“Thank God I Am an African Woman”the Christian as Exile in Maggie Gee’s My Cleaner

  1. Carlos Villar Flor 1
  1. 1 Universidad de La Rioja
    info

    Universidad de La Rioja

    Logroño, España

    ROR https://ror.org/0553yr311

Journal:
Oceánide

ISSN: 1989-6328

Year of publication: 2019

Issue: 11

Type: Article

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Abstract

The latest Pew Research Center report on the religious affiliation of international migrants, “Faith on the Move” (2012), concludes that 49% of the migrants of the world are Christian (105,670,000), and, when applied to those settled in the European Union, the percentage grows to 56 % (26,370,000). The fact that Christianity is the faith professed by the majority of the migrant population worldwide, however, does not necessarily imply that this factor may facilitate a welcoming reception in a host country with a Christian tradition, like the U.K. On the contrary, the migrant may find that one of the major constituents of his identity, his faith, is likely to amount to a further deterritorialization (Papastergiadis, 2000) in his new home nation. The English writer Maggie Gee has written three novels that can be regarded as outstanding examples of migrant literature: The White Family (2002), My Cleaner (2005), and My Driver (2009). These works explore different dimensions of the cultural and social clashes between a set of “traditionally English” characters and their antagonists, African or Caribbean immigrants. Whereas the conflict is overtly racist in the case of The White Family, it gets subtler and perhaps more insidious in the case of My Cleaner, where racism is of the “patronising, ‘well-meaning’, middle-class variety” (O’Kelly, 2005). As it turns out, most of the protagonists in these narratives are Christian to some degree, though their respective religious patterns show outstanding differences that do not help much in bridging the gap between the old and the new British citizens. This article will focus on the central character in My Cleaner, the Ugandan migrant Mary Tendo, and how she undergoes a process of displacement in the receiving-country that challenges her religious identity. As Carin Mardorossian explains, one common theme of migrant literature is how “the migrant’s identity undergoes radical shifts that alter her self-perception and often result in ambivalence towards both her old and new existence” (Mardorossian, 2002:16). I will explore how Mary’s inbred piety is in danger of cooling off in contact with a secularist or indifferent ambience, and how her difficulties to restate her self-perception as a Christian in a new home make her go through a phase of religious “deterritorialization”, adapting the term coined by Papastergiadis (2000).

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