar sisters, Clanchy and her western friends, use silence as a tool alternately to cloak the past or to veil guilty consciences. The atrocities that lie behind the "bad war" of Antigona's sister Blerta are unspoken and unspeakable. Similarly, silence is the sign of the genteel, middle-class discretion that prevents direct reference to "the problem" of Clanchy's friends: the pressure to succeed at home and at work.
A dissection of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch occupies the book's central pages, Greer's concern with the private and the public sphere nicely linking in with the concerns of the memoir. Clanchy objects to Greer's observation that "brilliant women" could continue to be brilliant and raise children, if only they went to live in a Calabrian farmhouse, with other similarly exceptional friends, leaving the necessary trivial ities of domesticity to a "local family who lived in the house".
For Clanchy, however, one woman's "brilliance" depending on another's immersion in household labour is an immoral and unethical solution to her "problem". A cry to sisterhood rings out from the heart of the memoir: "If we want to be feminists, if we want women to be free, all women, then we need to live differently here." Clanchy's great skill lies in her ability to illustrate this with subtle and richly suggestive vignettes. The memoir is deeply imbued with a sense of the accident of birth which meant that Clanchy was the one asking the crucial, triggering question, "Do you want a job?" of the woman she met in the park one warm spring day. Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East, Jonathan Cook, Pluto, 224pp, £15
Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution, John R Bradley, Palgrave Macmillan, 256pp, £14.99Fiction
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