On the ferry from Spain to Morocco

My recent book Becoming Diasporically Moroccan explores how next-generations after migration use communicative resources to feel ‘at home’ in their ancestral homeland. By following some Belgian, Dutch and French Moroccan-origin families, I learned the embodied and linguistic strategies next-generation young adults employed for ‘becoming-Moroccan’ through where they were hanging out and spending time in public space,  from marketplaces to nightclubs. By investigating how these interactions actually took place, as opposed to how they are reported when back at ‘home’ in Europe, I illustrate some of the social tensions about ‘Moroccanness’ as it is performed diasporically – in Morocco during the summer, when the diaspora ‘comes home’ and around the world.

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 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 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 70s. The ferry was overflowingly full with Moroccans who seemed to be ‘going home,’ yet who were definitely coming from homes in Europe. Even today, that ferry is 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

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The route to the port cities of Algeciras and Almeria in southern Spain is signposted in Latin and Arabic scripts

On the ferry crossing from Algeciras to Tangier, I have observed many times how a negotiation of belonging happens as each passenger steps up to the customs officers processing entries. 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. I have watched over and over 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 the diasporic visitors (DVs) who participated in this research, 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’ 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 of ‘betweenness’ in 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 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 new, 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.

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While the categorial distinction they face in Europe is something about descent – not coming from the right parents – in Morocco it is something about place – not being from the right environment, where place-based knowledge, practices, and forms of embodiment are immediately recognizable and categorizable in interaction. For individuals in such diasporically-oriented communities, place and descent are not mapped directly on to each other; they are inevitably askew. For the participants here, the circumstances of their parents’ mobilities led to their residence outside of Morocco, just as circumstances of others of their generation led to residence in Morocco. Each circumstance, through many interacting parts, leaves traces on their bodies and in their practices that are made relevant when coming face-to-face. In encounters where the rupture of migration is relevant, descent and place become pivots for categorial belonging.

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The way I present this discussion also gives categories, and modes of belonging to them, a certain amount of agency or force: they are working on people, evoking certain behaviors, being made relevant as specific practices. Following methods in membership categorization analysis and ethnomethodology, I used micro-analysis of interactions – to the extent that I was able to record and document these interactions for sequential analysis – to demonstrate how participants responded moment by moment in relation to categories that were made interactionally relevant by their practices. Over repeated iterations of similar activities, patterns emerge of a certain range of practices that are accepted by interlocutors, juxtaposed against unacceptable ones, creating the fuzzy and shifting boundary of categorial belonging. Through micro-analyses, we can see how, as people do things with categories, categories are also shaping the scope of what people can do – up to and including how new categories might emerge as a social collective of individuals are continuously pushing at the edges of current ones.

Reference

Wagner, L. (2017). Becoming Diasporically Moroccan: Linguistic and Embodied Practices for Negotiating Belonging. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Book page on publisher’s site.

Broadly speaking, I came away from this book thinking about the ‘native speaker’ as a classic problem of categories. In Michiyo Takato’s case, involving ethnic Okinawan migrants ‘returning’ from colonies in Bolivia and Brazil, a wild sea of categorizations mix together and render some of her research participants severely disadvantaged. They are caught between schooling systems in different countries that stress competence in imperial/national languages (standard Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish), or enable students to learn and maintain ‘heritage’ languages (all of the above, plus Okinawan), depending on a given framing of where they come from as a ‘native’ or migrant. Takato picks up on one of the striking insights of this book, highlighted in Doerr’s theoretical chapter, that ‘native’ is often assumed to include universal competence of written and spoken forms. Teachers in her focal school system sometimes fail to recognize students’ weaker competence in written forms by assuming that their ‘native-like’ speech is associated with ‘native-like’ written training at home, while their ethnically Japanese parents – who themselves grew up in South America – are effectively illiterate in most Japanese written forms. Takato’s young participants, then, end up caught between ideologies of ethnic/national linguistic proficiency, as well as ideologies of linguistic competence as being a 4-skilled, equal package – reading, writing, listening and speaking. They become people who don’t quite fit into any easy category.

Complementarily, Anne Whiteside’s chapter on the presence of Maya in San Francisco questions any categorization of ‘native speaker’ as a matter of proficiency. She runs into contexts where Yucatecan migrants – many of whom come from Mayan-speaking origins – describe contradictory ideologies of what a ‘native speaker’ of Maya might be, in light of the devaluation of Maya in relation to Spanish as well as idealized images of a ‘good’ speaker of Maya. She observes how Maya becomes a common language in some restaurant kitchens, where many of the staff might be Maya-origin, enlaced with many other spoken codes. Whether or not her participants could be considered ‘native speakers’ by an external definition, their use of language flows so much between different codes (English, Spanish, Maya, Cantonese, Greek, French or Wolof, as she lists them) that it becomes difficult even to categorize what ‘language’ is in use, nevermind who is the ‘native’ speaking it. This is one example of what Doerr advocates for research as ‘native speaker effects’: the real-world implications for participants in their everyday linguistic competence and use.

These discussions highlight two of the problematic issues that come to the fore again and again in much recent research in language and diversity. One is that the traditional definitions and divisions of categories upon which we base an idea of a ‘language’ only really hold up in a context where they ‘matter’ – in a ‘when, where and how’ that individuals need to draw lines of distinction in order to access social, economic, and political resources. The second is that this pragmatic aspect to language use opens important questions on how the 4 skills might need to be considered as separable attributes, rather than lumped into one ‘language’ as being qualified as a ‘native’. This issue comes up over and over again in my own research among Moroccans in Europe, where the complex combinations of migrant communities produces individuals who often have extensive spoken competencies across several ‘languages’ and much more limited written competencies, either because they didn’t have any training or because the codified written forms do not exist. Beyond thinking about what it means to be a ‘native speaker’, this book also points to ways that sociolinguistic research pokes holes in definitions of a ‘language’, and signals new approaches to thinking about what elements make up linguistic practice.

Reference

Doerr, Neriko Musha, ed. 2009. The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.