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.

Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

Carnatic singer Prema Anandakrishnan and her accompanists performing for the monthly Sydney Music Circle concert

An important element of language relates to its aesthetic use, in other words, how we make our lives beautiful and present ourselves to the world beautifully through language. Anthropologists and linguists have been interested in this dimension throughout the 20^th century in their study of ritual and folklore and the ways that language is used in them through song, chant, oratory and other kinds of interactional discourse. Bauman’s (1975) Verbal Art as Performance crystalised many of these ideas to place an emphasis on performance when looking at such aesthetic modes of communication and to establish performance as an important area of study within Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics. Singing is an important cultural activity in which language as performance intertwines with music. As with many other forms of performance, singing often takes place within the context of a range of other embodied cultural practices.

In my Linguistics PhD thesis supervised by Dr. Verna Rieschild at Macquarie University, I looked at two singing traditions – Irish traditional singing and South Indian Carnatic singing – as practiced in diasporic communities in Australia focusing on performance, language choice and language ideologies and musicolinguistic artistry. My thesis research provided a fascinating opportunity to apply the ideas from the study of language as performance to forms of singing I loved, and explore dimensions of multilingualism, globalisation and migration within them.

In singing, highly marked language choices can be made such as using a language you don’t know or normally speak, or using a non-dominant language in a dominant setting. The transformative nature of the performance enables a transformation of settings and communicative practices. Hence, Irish traditional singers in Australia who speak Irish let their use of Irish in songs spill over into the informal speech or banter between the songs. Tamil-speaking Carnatic singers choose a song in Tamil (from the multilingual song repertoire) to elaborate with extended musicolinguistic improvisation.

Language ideologies, equally prevalent in singing as they are in speech, are particularly strong and transformative due to the expressive and heightened nature of performance. In Carnatic singing, an ideology of devotion to the Tamil language has competed with ideologies about music as a “universal language”- in other words, beyond any particular spoken language- throughout the 20^th century (Ramaswamy 1997; Weidman 2005). Hence, the multilingual repertoire and centrality of songs in Telugu and Sanskrit has remained along with recognition of Tamil and singers consciously or unconsciously vary (typically in small degrees) as to how they weight each language in terms of the number of songs in each language and how this correlates with the types of songs chosen (some Carnatic songs are considered to be more musically “heavy” and consequently more at the core of the repertoire). Meanwhile, Irish traditional singing is connected with ideologies relating to Irish language use which have arisen in the course of its revival and resistance to the hegemonic influence of English.

Perhaps the most “moving” aspect of singing, however, is the way that music and language artfully intersect in performance, which I call musicolinguistic artistry. In the final part of my thesis, I analysed the musicolinguistic artistry of both singing traditions. In Irish traditional singing, one aspect of musicolinguistic artistry is the ways that singers perform different versions of the same song with slight differences in melody, rhythm, text or performance practice. Singers typically maintain aspects of the particular version they acquired but usually put their own individual stamp on it through acceptable variations in the song text (O Laoire 2004), innovative performance practices such as harmony or framing the song in a particular way through banter.

In South Indian Carnatic singing, musicolinguistic artistry is at its zenith in the improvisatory format known as niraval (literally “filling up”) in which a line from a song is repeated in various melodic and rhythmic combinations over the continuing steady beat cycle of the song. In niraval, the singer first uses the musical elements to emphasise particularly meaningful phrases in the song text and then gradually develops the melody and rhythm to increasing virtuosity to the extent that the line of text becomes more of a vehicle for the music (Radhakrishnan 2012).

The diasporic context adds the further dimension of migration and transnational movement. In the Australia-based communities of practice engaged in Irish traditional singing and South Indian Carnatic music, the singing traditions are transplanted from their territorial origins, evoking a strong sense of connection to those cultural homelands and triggering or providing a space for other embodied cultural and linguistic practices which accompany the singing traditions (cf. Ram 2000; Dutkova-Cope 2000). Performance events of these singing traditions hence create micro-level ecologies in which practices of cultural continuity and language maintenance and revitalisation can unfold in ways that are meaningful and beautiful. Practices of transmission of these traditions and transnationalism (e.g. singers or other community members traveling “back” to Ireland or South India for learning, performing or attending performances) add another layer which further strengthens continuity.

Looking at these two singing traditions in my thesis, I have realised that performance animates and “moves” language in a number of ways, particularly when what is being performed is language itself. Hence singing and other forms of performed discourse could be seen as another kind of “language on the move”, encompassing the range of communicative functions and social practices reflected in everyday speech but also transcending them into an aesthetic experience. When the language being moved through performance moves globally through migration and transnational practice, the shifts created are strong and encouraging for linguistic diversity in a multicultural world.

References

Bauman, R. (1975). Verbal art as performance. American Anthropologist, 77(2), 290-311.

Dutkova-Cope, L. (2000). Texas Czech folk music and ethnic identity. Pragmatics, 10(1), 7-37.

O Laoire, L. (2004). The right words: Conflict and resolution in an oral Gaelic song text. Oral Tradition, 19(2), 187-213.

Ram, K. (2000). Dancing the past into life: The rasa, nrtta and raga of immigrant existence. Australian Journal of Anthropology, 11(3), 261-273.

Ramaswamy, S. (1997). Passions of the tongue : language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. Berkeley. University of California Press. 

Radhakrishnan, M. (2012) ‘Musicolinguistic artistry of niraval in Carnatic vocal music’ in Ponsonnet M L Dao & M Bowler (eds) The 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference Proceedings – 2011 (Canberra, 1-4 Dec 2011) Canberra: ANU Research Repository

Weidman, A. (2005). Can the subaltern sing? Music, language, and the politics of voice in early twentieth-century south India Indian Economic & Social History Review, 42 (4), 485-511 DOI: 10.1177/001946460504200404