Becoming Diasporically Moroccan: Linguistic and Embodied Practices for Negotiating Belonging

Introduction

Not all those at the borders, such as tourists, migrants, or foreign nationals, are recognized as strangers; some will seem more ‘at home’ than others, some will pass through, with their passports extending physical motility into social mobility. There is no question posed about their origin. The stranger’s genealogy in contrast is always suspect. The stranger becomes a stranger because of some trace of a dubious origin. Having the ‘right’ passport makes no difference if you have the wrong body or name: and indeed, the stranger with the ‘right’ passport might cause particular trouble, as the one who risks passing through. The discourse of ‘stranger danger’ reminds us that danger is often posited as originating from what is outside the community, or as coming from outsiders, those people who are not ‘at home’, and who themselves have come from ‘somewhere elsewhere’ (where the ‘where’ of this ‘elsewhere’ always makes a difference). The politics of mobility, of who gets to move with ease across the lines that divide spaces, can be re-described as the politics of who gets to be at home, who gets to inhabit spaces, as spaces that are inhabitable for some bodies and not others, insofar as they extend the surfaces of some bodies and not others. (Ahmed, 2007: 162)

Instead of flowing easily from one side of the border to the other and back, the bodies Ahmed describes above encounter friction. These bodies hesitate in interaction with borders, which frame them as strange when crossing, but strange in a specific way – the body does not match an assumed categorization made by the passport. Their genealogy, their locality, their place of home becomes suspect – a facet of simply being that they must negotiate in order to pass through.

As people migrate from place to place around the globe, more and more ‘next generations’ are born into a place where they both belong and do not belong – they are ‘from’ there, but also ‘from’ somewhere else. Increased access to modes of travel mean that we can be ‘from’ somewhere and regularly visit another place where we are ‘from’. But sometimes, as Ahmed describes, those visits mean passing through borders where we are categorized: we become ‘strangers’, even if the passport says we are not.

I first encountered this phenomenon on a ferry boat between Algeciras, Spain and Tangier, Morocco, in July 1999. I was a person who precisely fit into a well-known category: an American college student, spending a summer backpacking through Europe. I was by myself for this leg of the trip, but found that I quickly met people on this boat: other European travelers, looking for adventure in Morocco, as well as Moroccan families living in Europe who were going ‘home’ for their summer holidays.

I was bowled over by the cacophony of voices I heard on that boat, speaking all varieties of European and Moroccan languages. I was surprised that there were so many people making this journey, since I had not known about the massive flow of Moroccan guestworker migration into Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. People who seemed to be like me – the budget travelers, at a time when there were no budget flights to Morocco – were a minority. The ferry was overflowingly full with Moroccans who seemed to be ‘going home’, yet who were definitely coming from homes in Europe. Although I was not yet an anthropologist, I wondered who these people were, where they were coming from, and how they found themselves on that boat.

Since then, I have crossed over on that ferry route several times: as a student of Arabic, as a researcher travelling independently for my Masters project, and along with a participating family in my PhD project. The boat is still a microcosm of Moroccan migration in Europe, where original migrants, now grandparents and great-grandparents, travel with their children and grandchildren between homes. It is a place where Moroccans from all different parts of Europe might meet each other, since many still travel by car overland from their European homes in order to spend their summer holidays in Morocco. It is also a place where they encounter the border: when travelling by ferry to and from Morocco, passport control often takes place during the three-hour ride. Moroccans from all over must present their passports and national identity cards, and negotiate the type of encounter Ahmed describes above. They have to show that they are both strangers and not strangers – that they enter the country as Moroccans but leave the country as Europeans, with the right to live elsewhere.

Figure 1Families on the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, July 2008

Becoming Categorized

As much as the homeland is imagined as a place to reunite with one’s ‘roots’ or imagined origins, for many visiting ‘home’ on vacation gives meaning to the sayings I hear repeated about this group: ‘ni d’ici ni de là-bas’ (neither from here nor there), ‘entre deux chaises’ (between two chairs), or even from Morocco as ‘sahab el-kharij’ (friends from outside). All of these epithets embody some kind of dualistic paradox untenable over time. There is a feeling of being perpetually ‘between’ places, and never at rest anywhere.

That feeling is so common, and so recognizable to many North Africans in France, that it is the core subject of the song ‘Entre Deux’ quoted in Extract 1.1. This French-Arabic rap was written and performed by Bachir Baccour, a.k.a. Tunisiano, a French citizen of Tunisian origin. The lyrics evoke many of the themes of dislocation and instability that surface for post-migrant generation individuals visiting their ancestral homeland.

This verse excerpted from the song lyrics¹ establishes some of the ways in which negative frameworks of belonging are practiced: the protagonist is questioned by the French, reproached by Tunisians, and feels himself unable to integrate in either place. The remainder of the song elaborates on these themes, with one verse in Tunisian Arabic and another in French, finally identifying all like migrant groups in France – Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and others – who share in this affect of dislocation.

As an artistic depiction of the experience of going ‘home’ for the summer holidays, ‘Entre Deux’ illustrates two points that are key discussions I seek to open in this book.

First, the fact of visiting the diasporic home is not a simple ‘return to origins’; it involves negotiations that refract on senses of belonging in both the diasporic home and the country of residence. The holidays are imbued with a sense of attachment to the diasporic home, in this case Morocco, and a troubling of that attachment through the sense of being rejected by those living there.

Secondly, this depiction connotes how negotiations of belonging take place along visually perceived dimensions, like visually perceived embodiment, which interlace and interact with other dimensions, like communicative practices. Tunisiano is recognized as a ‘stranger’ and ‘intruder’ by his neighbors, eyeing him suspiciously each summer when he arrives. As he expresses, in both Arabic and French, they call him Arab and they call him foreigner – an ‘intruder of the same skin color’. He is recognized as Arab by his skin and perhaps by his linguistic abilities, but recognized as foreign by his actions and accent.

This dynamic of negotiating belonging in relation to one’s passport, or one’s skin and accent among other means of categorization, are familiar to diasporic visitors (DVs) entering Morocco. Coming from Moroccan families, living in diasporic homelands (France, Belgium or The Netherlands in this case), their sense of ‘being-Moroccan’ is challenged when traveling to Morocco, from crossing the border to other everyday interactions with people and places in their territorial homeland. Even having the ‘right’ passport, as they nearly all do, they find their sense of belonging as part of Morocco is distanced by their own distance from residing in the homeland.

On the ferry crossing from Algeciras to Tangier, I have observed many times how this negotiation happens as each passenger steps up to the customs officers processing entries. Every visitor to Morocco receives a unique number – I have one stamped in the back of my current passport and my expired passport, and every time I enter Morocco that number is recorded. Moroccan citizens are recorded by their national identity card number; the system assumes that if you are ‘Moroccan’, then you have a Moroccan national identity card. If you live outside Morocco, then you have to make a trip to your embassy – often a costly and time-consuming affair – in order to maintain your ID card. I have watched over and over again how individuals step up to the desk to have their passport stamped for entry, and must negotiate being ‘Moroccan’ or not, based on having an ID card, or knowing their national identity card number. One of my research participants, in fact, entered as ‘Belgian’ because she had lost her ID card. Even while she spoke Moroccan Arabic with the officer, who acknowledged that she is a citizen, he stamped her as a visitor, with the same type of visitor ID number in her Belgian passport as I have in my American passport.

These small instances of classification, or categorization, all contribute to an experience of what it means to be ‘Moroccan’ or to be ‘diasporically Moroccan’ for migrant-origin European-Moroccans who took part in this research. During their annual summer visits, ‘being-Moroccan’ becomes an attractor in assemblage (DeLanda, 2006), a categorial ideal-type, shaped through dimensions and practices of embodiment that emerge in the encounters DVs have with resident Moroccans. I argue that this category exerts considerable force because of the tension between their materially ‘Moroccan’ bodies – visually categorizable as ‘Moroccan’ – and their materially and expressively ‘non-Moroccan’ corporeality. They belong because of their ‘Moroccan’ bodies, lineages, families and attachments, yet do not belong because of their ‘non-Moroccan’, ‘European’ habits, preferences, sensibilities, speech and ways of being in and through their skins.

I do not, however, want to accept this problematic ‘betweenness’ as the final definition for ‘being diasporic’. Instead, this book is concerned with how DVs reconcile this duality in interaction by negotiating the ways in which they are categorized through embodied and linguistic practices of belonging. It is also about how these categories of ‘Moroccan’ and ‘non-Moroccan’ are themselves malleable, and are changing in response to the way DVs and others engage with them. So, the subject of this book is not ‘being diasporic’, but becoming-diasporic: exploring how the practices, interactions, experiences and encounters of people who participated in this research emerge into vibrant categorizations of ‘diasporicness’ that change what it means to be ‘Moroccan’ both in Europe and in Morocco, and are becoming more recognizable and more solidified with every return visit.

An Ethnography of the Summer Holidays

In order to explore this intersection of migration, diaspora and practice, the following chapters engage theoretically and methodologically with cultural anthropology, human geography and sociolinguistics. At its core, this is an ethnography of the summer holiday as a timespace of encounter between diasporic and resident Moroccans. I used the anthropological method of ethnography to address how post-migrant generation diasporic visitors negotiate this double sense of attachment and distance to a place – related to both sociolinguistic and geographical discourses of that term – through their linguistic and embodied communicative practices while in Morocco. The ethnographic data, including observed practices as well as recorded interactions, reflect these practices as I observed them taking place during the summers of 2007 and 2008, with additional ethnographic contextual background from before and after these two seasons gathered through interviews and discussions with participants in Europe and in Morocco.

Throughout this book, I frequently use scare quotes, or single quotations around words that relate to categorizational identities. This grammatical form is often discouraged in academic written work, but I am using these purposefully, to remind the reader as frequently as necessary that such things as ‘Moroccanness’ or ‘Europeanness’ are always in process, unfixed, and contradictory. As I present this snapshot of becoming-diasporic as I observed it during this project, the ‘Moroccanness’ I observed will have shifted since then, and the scare quotes should signal that each iteration of ‘identity’ – as ‘local’ or ‘tourist’ or as ‘Moroccan’ or ‘European’ – inevitably hinges upon the time and place when it happens. I am never making claims about what it means to be Moroccan; I am only making claims about how becoming ‘Moroccan’ happened in this moment.

To set the stage for the data, I present in Chapter 1 historical and linguistic contexts related to European presences in Morocco and Moroccan presences in Europe. Next, I argue in Chapter 2 the theoretical bases for my analysis, beginning from theories of nation and diaspora and moving towards assemblage and communicative practice. Included with these, I present the methodological frameworks for this research, based primarily in socio­linguistic and ethnomethodological approaches alongside ethnography.

The three following empirical chapters are incremental and cumulating explorations of how these categories operate through the interactions of participants in and with the homeland. Chapter 3, Defining the Category, explores how participants describe themselves and their interactions with others – their metaphorical and discursive ideas about ‘Moroccanness’ – as well as how I observed their interactions. This chapter addresses some of the specific markers that become identifiable and are discussed as indexing embodied and linguistic belonging in Morocco. Chapter 4, Negotiating the Category, turns towards micro-analysis of marketplace interactions. Examples in this chapter show how participants strategically use their embodied communicative resources to negotiate themselves as ‘locally-Moroccan’ in order to get what is perceived as the right price for goods – whether or not they succeed in ratifying themselves into that category. Finally, Chapter 5, A New Category? extends these analyses of embodied and linguistic interactions towards how participants attempt to belong as simply diasporically Moroccan, without reaching towards other categorial definitions.

In combination, these chapters move towards an impression of how this cyclical encounter of diasporic and local Moroccans during the summer holidays becomes one in which the shape of ‘being-Moroccan’ molds and shifts, incorporating new elements as it sheds old ones, and possibly approaching categorizations whereby diasporic generations can acquire some persistent sense of belonging at ‘home’.

Note

(1)This representation incorporates user-produced Latinization of Arabic speech; see http://genius.com/Sniper-entre-deux-lyrics for the complete song. In addition, this site provides user-produced annotations translating Arabic to French and describing some of the pop culture references.

1Pathways and Backgrounds

As with any story, this one has many paths that were taken and not taken, along with backgrounds that contour the variety of possible paths, leading up to the present day. This chapter presents several of the pathways important for understanding how, when I arrived on that ferry, I found the mass of Moroccan-origin passengers who were born and raised in Europe, traveling ‘home’ for their summer holidays.

The first layer in this background relates the postwar labor migration history between Morocco and the three European nations under discussion (France, Belgium and The Netherlands). This layer accounts for the presence of Moroccans with similar, comparable migration histories in these countries. Their migration histories created material and social pathways for the annual summer holiday visit to Morocco – now, along with certain other diasporic populations in Europe (Turkish in Germany or Portuguese in France, for example), practically an institutionalized annual exodus.

This annual summer visit sets the stage for the next layer of background: multilingual practices in Morocco. Migration-based multilingual configurations are enabled by intersections of codes that are official, national and regional; written and spoken; local or foreign; and practiced in the home or outside the home by post-migrant Moroccans. All of these configurations are possible in the diasporic population, and can become relevant to practices of diasporic visitors from Europe in interaction with others in public spaces in Morocco.

The last sociolinguistic layer contextualizes how the skills involved in bargaining – an everyday activity in Morocco – are also performative utterances that change the state of the world after the speech act has been accomplished. For diasporic visitors, demonstrating bargaining skill has potential material consequences for successful or unsuccessful interactions when they try to purchase goods. These material consequences reflect on how categories of belonging in bargaining become relevant to complex global discourses of value and economic power, which feed back into the first background of migration histories between Morocco and Europe and their contemporary economic impacts in Morocco.

All together, these layers present the driving perspective on the DVs whose practices will be described in the following chapters. They frame both how and why they became participants in this project, and some of the many ‘identities’ and belongings that shape them as interlocutors with others between Europe and Morocco.

Europe and Morocco

From Europe: Backgrounds from Protectorate to Independence

Morocco experienced a short occupation period compared to other colonized states: it was only under French ‘protection’ from 1912 to 1956. Yet, the relationship between Morocco and Europe prior to the French Protectorate is long and complex, extending far beyond colonial power (see Cohen & Hahn, 1966; Minca & Wagner, 2016; Pennell, 2000, for more detail).

For Moroccan languages and diaspora, one key ideology that emerged from the Protectorate emphasizes the differences in cultural attitudes and language between Arab and Amazigh people (or Imazighen) in Morocco. Historical evidence indicates that these groups integrated their lives in a different way before colonial intervention and probably would not have taken the same pathway without it (Geertz et al., 1979). Both patterns of linguistic diversity in Morocco and patterns of out-migration from Morocco to Europe reflect how ideological differentiations separate groups within Morocco, so that those separations extend outside Morocco.

Group differentiation and integration between Imazighen and Arabs in Morocco stretch back to Islamic conquest around the 8th century, and travel through different waves of migration from the Arab Middle East to North Africa since then (Barbour, 1965; Cohen & Hahn, 1966). By the time the French arrived in North Africa in the 19th century, both groups were followers of Islam but, according to ideologies reproduced in French colonial research, the Kabyle in Algeria (a specific branch of Imazighen) were descended from Christians and were therefore more amenable to conversion to a French model of life than Arabs (Pennell, 2000: 164–166).

Along with this religio-cultural reputation, these groups also had distinct linguistic practices through their maintenance of the various Amazigh dialects of Morocco. As shown in Figure 1.1, these linguistic group separations stretched along the main mountain ranges of Morocco from north to south. Protectorate leaders in Morocco tried to use these linguistic