At Home on the Margins: Care Giving and the ‘Un‐homely’ among Casablanca's Working Poor

Abstract

In this article I examine some of the ways in which giving and receiving care on the margins of Casablanca become ambivalently constituted acts inscribed in a context of historical trauma and growing economic insecurity. Within this context I explore the usefulness of “un‐homely” as a conceptual tool for discussing forms of domestic care on the margins of a growing urban center. Drawing on fieldwork material gathered during 2013–2014 in a marginalized and criminalized neighborhood in Casablanca, I use an ethno‐historical approach to unpack the production of marginalization and poverty, and explore which forms of care are available to urban lower class women in particular. With the help of my closest interlocutor, Amina, I offer a discussion on the labor of caring, for oneself and of others, as well as the particular affect associated with this labor. I suggest that such skilled routines of caregiving do not only function as a coping mechanism for women in precarious situations, but they reproduce affects of un‐homeliness as much as they contain them. I argue that it is this ambivalent weaving, between containment and acceptance, that ultimately serves to help make precarious homes and uncertain futures livable.

Dissenting poses

“…18 As Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (2014) point out, this limited conception of responsibility does not do justice to the many other available forms and meanings that local communities may enact on the basis of other logics and within a variety of potentially competing frameworks. Indeed, in Hay Mohammadi, neoliberal ideas about self-reliance co-existed with daily responsibilities to give and receive care, be it of kin or neighbors, in an ongoing eff ort to make precarious lives livable (Strava 2017). For example, the same young men who could be seen aimlessly loitering on street corners were also occasionally called upon to look aft er younger siblings or help single mothers with various chores, and encouraged to attend Friday prayer once they reached their teens.…”

The Limits of Dwelling and the Unwitnessed Death

“…Yet this uncertainty is also stubbornly located in a place: the home that has become unhomely (Bhabha ). The unhomely, or uncanny ( bukimi ), implies both the expectation of intimacy and its disruption by something unsettling and unknown (Ivy ; Strava ; Gygi ). For my Japanese neighbors, the possibility that another solo‐dwelling older person ( dokkyo rωjin ) had died just around the corner was not shocking, as it was for me, but rather produced a mood of grim dysphoria for a world that had become disarticulated from the home.…”

The world-class city comes by tramway: Reframing Casablanca’s urban peripheries through public transport

“…These 'old' peripheries with a colonial history have suffered from state oppression and marginalisation for a long time (cf. Strava, 2017). However, since Mohammed VI came to power, these neighbourhoods have been the preferred target of discourses about 'urban integration', highlighting their significant historic role especially during the fight for independence.…”