Paused subjects: Waiting for migration in North Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which waiting for migration requires, nurtures and ultimately produces specific kinds of subjects in a part of the world marked by decades of transnational movement towards Europe. Drawing on my ethnographic research in emigrant areas of Morocco, I trace how waiting is a constitutive element not only of migration, but also of the subjects involved in its encompassing and multidirectional processes. To do this, I trace the ways in which waiting is spoken of, embodied and reckoned with in the areas by not (yet) migrants. Focusing in particular on the experience of women married to absent migrant husbands, the paper shows how waiting in Morocco engenders specific types of people with specific kinds of social relations, interceding into the very ways in which selves in proximity of transnational mobility emerge.

A Bigger Prison

“…In my attempt to translate their reflections and vocabulary into anthropological theory, I follow in the footsteps of an emerging line of research on migration and movement from an existential perspective (Sayad 1999;Hage 2005;Lucht 2011;Graw and Schielke 2012;Jackson 2013;Jackson and Piette 2015;Gaibazzi 2015b;Elliot 2015;Reeves 2015;Lems 2016;Tošić and Palmberger 2016), focussing on the motivations, experiences, and subjective and intersubjective engagements in a world where migration has become such a powerful source of this-worldly optimism 2 that it has transformed into something like a force of necessity (Alpes 2012;Elliot 2016). This persistent optimism as well as its ambiguous consequences require an existential look at the motivations, the trajectories, and the 'work of fantasy' (Masquelier 2009; see also Sayad 1999;Appadurai 1996: 31; involved in crafting paths of material improvement.…”

“…It also expresses a sceptical political vision of Egypt as a state that provides imprisonment rather than rights and services to its citizens. As a metaphor, imprisonment in both cases evokes the imagination of an outside where one can live a normal life (Elliot 2015). The specific sites of such imagination are manifold.…”

“…Both men and women, mughtarib-migrants and those staying at home put much shared effort towards reaching them. They often have to wait long before a desired-for normal life can begin (Elliot 2015). Recent research has shown how young people often remain-and are made-'stuck' when crucial forward steps in life they hope to take are obstructed (Reeves in this issue; Hage 2009).…”

On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan

“…Waiting has received considerable attention in studies on transnational migratory mobility and in studies of war, flight and exile in the context of conflict-induced displacement (Brun 2015;Elliot 2016;Hyndman and Giles 2011;Khosravi 2014;Turnbull 2016;Turner 2015). By focusing on those who try to stay rather than on those who are on the move, this article offers insights into how people actively seek to challenge the politics of displacement as related to the current wave of large dam projects in Africa that indicate the return or continuation of 'high modernism' on the continent (Abbink 2012;Dye 2016;Hänsch 2019;Verhoeven 2015).…”

The makeup of destiny: Predestination and the labor of hope in a Moroccan emigrant town

“…3.3.Although it is not unknown in the area for unmarried women to leave for Europe (Salih ), it is marriage that tends to make female migration socially acceptable. Indeed, while male migration is often conceptualized as a route to marriage in emigrant central Morocco, providing the young man with the social and economic maturity for conjugal life, for young women the relationship between migration and marriage is often reversed, as it is often through marriage to a migrant man that migration is imagined as a possibility (Elliot ). This is structurally reinforced by European immigration laws that grant entry primarily on the basis of “family reunification.”…”