staging testimony in nanay geraldine pratt and caleb johnston2 - unknown

the geographical review

The Geographical Review (): –, April Copyright © by the American Geographical Society of New York

� Dr. Pratt is a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BritishColumbia, ; [[email protected]]. Dr. Johnston is a lecturer in human geography at the Uni-versity of Edinburgh, Edinburgh , Scotland. [[email protected]].

STAGING TESTIMONY IN NANAY

GERALDINE PRATT and CALEB JOHNSTON

abstract. We present five scenes from Nanay, a testimonial play that we cowrote, drawingon conventional social scientific research transcripts from interviews conducted with Filipinodomestic workers, their children, nanny agents, and the Canadian employers of live-in caregivers.We developed this theater play from May through August and performed the piecein Vancouver and Berlin in . A reading of the script was staged in Edinburgh in , andthe play will be performed in Manila in November . We have turned to performance tocreate and extend public debate about current immigration policies, racial and ethnic stereo-types, the commodification of reproductive roles, and the transfer of care labor from the globalSouth to the global North. We interject the scenes presented here with behind-the-scenesobservations to more fully contextualize the script and to suggest ways in which this process ofcreative writing and performance informs conventional social science writing. Keywords:creative writing, Filipino domestic workers, performance, testimonial theater.

We created Nanay: A Testimonial Play1 to generate public debate about theLive-in Caregiver Program (lcp), a program that enables mostly women from thePhilippines to migrate to Canada as domestic workers. The lcp is one of the largestand longest-running temporary-worker programs in Canada and is an importantexample of an increasing worldwide trend toward temporary labor migration. Anunusual characteristic of the lcp is that registrants can apply for permanent resi-dent status in Canada and sponsor their dependents if they complete twenty-fourmonths of live-in care work within thirty-eight months (recently extended to forty-eight months). Despite the significance of the trend toward increased temporaryor “circular” migration, decades of critical research on the lcp by scholars across adisciplinary spectrum and activists’ perceptions that conditions within the lcp aredeteriorating (Macklin ; Bakan and Stasiulis ; Pratt , , ;Stasiulis and Bakan ; Pratt in collaboration with the Philippine Women Cen-tre ), remarkably little public debate has taken place in Canada about thistemporary migration program in particular or the striking expansion of tempo-rary labor migration more generally.

We created Nanay, in collaboration with theater director Alex Ferguson andthe Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia (pwc of bc), to bring theissue of temporary labor migration into visibility and to generate public debate.There is, we believe, no easy or simple relationship to this issue. We have beendrawn to theater to explore the ways that it might enable audience members tothink and feel about their world differently, to temporarily suspend judgment,and extend the terms of political discussion in productive ways (Kondo ,, ; Houston and Pulido ; Nagar ; Pratt and Kirby ; Dolan

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; Pratt and Johnston ; Burvill ). We are interested, in short, in thepotential of theater to “redistribute the sensible”: that is, what we see, hear andthink, and to function as a site where we can model (and not just profess) morevulnerable and egalitarian political debate (Ranciere ). We committed our-selves to presenting with equal subtlety the experiences of middle-class Canadiansin need of care and those of domestic workers and their children. We did so toencourage audience identification across all of these experiences and to push audi-ence members toward nuanced, complicated, sometimes complicit relationshipsto the issues.

We developed the play and firstperformed it at the Chapel Arts cen-ter in Vancouver, British Columbia,in February . Nanay was designedas a site-specific performance, duringwhich audience members were guidedin small groups of twelve through of-ten-cramped and intimate spaces towitness testimony performed by pro-fessional actors. Spectators were ledthrough different rooms that stagedthree scenes in which Canadian fami-lies narrated their struggles to secureaffordable care in Canada, and five scenes of domestic workers and their childrengiving testimony to their experiences in the lcp. We chose to develop the play atChapel Arts in part because of the disparity in comfort on different levels of thebuilding. It is a renovated funeral home, and many of the downstairs roomswherethe business of preparing the dead formerly took placeare unheated and dank;the scenes involving domestic workers and their children were staged there. Morecomfortable and formally decorated rooms are located upstairs, and this waswhere employers told of their experiences. Most of the scenes are monologuescreated verbatim from research transcripts developed from interviews with nannyagents, domestic workers, Filipino youths, and Canadian employers. We askedaudience members to listen closely to all that these different people had to say, inorder to come to an informed opinion of their own. An extended talk-back at theconclusion of every performance offered an opportunity for audience members toformulate their thoughts through a public conversation about the ethics and poli-tics of the lcp.

For reasons of space, we present here only five scenes (for additional segmentsof the script, see Johnston and Pratt ). We augment the script with behind-the-scenes reflections to more fully contextualize the project and to convey some ofwhat we learned though the process of creating the play. These reflections haveimplications for standard scholarly writing. That is, Nanay is more than an in-stance of disseminating conventional social science research through creative writ-

F. Chapel Arts, in the Downtown Eastsidearea of Vancouver, British Columbia, was the site ofthe inaugural performance of Nanay. (Photographby Caleb Johnston, )


ing and performance to create a more vigorous political debate; it has led us toreflect in new ways on our conventional academic writing as well.

Scene One: The Nanny Agent

[Staging: The nanny agent sits at a large, old-fashioned desk on which are a computer,a telephone, a pen, and some paper. A large image of his Web site is projected behindhim.]

nanny agent

“My clients are all over the country. The other nanny agencies don’t have the girlsthat I have. You see, if you want a girlGerman, Austrian, Danishcall me. No-body else has them. Show me one agency in [British Columbia]2 that has a Swissgirl, and I’ll eat my hat. I mean, Filipino girls you can get anywhere. Me, I deal withspecifics. We do bring Filipinas as well but it’s a minor part of our stock, if youwant to call it that way. Our mainstream is Europe.

“These Filipinas are very simple people. They can get pleasure out of very simplethings. The same tired old jokes can be told fifty times, and they laugh. When youtalk Filipinos you talkin’ aboutif you excuse the word‘servants.’ So you’re deal-ing with a totally different mentality. She’s used to being a servant.

“One of the main questions we ask our clients when they’re going for an over-seas: ‘Would you treat the girl as a member of the family?’ This means she can eatdinner with you. If you’re having a cup of coffee she sits with you to talk. This is amember of the family. Filipinas are not in that category. Because they feel they area servant. They’re coming here to serve. They come in here; the employer is a God.It’s a totally different breed. I have nothing against Filipinas, nothing against anynationals. We have people who want Filipinos and we give ’em that, because there’sa need for them.

“Your average Filipino girl is a quiet, shy personality. She does her job andthat’s the most important thing. The house has to be clean, spotless when God iscoming homesorry, the parents are coming home. The kids, they come second.”

[The telephone rings, and he answers, physically indicating that he is momentarilyexcusing himself from his monologue to take the call.]

“Hello, how can I help you? [pause] What do you have? Do you have a sepa-rate suite? […] How many children? How many square feet? How many bath-rooms? […] Do you want housecleaning? […] Cooking meals? […] Babysittingin the evenings? […] How much have you been paying? […] Okay, I’ve got twogirls that I can send to you right away. One is Czech. She’s nineteen. I’ve gotanother girl from Thailand in her forties. […] Yes, they’re both intelligent, butthe Czech girl might be a bit better. She’s a little heavy, but it’s no problem. […]How about Saturday? […] Offer them and then raise it again in threemonths. Even [if] it’s just , it’s an incentive. Can I get your number? […]Okay, good-bye.”

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[He hangs up the telephone and redirects his attention to the audience.]

“She was calling me to help with someone on [a date three weeks hence]. So youheard me. I heard what she needs. Usually, [this] computer is not even on my desk.Because this is my computer [pointing to his head]. I know the girls I have on hand.

“You ask other people; they’ll tell you the same thing about Filipinos. De-pends what you’re looking for, what you want. My personal view, if you have ababy and you want someone to lick your home clean: Filipino girl. Go for that.If you have kids three, four years of age, and you want interaction, you wantthem to go to the park, arts and crafts, do things, you’re better off with a Euro-pean.

“And here’s another thing. I had to show the government of Canada that I’mworthy of Canada to give me landed immigrant status. This is how I came to thiscountry. I’m an engineer by profession. This is why Canada said, ‘Okay, we willtake you.’ Because I’m an engineer. Never mind I ended up not being an engineer.

“Europeans [girls] are coming here for a year. They have a job and [after that]they’re going home. Filipinos want to stay. But why a girl that is coming from thePhilippines, who hardly has high school, who came as a nanny, can apply forlanded immigrant status after two years? [He snaps his fingers.] Just like that.Doesn’t make any sense. Girls are coming to work, they have a contract. Finish thecontract. Thank you, good-bye. You don’t have a job here, you have nothing tostay here for. I don’t mind the girls staying here. I have nothing against them.They’re fine. They’re very nice people. Nothing wrong. I am questioning the logicbehind the government decisions. But why do I have to go through all that to be alanded immigrant when people who are a lot less just get it like that? Why? This isnot right.”

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The nanny agent’s monologue was taken verbatim from an interview conducted in. It was developed by trimming and editing an actual research transcript. Nothinghas been embellished or invented. The interview itself was interrupted when he took atelephone call from a perspective client, and the alarming racist views were openlyexpressed. We wrote all but one monologue of Nanay in this way, uncovering thetheatricality of the performances that we regularly stage through our research practice.(The one invented monologue was delivered toward the end of the play by a represen-tative of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. It presented a crisp and reasoned de-fence of the lcp for the audience to consider alongside the testimonial monologues.)This nanny-agent scene was not performed when the play premiered at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival but was subsequently written intothe script when Nanay toured overseas to Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in June as part of the Your Nanny Hates You! festival.

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Scene Two: Testimony from a Domestic Worker

joanne

“My name is Joanne, marriedof course, one husband, and I have two kids. I am anursing graduate from Emilio Aguinaldo College. In the Philippines I worked as acommunity health nurse in my hometown for five years. I came here November , under the Live-in Caregiver Program, the famous lcp. I had no idea aboutthe lcp. I didn’t prepare myself for the treatment that would happen to me insidethe home. That’s why I was shocked.

“There was a problem with my first employment contract, and I finally startedwork January th, . I started working for them without papers. It was notlegal. I worked for them ‘under the table’ from January until April . And sothose first five months didn’t count toward my twenty-four months needed so thatI could apply for my landed immigrant status. My work permit was approvedApril . But April was my last day, I was told by my male employer that he nolonger had work and they would not be able to keep a nanny.

“I had been away for the weekend and it was only when I called them toarrange to come home that I learned that they decided they would not continuemy contract. So I said, ‘What’s going to happen? My work permit is on its way.’ Infact, they just told me that they would drop off my stuff. It was them who packedmy things. I told them I didn’t want them to touch my things because those weremy personal stuff. I should be the one packing my personal stuff, my own stuff.I told them. But they just told me, ‘Oh, just don’t worry. Nothing will go miss-ing.’ I told them, ‘Yeah, I know that, but the thing is, those are mine.’ So I just leftit because I thought if I go there they might call the police. I was worried thatI might be set up.

“My other complaint with them is my room. I wouldn’t consider my room as abedroom because it is used as a storage area. As part of the lcp I’m supposed tohave a real bedroom with a lock. There is a lock. But it’s on the outside of the room.So I wouldn’t be able to go out of the room. I would be trapped in the bedroom.

“After they let me go I was left with no choice. I had to survive. So I went toAngel Nannies to find my next employer. I started working for them in May.I remember this date because this is my birthday. I took care of an elderly womanwith cancer that started in her leg and then metastasized to her lungs. That wastwenty-four-hour care because it was only the two of us. It can be said that mypresence was needed.

“So for four months I worked with no permit, it was under the table. So againthis didn’t count. [And now ten months have gone by that don’t count toward mytwenty-four months.] I had followed up my work permit with Immigration, andthe work permit was approved September . Two weeks later my employer died.

“I found my next employer, Janice, from Whistler. I want to stress that I wastaking care of three kids, seven, four, and three years old. Regarding my workingconditions, I wake up at : in the morning, I end up working sometimes until

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or at night. I worked straight from : and prepare their breakfast. There arethree kids so I dress all of them. I brush their teeth, even the seven-year-old. I helpthem with everything, even with putting on their shoes, socks, everything I’msupposed to do for them. I prepare their lunch and put it in their lunch bags. Plusif I were not able to locate their scarves, the employer would even get angry at me.Like that. She would say to me, ‘Do you know how much that cost me? That was soexpensive!’

“So that’s :. I’m the one who brings them to the car. I’m the one who bucklesall of them in the van. She takes so long to get ready in the morning. She doesn’teven do anything! She just lies down. When all the kids are buckled, we just sit inthe car and wait for her. There are times when we drive to the village because shegets a coffee. Sometimes she buys me a coffee at Blenz, which is good because I’mtired by that time. So by the time I get home, it’s or : and I begin my workright away. By :, the youngest has to be picked up, and she makes me accom-pany her again.

“She brings me because she wants an alalay [servant], just like someone to dialthe phone while she drives, someone to hand her her credit card when she buysthings. I’m the one to . . . talagang atsay ka! [You’re really a slave!] I’m really expectedto be always moving, ready to serve her. She doesn’t work. It’s her husband thatworks down here in Vancouver. He’s a money manager. I’m not really sure what amoney manager does. So who only lives in the house are the three kids, me, and themother. But during the nighttimethis is what’s ‘nice’one of the kids, the young-est, wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with me.

“Why doesn’t she crawl into bed with her mother? The mother said, ‘Whydon’t you lock your door, then?’ So I did it once. But the thing is, the kid is knock-ing! So I have to wake up in the middle of the night. My sleep is interrupted, andI can’t fall back to sleep after that. So my work here was also twenty-four-hourcare. I would finish ironing p.m., a.m. She would come to my room, some-times all the kids are asleep beside me because they don’t want to sleep beside theirown mother.

“Not only did I take care of the three kids and their mother, I also took care oftheir bunny. The bunny was not part of my contract. I’m the one who has to carefor and clean the bunny. I clean the bunny’s poo everyday. I feed the bunny every-day. Everything.

“There were many times the mother would go down to Vancouver. It wouldjust be the kids and myself. In fact, she told me, ‘You’re the mother now, I’m not themother anymore.’ I’m doing everything. She expects me to review the schoolworkand assignments with the kids. I am even expected to help them with French. Whatdo I know about French? Sobra na! [It’s really too much]! I even hand-wash cloth-ing, like sweaters, even hand-washing panties. I’m not embarrassed to say thatI had to handwash blood-soiled panties! [Some monologue extracted here.] Mywork with Janice was twenty-four-hour care. That’s what I can say to describe myexperience there.


“I really want to continue working, bear a little more sacrifice. You have to un-derstand that sometimes it’s really hard to assert yourself to an employer becauseyou don’t want to have your employment terminated, right? So sometimes you justsay, ‘OK.’ You accept and keep on accepting. It’s so hard to object to their demands,especially knowing that my immigration papers are precarious right now.

“But it is too much to handle. I’ve already given my best. That’s it. But all ofthem are depending on me. . . . If I break down, many others will break down. SoI need to be strong. That’s the only thing that keeps me going. They’re all leaningon me. I need to keep standing. But the thing is, I don’t know what step to takenext. I really want to go home, but what about the fate of my family.”

guide

“Joanne was unsuccessful in getting her twenty-four months of employment com-pleted in the time required by lcp regulations. She was forced to return to thePhilippines in . Okay, could you all follow me.”

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Joanne’s testimony drew critical attention to several contentious issues related to thelcp, one of which is the fact that domestic workers are required to live in the homes oftheir employers, which renders them vulnerable to various forms of abuse. It immedi-ately followed a scene in an adjacent room where a domestic worker conveyed her hopefor the future and communicated some of the factors propelling Filipino women toleave their families to work abroad. In Vancouver, Joanne’s monologue was staged indark and damp garage situated in a back room of the Chapel Arts center. The actor worean overcoat because of the cold. Performances were routinely interrupted by unrulycommotions taking place in an alley outside, which forced our technical director toerect crime tape in a bid to ward off disturbances. Inside, Joanne’s testimony waspunctuated by her crossing weeks off a large calender mounted on one wall. This actionwas meant to communicate the intense pressure she faced in her race to completetwenty-four months of (registered) live-in care work within a thirty-six month period.

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Scene Three: Testimony from a Domestic Worker

jovy

“[My name is Jovy] I’m from Laloma, Quezon City, the hometown of the famouslechón! [Before leaving to Canada] I graduated [with a] Bachelor of Science inmathematics in the Polytech University of the Philippines and I was able to get ajob in . . . bpi, one of the biggest banks in Manila. I wanted to get a job that wasprestigious. It was a bank, right?

“The job is very good . . . [but] when I got married and I got two kids, then it’sa different story altogether: milk, diapers, vaccinations, and all that. You receiveyour pay and that’s itthe money is just enough. There is no savings. And pretty

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soon, my kids are going to school, right? What are our options? It’s to go abroad.But how? So I heard about this Live-in Caregiver [Program from a newspaperadvertisement]. They said that after two years you can get your family. So I tookthe training.

“[To tell you the truth, originally] . . . I don’t want to go anywhere. Sava angbuhay ko sa [my life was happy] in the Philippines. . . . I have a good job, I havegood friends, my family is there, so that’s it. It was only when, sort of, the necessityof money came that I decided that this was the only option. But I don’t want to goto the Middle East or Singapore or Hong Kong because I have [heard] lots ofstories from . . . domestic helper[s]. They just work there for ten years, fifteenyears, twenty years, until the kids grow up and then they grow old and they’re stillworking there as domestic helper[s]. [Me], I don’t mind working as a domestichelper but only for such a time. I know once ano man yung kung [I establish, youknow, my] goal, I can move [on]. I [was] willing to put my [office] career aside foras long as I have a goal and I have something to look forward to. We dreamedabout this.

“[How many years was I separated from my kids?] Four years. When I startedin , [how we communicated], it’s all phone cards! Oh my gosh. I should’vebeen a millionaire by now if I saved all that money. Everyday, siguro [maybe],maybe ten dollars. It’s an everyday thing. Those are the days when I still don’t havemy own pc. . . . [Finally] I got my own computer. So it’s the Internet now. Webcam.Everyday din yon [we did it], we webcam! There are even times that the webcam isturned on and they’re just about. It is me who . . . listens to what they are doing. . . .When I get homesick I just listen to the little noises they make, what conversationsthey are having, when the kids are playing even if the camera is not focused onthemI could still hear what they are doing around the house. . . . That’s all. I justlisten.

“After the twenty-fourth month [of work in the lcp in Canada, I] immediatelyapplied for my permanent residency, and I got my open visa. So it means I’m nolonger restricted to the caregiver job. [At] the same time, the papers [for myfamily]the embassy [in Manila] is already working on [them]. . . . All in all,[I was separated from my family] for four years.

“[After the lcp and before my family arrived] . . . then that’s the time that I gottwo jobs, three jobs. It’s pretty good earning but my body is worn out and tired. . . .[But] I wasn’t disappointed. I was content because . . . I found a job at a carpetmanufacturer and it is like a Filipino family. . . . Oh, we are really happy. So . . . [it’slike] my future is being designed so that I won’t get shocked when I am done withthe lcp.

“[At this business] little by little Filipinos are being employed! The Caucasiansare the minority because they like the Filipino work ethic. . . . It’s like they saw thatit’s harmonious. How come the Filipinos are always happy, do not complain, [andare] fast learners? [Now I have] office work in a cargo service facility. I was sentthere to teach the cargo systemthe computer system. It’s so happy. . . . I’m okay


here, but [is] there something more[?]. I am being prepared for the next step. . . .It’s like everything is falling into place. Thank God!

“[I came to Canada because] you have a lot of opportunities when you growup, you can have everything you want when you have a job. [My nine-year-olddaughter], she wants to design clothes. That’s good. If you excel in that, you canhave your own business. I told her [that this is the land of opportunities!] There’snothing impossible here. [It was easy for me to find a job right after the lcp be-cause I am a] go-getter. . . . Despite the circumstances . . . I never lose hope. [It’sjust] a matter of mind conditioning. If I say I can do it, I can do it. You know. It’s acombination of personality plus your experience, plus your confidence. . . . That’swhat I learned.

“You know how many people from the Philippines get disappointed when theyget here. They can’t do what their true job is. It’s hard to adjust. Me, I’m really surethat I will face difficulties. I prepare my heart for that. I actually put my prideaside. Because if one just has blind hopes, things won’t happen that way. You’ll getdisappointed. When you get disappointed, you go very, very low. You’re lonely . . .you cry. What will happen to you? That’s why so many of us caregivers who arefirst-timers going aboard, [end up] going back [to the Philippines].

“We learned about those cases. There are a lot. Either they commit suicide herefrom being so depressed or go crazy [or] return after eight months. It’s almost atthe end of their twenty-four-month term and [they] couldn’t make it and so wentback. It’s like, why? Almost twenty-four months and you quit? Types like that. Ifyou’re not strong here [points to head] and you’re not strong here [points toheart], you’ll have a hard time.”

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Martin Kinch, the dramaturge with whom we worked as we developed the script ofNanay, was persistent in his advice to include a monologue of a domestic worker whohad experienced immigrating to Canada through the lcp in a more positive way. Heargued that this would make the entire play more believable and more fully introducethe lived complexities of migrant’s motivations and experiences. It was only well intothe development process and after considerable badgering by Martin that we finallyturned our attention to creating Jovy’s monologue.

The tone of Jovy’s testimony is very different from most of the domestic workerinterviews that have been done as part of a long-term research collaboration with thepwc. This difference in tenor may reflect in part the fact that Jovy’s interview wasconducted by two Filipino-Canadian students at the University of British Columbiawhomuch like Martin Kinchchallenged the overwhelmingly negative stories thatthey had heard Pratt tell about domestic workers’ lives in Canada; they felt that thenegativity of domestic workers’ stories was to some extent scripted by the activist groupthat has been a constant research collaborator. This concern was echoed after oneperformance when Johnston was reprimanded by a young Filipino audience member(whose aunt had come through the lcp) for not telling more sides of the story; namely,

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offering a more nuanced investigation of this migration program and the varied expe-riences of domestic workers.

Our dramaturge’s writerly instincts have wider implications for social scientistsbecause they challenge the conventions through which people are scripted in scholarlyresearch more generally. We detect a pervasive tendency within academic scholarshipto flatten the affective tonalities of those who suffer structural violence and to reducethose who suffer such violence to a stereotype or an ideal type. But it is precisely throughher story of her exceptional entrepreneurial spirit and personal strength that Jovy tellsa larger story of community despair. And even within her narrative of her own success,she tells of the difficulties of years away from her children and her ways of coping bylistening to their “little noises” as they played in the Philippines, so many miles away.It is equally through positive agent-ful stories as stories of victimization and pure de-spair that the full weight of the structural violence can be felt. Animating interviews ina play thus suggested a larger project of bringing people to life in more formal academicwriting as well. Unfortunately, the decision was made not to stage Jovy’s monologue,testimony perhaps to the difficulty of learning our dramaturge’s nagging lesson.

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Scene Four: Testimony from an Employer

nadine

[Staging (in Berlin): Nadine emerges from the audience with whom she has beensitting and watching the previous scene. There are no props. An image is projected onthe wall of Nadine as a baby with her mother. A series of personal photographs, ar-ranged as a PowerPoint presentation, accompany Nadine’s monologue.]

“My mother had a stroke and she ended up in the hospital. We didn’t know whatthe outcome would be. And so my sister and I started checking out different op-tions. We started by looking at as-sisted-care living. But the problemwith that is that my mother doesn’tlike the thought of eating in the din-ing room, because she has Parkinson’s.We asked, ‘Could she eat in her room?’And they said, ‘No, because she hasParkinson’s she could choke.’ So shewasn’t an appropriate candidate forthese assisted-living places.

“So then we went to the long-termcare places and they were horrible.They were small little rooms, some-times with a shared bathroom and all kinds of demented people around in thehallways asking which room they were in. And in the dining room this womanbasically keeled over onto the table when we were there. Just like a tree, kind of fell

F. Nadine’s scene in the Vancouverproduction of Nanay. (Photograph by Caleb John-ston, )


sideways. The woman who was setting the table just straightened her up. AndI thought, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible.’ I couldn’t imagine my mother in one ofthese places.

“And my mother said when she was in the rehab hospital it felt like she was inprison. And she didn’t like the beds with the bars going up the side. They put her inthere so she wouldn’t fall out. You know quite frankly maybe they were right.Because when she came home from three months in the rehab hospital, I woke upone morning and she was on the floor and she couldn’t get up. She said she’d beenthere for five hours and she’s freezing cold because the air-conditioning was on andshe didn’t have a blanket on her. I just started to cry. It was awful. And after thathappened she finally resigned herself to the fact that she did need someone all of thetime.

“We already had Augusta. She’s a Portuguese woman who comes from to ,six days a week. But we needed more help. We needed someone to live in. My sisterhas a nice young Filipino tutor for her two kids. And she said that her cousinneeded a job.

“The cousin was invited to come from the Philippines to stay with her husband’sfamily and take care of his grandparents. One of them had Alzheimer’s. She tookcare of them twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. For two years. And itseems they never gave her any relief at all. And they didn’t give her any pay. Soshe’d basically never worked before in Canada except for taking care of herhusband’s grandparents.

“And so I met Letty. She’s thirty-two and she’s married. Her husband is in thePhilippines. And I said, ‘Would you like a job taking care of my mother? Augustawill still do all the cleaning and cooking and stuff but you could live here and be oncall in the evenings when she needs you. Like you could go to sleep, but we wouldhave a monitor in case my mother needs you.’ And she said, ‘Sure.’ And so I said,‘When we phoned an agency they said it was , to , a month. Since you haveno experience I’m going to start by paying you , a month for a two-monthtrial period.’ She told me that she had applied for citizenship and her papers aregoing through, so she would rather I pay her under the table. She isn’t allowed towork here until she gets her status. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll just do it like this.’

“My mother doesn’t understand why. . . . She doesn’t really see it as a job,taking her to the bathroom. She just thinks of it as like something you would do foranybody. If you just happened to live there, you would do it. She doesn’t see it aswage-gaining work. It’s like it doesn’t compute to her that people have lives andthey have other things to do. That this is actually labor. She thinks that her life istheir life and that basically all they do is sit down and watch tv with her or waituntil she has to go to the bathroom, which is like once every three hours.

“We were feeling bad because Letty was working six nights a week, and at firstshe was staying up all night. If you add it up her hours are from p.m. ’til a.m.when Augusta gets there. And that’s fourteen hours, so we thought that was waytoo many hours. And we pay Augusta hour, so Letty’s wages just don’t com-

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pare. But then you think about, it’s only three or four times a night that mymother needs you. So it’s kind of a weird job. The flat rate was the only way wecould really afford this. And I thought giving someone room and board couldreally help them out. But it’s not helping Letty at all because she’d rather live withher family. So it’s kinda like this really awkward situation, because I thought some-one would be happy to have a place to live. Especially in central Vancouver. But allshe does is go back to Coquitlam [an outer suburb of Vancouver] every day. Be-cause she is so lonely. When she first came to my mother’s house she was reallyreally grieving. Really lonely.

“I think Letty likes her job. It’s her first job in Canada, and we told her we’d giveher a good reference. If she got her papers in order it would be a really good job forher. Her husband could come and move in with her. I got her the Internet. I said,‘Do you want a tv and cable?’ And she said, ‘No I don’t watch tv.’ And I said,‘What do you want?’ And she said, ‘I’d like Internet.’ And after she got that sheseemed better. My sister says she spends all her time at night doing the webcamwith her husband.

“I just want my mother to be as comfortable as possible and to be as happy asshe can with her last days. So this is the only way we can do it. And it’s my mother’smoney. She worked really hard all her life. Different jobs, tons of different jobs:waitressing and then hairdressing and then real estate. She saved all of her money.And now she has this nice house. And she wants to stay there. She’s lived therethirty years. And she knows all of her neighbors. She doesn’t feel like going to oneof these institutions. As far as I could see of these institutions, they’re horrible.I don’t want my mother going there either. They’ll leave her in a fucking diaper allday. My sister says that the hospital made her incontinent. She never had thatproblem before. They kept putting diapers on her. So now’s she wearing a diaperevery frigging day.”

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Animating the monologues of employers was a site of intense struggle among thosewho created the play, and we battled an understandable impulse to stereotype, ridicule,and blame Canadians who hire foreign domestic workers. But as a nanny agent said toPratt when she was interviewed years ago: Canadian employers are just as likely to be“Mr. and Mrs. Safeway” (a run-of-the-mill chain food store), desperate for affordablechildcare or eldercare, as a bourgeois woman who “does lunch.” Exhausting the possi-bilities for creating monologues that would invite empathy within our existing archiveof interviews with parents in need of childcare, we began to interview friends andacquaintances who had been driven to the lcp in desperation to find care for theirailing parents. Eldercare works in a different emotional register from that of childcare:filial duty, chronic illness and the looming prospect of death, and concerns about theimpact of removing a parent from his or her home for their long-term survivalit’smore difficult to make light of such a situation. Risking a friendship for the cause (ourdramaturge cautioned against this!), we developed the monologue from the words of a


left-leaning academic friend who articulated a complex stew of emotions, rationaliza-tions, and compromises in ways that would, we hoped, invite careful considerationfrom audience members.

The staging of even this monologue presented challenges. In the Vancouver pro-duction (see Figure ), the costume designer put the actor in the most appalling outfitbased on her notion of what an academic woman might wear (big and baggy). Ourprotests that the woman was a rather hip, practicing artistnot unlike some of thosewho might view the playwere ignored. Inexplicably, the actor found her way into thecharacter through the prop of rolling her own cigarettes while delivering the mono-logue. When the scene was restaged in Berlin it was handled in an entirely differentway. The actor wore her own clothes and she used a prop that made sense given thecharacter’s profession: a PowerPoint on which she displayed pictures of herself and her(actual) mother, a pictorial narrative that told the story of them aging together. It couldnot have been made clearer to us that our script has been but one component of eachperformance.

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Scene Five: Storied Objects Room and a Break from Words

Rather than an instance of creativewriting, this scene offered a break fromwords. The installation was built as areplica of a domestic worker’s bed-room. Hidden speakers looped vari-ous environmental sounds, includingfootsteps on a creaky wooden floor,snippets of conversation from animagined upstairs, the flushing of atoilet and the groans of piping. Theroom was dark and claustrophobic.Spectators were given permission toenter the room to touch and feel per-sonal objects. They were invited toexperience the materiality of thespace, and the intent was to let ob-jects and sounds tell their own stories.Domestic workers worked closelywith the designer Tamara Unroe in theroom’s construction, and all of thematerials utilized were selected from conversations wherein domestic workers de-scribed the objects and sounds that were significant in their lives. An exact repro-duction of a domestic worker’s daily journal lay on the bedside table, inspirationaland devotional religious passages interspersed with an unrelenting schedule ofdomestic duties. Christian iconographyimages of Pope John Paul and a rosary

F. (above) and (below)Replica of adomestic worker’s bedroom, the setting for a scenein Nanay. (Photographs by Caleb Johnston, )

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draped on a small figurine of Christwere carefully arranged in the small space.Around the edges of the room were framed handwritten and drawn descriptionsof different domestic workers’ Canadian homes, as well as a collage of actual let-ters, cards, and photographs sent between family members in the Philippines andCanada. A scroll of paper was placed underneath the collage where audience mem-bers were encouraged to write down their comments and reflections.

As writers of the play, we were reluctant to stage this scene because it seemed togrant audience members the right to violate personal space without complicatingthis transgression. But the play was a collaboration, and we conceded to thedirector’s desire to give spectators respite from spoken testimony and for a moretactile experience. Our misgivings seemed to be confirmed when one member ofthe audience who identified herself as Colombian had this to say in a talk-back atthe end of one performance: “I just wanted to know, do you ever have on this showactual Filipina workers? Because I felt, I felt really weird. I have been in the samekind of situation, and I felt that looking at people [audience members] sitting onthe bed [in the model bedroom], it was like an invasion of my privacy. And for meit was awful to see Canadians like, you know, for me it was a little bit offensive.During the whole play, I was wondering, like I felt like a colored person watchingthe white people watching the play. […] Because when I have been in that situa-tion and you’re talking about me, that’s really different. I felt that they were look-ing at my room. […] I just felt that this play is for Canadians. It’s not for Filipinos,and it’s not for immigrants.”

In stark contrast, several of the domestic workers collaborating in the projectstated that they felt most attached to the Storied Objects Room: “I shared some ofmy experience there, I am still wounded [when I saw it] and I could still. . . . It’s aflashback in my memory when I hear [the audio recording of] the water splashingdown [through pipes in the wall]. Oh, it reminds me of how noisy my room was”;“like the bed . . . I really can’t control my tears. Because at the moment I can reallyfeel the environment, the temperature, the smell of the room, as well as the mate-rials around the room”; “it made a lot of the stories we hear tangible and sort of . . .you are stepping into their space.”

The scene thus emerged as a rich affective site within the play, and the strongreactions that it elicited created productive occasions for dialogue. It also pro-vided an important lesson to us as both social scientists and creators of this play:Scholarly critical skills are essential for assessing representations, but we cannotknow in advance the reception of our representations. Readings and reactions canbe quite unexpected, and they breathe new life into well-worn scholarly assump-tions and debate.

Closing

The last monologue of the play, involving the testimony of a domestic worker’schild, was staged as an interview, with Pratt (as researcher) sitting in the audience,prompting the monologue through a series of brief questions. The play, already


disrupted in this way, moved seamlessly into a talk-back jointly facilitated by Prattand a representative from the pwc of bc or the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance.Many of these talk-backs turned into extraordinary public conversations thatlasted thirty minutes to an hour after the play ended.

As writers, we took the words of domestic workers, employers, and others,already shaped through the protocols and artificiality of the interview methodand further abstracted through the process of transcription. We consolidated andreworked these words once again, attempting to bring them back to life as mono-logues that could be animated as realistic characters who would draw audiencemembers to them. We did this to bring the issues and research to Canadians whoseem not to care much about the lives affected by a global economy of care andneed. The characters remain much more shadowy in this nonanimated script, butwe hope that they have in some small measure come to life for you and that theirtestimonies and histories move you to think, feel, and act.

Notes

. “Nanay” means “mother” in Tagalog. To watch video excerpts from Nanay, go to [www.urban-crawl.com/nanay/].

. Material within the script that is set in square brackets is text that we inserted as we developedthe monologue. It was not part of the original research transcript.

References

Bakan, A., and D. Stasiulis, eds. . Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Burvill, T. . “Politics Begins as Ethics”: Levinasian Ethics and Australian Performance Concern-ing Refugees. Research in Drama Education (): –.

Dolan, J. . Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michi-gan Press.

Houston, D., and L. Pulido. . The Work of Performativity: Performing Social Justice at theUniversity of Southern California. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (): –.

Johnston, C., and G. Pratt. . Nanay (Mother): A Testimonial Play. Cultural Geographies ():–.

Kondo, D. . The Narrative Production of “Home,” Community and Identity in Asian AmericanTheater. In Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity, edited by S. Lavie and T. Sweden-burgh, –. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. . About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. New York: Routledge.———. . (Re)visions of Race: Critical Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in

Contemporary Documentary Performance. Theatre Journal (): –.Macklin, A. . Foreign Domestic Worker: Surrogate Housewife or Mail Order Servant? McGill Law

Journal (): –.Nagar, R. . Women’s Theatre and Redefinitions of Public, Private and Politics in North India.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (): –.Pratt, G. . From Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny: Discursive Geographies of Filipina Do-

mestic Workers in Vancouver, B.C. Economic Geography (): –.———. . Working Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.———. . Families Apart: Migrant mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.Pratt, G., and C. Johnston. . Turning Theatre into Law, and Other Spaces of Politics. Cultural

Geographies (): –.

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Pratt, G., and E. Kirby. . Performing Nursing: BC Nurses’ Union Theatre Project. ACME: AnInternational E-Journal for Critical Geographies (): –.

Pratt, G., in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre. . From Migrant to Immigrant:Domestic Workers Settle in Vancouver, Canada. In Companion to Feminist Geography, edited byL. Nelson and J. Seager, –. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Ranciere, J. . The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by G. Rockhill.London: Continuum.

Stasiulis, D., and A. Bakan. . Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the GlobalSystem. Houndsmills, England: Palgrave.

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