Silenced: Caribbean Domestic Workers Talk With Makeda Silvera

by Makeda Silvera

secondhand copy, curl to corner of covers, light wear. Revised Enlarged edition

Genres: Nonfiction, Canada, History

110 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1989

About the author

Makeda Silvera was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and spent her early years there before immigrating to Canada in 1967. Now living in Toronto, she is co-founder of Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press, where she is the managing editor. Her previous publications include Silenced, an acclaimed collection of oral histories of Caribbean domestic workers in Canada; Growing Up Black, a resource guide for youth, and Remembering G And Other Stories, her first book of fiction. She is also the editor of Piece of My Heart, a ground-breaking anthology of writings by lesbians of colour.

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just powerful. All of these women need to be heard. If you're Canadian, you most likely know someone who can here as a domestic worker. Listen to them, uplift them - especially women.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first time I read this book, it was for an African American Studies and English Literature Course entitled Exile and Migration in Caribbean Literature. The professor assigned it to be read alongside Jamaica Kincaid's novel 'Lucy'--a great recommendation that I strongly suggest.

'Silenced' is one of the best and most accessible academic texts that I've ever read; it's a shame that it's not read and cited more widely. The topics that Makeda Silvera is most deeply concerned with--global migrations of labor from the Global South to advanced capitalist nations, immigrant legal status and (in)visibility, anti-Black racism, care work, gender-based sexual violence, motherhood, income inequities within labor markets and the human cost of neoliberal economic policies--are just as present in today's political discourse as they were at the time of the book's publication in 1983. What do we make of the fact that upper-middle class and some middle-class women (of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds) in Canada, the U.S., and Western Europe, have only been able to enter the workforce because of the migration of women from South East Asia, parts of the African continent, the Caribbean and Latin America to perform feminized labor? What do we make of the fact that political antagonism against immigrants grows without restraint in advanced capitalist nations as neoliberal economies rely on that labor for the operation of the "free market"?

What is most important about this text, to me, is the way that it shows that notions of feminism that are predicated upon "gender equality" fall apart. Feminism is about dismantling systems that sustain gender-based oppressions AND building relationships and institutions that resist the maintenance of inequity. The book also raises some really critical observations about the human cost of economic "growth" in capitalist models. My one small gripe about the text is that while Silvera does a wonderful job of foregrounding her work and contextualizing her interviews, she provides no analysis of the data. It's been a while since I've engaged with oral histories, so perhaps this is a mark of the discipline. However, a chapter focused on analysis and unpacking some of the issues raised in the interviews would have been wonderful.

Highly recommended. Again, if you can, read it alongside Jamaica Kincaid's novel, 'Lucy.'