Paused subjects: Waiting for migration in North Africa

Introduction: Holding your breath

Hold your breath for long enough and your head will start spinning … your chest starts hurting, you can even lose your balance … I tried it once for longer than I should have … you know, just to see what would happen … things around me started twirling, they were hazy, blurry. This is how life is when you wait to go. You hold your breath and everything is hazy, it’s like everything around you is hiding behind a thin veil. But then you realise that it’s not the world that is spinning, that is hazy and blurry. It’s you.

Today, Youssef’s town, together with its surrounding rural and mountainous regions, is one of Morocco’s main departure centres for emigration towards Southern Europe. Although migration in the area gained momentum later than in other areas of Morocco such as the north-eastern Rif region, since the late 1970s impressive levels of transnational movement, particularly towards Italy and Spain, have been sweeping the area (De Haas, 2007). Today it is near impossible to encounter a household in the region that does not have at least one family member living abroad. ‘The rest of us are waiting to join them. You just hold your breath until then – if you survive the wait, that is’ Youssef dryly concludes his breathing parable.

As Youssef’s words testify, the high levels of migration towards Europe have not only affected the demographic composition and GDP of this area of the world, but also the very way in which existence, future and possibility are spoken about and understood, often by younger and older generations alike (Elliot, 2012; McMurray, 2001; Capello, 2008; Pandolfo, 2007). Migration in the Tadla Plain has become for many synonymous with a life worth living, and many of the actions, thoughts and routines of daily life are infused with – if not explicitly oriented towards – a sense of expectation for migratory futures to come. Waiting for migration, and for the livable futures it is understood to bring with it, is in this sense an ubiquitous quality of life in the area.

In this paper, I draw on extensive ethnographic research in the region to begin to unpack some of the qualities and textures waiting acquires in such a specifically ‘expectant’ context. Required before, during and after migration, waiting is at once the precondition for migratory movement, part of its substance, and often also its outcome (see Turnbull; Rotter, this volume). In the Tadla Plain, the waiting entailed in migratory endeavours expands beyond the singular mobile bodies of migrants, becoming part and parcel of the fibre of everyday life in the region. Indeed, waiting is seen in a sense as the area’s generalised malaise, and not only by the urban middle classes whom I have often heard condemn the countryside’s ‘culture of sitting’ (i.e. of doing nothing and waiting) that mirrors, they claim, Morocco’s ‘sitting’ on any development trajectory. The idiom of waiting-as-malaise emerges also from the area itself, where young men waiting to leave, men that refuse to work, study or marry, and instead incessantly plan intricate and dangerous crossings into Europe, are said to have l-barra f-rasshoum (the outside in their heads), and are spoken of as mrad (ill), only at times metaphorically so.

The expectant waiting for migration takes different forms in the area. It manifests in young men’s waiting at cafes and bars for news about new European migration laws, in a mother’s anxious waiting for remittances to arrive from an emigrant daughter, in the nervous, often exasperated, wait for an answer from the Italian Consulate in Casablanca regarding a tourist visa application. Waiting thus acquires different qualities for different people in the Tadla Plain, but, also, different registers and qualities of waiting exist within the lives of single individuals, at times succeeding one another, at times overlapping in complex ways.

In this article, then, I wish to address some of the multiple ways in which waiting for migration affects not only the experience of Moroccan transnational movement itself, but also the experience of those at its expectant peripheries. I aim, in particular, to reflect on how, in Morocco, waiting for migration is deeply implicated in the ways in which personhood is formed and performed, oriented and nurtured. To develop this point on the constitutive relationship between waiting and personhood, I focus in particular on a group of people in Morocco who are deeply involved in waiting: women married to emigrant men. A number of recent studies (e.g. De Haas and Van Rooij, 2010; Ennaji and Sadiqi, 2008) have highlighted how the pervasive phenomenon of emigration in Morocco has generated the corollary phenomenon of so-called ‘left-behind women’: women in emigrant areas throughout the country who are married to Moroccan men living in Europe, but who are not themselves migrants. ¹

In the emigrant areas of Central Morocco where I conduct my research, women married to migrants – sometimes referred to as ‘l-ayalat dyal barra’, women of ‘the outside’ – have an intimate, prospective, relationship with migration, a relationship that generates unique patterns of everyday life, specific kinds of kinship and emotional bonds and, ultimately, particular kinds of gendered persons. Migrants’ spouses in the area are qualified on the basis of their husbands’ absence and are related, also discursively, to migration. ‘Rajoulha f l-barra’ (her husband is in ‘the outside’) is often used in conversations to describe and qualify a woman of the neighbourhood. In a context where a woman’s social persona is intrinsically linked to her relational status (Joseph, 1999; Sa’ar, 2001), a husband’s migration is also taken as a reference for his wife, and correspondingly indicates a specific, prospective, relationship with migration (cf. Buch, 2013).

As we shall see, because of their peculiar connection to migration, mediated through their specific conjugal link, the life of the migrant’s spouse is characterised by a particular type of expectant, and urgent, waiting – a waiting that often is extended across years, if not decades. In the pages to follow, I trace ethnographically how Moroccan women married to emigrants speak of, reckon, and embody this multi-layered waiting for migration, and consider the ways in which waiting permeates their very sense of gendered self. Because of their specific, and at times precarious, marital status, stretched between Morocco and Europe, waiting for migration becomes for these women more than mere waiting for transnational movement. Rather, it involves the expectation for a normal life (hayat ‘adia) to finally begin, and for a real woman (mra dyal bassah) to finally emerge from it.

Tracing the ways in which prospective migration permeates the lives of these women, I thus begin to unpack in this paper how waiting and personhood intersect, generating specific kinds of expectant persons, but also specific forms of waiting. To do this, I take a close look at the texture waiting assumes in women’s lives. After providing a brief context of the research this article draws upon, I show how marriage to a migrant man in Central Morocco often translates into long periods of waiting – not only for migration, but also for a complete, and fulfilling, married life to commence. Using the work of Adam Reed (2011) on waiting and hope in particular, I then move to address the ways in which migrants’ spouses in the area conceive of their waiting as qualitatively (and indeed quantitatively) distinct from others’ waiting in the area, by virtue of their special conjugal link with l-barra, ‘the outside’. Building on this observation, I zoom-in into the life of one particular woman, Habiba, ² and trace how her waiting is constituted by periodic bursts of intense activity triggered by this peculiar marital link – intense activity that, rather than translating into actual migration to Europe, ultimately produces more expectant waiting. I conclude by reflecting on one of the ways in which prolonged periods of waiting for migration may be conceived as nurturing specific kinds of personhoods in Morocco.

Field and method

The article draws on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural emigrant areas of Central Morocco between March 2009 and July 2010, as well as on shorter research visits paid regularly to the region since. My research on migrants’ spouses is part of a wider anthropological project (see Elliot, 2012) which explores the textures and proportions migration assumes in so-called ‘sending communities’ – those areas from which migration begins and, ideally for many involved, where it will one day also end. The project focuses, in particular, on the intimate effects of emigration in an area of the world where transnational movement has come to saturate existence: kinship, friendship and romance, economic relations and values, and the expectations people have of life and of each other.

The setting of both the wider research project and of this particular article is, as mentioned above, a region of Morocco that has become in many ways synonymous with mass emigration towards Europe. Migration from the Tadla Plain gained momentum between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, a period when most countries that were traditionally involved in Moroccan migration (France, Belgium and Holland) were closing their borders and restricting legal entry for migrants. This, amongst other historical and multifaceted reasons, has meant that emigration from the rural areas that comprise the Tadla Plain has from the outset been oriented towards Southern European countries such as Italy and Spain, where, at the time, a comprehensive system of migration control was yet to be developed, and the demand for cheap and temporary labour was high (Persichetti, 2003; De Filippo and Pugliese, 1996). Today, migration to Italy and Spain has become one of Central Morocco’s defining characteristics. The region is also sometimes referred to in Morocco as ‘the triangle of death’; a chilling reminder of the incessant deaths in the Mediterranean sea of young aspirant migrants from the area who have not been granted legal entry into Europe, and a chilling testimony to the role migration has assumed in the administering of life, and death, in the region.

The ethnographic material upon which this article draws was collected through a variety of anthropological methods, including extended interviews with migrants’ wives, participant observation in women’s daily routines, and by living in emigrant households and neighbourhoods of the area during my stays in Morocco.

Life in waiting

To marry a migrant in a town of the Tadla Plain equals, in many ways, marrying into a state of expectant waiting. Migration in the area is still largely (though by no means uniquely – see e.g. Salih, 2003) a male affair, and it is predominantly men who leave, and leave first. Men in the region generally emigrate as young and unmarried drari (boys), often marrying a young woman from their native towns and villages during one of their return visits.

In most cases I have come across in my ethnographic research in Central Morocco, a fundamental aspect underlining the marriage negotiations between the families of the future bride and groom is an understanding that the migrant man will, as soon as possible, yddiha (‘take her’), meaning that she will move to live in Europe (or, in some rare, cherished cases, North America) with her husband. The degree to which families are adamant about this aspect of the premarital negotiation varies significantly, together with the degree to which families have the knowledge, status and connections to make these requirements specific and effective. While for some households, a vague promise that ‘gha nddiha’ (I’m going to take her) had been enough to marry off their daughters to zmagria (migrants), others had requested to see a copy of the aspirant husband’s work contract from Italy before they even considered the union. Either way, however explicit it is made or implicit it remains, ‘l-barra’ (literally meaning ‘the outside’ in Arabic, and the word used in the region to refer to ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’) is a fundamental element of the sdaq (bride-wealth) a migrant has to offer. However, while other elements of the sdaq are for immediate use and consumption (money, jellebas, blankets, jewellery), or to be kept safe in case of a divorce, l-barra constitutes a more ephemeral component, and it rarely actualises in the way and in the time expected of it. For various reasons, marrying a migrant man necessarily involves a certain amount of waiting for the promised ‘outside’ to materialise, which in turn involves a certain amount of waiting for one’s conjugal life to become (or begin to become) ‘adia (normal) – meaning, for many women, a husband, wife and children living in the same house, and country, and a married woman not being dima buhadha (always alone).

The long, often decades long, periods of waiting for migration to actualise itself are lived as intensely precarious by women in the area. ‘I don’t know what I am doing here’, Hanane, a woman in her mid-30 s who had been waiting many years for the right moment to join her emigrant husband in Italy told me when I first met her. She was making reference to her peculiar life condition: married but ‘bla rajouli’ (without my husband), an adult woman but still under the formal responsibility of her father, a mother but an interrupted one – with only one child as her husband was ‘un clandestino’ (an undocumented migrant) in Italy and had not been able to return to Morocco since the first birth – alone in her married life but not widowed. Hanane’s conjugal link with a migrant, awkwardly positions her in the social, familial and gender life of the Tadla, making her waiting for migration particularly urgent.

From the point of view of migrants’ wives such as Hanane, life in Morocco without a husband is conceptualised as an anomalous parenthesis (Robbins, 2004:159; Guyer, 2007), one that will finally close once the woman herself also leaves for ‘the outside’. Because of their specific conjugal relationship, stretched between Morocco and Europe, the outside constitutes a constant possibility for the women in the Tadla, making waiting for this possibility to actualise itself a fundamental element of their daily lives, and, in turn, a fundamental characteristic of who they are in relation to others. Daily life, in fact, is pervaded by a sense of intense waiting, not only for the next outside intrusion to appear – be it news from a relative, the arrival of remittances, or a visit from one’s husband – but also for a stabilising, definite and definitive, event to take place: a movement to Europe by the wife, or a permanent return to Morocco by the husband. Although there are emigrants who have eventually returned to the Tadla Plain to live with their wife and kin, most women I know consider this a very improbable (and not necessarily desirable) scenario in their own case, and see their own migratory movement, often the original conjugal agreement, as the event that will restore normalcy to their lives and personhoods.

Habiba, who had been planning her departure to join her emigrant husband throughout her nine-year marriage when I first spoke to her, tells me nearly every day, ‘mlli gha nkoun tmma mah kulshi gha ykoun mazian’ (when I will be there with him, everything is going to be ok). For Habiba, as for other women, there is a sense of urgency to her waiting; she feels her husband’s absence and her anomalous life slowly eating away at her. Habiba is constantly waiting for something to change, to happen, to evolve. She sees her own waiting as qualitatively different to the waiting of other people surrounding her, as she knows that her conjugal link to a migrant makes the possibility of ‘the outside’ imminent and mntaqi (logical). ‘Everyone here is waiting for “the outside”, but I am waiting more than anyone’, she says.

Waiting (tsnna) is not necessarily a shameful activity in Morocco, as it is for example for Biao Xiang's (2007, 2011) informants in North West China, where, he argues, waiting is increasingly deemed to be morally dubious. In his study of a Chinese sending community, Xiang highlights how, in rural North West China, ‘waiting’ increasingly contradicts people’s temporal anxieties and goes against an embodied time-as-money ideology where rushing is a necessary component of being (see also Crawford, 2008; Hage, 2009b:3). This, as he shows, implies that a kind of secrecy and embarrassment are interwoven into people’s constant waiting to migrate from their villages. In the Tadla Plain, however, waiting is a very integral and explicit part of female lives. Unmarried girls, whether university educated or illiterate, are often described as ‘waiting beings’ (ytesennau: they wait), waiting for a husband and for marriage. This is an image that is used in a demeaning way at times, for example by educated young women when commenting sneeringly on the female members of their family who have left school and are now at home “waiting for a husband”. However, ‘ah tatglis’, she is just sitting/she just sits (i.e. she does not work, she stays at home), is often used to describe a state of affairs, rather than being a negatively tainted observation.

Habiba’s waiting isn't necessarily a strange state to be in, therefore, and nor is it unusual. However, as she herself points out, there is a particular quality to her waiting that distinguishes it from, on the one hand, the kind of waiting that unmarried girls do, and, on the other, the kind that all aspiring migrants in the region do. Her conjugal link makes her waiting a specific type of affair and her ‘prospective orientation’ (Reed, 2011:528) a particularly concrete one. Habiba distances herself, for example, from those young men sitting at cafes and waiting for ‘the outside’ to come their way. Alone or in groups, watching people walk past them with a distracted gaze, slowly sipping coffee and slowly puffing out cigarette smoke, these men ‘ytassanau l-barra’ (they wait for the outside), Habiba whispers to me, keeping her eyes to the ground and walking quickly past the male-populated cafes. The same thing is said about the young Sub-Saharan African men and women, standing around on street corners of the Tadla Plain’s bigger towns, waiting for an opportunity to leave Morocco.

‘Ana mashi bhalhoum, ana ghadia’ (I’m not like them, I’m going), Habiba tells me. ‘The outside’ has, in a sense, already come her way, through her marriage, and all she needs to do is wait for that connection to actualise itself. The distinction women married to migrants make between themselves and the rest of the ‘waiting beings’ that surround them contains interesting parallels with Adam Reed’s (2011) ethnographic analysis of the distinction made in a Papua New Guinean prison between remand inmates, those waiting for judgement, and sentenced prisoners, those who have been already convicted. Reed shows that the fundamental distinction between the two categories of people rests on hope, directly generated by the indeterminacy of the sentence for those still waiting for judgement as against, the rest of the inmates' determinate sentence. Reed argues that these different existential situations generate different qualities of waiting: the convicts are ‘waiting out’ their determinate time in prison, those on remand are ‘waiting for’ the outcome of a trial. While convicts have ‘no hope’ because their sentence is determined and certain, their colleagues on remand impersonate hope because of their yet-to-be determined sentence.

In the Tadla, the situation is in a sense reversed, though, I would argue, not completely so. What distinguishes women married to migrants from others is that they have a certain link to ‘the outside’, crystallised in their husband’s absence. In this sense then, they are not ‘hoping’ for migration as they see others doing, but simply ‘waiting out’ their time in Morocco for it to actualise itself in their lives (see also Hage, 2009c; Lam, this volume). The actualisation of migration is a certainty rather than a hope, and from this perspective the parallel can be drawn with the existential positioning of Reed’s convicts, the women being fundamentally distinct from those people ‘waiting for’ migration. ³ However, because the timing and route of this actualisation is indeterminate – women can indeed wait decades for it – then the ‘waiting for’ is never completely eradicated from the women’s orientation. Thus, for women in the Tadla Plain, the certainty of future mobility is made up of indeterminate routes and passages – the women know they are leaving (and thus are ‘waiting out’ their time in the Tadla), but they don't know when and how (and thus are also ‘waiting for’ those decisive events to take place).

Life is thus permeated by a particular mode of certain but indeterminate anticipation that ‘continually redirects attention towards the fact that something has to still happen and become’ (Reed, 2011:528; Hage, 2009a; Miyazaki, 2004). Perhaps because of the distinctive juxtaposition of certainty and indeterminacy that characterises it, this anticipation, rather than having the immobilising effect that it is conceived as having on the male cafe customers and the young Sub-Saharan Africans at street corners, is the cause of periods of intense activity and doings related to the actualisation of migration. Although Habiba and other women married to migrants – particularly those who do not work – are described, both by themselves and those around them, as ‘sitting and waiting’ (ygilsu u ytsannau), on looking more closely one sees how both the ‘sitting’ and the ‘waiting’ are ripe with doings, purposes and activities (cf. Liebow, 2003). ⁴ These are not only the everyday female activities of baking bread, cooking, cleaning, milking the cow(s) and harvesting, going to the market and so on – somehow eclipsed by the notion of galsa (she sits/she is sitting). The ‘sitting’ and ‘waiting’ of migrants' wives also involves doings oriented towards migration and the actualisation of the possibility incorporated in one’s conjugal link. However, as I will now go on to show ethnographically in the story of Habiba, these ‘doings’, rather than translating into actual trans-Mediterranean movements, seem to produce more expectant waiting, transforming waiting into something like a personal quality, or an inherent attribute, of migrants’ wives.

Sitting and moving

Throughout the years I have known her, Habiba’s life has been characterised by periodical ‘migratory restlessness’ ⁵ – moments when her activities, imagination and actions are oriented in a particularly intense way towards actualising her connection with l-barra, ‘the outside’. Though always latent, from time to time the possibility of her departure somehow erupts on the surface, making her movement to Europe seem closer, more imminent and more urgent. This sudden increased expectation can be generated by a variety of factors – a change in the tone of her husband’s voice on the phone, a rumour that a new immigration law is being discussed in the Italian parliament, a dream about her son speaking Italian. These elements can generate a period of intense migratory activities, which can occupy Habiba for a few weeks, directed towards a new leaving plan. During this period, she will dash around for documents, save money to go to Casablanca offices, call relatives to get information, call her husband in Italy asking for the necessary documents, set up meetings with the migration brokers who hang around consulates and visa offices, and spend sleepless nights disentangling the magical, counter-intuitive, maze of visa applications. These plans will then slowly wither away, and the intense and effervescent activities accompanying the brief flurry of excitement generated by the perceived approaching possibility of leaving, are followed by a slow return to the routine activities of low-profile waiting.

The first time during my research that I experienced one of these flurries of activity, I was confused by the dormant reactions of Habiba’s close relatives, in both Italy and Morocco. There we were, travelling on five-hour-long bus journeys to the Italian Consulate in Casablanca, talking till late at night about Habiba's new life in Italy, going to town to get passport-photos taken, photocopying papers and statements, slipping shi haja (something, i.e. money) into the hands of intermediaries and so on. During all this migratory restlessness, Habiba’s relatives stood back and watched. Even Habiba’s husband – who, theoretically, was the one who had triggered the whole process by saying that finally, after nine years, he had procured the right documents – was not as involved as I thought he would be. At a certain stage, this frenetic activity of gathering documents slowed down, until it came to a complete halt. A hurdle had appeared in the process, the husband’s documents kept not arriving, an appointment at the Casablanca office was missed because the son was ill, a document had gone missing. For a variety of different reasons, the urgency of Habiba’s expectation had slowly paled away before my eyes, and she had gone back to saying – with the characteristic certain but indeterminate tone of all migrants’ wives I knew – ‘shi nhar ana ghadia’ (some day, I’m going). It was a telephone conversation with Habiba’s cousin that made me realise that the family was dormant because they already knew what the outcome of Habiba’s (as I later discovered, periodic) outburst of migratory energy would be. Habiba’s cousin, who lived in Italy, finally explained to me over the phone what was going on:

This happens every few months, it has been happening for the last nine years, since Habiba got married. There are moments when it looks like she has managed to get all the right papers, that her husband has finally decided he wants her here [in Italy] and that she might finally leave … but it never happens, something always goes wrong, some deadline is always missed, her husband always gets cold feet at some point and pulls back … and after a bit it all goes back to normal and Habiba … well she just goes back to normal waiting…

Conclusion: Waiting as personhood

As much as migratory activity seems to simply reiterate more deeply Habiba’s existential quality of someone who waits, it must be said, however, that the expectant waiting with its periods of frenetic movement and periods of relative stasis, have not left Habiba and the other women I know unaffected. Rather, in the process of waiting, and through all the movements, activities, dreams, plans and expectations that constitute the waiting, migrants’ wives are becoming a specific type of person in the region, and are in a way strengthening their relationship with ‘the outside’. Though the opposite may seem true, with the passing of the years, the relationship that migrants’ wives have with migration is actually growing stronger: women are collecting detailed information about it, their knowledge of the workings of the Italian bureaucratic system is becoming increasingly accurate, they have accumulated, over the years, an increasing number of outside ‘things’ (perfume, pans, words, clothes, magazines, phones, contraceptive innovations, recipes, immigration brochures and so on), and, in their telephone conversations with their husbands, they speak with ‘the outside’ every single day. Their husbands, in many ways, play a minor role in this relationship. Because of the absence of the migrant husbands, their place in the conjugal relationship is being taken by ‘the outside’ itself. By expectantly and actively waiting for migration, the women are also dealing directly with Europe and creating a specific type of relationship with it – they are getting to know its rhythms and its flaws, its dangers and its special properties, its currencies and its laws. This relationship goes beyond the migrant husband, and although the husband is its conduit and the one that originally generated it, with the passing of time his role somehow fades, leaving space for the relationship between his wife and ‘the outside’ itself.

People around migrant wives recognise and validate this relationship. Neighbours and kin often come round to Habiba’s house to ask her advice about documents or dwa men tmma (medicine from ‘there’) that their sons have sent them from Italy or Spain. Neighbours and kin also come over to listen to Habiba’s stories about Europe, stories she has collected from her husband, from the suq (marketplace), from the hammam, or that she just knows (‘ah tan‘arfhoum!’). Although she has never been there, Habiba’s special connection with ‘the outside’, and the expectant waiting and specific orientation of her life and thoughts it produces, make her closer than others to migration itself, a closeness which, in turn, affects her relationships with other people, making her a special kind of conduit between Morocco and the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. One could argue that waiting, and all the activities and mishaps which constitute it, rather than being a means to an end (that of becoming an emigrant, and finally leaving for ‘the outside’), is the end, and is what makes Habiba who she is. By ‘waiting out’ and ‘waiting for’ the actualisation of a certain but indeterminate possibility, Habiba is not only becoming a specific kind of person, but also a kind of extension, in her neighbourhood, of what she is waiting for. Both her relationship with migration, crystallised in her conjugal link with an emigrant man, and the expectant propensity towards it that it produces, make women like Habiba a kind of stable connection with ‘the outside’ for the people around them, and in a way a much more accessible connection than emigrants themselves, with their swift visits, their strange behaviours and their boisterous showing-off. Habiba’s waiting, her inclination, her propensity towards migration, have brought her closer to l-barra (the outside) without her ever leaving l-huma (the neighbourhood).