Fatou’s Learned Helplessness 

Zadie Smith’s short story, The Embassy of Cambodia tells what kinds of challenges like feeling alienated, identity confusion, otherness, and traumatic experiences an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, Fatou faces in London where there are working people belonging to different ethnicities and suffering from a variety of inequalities in terms of citizenship.

Fatou works as a housekeeper for a rich Asian family, the Derawals, and has difficulty in belonging to English identity and culture because she is treated as a second-class citizen who is restricted with certain rights and positions like being the only servant in London. For this reason, Fatou starts to question her presence in the multicultural English society and finds herself lonely and disconnected from the idea of Englishness. Her awareness and transformation from a submissive and ordinary servant into a woman questioning the value of her own humanity take place through the Derawals’ insulting treatments.

Smith ascribes the meaning of multiculturalism to London and demonstrates how this leads to a variety of inequalities for the immigrants. Fatou’s social life is dependent on the permission and privileges of the Derawals in London where she can go swimming with the card of the Derawals, so she is actually exposed to the unfair order established by the Asian family, in other words, another foreign ethnicity. However, this hierarchy is determined by the natives because they offer some advantages for the immigrants who gain the developing conditions in London and adopt the native culture. The Derawals see themselves more superior to Fatou as a race and position and also blame her for the inability to learn the new culture, so they debar her from some rights like her wage. While Fatou reads the news of an immigrant girl described as a slave of a rich Londoner, she compares her own position with this girl in the newspaper and tries to console herself with her own slightly better conditions. This sheds light on the changing balance of power between the various cultures. The natives determine this hierarchy, assimilating the immigrants in times throughout history. Fatou with an African identity is one of the lowest members of the hierarchy, so she is exposed to a variety of traumatic experiences. On the other hand, Fatou makes her own arrangements with her conditions by keeping herself busy with swimming and the game of badminton, so this seems like her strategy trying to adopt London, but there is no expression about her sense of belonging to London or her effort to learn the native culture. Thus, she is just consent to her own fate controlled by the superiority of another race.

In conclusion, Smith describes the balance of power between the different races in multicultural London where Fatou is the victim of her own geography because she has the same traumatic experiences in both her own country and London. Even if she works as an unpaid housekeeper in return for food and water and saves the Derawals’ child, she does not get respect from the family as a human. Andrew, who is her native church friend and works as a nightguard, supports her, but he does not realize her romantic interest in him. As Fatou is getting used to making herself content with the present conditions, her relationship with him stays uncertain like her future. Even if she knows English and speaks a little Italian, her efforts are considered useless and unimportant because of her race. She cannot find any kind of social position except being a servant. For this reason, she actually takes refuge in her own fate’s helplessness.