African Migrations: Traversing Hybrid Landscapes 1666938696, 9781666938692

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African Migrations

African Migrations Traversing Hybrid Landscapes

Edited by Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gintsburg, Sarali, editor. | Breeze, Ruth, editor. Title: African migrations: traversing hybrid landscapes / edited by Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze. Other titles: Traversing hybrid landscapes Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores the hybrid landscapes of African migration and offers new insights into the complexity of migratory movements and migrant experiences associated with the African continent. The methodological approaches within this volume include sociolinguistic analysis, literary analysis, and autoethnography”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023030404 (print) | LCCN 2023030405 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666938692 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666938708 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: African diaspora. | Africans—Migrations. | African diaspora in literature. Classification: LCC DT16.5. A346 2024 (print) | LCC DT16.5 (ebook) | DDC 909.0496—dc23/eng/20230629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030404 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030405 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

  Acknowledgments vii   Introduction: Mapping the Landscapes of Migration    Ruth Breeze and Sarali Gintsburg

1

1  F  rom Angola to Portugal: Narrating Migration, Memory, and Identity in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Works    Jessica Falconi

15

2  G  luing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs: A Heterotopian-Utopian Approach    Sarali Gintsburg

37

3  C  lashing Ideological Frameworks in a Belgian Job Interview with a Sierra Leonean Candidate    Dorien Van De Mieroop and Melina De Dijn

59

4  A  long the Paths of Resistance: The History of a Moroccan Family in Catalonia through their Multiple Voices    Marta Amorós Torró

87

5  Finding the Voice: Positioning in African Diaspora Media    Ruth Breeze

109

6  “ From Okacha to Molenbeek”: Moroccan Muḏakkirāt in L7a9d’s Digital Storytelling    Rosa Pennisi

129

7  C  aribbean Canadian Writers of African Descent: The Legacy of “the Door”    Judit Nagy

153

v

vi

Contents

8  Moroccan Women in Rural Spain: Intimate Heterotopias    Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze 9  M  winda, “Light of the World”: Healing Among Congolese Diasporas in Massachusetts    Carolina Nvé Díaz San Francisco

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  Index 209   About the Contributors

213

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our thanks to the Institute for Culture and Society (University of Navarra), which generously funded the MYOUROPE project, led by Sarali Gintsburg in 2020–23, to Sydney Wedbush, our helpful editor at Lexington Books, and to all the collaborating authors who have made this volume possible. We dedicate this collection to captivating Africa and to all those who are on the move and whose presence makes our landscapes more diverse.

vii

Introduction Mapping the Landscapes of Migration Ruth Breeze and Sarali Gintsburg

Humanity first came into being in Africa; ever since then, from the very earliest times, the people of Africa have been on the move, seeking new opportunities, fleeing from danger, or tragically uprooted through human greed and cruelty. In the twenty-first century, with over 40 million people migrating from and within Africa every year, migration still has a significant impact on every aspect of African life. In 2020 alone, around 21 million Africans moved to an African country away from their birthland, while another 19 million left the continent to go elsewhere (Africa Center for Strategic Studies 2023). Yet despite the powerful centrifugal forces that drive this constant movement, there is also a sense in which those who leave do not leave their homes behind, but rather carry them within themselves, recreating the comfort of their homelands within the relative safety of diasporic communities, or perhaps retreating into the security of their domestic sphere when the public sphere proves threatening or hostile. So as they cross the landscapes of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, these migrants bring new colors, sounds, and aromas to the places they traverse, often giving rise to novel cultural blends in which timeless traditions become fused in new creative syntheses. But of course, it is important to consider that this process can be understood in two ways: just as heterotopias may arise where people lead their lives side by side with little engagement, so hybrid artefacts, lifestyles and cultures can come into being, in which tentative mixing gradually makes way to integration and perhaps finally culminates in métissage. Research on the latter acquires even more importance today, as we are witnessing the rapid and significant increase in the number of people identifying themselves as mixed, a trend that raises questions about the legitimacy of the categories themselves (Vertovec 2023, 12). In the present volume, we explore the hybrid landscapes of African migration, with the aim of offering new insights into the complexity of migratory 1

2

Introduction

movements and migrant experiences associated with the African continent. Taking the view that the only ecologically valid way to understand migration is by looking at it through the eyes of the migrants themselves, we draw on a wide spectrum of firsthand evidence from a multiplicity of sources, including testimonies, media artefacts, workplace situations, interviews, and ethnographic observations. APPROACHING MIGRATORY PROCESSES Migration is increasingly being understood as a complex phenomenon involving multiple trajectories, implying not just one definitive movement from one place to another, but rather consecutive or concurrent traversing of and participation in diverse spaces. This may be realized through seasonal or lifespan patterns of movement between different areas, or by using digital affordances to maintain a presence in multiple spaces (Sinatora 2022). The simultaneous participation in several spaces, or perhaps the refusal to be completely bound by the confines of one single space, may contribute to the complexity of migrant life. On the one hand, migrants do not travel emptyhanded, but carry within them a wealth of experiences that condition the way they can experience the new opportunities that lie before them. On the other hand, they may experience a radical openness to those new phenomena, rarely embracing them entirely, but usually effecting subtle changes when they endeavor to make them their own. The study of lives that traverse many locations thus inevitably raises questions of hybridity and mixing, understood in a complex sense rather than simply as cross-cultural exchange. In one sense, today, as the twenty-first century moves into its third decade, the topic of ethnic and cultural identity is still a vital aspect of constructive coexistence. When, in the result of migratory processes, two or more nations or peoples come into contact, the tradition of tolerance established in one culture or another, tolerance of the “other,” and the ability to appreciate the cultural peculiarities of the people coming into contact, begin to play a major unifying role. It is important to ask how we might synthesize our own and others’ cultures, overcome contempt for others, and at the same time continue the process of transmitting what is valuable and durable in the world cultures that we have inherited. If this is true for all of us, it is even more crucial in the life of the immigrant. The identity of the migrant is formed on a kind of movable boundary where different cultures converge, and it is at this boundary that hybridity emerges (Baynham and Gintsburg 2022). Yet perhaps paradoxically, in this context, mimicry tends to be conditioned by the “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 1994, 86).



Introduction 3

Taking a wider theoretical perspective on migration, we might also consider the vision of the kaleidoscope, projecting the multicolored, multicultural spaces of human co-existence onto a single plane. The more static image of the mosaic, too, continues to receive attention in the field of postcolonial and migration studies. What we are witnessing is an attempt to equip a new platform and justify a theory based on the generative intersection of various projections coming from different fields of research. One of the main motivations behind approaches of this kind is to try to escape from the logic of binary oppositions and dichotomies, such as colonizer-colonized or East-West (more lately, Global North–Global South). For some, the metaphor of the rhizome offers a way of approaching this juxtaposition of multiple disparate elements: a multiplicity “has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 8). But perhaps such rhizomatic union-disunion is too chaotic to bring order into real people’s lives or facilitate meaningful patterns of interaction. In some cases, it even seems that disparate groups are destined to live in closed heterotopic capsules, fated never to comprehend each other. As Le Houérou (2022, 63) points out, “exile is linked with space and time, but with no measurable interconnectedness.” Yet this may be too deterministic. Migrants are also agents within their own trajectories. Their odyssey cannot be understood merely as a voyage between that never arrives, as a journey down the cracks between civilizations. The agentive view of migration leads us to envision such movements as a search for alternative spaces, and to understand migrants we must reach out for other ways of thinking and reasoning that allow us to approach the complexity of the human world. We, too, must embark on a quest for new ways of thinking about the postcolonial world and the ongoing struggle for very real spaces both in former colonies and their metropolises, but in a way that celebrates difference while acknowledging the very real tensions that these contrasts may generate. By doing so, we hope to further contribute to further problematizing of what Vertovec defines as category plus—“the recognition that individuals are always part of more than one category, and any category involves people with more than one identity” (2023, 14). COVERING SPACE, ELUDING TIME Clearly, one of the most fundamental ways to approach migration is to consider it as a movement in space and time. Elsewhere, we have considered the nature of time and space in migration narratives, concluding that it would be more appropriate to discard the Bakhtinian term “chronotope” for the

4

Introduction

term “topochrone,” given the precedence of place over time in the migrant experience (Breeze, Gintsburg and Baynham 2022). As we know, Foucault and other twentieth-century French philosophers also created their own “spatial revolution,” putting space first and giving time a secondary role, while Epstein ([2003] 2007) pointed to the primary role that space takes on when the future is either unknowable or already a foregone conclusion. One rarely considered factor in all this is that by the beginning of the twentieth century, the planet Earth was almost fully “discovered” by the West (technically the last expeditions were the Antarctic expeditions from 1901 to 1904). This led humanity to the need to re-conceptualize space, including inhabited and uninhabited places, as space is in a sense conquered yet still holds mysteries for us. As we shall see, space takes on a fundamental role in the lives of migrants today. Space is a barrier, a desert, to be crossed as swiftly as possible, yet it also throws up places of interaction where those who travel can leave their various marks. But through new media it can also be strangely compressed, offering possibilities of multilocation as never before. At the same time, those promising new spaces can turn out to be prisons, when participation is conditional on unfamiliar rules or countered with hostile responses. Time, on the other hand, remains firmly beyond human control, so simple and yet so hard to comprehend. Paradoxically, although the migrant may yearn for the clean break of the new life, desiring to propel him/herself into the radical, discontinuous “explosive” time of the new order (Jarvis 2022; Breeze 2023), what so often happens is that she/he ends up inhabiting a narrow compartment within, but not part of, the host country, governed by rules of time and space that are at once anachronistic and anatopic (Le Houérou 2022; Gintsburg and Breeze, this volume). So, if we stay with the primordial role of space, with its apparent simplicity, then Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, that is, of spaces within spaces, might serve as an appropriate model for conceptualizing migratory spatiality, bringing us closer to the field of philosophy and other disciplines. As Foucault observed, “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time” (1967, 22). The collection of chapters presented here lends depth to the idea of the significant role of space in defining one’s identity, exploring how that spatial, a-spatial, or transspatial identity is perceived by those around us. The interactions between different perceptions of space, different anchorings in the physical world and different positionings towards the identities associated with them form one of the principal themes of this book.



Introduction 5

OVERVIEW OF THIS VOLUME In our previous volume Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (Breeze et al. 2022) we explored space and time in narratives from Africa and the Middle East. In this book, we venture further into the African migrant experience by addressing some of the following questions: - How do diasporic communities from, into and within Africa map out the landscapes they inhabit, both virtual and physically, and lay claim to space? - How are hybridity and métissage experienced, narrated and interpreted in the African context? - How is migration within Africa understood by those who experience it as migrants or hosts, and what kind of cultural mixing and complementation takes place? - What is the impact of migrants from and within Africa on the landscapes and cityscapes they inhabit?

To address these questions, our authors draw on a range of evidence, always with a view to privileging firsthand accounts and giving voice to the migrants themselves. Regarding sources, this volume builds on a wide array of evidence, from ethnographic approaches (chapters two, four, eight, and nine), conversation analysis (chapter three), contemporary literary work by writers of African descent (chapters one, two, and seven), digital storytelling (chapter six), an online news diaspora magazine (chapter five), and personal memoirs (chapter seven). Diversity is also present in the methodological approaches used by our authors to analyze their material and tease out different instances of hybridity—linguistics and sociolinguistics (chapters two and three), literary analysis (chapters one, two, seven, and eight), anthropology (chapters four, eight, and nine) and positioning theory (chapter five). Several chapters thus apply mixed methodology—chapter five combines positioning theory with media analysis to address the polyphony of Caribbean-African diasporic voices in Britain. Chapter six applies mixed methods to analyze the digital memoirs of a Moroccan political activist now living in Belgium. Chapter two runs a mixed analysis of literary texts written by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abderrazak Gurnah and grassroots testimonies to map the utopian-heterotopian landscape of Zanzibar—the melting pot of East Africa. In this book, we thus aim not only to present the African continent in its cultural diversity but also to cover the complex and wide trajectories of migrations to, into and within Africa. On this panorama, we include a variety of very different geographical locations. On the one hand, we look at people

6

Introduction

with countries of origin within Africa, including Angola, Zanzibar (Tanzania), Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Morocco. On the other, we present evidence from a range of different destination countries: countries within Africa, but also European countries such as Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, as well as the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Oman, and Yemen. Several chapters address African migration in general, while one chapter is devoted entirely to migrations within the African continent. In various chapters, we encounter the trajectories of migrants who come, go, move on and go back, showing how migration today is rarely a one-way passage. Our book is therefore a true voyage of discovery, traversing multiple landscapes, social settings, meeting places and media, and encountering migrants from backgrounds that could hardly be more diverse. The nature of the research perspectives used to approach these phenomena is also extremely varied. The chapters in this book alternate between ethnographic or discursive analyses of real-world data and reflections on literary productions by African writers. The volume itself is thus a hybrid production, which we hope will offer complementary and comparable visions of parallel realities. In the following paragraphs, we provide a brief synopsis of each chapter, bringing out some of the comparisons that come to mind, and suggesting themes for further reflection. To bring out these different strands, we will now briefly draw attention to what we perceive to be the principal contribution of each chapter. In chapter one, Jessica Falconi provides a welcome view from the Portuguese-speaking world, examining images and memories of migration from Angola to Lisbon in novels by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. She shows how the pervasive presence of the colonial and imperial past in contemporary spaces in the post-colonial city, applied both to the cities of the former colonies and to the former metropolises, connects distant and distinct territories. This enables us to tease out the histories, relations, and configurations of identity that have always circulated between centers and peripheries, while acknowledging the asymmetries concealed beneath the surface of the postcolonial city. In this chapter, we consider the position of the “Afrodescendants,” venturing to explore the articulation between race, gender, class, body, and sexuality that also conditions their relationship to the spaces around them. What the author terms a “complex and painful exercise of personal and historical ‘repair’” is needed for the protagonists of these novels to find their “place” in the postcolonial cityscape, which is at once a place of enchantment and disenchantment. But at the same time, inevitable mixing takes place, and we read how a young child hybridizes the urban space of Lisbon by “reconfiguring it as a place of origin” (18).



Introduction 7

Chapter two takes us to East Africa, where migratory flows have long been going in both directions—African peoples moved to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, India, and elsewhere in South Asia, while East Africa received migrants from various parts of Asia, and from Oman and Southern Yemen. The protagonists of these multi-trajectory migrations wove intricate networks of intercultural contacts, and complex multicultural spaces emerged offering an agora where cultures that had little in common engaged with each other. Through an analysis of literary and ethnographic sources relating to the Arab diaspora in Zanzibar, in an approach informed by Foucault’s six principles of heterotopia, Gintsburg shows how Zanzibar continues to function as both a heterotopia and a utopia, playing a quasi-magical role in the minds not only of Zanzibari Arabs, but of the wider Arab World. Images and memories of Zanzibar come to form a shared imaginaire that shapes identity and fosters a sense of community among those who have been scattered. In the third chapter, inspired by Conversation Analysis, Dorien van de Mieroop and Melina de Dijn address the very real issue of African immigrants’ labor market integration from a discursive perspective. Their detailed micro-analysis of a job interview for a position in a supermarket warehouse between a Belgian employer and a first-generation immigrant from Sierra Leone focuses on dissimilarities in mentality or “ideological frameworks” that may cause problems when such candidates seek to improve their situation in Europe. This chapter provides insights into the clash between the way of thinking that the candidate has acquired from his cultural background or life experience and the more secularized ideologies typical of western Europe, showing how the liberal, secular mindset in fact demands stereotyped responses and proves insensitive to cultural difference. The authors make a compelling argument that a truly inclusive and diverse workplace ought to include people with different perspectives and beliefs, and that it would be important to change this approach to hiring so that the untapped talent of people from the African continent can be recognized and celebrated. These conclusions resonate in a way with the words of Ruth Finnegan, a great scholar of Africa and African people (and, in particular, the people of Sierra Leone), who insisted that we Western people should never label an African person as simple or a complete failure only because he/she did not succeed to comprehend particular customs of our culture (2012, 504). This chapter thus advocates more openness to hybridity on the part of European employers, with a view to diversifying and enriching the host culture. Chapter four, by Marta Amorós, gives a detailed multivocal analysis of the way a North African family has survived in and adapted to life in a Catalan town over two generations. By comparing and contrasting the different family members’ life stories, she illustrates how the protagonists of this migration

8

Introduction

experience have come to shape an attitude that resists the reproduction of stereotypes. Their way of adopting a reflective stance in situations in which they may feel unfairly judged by others enables them to agentively pre-empt stereotyping. Importantly, the family proves to be a reliable support system that enables them to learn and cope. As for many migrants, for these people the family offered a plurality of voices that make sense together, creating a sense of community and a feeling of harmony that gives them strength to learn and grow in their adaptation to the “outside” world. In her words, the experience of parental migration has been “internalized and apprehended” as a positive biographical resource for coping with everyday challenges, as the family members gradually break down the invisible barriers surrounding their potentially heterotopic existence. Continuing with the theme of adaptation and conditional hybridization, in chapter five Ruth Breeze analyzes different layers of positioning in the Black British magazine The Voice. This is the first of two chapters related to the Caribbean with its tragic legacy and “double diaspora,” the second being the analysis of literary productions in chapter seven (see below). In this chapter, Breeze illustrates how Black identities in Britain are indeed conditioned by present inequalities and by centuries of history, but they are also multifaceted and multilayered, porous, and open to creative reworking. What is striking about the evidence presented in chapter five is that the writers, interviewees, and news protagonists appearing here are quite aware of their precarious position within British society, explicitly and implicitly acknowledging antagonism and disadvantage, yet expressly envision brighter futures for themselves and their children. In this context, many of the writers and their interviewees appear to have already embarked on the re-valorization of Continental African heritages as a way of counteracting the legacy of slavery that afflicts African Caribbean (and indeed African American) cultures to this day. The analysis by Rosa Pennisi in chapter six leads us into a new form of hybridity, in the form of the multimodal evolution of the narrative genre of muḏakkirāt, or “memoirs,” in Moroccan digital literature. She explores the digital multimodal communication strategies adopted by Moroccan dissident Mouad Belghouate, or L7a9d, in his serialized autobiography. From the diaspora, Mouad succeeds in maintaining strong links with contemporary Moroccan society, using digital media to develop a voice for asserting both his own identity and his social and political ideals. The use of the digital third space thus enables him to transcend physical borders and continue to play a role in his homeland. Within a theoretical perspective, we see how the emergent hybrid genre of the digital memoir with its intertextual interplay of monologues, dialogues and audio tracks with quotations and images, not only proves productive for creative artistic expression, but also invites audiences to new styles of engagement.



Introduction 9

Judith Nagy’s account in chapter seven investigates the profound loss effected by the legacies of slavery: for many, home is no longer retrievable, not even traceable. In her words, Caribbean people of African descent live in a world that will never become complete, that will always lack an essential part. The image of the door in the writers she studies implies the need for a physical and spiritual journey “back” to Africa, the memory of which inhabits the deepest recesses of their protagonists’ unconscious minds. The tragic lives narrated in the stories by Caribbean-heritage writers Austin Clarke and Dionne Brand are doomed from the beginning because the characters essentially come into being as hybrids, configured to assume identities, mannerisms or even ways of thinking that can never be truly their own, thus living in the limbo of historical trauma (Mohatt et al. 2014). In some sense, it seems to be the tension this generates that fuels their pent-up misogyny and violence as “trauma begets violence and violence begets trauma” (Levine and Kline 2010, XVIII). Nonetheless, in their longing for an “Atlantic world” somewhere in between West Africa, Britain, and the Americas, the protagonists of these literary works seem to be groping towards the possibility—however remote—of a harmonious synthesis, in which the frictions between the different elements within their hybrid identity can be healed and the Caribbean and African can be fused together in wholeness. In chapter eight, Gintsburg and Breeze map the heterotopic landscapes inhabited by Moroccan women in rural Spain, showing how they retreat into confined spaces that are conditioned partly by poverty, partly by cultural schemata that regulate the psycho-physical enactment of honor and shame. Even these women’s tentative ventures into cyberspace are constrained by the norms that regulate their bodily presence in the public sphere. Ironically, their insistence on the headscarf as the first requisite and primary protection for entering public spaces turns out to pre-empt social interaction and truly ensure that the culture and mores of their neighbors are kept at a distance. Perhaps this physical barrier functions as a wall around their personalized heterotopia, literally ensuring that the ideas circulating in the public space are kept out of their mind: as Mernissi suggested many years ago, such women are still “going around with a frontier inside the head” (1994, 66). Chapter nine turns to the difficult area of suffering and trauma in African diaspora communities, exploring how uprooted groups realign in therapeutic systems or cultures of healing, generated through diasporic encounters of spirituality and resistance. Based on interviews with members of the Congolese Catholic Charismatic Church in the United States and participant observation of their activities, Carolina Nvé Díaz San Francisco comes to a deeper understanding of the role of spiritual and community healing procedures in the life of the displaced. This chapter therefore contributes to anthropological research on the role of ritual in the context of diasporic self-making (Luksaite

Introduction

10

2010). In the Mwinda church meetings and rituals, she observes how the migrants’ sense of profound cultural loss, often combined with personal tragedy, is given expression in an atmosphere of forgiveness and reconciliation, so that people come to make sense of their experiences in a profoundly spiritual way. This new synthesis, embracing difference within the diaspora community and building solidarity, proves a source of energy to face the future in the new environment. Notably, however, these migrants also keep their Congolese home very much in mind, coming to understand their homeland not just as a source of identity and a place of past sorrow, but also as a common project for the future and a focus for hope. A NOTE ON ARABIC TRANSCRIPTION Since our volume covers a wide array of countries and cultures, including Arabic-speaking countries, it was difficult to decide how much attention would be given to explaining the distinctive features of Arabic language and its dialects. As a result, we chose a simplified transcription system that would provide enough indications for general readers to read both separate words and pieces of text. The transcription used in the chapters dedicated to the Arabic-speaking part of Africa is presented in two tables below. Apart from traditional Arabic alphabet, these tables also contain what is routinely known as Arabic chat alphabet. CONSONANTS AND DIPHTHONGS Table 0.1.  Consonants and Dipthongs Arabic letter

Transcription

Arabic chat alphabet letter

‫ب‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ج‬ ‫خ‬ ‫د‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ز‬ ‫س‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ص‬ ‫ض‬ ‫ط‬

b ｔ ṯ ḥ j/ž/ǧ x/kh/ḫ d ḏ r z s š ṣ ḍ ṭ

b t t h/7 j 5 d d r z s ch/sh s d T/6

Introduction 11

Arabic letter

Transcription

Arabic chat alphabet letter

‫ظ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق\گ‬ ‫ك‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ه‬ ‫و‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ء‬

ḍ/ẓ ‘ ġ/gh f q/g k l m n h w y ’

d 3 g/r f q/g/8 k l m n h w/ou y 2

VOWELS Table 0.2.  Vowels Short vowel

Long vowel

Arabic chat alphabet

a/ə u/ə I/ə

ā ū/ō ī/ē

a u/ou/o i/e

VENTURING INTO THIRD SPACES, GLIMPSING HYBRIDITY Before closing this introductory chapter, we need to devote a few words to the overarching themes of heterotopia and hybridity that we mentioned at the beginning and have glimpsed in different forms through the foregoing overview of chapters. In postcolonial theory, the concept of hybridity is often posited as opening a space, of a figurative nature, for the construction of a political/social/psychological object that is entirely new, in which neither the colonizer nor the “other” has the determining role, but both are radically unsettled (Bhabha 1994). This process can be replicated on many levels, from the macrolevel of the flow of cultures and their interactions, the meso-levels of postcolonial and de-colonial nation-building, or indeed the micro-level of the condition of migrant diasporas and individual people in the contemporary metropolis. However, the notion itself remains strangely intangible. On a material level, the concept of an idealized future hybridity has sometimes been discarded as merely aspirational, since it proves quite distant from the dynamic but untidy realities of life in the diaspora (García Canclini 1990). On a theoretical level, some critics have undermined the inchoate vision of emergent hybrid cultures by pointing to essentialist elements running

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Introduction

through the whole hybridity project. Theories of hybridity tend themselves to privilege certain views, ignoring material realities (such as poverty and injustice) and blurring the many very real differences that persist between the agents of the process themselves. Some critics, like Acheraïou, have even argued that the theory of hybridity completely eludes the material context (2011). In his view, at many sites across the world today, hybridity or indeed “third spaces” in general prove to be the space of the impossible, rather than possible venues for cultural or racial emancipation. From a slightly different perspective, in a volume that proposes the necessary imbrication of globalization and hybridization, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2004) critiques approaches that see such hybridization processes as being necessarily homogenizing, modernizing, and westernizing, rather putting forward the idea that hybridity is essentially rhizomatic, with “multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2004). Syntheses between cultures emerge rather as different bodies of water might intermingle, with effects that are ultimately elusive and untraceable. To answer the critiques mentioned above, proponents of this approach would tend to posit that hybridization processes occur, but that they are subject to multiple forces and have no clearly emancipatory outcome. As the chapters in the present volume will show, African cultures coexist and engage with each other, and with other cultures, on many different levels. But in the real and literary testimonies discussed in the present volume, the evidence for advanced stages of hybridity is slim, the discomfort generated by cultural mismatches is palpable, and the signs of incipient hybridization are often ambiguous. On their migratory paths, individuals experience inequalities, injustice and misunderstandings that are often distantly determined by colonial legacies or harshly affected by more recent impositions on the socioeconomic order. However, on a more optimistic note, we shall also see that the support of family and community, the healing power of religion, and the liberating potential of digital media enable African migrants to weave new social fabrics that sustain their lives in diaspora. The energy and creativity inherent in so many migrant experiences together constitute a force that theory cannot afford to ignore. On a theoretical level, then, the phenomena documented here illustrate the intensification of processes of cultural diffusion, both in everyday life and at the level of literature, showing how these can affect our understanding of cultural norms and help us to redefine the concepts of the universal and the national, their interaction and mutual enrichment. The interaction of postcolonial theory, migration studies, sociolinguistics and cultural anthropology in this volume should help us to comprehend better the hybridity and liminality present in our contemporary landscapes. We hope that readers will find the contributions published here both simulating and attractive, and that they will provide a starting point for future research on Africa and its peoples on the move.



Introduction 13

REFERENCES Acheraïou, Amar. 2011. Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization. Cham: Springer. Africa Centre for Strategic Studies. 2023. African Migration Trends to Watch in 2023. https://africacenter.org/spotlight/african-migration-trends-to-watch-in-2023/ Baynham, Mike and Gintsburg, Sarali. 2022. “Tar or honey? Space and time of Moroccan migration in a video sketch comedy ‘al-Kamira lakum.’” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, 157–74. London: Bloomsbury. Bhabha, Homi, K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Breeze, Ruth. 2023. “Time for Brexit? Temporalities in the 2019 UK European Election Campaign.” Text & Talk (online first). https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0004 Breeze, Ruth, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, eds. 2022. Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980/2004. A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. Epstein, Mikhail. 2007. Amerussia. Selected essays. Moscow: Serebrianye Niti. Finnegan, Ruth. 2012. Oral Literature in Africa. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Foucault Michel. 1986 Of Other Spaces, translated by Jay Miskoweic, Diacritics 16, no. 1 22–27. García Canclini, Néstor. 1990. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gintsburg, Sarali, and Breeze, Ruth. 2022. “Circumscribed transnational spaces: Moroccan immigrant women in rural Spain.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, 121–42. London: Bloomsbury. Le Houérou, Fabienne. 2022. “Exile, time and gender: time negation and temporal projection among refugees from the Horn of Africa.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, 51–66. London: Bloomsbury. Jarvis, Lee. 2022. “Constructing the coronavirus crisis: Narratives of time in British political discourse on COVID-19.” British Politics 17: 24–43. Luksaite, Eva. 2010. “Constructing the diasporic body: ritual practices among South Asians in Britain.” Asia Europe Journal 8(1): 11–24. Levine, Peter. A., and Kline, Maggie. 2010. Trauma through a child’s eye: awakening the ordinary miracle of healing. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. The Harem Within. London: Doubleday. Mohatt, Nathaniel Vincent, Azure B. Thompson, Nghi D. Thai, and Jacob Kraemer Tebes. 2014. “Historical Trauma as Public Narrative: A Conceptual Review off How History Impacts Present-day Health.” Social Science and Medicine 106: 128–36. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. 2004. Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Sinatora, Francesco L. 2022. “Digital narratives of Syrian political dissidence in the diaspora: chronotopes of the Syrian revolution and transnational grassroots.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, 191–212. London: Bloomsbury. Soja E. W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-lmagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Vertovec, Steven. 2023. Superdiversity. London: Routledge.

Chapter One

From Angola to Portugal Narrating Migration, Memory and Identity in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Work Jessica Falconi INTRODUCTION Since the publication of her first book in 2015, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida has established herself as one of the most original and celebrated1 voices in Portuguese literature today. Considering her Afrodescendant origins and the themes and characters in her works, she is also regarded as a prime example of the literary output of an emerging group of writers who self-define or have been defined as “Afrodescendants,” that is, authors whose origins and family histories point to the history and geographical context of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and the subsequent process of decolonization. As recent social studies have shown, the debate on the definition of Afrodescendancy in Portugal is still ongoing, and this is also reflected in the field of literary studies. As happened, in the context of continental Europe, with what is called “Afro-European literature” (Brancato 2008) or, mutatis mutandis, in Brazil, with Afro-Brazilian literature (Duarte 2015), the term “Afrodescendant literature,” or by Afrodescendant authors in Portugal, is a recent category and so is in need of problematization. This requires an examination of two types of principal factors, i.e., the question of the subjects— who are Afrodescendants?—and, following on from this, that of the works in question—what would be included in a corpus of Afrodescendant literature? And what would be the relationship between this corpus with both the national system of Portuguese literature, and with the national literary systems of African countries where Portuguese is the official language? The special edition of the journal Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies entitled “The Open Veins of the Postcolonial: Afrodescendants and Racisms,” edited by Iolanda Évora and Inocência Mata, seeks to debate the category of Afrodescendancy from social, historical, and literary perspectives. In 15

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particular, the two editors map out different definitions of the category of Afrodescendancy, pointing out how, in Portugal, it is socially and politically associated with the category of immigration. This being the case, the possibility of the existence of black Portuguese people continues to be silenced or little debated. The authors call for wider research into the different conceptualizations of Afrodescendancy, whilst warning to the risk of this category becoming, especially for Portuguese academe, “a form of appeasement” vis-à-vis the uncomfortable memory of the colonial past and contemporary racism (Évora and Mata 2021, 60). Reflection on Afrodescendant literature in Portugal has been developing in dialogue and in counterpoint with other contexts (Europe, the Americas, Africa), thereby generating different proposals for categorization. One example is the article by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, which, albeit implicitly, posits Afrodescendant literature as a part of Portuguese literature, in looking at the literary works of three Portuguese Afrodescedant women (Ribeiro 2021). In contrast, Rosângela Sarteschi chooses to place the category of race and skin color at the heart of the classification, by proposing to inquire into “contemporary literature by black authors in Portugal” (Sarteschi 2019, 283). A similar approach is taken by Emerson Inácio, who proposes the definition of “writings in black” both for Brazil and for Portugal (Inácio 2020). Without seeking to elaborate on or validate these ongoing proposals and the criteria that underlie them, it is useful to point to this debate as an initial relevant aspect of the approach to the work of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. This debate goes beyond merely classifying the work or this author and points us instead to the representations of identity contained in her novels and to the dialogue that her work establishes with the Portuguese literary canon. As we shall see, the author sees the relationship between different categories—such as Afrodescendancy, immigration, Portuguese national identity, African identity, and radicalization—as a complex and multifaceted relationship. These categories are characterized, in her narratives, both by porosity and by differentiation, sometimes generating tensions and conflicts between characters, and sometimes leading them to identity and feel solidarity with each other. So when considering this author’s work, it is useful to bear in mind Paulo de Medeiros’s suggestion that assessment of its reach should take into account the movements and migrations across national and continental frontiers (Medeiros 2020, 146). Starting out from these premises, I shall concentrate on representations of passage and migrations, and on the memories and identities that arise from them, in two novels by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: That Hair and Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso. In the final part of the chapter, I will also address her most recent novel, entitled Maremoto [Seaquake], to show the continuity and coherence of her literary project. My aim is to demonstrate that, in focusing



From Angola to Portugal 17

on passage or transit between Angola and Portugal, her narratives project essentially hybrid identities and spaces of identification, insofar as they challenge fixed notions of national belonging, questioning the actual concept of “place of origin” in the light of the history of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and its effects on the contemporary world. The intention is to approach the representations of identity in these novels as ways of “declining” national identities. Mireille Rosello proposes thinking of formal declensions as metaphors, that is, as “an interesting combination of fixed roots and variable endings, as crossroads where form and function meet and where the principles of sameness and difference are united as two aspects of the same realities” (Rosello 1998, 10). Transferring this formulation to a reflection on postcolonial cultural identities, it is possible to think of the idea of “declining” as the ability to position oneself within a national identity to decentralize it and reveal its lack of homogeneity. In Almeida’s novels, the strategies of this act of “declining” mobilize the centrality of the body, skin color, and of personal and family memory. From this perspective, declining also means focusing on the enumerability of “flexions” of identity that the categories codified by intersectional perspectives sometimes fail to locate, when applied to narratives of passage, migration, and resistance. Indeed, starting out from Maria Lugones’s reflection on forms of resistance that emerge at an infra-political level, Catarina Martins has identified in the narratives of migrant African women or women in transit between frontiers, “transgressive proposals” and “new forms of emancipation that arise [. . .] from the infra-collective and the infra-individual, insofar as they do not presuppose stabilized subjectivities, precisely localized in systems of oppression” (Martins 2018, 93). The aim is therefore also to demonstrate that Almeida’s novels seek to record narrative movements and displacements that undermine the “crystallized grids of perception of geographies, societies and culture” (Martins 2018, 100). Considering that the movements and migrations in the work of this author are multiple—between places, memories, registers of writing, narratives, identities—and that they have also been approached in other readings of her novels, I shall give particular prominence to the urban and suburban transit recreated at the fictional and narrative levels, in order to stress the contribution of literature to another knowledge and a groundbreaking representation of the African and Afrodescendant presence in postcolonial Portugal. This is a country which, according to Évora and Mata (2021), has stubbornly represented itself as essentially white, silencing other forms of “declining” postcolonial cultural identities.

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THAT HAIR AND CAPILLARY MEMORY That Hair establishes the dimension of hybridity in its actual formal characteristics: it is an account that lies between autobiography and Bildungsroman, coming close to the genre of autofiction, as this has been conceived in its relationship with the contemporary novel. As the Brazilian critic, Euridíce Figueiredo, has observed, the contemporary novel has “vampirized writings about the self,” to the extent that “the tendency today is to regard narrative as autofiction whenever it indicates that it is inspired by the facts of the author’s life. As regards the main character’s name, this may coincide with the author’s name (or some family name) or be absent” (Figueiredo 2020, 239). In Almeida’s novel, the first-person narrator is called Mila, which immediately suggests a possible diminutive of the author’s name. The book’s title points to the centrality of the body in the construction of the narrative, which is presented as the troubled story of Mila’s attempts and refusals to domesticate her own kinky hair. The topic of kinky hair connects Almeida’s narrative to a broad debate concerning the intersections between race and gender in representations and performances of the racialized identities of Black and mestiza women in various parts of the world—Europe, the United States, Brazil, etc. (Lukate and Foster 2022). In Almeida’s novel, Mila’s kinky hair bears witness to her Angolan heritage, through her maternal grandparents—her grandfather Castro Pinto and her grandmother Maria da Luz, who emigrated from Angola to Portugal—and becomes a pretext for a search for her identity. Doris Wieser has placed That Hair within what is called the “literature of return,” i.e., the literature produced by a wide category of subjects who, following on from Portuguese decolonization in Africa, emigrated from the former African colonies to Portugal (Wieser 2021). Although, apparently, this was a “return” different from that of the Portuguese who returned after decolonization or that of Africans fleeing the civil war, I shall again have recourse to the reflection of Medeiros, when he warns that “it should be borne in mind that the notion of return, even when false or impossible, cuts across the experience of many people from both sides of the colonial line of division” (Medeiros 2020, 147). From this perspective, Wieser’s essay follows the nonlinear itinerary of the search for identity through the dynamic of caring for/ neglecting the hair, read as a symbolic transposition of the main character’s oscillation in relation to her black African heritage, brought by her maternal grandparents, which becomes the prompt for intersectional reflection on the body, gender, race, and class. The articulation between race, gender, class, body, and sexuality also lies at the heart of the reading proposed by Sandra Sousa, who analyzes the trajectory of Mila’s kinky hair in the light of a geopolitics of the body (Sousa 2017),



From Angola to Portugal 19

clearly evoked by one of the most frequently quoted sentences in the book: “the history of my kinky hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: geopolitics” (Almeida 2015, 13). Whilst on the one hand, as Wieser notes, hair plays an important role in the identity equation of gender and race (Wieser 2021, 162–163), on the other hand, this topic falls within the wider figurative relationship that connects the body to space. In Almeida’s case, this is a relationship that associates the body with geography/geopolitics, in other words, literally, the body with the writing of space and the relationship between territories and politics, which may be considered a trope in the art and writing of women, explored especially by the writers and artists of the Black diaspora. In the context of the Lusophone black diaspora, a clear example of this trope is provided by certain works of another Afrodescendant Portuguese artist, Mónica de Miranda, whose photographic work Back Pack Paradise portrays landscapes and maps drawn on a woman’s body.2 The relationship between body and geography/geopolitics thereby becomes a transversal trope for embodying space and giving space to the body, establishing the transit and migration of bodies through space as elements that make it possible to ‘decline’ affiliations, ties, belongings, as well as stereotypes and social divisions. The article by Roberta Guimarães Franco points to the importance of memory in the novel, insofar as That Hair is a highly self-reflexive novel as regards the workings of memory. Indeed, Franco (2021, 112) uses the category of “fictions of memory” explored by Birgit Neumann to inquire into both the narratives that reveal the workings and functioning of memory, and also the stories about the past that individuals and cultures tell to respond to the questions of the present (Neumann 2008, 334). This is the case of That Hair, which invests in memory as the central thread of the writing and the search for identity, a thread that brings “the book face to face with her hair” (Almeida 2015, 7). Albeit without elaborating on the idea, Franco uses the expression “capillary memory” (2021, 113), which I find illuminating if accepted in its multiple meanings and potentially unraveled components. Whilst the most immediate meaning is that pointing to a bodily memory, i.e., connected to the non-linear history of the main character’s hair, on the other hand the idea of capillary memory evokes the fluid ability of memory, in line with the physical phenomenon of capillarity, to emerge through unyielding surfaces and to penetrate densely woven fabrics. In a more figurative and political sense, it also points to the ability of an organization, movement, or group to infiltrate locally, so that we can conceive of the capillary memory of the main character, Mila, as a narrative form of declining a postcolonial identity, i.e., that of a Portuguese mixed-race girl. It is from this perspective that I shall examine the representations of urban and suburban transit in the author’s novels, illustrating the strategies for building both identity and difference in Afrodescendant and immigrant subjectivities in postcolonial Portugal.

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URBAN TRANSITS: DECLINING STEREOTYPES AND BODIES The representation of Lisbon in the works of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is a significant topic insofar as, whilst on the one hand, historical, anthropological, and social studies, as well as the visual arts and cinema, have explored the African presence in the city of Lisbon3, literary fiction has only now started to make more systematic incursions into this area. This occurs above all in the work of Afrodescendant writers, as can be seen in the novels of Telma Tvon, Kalaf Epalanga and Luisa Semedo, among others. Almeida’s works explicitly align themselves with these endeavors to fill a gap in the literary representation of African and Afrodescendant Lisbon. In That Hair part of the urban space is mapped out by the memory of the main character’s itineraries through the outskirts of the city on her visits to several beauty parlors managed by different ethnic groups living in the city. This mapping out exemplifies one of the main features of the representation of Lisbon in the author’s work. This is the rejection of celebratory images of mixed-race, creole, or multicultural Lisbon, often associated with the central area of the city, increasingly given over to tourism, comprising the areas around Martim Moniz, Praça da Figueira, and Rossio. Instead, the beauty parlors are recalled with irony and sarcasm, and linked to the somewhat traumatic personal memory of her hair and the social memory of a semiperipheral postcolonial Portugal, in the process of modernization. This a Portugal marked by the “returns” from the former colonies and by new waves of migration that gradually altered its ethnic and sociocultural fabric, although without affecting its self-representation as a European and racially homogeneous country, except for the “commodification” of ethnic and cultural difference in the city center. In the words of the narrator, the history of how her hair was treated and the visits to the hair salons is approached as a “learning exercise in femininity [. . .] it’s not the fairytale of miscegenation, but rather a story of repair” (Almeida 2015, 15). Far from celebrating the “fairytale of miscegenation,” the narrative voice declines the stereotypes in full self-awareness that resisting them is a complex and painful exercise of personal and historical “repair” of a body marked by the colonial past and the colonial mindset still in place in contemporary Portugal. In its representations of the urban center, associated with a mixed-race and multicultural Lisbon, the narrative voice also addresses this to decline—in its multiple meanings—the stereotype, reflecting on strategies of rejection/ acceptance. In recalling visits to a shop selling hair products, located in the city center, Mila projects the simultaneous identification and differentiation between herself and other African women with kinky hair. In the shop, white Portuguese shopkeepers, “typical Portuguese” (Almeida 2015, 76) recommend products and “boast about the hair of all the women cleaners” who



From Angola to Portugal 21

come in from the city’s outer suburbs. These are memories of daily transit between the center and outskirts of the city, and of social and racial interactions woven into everyday life in postcolonial Lisbon, marked by stereotypes, paternalism, differences of class, race, and gender. In establishing the link between the protagonist’s hair and that of the cleaning ladies, the narrative voice also establishes a distance that points ambivalently both to the identification and empathy—between Black Portuguese women and immigrant African women, but equally to the difference between them, created by social class. This difference is also highlighted in relation to—typical—Portuguese shopkeepers, whose condition as local people is something to which the narrative voice is close and from which it is distant at the same time. Whilst the urban and suburban transit through post-colonial Lisbon points to specific movements and interactions, it also points to the journey of identity of a “nomadic” subject and of an ambivalent narrative voice, as the factors of differentiation on grounds of gender, race, social class, age, among other factors, mirror “the complex interactions of the various levels of subjectivity” (Braidotti 2002, 13). Through Braidotti’s category of nomadic subject as a figuration of the positioning of the subject in a diagram of relations, the everyday life of the city filtered through Mila’s memory may be seen as an attempt by the narrative voice to locate itself on the map of power relations, expressing connections and distances, empathies and aspirations not crystalized in unambiguous affirmations of identity. Whilst, as Wieser asserts, Mila is divided between her white and her Black heritage, from her paternal and maternal grandparents, respectively, she emerges somehow as an intermediary, between belonging to the immigrant community and to that of the typically Portuguese. She ends up situating herself between these two extremes, which could be considered a way of establishing difference as a component of Portuguese national identity. This positioning does not suggest a relativist stance in relation to identity, but rather a complex placing of the subject within a system of power relations marked by the “exchange” of stereotypes and by individual and collective memories—capillary memories—that render the question of identification yet more dense. In other words, Mila appears to be aware that “Afrodescendants appear not to fit in the template still applied to previously colonized individuals, transformed in the meantime into immigrants” (Évora and Mata 2021, 44). At the same time, as illustrated by Braidotti’s theory on the nomadic subject, the main character seeks to reclaim her territory through memory, the trajectories of the past and multiple interconnections—affectionate, family, but also cultural, transnational and political. In one of the most surprising passages in the book, Mila says her hair looks like it has been styled from the famous photograph of the African American activist, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a furious mob at the entrance to Little Rock Central High School. The subject’s multiple locations on the map

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of power relations and her fractured self-perception are especially relevant in the passage accompanying the photograph: Not that this photograph symbolizes any particular episode in my life. Instead, it’s an X-ray of my soul. My soul is the misleadingly impassive figure of Elizabeth Eckford in the foreground and the implacable hatred of the crowd as she passes through in the background [. . .] I am the officers in the back policing myself at a distance. I am the onlookers simply enjoying the spectacle. It’s the portrait of self-persecution and the daily attempt to be indifferent to it. (Almeida 2015, 102)

Returning to the representation of urban space, another significant passage is that in which Mila reflects on the isolated condition of her maternal grandmother and how little she knows of Lisbon, because she lives in a “shanty town on the outskirts of Lisbon” (Almeida 2015, 23). Mila recalls what she defines as the “the incomplete tourist itinerary that Lisbon was for us,” experienced as a “truncated city” (Almeida 2015, 46). Further on, the main character reflects: What would be the inward consequences of out amputated concept of Lisbon, of our hopes being pinned on the redevelopment of Restauradores and Colégio Militar, diversions for traffic and pedestrians, exposed piping under wooden planks, covered scaffolding through which we might glimpse the workmen, our fellow countrymen, having lunch or relieving themselves, the prospect of new music megastores, as if we would rush to buy coffee and gloves, admire the cats in the window, drink a ginjinha, have our photo taken with Pessoa, and not, without any other purpose, just to relieve the dullness—and as if the life of Lisbon’s inhabitants were closed to us, just as ours was closed to them, and they were the invisible ones? (Almeida 2015, 47)

The image of the semi-peripheral city in the process of modernization typical of the 1980s and 1990s, in which “new citizenships” (Lobo 2016) were being asserted, is evoked to recount the wanderings of the young protagonist and her cousins, once again revealing an intermediate and hybrid positioning between the city of the lisboetas and the truncated city experienced by Maria da Luz, for whom Portugal was always “clothes flapping in the breeze” (Almeida 2015, 46) in the São Gens shanty town. Off limits to African immigrants, the city is again the scenario the author uses to express transit between Mila’s identities and nomadic subjectivity: the city of the lisboetas is not off limits to Mila and her cousins, but rather the reverse is true, i.e., the life of Portuguese Black young people is off limits to lisboetas. It is not they who are invisible, but the category of immigrants, represented by their maternal grandparents and also by the building site workers, who



From Angola to Portugal 23

are ambivalently defined by the narrator as “our fellow-countrymen.” In this passage, the memory of the city of her adolescence leads Mila to position herself simultaneously and nomadically at the center and at the margins of a map of unequal power relations which involve different levels of construction of subjectivity, where race, class and age function as principal factors of differentiation and identification in the daily transit through the postcolonial city, itself represented in its material stratifications, divisions and areas of contact—the pavement, piping, screening around building sites. Mila’s capillary memory penetrates other maps and traces distinct routes, individual, and generational, around the city, which are part of a “dirty ethnography” (Almeida 2105, 108). This ethnography inscribes the nomadic subject in other marginal areas linked to the capital’s night life, the diffusion of electronic dance music in Portugal or the consumption of drugs. Likewise dirty is the city experienced in the 1990s and 2000s, and described through the “smell of urine, condoms and used syringes, empty plastic glasses from which I had also drunk” (Almeida 2015, 114). However, transit through a squalid city is also evoked in connection with the arrival of Africans from the former Portuguese colonies, who, while not falling within the classical category of economic immigration, are nonetheless individuals marked by the dynamics of colonialism and decolonization. This is the case of Mila’s maternal grandfather, the old Castro Pinto, who arrived in Lisbon to secure medical treatment for one of his children born with one leg shorter than the other, suggesting the lack and precarity of health system facilities in newly independent Angola. Mirroring Mila’s hair as a bodily element around which the narrative is built, the sick body of Castro Pinto’s child is the prompt for a description of another portion of the post-colonial city, in its semi-peripheral location in relation to Europe. The Pensão Covilhã, a boarding house which is home to many invalids who have arrived from Africa, functions as a squalid theatre presenting another truncated representation of Lisbon: “a lepers’ colony on the roadside, located in the city center but ostracized, because in order to arrive nowhere it’s enough to turn a dirty corner” (Almeida 2105, 22). The description of the Pensão Covilhã recalls the descriptions of hotels and boarding houses which accommodated the Portuguese retornados (people returning from the former colonies) in the novels The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso and As Naus (The Carracks) by António Lobo Antunes. These are seminal novels depicting the trauma of decolonization for Portuguese people returning from Africa, pointing, in my view, to Almeida’s intention of inhabiting and decentralizing the literary canon, bringing other forms of return into the center of the representation: that of Africans and Afrodescendants. Indeed, in defining the invalids recently arrived from Africa as the “debris of Empire” (Almeida 2015, 20), That Hair sheds light

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on these other forms of return, suggesting an implicit parallel between the arrival of the invalids and that of the retornados, also initially accommodated in hotels and boarding houses. In the heart of the postcolonial city, the boarding house and its invalids also function, by way of analogy, as places and bodies that recall the uncomfortable and traumatic memory of the colonial war (Almeida 2015, 21). Sick bodies are a recurrent feature of Almeida’s work: indeed, the Pensão Covilhã reappears in Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), a novel in which the fictionalized representation of the urban and suburban spaces of the postcolonial city looms large. This same boarding house is here home to two leading characters, the elderly Cartola, and his son Aquiles. Once more, narrating means giving space to the body and embodying spaces, in other words, establishing an intrinsic relationship between body and geopolitics, pointing to the complex locations of subjects by virtue of the distinctive components of their identity. While That Hair fixes on hair, in Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso the author, through the narrator, chooses to tell the story as the story of a heel, the malformed heel of Aquiles (Almeida 2018, 6). The narrator of the author’s latest novel, Maremoto (2021), the character Boa Morte da Silva, a former Angolan soldier who saw active service in the Portuguese colonial army, has a sick and deformed body. As Sandra Sousa has observed in relation to That Hair, these sick bodies that inhabit Almeida’s narratives can be read “as a metaphor for the end of Empire; and Empires whose limbs are broken, in an open wound, without arms to take in its children, who have also been dispossessed” (Sousa 2017, 62). URBAN AND SUBURBAN TRANSITS: HYBRID SPACES Whilst, as we have seen, That Hair is narrated in the first person, in a hybrid register somewhere between fiction and autobiography, the narrative options in Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso are different, using a third person narrative interspersed with what Paulo de Medeiros defines as “objects of memory” (Medeiros 2020, 145)—letters, transcriptions of telephone calls, notes, drawings. The decision to narrate the novel in the third person points perhaps to a greater distance between the Afrodescendant origins of the author and the immigrant characters. It should be stressed that, like Mila’s maternal grandparents in That Hair, the main characters of this other novel, Cartola and Aquiles, have emigrated from Angola to Portugal in search of medical treatment and end up taking on characteristics—the job on a building site, living on the outskirts of the city, socio-economic marginalization—which, in combination with skin color, construct them socially as “immigrants.” There are clear parallels between the character of Mila’s grandfather, Castro Pinto,



From Angola to Portugal 25

and Cartola: both originally come from M’Banza Kongo, in Angola, children of an Albino father, they emigrate to Portugal to get medical treatment for a child: for a shorter leg in the case of Castro Pinto, and a deformed heel in the case of Cartola. Both were nurses in Angola and find themselves marginalized in Portugal. The characters, inspired by members of the author’s family, move from one narrative to another, suggesting they are fluid and migrant entities, like the subjects represented. In 1970s Luanda, in the final period of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, Cartola dreams of Lisbon from his home in a poor neighborhood where identities rooted in local cultures and assimilated individuals, produced by Portuguese colonial policy, live side by side. Some time after Angola became independent, in 1985, Cartola and Aquiles arrive in Lisbon, and like Castro Pinto and Maria da Luz they have a truncated experience of the city. The “Rossio of dreams,” the city dreamt of from the former colony, turns out to be a city which is “small and dark” (Almeida 2018, 19) and above all inhospitable, experienced through the squalor of the hotel and disappointment. The images of the city discerned by the characters as they move around it reflect the intrinsically hybrid nature of postcolonial spaces experienced by the former colonized Africans and their descendants. As Paulo de Medeiros has written: one of the defining characteristics of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s work is is precisely the way in which it transcends national frontiers and invites the reader to imagine instead all those hybrid spaces between Africa and Europe, between Angola and Portugal, all of them intrinsically connected. (Medeiros 2020, 139)

This is a hybridity that has little to do with “the fairytale of miscegenation” or with the celebratory versions of the city—whether mixed-race, creole or multicultural and multiethnic—representing post-coloniality as an intimate connection between (former) colonies and the (former) metropolis, between (post-)colonial Portugal and the (former) empire (Sanches 2006). This is a connection constantly brought up to date by the pervasive presence of the colonial and imperial past in contemporary spaces and relations. It is from this perspective that the concept of the “post-colonial city” turns out to be especially relevant when applied to cities that were formerly imperial capitals, insofar as they were also produced by transit and migrations, both material and symbolic. As Brenda S. A. Yeoh has pointed out, the concept of the postcolonial city, applied both to the cities of the former colonies and to the former metropolises, connects distant and distinct territories, and enables us to address the relations, histories and configurations of identity that have always circulated between centers and peripheries (Yeoh 2001, 457).

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In the context of postcolonial Lisbon, the hybrid nature of spaces portrayed in Almeida’s work functions as another face of lusotropicalism and assimilation, in the hegemonic discourses of the “management of diversity” (Aixelà-Cabré 2018) used by Portuguese colonialism over history. Lusotropicalism, the theory formulated by Gilberto Freire to illustrate the formation of Brazilian society based on miscegenation, was appropriated by the political discourse of the Estado Novo to legitimate and justify Portuguese colonialism in Africa (Castelo 1998). Assimilation was in turn the principal tool of Portuguese colonial domination in the African colonies, used to place colonial subjects in a hierarchy (Meneses 2018). These are, mutatis mutandis, old versions of modern discourses that celebrate the multiculturality of Western postcolonial cities, concealing the asymmetries, the structural racism, and the marginalized conditions in which certain social groups live. The hybrid nature of the spaces portrayed by Almeida lays bare, in the words of Évora and Mata, paraphrasing Eduardo Galeano, “the open veins of the post-colonial,” insofar as it shows how memory—capillary, infraindividual and infra-collective—conceives of bodies and spaces in transit between past and present, between Africa and Europe, between Portugal and Angola. In That Hair, hybrid space, produced by family displacements and post-colonial geopolitics, emerge through the exercise of Mila’s capillary memory, which seeks to reconstitute her place of origin, in Angola, of which she remembers little, renewed by visits after leaving for Portugal. It is significant how the memory of transit through the city of Lisbon ends up “hybridizing” the urban space and reconfiguring it as place of origin: the neighborhoods that Mila goes through when looking for beauty parlors give her a feeling of déjà vu that she associates with the image she retains of Luanda (Almeida 2015, 18). In Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, as pointed out by Fazzini (2020, 168), the old Cartola is someone formerly assimilated who “[h]as arrived in Lisbon too late, after it was possible for him to domesticate the city. In his head, he shaped Lisbon around what he knows of Luanda: Sagrada Família-Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, Ilha-Cacilhas, Prenda-Prior Velho” (Almeida 2018, 21). However, Aquiles, born in the 1970s in Angola, and so disconnected from the concept and policy of assimilation, also ends up sharing the imaginary world and experience of his father. The room in the Pensão Covilhã is also seen as a hybrid space between past and present and between Angola and Portugal. In this room, “things from Luanda were mixed in with things from Lisbon, calendars, bits of clothing, an empty wine bottle, a Belenenses [football team] scarf, a wireless. In the ragged clothes in room 111 and on the faces of father and son, the empire remained intact” (Almeida 2018, 46).



From Angola to Portugal 27

As the two characters experience disappointment in relation to the city they dreamed about, the city reveals its rhythm of blindness, swallowing up father and son in indifference and the lack of opportunities for social and economic advancement, and so repelling them. The topic of invisibility is posited in the novel as a mechanism intrinsic to the city. Even if it appears as the desire of the characters to render themselves invisible, it is actually the urban rhythm that turns them into ghosts, a markedly paradoxical rhythm which, by excluding, includes, and vice versa. [Cartola p]erformed the magic of passing by others like a ghost. It even seemed as if he had chosen it. Perhaps this was the last manifestation of his ingenuity: of deeming himself master of his disguise and of the speed with which slipped out of the memory of people who passed him in the street. When, in reality, walking as if busy but in no hurry to get anywhere, just another person getting on with his life, he was at one with the rhythm of the city, which carried him along like a tide. (Almeida 2018, 41)

The main characters of Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso end up leaving the Pensão Covilhã for a fictional neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon called Quinta do Paraíso [Paradise Estate], finding work on building sites, the precarious working conditions on which are carefully described by the narrator. In this outlying neighborhood, with features that recall an almost rural environment, Cartola and Aquiles will constitute a new human and hybrid household, as an alternative for family, with Pepe, from Galicia, his son, Amândio, the dog, Tristão, and a child named Iuri. The arrival at Paraíso of Justina, Cartola’s daughter, also reveals the existence here of a hybrid space run through with memories and identity traits symbolized by objects from their old life in Luanda, still kept in a suitcase which materializes unrealized hope and aspiration, a destination not yet reached, as this passage reveals: Out of the suitcases came loose razor blades falling out of their cardboard boxes, strips of gauze that time and mercurochrome had stained with orangey patches; certificates and documents on which Cartola’s handwriting had faded, bills, X-rays of Aquiles’ heel, an old membership card from the Moçâmedes Table Tennis Club, out-of-date prescriptions, calendars advertising a restaurant, a tin whistle, a paperweight in the form of a light aircraft, a battery-powered torch that no longer worked. [. . .] It had not been through laziness that they hadn’t unpacked. It was out of hope. They knew they had not yet reached their destination. Overnight, Justina forced them to disembark, without their realizing where those seven years had gone. (Almeida 2018, 81)

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Even living on the Paraíso estate, caught between material poverty and the human richness of a supporting community, Cartola and Aquiles continue, each for their own reasons, their wanderings around Lisbon. It is significant that Rossio, the urban area historically marked by an African presence, where new diasporas revitalize old cultural memories (Henriques 2021; Gama 2005), appears in the novel not as a place of collective aggregation, but as a place dreamed of from afar and then the scene for key moments in the relationship between father and son and of self-reflection by the characters about their own identity. It is around Rossio that Glória, Cartola’s wife who stayed behind in Luanda, dreamed of strolling with her husband. It is at the Ginjinha bar in Rossio that Cartola calls his son “Papá Aquiles,” meaning that the boy has become a man, symbolically handing to him a possible key to the future in the city where no one knows who he is, which allows him to be what he wants (Almeida 2018, 46–47). It is also in a hat shop on Rossio that Cartola remarks on his image in the mirror and finds himself profoundly changed by life in Portugal, worn down by poverty, almost emptied of identity, a stranger to himself: “His face looked to him like a sketch by a bad painter. He had to stop himself from asking the stranger if he needed help, if he could give him a hand, or if he wanted a cigarette” (Almeida 2018, 62). It is also in Rossio that Aquiles tries to take charge of himself in the city, taking advantage of his very invisibility and anonymity, above all at night, the moment when: [he] loses his fear: it is the color, walking without the burden of being seen, no one to notice him. He is the color of pigeons, the homeless people, the cats, the prostitutes in Cais do Sodré, whose faces he fails to distinguish when he sees them in passing, their slick, cashew-colored hair, their worn lips; the color of parked taxis listening to the radio, the color of the rooftops, the statues, the color of the sky. (Almeida 2018, 112)

In the author’s narratives, a complex connection is suggested between invisibility, madness and what is defined as the “privilege of citizenship.” The passage quoted about how Aquiles’s color is rendered invisible by the night connects, in place, with the passage in That Hair in which the narrative voice reflects on the fact of feeling at home means not being afraid of being taken for mad: “It is as if only in our homeland were we authorized to go mad in public, ignoring passers-by, that this was an option” (Almeida 2015, 25). The center of the city, the old heart of the empire is now, in postcolonial times, a place sometimes of bewilderment, sometimes of possibility, and sometimes of disenchantment, and so an emblematic place in the postcolonial Lisbon portrayed in the novel, albeit distant from the usual representations of a place of aggregation and interaction between the various African communities in the diaspora.



From Angola to Portugal 29

In Maremoto (2021), Almeida’s most recent novel, the center of the city and, in particular, the Chiado and Baixa districts of Lisbon are the prime scenarios for the narration because the main character and narrator, Boa Morte da Silva, works as an arrumador de carros (individuals who eke out a living helping motorists to park) in these areas of the city, where he is familiar with all the movement, traffic and habits, because “the city is made out of our obsession with doing the same thing at the same time” (Almeida 2021, 10). The map of the city center drawn in this new novel is significantly broader and more specific but, as in the other books, the outlying districts are still where people make their home and are able to inhabit space through human relations shaped by mutual help, Indeed, it is not difficult to see parallels between the tiny house with a zinc roof in São Gens where Mila’s maternal grandparents live in That Hair, the shack inhabited by Cartola and Aquiles in Quinta do Paraíso, destroyed by an explosion and then rebuilt, and the dwelling in Prior Velho inhabited by Boa Morte, Angolan veteran of the colonial war in Guinea-Bissau. Here, Boa Morte writes his long letters to his daughter Aurora, whom he only ever saw at her birth in Bissau, and dreams of starting a vegetable patch in the backyard of the house belonging to his landlady, Dona Idalina. Far from romanticizing life in these suburbs, which present themselves as quasi-rural spaces because of the ties of mutual help and the possibility of creating infrastructures for subsistence, Almeida’s books actually portray these outlying and marginalizing spaces with a certain degree of realism. However, as has been pointed out, hybrid aggregations of humans and non-humans grow up, with dogs belonging to these precarious and temporary webs of ties and affection. What the author portrays comes close to the concept in urban theory of “people as infrastructures,” a concept that lays the stress on collaborative processes between marginalized residents (Simone 2004, 407). This concept draws on the idea of infrastructure, generally linked to efficiency and productivity and conceived in material terms, whilst the person as infrastructure extends the notion to the “complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons and practices” which become hybrid platforms—hybrid in terms of nationality, ethnicity, race or even species—for producing and reproducing life on the margins of large cities (Simone 2004, 408). However, in Maremoto, the strongest relationship in terms of affection and solidarity—that between the arrumador, Boa Morte, and Fatinha, a homeless Santomean woman born in Portugal—is displaced to the center of the city, suggesting a new movement in the author’s fiction towards “reoccupation” of the center by marginalized subjects. Fatinha, a woman lost in time and space, who believes in the existence of a city beneath the waters of the Tagus, of which we know very little, is the most vulnerable of all the characters in the author’s fictions, because she “inhabits” the “zone of indistinction” (Agam-

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ben 1998) formed by the street, a space that evades regulation by the dominant norms. The bodies that live in it are constantly exposed to the arbitrariness of interactions and to the possibility of violence (Aldeia 2016). Fatinha is potentially also a subject stricken by multiple forms of coloniality, in whose body the coloniality of gender, race, power and class intersect, in view of the distinctive components of her identity, which are joined by her homelessness, a condition deemed to be “unworthy of being lived” (Agamben 1998, 132). It is only Boa Morte, the arrumador, who can see Fatinha’s humanity and life: “behind each scrunched up paper, each used bus ticked, the pharmacy leaflet discarded on the ground, yesterday’s sports paper left on a bench, Boa Morte was able to see into a house, someone, a life in which each part was connected in a first arrangement” (Almeida 2021, 31). So in this novel, Almeida again draws on a series of central topics to reflect on ways of “declining” postcolonial Lisbon and Portugal, i.e. forms of vulnerability experienced by subjects whose affiliations and forms of belonging are controversial, temporary and precarious. As has been pointed out, it is not by chance that the author brings together two figures in the heart of the city, one that is a black woman born in Portugal and looking for fragments of her past and her identity in the rubbish and beneath the waters of the river, and an Angolan veteran of the Portuguese army who lays claim to his grounding in Portugal—proclaiming himself a servant of the city of Lisbon because of his informal and precarious work. The whole weight of Boa Morte’s trauma in having fought against his fellow Africans in the colonial war because he believed in his condition as a Portuguese citizen is materialized in an umbilical hernia. The sick body is again central in his relationship with space and memory, as revealed in a dream related by Boa Morte: My hernia is my whole life, what I did to your mother [. . .] the other day I dreamed that my belly was the Chiado, from Rua Nova do Almada to Rua do Loreto. I’d swallowed it all. The Chiado continued, inside of me, people running, gentlemen, ladies, little girls, courting couples, Rua do Alecrim, Igreja de São Roque, the beggars outside the Igreja dos Italianos asking my stomach for alms, Largo Camões, motorcycles, bookshops, restaurants, cars, everything was in there, my belly was swelling up, there were more and more people in the street, people marching up and down and pummeling my insides. (Almeida 2021, 24)

The dream of the individual who swallows the city into his body appears to suggest a strategy of inclusion different from the dominant and normative strategy, in other words, instead of being swallowed up and somehow included in the urban space, the individual tries to include this space and its movement in his own body, as a dreamlike and unreal way of creating identification and laying claim to a relationship of belonging.



From Angola to Portugal 31

Another active strategy that Boa Morte enacts is also related to memory and transit: the train journeys that take him from one side of the city to the other become the moments when he is plunged into the past and his way of reliving his own story, like his window shopping in the Baixa, as revealed in these passages: My past passes before my eyes when I go to the train window. I see my mother, my homeland, your mother, your birth, the days of way, my arrival in Lisbon. I lean back in my seat and watch the film of my life [. . .]. I look at the shop windows, in the Baixa, but I no longer see in them the reflection of my face, I don’t notice what they’re selling. I see my life in the glass while I walk up Rua Nova do Almada, the glass of the shop windows tells me who I was. (Almeida 2021, 49)

The urban space and the character’s movement through it as he searches for himself are re-signified by the individual memory, which is also the collective memory of Africans who, like Boa Morte, fought in the colonial war and were then left in a state of multiple exclusion after the end of the war, because of decolonization. As pointed out by Roberta Franco, in Maremoto, the destruction and family loss is greater than in the other novels, as Boa Morte’s only family tie is one he created himself and has nourished through his letter to a daughter he hardly knows (Franco 2021, 118). However, it is in his relationship with Fatinha, with the dog, Jardel, and other figures in the street and the outlying district where he lives that Boa Morte seeks to reconstitute new forms of affiliation which will nonetheless be frustrated by the disappearance of the woman, showing the author’s vision to be profoundly devoid of romanticization. CONCLUDING REMARKS Whilst differing in the narrative approaches taken, the novels of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, analyzed in this essay from the perspective of passage and migrations between the former colonies and the post-colonial city, also show themselves to be part of a broad and coherent endeavor to “decline” post-colonial Portugal, starting out from decolonization, with incursions into the colonial past through the memory of the characters. The sometime permeable frontiers between the narratives in question and the similar features of the characters point not to an intention to homogenize categories, but to an endeavor to represent, within the rationale of “fictions of memory,” the workings of a “capillary” memory. This is a memory which is able to connect and cross distinct bodies and spaces, bringing to light what connects and

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intertwines them, but also their differences as subjects who, each in their own way and using their own strategies (successful or otherwise), see themselves as “local” subjects. The grandfather, Castro Pinto, the grandmother, Maria da Luz, alongside Cartola and Boa Morte, are formerly colonized people who inhabit the former metropolis, transforming it into a hybrid space of reminiscence, identities and memories. They are also individuals who suffer the contemporary effects of the complex “webs woven by the empire,” to paraphrase Fernando Pessoa. Through Almeida’s novels, marked by the centrality of passage and migration, the lives of these characters, and of their memories and their bodies, end up “occupying” post-colonial space, belonging to it in keeping with the complex mechanisms of identification and affiliation. Assimilated persons frustrated in their aspiration to be Portuguese, Castro Pinto, Cartola, and Boa Morte somehow end up renouncing that aspiration, as can be read between the lines of their gestures or movements, opening the way for new forms of identification which, however, are left in suspense. Indeed, the author builds unfinished narratives, whose endings let us imagine further journeys able to interconnect times, spaces, and individuals. We might point to the endings of Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso and Maremoto, where, respectively, we see Cartola throwing his hat into the river and Boa Morte being swallowed in the tide of people at the entrance to the Metro. Both characters have lost the affection and ties forged in the meanderings of urban and suburban space of the post-colonial city—with Pepe in Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso and Fatinha in Maremoto – and both feel disappointed, but their bodies remain suspended in a future which cannot yet be decided. In contrast, prior to the questioning and enigmatic ending of That Hair, there is a photo of an actor in blackface. As Medeiros has pointed out, “[t]he complex and painful history of imitation and of white desire to assume all the attributes of the racialized Other, including actual skin color as a fetish, in the attempt to eliminate their difference, still burns like a fire before us” (Medeiros 2020, 148). Before the final photograph, the narrator sets out a reflection on individual and collective memory, returning to the idea of the truncated city and transposing it to her own identity. She also calls on the inseparable relationship between identity and representation, between declensions and stereotypes, between the Other and the Same, between the colors of skin and those of masks: “However, and I shudder to think it, it is that mask that I miss [. . .] the face for which I feel nostalgic, the same that I judge not to be mine, does not announce me except to myself” (Almeida 2015, 96-97). If on the one hand the concept of post-memory serves to reflect on the impossibility of total reconstitution of the memory in which the construction of Mila’s subjectivity is inscribed, on the other hand the idea of a truncated identity will sometimes have to do with the (still incipient) positing of the Afrodescendant



From Angola to Portugal 33

subjectivity highlighted by Évora and Mata. A subjectivity which, according to the authors’ reasoning, needs to find its place, not only politically, but also historically and creatively, in the longue durée of the African presence in Portugal and of the mutual representations between Africa and Europe. In evoking formerly assimilated individuals and their descendants, black homeless Portuguese young people—literally, in the case of Fatinha, and inwardly, in the case of Mila or Aquiles – retornados with kinky hair, black and sick bodies, the author passes through similarities and differences, solidarities and distances, putting together an unfinished portrait but constantly asking: “who is Mila still?” (Almeida 2015, 99). This is an endeavor which seeks to confer aesthetic and political citizenship on post-colonial identities in contemporary Portugal, pointing to other forms of return and establishing a new narrative space for Afrodescendants in contemporary Portuguese-language literature. NOTES 1.  Among other accolades, she was the winner of the Novos Prize, in 2016, in the literature category, for That Hair. The same work was shortlisted for Casino da Póvoa Literary Prize in 2018. Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso was awarded the Fundação Inês de Castro Prize for Literature and the Fundação Eça de Queiroz Prize for Literature, both in 2019. In the same year, she won the prestigious Oceanos Prize and in 2020 won second place in the same competition with A visão das plantas. Her books have also been widely reviewed online and she has been interviewed in online publications and academic journals, pointing to a significant level of interest in her work. See for example Almeida 2021. 2.  See http://artafrica.letras.ulisboa.pt/pt/artist/420.html 3.  See, on this matter, inter alia, the studies by Isabel Castro Henriques (2021); Jean-Yves Loude (2005); José Ramos Tinhorão (1988); Nuno Domingos & Elsa Peralta (2013); Fernando Arenas (2012).

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Almeida, Djaimilia Pereira de. 2021. Maremoto. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água. Almeida, Djaimilia Pereira de (2021) “Entrevista com Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida.” Língua-Lugar: Literatura, História, Estudos Culturais, 1 (2): 174–183. Antunes, António Lobo. 2007. O meu nome é legião. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Arena, Joaquim. 2006. A verdade de Chindo Luz. Dafundo: Oficina do Livro. Arenas, Fernando. 2012. “Cinematics and literary representations of Africans and Afrodescendants in contemporary Portugal: conviviality and conflict on the margins.” Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 24: 165-186. https://doi.org/10.4000/cea.676. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Nuovi soggetti nomadi. Roma: Luca Sossella editore. Brancato, Sabrina. 2008. “Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category?” Research in African Literatures 39(3): 1-13. Cardoso, Dulce Maria. 2012. O Retorno. Lisboa: Tinta da China. Domingos, Nuno, and Peralta, Elsa, ed. 2013. Cidade e Império: dinâmicas coloniais e reconfigurações pós-coloniais. Lisboa: Edições 70. Duarte, Eduardo Assis de. 2015. “Por um conceito de literatura afro-brasileira.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 41(81): 19-43. Évora, Iolanda, and Mata, Inocência. 2021. “As Veias Abertas da Afrodescendência: Herança Colonial e Contemporaneidade.” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 34-35: 42-65. Retrieved from https://ojs.lib.umassd.edu/index.php/plcs/article/ view/PLCS34_35_Mata_page42/1330 [8/05/2023]. Fazzini, Luca. 2021. “Visões de Lisboa em dissonância: dinâmicas do poder no espaço urbano e escritas em trânsito.” Cadernos de Literatura Comparada 43 (12): 155-174. https://doi.org/10.21747/21832242/litcomp43a10. Figueiredo, Eurídice. 2020. “A autoficção e o romance contemporâneo.” Alea. Estudos Neolatinos 22(3): 232-246. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1517-106X/2020223232246. Franco, Roberta Guimarães. 2021. “A ‘inseparabilidade’ dos trânsitos na obra de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida.” Abril 13(27): 109-124. https://doi.org/10.22409/ abriluff.v13i27.50258. Gama, Henrique Dinis da. 2005. Baixa pombalina: a luz obscura do Iluminismo. Lisboa: Caminho. Henriques, Isabel Castro. 2021. Roteiro histórico de uma Lisboa africana. Lisboa: Colibri. Inácio, Emerson da Cruz. 2019. “Novas perspectivas para o Comparatismo Literário de Língua Portuguesa: as séries Afrodescendentes.” Revista Crioula 23: 12-33. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1981-7169.crioula.2019.160606. Lobo, Marina Costa. 2016. Portugal e a Europa: novas cidadanias. Lisboa: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. Loude, Jean-Yves. 2005. Lisboa, na Cidade Negra. Lisboa: Dom Quixote. Lukate, Johanna M. and Foster, Juliet L. 2022. “‘Depending on where I am . . .’ Hair, traveling and the performance of identity among Black and mixed-race women.” British Journal of Social Psychology 62(1): 342-258. https://doi.org/10.1111/ bjso.12584. Martins, Catarina. 2018. “O reverso-do-moderno nas narrativas migrantes de mulheres africanas contemporâneas.” In Identidades em Trânsito, edited by Fernanda



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Mota Alves, Gerard Hammer and Patrícia Lourenço, 81-101. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Humus. Medeiros, Paulo de. 2020. “Memórias Pós-imperiais: Luuanda, de José Luandino Vieira, e Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida.” Revista Língua-Lugar 1: 136-149. https://doi.org/10.34913/.journals/lingua-lugar.2020.e211. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2008. La condizione postcoloniale. Verona: Ombre Corte. Neumann, Birgit. 2008. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning, 333-344. New York: De Gruyter. Rosello, Mireille. 1998. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. Hanover; London: University Press of New England. Sarteschi, Rosângela. 2019. “Literatura contemporânea de autoria negra em Portugal: impasses e tensões.” Via Atlântica 1 (36): 283-304. https://doi.org/10.11606/ va.v0i36.163936. Simone, Abdou Maliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16(3): 407-429. Sousa, Sandra. 2017. “A descoberta de uma identidade pós-colonial em Esse Cabelo de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida.” Abril, 9(18): 57-68. https://doi.org/10.22409/ abriluff.v9i18.29921 Tinhorão, José Ramos. 2019. [1988] Os Negros em Portugal. Lisboa: Caminho. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. 2001. “Postcolonial cities.” Progress in Human Geography 25 (3): 456-468. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201680191781 Wieser, Doris. 2021. “The Frizzy Hair of the Retornados. “Race” and Gender in Literature on Mixed-Race Identities in Portugal.” In The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa, edited by Elsa Peralta, 150-170. New York: Routledge.

Chapter Two

Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs A Heterotopian-Utopian Approach Sarali Gintsburg INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN MULTICULTURAL SPACES AND HETEROTOPIA Africa is often perceived as a “continent on the move,” or a continent from which mass migrations are taking place due to poverty, armed conflicts, and political instability. While there is much truth in this perception, it is also true that migratory processes are complex and multidirectional—people may move back and forth even over the course of one century, leaving behind cultural and linguistic traces of their presence. The interactions between different cultures that have taken place and are taking place today on the African continent are no exception to this rule and they are much more multidirectional and diverse than is commonly thought. Particularly interesting in this regard is the eastern part of the African continent, which historically has been in close contact with other countries in the Indian Ocean. For many centuries, migratory flows have been moving in both directions—African people migrated to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, the Indian Peninsula, and even South Asia.1 In parallel to this, East Africa was also receiving migrants, who were coming from various areas in India, Persia, South Asia and from the areas that are known today as Oman and Hadhramawt (Southern Yemen). These complex multi-trajectory migrations led to the establishment of rich intercultural contacts and therefore the emergence of complex multicultural spaces, where cultures that had little in common overlapped with each other. The Zanzibar Archipelago is a striking illustration of an East African society with a culturally and ethnically diverse, multilingual population. Until the Revolution of 1964, Zanzibar, which had been officially part of the Sultanate of Oman (1698–1856) and later became the Sultanate of Zanzibar (1856–1964), was attracting settlers from various countries in the Indian Ocean basin, including 37

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the Arabian Peninsula.2 Up to the Revolution of 1964, ethnic Arabs accounted for a population of around 54,000 members, which was then equal to 15 percent of the total population of Zanzibar (Lofchie 1965). Ethnic Arabs of Omani and Hadhrami origin who had lived in Africa for generations, as well as the recent arrivals, sought to maintain their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity. After the 1964 Revolution, when the pro-nationalist forces came to power, a large part of the non-autochthonous population, especially the Arabs, were forced to leave Zanzibar and settle in other countries. Nevertheless, the migrations of the Arab population to and from Zanzibar that took place over the last seventy years have not yet been forgotten—their direct participants are still alive. With this case study, I hope to demonstrate the potential of the Foucauldian notions of heterotopia and utopia for their application to the study of complex multicultural spaces, especially those where cultures with little in common overlap with each other. While every multicultural entity has its own unique cultural features, the application of a heterotopian-utopian approach makes it possible to find not only uniqueness but also commonalities between groups that differ culturally and linguistically, and therefore get a more holistic picture of their identities. For my analysis I will use literary works by Abdelrazak Gurnah, a writer from Zanzibar of Yemeni descent who lives and works in the United Kingdom, as well as narratives I collected from Arabs of Yemeni and Omani origin whom I met in Zanzibar in 2015. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK To start the conversation about heterotopia, as suggested by Cenzatti (2018), we should turn to the field of medicine, where this term was initially coined. Heterotopia is “the displacement of an organ or part of the body from its normal position” (Concise Medical Dictionary). The features of heterotopia were formulated by Michel Foucault in two of his works: first Words and Things (1966 [1994]) and then Other Spaces (1967 [1986]). In Words and Things, Foucault gives an outline of the future idea and compares heterotopia to utopia. In Other Spaces, the author develops in more detail the idea of heterotopias as special spaces which break the continuity and normality of common everyday spaces, by breaking borders and creating zones of otherness. According to Foucault, like utopias, heterotopias refer to “other spaces” where time and space are distorted, but while utopias are only an idea, heterotopias do exist physically. Further, unlike utopias, which are intrinsically unattainable, heterotopias are real spaces, but seem to be anomalous in one way or another. In The Other Spaces, Foucault formulated the six



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 39

principles of heterotopias, providing their systematic description. Thus, the first principle of heterotopia presupposes the assumption that every culture in the world creates its own, inherent heterotopias, although the same heterotopias can take different forms depending on the context of a given culture. The same principle suggests that heterotopias can be described as crisis and deviant spaces. The second principle states that heterotopias’ function in each society can be modified with time. To illustrate this second principle, Foucault offered the example of cemeteries in Western culture and how their role changed over the last century. The third principle, perhaps the most essential and the obvious one, concerns the essence of heterotopia, which is that heterotopias juxtapose in one physical place several incompatible spaces. The fourth principle points out that heterotopias are often connected with slices in time; they break up traditionally current time in certain areas. Foucault notes that otherness in heterotopic space can have its own particular modes of time, heterochronies: heterotopia can either accumulate time and evolve around infinity, or, in the opposite sense, evolve around a very limited period of time. The fifth principle says that heterotopias are always open and closed, which isolates them and makes them permeable at the same time. Systems become open when certain ritualized actions are performed, which creates the possibility of entry and exit. Finally, the sixth principle manifests itself in two extremes: heterotopia can make the real world illusory or compensate reality with what is missing to have a perfect space. Among examples of illusion and compensation suggested by Foucault are once famous brothels, or the Jesuit colonies in South America. To summarize, a heterotopia has the following characteristics: 1) universality; 2) multifunctionality; 3) ability to juxtapose several spaces in one place; 4) connection to different time periods; 5) an open and closed system; and 6) creating the effect of illusion/compensation. The principles of heterotopia are widely applicable to the study of cultural processes and their many phenomena, and their interpretation is very broad, to the point of seeing the whole of space as heterotopia. The notion of utopia became central to Foucault, as he used it to better define the meaning and qualities he ascribed to heterotopia. While both heterotopia and utopia are concepts related to spaces, they, said Foucault, are very different as heterotopia is a real-world space that exists outside of the normal and utopia is always imaginary, non-real space. Curiously, to show how heterotopia is different from utopia, Foucault used the now famous example of the mirror and ended up saying that the mirror that reflects our image is a metaphor for utopia because it shows us what does not exist, that is, a reflection, but it is also a metaphor for heterotopia because the surface of the mirror is a real object.3

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We see therefore that the divide between heterotopia and utopia is quite narrow and both concepts can be used in various contexts to describe other spaces, both real and imaginary, that question the norms and values of dominant cultures and societies. The study of heterotopias can help us comprehend the uniqueness, openness and closure, and otherness and typicality of global and local cultures in mono-cultural and multicultural societies. For the purpose of this study, it is necessary to differentiate between cultural heterotopia and heterotopia of text. While both varieties reflect how particular cultural space can be marked by the coexistence of several cultures, heterotopia of text concerns the spaces of text. Heterotopia of Text in Literature and Linguistics Foucault’s ideas on other spaces had led him in fact to describe two heterotopias, which appear to have different meanings. On one hand, heterotopias are discursive structures with an unknown order or disorder of words and objects, in heterotopias “fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately” and they also “secretly undermine language . . . because they destroy syntax in advance . . . desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks” (1994, XVII–XVIII). On the other hand, heterotopias are also other spaces that exist in our real world, in “the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs” (1986, 23). The notion of heterotopia therefore can be applied to various forms of text, as text is first and foremost a space. And, indeed, in recent decades, the notion of heterotopia has been applied to various forms of literature, including novels, poems, and plays (Genocchio 1995; Higgins and Leps 2022). In literature, heterotopia can refer to alternative spaces or locations within the narrative that operate outside the dominant society with its social and cultural norms, or to the literary representation of these spaces. For instance, a literary work that explores a marginalized community, such as a ghetto or a mental institution, can also be considered a heterotopia. In linguistics, the term “heterotopia” refers to a linguistic space or domain that is distinct from the normal linguistic experience of an individual. The notion of heterotopia can refer, for example, to language that is different from a speaker’s native language or to a situation in which a person is using a language that is not normally used in a particular context (Skorvid 2016; Tufi 2017). For example, a multilingual person who switches between languages in different social settings can be said to be operating in a heterotopia, as they are using a language that is different from the norm for a given context. Similarly, a person who is speaking a language that is not normally used in a particular region, such as a tourist who is speaking their native language



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 41

in a foreign country, can be seen as operating in a linguistic heterotopia. Heterotopia can also refer to the way that language can be used to create a sense of otherness or to challenge dominant norms and values. For example, a nonstandard dialect or language can serve to subvert the dominant linguistic norms of a society and to assert a sense of identity and cultural difference. Overall, heterotopia of text refers to a language space or domain that is distinct from the mainstream experience of a given culture and can be used to challenge or subvert dominant language-related norms and values. ARABS IN ZANZIBAR4 AND THEIR FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES From at least the first century of the Islamic era, Zanzibar has served as a hub for trade and commerce for centuries, attracting immigrants from across the region and beyond (Gintsburg 2018), and when the Portuguese arrived there toward the very end of the fifteenth century, Zanzibar was inhabited by a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous population of African, Persian, Arab, Indian, and Indonesian origin (Lodhi 1994). Arab migrations to Zanzibar took place over many centuries from two main sources–Hadhramawt, a province in southern Yemen, and Oman. Internal issues in the Arabian Peninsula’s Sultanate of Oman, which is where the Omanis left for East Africa, were a major factor in their exodus. Following the establishment of the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1698, the Omanis’ role in the region began to assume a crucial significance, and the overall Arab presence in the area began to rise significantly (Sheriff 1995). This situation remained from the eighteenth century into the second half of the nineteenth (Bennett 1978), and by the first decade of the nineteenth century, Arab influence—specifically Omani and Hadhrami—had reached its apex in Zanzibar. The Hadhrami people significantly increased their political clout while the Omanis obtained considerable political influence and power. The spread of Islam and the Arabic language were two of the most significant effects of the Arab presence’s expansion in East Africa during this period. Omani rule began to wane toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Both the British and the Germans extended their presence in the area at the same time. In 1890, the British and the Germans concluded a contract under which the British received Zanzibar and the Germans gained control of, among other territories, the coastal region of contemporary Tanzania. Muslims (mainly Arabs) were no longer able to dominate the region politically and economically when it was ruled by the British. However, they were initially hired for junior positions because the colonizers valued their administrative experience and literacy abilities. Over time, newly converted Christians took their place.

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Omani Arabs There have historically been two main groups of Omanis in Zanzibar: the wealthy and established who traveled there several generations ago and the poor, known as manga, who moved there recently from inland Oman, ostensibly in pursuit of a better life. About 17,000 Omanis left Tanzania after the revolution, but in the years that followed, only about 3,700 of them went back to Oman, while the rest stayed in Dubai, Kuwait, Egypt, and other places (Petterson 2002). As a result of a program started by Sultan Qaboos, 10,000 Zanzibari Omanis had left Zanzibar and returned to Muscat by 1975 (Valeri 2007). About 5,000 Omanis remained in the UAE because of the program’s brief existence and the refusal of Omani authorities to grant these people Omani residency. Hadhrami Arabs Religious and economic factors drove Yemeni migration, with the twentieth century’s peak waves leaving Hadhramawt in 1917 and 1941–1943 for East Africa (and Zanzibar) (Walker 2008). After the Revolution of 1964, a sizable portion of Zanzibari Arabs left the archipelago, but the Hadhramawt community is still present. Islamic guardians of religious knowledge of Hadhrami descent rose to prominence in Zanzibar throughout the second part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was primarily the Hadhramis who introduced the Shadhiliya, Qadiriya, and ‘Alawiya religious orders to East Africa. Even more significant was the Hadhramis’ support for Zanzibar’s reformation of both religious and secular education (Bang 2007). Hadhramis were split into two groups, much like Omani Arabs, the wealthy and well-established and the impoverished, or shihiri, who came to Zanzibar through the Hadhrami port of Shihr to flee the unrest and poverty in their home country. The 1964 Revolution culminated in the last Sultan of Zanzibar being removed from power and the ethnic Arab populace being persecuted. Zanzibar and Tanganyika merged shortly after the military takeover to create the United Republic of Tanzania. The new pro-African government ordered the remaining Omani Arabs to leave the nation. The 1964 Revolution also had a negative effect on the Hadhrami Arabs, who began leaving Zanzibar out of concern that the newly independent government would forcibly remove them. The Omanis, who historically held the highest positions in Zanzibari society, were the main targets of anti-Arab prejudice, but other immigrants, like the Hadhrami Arabs, Indians, and Persians, also suffered discrimination. Despite this tragic sequence of events that had a negative impact on the lives of ethnic Arabs of both Hadhrami and Omani origin, today the Arab diaspora in Zanzibar, is still a significant community with a long history in the



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 43

region. Yemenis and Omanis have established themselves as successful merchants, traders, and business owners on the island, and have contributed to the cultural and economic diversity of Zanzibar. They have also established their own distinct cultural and religious communities, and have maintained close ties with their respective homeland, Oman, and Yemen. Moreover, in recent years, cultural ties between Zanzibar and Oman, as well as other countries of the Persian Gulf, have witnessed a significant improvement—during the last decade there have been numerous bilateral agreements signed by Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Oman (Gintsburg 2018) in addition to regular direct flights to Zanzibar from Muscat, Dubai, Sharjah, and other cities in the Persian Gulf.5 Arabs in Zanzibar have made and continue to make significant efforts to maintain their cultural identity as well as their lineage, which is of exceptional importance for, for example, Hadhrami Arabs who even used to send their male children to Hadharamawt for studies (Walker 2008). Those who were forced to leave Zanzibar, however, felt more like East Africans. Many people hope to one day return to Africa since they feel alienated and unwelcome even in their ancestral country. For instance, Walker also noted this phenomenon of “being different, clinging to their foreign habits and strange language (i.e., Swahili, clarification is mine)” he observed in East African Hadhramis who returned to Yemen (2008, 53).6 Similar problems were encountered by a culturally heterogenous Omani diaspora7 who returned to Oman, as in their ancestral country they were perceived as Africans or Swahilis because of their language and liberal life style compared to the conservative Omani one. Moreover, ethnic Omanis who had to relocate to Oman from various African countries often for political reasons are often referred to as Zanzibari, a generalization which has a clear negative connotation (Valeri 2007). Finally, a large proportion of ethnic Arabs, as well as those from the Indian Peninsula, migrated from Africa to Western countries, primarily to Great Britain, where today they live in a significant and distinct diaspora.8 MATERIAL In my analysis I will use two sources of materials—literary texts produced by Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer from Zanzibar, who lives and works in the United Kingdom, and narratives I collected from Zanzibari Arabs during my stay on the island in 2015. Abdulrazak Gurnah and His Works The very life of this author can be considered as an independent case study for the multilayered identities of the Zanzibar Arabs. Gurnah, the future Nobel

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Prize laureate in literature, was born in Zanzibar in 1948, in a family of Yemeni origin. At the end of the 1960s, like many Zanzibar Arabs, he was forced to leave his country. The young Gurnah managed to move to England, where he trained as an English teacher. He later earned a doctorate, taught literature at the University of Kent, and wrote prose at the same time. It is interesting that his works, in which he explores questions of identity in the framework of cross-civilizational and cross-religious contacts, the fate of immigrants and historical memory, are always related to East Africa and Zanzibar. Gurnah’s fictional characters do not necessarily live in Zanzibar–in fact, they are quite mobile—just like Gurnah himself, some of them migrated to the United Kingdom (Admiring Silence, 1996 or By The Sea, 2001), while some travel across East and Central Africa (Paradise, 1994, Desertion, 2005)—but all of them inevitably have connections to Zanzibar in one or another way. Gurnah’s writing is characterized by a deep sense of nostalgia for his childhood experiences in Zanzibar and a keen interest in the complexities of cultural identity. In his novels, Gurnah often interweaves personal memories with larger historical events—he draws on his own experiences growing up in East Africa and the ways in which colonialism and modernization have shaped the lives of ordinary people. Through his writing, Gurnah seeks to preserve the cultural heritage of East Africa and to provide a voice for those whose experiences have been marginalized or forgotten. In the way the author lovingly and meticulously, though perhaps not always with complete authenticity, paints pictures of his past out there, one senses a desire to distance himself from the present that has arrived. This reveals a certain escapism that is, however, devoid of any political connotation, but at the same time very far from selfidentification with the here and now. Although the writer’s native language is Swahili and, to some extent, Arabic, he chose English as the language of self-expression and communication with the reader. Yusif, Salim, Salih and Mzee Yousef9 and Their Narratives My encounter with Yusif (by the time of recording 79 years old, native of Seyun), Salim (by the time of recording 75 years old, native of Seiyun) and Salih (by the time of recording 68 years old, native of Zanzibar, born to parents from Yemen) took place in the former Yemeni neighborhood in the Stone Town. All informants at the time of recording lived in an abandoned house in the Stone Town. This house was inhabited by elderly Hadhrami males who had no relatives left in Zanzibar. I met the three Hadhramis three times and recorded what they were willing to tell me about their past and their current lives in Zanzibar. Yusif and Salim are native speakers of Arabic (Hadhrami) and are fluent in Swahili, Salih is a native speaker of Swahili but also fluent in Arabic (Hadhrami).



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 45

I met Mzee10 Yousef, a native of Zanzibar of Omani origin on his plantation located about a dozen kilometers away from the city. Our visit to Mzee Yousef coincided with an annual visit from his relatives living in Oman. We had tea together and I recorded what Mzee Yousef and his family members allowed me to record about their life in Zanzibar and Oman. Mzee Yousef is a native speaker of Swahili but also fluent in Arabic (Omani and Standard). My conversations with Yusif, Salim, Salih, and Mzee Yousef, and therefore their answers, were conducted in the Arabic language. ANALYSIS After introducing the notions of heterotopia and utopia and the complex history of Arab presence in Zanzibar, I will apply Foucault’s six principles of heterotopia and utopia to Gurnah’s writings, as well as to the narratives I collected. The first part of my analysis will be dedicated to defining Zanzibar as cultural heterotopia(s), using the content of Gurnah’s writings and the narratives I collected, and where appropriate complementing the notion of heterotopia with that of utopia. The second part, which is rather general, will be a demonstration of the application of heterotopia to text. With my two-part analysis I will attempt to bring together the scattered pieces of identities of Zanzibari Arabs—those who left and those who stayed. Zanzibar as Cultural Heterotopia(s) Principles One and Two: Universality and Multifunctionality All cultures have heterotopias, says Foucault, and this is true of the multicultural place that Zanzibar has long been. One of the heterotopias in the Zanzibar landscape was and is the Arab communities of Omani and Hadramawt, which, as I wrote earlier, have long maintained a national and cultural identity. Although Yemeni and Omani Arabs belong to two different diasporas, they acknowledge their similarity, or, as my Zanzibari informant of Yemeni origin Salih put it “there is a difference but we are one country” (‫)في فرق ولكن احنى بلد واحد‬.11 This Arabness is clearly evident in Gurnah’s novels, which offer a retrospective view of Zanzibar. Gurnah, in his descriptions of “local” life in precolonial and colonial East Africa and Zanzibar, masterfully portrays the complexity of society in those days—Zanzibari Arabs remain strangers to native Africans and, just like Europeans, they despise them. In Paradise, for instance, native Africans who live in the inland part of modern Tanzania are referred to as “savages.” Zanzibar and Africa are perceived by the pro-

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tagonists (but not by the author) from the Arabocentric perspective. This is a heterotopic construction, as Gurnah’s protagonists trace their lineage to Oman and Yemen and maintain their Arabness while living in East Africa, as is the case with Uncle Aziz and the shop keeper in Paradise. Curiously, when taken out of Zanzibar, Arabness becomes mixed with what can be conditionally referred to as Zanzibarness and often gives credence to another heterotopia–the heterotopia of being an Arab from Zanzibar living practically in exile. This is the case with several Gurnah’s protagonists—from Admiring Silence and even more the old refugee Saleh Omar from By the Sea (2001). Omar Saleh subconsciously attempts to re-create his life in Zanzibar, which leads to almost absolute isolation, as he is culturally too different from the UK society: I live in a small town by the sea, as I have all my life, although for most of it it was by a warm green ocean a long way from here. Now I live the half-life of a stranger, glimpsing interiors through the television screen . . . I have no inkling of their plight, though I keep my eyes open and observe what I can, but I fear that I recognize little of what I see. (Gurnah 2001, 2)

This resonates with the testimony of Yusif, my informant of Hadhrami origin, who explains that he never leaves Zanzibar because “I am at home here, the sea is nearby, [I am surrounded by] a lot of people [I am close to] and I don’t like crowds and large groups [of known people]” (‫)انا في البلد هنا البحر قريب و الناس كثير و انا ما احب الزحمة والجماعة‬. My informants in Zanzibar continue to speak Arabic and identify themselves as Arabs, thus maintaining this heterotopia of Zanzibar as an Arab space, although Zanzibar stopped being a place associated with Arabs long ago. Curiously, the informants from Hadhramawt even insisted that they can only speak Arabic and no other language (i.e., Swahili), although they exchanged phrases in Swahili in my presence on numerous occasions. This is of special interest because during the Revolution a lot has been done to wipe off any memories of this. In an attempt to protect their identity, my three informants from Hadhramawt, Yusif, Salim, and Salih continue to live in the part of the Stone Town that was once inhabited by arrivals from Hadhramawt. They occupy a now almost abandoned sixteen room house that earlier used to belong to Hadhrami people who had left the country. Several dozens of meters away from that place there a Yemeni cemetery that was mentioned by Salim on a number of occasions as the center of Hadhrami presence in Zanzibar because “everything related to our ancestors and our history here is documented and written down there.” As Salim explains, before the Revolution the Stone Town was home to a large Hadhrami community with shops, and restaurants, where Arabs would eat, drink coffee, smoke a shisha pipe and chat with each other. However, adds Salim, “this is before



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 47

Figure 2.1.  Yusif, one of the last surviving first generation members of the Hadhrami community in Zanzibar Source: Photo taken by author

the Revolution because after a lot of [our] people were imprisoned, robbed, a lot of people became mentally ill” (‫هذا قبل الثورة الن بعد الثورة كثير الناس سجنوهم كثير الناس اخذوا اموالهم كثير الناس‬ ‫)يعني تجننوا‬. Today this neighborhood, as well as the rest of the Stone Town, is actively promoted by numerous local tourist agencies that invite visitors to explore the architectural diversity and rich cultural past of this place. We see therefore now the former lively Yemeni neighborhood in the Stone Town, which is a heterotopia per se, is now inhabited mostly by nonArab population and is starting to play a different role—a sort of open-air museum for those interested in the Arab heritage. Principle Three. Juxtaposition Multicultural Zanzibar with its numerous communities coming from different parts of the world—inland Tanzania, Persia, the Indian Peninsula, Oman, and Yemen, as well as various European countries—can be likened to the ancient Persian garden containing the four corners of the world, the example used by Foucault to illustrate juxtaposition. Between 1960 and 2000, the official policies of Tanzanian authorities were Africanization on one hand, and the trend to use the term “class” instead of “race” and “ethnicity,” which, to a large degree caused blurring of Zanzibari identity and identities (Hettiger 2010). In pre-Revolution times, Zanzibar, indeed, was home to many communities that often maintained their identity, religion, and lifestyle, while relatively peacefully co-existing with each other on the island.

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Principles Four and Five. Connection to Different Time Periods and an Open and Closed System Once the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, Zanzibar—with its houses that once belonged to Arab families, its city buildings, and its ancient cemeteries—is both a museum-reserve for the ubiquitous tourists and a historical homeland for those who were forced to leave the archipelago in the 1960s. The sense of being in another historical time is exacerbated by the fact that since the expulsion of the Arabs from Zanzibar, with a few exceptions, many of their houses have remained standing unrepaired, gradually dilapidated and covered with dense vegetation (Fig. 2.2). At the same time, with the recent improvement in relations between Tanzania and the countries of the Persian Gulf, primarily Oman, many former Zanzibaris who had missed their homeland for decade have begun to visit Zanzibar to walk the streets of their

Figure 2.2.  An abandoned house in the Stone Town Source: Photo taken by author



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 49

childhood and sometimes to visit relatives. In 2015, my stay in Zanzibar coincided with the end of Ramadan, the season when Zanzibar gets filled up with former Zanzibaris, especially those who now live in Oman, come to Zanzibar and, depending on their lifestyle, spend on the island anything from several days to several months. While for some Zanzibar becomes what Foucault defined as “Polynesian village,” for others, a visit to Zanzibar becomes a travel in time back to “self.” This was the case of Mzee Yousef, a Zanzibari Arab of Omani origin, and the family of his sister, who came to visit him from Oman. Mzee Yousef’s sister explained to me: ‫اوالدي كلهم بعمان و انا جيت قبل رمضان جينا صمنا و بعد عيد االضحى باروح ان شاءالله‬ All my children are in Oman, I came [to Zanzibar] before Ramadan, we arrived, we did our fasting [here] and, God willing, after the Feast of the Sacrifice, I will go back

However, Zanzibar, which remains a popular tourist destination, opens up as a special space to those who have a spatial relationship with it—former and current members of its once numerous Arab communities. Principle Six. Having a Special Role in Relation to the Rest of the Space. Utopia The glorious past and the mystical areal that surrounds this place contribute to creating an illusional image of Zanzibar for both local people and its visitors. Yusuf, the central protagonist in Gurnah’s Paradise, who was separated from his family and given to his rich uncle to pay his parents’ debt, keeps taking care of his garden, as if this garden is the lost paradise.12 This boy also sees prophetic dreams; in one of them he sees what he thinks was a paradise. Although the description of this paradise reflects the beautiful landscapes of inland Tanganyika and not the island, it is clear that the writer meant to say with this: this beautiful land is not a paradise, it is a mere illusion and the enslaved will not be free. Gurnah’s vision of Zanzibar as illusion is confirmed in other novels set in contemporary times. In Admiring silence (1996), for instance, the main protagonist leads a lonely life in the United Kingdom, although he lives with Emma, an English woman, and has a daughter with her. During the seventeen years of his life in England, the main protagonist reconnects with Zanzibar through the stories he tells Emma and her father. When he decides to visit Zanzibar, he experiences disappointment as he finds out that the place that he once knew has deteriorated and changed to the degree that he does not fit in it anymore.

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Despite Gurnah’s disillusionment with Zanzibar, this place remains for the writer, who, as we know is also an Arab from Zanzibar, charmingly attractive, just as it is attractive to Zanzibarian families now living in Oman, despite the difficult memories associated with the place. I suggest therefore that in the case of Zanzibar and its Arab population, it is possible to explain the mechanism of this illusion if we recognize that Zanzibar can be described not only in terms of heterotopia, but also in terms of utopia. Zanzibar Is a Utopia? Foucault wrote that while heterotopias are “disturbing,” as they violate the order of things, utopias “offer consolation as although they have no real locality, there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold” (1994, XVIII). Although, based on Foucault’s words, it might appear then that Zanzibar cannot be a utopia since it is a real place, I would like to argue that Zanzibar still has a utopian connotation for the reasons I will now explain. Zanzibar is not only the name of archipelago; it is also the name of the former powerful and flourishing empire, a jewel in the crown of Omani rulers and later an independent sultanate that controlled East and also some parts of Central Africa. In this sense, Zanzibar does not exist anymore and, consequently, can be considered as a utopia. The role of Zanzibar in this sense can be compared to the role of al-Andalus—the ideal state where the Arabo-Islamic culture reached its cultural and political peak, and people of different religions peacefully and happily co-existed with each other (García Sanjuán 2003). And, indeed, it appears that with time, Zanzibar is starting to play this role in the Arab world—during the last decade or two, the idea of likening Zanzibar to al-Andalus, is being promoted in the press (Gintsburg 2018) but also in fiction.13 In 2021, the Qatari financed Television channel ‘Arabi 21 TV presented a documentary titled Zanzibar–the lost paradise (‫ الفردوس المفقود‬. . . ‫)زنجبار‬, where Zanzibar is contrasted to al-Andalus not only in the sense of sufferings of the Moriscos but also in the sense of presenting the island as once an ideal place to live. In addition, the image of Zanzibar, a remote island located in the ocean, is per se an ideal candidate to become a utopia—utopias, as we remember, are towns, villages, trees, and mountains. The entire colonial era, as the renowned expert in postcolonial literatures Bill Ashcroft accurately points out, was largely inspired by utopias, often portrayed as geographically distant but very real places (2012). In postcolonial literature the theme of utopia has become central. However, as Ashcroft notes, if pre-independence utopianism was physical, as writers and philosophers were dreaming of soon-to-be liberated countries, postcolonial utopia “is no longer a place but a spirit of hope” (2012, 2). Further, explains Ashcroft, utopia is a fusion of memory and future (2012, 6), as we go back to the past to be able to



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 51

imagine the future. In this connection, it worth mentioning that Gurnah, in his writings about East Africa in general and Zanzibar in particular, always examines the past—sometimes he is interested in describing and reconstructing early colonial Zanzibar (and East Africa, in general), the world that was literally destroyed by Europeans—this is the case with Paradise (1994) and also Afterlives (2021). In other cases, the writer investigates the pre-independence times and matches them against modernity. Gurnah is far away from idealizing either pre-European, or pro-African Nationalist times, in fact, he is quite ironical about Arab presence in Africa. Despite his apparent disillusionment with Zanzibar and its Arab past, the writer is clearly engaged with something that has completely gone and will never be back. Perhaps, drawing inspiration from memories from his childhood in Zanzibar, the writer is looking for hope? Heterotopia in Text14 I will now proceed to the final part of my analysis and demonstrate how heterotopias can emerge in text and therefore become manifested in different spaces. I will remind to the reader that Foucault started developing the notion of heterotopia by reflecting on the role they have in discourse, and it was only at a later stage that heterotopias were formulated as a more general phenomenon. Foucault wrote: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” (1994: xviii)

Foucault’s ideas on heterotopias in text and therefore language were later developed by other researchers, first of all, by Robert Topinka, who suggested that heterotopias “work to undermine text; they attack the space on which text is written” and that “yet attacking the space for writing or speaking also entails an attack on the principles according to which texts are written: grammar, syntax, and more generally, order” (2010, 58). How do heterotopias become manifested in the textual production of Zanzibari Arabs, both literary and ordinary? A superficial screening of literary works by Gurnah already allows to note that the writer, who made a deliberate choice to write his novels in English, regularly uses separate lexemes, as well as entire phrases in Arabic and Swahili. Sometimes foreign “objects” in the text written in English are put in ital-

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ics and accompanied by translation. For instance, this is the case of Desertion (2005) and By the Sea (2001). Several examples: Hassanali had hurried past to open the yard door, in his terror only managing to say mzungu wa serikali amefika. The government European has arrived. (Gurnah 2005, 57)

Or: The servant pleaded with Hassanali, Mpe, mpe chochote. Humjui mambo yaka mzungu huyu. Give him, give him something. You don’t know this man’s ways. (Gurnah 2005, 57)

In his novel By the Sea, Gurnah regularly uses non-italicized borrowings from Arabic and leaves them without translation, although we understand the text is intended for an average speaker of English with no prior knowledge of Arabic and Swahili. Consider the following examples: Mashaallah, mashaallah, that is beautiful, Allah karim. May I bring you some coffee, maulana? (Gurnah 2001, 31)

While, arguably, the reader might know that “Mashaallah” (‫ )ما شاءالله‬and “Allah karim” (‫ )الله كريم‬are formulas widely used in Arabic language to express approval and admiration, it is unlikely that he would know the meaning of “maulana,” (‫)موالنا‬, which is an Arabic honorific. A similar writing technique is used by Gurnah in Paradise (1994), where non-italicized Arabic words are scattered across the text with no translation: Shabab (‫شباب‬, means “young people,” translation is mine), what a brave little brother you are! (Gurnah 1994, 39)

Or Speak, you maluun (‫ملعون‬, means “damned,” translation is mine). (Gurnah 1994, 27)

In the same novel, the writer interweaves into the fabric of his text nonitalicized borrowings from Swahili, regularly leaving them without any translation: We won’t be bringing the vipusa (i.e., “rhinoceros horn,” translation is mine) back here. That’s my job, to take them over the hills all the way to the border, juu kwa juu (i.e., “up there,” translation is mine), and deliver them to a certain Indian near Mombasa. Our bwana (i.e., “master,” translation is mine) has different business to see to, so he will leave all this to me. (Gurnah 1994, 189)



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 53

We see therefore that in his writings, to reconstruct15 the multilingual, complex and multicultural society in Zanzibar that I earlier described in terms of cultural heterotopia, Gurnah creates similar heterotopias in the space of his texts. As suggested by Foucualt and Topinka, the author undermines the space of English text by introducing borrowings from Arabic and Swahili in the form of: specific lexemes, especially but not exclusively, those referring to local realities but not only; and phraseological units. The effect of undermining is further fortified by leaving in certain cases the text written in Arabic and Swahili without translation. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I analyzed the identities of Zanzibari Arabs, a non-autochthonous group of population with increasingly complex life trajectories and, consequently, fragmented identities. For this purpose, I used the notions of heterotopia and utopia, as well as cultural heterotopia and heterotopia in text, concepts that are instrumental for studying heterogenous cultures with rich spatial, temporal, and symbolic variations. In my analysis, I used literary works by Abdelrazak Gurnah and narratives I collected from Zanzibari Arabs during my stay in Zanzibar in 2015. By application of the six principles of heterotopia formulated by Foucault, I have shown the role that Zanzibar has played and continues to play in the lives of former and current members of the diaspora of Zanzibari Arabs and how this place helps them maintain a sense of belonging. By describing Zanzibar in terms of utopia, I have also shown the spiritual, almost magical role that this place plays in the lives not only of Zanzibari Arabs, but of the Arab World at large. I concluded that this role, in general, can be compared to the utopia of al-Andalus. Further, I analyzed Gurnah’s literary texts and showed the principle of heterotopia works also at the level of language, where the author recreates the historical, cultural, and linguistic heterotopias of his childhood. In his writings, Gurnah invents the collective identity of Zanzibari Arabs, adding missing pieces and trying to bring together once broken fragments of the fragile construct of being an Arab in Zanzibar. Members of the Zanzibari community contribute to this in their own way—through their stories and lifestyles they create and maintain heterotopias. Zanzibar then becomes a uniting factor, a glue that holds together multiple fragments of what it might mean to be a Zanzibari of Arab descent. While the emergence of heterogeneous cultural spaces like Zanzibar is nothing new to our world as these spaces have existed for most of human history, today such spaces are proliferating at a great speed, so that identifying and studying them is becoming important for understanding contemporary transformations and the possible consequences of such transformations. The

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heterotopian-utopian approach I have demonstrated in my chapter offers an instrumental approach to studying such phenomena. NOTES   1.  In many cases, these migrations were not voluntary as Africans were brought to other Indian Ocean countries as slaves. Today, numerous descendants of African slaves continue to live in well-defined communities in Iran, India, the Persian Gulf countries, and Yemen. One of the least studied African communities in the region is the one in Soqotra (Gintsburg and Esposito 2022; McNeer and Gintsburg, forthcoming).   2.  Although now considerably less than before the Revolution of 1964, Zanzibar remains a truly multinational place with a population of diverse backgrounds: Indians, Iranians, Omani Arabs, Yemeni Arabs, Comorians but also various mainland Bantu tribes. Undoubtedly, each community has a rich a complex history to offer researchers. In this chapter, however, I will only focus on the Arab population of Zanzibar, who are Yemenis from Hadhramawt and Omanis.   3.  In this regard, it is interesting that in Islamic mystical thought the mirror is seen as a link between imaginary world and reality and the surface of the mirror is associated with the concept of mazhar as place where the imaginary appears (Corbin 1995, 11).   4.  Although this chapter focuses exclusively on Zanzibar, much of what will be discussed here will also be valid for the Arab diasporas in other parts of East Africa, most notably Dar al-Salam and Mombasa.   5. Another example of re-activating ties between Zanzibar and the Arab World is the opening of the Consulate of the Sultanate of Oman in Zanzibar several years ago. The Consulate’s official website lists among its aims and objectives political and diplomatic cooperation, trade and investment and cultural, and educational and scientific exchange (Website of Consulate of the Sultanate of Oman, Zanzibar, Tanzania).   6.  Adding to this observation, Walker further suggests using the notion of cosmopolitanism coined by Vertovec and Cohen (2002).   7.  For further details of heterogeneity of the Omani population in East Africa, please see Middleton (1976) and Valeri (2007).   8.  One of the biggest diasporas in Great Britain is that of Tanzania (International Organisation for Migration 2009). Since Zanzibar is technically an autonomy within Tanzania, it is unfortunately impossible to determine the precise number of ethnic Arabs from Zanzibar living in Great Britain or the native population of Zanzibar.   9.  The informants’ names were changed to fictional ones. 10.  Mzee, a Swahili honorific. 11.  By one country Salih obviously means their belonging to the Arab World, i.e., countries, where Arabic is spoken. 12.  In the Muslim tradition, Paradise is often referred to as “garden.” 13. Zanzibar in such publications is often referred to as al-Andalus of the East (‫)زنجبار اندلس الشرق‬, as this was the case of the novel by Salman Ja‘far (2018), or alAndalus of Africa (‫( )اندلس افريقيا‬Zriqi, n.d.).



Gluing Together the Fragmented Identities of Zanzibar Arabs 55

14.  For textual analysis, I will only use Gurnah’s texts because the narratives I collected from my informants in Zanzibar are entirely in the Arabic language and therefore did not offer any representative material to analyze. Although in their everyday speech Yusif, Salih, Salim and Mzee Yousef constantly code-switch and use at least Arabic and Swahili (and in case of Mzee Yousef also English), their stories were addressed to me, a fluent speaker of Arabic with no working knowledge of Swahili. 15. Another possible explanation is that the writer, who himself grew up in the multilingual and multicultural Zanzibar, simply chooses the register in which he grew up and habitually mixes languages, bringing Swahili-Arabic heterotopic constructions into the English text. This, however, would be a separate topic for research and requires verification.

REFERENCES Ashcroft, Bill. 2012. “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia.” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 2nd series, 1: 1–17. Bang, Anne K. 2007. “Teachers, Scholars and Educationalists. The Impact of Hadrami-Alawi Teachers and Teachings on Islamic Education in Zanzibar Ca. 1870–1930.” Asian Journal of Social Science 35: 457–47. Bennett, Norman. 1978. A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar. London: Methuen Publishing. Genocchio, Benjamin. 1995. “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces.” In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 35–46. Blackwell Publishers, London. Cenzatti, Marco. 2008. Heterotopias of Difference. In Heterotopia and the City – Urban Theory and the Transformations of Public Space, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 75–85. London: Routledge. Concise Medical Dictionary Online. n.d. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095934256 [11/05/2023]. Corbin, Henri. 1995. Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam (translated by Leonard Fox). West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16 (1): 22-27. Retrieved from: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1. pdf [30/04/23]. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. García Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2003. “¿Fue al-Andalus un paraíso de tolerancia religiosa?” In Utopías, los espacios imposibles, edited by Rosa García Gutiérrez, 265–80. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Ghazal, A. 2012. “Re-searching the ‘other Andalus’ in Alakhbar English.” Retrieved from: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/3357 [08/04/2023]. Gintsburg, Sarali. 2018. “Arabic language in Zanzibar: past, present, and future.” Journal of World Languages 5(2): 81–100.

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Gintsburg, Sarali, and Eleonora Esposito. 2022. “The Asymmetric Linguistic Identities of African Soqotris.” In Language and Identity in the Arab World, edited by Fathiya Al Rashdi and Sandhya Rao Mehta, 236–54. London: Routledge. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 1996. Admiring silence. New York: The New Press. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 1994. Paradise. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 2001. By the Sea. London: Bloomsbury. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 2005. Desertion. London: Bloomsbury. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 2021. Afterlives. London: Bloomsbury. Hettiger, Matthew. 2010. “The Racialization of Politics in Revolutionary Zanzibar.” The Honors paper, United States Naval Academy. Retrieved from: https://www. usna.edu/History/_files/documents/Honors-Program/2010/Hettiger_Zanzibar.pdf [01/05/2023]. Higgins, Lesley, and Marie-Christine Leps. 2022. Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje, Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press. International Organization for Migration. 2009. Tanzania: Mapping Exercise. Retrieved from: https://web.archive.org/web/20110716163206/http://www.iomlondon.org/doc/mapping/IOM_TANZANIA.pdf [29/04/2023]. Lodhi, Abdulaziz Yusuf. 1994. “Muslims in Eastern Africa–their Past and Present.” Nordic Journal of African Studies 3(1): 88–98. Lofchie Michael.1965. Zanzibar: Background to Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McNeer, Kevin, and Sarali Gintsburg. forthcoming. “Transmuted Memories of Africa on the Island of Soqotra,” In Slavery in the Modern Middle East and North Africa: Exploitation and Resistance from the 19th Century–Present Day, edited by Elena Andreyeva and Kevin McNeer, xxx. London: Bloomsbury. Middleton, John. 1976. “The Arabs of the East African coast.” In History of East Africa, Vol. III, edited by Donald A. Low and Alison Smith, 489–507. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Petterson Don. 2002. Revolution in Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale. Boulder: Westview Press. Salmān, Ja‘far. 2018. Zanjibār Andalus aš-Šarq (Zanzibar al-Andalus of the East). Kuwait City: Drīm Būk li-n-našr wa-t-tawzī’. Sheriff, Abdul. 1995. An outline History of Zanzibar Stone Town. In The History & Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town, edited by Abdul Sheriff, 8–29. Zanzibar: Department of Archives, Museums & Antiquities. Skorvid, Sergey. 2016. “Geterotopiya detstva ‘ne zdes.’ K lingvisticheskoy kharateristike lokalnogo soobshestva zhiteley polsko-belorussko-litovskogo yazikovokogo pogranichya v kontse XIX veka (na materiale memuarov L. Skorvida).” Literatūra, 57, no. 5: 221–29. Topinka, Robert Jr. (2010). “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces.” Foucault Studies 9: 54-70.



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Tufi, Stephania. 2017. “Liminality, heterotopic sites, and the linguistic landscape. The case of Venice.” Linguistic Landscape 3, no. 1: 78–99. Valeri, Marc. 2007. “Nation-Building and Communities in Oman since 1970: The Swahili-Speaking Omanis in Search of Identity.” African Affairs 106 (424): 479–96. Vertovec, Steven and Robert Cohen. 2002. “Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism.” In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Theory, Context, Practice, edited by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Ian. 2008. “Hadramis, Shimalis and Muwalladin: Negotiating Cosmopolitan Identities between the Swahili Coast and Southern Yemen.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2(1): 44–59. ‘Arabi 21 TV. 2021. Zanjibār al-firdaws al-mafqūd (Zanzibar the lost paradise). Documentary (published 25.09.21). Retrieved from: https://arabi21.com/story/1386087/ 19.02.23[ ‫المفقود‬-‫الفردوس‬-‫]زنجبار‬. Zrīqi, Mu’ād. n.d. Zanjibār andalus ifrīqiya [Zanzibar the African Andalus]. Anwān. Retrieved from: https://anwan.me/efe5c805151d-19/02/2023[ ‫أفريقيا‬-‫أندلس‬-‫]زنجبار‬ Website of Consulate of the Sultanate of Oman, Zanzibar, Tanzania. n.d. Retrieved from: https://fm.gov.om/zanzibar/ [01/05/2023].

Chapter Three

Clashing Ideological Frameworks in a Belgian Job Interview with a Sierra Leonean Candidate Dorien Van De Mieroop and Melina De Dijn

INTRODUCTION Compared to other European countries, Belgium is characterized by a relatively high proportion of people with African roots. About 50 percent of immigrants from developing countries in Belgium are from African countries such as Morocco and Congo (Bossard 2009)—the inflow of immigrants from the latter country can of course be linked to Belgium’s colonial past (OECD 2008). Hence, the African continent has an important impact on the outlook of migration in Belgian society. In this chapter, we particularly focus on the labor market integration of immigrants, regarding which Belgium is not doing very well at all. While immigrants in Belgium make up about one-fifth of the total working age population, fewer than 60 percent of them are employed, which makes Belgium one of the lowest scoring European countries in this respect (OECD 2023). Despite recent reforms to improve the integration of immigrants in the Belgian labor market and an improvement in the employment situation of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East in OECD countries in general, these two groups of immigrants remain the most disadvantaged in terms of employment (OECD 2022). The reasons for this are of course quite complex, but discrimination may be considered as a potential underlying factor, since there have long been indications of discrimination against immigrants in the Belgian labor market (OECD 2008). While there are indeed well-known examples of discrimination regarding labor market integration in general, and recruitment processes in particular—such as the lower success of candidates with foreign-looking names in comparison to their natively named, yet equally qualified counterparts (Martens and Ouali 2005)—we aim to show in this contribution that there are also 59

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other, much more subtle aspects of the recruitment process that put candidates with foreign roots in a disadvantaged position, even when they are confronted with recruiters who have their best interests at heart (see also Van De Mieroop and De Dijn 2021). In particular, we focus on one specific, yet crucial moment in the recruitment process, namely the job interview. As in other countries, the job interview is widely used in Belgium as a gatekeeping device that is decisive for entrance into the labor market (Kerekes 2007), and it thus forms an important potential stumbling block for immigrants’ integration in the labor market. While recruiters may make efforts to interview all candidates in an objective way, job interviews are nevertheless not “neutral” encounters: interviewers’ evaluations are based on their expectations and preferences regarding what can be considered as a “good” answer and these are embedded in a specific spatio-temporal framework (Kirilova and Angouri 2017). The job interview is thus “rigged [. . .] in favor of those individuals whose communication style and social background are most similar to those of the interviewer with whom they talk,” with whom they can construct co-membership (Erickson and Shultz 1982, 193; see also Kerekes 2007). And, conversely, when the interviewer and interviewee have dissimilar cultural, social, or demographic backgrounds, they may encounter more challenges in the interview process than candidates with a similar background (Auer and Kern 2001). More specifically, this chapter focuses on dissimilarities in ideological frameworks that may cause problems in job interviews. “Ideology” can be defined as “any basic pattern of meaning or frame of interpretation bearing on or involved in (an) aspect(s) of social ‘reality’ [. . .], felt to be commonsensical, and often functioning in a normative way” (Verschueren 2011, 10). From this definition it is immediately apparent that ideologies seldom surface explicitly in real life since they are rarely questioned and can thus not be gauged in a direct way. However, one of the ways to make ideological differences tangible, is by looking at the discourse used in a particular context, as this is “(one of) the most visible manifestations of ideology” (Verschueren 2011, 16). More concretely regarding job interviews, underlying ideologies have been studied quite intensively (for two extensive studies, see Tranekjær 2015 and Kirilova 2012) and it has been argued that ideological differences between interviewers and interviewees may be exposed by teasing out discrepancies in communicative style, leading to difficulties in understanding (Auer and Kern 2001, 112) and miscommunication. These are often explained away by interviewers who point to the candidates’ lack of linguistic proficiency, but it has been shown that ideologies have an equally great effect on comprehension and successful communication as proficiency (Kerekes 2017). While the importance of certain ideological differences may sometimes surface relatively clearly through a difference in related actions that can then be explicitly topicalized



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in job interviews (see, e.g., Tranekjær 2017 on the refusal of Muslims to buy alcohol), in this chapter we will focus specifically on much more implicit differences relating to ideological frameworks that do not clash so explicitly. In particular, one of the ideological frames of interpretation that holds significant importance for the job interview in Western contexts, is inspired by the New Work Order (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996), which specifically emphasizes individual empowerment in the job interview (Campbell and Roberts 2007). This implies that interviewers expect interviewees to emphasize their own strengths and agency (Roberts 2011) and to articulate their answers and stories in an “agentic rhetorical style” (Roberts and Campbell 2005, 67). However, not all interviewees are familiar with these unwritten rules of the “interview game” (Roberts and Campbell 2005, Sarangi 1994) and this is especially the case for candidates who have been socialized in a different context than the Western context. It is thus not surprising that candidates with a migration background may sometimes struggle with correctly gauging the discursive expectations of western interviewers (Roberts 2011, Tranekjær 2017) and may instead fuel their discourse from a different ideological background in which empowerment and personal agency do not hold such a central position. And it is exactly such an ideology that we will focus on in this chapter, namely a religious ideological framework that approaches life and its challenges from a perspective that, from a non-religious view, can be considered as fatalistic. This is because agency for what happens in one’s life, and how one deals with this, may be systematically attributed to God—as is reflected in sayings in various religions like “Insjallah” or “God’s ways are not our ways.” This framing of God as the one “in charge” (see also Ladegaard 2017, 436) of course stands in sharp contrast to the personal agentic perspective that is propagated by the New Work Order ideology. In this chapter, we specifically aim to uncover some of the processes that can be related to the clash between the New Work Order ideology and a religious ideological framework. It is important to note that it concerns a Christian religious framework here, which is also the dominant religion in Belgian society. Even though the latter is largely secularized, many of the Belgian “ways” are nevertheless rooted in Christianity (similar to the Danish ways as described in Tranekjær 2015), and one might thus expect that these two frameworks would not clash, as they co-exist in Belgium anyway (in contrast to, for example, the clash described in Tranekjær 2015). Yet, we nevertheless found traces of the mismatch between these two frameworks, as we will show in our analyses in which we zoom in on the micro-workings of job interview talk to track down the—often subtle and indirect—ways in which the above-mentioned ideological differences are “talked into being.” But first, we outline our approach and the data that we use.

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METHOD AND DATA For this study we used a micro-analytical approach that integrates three analytical layers. Firstly, we look at the sequential features of the interaction. For this, we draw on insights from conversation analysis and we apply the principle of the next-turn proof procedure (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) to guarantee an emic perspective on the interaction. Secondly, we take into account discursive elements such as boosters, hedges, pronominal forms and lexical choices that contribute in important ways to the negotiation of meaning between the interlocutors, as is typical of discourse analytical and interactional sociolinguistic studies of language in the workplace (see, e.g., Holmes, Marra, and Vine 2011). Finally, we also pay attention to the multimodal resources—such as gestures, eye-gaze, and facial expressions—that are invoked by the participants in this particular context. We integrate these nonverbal resources into our analysis because nonverbal cues can provide additional information beyond the spoken words (see Mondada 2016a), thus helping us to shed light on the way in which ideologies are embodied and enacted in discourse. We combine these three analytical layers into a holistic analysis, as such teasing out how the interplay between all these different resources contributes to the negotiation of meaning among the participants. In our analyses, we present a single case study of a job interview in which a female Belgian recruiter interviews a male candidate with Sierra Leonean roots. He is a first-generation immigrant applying for a warehouseman position in a supermarket. The candidate is currently working in another branch of the same chain of supermarket stores, but he would like to change jobs to be able to work closer to home. The language of the interview is the local language of the northern part of Belgium, Dutch, and it is noticeable that the candidate has a lower proficiency in this language than the recruiter, who is a native speaker. Yet, despite this, the two participants tend to understand each other quite easily in most of the interview. The interview is relatively long (1h21), especially when compared to other interviews for low-skilled jobs in our dataset. This makes the job interview particularly suitable for our research purposes, as it allows for a deeper analysis of the ways in which ideology may surface in discourse than would be the case in a short interview. The data were collected with the informed consent of all recorded individuals, following a procedure approved by the Social and Societal Ethics Committee of KU Leuven. The interview was fully transcribed using simplified Jeffersonian transcription conventions (Jefferson 1984), which were complemented by multimodal annotations (Mondada 2016b).



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ANALYSES In the job interview that is the focus of this chapter, we noticed that the candidate quite often referred to a Christian religious frame of interpretation, as mentioned above. In this analytical section, we will discuss the emergence of this religious explanatory framework in the job interview—which was always at the initiative of the candidate—and we will show how it was dealt with in the interaction. From this, we will derive conclusions regarding the implications of the candidate’s orientation to this religious ideology in relation to the job interview context. Given our interest in how this framework played a role during the interaction, we will discuss the fragments in the chronological order in which they occurred in the job interview. As there were three topical discussions in which references to God and religion were frequent, we have thus subdivided the analyses into three subsections labelled according to the topic under discussion. The Forklift Driver Training The first time the candidate’s faith is topicalized, is in the middle of a discussion about his current tasks at the supermarket warehouse. In this discussion, he mentions that he followed training to become a forklift driver but that he “was stopped” by his boss because he drove the forklift too slowly. He adds to this that he did not have any problems with the forklift tasks themselves, but then concludes that the only thing that mattered to his boss was his driving speed. From the candidate’s emphasis on the tasks that he performed really well, the recruiter may have assumed that the candidate disagreed with his boss’s decision and so she probes for the candidate’s view on this, as we see in the first line of the fragment in figure 3.1 (in which the “he” refers to the candidate’s boss). After the recruiter’s question about the candidate’s evaluation of his boss’s decision, the candidate initially describes his disagreement (“I did not want,” line 602) and, through a reported exchange consisting of several turns of direct reported speech, he “shows” rather than “tells” (Buttny 1997) how the discussion with this boss unfolded. While analyzing this part of the candidate’s response, it is important to keep in mind that reported speech is known not to be an accurate rendition of the way the preceding interaction actually took place, but that it is constructed for the purposes of the current telling instead—hence the alternative term “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 1989). From this perspective, it is all the more interesting that while he initially vividly enacts his disagreement by reporting his own repeated pleas in lines 603-604, he quickly and rather abruptly shifts to agreeing with his boss’s

Figure 3.1.  The forklift driver training discussion (part 1): transcript and screen captures Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)



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decision from line 608 onwards. Yet, the boss’s reported response preceding this agreement was not formulated in a particularly convincing way, as it merely consisted of a negative particle (line 605), a head shake (line 606) and a hedged (cf. “I think”) negative evaluation of the candidate’s assumed skills in this respect (line 607). It is thus quite surprising that after this rather weak argumentation, the candidate who presented himself as so strongly engaged in changing his boss’s opinion and finalizing this training, then rather fatalistically acquiesces to the decision. Moreover, he even refutes that this is problematic for him (line 608) and causally (cf. “because”) links this to “believing too much” (line 609). He continues by another reported turn in which his abrupt agreement is further explained by a general resignation to “leave” the things that are “really not for [him]” and to only engage fully with things that are “for [him]” (lines 611–615). After stating his inability to push others (line 616 and following), he repeats this general frame of interpretation (“if that is for me, it is for me,” lines 621–622) and links it again in a causal way to “believing a lot” (line 624). Interestingly, this time, he not only boosts this claim by saying that he “knows” it “for sure” (line 621), but he also presents it as a character trait (“I am like that,” line 620). As such, he claims that this worldview should be understood as his general frame of reference, and thus his ideological background. Moreover, it is interesting to also investigate the behavior of the recruiter during this fragment, however minimal this may seem to be. It is important to know that she tends to be typing continuously with only a few short pauses, and that she only pauses a bit longer when she is talking during this interview (as well as in another interview with another candidate that we were also allowed to record). As this thus seems to be her default listening mode, it is important to investigate potential deviations from this pattern. We observed that during this fragment, she stops typing for longer than just brief pauses twice, namely during the line after the candidate’s first statement about “believing too much” (line 609) as well as during his second statement about his belief in line 624 (see the multimodal annotation in the fragment in figure 3.1). After this second typing-stop, the recruiter subtly shifts position, as she moves her head upward to fully look at the candidate—rather than having a half eye cast on the computer screen and her head orienting slightly downward, as tends to be her default position (see screen captures in figure 3.1). As soon as the candidate stops speaking, the recruiter then takes the turn to ask for clarification, as we see in the first line of the fragment in figure 3.2, and through her body-language, which is now oriented much more towards the candidate instead of the screen of her laptop (cf. screen capture 3.1.2 in figure 3.1), it is clear that she is really engaging in the interaction to understand what the candidate “means exactly” (cf. line 625). Overlapping the recruiter’s question, the candidate starts reiterating his reasoning based on his religious ideology. After this first reiteration in lines 625 and 626, there is a long pause in which both interlocutors stay still and

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Figure 3.2.  The forklift driver training discussion (part 2): transcript and screen captures Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)

face each other. The candidate then repeats his phrase once more, but this time he also corrects the grammatical error of his preceding phrase by adding a preposition (believe in God, line 629), and he speaks more slowly. This is overlapped by a recognitional “ah,” marking the change of state (Heritage



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1984) of the recruiter who has now finally understood that the candidate refers to his religious beliefs. She repeats the crucial part of the sentence (“in god,” line 630) and when uttering the word “god,” she quickly raises her eyebrows (see screen capture 3.2.1 in figure 3.2), indicating her surprise. Then she closes her turn with the affirmative particle “yes.” Soon afterward, the recruiter resumes her default typing activity with its regular brief interruptions (see, e.g., line 634) and her contributions are limited to continuers and acknowledgment tokens for the rest of the fragment. After this misunderstanding has been cleared up between the recruiter and the candidate, the latter takes the floor again to repeat the point of the preceding story by re-enacting the end of the reported exchange with this boss (line 631) in which he again relies on his religious ideology. Yet, this is now explained much more explicitly and it becomes clear that he understands the events relating to the forklift driver training as “the will of God.” Given the multiple repetitions of this phrase in the course of lines 632–639, he strongly emphasizes the importance of this aspect for his understanding of the world. Yet, after this fragment, the recruiter does not pursue this topic further and immediately reorients the discussion to the tasks of the candidate. In sum, this subsection revolved around a topical discussion about the boss’s refusal to let the candidate complete his training to become a forklift driver. Probably due to the positive way in which he presented his skills in relation to forklift driving (mostly prior to the fragment in figure 3.1), the recruiter probes for whether the candidate disagreed with his boss regarding this decision—which, from a New Work Order perspective, would be a positive sign of a critical and engaged employee (cf. Van De Mieroop forthcoming). The candidate’s response is a bit ambivalent: while he on the one hand enacts his pleading to his boss to let him continue the training, he on the other hand also seems to resign himself rather quickly and abruptly to the decision. He then accounts for this by drawing on a religious ideological interpretation framework of the world, thus interpreting this setback in the light of his faith (cf. Ladegaard 2017). Importantly, from the interactional negotiation that is required before the recruiter finally understands what the candidate means, as well as her verbal and multimodal expression of surprise when it dawns upon her that the candidate is actually referring to religion, it becomes clear that this frame of interpretation forms a “rupture of expectation” (Birkner 2004, 319) for the recruiter. The Debt Collector Sometime after the preceding discussion, the candidate’s religious ideological framework emerges again, this time in a story that he tells at his own initiative. Telling personal stories is not an unexpected activity in job interviews, as this offers recruiters a chance to check the fit “between the individual’s selfconstruction and the culture of the organization that employs them” (Campbell

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Figure 3.3.  The debt collector discussion (part 1): transcript Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)

and Roberts 2007, 244) and recruiters are often well trained to “normalize” these stories to make them “processable” (Roberts and Campbell 2005). Prior to this story, the recruiter probed the last performance appraisal interview the candidate had with his boss. As these interviews take place on an institutionally regulated periodical basis, it is rather strange that the candidate claims that this was “a long time ago” (line 1119, prior to the fragment in figure 3.3). He then accounts for this by claiming that he is “so easy” that he does not have “anything to discuss with [his] boss” (lines 1123–1127). This results in a lengthy discussion relating to the candidate’s “easy” character, of which we see the end in the first lines of the fragment in figure 3.3. In the initial part of this fragment, the candidate resorts to not making claims about his character to himself anymore but instead attributing these claims to others (“the people,” line 1150) by means of a “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 1989). Interestingly, he not only “reports” the attribution of the character traits (“calm” and “easy,” line 1151), but he also adds a probe (“why,” line 1151) for the reason behind him being “so calm” and “so easy.” Instead of answering this probe, the candidate initiates an anecdote that will illustrate this reason, as marked by the framing of the upcoming story as an example (“for instance,” line 1153). He then launches the orientation phase (Labov and Waletzky 1966) of this story, which sets the scene, after which the complicating action starts by focusing on a letter from the tax office that arrived (lines 1157–1161).

Figure 3.4.  The debt collector discussion (part 2): transcript and screen captures Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)

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In a very extensive discussion (not shown here for reasons of space), he explains that he has an outstanding debt and that he agreed with the tax office employee that he would catch up on this overdue payment by the end of November. Yet, he then explains that he failed in following through on this, as we see in the first line of the fragment in figure 3.4. Following the statement that he did not manage to make the required payment on time (line 1241), the candidate relates the next step in the complicating action, namely that the tax office employee (“she,” line 1243) got in touch with the debt collector. By adding that this action happened “immediately” after his failure to make the payment, this employee is presented as a somewhat merciless person and the situation’s urgency is emphasized. This is also clear from the recruiter’s reaction, who normally remains silent and leaves the floor open for the candidate (cf. the many pauses in which the recruiter refrains from taking the turn). Yet, this time, she responds by uttering a d-sound, which, we can hypothesize is a repetition of the initial sound of the preceding word “debt collector” while simultaneously raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes widely (see screen capture 3.4.1 in figure 3.4). Then, she quickly restores her facial expression to her regular downcast eye-gaze oriented to her laptop (see screen capture 3.4.2 in figure 3.4) and utters the particle “yes” with a marked rising pitch, in this way thus probing for the ensuing events. The candidate continues by sketching how the situation aggravated further by describing the additional costs that this entails (lines 1246–1247). After a short digression about a phone call to his wife, he continues by describing what he did to solve the issue. Importantly, the first step he describes to solve this tricky situation, is that he is “going to pray” (line 1264). He adds the tag eh (translated as “aye,” line 1264), after which the recruiter starts smiling silently. The candidate subsequently reciprocates by audibly laughing at himself (cf. @@@, line 1264) and then continues his story by describing his actions. These consist of grabbing the phone (line 1265) and talking directly to the tax office employee (line 1267). A long-reported exchange follows in which the interaction between the latter and the candidate is mimicked in a rather chaotic way (omitted here for reasons of space). Finally, in line 1295, the concluding conjunction dus (“so”) signals the start of the resolution phase of this story, in which the candidate formulates a proposal to complete the payment in three instalments starting from December (lines 1295–1301). This is followed by a continuer by the recruiter (“uhu,” line 1302) and a pause (line 1303). As the candidate does not take the next turn immediately and the resolution of the story is still in the proposal phase, the recruiter probes for what the response to this proposal was. The candidate then, in partial overlap, explains that this “works” (line 1306) and concludes the reported exchange by mimicking the tax office employee’s explicit agreement (“okay,” line 1308).



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After another digression, the candidate launches the story coda, in which he links up the point of the story to the preceding talk, namely the question “why” he is such a “calm” and “easy” person (see fragment in figure 3.3). He does not mention this relation to the preceding talk explicitly though, but merely resorts to a more generalizing description of his behavior in such situations, as we see in the use of the definite article in “the situation” in line 1325 suggesting a more categorical rather than specific meaning (cf. fragment in figure 3.5). In this fragment, the candidate sketches in generalizing terms how he deals with difficult situations in his life. In particular, he first describes that he laughs (line 1329) and then starts praying (line 1331). He accounts for this by saying that in this way, he is “able to find the solution” (lines 1333–34). This time, the definite article in “the solution” (line 1334) suggests that there is only one right solution to each problematic situation, rather than various

Figure 3.5.  The debt collector discussion (part 3): transcript Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)

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potential ways of solving an issue. This fits with his religious ideological framework, which he makes more explicit toward the end of the fragment, namely that God “has helped” him find this right solution “a lot” (line 1340). Furthermore, the importance of his faith is underscored further by claiming that “that is [his] life” (line 1338), thus marking it as a crucial aspect of his being. During this fragment, the recruiter responds minimally and is mainly typing with a downcast eye-gaze, which is her regular behavior (as discussed above). Yet, at the end of the fragment, she starts smiling again, which is once more met with reciprocating audible laughter by the candidate (line 1342) in a similar way as in the fragment in figure 3.4. After the fragment in figure 3.5, the candidate reiterates the story solution, namely that he will pay the first instalment by December. Yet, the recruiter does not seem to understand nor hear this, and in overlap with the last part of the candidate’s utterance (line 1348), she questions the story’s resolution further, as we see in the fragment in figure 3.6. In particular, in this fragment, the recruiter probes for the story’s definitive outcome, namely whether “it is going to turn out fine then with the taxes” (line 1349). She adds a tag which consists of an adverb that expresses contrast (toch, translated as “right,” line 1349), thus hinting at the possibility of a not so favorable outcome of this story. Yet, the candidate refutes this possibility and by means of the triple repeated affirmative particle, confirms that the problematic situation will be solved. Yet, the recruiter pursues the topic even further, by picking up the ominous word “debt collector” again, which already caused quite a shock for the recruiter—as marked verbally as well as nonverbally, see fragment in figure 3.4—when it was first mentioned. As the

Figure 3.6.  The debt collector discussion (part 4): transcript Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)



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candidate does not respond (line 1352), the recruiter continues her sentence and adds an explicit negative evaluation of the situation (“that’s not so good,” line 1353), followed by another tag oriented at eliciting response. In the subsequent lines (omitted for reasons of space), the candidate refutes this, after which the recruiter returns the focus to her initial question from line 1364 onward. In her formulation, we see that the recruiter treats the candidate’s story as unrelated to her question—which is underlined using eigenlijk (“actually,” line 1364) in relation to the question. This treatment is mirrored by the candidate, who apologizes and then reciprocates the recruiter’s laughter. However, one could argue that from the candidate’s point of view, the story was not a side-sequence, but an account for the reason why he did not have a recent performance interview. In particular, as we saw in the first fragment of the debt collector discussion, the candidate explains that he does not have anything to talk about with his boss because he is “so easy” and “so calm” (fragment in figure 3.3). These character traits are then accounted for further because of his religious ideological framework, namely that he believes that God helps him to find solutions for the problems that arise, and that there is thus no point in raising issues oneself or objecting to something. This is in line with the worldview that emerged in the forklift driver training discussion (see section above), in which the candidate accounted for his quick acceptance of an unwelcome decision by means of his belief in God’s will. Thus, in this way, this story is topically related to the question. Yet, it is not surprising that the recruiter does not interpret it in this way. As we observed at the end of the story, for her the point of the story is not related to the candidate’s faith and character (fragment in figure 3.5), but instead, for her, it is about the dire—and potentially problematic—financial situation of the candidate (fragment in figure 3.6). The fact that this is the point the recruiter takes away from this story is also proven by her treatment of the whole story as unrelated to her initial question. There is thus a clear mismatch between the candidate’s understanding of the point of the story, and the recruiter’s, and this can be related to the clash between the ideological framework that the candidate is talking into being here, and the more secularized ideologies typical of Western Europe that the recruiter is probably familiar with. This is also clear from the way in which she responds to the references to religion that the candidate formulates. After her initial surprise during the forklift driver training discussion, her reactions in the debt collector discussion merely consist of silent smiles without any further probes or followup questions. While these reactions can be considered as minimal, they are nevertheless important, as this recruiter normally maintains a neutral facial expression and a downcast laptop-oriented eye-gaze. This points to the fact that the invocation of this religious ideology is marked in some ways for the recruiter. We will now investigate the final discussion in which this religious ideological framework emerges once again, yet very extensively.

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The Personality Question As is quite standard procedure in job interviews (see, e.g., Campbell and Roberts 2007), this recruiter also probes for the candidate’s personality, especially in relation to his colleagues, as we see in the fragment in figure 3.7. In this fragment, the turn-initial delay at the start of the second pair part (consisting of a thought marker (line 1423), a pause (line 1424) and a hesitant start of his utterance (line 1425)), marks the difficulty this question poses for the candidate. In spite of this, he provides a nicely formulated character trait in relation to his behavior in a group, namely that he “give[s] motivation to those boys” (lines 1425–1426). Interestingly, through the behavior he describes, he presents himself as a moral leader of the group and he implicitly places himself above the others, as the depiction of his colleagues as “those boys” indicates. Furthermore, the formulation is perhaps a bit too fluent, by which we mean that it is reminiscent of Campbell and Roberts’s description of the “rote-learned ‘textbook’ answers” (2007, 244) some candidates in their data provide. In any case, from the recruiter’s response (namely the continuer “yes” pronounced with a rising intonation (line 1427)), it becomes

Figure 3.7.  The personality question discussion (part 1): transcript Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)



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clear that the candidate’s answer fits nicely in her expectation framework as she implicitly encourages him to expand on his answer further. The next turn is prefaced by “and,” which highlights continuity (Neville 2006), and it thus indicates that the candidates indeed pursues this topic further. After a few word searches (line 1428), he provides an explanation of his motivational behavior towards the group. This takes the form of a generic narrative (Van De Mieroop 2021) in which he explains that he acts as advice-giver to his colleagues. The generic nature of this narrative is mainly shown by the fact that he implicitly claims that there are many problematic situations—rather than one specific situation—in which people seek him out for advice.1 Most importantly though, before discussing this advice-giving activity, the candidate states that the others “know” him and, in particular, know that he is deeply religious (“I believe god,” line 1429). By placing this information at the start of his generic narrative, it is presented as an important reason why he is sought out as advice-giver by the others, and as a crucial character trait of the candidate. While the recruiter lets the candidate finish his answer (in a few extra lines beyond the fragment in figure 3.7), she pursues the personality question further, but this time she shifts the perspective and probes for perceptions of others of the candidate. As she explicitly asks “what else” (line 1447, prior to the fragment in figure 3.8) his colleagues would say about the candidate, it is clear that she probes for another character trait. After a few word searches, the candidate claims that he is honest in the first line of the fragment in figure 3.8. After the candidate claimed honesty as a character trait (line 1457)—and before repeating and briefly explaining this at the end of the fragment (line 1466–67)—he links this to an embodied contrast pair of being straightforward (line 1462) versus “playing” (line 1460) in crooked ways (cf. the accompanying hand gestures in screen captures 3.8.1 and 3.8.2 in figure 3.8). Interestingly, he explains this further paraphrasing a passage from the Bible, namely Matthew 5:37, “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’” (1982). While he does not explicitly say that he is referring to the Bible, the fact that the passage is almost literally quoted in lines 1463 and 1465 will make it clear to any listener with some religious knowledge that the candidate is once more linking his character to his faith (see also Ladegaard 2017, 431). The recruiter, however, does not hint at understanding this in any way and the candidate subsequently makes the relation between his personality and his religious beliefs more explicit, as we see in the fragment in figure 3.9. Once more, the initial and-prefacing links up this turn with the preceding turn and given that the candidate now starts describing perceptions of nonbelieving people (line 1468) of him, this continuation is indeed clearly on topic as it is still a response to the recruiter’s question (see the fragment in figure 3.8). A bit surprisingly given the job interview context in which candidates tend to

Figure 3.8.  The personality question discussion (part 2): transcript and screen captures Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)



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Figure 3.9.  The personality question discussion (part 3): transcript and screen capture Source:Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380) 

try to present themselves in the best possible way (see, e.g., Van De Mieroop, Clifton, and Schreurs 2019), he then claims that his non-religious colleagues “see” him as “a crazy boy” (lines 1469–1470). The latter description is also displayed non-verbally by a finger gesture to the forehead (see screen capture in figure 3.9). The candidate then briefly laughs, which triggers a smile by the recruiter, and he then sets the scene for a brief habitual narrative consisting of a reported exchange (Buttny 1997) on the topic of “believing” or “not believing” in God (lines 1472–1475). He then concludes that he is respectful towards “these people” (line 1476), and this topic is then further and extensively elaborated on in the final segment of this discussion, which we see in figure 3.10. Again, the candidate sets the scene for a story revolving around himself and colleagues, and he zooms in this time on colleagues who are gay. In a reported exchange, the candidate is addressed by unspecified colleagues who probe for his view on gay people (line 1480). He then claims that he has “nothing against” them and illustrates this point of view by contributions that

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Figure 3.10.  The personality question discussion (part 4): transcript Source: Photo provided by the authors (KU Leuven SMEC approval number G-2015 10 380)

are a bit ambivalent in format (lines 1483–86). These can either be read as reported talk in which the candidate addresses a gay recipient, or they may be general claims, in which the second-person pronoun is thus understood as used generically. Either way, these turns serve to illustrate that he is respectful and tolerant towards gay people, but the fact that he frames homosexuality as a “choice” (line 1486)—rather than as a part of one’s being—nevertheless illustrates his orientation to a more conservative religious ideological framework in which choosing for God equals renouncing homosexuality. After he once more repeats that he has “nothing against that” (line 1488), he sets up a contrast (“but,” line 1489) with the fact that he “does” believe in God (line 1489). This explicitly affirmative formulation is formulated in Dutch by means of the particle “wel,” which typically expresses “a denial of an implicit or explicit previous denial” (Hogeweg 2009, 522). Hence, he implicitly excludes gay people from the religious community, and, to once more emphasize where the contrast is situated, he claims his own heterosexuality by referring to his marital status “to a woman” (line 1490). After a reiteration of his claims (lines 1492–93), the candidate then finally concludes his discussion (cf. the turn-initial “so,” line 1495) by stating that he “can interact with everyone.” The recruiter’s ensuing affirmative particle, formulated with a falling intonation, concludes this topic. Overall, in this long discussion of the candidate’s personality, it is clear that religion takes up the center-stage to which the candidate links his character



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traits. He is able to give advice and motivate others because he believes in God (fragment in figure 3.7), he is honest because the bible prescribes this (fragment in figure 3.8), he talks to other colleagues about God (fragment in figure 3.9) and while he claims to be respectful and tolerant toward nonbelievers (fragment in figure 3.9) and gay people (fragment figure 3.10), he nevertheless excludes the latter group from the religious ingroup. Moreover, by framing homosexuality as a choice, he implicitly aligns with religious ideological views that tend to take a conservative stance towards this matter (fragment in figure 3.10). Throughout this long discussion, the recruiter made only very minimal contributions, except for her probe at the start of the fragment in figure 3.8 to find out “what else” the candidate’s personality is made up of, and we may hypothesize that she was pointing at a less ideologically imbued discussion. Moreover, it is also important to note that in this response to a question which is so typical of job interviews and which is really an opportunity for candidates to show their qualities, that this candidate actually manages to selfinitiate—and thus highlight—the potentially negative social implications of his strong faith, namely by being considered by his colleagues as an outsider—viz. “a crazy boy”—of whom his colleagues even expect that he might be biased against the LGBTQIA+ community. By these characterizations projected upon him by his colleagues, the candidate draws attention to the fact that his religious beliefs make him somewhat of an outcast in the group, as such jeopardizing the recruiter’s assessment of the candidate as an employee who would fit seamlessly in any part of the organization, which has become an important criterion in job interviews that orient to the New Work Order ideological framework (Campbell and Roberts 2007). Finally, by these other-characterizations and by self-initiating a refutation of intolerant behavior towards non-believers and people from the LGBTQIA+ community, the candidate displays an awareness of certain prejudices against his religious ideological framework (cf. the construction of the “moderate Muslim” identity in Tranekjær 2017). CONCLUSION In this contribution, we aimed to show some of the discursive processes through which clashes in ideological frameworks between people who were socialized in different societies—viz. Belgium versus Sierra Leone—may be uncovered. In particular, we focused on the mismatch between the New Work Order ideological framework and a Christian religious framework. As both frameworks co-exist in Belgium (see introduction) and may thus not be expected to clash at all and given the somewhat “undercover nature” of ideology, we particularly looked for subtle indications of an ideological mismatch. We thus approached this topic by scrutinizing the interaction between the

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participants from a micro-analytical perspective. From these careful analyses, we can now draw a number of conclusions. We could first of all observe the recruiter’s difficulties to understand what the candidate was getting at first in the forklift driver training discussion. While such understanding issues may routinely be attributed to the latter’s lower linguistic proficiency as is often the case (Kerekes 2017), we know from the rest of this interview that the recruiter is usually quite able to pick up what this candidate means. These understanding difficulties thus pointed at a “rupture in expectation” (Birkner 2004, 319) caused by the invocation of the religious ideological explanatory framework instead. Moreover, while we observed that the recruiter tends to maintain a neutral facial expression throughout the interview, we could identify regular smiles when the candidate refers to his faith, which suggest that this religious framework is marked in some ways for the recruiter. This emically demonstrates that a religious ideological framework is unexpected for the recruiter. Even though Christianity is the dominant religion in Belgium, this is not surprising given the secularized nature of many Western countries, including Belgium, in which references to religion or a religious explanatory framework have become rare, especially in workplace contexts. This marked nature of such a religious ideological framework has many implications. First, in general, when there is no sharedness, there is no opportunity for the creation of co-membership in job interviews, and this has proved to be of great importance for the success of candidates (Kerekes 2007; Van De Mieroop and De Dijn 2021). Hence, from a general perspective, we can conclude that the mismatch between ideological frameworks of the recruiter and the candidate will not be helpful for the candidate’s potential success in the job interview. Second, the—from a non-religious perspective—fatalistic nature of the religious ideology as voiced by this candidate, clashes with the agentic expectations of the New Work Order ideology that underlies the reasoning in many western job interviews. We have observed this at the start of the forklift driver training discussion, in which the recruiter probed for potential agentic actions by the candidate against his boss who cut off the candidate’s training. It would have been an example of empowerment, agency, and a display of an orientation to the more egalitarian New Work Order ideals if the candidate had claimed that he really stood up for himself in this matter and dared to criticize his boss (cf. Campbell and Roberts 2007). Yet, the opposite happened, as the latter described his easy resignation to his boss’ decision, which he attributed to his acceptance of God’s ways. This is, of course, far from the expectations based on the New Work Order hegemonic ideology, and thus this is a missed opportunity for the candidate to tick the boxes the recruiter is probing for (cf. Roberts and Campbell 2005). Moreover, the debt collector



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discussion had a similar potential, as the candidate could have capitalized on his problem-solving skills, agency, and calmness in the face of adversity, but this potential is once again not reached due to the focus on the agency of God in this matter rather than that of the candidate. Third, we can assume that it is the emphasis on honesty that pushes the candidate to take the initiative himself to tell stories that are probably not beneficial for the way he is perceived by the recruiter—namely, on a personal level, as a man with financial problems (see the debt collector discussion), and, in terms of the “fit” with the organization (Campbell and Roberts 2007), as someone who is a bit of an outcast in the team, given that he claims himself that he is regarded by some colleagues as a “crazy boy” who may potentially even hold prejudices against LGBTQIA+ people (see the personality question discussion). Yet, this approach once more stands in sharp contrast to western job interview expectations of presenting the best possible version of oneself (see, e.g., Van De Mieroop, Clifton, and Schreurs 2019). One of course wonders whether this honest approach does not give the candidate a substantial disadvantage in the competition against other candidates who do orient to this best possible self-presentation idea and claim wonderful character traits without any downsides. One could say, of course, that this candidate actually displays the “honesty” character trait that he claims to own in the personality question discussion through his honest stories, but it remains an unanswered question whether this weighs up against the negative aspects that the candidate reveals through these stories that were not even probed for by the recruiter. Fourth, next to attempting to be honest, the candidate’s self-initiation of the topic of his views on homosexuality—and, by extension, the LGBTQIA+ community—in the fragment in figure 3.10 displays an awareness of the potential prejudices of secularized society members regarding religious people. This also explains why the candidate broaches this difficult topic himself, without any probe by the recruiter, and it thus functions as an attempt to minimize the stereotyped difference between his and the recruiter’s ideologies (see also Tranekjær 2017). Overall, while this candidate thus demonstrates to be aware of the secular nature of Belgian society, as exemplified by his awareness of certain prejudices against religious people—cf. his refutation of being biased against gay people—it is clear that the many unwritten rules of the hegemonic job interview ideology inspired by the New Work Order, remain quite a mystery to him. Given the importance of labor market integration of immigrants—not just on a social level, but also on an economic level given the current scarcity of workers in the Belgian War for Talent labor context (Theunissen, Vansteenkiste, and Sels 2018)—we argue for a re-thinking of the way in which job interviews tend to take place. Making unwritten rules more explicit to candidates as well as recruiters is one thing to start with, as has been pointed out

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elsewhere as well (see, e.g., Tranekjær 2015). Yet, we also believe that an increased awareness and openness to unanticipated aspects and talents that may not tick the expected boxes may not only give candidates with foreign roots more chances, but that it will also be beneficial for the mix of talents in the workplace. From the candidate’s stories, one may infer that next to being an honest man, he has character traits such as resilience, flexibility, and a strong will to be supportive to others. While we have also observed that this recruiter went through great lengths to give the candidate many interactional opportunities to express his point of view and to engage with him until she understood his reasoning, many of the aspects mentioned by the candidate simply do not fit with hegemonic expectations in the western job interview in a straightforward way. We can thus assume that these aspects remain largely under the radar in the overall assessment of this candidate’s suitability for the job on offer.2 We argue that this is a pity, not only because these talents may thus not be rewarded in the job interview gatekeeping process, but also because they may remain largely unnoticed in this context. We believe that this “noticing” is nevertheless very important, in particular because ideologies are not fixed entities. While discursive practices indeed are influenced by ideological frameworks, this is also a process that works the other way around, as these practices constitute the driving force of the hegemony of a certain ideology. In other words, ideology not only frames but is at the same time framed by discursive practices (Hudson 2016), and the latter may contribute to a change in the former. So, making recruiters aware of these alternative ideological views will make these different perspectives noticed, and this will give them the potential to feed into the alteration of hegemonic ideologies underlying western job interviews. This, we believe, is long overdue, as there have been calls to change the communicative practices of job interviews in relation to some of the reasons mentioned above for many decades now (see, e.g., Gumperz, Roberts, and Jupp 1979). Only then will the immigrant community’s talents and skills—from the African continent and beyond—have a chance to become fully recognized in their new home countries. NOTES 1.  This is established by means of the example, namely difficulties at home (line 1430) followed by ‘or’ and then an embodied display of similar, yet generic problematic situations (cf. the upward hand gesture). 2. In a worst-case scenario, this clash of frameworks could lead to an unfair treatment of the candidate in question. However, we have no indications that in this particular case, the candidate was discriminated against on the basis of this job interview. To the contrary, the recruiter that appears in the interview collaborated in the



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data collection for this study because of a strong commitment to advance the chances of candidates with a migration background and was very open to feedback in this respect. Still, that makes our findings probably even more relevant, since unfortunately certainly not all recruiters in Belgium are as engaged as this.

REFERENCES Auer, Peter, and Friederike Kern. 2001. “Three Ways of Analysing Communication between East and West Germans as Intercultural Communication.” In Culture in Communication: Analyses of intercultural situations, edited by Aldo Di Luzio, Susanne Günthner and Franca Orletti, 889-116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Birkner, Karin. 2004. “Hegemonic struggles or transfer of knowledge?: East and West Germans in job interviews.” Journal of language and politics 3(2): 293–322. doi: 10.1075/jlp.3.2.08bir. Bossard, Laurent. 2009. The future of international migration to OECD countries: Regional note West Africa. OECD. Buttny, Richard. 1997. “Reported Speech in Talking Race on Campus.” Human Communication Research 23(4): 477–506. Campbell, Sarah, and Celia Roberts. 2007. “Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview: synthesizing the institutional and personal.” Discourse & Society 18(3): 243–71. Erickson, Frederick, and Jeffrey Shultz. 1982. The counselor as gatekeeper: Social interaction in interviews. New York: Academic Press. Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. 1996. The New Work Order. London: Saint Leonards Allen and Unwin. Gumperz, John J., Celia Roberts, and Thomas Cyprian Jupp. 1979. Crosstalk: A study of cross-cultural communication. London: National Centre for Industrial Language Training in association with BBC. Heritage, John. 1984. “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement.” In Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, edited by John Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 299–345. London/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hogeweg, Lotte. 2009. “The meaning and interpretation of the Dutch particle wel.” Journal of Pragmatics 41(3): 519–539. Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine. 2011. Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudson, Nancie. 2016. “Communication and power in the job interview: Using a ventriloqual approach to analyze moral accounts.” Text & Talk 36 (3): 319–40. doi: 10.1515/text-2016-0015. Jefferson, Gail. 1984. “Transcription notation.” In Structures of Social Interaction, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 191–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerekes, Julie. 2007. “The co-construction of a gatekeeping encounter: An inventory of verbal actions.” Journal of Pragmatics 29: 1942–73.

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Kerekes, Julie. 2017. “Language Mentoring and Employment Ideologies: Internationally Educated Professionals in Search of Work.” In Negotiating Boundaries at Work, edited by Jo Angouri, Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes, 11–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kirilova, Marta. 2012. All dressed up and nowhere to go: Linguistic, cultural and ideological aspects of job interviews with second language speakers of Danish. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Kirilova, Marta, and Jo Angouri. 2017. “Communication practices and policies in workplace mobility.” In The Routledge handbook of migration and language, edited by Suresh Canagarajah, 540–57. Abingdon: Routledge. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1966. “Narrative Analysis: oral versions of personal experience.” In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, edited by June Helm, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ladegaard, Hans J. 2017. ”‘We’re only here to help’: Identity struggles in foreign domestic helper narratives.” In Identity struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world, edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr, 427–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martens, Albert, and Nouria Ouali. 2005. Etnische discriminatie op de arbeidsmarkt in het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest (Syntheserapport). ULB/KU Leuven. Mondada, Lorenza. 2016a. “Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(3):336–66. doi: 10.1111/ josl.1_12177. Mondada, Lorenza. 2016b. Retrieved from “Conventions for multimodal transcription.” https://franzoesistik.philhist.unibas.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/franzoesistik/ mondada_multimodal_conventions.pdf. [09/05/2023] Neville, Maurice. 2006. “Making sequentiality salient: And-prefacing in the talk of airline pilots.” Discourse Studies 8(2): 309–32. OECD. 2008. Jobs for immigrants (Vol. 2): Labour market integration in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Portugal. OECD. 2022. International Migration Outlook 2022. OECD. 2023. “Foreign-born employment (indicator).” accessed 6 February 2023. https://doi.org/10.1787/05428726-en. Roberts, Celia. 2011. “Gatekeeping discourse in employment interviews.” In Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions, edited by Christopher N. Candlin and Srikant Sarangi, 407–32. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter. Roberts, Celia, and Sarah Campbell. 2005. “Fitting stories into boxes: rhetorical and textual constraints on candidates’ performances in British job interviews.” Journal of Applied Linguistics 2(1): 45–73. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation.” Language 50(4): 696–735. Sarangi, Srikant. 1994. “Intercultural or Not? Beyond Celebration of Cultural Differences in Miscommunication Analysis.” Pragmatics 4(3): 409–27. Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Theunissen, Gert, Sarah Vansteenkiste, and Luc Sels. 2018. “Leidt de hoge vervangingsvraag van 50-plussers tot een structurele krapte op de arbeidsmarkt?” Werk. Focus 3. The Holy Bible, New King James Version. 1982. Nashville: Nelson. Tranekjær, Louise. 2015. Interactional Categorization and Gatekeeping: Institutional Encounters with Otherness. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Tranekjær, Louise. 2017. “Laughables as a resource for foregrounding shared knowledge and shared identities in intercultural interactions in Scandinavia.” In Identity struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world, edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr, 185–205. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van De Mieroop, Dorien. 2021. “The Narrative Dimensions Model and an Exploration of Various Narrative Genres.” Narrative Inquiry 31(1):4–27. Van De Mieroop, Dorien. forthcoming. “Identity gatekeeping in New Work Order organizations: Quality care discussions during performance appraisal interviews.” Pragmatics & Society. http://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20039.van. Van De Mieroop, Dorien, Jonathan Clifton, and Charlotte Schreurs. 2019. “The interactional negotiation of the rules of the employment interview game.” International Journal of Business Communication 56(4):560–85. doi:10.1177/2329488416673816. Van De Mieroop, Dorien, and Melina De Dijn. 2021. “A multimodal analysis of foreign national origin membership categories in Belgian blue collar job interviews with first generation immigrants.” Language and Intercultural Communication 21 (2):237-259. doi: 10.1080/14708477.2020.1850752. Verschueren, Jef. 2011. Ideology in Language Use: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Four

Along the Paths of Resistance The History of a Moroccan Family in Catalonia through their Multiple Voices Marta Amorós Torró INTRODUCTION The research for this chapter was conducted during fieldwork in the Catalan Pyrenees as part of a doctoral dissertation dedicated to the way six members of a Moroccan family signified and interpreted their life experiences (Amorós 2016). Drawing from a life history crossed method based on biographical accounts applied to one particular family, the goal was to deepen our understanding of the migratory process and gain insights into the biographical and family dimension of such migration experience. I proposed to develop a monograph on this family from a multicentric perspective in which the narratives of each family member were confronted and completed with the other family member’s accounts. This work created the possibility to analyze a multivocal text, following what some authors have called a “polyphonic system,” capable of learning about the same story through different voices (Pujadas 1992, 85). As in the work of Oscar Lewis (1961), the intention was to bring out the biographical dimension of families as a unit of analysis. In this sense, Franco Ferrarotti underlines the importance of the role of the family as the “primary group” of biographical research, which constitutes a fundamental region of mediation between the structures and the individuals (Ferrarotti 1981, 23). I followed those indicators in the autobiographical accounts that led me to explore specific interpretative pathways in greater depth. As noticed by Daniel Bertaux, such indicators are the tip of the iceberg of analytical work and serve as a guiding light to orient our mental and discursive elaboration of the processes and relations at the origin of the phenomena described by our interlocutors (Bertaux 2005/1997, 91). The central aspects of my attention became those that revealed the same topics in different ways in each of the 87

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collected narratives. By following the thread along the different accounts, I identified a parental strategy influencing, from the very beginning of the migratory family project, the living conditions of the children from their childhood onward. These conditions help us to understand their behavior and their social relationships. The parents’ strategy was born from the desire to protect their children from being treated differently on the grounds of their Moroccan origins and migrant condition. It also marked the biographical orientation of their accounts, characterized by a lack of victimization and culpability, highlighting perseverance and integrity. However, even if this foundational family attitude was cherished and valorized by all, differences could be found in the way each one lives and interprets the family legacy and the migration story, resulting in different relations to the extended family in Morocco, different attitudes regarding their mother tongue, and contrasting ways of understanding themselves and projecting themselves into the future. To frame these family narratives, I will first briefly describe the main events in the family history. The text is then subdivided into three moments, referring to the different intergenerational points of view: first, departing from the parents’ vision, narratives, and strategic actions; second, going through the time of the children where we can observe their positioning, attitudes, and biographical orientations; and finally, envisioning possible futures, focusing the topic of return and bonds with the country of origin. MAIN EVENTS IN FAMILY HISTORY The father Ismael was born in Larache, a maritime city on the Atlantic coast of northern Morocco. He does not remember his mother as he was still very young when she died. Shortly afterwards, his father remarried, and at the age of ten, he was forced to leave home because of disagreements with his stepmother. At the age of fourteen, he arrived in Barcelona and set off to the north in search of work. In 1971, he arrived in Ribes, a village in the Catalan Pyrenees, where he found work in the construction industry. Ismael is now retired and devotes much of his time to the vegetable garden he cultivates, where he takes his grandson Nadir whenever he has the chance. Laila, the mother, was born in Larache in 1962; she is the second of ten children. Shortly before her twentieth birthday, in 1982, she married Ismael, a family friend. The following month she arrived in Ribes, where the couple still lives. In 1984, Laila took her younger brother, Mourad, into her home when he was only three years old. Mourad lived with them until he started university and became independent. In 1986, Nawal was born, the first child of Moroccan origin in Ribes, followed four years later by her brother Ylias and two years later by Jawhara. Nawal would be the first of the three siblings to go to Bar-



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celona, in her case to study Arabic Philology at the university. In Barcelona, she met her future husband, Sami, a young man from Casablanca. In 2016, she was working in a company in the electrical sector with a schedule that allowed her to spend time with her three-year-old son Nadir. Ylias would take more time to finish high school than his sisters. Eventually, he finished his studies and moved to Barcelona with his sister, but he missed a less urban life. He left Barcelona before finishing his studies and got a job in an optics store in La Jonquera. For Jawhara, the youngest of the siblings, her arrival in Barcelona was long-awaited. She settled with her siblings in the city. The three of them shared a flat for almost two years. Jawhara studied nursing. Two years after starting university, she decided to change her educational path and start a pharmacy degree. She met Moroccan classmates in the new faculty and became friends with them. In 2017, she started working at weekends in a pharmacy in Barcelona1. THE TIME OF THE PARENTS: A FOUNDATIONAL STRATEGY Perceiving risks, anticipating them, and acting accordingly to prevent their occurrence is a common concern for many families, which we can identify as a strategic action. As Catherine Delcroix argues, “if there is reflection, matching of resources to the prevention action, and its continuation in the long term, there is a strategic action” (Delcroix 2013, 255).2 Therefore, Laila and Ismael’s strategic position to prevent Mourad, Nawal, Ylias, and Jawhara from feeling different from the other children in the village because of their family background cannot be understood independently of the spatial-temporal context in which it was framed. Ribes is a small village, and the three siblings were the first children of Moroccan origin to be born there. At the beginning of his story, Mourad considered that the fact that they were the only immigrants from outside Spain in the village may have influenced their experience of a “normal” childhood. Nevertheless, the small town is also a place where anonymity is complex and, in Nawal’s words, all the clichés are intensified. Laila and her husband Ismael made sure that their children and Mourad did naturally what any other child in the village would do. They contributed to their immersion in the socio-cultural world of Ribes and encouraged them to participate in popular traditions and get actively involved in the activities they carried out with their friends or classmates. The important thing was that they feel that they are part of the place where they were born, that they do not suffer the rupture migration entails, the ambivalences it generates, and the feeling of not being fully from one place or the other. Both Laila and Ismael tried to minimize the “double absence” of the migrant, so well referred

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to by Abdelmalek Sayad (1999/2010), emphasizing a committed and active presence in the place where they live. This strategy also reflects an interest in preventing curious but also prejudiced and stereotypical gazes from falling on their children and Mourad. Adaptation is also a process in which one seeks to disprove suspicion, to demonstrate a sincere intention to integrate, to atone for the involuntary guilt inscribed in the act of migration, in the stage of incompleteness to which it leads, whereby one is neither entirely from here nor completely from there. This is what Sayad calls a “displaced presence” in the physical and moral sense: “The very fact of migration is tainted with the idea of lack, with the idea of anomaly or anomie. The immigrant presence is always marked by incompleteness, a presence that is fallible and guilty in itself” (Sayad 1999/2010, 391). Laila’s story reflects this idea or feeling of guilt and her desire to prevent it from weighing on her children’s lives so that they can choose their path with autonomy to build their own identities freely and on their own: “Because it is not their fault being born here. It was clear to me from day one [. . .]. It is not their fault being born here.” It is necessary to act pre-emptively and ward off the experience of prejudice and stereotypes that could imprint itself on their children’s bodies. Their body is the space where they observe and communicate with the world. It is in the body that experiences are forged based on the sensitive relationship between the body-space and the space that is outside the body (Delory-Momberger 2010, 50). It is also in the body that memory relies on to remember. In their stories, Laila, Ylias, and Nawal allude to an experience of the body marked by neatness and the reaction this generates in others. Nawal stresses her parents’ wish for them to be clean, even standing out from the other children in the village. This is, moreover, an attitude that she now reproduces as a mother, doing just as her parents did, with their grandson: Now my boy is always in tip-top shape there. My father combs his hair, and puts cologne on him, I don’t know what else he puts. Because people are going to look for faults, you know. “Ah, look at that one with the torn trousers” [. . .]. But my parents didn’t want to trigger that. They acted before that. My mother always explained that when they went out to the park, she always carried a backpack with a bottle of water, a whole packet of biscuits, cream, everything, you know? You never know. And she would always say, “I ended up being the first aid kit for the whole park.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 296)

But it is not enough to stand out, this “rebellion against stigma” does not always manage to “reassure” those who view with unease the presence of the immigrant, which is seen and interpreted by some “in terms of rivalry, and undue rivalry, illegitimate rivalry and unfair competition” (Sayad 1999/2010,



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400). At the beginning of her arrival in Ribes, Laila experienced situations in which she had to learn to react to those who were irritated or surprised at her socio-economic well-being: People have said this in my face: “I do not know how you manage to maintain these children. You can send them to school, and they’re fine.” If they are in rags, it’s good for them to be in rags. When you see that they are [well-dressed]. That, “aissshh” [makes a gesture with her head backward]. [. . .] Now I’m talking about thirty years ago, but one day you have a bad day, and you think, “I’m answering because I can’t take it all the time.” And if you answer: “Look how she’s got her wits about her!” Yes, because they notice everything. (Amorós Torró 2016, 262)

This being different from what is expected generates strangeness but can also be accompanied by a feeling of irritation when the members of the stereotyped group go from being observed with paternalism and benevolence to being seen in terms of a conflict of interests and a competitive system, but without being recognized, on the other hand, as legitimate competitors. Nevertheless, the stories show us situations that are remarkable for the narrators’ restraint and ability to control their emotions in the face of experiences marked by discrimination or comments that convey prejudice. Empathy and understanding are values that Ismael and Laila have striven to instill in their children and in Mourad, values that play an essential role in shaping an attitude that avoids the reproduction of stereotypes and which also encourages them to adopt a reflective stance in situations in which they may feel unfairly judged by others. Laila reproduces her words to her children and Mourad as follows: I always told them: “People must know you to know who you are. They can’t judge you, and you can’t judge anyone without knowing.” “Ah, look at this one!” “No. Who is this one? Because he has a name, he has a house, he has his parents.” “No, as he told me . . .” “Well, no, if you don’t like him, just walk away, and that’s it.” So there are a thousand ways of not . . ., of not looking. Although I think they have also been quiet children. (Amorós Torró 2016, 355)

Resistance is organized in the family, and examples of a variety of strategies are constructed and transmitted through actions, words, and silences, which enable them to resist, neutralize, or rebel in the face of hostile situations that appear unfavorable and unjust. These situations, far from discouraging them, allow them to learn lessons to reflect on alone or with the rest of the family. We must distinguish between the concept of “resistance” and the concept of “reaction”; resistance, unlike reaction, refers to a disposition or capacity for reflexivity. In this sense, resistance leans toward an emancipatory and po-

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litical dimension (Hajjat 2005, 52). The family is a common space for learning about the social world, where experiences are discussed and exchanged. We observe how many anecdotes have been passed on by the parents, especially Laila, and internalized by their children and by Mourad, who know the details of some of the situations they have experienced. Laila and Ismael avoid showing signs of vulnerability towards their children and Mourad. In their stories, neither conceives themself as victimized by discrimination; on the contrary, they appear as people who have been able to overcome stigmatizing situations with determination. Nawal does not remember her father telling her when she was a child about experiences that could show him as fragile or vulnerable: “But what my father would not have done is to tell us something about his bad experience. He did not do that.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 301) Another logic imprinted on the behavior of the family members is determined by the importance they attach to personal skills and merits. The value reinforced this position that their parents give to study and training, and by the trust that they place in their children and in Mourad, and in their capacity, without gender differences, to achieve whatever they set out to do with effort and determination. On the one hand, this impels them to seek personal excellence and individual improvement, and, on the other, allows them to have the necessary self-esteem to be able to face situations in which they might feel devalued with a proactive and vindictive attitude. This is how Jawhara expresses the subjective resources that she has built up from the values and practices that her parents have passed on to her and which have contributed to the consolidation of a positive self-image: “At home, I’ve been taught that if you’re good, you’re good everywhere [. . .]. I’ve never felt less, you know, I don’t have a feeling of inferiority for being like this. I don’t, no. There are people who do, and I’ve met a lot of people who do. Not in my house, because my parents have given me tools.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 357) The support they receive from the group of friends is also crucial in overcoming difficult situations, strengthens the bonds of friendship between family members and those close to them, and contributes to the creation of a network of relationships between neighbors and friends based on mutual help. Ismael tells us about the warm welcome he received from a part of the people of the village with whom he still maintains a deep friendship while reinforcing his own responsibility in establishing and consolidating this bond of trust over the years: This village has opened all the doors for me. I have friends, friends I made at the beginning who are still friends. They are friends, and I have absolute confidence. If, for example, now, if I was left penniless, I would go to these houses, and they would help me with anything. Why? Why? Because they haven’t kept it, I have kept it [the trust]. Because whenever they called me, I was al-



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ways ready. When, for example, they wanted something, or they saw that they couldn’t do it, they called me, I’d leave mine, and I’d go and do it. Never with a bad face. (Amorós Torró 2016, 357)

But among all the people from whom they have received support, one figure stands out, who has played a decisive role in the family story, “la Carmen.” Carmen appears recurrently in all the stories, and she is the person who has helped the family from the beginning and has given them invaluable support—support without which Ismael’s life would probably have been very different. Her first welcome allowed Laila not to feel in all its harshness the loneliness in the first weeks of her arrival in Ribes, and she proved a strong presence and a reference for Mourad and the children of the family. On one occasion, Carmen’s sister, Enriqueta, responded forcefully to those who insistently questioned Laila shortly after she arrived in the village with their stereotypical conceptions of Morocco: “But they were more surprised about me than I was about them. “And how is the school?” Even here in the butcher’s shop, one day, they asked me if we had doctors. And Carmen, not Carmen, her sister, jumped up and said: “Look, I’ve had enough, now all you have to do is ask her whether she has a heart or not!” (Amorós Torró 2016, 301) The narrators’ reflections on their experiences, in which we observe the existence of a stereotyped and distorted view of migrants of Maghrebi origin and their descendants, tell us about the acquisition of biographical, discursive, and practical skills by our interlocutors, who end up describing with a certain indulgence and even pity those people who, out of “ignorance,” adopt a differentiating and prejudiced attitude toward them. Humor is a common characteristic of all the members of the family that stands out in the tone they adopt in certain passages of their stories. Good humor is also shared when they get together and share their experiences or when they communicate through WhatsApp and in the group created in the mobile app under the name “Things from home.” Mourad, Nawal, Ylias, and Jawhara participate in this group, which serves as a platform for them to communicate from a distance and to describe various situations that happen to them in their daily lives, on which they reflect collectively and amusingly: We’ve laughed a lot, and we’ve never taken it badly. And also, as Nawal, Ylias, Jawhara, and I, of course, grew up here. However, we have our own Moroccan thing, so sometimes you create your own language mixing words from here and there, and then when something like that happens, we all know how it goes. With a look, we understand each other. And then, if something happens in the group, we say: “This happened.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 246)

Jawhara is puzzled that people are still surprised when she speaks in Catalan, aware that she is part of a generation born in Catalonia and that several

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decades have already passed since the arrival of the first migrants from outside of Spain. Indirectly, she wonders about the generations that will have to pass so that the descendants of migrants stop being seen as anomalies and that their presence and established social relations will be incorporated into the collective imagination as a normalized fact: I’m sorry that after so long, I mean, we’re not . . . I’m sorry that people are still surprised, because: “Ah, you speak Catalan very well!” “No, no, you should be surprised that I don’t speak it well because there have been a lot of people from abroad for many years.” Twenty years for sure. [. . .] It’s not that I’m surprised, but I think, why isn’t progress being made? (Amorós Torró 2016, 338)

These are the reflections that Jawhara carries out of her arrival in Barcelona, which, unlike Ribes, is a place where she must put into practice strategies of resistance to stereotypes and prejudices on her way toward emancipation and towards the autonomous definition and evaluation of her identifications. The youngest member of the family describes the differences between her life in Ribes and Barcelona. In comparison with the Catalan capital, Jawhara highlights the positive aspects of having been born in a village where she and the rest of her family have not been seen as different: “I am also partly grateful for having grown up in the bubble that is Ribes.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 345) And she positively values the involvement of her parents in making this happen, in what she considers a protective attitude toward her, her siblings, and her uncle Mourad. But despite this recognition, the narrator also shows a sense of longing for some unlived experiences: What my mother has never wanted, well, my parents, is for us to be seen as different from other children in the class, that is, for us to be different from those we grew up with. And they have succeeded. The truth is that I don’t feel like one, and I don’t think they see me as one, but on the other hand, now that I’m older, sometimes I think, “oh well, maybe I would have needed it a bit because sometimes you miss those things.” In the sense of meeting Moroccan people, in the sense of having more friends, sometimes these are things you miss. (Amorós Torró 2016, 363)

It is in Barcelona where Jawhara first established intense friendship contact with other people whose parents also migrated from Morocco, where she became aware of the differences that exist between herself and her friends of Moroccan origin and where she felt the need to highlight some aspects of her self-identification that until then had gone unnoticed in the eyes of others, and which she highlighted in the second interview I conducted:



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Then, of course, you get older, and you realize, and you say, “I’m different.” Well, I don’t find it negative either, but you feel different, and then, of course, you need to bring it out because it’s part of you. I’m not saying that my mother wanted to hide it. But she didn’t want it to go unnoticed, but she didn’t want it to stand out either. And so, maybe my brothers didn’t, but I, for my part, needed to highlight it. (Amorós Torró 2016, 341)

According to her, the visible absence of cultural traits associated with her family background influenced the unequal treatment she receives from her Moroccan friends, which she attributes to the fact that “I have more things from here because I am more from here.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 338) Jawhara acknowledges the customs that her parents have passed on to her but also imagines how different her life would have been if she had lived in Morocco: “Maybe our life would have been very different living there or having more customs from there in my house. We do, but it is different, it is lighter.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 339) These reflections on her family legacy will come into play in her self-definition, which found fertile ground for reflection when she arrived in Barcelona. On leaving the village of Ribes, we enter a new time and space in which Jawhara, Nawal, Ylias, and Mourad had to fend for themselves, accompanied by the strategic resources they had acquired (open, reflective, and resilient attitudes) throughout their lives with their family and friends. In their social relationships, they established their own path, always looking towards the future, but without losing sight of their past and being the bearers of a family legacy marked by migration. The positive valuation of the family as a place where values are transmitted and as an example of a constant struggle for a better future is present in each of their stories. Ylias’s recognition of his father’s life journey is eloquent on this point: He is someone admirable, whom you say, “wow that he has brought it on himself from a young age, that he has come from the bottom.” He has carried it all on his shoulders without asking anyone for help [. . .]. I’ve always seen it, but I didn’t want to say it. Moreover, he looks happy. He looks proud of his work, of everything he has done, and of everything he has built. (Amorós Torró 2016, 323)

THE TIME OF THE CHILDREN: INTERPRETERS OF THE FAMILY LEGACY In this segment, I will focus on how the family members signify and interpret the family legacy and how its transmission might have influenced their attitudes and the construction of their identifications. Diving back into the words of our interlocutors, we discover the basis of their actions and their biographical orientation, the existence of a dialectic

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between past and present with an eye to the future. In this sense, we identify the function of reflexivity of the family memory referred to by Anne Muxel (2007, 30), with which we consciously evaluate life and evoke the past in a reflexive way, with which we draw lessons from the family experience, project ourselves into the future and define our affiliation by situating ourselves in family history. In short, the work of memory with a function of reflexivity is carried out in a retrospective and, at the same time, prospective reading of the life itinerary. Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame also described the family as a field of memories, a source, and a storehouse of experiences that generate practical knowledge about the social world (Bertaux-Wiame 1988, 34). The knowledge of family history and life itineraries in the past contributes to the perception of a diversity of social situations and behaviors and the representation of a field of possible futures. We can observe a clear differentiation in the form and significance that the memory of paternal and maternal family history acquires in the story. Ismael’s family history has probably been blurred after migration due to a lack of transmission and the absence of direct contact with the rest of the members of his family. Thus, there is no memory of the paternal family based on personal experiences. Migration also contributes, in the case of Ismael’s family history, and unlike Laila’s, to creating an abyss that is difficult to overcome. This lack of contact contrasts with the relationship between the members of the maternal family. In this place, most of the memories that constitute the central reference point of their link with Morocco are stored. The history of the maternal family is not only present in memory through the transmission and circulation of remembered events. It is also part of a living memory forged in personal experiences. Nawal and Mourad know life in Larache and the long summers spent there as children are relived in their stories with emotion. Nawal talks about her summer visits to Morocco, which she sees as more than just a holiday, which gave her a profound experience of the country: “We would go to Morocco every summer. For three months. So I lived with my grandfather, I lived with my uncles and aunts. So, if I know Morocco, it’s because they sent me there. In fact, I know Morocco as a country, not as a tourist, precisely because of that, because I have lived it.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 303) Also, Jawhara claims to have grown up with her family in Morocco, not so much through direct or daily contact with them, but through a relationship that has been formed and consolidated in the communication she has maintained with her relatives, even at a distance. Nevertheless, regardless of the greater or lesser contact they have established with the maternal family, of the memories passed down from previous generations that have been incorporated into the family’s collective memory, in all the stories, there is a central figure who embodies the family history, the paternal grandfather and father of Laila and Mourad. Laila recalls when, as a



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child, her father used to go to work in Barcelona: “My father came to work. My father came in ‘68. But he was in Barcelona. And he came back every three months. He would work, earn a bit of money and then he would go back.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 370) There are anecdotes known to all that tell us of the grandfather’s first seasonal migration experience, the meaning of which was closely linked to work with a community goal. As a myth or founding reference of the family’s migration history, these are stories of a time that the grandfather of the family wanted to transmit to his son Mourad and to his three grandchildren. In his narration, Mourad recalled anecdotes that his father told him about a context in which migration was not thought of with a view to long-term family settlement: He explained to me where he lived in Barcelona, in Escudellers street, that he worked as a trowel [. . .]. And he remembers that he lived in a house, that’s what my father always explained to me, that he lived upstairs and the owner lived downstairs, and he was the builder, and the builder wanted him to marry his daughter. And, of course, my father said: “Well, I have a family, I have my wife. And I have three or four children in Morocco.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 370–71)

To the figure of the grandfather in the past, we must add the image we are shown of him in the present. He appears in the stories as an attentive and understanding person, whom we have decided to describe as “clairvoyant” because he knows how to see, even from a distance, the uniqueness of each of his grandchildren. This image is reflected in Ylias’s words: And I, that’s what they say, my grandfather has always told me, he says: “You’re a little Catalan!” And he has always said it like that, and when I go to see him, he says to me: “Look at the little Catalan!” Because he knows that I don’t have this feeling. That’s the difference between everyone, and everyone has a way of thinking about Morocco, I don’t have it. (Amorós Torró 2016, 325)

Jawhara also described an anecdote that shows the good relationship she has with her grandfather, as well as exemplifying his understanding of nature and his interest in his granddaughter enjoying the pleasures offered by the land of her parents, such as the taste of good peaches, in the company of her family in Larache: I still haven’t gone to Morocco saying that I am [vegetarian]. But at home, they already know that I’m a bit like that because I’m a very special person when it comes to food and, of course, there in Morocco people say: “Eat, eat and eat.” And if you don’t eat, you look bad. I remember that on the day of the Eid, of the holiday, I spoke to my grandfather for a moment. He said to me: “Well Jawhara, you should know that I have-,” because I love peaches, and whenever I go there, they always buy me peaches, and it was the day of the Eid because there is meat to give and sell, and he said to me: “Well, I have saved some peaches for you.”

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And I thought to myself, well, if I go there and tell him I don’t eat meat, it’s not so bad because if he talks to me about peaches on the exclusive day of the meat, it means that it won’t be too strange, right? (Amorós Torró 2016, 372)

But the grandfather also appears in the stories as a person who waits, expecting visitors taking too long to arrive. He attributes this delay, without being able to avoid expressing a certain regret, to a lack of interest on the part of his children or grandchildren who live far from Larache. The emigrant’s absence in his country of origin, even if it is not a “fault” committed intentionally (Sayad 1999/2010, 391), can be seen as such, and can produce in the family that continues to live and spend years there the perception of a voluntary distancing of the emigrant from the place where he grew up. Mourad makes this point when referring to the possible return of his sister Laila and his brother-in-law Ismael to Morocco, and he underlines his father’s regret at their absence: “I would like them to come down for holidays because they haven’t been down for many years. And you must think that my father is very old, and my father sees it as if they don’t want him anymore.” Time passes, and the chances for the family to be fully reunited are increasingly remote. In the narrators’ recollections of family history, we discover a narrative of affiliation, an awareness of belonging to the extended family living in Morocco. This belonging is further reinforced by the physical resemblance that characterizes the family members, which serves for others to locate them as part of the same family nucleus. In relation to this physical resemblance, the youngest of the siblings describes situations in which she compares the “bubble” that Ribes has been for her with the “bubble” in which she lives when she visits her family in Larache. Her physical appearance immediately connects her to her family’s history, which makes the anonymity she sometimes wishes for impossible. In both Larache and Ribes, people recognize her, in Ribes because they have known her since she was a child and in Larache because they recognize in her the physiognomic characteristics of her maternal family: I’m telling you, it’s been a bubble, both here and there. There too, there too. And it’s based on the idea that Larache is like Ribes because we all look alike. Of course, because my uncle, my uncle is a mechanic, of course, all the taxi drivers go with him. It has happened to me that sometimes I get into a taxi, and they say to me: “Are you Ismael’s niece?” And I say: “Yes, yes” [laughs]. (Amorós Torró 2016, 345–46)

Laila’s story is much more present in the narrators’ accounts than the story of Ismael’s family. But forgetfulness, silence, or ignorance of paternal history are also bearers of meaning. The poverty of memories in relation to the father’s story is symbolically linked to the material poverty that Ismael experienced in his childhood and at the time of his arrival in Catalonia. This poverty



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lived in solitude participates in the narrative configuration of the figure of the father, who appears in the stories wrapped in a halo of heroism. His life is seen as an example that encourages them to live one’s own life with a strong spirit of self-improvement and autonomy, as Jawhara relates: “That phase of independence, of being alone and living alone, my mother has not experienced it. But my father did. Therefore, yes, I can feel that he can guide me more [. . .]. This idea of wanting to go somewhere by myself was not given to me by my mother, it was given to me by my father.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 381) If the father appears to us in the stories as a figure whose life example influences the way his children deal with daily and future challenges, Laila reveals herself to us as an understanding mother who maintains conversations about all kinds of topics with her children. It is to her that they tell their problems or concerns, a figure that appears as a continuous presence and dedication to the care of the family. The recognition of the work that their parents did so they did not have any material or affective deprivation is present in the position adopted by the children of the family and by Mourad, who feel they are heirs of an ethic of effort and a fight for wellbeing. The four have helped the family financially, taking responsibility whenever they could for their expenses, and all four are aware of the significance of their decision. Both Nawal and Mourad started working at the weekend at a young age, thus being able to combine work with studies. Nawal reveals in her story an attitude that began when she was young, that she maintains today, and that flows from her desire to be economically independent: In other words, when I went to the high school in Ripoll, I had already paid for transportation and food there. Because I already worked the weekend. But not because they told me. And from that moment on, it’s me alone . . . that someone supports me before I shoot myself, you know? I mean, I don’t like it, maybe because I’ve always been able to manage things alone. (Amorós Torró 2016, 383)

From her parents, but also from her brothers and her uncle, Jawhara has learned the value of work, she knows just like her brothers that it involves a necessary effort in pursuit of personal autonomy: “I work summers, and my mother told me so: ‘If you don’t feel like it, don’t do it.’ But I say: ‘Mom, it just doesn’t occur to me to spend the month of August doing nothing.’ Because I carry it inside that one has to work and earn a living.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 344) Despite the importance they attribute to work, and the acquisition of independence and economic autonomy, the parents of the family encouraged their children and Mourad to study and take advantage of the opportunities offered by the educational system. In a parental project that seeks success and social promotion, studying has been a priority: “My father is a person who has always told me: ‘Study, study, study, study.’ And, of course, it is something that

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I have very, very clear. Sometimes my father comes to me and says: ‘Thank you, Jawhara.’ Few parents say thank you for studying.” Both Jawhara and Nawal highlight in their stories the non-existence of differences between them, their brother, and their uncle regarding the support received by their parents to achieve their wishes and their respective life projects. The youngest of the sisters argues as follows: “Based on the fact that in my house there is no ‘that you are a boy, that you [are a girl].’ I have not encountered these problems of ‘no because you are a girl,’ that is not there.” I want to highlight, in addition to what was mentioned above, that the biographical position of a social and political nature adopted by the family members, with special relevance for the daughters. The stories of Nawal and Jawhara reveal their concern and interest in transforming the society in which they live through active citizen’s participation in the decisions and demands of the community. In their stories, we glimpse a dimension that goes beyond identity (which seeks to know who one is). It is a political dimension (which seeks to reappropriate the ability to define oneself), accompanied by a political-social conscience that is concerned with the realization of an alternative project of citizen coexistence that considers all forms of domination. We are, then, looking at biographical orientations that allow us to situate our narrators far from an introspective identity withdrawal and in line with an open sociopolitically committed attitude (Hajjat 2005, 72). But despite their militant attitude and their social commitment, they recognize that their participation in social entities has sometimes given them a feeling of impotence in relation to some issues that particularly concern them, for example, migration. This is how Jawhara tells us: You are always powerless, there are things that are unfair, and there are things that you have to fight for because you just can’t be locked up at home and wait for the world to improve. But I guess with the subject of politics or with the subject of immigration, if you work in immigration or anything like that, there is always something unfair. It’s like you always have to live with the feeling of impotence. (Amorós Torró 2016, 389)

THE TIME OF POSSIBLE FUTURES The biographical journeys that we undertake together with the narrators lead us through paths of the past, of the present, and through spaces and times of the future that have not yet been realized. The description of the family’s life experiences is not limited to what happened but goes beyond what has been lived and extends toward the representation of possible futures. In narratives, we can discover a retrospective reading but also a prospective reading of life,



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in which the memory of the past and the expectations of the future give meaning to the path traveled. In this section, I am especially interested in those passages that speak to us of a desired, expected, or unimagined future time, but also those practices that we identify in the present as carriers of transformations of times and spaces (also future ones) in which the social and intersubjective relationships of the narrators are inserted, such as, for example, the use of new technologies or the appreciation and learning of the language of origin. Taking the words of Delory-Momberger, one of the characteristics of modernity is the expansion, thanks to information and communication technologies, of our “individual topography” and the introduction of what she calls the “phenomenon of co-spatiality,” that is, “the ability to find oneself in the same time in relation to multiple distant spaces (what the telephone, the television or the Internet network allow us today)” (Delory-Momberger 2010, 55–56). In the case of our interlocutors, despite the geographical distance that exists between them and other family members living in Morocco, communication technologies have allowed them to maintain contact and even intensify their relationships (Gintsburg and Breeze 2022). The Internet and smartphones bring new forms to subjective time in relation to the new spatialities and mobilities offered by the virtual world. Nawal reflects on the use of mobile and computer applications. WhatsApp allows her to stay in touch with her cousins, with whom she would otherwise hardly establish a relationship. In this particular way, the family bond is also reinforced: It’s true, now I have a WhatsApp group with my two cousins, and my sister and I find out everything from them. Before, I would call: “Hello, how are you?” And if you feel like talking, very well, and if not, too. And, moreover, I wouldn’t call her. If I had to call, I would call my grandfather: “How are you?” I couldn’t call this cousin, now the other cousin because it would cost me a bunch. Now with WhatsApp, it’s great! [. . .] You see, with this technology, there is no harm that does not come for good. (Amorós Torró 2016, 304)

Mourad also recognizes the role of new communication technologies, highlighting the use of WhatsApp and Facebook with friends and neighbors from his childhood and adolescence, neighbors with whom he related when he spent summers in Larache and with whom he had practically lost contact. Thanks to WhatsApp, which allows one to send voice messages, Mourad can communicate with them in Arabic, in the same way, he did in presence: “Because there is a specific friend that I haven’t seen for perhaps fifteen years. And now I know that he lives in France, and well, we have WhatsApp, and we send each other audios. Audios, we don’t write because I don’t know how to write Arabic [. . .], but I record an audio and send it.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 392)

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Language is an instrument of socialization that allows us to build and participate in the cultural references of a community and create forms of emotional and symbolic exchange. The Arabic language is for Mourad, the language of his family and friends who live in Morocco, it is part of his family environment, it is a cultural heritage that belongs to him and in which he lives. But Moroccan Arabic is not the only language that Mourad considers his own, Catalan also became at an early age a “language of interiority,” as the Romanian writer Norman Manea calls his mother tongue (Manea 2008). Ismael finds refuge and company in his mother tongue, in its sounds, in the lyrics and music of the songs that he sings at moments in the story that show us his perseverance to move on, not to get lost, in a literal and figurative sense: “I’m singing, singing. I went by here, there, and I’m singing, and that’s it. It’s the same, I don’t care. I’m happy, that is, singing. I hardly worry about anything, no. Singing [. . .]. Singing in Arabic, like this.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 238) But the language of the future life, the language of life that begins with migration, is everywhere, especially in the first interactions that migrants carry out in their new environment. Catalan is mainly the language that surrounds Ismael and Laila in the village of Ribes, it is the language that they are told to learn, and this is the goal that they set themselves and that they end up achieving. Laila focused her efforts on learning Catalan, as she understood the need to master the “inner language” of the people that she lived with, which was also the language of correspondence and bills from the electricity, gas, or water: Carmen said: “Here we speak Catalan and you have to speak Catalan.” And they were the ones who taught me: “Raa-bbit.” And I took the paper and I [wrote] “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.” [. . .] and since it was the same as French it was not difficult for me, but of course, writing . . . I was interested in writing Catalan because I thought, “the letters will arrive, electricity bills, water bills” [. . .]. Then, this [Ismael], on Saturdays, for example, in the afternoon, he took the radio cassette, we went to buy a tape, and we recorded [. . .]. He would record it on a radio cassette, and I would listen to it. (Amorós Torró 2016, 254)

Little by little, Catalan is finding its place as an “internal language” or “home language,” from the establishment of meeting points between the mother tongue and the new language, which end up interacting with each other, to revealing one through the other, when the border that existed between the language of interiority and that of the new life, that of migration, finally becomes permeable (Manea 2008, 46–47). The linguistic heritage of migrants is enriched by the new languages they learn, which they end up internalizing and considering as their own. Thanks to this learning, the effects of migration are mitigated, the feeling of uprooting is softened, and the



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understanding and acceptance of the situation that is experienced far from the place where one was born are consolidated, that is, the migrant’s destiny itself is accepted. Ismael and Laila were interested from the beginning in ensuring that their children and Mourad learned Moroccan Arabic. Both Nawal and Mourad remember the summers they lived in Morocco when a teacher gave them language lessons, even though they craved moments of fun. The parents of the family hoped that the summer days spent in Larache in the company of the rest of the family members would serve them to practice and perfect the family language that in Ribes had been relegated to the language of the house, where little by little it had also been losing its presence. Nawal recalls his stay in Morocco with the following words: “I used to go there four months a year [. . .]. I mean, I’ve lived it. I have studied. In the morning we had a teacher who would come home and give us classes, and then in the afternoon she would go out into the street.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 303) Jawhara stresses the role of the father in maintaining the language of origin within the family. Ismael’s linguistic awareness, fueled by the affective ties he built with his mother tongue and by the impossibility of using it in his daily life outside the family environment, is reflected in the concern he has shown for his children not to stop practicing it, because Moroccan Arabic also became, along with Catalan, his inner language: “I remember my father always: ‘Speak Arabic!’ I think that by inertia, we already speak Catalan, it comes out. My parents speak Arabic among themselves, but with us now, it’s like they have to change their minds.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 397) If the language of the future life, of the new existence in migration, was Catalan for Ismael and Laila, the language of the future, of the generational time that is projected toward the descendants, is Arabic for Nawal, Mourad, and Jawhara. The three share the wish that in the future, their children will speak Arabic. This fact could even condition, in the case of Jawhara, the choice of a place of residence or a partner and future father of her children. The fact that the couple speaks Arabic, although it does not fully determine their choice, does appear in their story as an important aspect to consider: I think I need to go and live there longer because after all I know Morocco from summers and now I haven’t been there for a long time. [. . .] I am very interested in conserving the language, speaking the language, I really like watching TV. And, of course, preserving the language is very important to me, and sometimes I think that I can’t imagine having children who don’t speak Arabic, and sometimes I think, damn it, that I can’t imagine having a partner who isn’t Arab, but you say, let’s see, you say, you never know, and if it’s Chinese, what happens? right? (Amorós Torró 2016, 335–36)

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Ylias, unlike his sisters and his uncle Mourad, has not felt the need to speak and learn Arabic. He emphasizes the fact that he was the only one in the family who has always spoken Catalan. This position regarding the language of his origins, which is approached in his narration from a more utilitarian than affective vision, is reflected in the words reproduced below: At home, I have been the only one who has always spoken Catalan, always. I have not given much importance to the language issue of speaking Arabic. Sometimes I have thought, “holy hell, it would be interesting if you learned it,” but not because of the family issue, but because of having a language and having a resource within a curriculum. (Amorós Torró 2016, 325)

A major theme that appears in the accounts of people who have experienced migration and is related to their future projection is the idea of returning to the country of origin. As pointed out by Abdelmalek Sayad in his magnificent book, the question of return is a constitutive element of the migratory phenomenon. For the Algerian author, the return is intrinsically present in the very terms “emigration” and “immigration.” In his words, “return is naturally the desire and the dream of all immigrants” (Sayad 1998/2006, 139). But the dream of returning, even contained in the act of migrating, is not always fulfilled. Migration also includes the illusory possibility that upon returning to the country of origin, the migrant will find it just as he left it at the time of departure. Some authors speak of the “myth of return” that every person who emigrates conveys. The sociologist and poet Habib Tengour confirms, in a study based on a qualitative approach about old age in exile, the preference of immigrants of Algerian origin who live alone to grow old in the country of destination despite the effects that ġorba produces or produced on them (Tengour 2009, 161). This Arabic word is used by migrants of North African origin to refer to exile, emigration, or the feeling of absence, loneliness, and longing abroad. The passage of time during life in migration forces emigrants to rethink their relationship with their country of origin, a redefinition that they constantly carry out. Learning a new language also plays, as we saw previously, an important role in accepting the situation of rupture that any migration entails, which necessarily leads to the search for and construction of a future far from the family of origin. In Laila’s following words we sense the reflection that she has carried out about the effects of the passage of time on the perception of the course of a life marked by migration: Right now in Morocco . . . I came here when I was eighteen years old, what I lived in Morocco was childhood, that one hardly has . . . we don’t really have



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much memory about it. When you start to be you, and you think for yourself, I think, from eighteen years old onwards, you start to make your [decisions]. And I’ve been here for thirty-three. And I think, “let’s see, now how do I think about it?” (Amorós Torró 2016, 401)

The immigrant ceases to be one when others and himself stop calling him that; the disappearance of this label greatly mitigates the question of return. The migrant returns, however, according to their possibilities and the conditions in which they live in the place where the residence is established, where life and community are lived; they return as a “person who is on vacation,” and in doing so they find a world of strangeness (Sayad 1999/2010, 83). Mourad observes the great change that Larache has undergone compared to the city where his sister and brother-in-law lived. According to Mourad, this is one of the main reasons that would make his return difficult: I think that Morocco has changed so much, it is not the Morocco of when they lived there. And I think they wouldn’t know how to live there now [. . .]. So maybe they would go down, they would be there for a month, and they would end up getting tired and go up again. Because Larache has changed, it has changed a lot, it has become a very large city with many people. (Amorós Torró 2016, 401)

In migration narratives, space plays a central role; time, on the other hand, becomes intangible or sometimes appears as a background to the accounts (Gintsburg and Breeze 2022, 139). The return can be thought of as a return to the past, a return to the time before migration. The return, therefore, plays a retrospective role in memory. Unlike time, the space to which subjective migrants return corresponds geographically to the same place from which one day they have left; but the places and people who practice them, who make them concrete, lived spaces full of emotion, have changed over time and it is impossible to return to them in the state they were before the departure. Space, then, becomes part of “imaginary spaces,” the space of the ancestors charged with affectivity that are clearly differentiated from the “real space” of migrant’s daily lives (Tengour 2009, 163). Laila cannot avoid evoking those who are no longer there when she returns to Larache, it is a whole generation that she does not find upon her arrival, whose absence causes her great loneliness every time she returns to the bustling family home of before: “I will go down whenever I can and if I can. And if I can’t, I’ll also try to go down, but I’ll always find a void. And that goes a long way.” (Amorós Torró 2016, 264) The “myth of return” would not, then, refer to a possible return to the place of departure, but to a return in time, to an impossible return to the past. Contrasting but complementary to nostalgia, there is also a feeling of disappointment for those who have migrated when they discover on their return to the

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country of origin the action of time on the people they left behind. But, above all, there is a disappointment when discovering in themselves the effects of distance, of living life elsewhere. Their daughter Nawal observes and understands the difficulties that a return to Morocco could entail for her parents, the effort that it would entail for them to have to adapt to a new environment and build a new home in it: “My parents had always said that when they retired, they would go to Morocco, well, look, here they are. Now they are more from here than from there. I think that there comes an age when one is already tired of fighting with the world, right? And now, at this age, what do you want?” (Amorós Torró 2016, 404) One issue that is related to the return is the construction of a house in the country of origin. Unlike other families of Moroccan origin, the parents of this family have not built a house in Morocco. The construction of a house continues to symbolize, for many, the materialization of a link with the land of their ancestors (Berriane 2004, 25). Even if they remain vacant, the houses take on affective qualities and have the capacity to convey a sense of belonging to their country of origin (Coe 2022, 15). The family house, even if it is not built, exists potentially and in the imagination of the father of the family, who, throughout his life and thanks to his work, has been able to put it together piece by piece. Morocco’s house is contained in his garage in Ribes but may never see the light of day. Nawal tells us as follows: My father has spent his whole life, but his whole life buying materials to build his house in Morocco. My father has always wanted. He said: “I will build the house myself. I’ll take three, four guys to help me, and I’ll build the house myself.” Well, there it is in the garage, but you have taps to mount three cases, light installation, gas installation, everything! He even has scaffolding because when his company closed, the boss told him: “Look, I have this. Do you want something?” My father went and took a scaffold. It has everything, the only thing it doesn’t have is sand, which is cheap there. It has bricks, and it has parquet, it has everything. He has the house, but it’s not on. (Amorós Torró 2016, 407)

This sequence of the story appears to us as a powerful metaphor for the omnipresence of the idea of return in emigrants but also for the improbability of its realization. The strong ties that emigrants establish with their place of destination unite them inevitably with it, especially when their children and grandchildren are born there.



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CONCLUSION The monographic study of the family from a multicentric perspective makes it possible to bring together in the analysis the common themes present in the narratives. It also shows those processes in which all family members have been protagonists or observers. These are “crossed life stories” (Pujadas 1992), where the members of the family explain the same event often differently and according to their own interpretations, thus embracing the “dialectical interaction” that determines the specific life of the family, understood here as the “primary group” of biographical research (Ferrarotti 2003, 22). Hence, each one of the narrators interprets their experiences and integrates them into a unique and singular life story; but all have their memories intertwining with the past, present and future of the rest of the family. The biographical and family dimension of migration is present in all of them, and this emerges with all its inter-relational richness thanks to the multivocal representation of family history. In this family, the analysis of the life stories reveals that parents developed a protective attitude toward the children so they would not feel different because of their Moroccan origins, but rather feel part of the Catalan village where they lived. Consequently, the children gained strategies of resistance to face difficult and unfair situations. The strategic resources they acquired (open, reflective, and resilient attitudes), conform their “capital of biographical experience,” as defined by Delcroix (2013), which has been passed down in the family through word and practice. It is the result of shared past experiences and engaging in joint reflection that serves as a transmitter of family memory, which influenced their biographical positions and actions so that the experience of parental migration has been internalized and apprehended as a positive biographical resource for coping with everyday situations. NOTES 1.  To preserve the narrators’ privacy, their real names are not shown and pseudonyms are given instead, which in many cases were chosen by the narrators themselves. 2. Quotations in other languages, both from bibliography and narrators, were translated into English by the author of this chapter.

REFERENCES Amorós Torró, Marta. 2016. “En busca del tempo y del espacio recobrados. Una investigación biográfica a partir de relatos de vida y migración de una familia de

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origen marroquí del Pirineo catalán.” PhD diss., University of Girona. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10803/456185 [24/05/2023]. Berriane, Mohamed. 2004. “La larga historia de las migraciones marroquíes.” In Atlas 2004 de la inmigración magrebí en España, edited by López García and Mohamed Berriane, 24–26. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Bertaux, Daniel. 1997/2005 Los relatos de vida: Perspectiva etnosociológica. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle. 1988. “Des formes et des usages: Histoires de famille.” L’Homme et la Société, 90: 25–35. https://doi.org/10.3406/homso.1988.2364. Coe, Cati. 2022. “Settling Out of Place: Narratives of Housing and Strategies of Aging by a Ghanaian Migrant in the United States.” In Narrating migrations from Africa and the Middle East: a spatio-temporal approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 15–28. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Delcroix, Catherine. 2013. Ombres et lumières de la famille Nour: Comment certains résistent face à la précarité. Paris: Payot & Rivages. Delory-Momberger, Christine. 2010. La condition biographique: Essais sur le récit de soi dans lamodernité avancée. Paris: Téraèdre. Ferrarotti, Franco. 1981. “On the Autonomy of the Biographical Method.” In Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, edited by Daniel Bertaux, 19–27. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Ferrarotti, Franco. 2003. On the Science of Uncertainty: The Biographical Method in Social Research. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gintsburg, Sarali and Ruth Breeze. 2022. “Circumscribed transnational spaces: Moroccan immigrant women in rural Spain.” In Narrating migrations from Africa and the Middle East: a spatio-temporal approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 121–42. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hajjat, Abdellali. 2005. Immigration postcoloniale et mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lewis, Oscar. 1961. The Children of Sanchez. Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House. Manea, Norman. 2008. La llengua nòmada. Barcelona: Arcàdia. Muxel, Anne. 2007. Individu et mémoire familiale. Paris: Hachette. Pujadas, Joan Josep. 1992. El método biográfico: el uso de las historias de vida en ciencias sociales. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1999/2010. La doble ausencia. De las ilusiones del emigrado a los padecimientos del inmigrado. Rubí: Anthropos. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1998/2006. L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité: L’illusion du provisoire. Paris: Raisons d’agir.

Chapter Five

Finding the Voice Positioning in African Diaspora Media Ruth Breeze

For migrant diaspora communities everywhere, the discursive formulation of their identity and presence in their current surroundings and their articulation with mainstream identities or groups present something of a dilemma. Individuals and groups may seek to position themselves as aligned with the host culture in every respect, but this may prove problematic because that community may choose to position the incomers otherwise, offering them only subservient positions and outsider roles. On other occasions, the minority community may seek to define its own position, and thereby come into conflict with the social expectations of mainstream society. For people of African and African-Caribbean origin in the United Kingdom, the issue of chosen and imposed positions has been a site of struggle over the last half-century, and still gives rise to controversy (Lam and Smith 2009; Maxwell 2009). Arguably, the African (including African-Caribbean) diaspora media have played a particularly important role in raising awareness among Black communities in the United Kingdom, helping to empower people from this background by proposing positive identities and new articulations with the mainstream culture. This chapter looks at one successful African diaspora online magazine that is produced and consumed in the United Kingdom, namely The Voice. Launched forty years ago, The Voice is a London-based national magazine published monthly in a paper version and also available online. It targets a mainly African-Caribbean readership, and so from the outset its positioning is rather complex: its audience represents a kind of double diaspora, that is, people whose ancestors were displaced first from West Africa to Jamaica and other islands, and then from this area to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. In this chapter, positioning theory will be used to explore how the journalists, feature-writers, and interviewees in recent editions of The Voice position themselves with regard to the West Indies, Africa and Britain, both in their 109

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celebration of the “Black British” identity, their assertion of difference and diversity, their adoption of forms of cultural hybridity, and their alignments with other minority groups. However, it will also trace the legacy of other forced positionings that can be accessed through the articles, particularly the recollections of the Windrush generation, experiences of racial prejudice, and sinister historical memories of slavery. My conclusions will bring out the challenges that are intrinsic to this process of renegotiating social positions and draw parallels with other situations in which minorities have sought to reposition themselves. DISCURSIVE APPROACHES TO POSITIONING The notion of “positioning” has its origins in Goffman’s approach to social psychology, and its evident symbiosis with notions of discourse and identity has given rise to a productive line of enquiry within discourse studies. Quite aside from the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the human person, it is uncontroversial to say that in different kinds of social interaction people present certain images of themselves, and this self-presentation amounts to a kind of performance executed through language and other semiotic systems, in which people align themselves with other (present or imagined) participants (Goffman 1959). Early in his career, Goffman explored the concept of self as performer: when individuals are in the presence of others, they will tend to say and do things that (they think) those others will understand and expect. Performers act in relation to a (real or imagined) audience, which both understands and assesses their performance. In this understanding, different forms of self-presentation are available, and the alignments we take up at any given moment vis-à-vis other possible positions are understood, in Goffman’s own terms, as “footings.” Goffman (1981) defines footing as “the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance” (128). However, it is also important to note that in Goffman’s view, our possible footings are constrained by the alignments available to us and the normative conduct associated with these. In interaction, people display themselves in respect to others, so if they want to project a certain image, they must “realize other people’s conceptions of what that image entails” (Marinova 2004). In a similar approach to human interaction, Rom Harré and associates subsequently developed their Positioning Theory, which proposes that to understand why people act as they do, we need to look at what they can do according to the prevalent order in their environment and the social positions



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that are available in that order (Davies and Harré 1990; Van Langenhove 2020). “Positions” can also be understood as reflecting the clusters of beliefs that people have with respect to their rights and duties to act in certain ways (Van Langenhove 2011), while the action of “positioning” refers to the processes of assigning, appropriating, or rejecting particular positions (Van Langenhove 2020). In this understanding, every position someone adopts both opens and closes possible routes of action. For their part, Davies and Harré (1999) take one step away from the notion of conventions ruling interaction, adopting the radical immanentist view that people position themselves freely, but that their interactions also have a special dynamic, so that participants become involved “in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines” (37). People take on certain roles in the story, but they can also change or reject them as the story progresses. However, their immanentism shows a certain porosity, because they also concede that wider social factors (knowledge of what has already happened and what people may expect) probably have a bearing on the way people opt to position themselves. Both approaches, then, focus on how people perform or “produce” themselves in interaction, and allow for the influence of wider phenomena (expectations, histories, roles) on this, but while Goffman places more emphasis on the way participants’ performances are shaped by situational constraints, Davies and Harré take the immanentist view that the individual emerges through the process of social interaction. Here, a combination of these two approaches will be used, for two reasons. First, and importantly for this paper, it was Goffman (1981) who suggested that examination of linguistic cues can provide a key to understanding the “footing” that people take up in a given situation: in other words, through their engagement in discursive social practices, people actively contest and renegotiate the positions offered to them to construct new identities that may gain social recognition over time (Kayi-Aydar and Steadman 2021). In Harré’s terminology, we could say that people’s discursive constructions of themselves, others, and the relations between groups are the key to understanding both passive and active aspects of their social “positioning.” As Smith (2019) explains, “individuals may decide to respond positively or negatively to being positioned by a local context in a given way based on whether they believe they have claims to certain rights or to duties as governed by their moral reasoning at a given time,” and in our understanding, they may accept an imposed social positioning, or reject it and agentively reposition themselves on the social stage. Analysis of this in action affords insights into the way identities are constructed, affirmed, and reconfigured through positioning processes within which discourse plays a central role (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; de Fina et al. 2006). Second, since this

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chapter focuses on media texts, Goffman’s emphasis on social conventions and alignments is particularly relevant. Not only are news articles, interview, videos, and so on, all highly constrained by the conventions of the genres to which they belong, but the writers/composers of these media artefacts are also fully aware of the possibilities that are socially available to them and the limits of what in Goffman’s terms could be called the “ratification” of their right to write. For both these reasons, the analysis that follows will use the terminology of “positioning” with its radical-immanentist undertones, while also taking a Goffmanian view of the importance of social and discursive practices in configuring and reproducing identities. The question of media production processes brings us to another important aspect of Goffman’s model, namely the realization that in many instances, in a basic sense, there is more than one “author” at work. His division between the “principal” (the producer of a TV program), the “author” (or screenwriter), and the “animator” (who does the talking, that is, produces the words that we hear), is often used to tease out different strands in the interaction. In his scheme, the principal is the editor who decides whether a text can be published in the magazine. The editor in some sense “represents” the constraining factors listed by van Dijk (1988) (i.e., professional, ethical, social, economic, conjunctural constraints) that shape what can be understood to be “publishable” in a given newspaper or magazine (Breeze 2015). On the other hand, the author is the writer him/herself. However, we should note that news articles are generally polyphonic, in that they present not only an overall narrative composed by the author but re-present words that others have originally produced in writing or speech (or are supposed to have produced) (Ducrot 1986, see also Breeze 2016; Breeze and Olza 2017). In terms combining Ducrot (1986, 157) with Goffman, the author has a second role as animator (“locutor”), who holds the microphone, so to speak, for other speakers, yet also controls the way their words are reproduced in the text. As de Lucas Vicente (2014) points out, in the kind of reported speech found in news media, the animator/author is ostensibly not responsible for the words reported, and all the responsibility rests with the interviewee. Of course, the extent to which the quotations are literally what the interviewee has said, or even an approximation towards this, is doubtful (see de Lucas Vicente 2014), but there is an implicit pact with the reader that makes it appear that this is so, and in 99 percent of cases this is never questioned. As Waugh (1995, 156) puts it, the original and the direct speech rendition are evaluated by the reporter (and the reader) as functional equivalents, as two tokens of the same type. The fact that quotations are (almost) never exact, verbatim renderings is irrelevant. They should merely “suggest that they are true, hence their rhetorical function and effect” (van Dijk 1988, 87). In the present context, then, the



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polyphony of media texts and the different levels of “authorship” present will also be borne in mind, particular in the analysis of media articles that present multiple voices. TEXTUAL MATERIAL AND METHODOLOGY The Voice was founded in 1982 and is based in London. Originally a paperbased weekly, it is now a monthly print magazine, but has a large online readership. It mainly targets the African-Caribbean community in the United Kingdom, but devotes space to other African diaspora communities, as well as to news from the African continent. The magazine particularly came to the notice of non-Caribbean and non-African readers in 2022 when (the then) Prince Charles was invited to contribute to its fortieth-anniversary edition. The contents of the online edition cover a wide range of subject areas. UK news centers on events happening in or relevant to the target community. World news is largely from the West Indies, Africa, and the United States. A large section of human-interest stories focuses on achievement of community members, often in the face of adversity, as well as on precarity and experiences with various forms of racism and perceived threats to parts of the community. The large sport section has articles on football, boxing, athletics, tennis, and the Commonwealth Games, with a particular focus on sportspeople from the target community. Feature articles highlight topics such as black beauty (particularly hair), and Caribbean and African music, food, and traditions. A “relationships” section features regular contributions on “community heroes” and “making black love last.” Opinion articles discuss general themes such as identity loss among “British Caribbeans” or address topical issues such as the need for more members of the reader community to donate blood. A qualitative discourse analysis procedure was carried out to explore the positions adopted and represented in the articles from five sections of the magazine, namely news, human interest, sport, culture, and opinion. This involved a critical reading and re-reading of the articles published on the magazine site from September 2022 to February 2023, with particular attention to the way the writers positioned themselves and the protagonists of their articles, and the positions taken up by those interviewed in the articles. The positions identified were grouped together through a process of thematic analysis, and representative examples were chosen to illustrate the different positions. Since the positions identified were substantially different in the five sections chosen, in what follows each section will be discussed separately using one representative article as a case study, and the findings will be compared in the discussion at the end.

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FINDINGS Positioning in News News items reported in The Voice are often presented from a characteristic perspective: not only do news articles mainly focus on the African and African-Caribbean community, but links between the Caribbean and Africa are frequently celebrated, with allusion to a shared historical memory and a desire for future collaboration. In this context, the article “First commercial flight from Africa to Caribbean lands in Antigua,” about the launching of commercial flights from Lagos to Antigua, provides a typical instance of this positioning. By foregrounding the relationship between countries that have links with Africa, the writer is taking up a distinct position that differs from what would usually be found in the mainstream British media. None the less, we should note that this headline is couched in neutral terms, following the convention whereby the news value of “novelty” (here encapsulated in the idea that this is the “first” flight of this kind) is enough to make an item newsworthy. Significantly, this rather neutral headline is followed by the subheading “PM of Antigua and Barbuda hailed historic flight just hours before the momentous take-off,” in which the writer appears to position themselves alongside the Prime Minister, reporting his statement using evaluative adjectives to adopt a celebratory position (“historic,” “momentous”). In the lead, the story is then formulated boldly by the writer as a groundbreaking event, “Antigua and Barbuda made history as it welcomed its first-ever commercial flight from Africa to the Caribbean” (Mahon 2022). The expressions “made history” and “first-ever,” with the positive connotations of “welcomed” clearly align the journalist and magazine with the view that this new link between the Caribbean and Africa is a piece of exceptionally good news. The celebratory tone is maintained through use of quotations in a similar vein from various participants. The third sentence adds a further nuance by citing the words of the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, who celebrates the new route as a triumph against unspecific “critics” (see Breeze 2016), that is, as a victory against adversity: The Prime Minister of A&B, Gaston Browne, boasted just hours earlier that critics said that flight “could not be done.” “Once again, they were proven wrong. Antigua Airways lands tomorrow!” he wrote on Facebook. (Mahon 2022)

Later in the text, some other statements are cited that add a further dimension to the event. Here, the journalist steps back into the familiar “reporting voice” (White 2012) of English-language news reporting, attributing evaluative statements to participants in the event, rather than taking writerly responsibility for what is said:



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Minister Fernandez and Minister Greene both called for creating deeper links with Nigeria and the continent, because of their shared history in the transAtlantic slave trade. They said that “although our ancestors were once forced to travel to these waters, many will now get the chance to do so freely while rebuilding both nations’ economies that were impaired by the Covid-19 pandemic.” (Mahon 2022)

The fact that The Voice’s journalist aligns with African and CaribbeanAfrican positioning in this way is in itself significant. It is clear that Africa figures as a major protagonist in this story, in which echoes of past traumas combine with hopes for future reconciliation and renewal in the knowledge of shared bonds. At the same time, the writer follows many of the conventions of “neutral” news reporting, frequently preferring to put evaluative utterances in the mouths of the protagonists. Significantly, though, in the closing segment of the article, the journalist goes some way to realigning the neutral reporter voice with the theme of “strengthening links with Africa,” mentioning that this new flight is “reported to be a major step forward”: a formulation that both conveys an upbeat evaluation of the situation (“major step forward”) with a conventional acknowledgement of the reporter role as a presenter of facts rather than an evaluator of contents. As White (2012) convincingly argues, although the conventions of mainstream serious English-language news reporting require the journalist to appear to stand back from the events and report them objectively (Breeze 2016), at the same time they allow the journalist certain license to impose their particular vision of those events. One way this can be done is through framing effects exerted by the choice of headline and lead. In the case at hand, we can say that particularly through the subheading, the writer offers a positive framing of the event and predisposes the reader favorably toward what is happening. Importantly, though, the meaning of this relationship is given evaluative emotional color by the strategic use of a second important resource at the journalist’s disposal, namely the use of (purportedly) direct quotations from participants. In this case, the journalist uses the voices of prestigious participants, represented as members of the same wider in-group of people with an interest in Africa to which the readers are assumed to belong. The distinct “voices” quoted not only add color and authenticity to the text, but even more importantly give the sensation that people with some credibility are also excited by this development. Moreover, the direct quotations ascribed to them have the important function of allowing the writer to situate this event in two wider, interrelated frameworks: that of visionary minorities triumphing against “critics,” and that of the restoration of historical bonds between the Caribbean and Africa. The take-home message that past tragedy can give way to future healing and reconciliation is conveyed clearly in a way that readers are

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likely to appreciate. Nonetheless, we should note that in the classic tradition of English-language news journalism (White 2012), the most striking or “risky” positions are represented by the voices of actors in the text, rather than by the writer him/herself: the actual journalist here acts as “animator,” that is, uses the words attributed to actors to create an evaluative effect while simultaneously preserving an air of objectivity and evading full responsibility for what is said. Positioning in Features Many feature articles published in The Voice take as their subject people of Caribbean-African or African origin who have been successful in life, often defying stereotypes to achieve their ambitions. The master-narrative of “rags to riches” is thus retold with many variations, mostly from the position of disadvantage arising out of the poverty associated with migration and/or the position of underprivilege resulting from non-mainstream ethnic origins and/ or the encounter with unhelpful social attitudes. One such article is presented with the headline “The Black Farmer: ‘The moment you operate outside a stereotype, it confuses people,’” and tells the story of Wilfred EmmanuelJones who moved as a boy from rural Jamaica to Birmingham, and eventually managed to attain his goal of owning farmland and creating his own Jamaican sausage brand. The conventions of feature writing allow more freedom to the journalist in terms of license to use evaluative language or position him/herself positively toward the subject (Sanders 2010). Positioning himself alongside the protagonist of his article, the journalist articulates the story around the narrative that “while [Wilfred]’s rags-to-riches success story is inspirational, he doesn’t want other black people to face the same barriers he did.” In other words, not only is it clear that the writer positions himself alongside the protagonist, admiring him as an exemplar, but he simultaneously holds up his story as both an inspiration and a lesson for the future. One man’s triumph is encapsulated within a wider narrative about how society must change so that other people will not have to struggle so hard. Importantly for this narrative, the protagonist himself is reported as rejecting the marginal position imposed on him by social expectations. As the present author has discussed elsewhere (Breeze 2016), the implicit presentation of antagonistic positions is an integral component of media messages in the UK context. For example, Wilfred is keen to refuse the notion that he is producing “ethnic” food. He himself says that by the very act of claiming a mainstream position, he arouses suspicion: “The moment you operate outside a stereotype, it confuses people.” If we read between the lines, the writer leaves us in no doubt that it is precisely the willingness to embrace this contradiction that is potentially liberating.

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In general, the journalist leaves most of the more defiant words in the mouth of the protagonist, who positions himself defiantly as a pioneering figure, strongly encouraging other members of his community to follow suit, “for black entrepreneurs wanting to follow in his footsteps, he has this to say: ‘Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting to be accepted, it ain’t going to happen’” (Francis, 2020). He adds that he wants people to realize that there is no helping hand when it comes to bringing about the change that is needed— but he believes there is untapped potential within the Black community. “What I think is that we as black people have to come to terms with is that we have power and we should be utilising that power a lot more than we have done in the past,” he says. (Francis 2020)

However, at the same time, the journalist’s evaluation of Emmanuel-Jones as “inspirational” and “ambitious” clearly aligns him (and by implication the readers) with that position. Interestingly, a dichotomy is established in the text between “black farmers” and “white people” and between “black customers” and “big supermarkets,” in which the writer clearly positions himself and the readers on the side of the underdog. Yet, importantly, Emmanuel-Jones refuses to let his business endeavors be classified as “ethnic” and assigned to the bottom shelf, aspiring to being “mainstream British”: I do not want to be categorised as an “ethnic” brand because what happens is that you get stuck down in the bottom shelf . . . I said the first thing I want to do is I want to be a mainstream British brand—that in itself is a big challenge. (Francis 2020)

Arguably, this positioning as a (de facto) underdog who aspires to be a mainstream player reveals one of the significant tensions in the way ethnic minorities position themselves and are positioned by others: by asserting difference, they often relegate themselves to minority positions, while by asserting alignment with mainstream positions, they run the risk of sacrificing part of their identity. In this case, the “Jamaican” identity is not brought into the foreground, being rather subsumed into a “black” identity that is, by default, British, and that aspires to recognition as such on an equal footing. Positioning in Sport The sport section of The Voice contains subsections focusing on the Commonwealth Games, football, athletics, boxing, motoring, and tennis. As well as reports on hiring and firing, team performance and ongoing championships, there is a considerable focus on combatting racism and sexism in sport, and on the triumph of non-white sportspeople in the face of adversity. One such

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article is “Whisper it! Reggae Boy Dujuan Richards signs for Chelsea,” in which the rise of a Jamaican player is celebrated in the subheading as “This is history made and an accomplishment never seen before at this high a level of a club. From little Phoenix in Jamaica to the mighty Chelsea.” The writer’s general positioning in this article is rather similar to that found in the news article analyzed above. Although the headline and subheading are distinctly celebratory in tone, making use of colorful emotive language to attract the readers’ attention, the actual text itself is presented in the more cautious “reporter voice” (White 2012), purporting to offer a neutral position towards the same event. This neutrality, however, is punctured by direct quotations from participants, whose positioning is clearly partisan. In this case, the quotation is a literal one, extracted from a social media post by the Jamaican team’s manager, Craig Butler: Butler posted: “History has been made. The Phoenix All-Stars Football Academy is proud to announce that Dujuan ‘Whisper’ Richards, who has been with us since 12 years old, has put pen to paper and signed his pre-contract with Chelsea FC in England and will be plying his trade in the Premier League.” (Harley-Rudd 2023)

This post goes on in similar vein, to say: We’re proud of the people of Jamaica who believed in Whisper, in Phoenix, and in our country’s ability to produce, if only we are willing to work hard, smart, and are committed to excellence. [. . .] This is history made and an accomplishment never seen before at this high a level of a club. From little Phoenix in Jamaica to the mighty Chelsea. (Harley-Rudd 2023)

If we examine this position in more depth, we can observe that in the social media posts, the player’s success is presented as a triumph for Jamaica, but also as a success that has been earned by hard work and commitment. At the same time, by extracting and reproducing this entire post, the journalist responsible for the article is implicitly allowing the post writer’s position to become the dominant one that determines the way readers will experience the text (Breeze 2016). The journalist’s role as “animator” thus enables them to present a celebratory text while appearing to adopt the conventional position of journalistic objectivity towards the facts of the story. Positioning in Lifestyle The lifestyle section offers a range of feature articles grouped together loosely under the headings of fashion and beauty, food, health and well-being, relationships, and travel. In different ways in these sections, The Voice addresses the sense of difference experienced by members of the target community and



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discusses topics that are evidently considered to be of particular relevance to them, such as health conditions that are frequent in these ethnic groups, or aesthetic questions such as how to care for Afro hair. It also provides specific fashion tips for people of ethnic background, gives advice on relationships, and publishes recipes with an ethnic flavor, usually from a Caribbean, African, or Middle Eastern tradition. One article that combines several of the characteristic positions found in this section is an article titled “Pageant aims to make black British women ‘proud of African culture,’” which presents to readers the “Miss Adanma Pageant International, a ‘non-bikini cultural and beauty pageant-with-a-purpose’” which “will highlight African women’s role in preserving culture.” The positioning in this article is particularly interesting, because the starting point is Continental African, but phrased as offering an open door to “black Britons of Caribbean heritage,” acknowledged as people who share a common history. Contestants in the pageant, are mostly young women who have African heritage. However Adimora is hoping that black Britons of Caribbean heritage will also attend the event. (Motune 2020)

Moreover, the positioning adopted by the organizer is clearly positive, to promote African identity, values, and culture, and to invite all those with African roots to do the same: She told The Voice: “This is all about the younger generation of African girls here in the UK. We hope that the Miss Adanma Pageant International will result in a restored sense of identity and belonging, a heightened awareness of their cultural heritage and a renewed pride in their unique African beauty.” (Motune 2020)

This positive positioning concerning Africa is explicitly placed in counterpoint to negative media reporting on the continent which the organizer hopes to counteract: Miss Adanma is our contribution especially to the younger generation to show the positive side of Africa. The innate beauty of the African woman combined with her unique heritage is something that we can proudly and regularly celebrate and promote. (Motune 2020)

In this case, as with the feature article above, the journalist clearly aligns himself with the main protagonist of the story, largely reproducing or paraphrasing her words without adopting a stance towards them. Although the event described implicitly criticizes traditional western beauty competitions and subtly challenges some western concepts of female beauty (this is emphasized

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as a “non-bikini” event that has a “purpose” and celebrates “cultural heritage” and “identity”), no explicit comparisons are drawn. The reporting could be described as bland, limited to representing the organizer’s intentions. What is perhaps most interesting about this article is the way that the African identity is presented as a source of particular pride, while African heritage is something to “celebrate and promote,” and these assets are offered by Africans to “the wider black community” as shared cultural capital. The implicature present throughout this article is that the mainstream British culture, and the Western culture that shapes “typical” beauty contests and by implication, conceptualizations of femininity and female attractiveness, are inappropriate for Africans—and explicitly also for “Black Britons of Caribbean heritage.” By asserting the value of an alternative, in which “traditional fashion, dance, music, folk tale, language, food and song” are celebrated, the organizer of this event calls on Black women to realign themselves with African values, which will “restore” their sense of identity and belonging. Positioning in Opinion The article by Barbara Blake Hannah, published under the headline “I am African. I am Jamaican. I am British,” presents an explicitly personal stance to recent issues facing the African-Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom. Since this is an opinion article, it would be expected that the text should adopt a clear position to the topics under discussion, since opinion writers are not bound by the conventions of news reporting (see Breeze 2015, 2016, on the ways alternative voices are presented in opinion writing in the UK press). In this section, I endeavor to trace the positioning in Barbara Blake-Hannah’s piece, and relate it to the themes of African, Jamaican, and British identity that are under discussion here. As the headline suggests, this writer lays claim to all three identities mentioned, but it is only the last of these that is posed as problematic, through the particular stress that is given to it in the subheading: “We are British. It’s our birth right and it’s the only thing Britain has given us as reparations for the cruel history of slavery.” In other words, the emphatic assertion of this third identity suggests that this may be problematic and requires further negotiation, while the other two identities are taken for granted. In the course of the text, it transpires that the writer spent only ten years of her life in Britain, in the 1960s, “which ended when I became tired of British racism and having to pretend that it didn’t matter, and returned to my early home.” It turns out that she had worked as Britain’s first Black TV journalist in the 1960s, but had lost her job because of racist pressure, an incident that she describes as “a cruel, bitter moment of my British life.” This came



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to the public attention fifty years after the event, when the UK Press Gazette created an award for Black journalists in her name. She links the media attention that surrounded the launch of this award in 2021 to the Black Lives Matter movement, thus positioning her personal trajectory within the broader international perspective. The writer then goes on to explicate her position towards Britain in historical terms, situating her own experience of racism and Britain as a “cruel ‘mother’” alongside the history of (British-run) slavery and brutal exploitation in the Caribbean. This in turn is linked to the Windrush deportations of the twenty-first century, through which people of Caribbean origin who had spent most of their lives in the United Kingdom were sent “back” owing to inadequate paperwork. She asserts her right to a British identity as a logical corollary of the violence and exploitation exerted on African people by the British and their subsequent domination of Jamaica in colonial times: Britain had brought our parents to Jamaica for three hundred years and declared us and Jamaica British. [. . .] How can it be that we are not British? We were born on British lands, followed British rules, language, education and way of life. We know no other. How are we suddenly not part of the world that created us? (Blake-Hannah 2021)

Her personal history aligns fully with that of thousands of other people, many of whom have suffered similarly from racism, xenophobia, and inhumane policies. At the same time, her “British” identity is asserted as a right that is received in compensation for past abuse—but not, it seems celebrated in any positive sense. Her account of her positioning toward this “Britishness” at no point reflects an alignment with mainstream British culture. So, on the one hand, she is vehement in her claim to Britishness: Of course I am British. Have been since I was born in 1941 on that British plantation Jamaica with British citizenship. I came to Britain because I was British. I and all the Blacks in Britain are here because Britain was there, in Africa and in the Caribbean. I would still be an African, not only by race but by residency, if Britain hadn’t been there. (Blake-Hannah 2021)

But at the same time, she positions herself very critically towards the British culture that has historically consigned her and her fellows to positions of inferiority: We have swallowed the version fed to us by our education and the media that we are inferior beings who must be glad to be tolerated by and allowed to live with white Britons. (Blake-Hannah 2021)

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In all this, the writer argues powerfully for recognition of and respect for her “African ancestry,” calling for a rediscovery of the African history that is little known, and that will give dignity and pride to people of African ancestry. To end her text, she takes a combative stance, denying that Britain has overcome racism, calling the current generation of Black journalists “figureheads given a spot to alleviate the guilt Britain pretends to feel for the racism it continues to practice,” and echoing the call for Britain to make an official apology for its role in the slave trade. Her assertion of British identity is a long way from the desire to become part of the mainstream, as we might read in the feature article discussed above. Her positioning as Black British is a deliberately antagonistic one, rooted in an awareness of historical disadvantage and inequality, and calling for intransigence in asserting the need for reparations and redress: We Black British must find the courage to do the work that will call white Britain to acknowledge and compensate us all for what has been done, and is still being done. (Blake-Hannah 2021)

The Black British identity is thus problematized as work in progress: for this writer, to be Black British is to have equal rights with other British people, but also to have the duty to assert those rights, and to demand reparations for past wrongs. DISCUSSION This chapter has shown how The Voice operates through a strong but loosely defined awareness of the special situation of the Black diaspora populations in the United Kingdom. In its special interest in African nations and diasporas, as well as its particular concern with the Caribbean, the base position from which this magazine constructs “newsworthiness,” contrasts sharply with that of the mainstream British press. From this liminal position, the writers in The Voice celebrate the triumphs and defend the interests of their perceived target readership, and at the same time project—actively or passively—a range of different possible positionings for Black people in today’s Britain. Taking this further, we can say that The Voice acts less as a “voice” and more as a forum for Black people living in or with some affiliation to Britain. In fact, this magazine gives voice to a diverse population with many different interests and political aspirations, which is somehow bonded together by the sense of having a shared Black heritage. In psychological terms, this is comprehensible, since it is well known that being a member of a salient minority in society means that “the identity derived from and feelings towards one’s



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ethnicity are typically strong” (Lam and Smith 2009, 1263). However, the reality of the different groups within the British Black population is also strongly conditioned by their diverse (Caribbean or African) histories and the complexity of the double diaspora (see Nagy, this volume). This means that members of this broad group are often subject to contradictory positioning forces, and they take up a range of self-chosen positions, which may be more or less affirmatory or antagonistic towards the mainstream culture of the country. We have seen how the writers in The Voice both position themselves and offer various positionings for their readers, who are presumed also to share a variety of possible Black backgrounds, identities, and commitments. In the context of the various Black African-Caribbean diaspora populations in the United Kingdom, we might observe how the self-positioning within the group ranges from a desire to be “mainstream” to a position of antagonism and defiance. The evidence from the Continental African diaspora populations in Britain represented here seems to entail less resentment, yet at the same time makes a stronger claim for the recognition and reevaluation of African heritage(s) as a worthy alternative to hegemonic British culture, an option that is presented as potentially available to those of Caribbean heritage as well. The African-Caribbean British population has undoubtedly had a complex history, and today still bears many of the scars of a chronically disadvantaged group. Researchers such as Maxwell (2009) have found that Caribbeans express less positive attachment to Britain than other minorities, situating their disaffection in a combination of cultural disinheritance and structural inequality. In a similar vein, Strand (2012) discussed the educational underperformance of Caribbean British students, reviewing explanations in terms of the prevailing subculture that is antagonistically positioned towards the British mainstream and the notion that “behaving white” (i.e., complying with school expectations) is perceived as a betrayal of Black identity. However, Strand also suggests that widespread institutional processes accentuate group differences in achievement, and that both sets of factors interact, setting in motion a downward spiral of mutual hostility. In such contexts of disaffection, assimilation cannot be regarded as the optimal goal of immigrant integration (Jung 2009). One intriguing solution is that advocated by, for example, Kim (2014), who explains in the North American context how African students appear to adapt better to educational settings in the United States than their African American counterparts, precisely because they come from strongly defined, rich cultures that give meaning to their lives and enable them to cope with their new experiences as migrants. As Kim notes, “understanding the bicultural socialization experiences of Black immigrant students is critical to shaping their educational outcomes. Black immigrant students develop responsibility and maturity by

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maintaining relationships with their native cultures, while at the same time they learn to succeed academically and socially by getting involved with the college” (Kim 2014, 590). In precisely this context, one important strand running through many of the articles in The Voice is the re-valorization of Continental African heritages— be they near or distant in time—as an antidote to the tainted heritage of slavery that afflicts African Caribbean cultures (see Nagy, this volume). In this sense, the growing awareness of macro-diaspora and double diaspora perceived in the texts from The Voice seems to show evidence that many people are feeling their way towards new paths for the future characterized by forms of inclusive African-ness open to Black people of different backgrounds, within an inclusive Britishness that accepts these people on equal terms. Although it is important not to underestimate the corrosive effects of longterm inequality and abuse, these rediscovered bonds and identifications may generate new synergies that help Black British citizens find new ways ahead. In the Caribbean itself, societies have proved open to radical new synergies (Esposito 2021), and it is possible that alliances with other African diasporas will help Caribbeans come to see their own heritage in a new light. As Phoenix (2006) suggested, an attitude in which “social categories and their associated positions and identities are treated as fluid and multiple” is to be preferred to a more fixed or embedded view of identity, with the proviso that there should be recognition that “structure and culture are mutually constitutive” (Phoenix 2006, 1). Moreover, there is space within this model for expression of the different identities resulting from the double diaspora. In a similar context, Lam and Smith (2009, 1249) provide an overview of approaches showing that “identity is not an ‘either-or’ matter: individuals may categorize themselves as well as adopt ways of feeling and thinking about themselves to varying degrees in relation to their multiple group memberships.” It is important to allow for the multifaceted and multi-layered nature of identity, and to leave scope for the individual to position herself freely in relation to her multiple inheritances and social opportunities. As these writers suggest, Black identities in Britain are indeed conditioned by present inequalities and by centuries of history, but they are also multifaceted and multilayered and open to creative reworking. Finally, from the perspective of media discourse studies, one aspect of the case studies here is the marked difference in voice between the (often unnamed) journalists, who tend to adopt the conventional reporter voice within the framework of The Voice’s editorial lines, and the opinion writer or interviewees. However, we should not forget that, at least in the case of the direct speech relayed in news items, it is the journalist who acts as puppet master, “writing” the lines uttered by the other participants. In a sense, the



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journalist appears to hand the microphone to “characters” who appear in the text, but he/she clearly also maintains control over what they are represented as saying (Waugh 1995; de Lucas Vicente 2014). Although the authenticity of the quoted words is rarely questioned (Waugh 1995), the journalist/author obviously has a great deal of control over what is selected for publishing in the article and what is not, not to mention a degree of “editorial” control over the text itself (Breeze 2016). In this case, we have seen how the conventions of “reporter voice” (White 2012) prevail, with the result that the riskier assertions are regularly attributed to actors in the text. The Voice thus positions itself as a magazine as a relatively positive, nonradical medium for the Black British communities, which provides a forum for more outspoken voices without aligning itself with their positions. REFERENCES Blake-Hannah, Barbara. 2021. “Barbara Blake Hannah: ‘I am African. I am Jamaican. I am British.’” The Voice, May 25, 2021. https://www.voice-online.co.uk/blackbritish-voices/2021/05/25/barbara-blake-hannah-i-am-african-i-am-jamaican-iam-british/ Breeze, Ruth. 2015. “‘Or so the Government would have You Believe’: Uses of ‘You’ in Guardian Editorials.” Discourse, Context & Media 10: 36–44. Breeze, Ruth. 2016. “Negotiating Alignment in Newspaper Editorials: The Role of Concur-Counter Patterns.” Pragmatics 26(1): 1–19. Breeze, Ruth, and Inés Olza, eds. 2017. Evaluation in Media Discourse: European Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: A Socio-Cultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 7(4/5): 585–614. Casado, Manuel, and Alberto de Lucas Vicente. 2013. “La evaluación del discurso referido en la prensa española a través de los verbos introductores” [The evaluation of reported speech in the Spanish press through introducers verbs]. Revista Signo 83: 332–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-09342013000300003 Davies, Bronwyn, and Rom Harre. 1999. “Positioning and Personhood.” In Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, edited by Rom Harre and Luk van Langenhove, 32–52. Oxford: Blackwell. de Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg, eds. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Lucas Vicente, Alberto. 2014. “Verdad y argumentación en la cita periodística.” Revista Española de Lingüística 44, no. 1: 39–64. Ducrot, Oscar. 1986. El decir y lo dicho. Polifonía de la enunciación. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós. Esposito, Eleonora. 2021. Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Critical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Francis, Alannah. 2020. “The Black Farmer: ‘The moment you operate outside a stereotype, it confuses people.’” The Voice, November 11, 2020. https://www. voice-online.co.uk/lifestyle/food/2020/11/11/the-black-farmer-the-moment-youoperate-outside-a-stereotype-it-confuses-people/ Flowerdew, John, David C. S. Li, and Sarah Tran. 2002. “Discriminatory News Discourse: Some Hong Kong data.” Discourse & Society 13(3): 319–45. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia PA: University of Philadelphia Press. Harley-Rudd, Neil-Monticelli. 2023. “Whisper it! Reggae Boy Dujuan Richards signs for Chelsea.” The Voice, March 16, 2023. https://www.voice-online.co.uk/sport/ football/2023/03/16/whisper-it-reggae-boy-dujuan-richards-signs-for-chelsea/ Jung, Moon-Kie. 2009. “The Racial Unconscious of Assimilation Theory.” Du Bois Review: Social Research on Race 6(2): 375–95. Kayi-Aydar, Hayriye, and Angel Steadman. 2021. “Positioning Theory for EnglishMedium Instruction (EMI) Praxis: Insights and Implications for Teaching and Research.” Ibérica 42: 15–32. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.42.15 Kim, Eunyoung. 2014. “Bicultural Socialization Experiences of Black Immigrant Students at a Predominantly White Institution.” Journal of Negro Education 83, no. 4: 580–94. Lam, Virginia, and Gordon Smith. 2009. “African and Caribbean Adolescents in Britain: Ethnic Identity and Britishness.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7: 1248–70, DOI: 10.1080/01419870802298421. Mahon, Leah, 2022. “First commercial flight from Africa to Caribbean lands in Antigua.” The Voice, November 2, 2022. https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/ world-news/2022/11/02/first-commercial-flight-from-africa-to-caribbean-lands-inantigua/ Marinova, Diana. 2004. “Two Approaches to Negotiating Oositions in Interaction: Goffman’s (1981) footing and Davies and Harre’s (1999) Positioning Theory.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 10, no. 1, Article 17. Maxwell, Rahsaan. 2009. “Caribbean and South Asian Identification with British Society: The Importance of Perceived Discrimination.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 8: 1449–69, DOI: 10.1080/01419870802604024. Motune, Vic. 2020. “Pageant aims to make black British women ‘proud of African culture.’” The Voice, February 26, 2020. https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uknews/2020/02/26/pageant-aims-to-make-black-british-women-proud-of-africanculture/ Phoenix, Af Ann. 2006. “Interrogating Intersectionality: Productive Ways of Theorising Multiple Positioning.” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 2/3: 21–20, DOI https://doi. org/10.7146/kkf.v0i2-3.28082 Sanders, José. 2010. “Intertwined Voices: Journalists’ Modes of Representing Source Information in Journalistic Subgenres.” English Text Construction 3(2): 226–49. Smith, Patriann. 2019. “(Re)Positioning in the Englishes and (English) Literacies of a Black Immigrant Youth: Towards a Transraciolinguistic Approach.” Theory into Practice 58(3): 292–303, DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2019.1599227



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Strand, Steve. 2012. “The White British–Black Caribbean Achievement Gap: Tests, Tiers and Teacher Expectations.” British Educational Research Journal 38, no. 1: 75–101, DOI: 10.1080/01411926.2010.526702 Van Dijk, Teun A. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Waugh, Linda R. 1995. “Reported Speech in Journalistic Discourse: The Relation of Function and Text.” Text & Talk 15(1): 129–173. https://doi.org/10.1515/ text.1.1995.15.1.129 White, P. R. R. 2012. “Exploring the Axiological Workings of ‘Reporter Voice’ News Stories—Attribution and Attitudinal Positioning.” Discourse, Context & Media 1(2/3): 57–67.

Chapter Six

“From Okacha to Molenbeek” Moroccan Mudakkira¯t in L7a9d’s Digital Storytelling Rosa Pennisi ‫قَا َل َربِّ السِّجْ نُ أَ َحبُّ إِلَ ِّي ِم َّما يَ ْدعُونَنِي إِلَ ْي ِه‬ ٣٣ ‫سورة يوسف‬ “My Lord! I would rather be in jail than do what they invite me to” (Sūrat Joseph 33)1

The above Quranic quotation is found at the end of each video that forms the musalsala, or multi-episode show, titled “From Okacha to Molenbeek” (Min ʿOkāša ilā Mūlinbīk), uploaded in 2021 on the YouTube channel of Mouad Belghouate, a Moroccan rapper known by the alias L7a9d (from the Moroccan Arabic term l-ḥāqəd, meaning both “The Enraged” and “The Indignant”). The quotation from the sūrat Joseph is used by L7a9d as a metaphor. L7a9d refers to the struggle for fundamental human rights and in particular the struggle for freedom of expression against the oppression of Moroccan political power. L7a9d, like Joseph, states that he would prefer imprisonment to the silence that they, i.e., the maḫzan (the palace, the power), implicitly invite participants to. Mouad’s dissident voice echoed in Morocco during the Arab Spring protest movements of 2011 resulting in long periods of detention. The musalsala, Min ʿOkāša ilā Mūlinbīk, collects Mouad’s autobiographical account in the form of an audiovisual storytelling spread online. This is the most recent evolutionary step that Mouad has made using his memoirs from prison, previously published as a multi-chapter novel under the title Muḏakkirāt Muʿād l-Ḥāqəd: Min ʿOkaša li-Mūlinbīk “Memoirs of Mouad L7a9d: ‘From Okacha to Molenbeek,’” in the Moroccan online newspaper, Goud, on a narrative basis. This chapter aims to analyze the multimodal evolution of the narrative genre of muḏakkirāt “memoirs” in Moroccan digital literature, exploring the 129

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linguistic, stylistic, and pragmatic aspects of digital and multimodal communication. Through the Third Space, i.e., the Internet and social media, L7a9d’s memoirs represent the meeting place between Mouad, a wuld š-šaʿb “a guy of the people,” who is currently a refugee in Belgium, and the Moroccan people to whom he belongs. Online literary production is used by Mouad as a means of identity representation and resistance against the ills of his country. Evoking episodes from his personal prison experience, Mouad reports his reflections and issues denunciations on the abuses, corruption, oppression, and marginalization suffered by the lowest social classes in contemporary Moroccan society. The first part of the chapter is devoted to the historical and literary contextualization of the muḏakkirāt genre and the evolution of autobiographical literary writing from traditional fiction to digital storytelling. The second part focuses on the figure of Mouad L7a9d and his artistic production. Finally, the third part concentrates on the analysis of muḏakkirāt published in 2016 in the Moroccan online newspaper Goud and the multimodal evolution of audiovisual memoirs on YouTube. EVOLUTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: FROM MUḎAKKIRĀT TO STORYTELLING European critics have formally analyzed the autobiographical genre by defining its structural characteristics and historical functions. Leujeune’s (1975) study of the autobiographical writings of French authors defines autobiography as a first-person prose narrative in which a real personality (more or less well-known) traces his or her individual history and his or her social and personal identity through a retrospective view. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the autobiographical genre in the Arab world, defined by the terms tarǧama ḏātiyya and sīra ḏātiyya, has emerged as an important vehicle for modern Arabic cultural and literary production. The autobiographies of modern Arab intellectuals2 have assumed a fundamental historical value because they not only preserve and celebrate the actions of Arabs (Suriano, 2019, 215), but also represent “a meaningful but unresolved tension between the unique and the universal, between the individual and the historical society of which he is a member” (Philipp, 1993, 577). The sīra ḏātiyya can take the form not only of personal notes or diaries (yawmiyyāt) or autobiographical novel (riwāyat at-tarǧama aḏ-ḏātiyya), but also of autobiographical writing such as that represented by the muḏakkirāt, or memoirs, in which, “a well-known author presents himself as functioning in a social or historical context” (De Moor, 1998, 112).3



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Muḏakkirāt developed in Egypt and in the Syrian-Lebanese area in modern times, during the period of the cultural movement of nahḍa “the Awakening,” especially in intellectual circles, as evidenced by literary and reformist journals such as al-Sufūr, al-Bayān, and al-Hilāl, which disseminated and promoted innovations in modern Arabic literary production. The first muḏakkirāt, dating from the 1930s in the Egyptian area, are often anonymous and written in both fuṣḥā (Standard Arabic) and ʿāmmiyya (colloquial varieties), and frequently “have a comical character [. . .] They are not genuine autobiographies; rather, the form of the muḏakkirāt has been used as a literary fictional frame for the description of the lives of prostitutes, gamblers and others living on the margins of society” (De Moor 1998, 113). In the landscape of Arabic literature, muḏakkirāt have adapted to the stylistic evolutions and literary currents that have marked the developments of contemporary Arabic prose, first under the influence of existentialism (1950s) and then that of surrealism (1960s). Indeed, since the 1970s, the muḏakkirāt genre seems to represent a means of projecting the ills of contemporary society, as well as contributing to contemporary Moroccan literary production.4 From a stylistic point of view, and focusing on contemporary Moroccan literature, some muḏakkirāt authors represent the problems of Moroccan society caused by the trauma that the so-called leaden years, i.e., the reign of Hassan II (1961–1999), marked in the collective memory. In particular, the experiences of those who were imprisoned during the leaden years are represented in literary prose through narrative techniques very close to storytelling. Ellison (2009), for instance, analyzes Abdellatif Laâbi’s Le chemin des ordalies (Path of Ordeals) and Khadija Marouazi’s Sīrat ar-rimād (Biography of Ashes). As Ellison states, through the use of (1) choral narration (i.e., the presence of multiple narrators and voices), (2) the shifting of point of view, and (3) the inclusion of multiple languages and linguistic registers, these two novels serve as a communication medium that preserves the historical memory of the leaden years and, above all, seeks reconciliation with the past, in order to face the future.5 This example shows how the literary production of memories, and in particular, memories from prison, can be considered one of the literary forms that fit perfectly with the expressions and representations of society’s shortcomings. More recently, with the digital revolution, the new tools of digital communication, such as online newspapers and social media have created a new space for the dissemination of artistic and literary production, even in the Arab world, accommodating to the communicative and expressive needs of the younger generations. Digital literature has enabled the young generations in the Arabic-speaking area to promote, disseminate and innovate their artistic and expressive needs, as “The Internet offered the possibility

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of developing and enriching the field of Arabic literature, by surpassing geographical distances, censorship and the costs of book publication, as well as experimenting with new styles and literary forms” (Pepe 2019, 29-30). In addition, digital tools have also revolutionized the public’s reception of digital literary production, which as Lenze (2019) points out, fosters and promotes participatory culture, transforming “the interpersonal experience of readers who participate in the reposting and remixing of cultural goods” (Lenze 2019, 47). In fact, interactivity between users, as well as also the possibility of sharing and mixing different forms of expression (images, sounds, texts, videos, memes, emoticons, etc.), offer authors the opportunity to make the expression of their resistance, identity, and denunciation more incisive and dynamic through multimodal communication (Kress 2010), transcending the geographical boundaries of the country of belonging and communicating from the diaspora as well. Indeed, in Morocco, the genre of muḏakkirāt, particularly memoirs from prison, also found its way into digital communication after the 2011 demonstrations organized by the ḥarakat 20 fibrāyr (February 20 Movement). The movement represented political contestations in Morocco following the wave of demonstrations that passed into recent history as the “Arab Springs,” which involved several Arab countries in the same years (2011–2012). Several young people belonging to the February 20 Movement were arrested by Moroccan authorities following the demonstrations, although on formal charges that were not entirely related to their political activism (Caubet 2018, 391). In particular, two former Moroccan militants of the February 20 movement, Mohamed Socrates and Mouad Belghouate (aka L7a9d,6 “The Indignant”), spent a long time in prison and, once free, decided to use autobiographical narration to recount their memoirs from prison, transforming the traditional genre of muḏakkirāt into digital storytelling. Mohamed Socrates, who is a blogger and former militant of the February 20 movement, and Mouad Belghouat, who is a rapper and former militant of the February 20 movement, published their memoirs from prison in the Moroccan online newspaper Goud in the form of serialized novels, respectively under the titles Muḏakkirāt Muḥammad Suqrāṭ fī as-siǧn (“Memoirs of Mohamed Socrates from Prison,” published in Goud in 2014) and Muḏakkirāt Muʿāḏ l-Ḥāqəd: min ʿOkāša li-Mūlinbīk (“Memoirs of Mouad L7a9d: from Okasha to Molenbeek,” published in Goud in 2016). While Mohamed Socrates continues to live in Morocco and collaborate as a writer of opinion articles for the newspaper Goud, Mouad L7a9d, whose muḏakkirāt are the subject of the present study, currently lives in Belgium as a political refugee, from where he continues his artistic and creative activity, exploiting the communicative potential of multimodal social media. Indeed, his desire to preserve the memory of his



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experiences from prison—but also and above all the desire to denounce society’s ills—advances not only through “traditional” literature but also through the forms of self-narration and storytelling. In 2021, L7a9d decided to turn his multi-chapter novel into a musalsala on YouTube. In the following analysis, the author’s biographical profile will first be traced, and then the two versions of L7a9d’s memoirs (digital writing and digital storytelling) will be analyzed through the observation of stylistic and multimodal evolution. MOUAD L7A9D: MOROCCAN RAPPER AND STORYTELLER Mouad Belghouate was born in 1998 in Casablanca and grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Okacha (namesake of the Okacha prison), a suburban area of Hay Hassani (Casablanca). In his memoirs, Mouad relates that he grew up in a working-class environment and attended three different primary and secondary schools; this constant change affected his personal growth as he was confronted with diametrically opposed realities and social classes.7 In the early 2000s he began his artistic experience as a rapper. Mouad, better known by the name L7a9d “the Indignant,” forms 3okacha family, his crew,8 with whom he began to produce several albums. The first one was released in 2007 under the title L7a9d Mn 3okacha. Similar to many other rock and hip-hop groups that were productive in Morocco in 2000s, such as H-Kayne, Hoba-Hoba Spirit, Donn Bigg, Fnaïre, and many others (Gintsburg 2013), Mouad’s lyrics were irreverent especially towards the police and the monarchy. He has always denounced corruption, which he still considers one of the main ills of his country, and specifically the corruption among the police system. Like several of his peers, he was a member of the Lejnat el-ibdaʿ “Creative Committee” (Caubet, 2018, 391), and was an active member of the February 20 movement, participating in the 2011 protests, and his songs echoed among the square demonstrations.9 Mouad was arrested for the first time on September 9, 2011, spent four months in prison on the official charge of assault on a pro-monarchist militant. Since then, he began a long ordeal, in and out of prison, which lasted one year from March 2012 to March 2013, when he was arrested on charges of threatening the police through a song, Kilab ad-daoula, “the watchdogs of the state,” and again from May to September 2014 (Caubet, 2018, note 9, 402).10 L7a9d continued the fight for freedom of expression and was supported by the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), who describe his ordeal as a return to the years of lead.11 In spite of all this, when he was released

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from prison, Mouad took part in several artistic residencies and collaborations in different European countries and produced his new album, Walou (“Nothing”), in 2014 with the collaboration of musicians and artists from other countries. After the publication of his last album, which caused him to be banned from performing in public in Morocco, he won the #IndexAwards2015,12 i.e., Freedom of Expression Awards, in the arts category (Caubet 2018, 391). In 2015, while he was in Belgium, he learned that he would be arrested again as soon as he landed in Morocco, which is why he decided to stay in Belgium. He settled in Molenbeek, where he is living still nowadays as a refugee. Regarding his musical production, in 2017 he released the album M3LM, which is an acronym for “Min 3okacha Li Molenbeek” (‘from Okacha to Molenbeek’).13 This same title was used in 2016 for his multi chapter novel, Muḏakkirāt Muʿād l-Ḥāqəd: min ʿOkāšā lī-Molenbeek, published in the online newspaper Goud.14 Not surprisingly, L7a9d published his memoirs in the newspaper Goud (“direct,” or “straight” in Moroccan Arabic),15 an online newspaper founded on February 14, 2011, which was six days before the start of the Arab Spring demonstrations in Morocco, by Ahmed Najim, the current editor. It is worth mentioning that Moroccan Arabic, also known as dārija, is a vehicular language in Morocco, but it is not the official language of the country.16 Moroccan Arabic is not a codified language and is normally used for everyday oral interactions of both a formal and an informal kind. In addition, and unlike many other Arab countries, Morocco has a long tradition of literary production in Moroccan Arabic, perhaps due to the country’s linguistic remoteness and peripheral status. However, the phenomenon of the shift to written dārija has undergone significant growth with the advent of the digital age and technological advances.17 Written production in dārija has therefore gained greater visibility through the Internet and social media. Precisely through media, both traditional and digital, it is also possible to observe the new linguistic attitudes of users/speakers towards dārija (Caubet 2017a–b, 2018, Pennisi 2020), which is currently being used not only for informal communications and expressive or artistic needs, but also in formal and institutional contexts, such as in some online newspapers. Among these, Goud is an online newspaper in which journalists are free to write their articles in both Standard Arabic and Moroccan Arabic. The newspaper promotes the use of Moroccan Arabic, which is considered by the editorial team to be a direct language that speaks clearly to all Moroccans, allowing them to follow current events, whether they live inside or outside their country. Moreover, Goud always offers space to young people and their artistic and literary productions. Like other newspapers, Goud also has an opinion column, which, in fact, gives voice to the stories of young authors, such as Mouad L7a9d, who, like Mohamed Socrates, published his memories from prison online in the form of muḏakkirāt.



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WRITTEN DIGITAL MUḎAKKIRĀT: L7A9D’S MEMORIES From the biographical profile I presented in the previous section, it is evident that Mouad is not a writer in the traditional sense of the term. His artistic production is mainly limited to the musical sphere. However, his multi-chapter novel attests to his desire to communicate his personal experiences, including through fiction and storytelling. In fact, whether intended or not, his memoirs bear a significant trace of social issues in contemporary Morocco, enriching cultural production with new forms of expression. Mouad’s muḏakkirāt were written with the use of different registers of Moroccan dārija, including slang. Indeed, it is no accident that Mouad chose to express himself in dārija: Caubet (2018) analyses an excerpt from an interview with Mouad, in which the young man states that dārija is a powerful language (a language, not a dialect or variety), which all Moroccans understand, although it may appear difficult to write (Caubet 2018, 392). Therefore, Mouad’s linguistic choices imply different ideological, stylistic, and pragmatic impacts on the value of his written production. His muḏakkirāt enrich and expand the repertoire of contemporary Moroccan artistic and literary production, effectively fitting into the strand of the promotion and valorization of dārija as a language that represents the sense of identity belonging to “Moroccanness” (Caubet 2017b). It should also be noted that Mouad unequivocally addresses a Moroccan audience, even though he is physically in Molenbeek as a refugee. From the pragmatic viewpoint, for Mouad, dārija represents the most effective tool in the communicative process. Mouad’s muḏakkirāt in the dārija speak directly and profoundly to all Moroccans and create a relationship of (linguistic/identity) cohesion and (socio-identity) identification between Mouad— a wuld l-blād (i.e., “a fellow Moroccan”), who suffers from the oppression of power, the corruption of the system, and social inequality—and the Moroccan nation whom he identifies himself with, although he is forced to live elsewhere. The process of identification occurs more specifically in communication, on the Internet, that is, through digital communication. Mouad, in fact, not only publishes his memoir in an online newspaper, but also writes and shares his story with his Moroccan audience, still keeping his voice alive in his country, albeit from the diaspora. Indeed, although in Morocco the young man is banned from any public artistic performance, his voice, his story, and his experiences echo in a powerful language (i.e., Moroccan Arabic), and they reach the people of Morocco through the digital space, which connects his geographical origin and identity affiliation with the physical diasporic space. As anticipated in the introduction, the analysis of L7a9d’s muḏakkirāt will chronologically follow the evolution from autobiographical writing on

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Goud, to audiovisual storytelling. For both phases of the analysis, the literary corpus, available from Goud’s archives, will be described,18 as well as the audiovisual corpus shared on L7a9d’s channel on YouTube.19 After a presentation of contents and narrative strategies adopted by Mouad, the analysis will focus on the linguistic aspects of muḏakkirāt and the pragmatic and stylistic elements of multimodal communication. WRITTEN MUḎAKKIRĀT ON GOUD As intuitively perceived in Mouad’s previous presentation, L7a9d goes from being the object of news in the Moroccan press, to being the subject/actor/ author of his personal narrative in the same medium. Muḏakkirāt Muʿād l-Ḥāqəd: min ʿOkāšā lī-Molenbeek was published in the online newspaper Goud in 2016, at a frequency of about three episodes per week, from February 18, 2016, until May 25, 2016 (the last episode of the series available on the journal’s website Goud). The corpus available today in the archives of the newspaper Goud consists of approximately20 twenty-three episodes, distributed in chronological order of publication, as shown in Table 1 in Annex A. Each episode published in Goud is numbered in ascending order from 1 to 23, but they do not present the events he experienced chronologically (from Mouad’s arrest to his release). The first episode, which bears the title of: ‫ شكر مممنون للحبس‬: 1 ” ‫ “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬. . . ‫مذكرات معاذ لحاقد‬ “Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt ‘From Okacha to Moleenbek’ 1: Heartfelt thanks to prison,”21 contextualizes and introduces L7a9d’s autobiographical narrative. In other words, after going through his experience in prison, Mouad expresses his worldview and ideals with a cool mind, describes his period of detention, and uses the digital space of the first episode to present the way in which he will tell his memoirs from prison. In this first episode, he thanks those who participated in his detention: Mouad explains that, thanks to the imprisonment, he has been able to find time to read and augment his reflections and songs; moreover, thanks to his imprisonment he has also been able to find new real friendships. In addition, he recounts that his judicial bargain allowed him to participate in festivals and concerts around Europe after his release from prison. In this first introductory episode, Mouad finally states: 1)‫ غادي نكتب داك شي كيف عشتو‬، ‫غادي نكون صريح واخا الصراحة غتشري ليا صداع مع بنادم‬ 22 ‫وكيف سمعتو بال زواق و بال نفاق وغادي نحاول نكون محايد واخا مكينش الحياد يا ايما مع يا ايما ضد‬ I will be honest and even if honesty makes me clash with people, I will write this as I experienced it and as I felt it, without ornamentation and without hypocrisy,



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I will try to be neutral, although there is no such thing as neutrality, either you are for, or you are against . . .23

From this example, it can be immediately observed how Mouad expresses himself through a simple communicative style, when he says, for example, ġādī nəktəb dāk šī kīf ʿəšt-ū w-kīf smiʿt-ū “I will write this as I experienced it and as I felt it” (emphasis added), specifying that he will do so in a straightforward manner when he states ‫( بال زواق و بال نفاق‬blā zwāq w-blā nifāq) “without ornamentation and without hypocrisy.” Indeed, he quotes in this short statement part of the slogan of the editorial lines of the Goud, which hosts his memoirs. The slogan found on the logo of the Goud newspaper is precisely: ‫ ديما نيشان‬،‫( المغرب بال زواق‬l-Maġrib blā zwāq, dīmā nīšān) “Morocco without ornaments, always Nichane (direct).” So, while the first episode serves an introductory function, Mouad builds his memoir by delving into a different social issue/problem in each episode, or by reporting vicissitudes experienced in prison or personal memories before prison. This is not to say that each episode is unconnected or independent. In fact, Mouad tends to tie the episodes together by beginning a new episode with the words used at the end of the previous episode. However, the sequentiality does not reflect a chronological and linear progression of events, but rather advances thematically. Moreover, his memoirs from prison are deliberately interrupted by the evocation of memories outside prison, as is the case for example in episode 11: ‫ كتبت فالطاولة‬. ‫لكتابة فالحيوطة عندي فالدم‬:11 ”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ‫ديال لمدرسة فالحيوطة ديال الدرب فالكراسة ديال طوبيس‬ “Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt ‘From Okacha to Moleenbek’ 11: Writing on walls is in my blood. I wrote on school desks on neighborhood walls on bus seats.”24 In this episode, Mouad describes his attitude toward writing (from tags on walls, to the lyrics of his songs). Again, he begins episode 11 by quoting the same words from the end of the previous episode: 2) ‫قريت تقريبا گاع داك شي لي مكتوب فالحيط وكان خاصني حتا انا نكتب شي حاجة ونخلي‬ 25 ‫ مكانش عندي باش نكتب ولكن طاحت ليا فكرة فراسي حمقة‬. . . ‫الطراس‬ I read almost everything that was written on the walls, I also had to write something and l leave a trace . . . I had nothing to write with, but a stupid idea came to me . . .

Narratologically, Mouad uses the flashback trick as a psychological breakout to a positive memory (the tags and slogans he used to write on school desks or trains or walls), to escape the boredom and stressfulness of the interminable wait before the hearing with the judge, who would notify him of the charges of his incarceration. In the waiting room before the hearing with the

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judge, Mouad notices some writing on the walls and recalls the readings that he considers formative and true. Indeed, he mentions Mohamed Choukry’s novel, For bread alone, as well as Machiavelli’s The Prince, from which he quotes some famous citations. Moreover, it is no coincidence that he also mentions the Assyrian civilization and the clay tablets with the Epic of Gilgamesh, which represent one of humanity’s earliest forms of writing. In fact, “the stupid idea” evoked at the beginning of the episode is nothing more than engraving a tag with a lighter right on the wall of the waiting room. He manages to write ‫( عكاشة فاميلي‬Okāša Fāmīly) “Okacha Family” (the name of his crew), ‫( معاد لحاقد مر من هنا‬Mu’ād l-Ḥāqəd mrra mən hunā) “Mouad l-Ḥāqəd came by here,” and finally he also wanted to add one last tag with ‫( عاش الشعب‬ʿāš l-šaʿb) “Long live the people,” but did not have enough time to complete it: 3) ‫ كنت‬. . . ‫ اواه خاصني نكملها بقاو ليا غير ثالثة الحروف‬. . . ‫سمعت صوت لبوليسي كيعيط بسميتي‬ ‫ مابغاوهش اعيش وال هو مباغيش اعيش‬. . .62 ‫ الشعب معندوش الزهر‬. . . “ ‫ياله كتبت “ عاش ال‬ I heard a policeman’s voice repeating my name . . . come on, I have to complete, I only have three letters left . . . I had already written “long live the . . .” the people have not flourished . . . they don’t want him to survive, and he doesn’t want to survive either . . .

This last statement is used by Mouad to recall another memory from his life before prison that concerns precisely the tag “Long live the people” written on one of the walls in his neighborhood that was erased by other residents: 4) ‫قالي هاد شي مس بالمقدسات وراه كاين غير عاش الملك … قلت ليه ياك الملك حتا هو واحد من‬ ‫ قلت ليه نتوما مسحو‬. . . ‫ متسوقش ليا ودور وجهو وبقا كصبغ‬. . . ‫الشعب وحتا حنا بغينا نعيشو معاه‬ ‫وحنا نعودو نكتبو صباغة موجودة‬ he told me “this thing is a sacrilege, you can only say ‘long live the king’” . . . I told him “of course, the king is also one of the people and we also want to live with him” . . . he didn’t take me at face value and continued to repaint . . . I told him “you delete and we go back to writing new tags . . .”

With this example, Mouad intends to criticize the submissive and uncritical approach that even in his neighborhood people observe out of respect for the monarchist figure. In particular, he seeks to understand, through dialogue, why the people of the neighborhood, do not approve of the democratic message of “Long Live the People” and, finding no concrete answers, Mouad continues to make his voice and message heard: ntūma msaḥū w-ḥnā nəʿūdū nəktubū ṣibāġa mawǧūda (“you delete and we return to write new tags”). This attitude reflects the same form of resistance, represented by his memoirs from the diaspora: although in Morocco, Mouad cannot (any longer)



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perform publicly, his voice and message continues to echo in his country through his memoirs: the muḏakkirāt on Goud, his music, and his storytelling on YouTube. Similarly, he recalls his personal experiences to express his thoughts and ideologies, such as in episode 18, entitled ”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ‫غالطة على الشعب المغربي‬28 ‫قبل ما نسافر ألوروبا كانت عندي فكرة‬: 18 “Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt ‘From Okacha to Moleenbek’ 18: Before travelling to Europe, I had a misconception about the Moroccan people’: 5) ‫انا ختاريت نكون مع الفرقة المغلوب امرها وهاد شي خلق ليا الكثير من المشاكل‬

[…] ‫قبل ما نسافر ونتعرف عال شعوب اخرا واماكن اخرا كانت عندي فكرة غالطة عال‬ ‫ كنت اعتقد بان االنسان فاوروبا متفوق عال االنسان فالبالد لي تزاديت فيها‬، ‫الشعب المغربي‬ ‫ وبلي هو كيعيش حياة حسن من الحياة لي كنعيشو حنا ولكن ملي كتجي تشوف كتلقا راه‬، ، ‫حتا فأعظم الدول بحال بريطانيا مثال كاين الكالخ والقطيع والناس قليلة لي كتفكر اواعية‬ ‫النكاح القص والطواليط وجمع لباوند‬29 ‫ الخدمة‬، ‫االكثرية غير عايش بحال روبو‬ I chose to stay with the group of the defeated, to lead them, and this created many problems for me [. . .] Before I travelled and got to know other peoples and other places I had a misconception about the Moroccan people, I believed that the man in Europe was superior to the man in the bled in which he grew up, and that he lives a better life than we do; but when you start to see that even in the highest states like Britain for example there is the insensitive and the masses and a few people who think consciously, the majority just live like robots, work, marriage, toilet and all the pounds.

Only in these rare examples does Mouad bring up his experiences in Europe, focusing on the lifestyles and ideals that drive him to express his opinions. The comparison between Morocco and Europe, emerging from this last example, is based on his criticism of capitalism and the uncritical lifestyle that exists in Morocco as well as in Europe, and indeed everywhere. However, he speaks about himself, in dārija, his mother tongue, and addresses mainly a Moroccan audience, from the diaspora, from the third virtual space, as he would if he were physically in Morocco. He uses the Internet, and in particular the newspaper Goud, as a place of contact between himself, in the diaspora, and Moroccans (everywhere). Consequently, two reflections emerge from examples 1 to 5. The first concerns the narrative and pragmatic strategies of his memoir, and the second concerns the linguistic and stylistic choices. Mouad constructs the narrative of his memoir by interweaving the space-time of actions concerning the detailed experiences of the prison period with the space-time preceding his arrests. Geographic space, however, regardless of space-time, is always limited to Morocco (although he writes his memoirs from Molenbeek). In this way, the surface details of prison space-time help Mouad dig deeper into

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his memory. In fact, Mouad brings autobiographical memories of the pre-jail space-time back into his narrative of the prison space-time. The example of the “Long Live the People” tag on the walls of his neighborhood represents the social critique that permeates the entire self-narrative, aimed at triggering a collective reflection against authority and the corruption of the system. The memoir also allows him to express himself in the first person, but he reports direct speeches from dialogues with other characters (guards, judges, commissioners, prisoners, friends, or, as in example 4, the inhabitants of his neighborhood). Within the narrative, this choral narration of different voices enriches not only the dynamism of the text but also serves to emphasize how dialogue is the driving force behind individual and collective actions. In sum, through dialogic interaction Mouad appropriates his right to express himself freely, critically arguing even the ideas he does not share. The second reflection, however, concerns the linguistic and stylistic choices related to the communicative strategies of his self-narrative and the ideological impacts of his language. In particular, in addition to a dialogic and choral communicative style, Mouad expresses himself freely without selfcensorship, using different registers of language. He also often adopts vulgar expressions, but his language is above all extremely direct, timely and hybrid. In fact, he uses several borrowings from French or English, especially when he talks about the rappers’ artistic and musical milieu. Note, for example, in Example 2 the expression nḫallī laṭras (“I leave a trace”), where laṭras is a cast from the French “la trace.” The same term is also grammaticalized by the addition of prefixes to conjugate in Moroccan Arabic a verb borrowed from the linguistic repertoire of another language, e.g. 30 ‫( وكنعاود نطراسي‬w-kanʿāwd nəṭrāsī, emphasis added, as “I restarted to trace,” where the verb nəṭrāsī is composed of the prefix n- (1st sing. pers. present tense, “I trace”) applied to ṭrāsī (infinitive of the French verb tracer “to trace”). In addition to the borrowings from foreign languages, the text of muḏakkirāt also carries the specific vocabulary of the prison semantic field (truck, handcuffs, cell, etc.), but also the language of the people through terms related to traditional Moroccan culture (‫ َكاميلة‬gāmīla a meat dish, or the use of ‫ بالد‬blād “country” to refer to one’s own country), which once again emphasize Mouad’s cultural affiliation with Moroccan identity. Although this is a written text, the syntax of the sentences reflects a construction typical of oral communication, for instance, in the Subject-Verb-Object structures and the constant references to direct speech without pointing syntactically, just as in oral communication where direct speech is marked, for example, simply by prosody. In fact, Mouad’s muḏakkirāt are characterized by their dialogical and oral aspect, which reflects his interactional communicative attitude and approach. His



“From Okacha to Molenbeek” 141

communicative attitude thus evolves into storytelling, transforming the genre of muḏakkirāt into digital storytelling. AUDIOVISUAL MUḎAKKIRĀT ON YOUTUBE After publishing muḏakkirāt on Goud (2016) and after moving to Molenbeek (2015), in 2021 Mouad published the first episode of the musalsala (multiepisode show) on his official YouTube channel (L7A9D, @mouadl7a9d),31 which has about 224,000 followers. The title of the first episode (Episode 0) is: “‫ ريحة البالد‬0 ‫ من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة‬L7a9d–Èpisode 0–Ramadan 2021” (“L7a9d–From Okacha to Moleenbek–Smell of Bled–Episode 0–Ramadan 2021”). This Episode 0, with a duration of 5'20", introduces Mouad’s new project of transforming his muḏakkirāt into an audiovisual storytelling, divided into short episodes that last between 15 and 30 minutes on average. His activity as a digital storyteller with his muḏakkirāt coincides with the period of Ramadan (2021), during which musalsala are the notoriously the best popular entertainment format, when the best and most successful multiepisodes are shown on local television and, most recently online (Baynham and Gintsburg 2022, Gintsburg forthcoming). Normally during Ramadan, it is ordinary to spend time with family and friends, breaking the fast together. Again, Mouad exploits the third space as a virtual meeting place with his family and friends physically in Morocco through the sharing and interaction that takes place on YouTube, with the aim of entertaining with his memoirs, voice and messages not only his friends and family, but the whole Moroccan public. The audiovisual corpus32 of memoirs consists of about nineteen episodes33 with views ranging from a low of 30,000 (views episode number eighteen) to a high of 114,000 (views episode six). The script and direction are by Mohamed Benmiloud, while the conception and presentation are by Mouad Belghouat (aka L7a9d). In one recent publication on the multimodal aspect of Moroccan artistic production, Baynham and Gintsburg demonstrated how the performer uses the affordances of the digital space in order to re-create the environment of the traditional story-telling event known in Morocco as halqa (Baynham and Gintsburg 2022). Mouad’s show confirms this: through his audiovisual production, this rapper’s communication becomes multimodal, and every visual detail (such as set design, clothing, gestures, intertextuality) or sound detail (such as soundtrack, prosody, interruptions, voices) takes on meaning because it is intrinsically linked to the new narrative mode. In terms of set design, all episodes systematically feature L7a9d alone against a black background, seated at a desk, with a recording studio micro-

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phone resting on the desk in the direction of L7a9d who is facing the camera. There are a few scenic variations between episodes. The most obvious one concerns L7a9d’s appearance, which is sometimes sober (t-shirt or sweatshirt), other times more histrionic (hyper-colored or shiny jackets with hair colored in strong hues, blue or green). A new element that appears in episode 13 is an open notebook, which L7a9d could read if he wanted to, resting on his desk, handwritten and remaining until the end of the musalsala (episode 19). The notebook, known as kunnāš, was traditionally used by poets and performers to write down the text and also, if needed to confirm authorship (Gintsburg 2020). 34 An element of the cultural tradition of the Arab world is thus introduced into Mouad’s digital performance. The notebook holds and symbolizes L7a9d’s written memoirs, the same memoirs that L7a9d is telling through oral storytelling in his videos. One element that is definitely different from the memoirs published in Goud concerns the title of the muḏakkirāt. At the end of episode 0, a different title appears from the one published in the YouTube playlist, namely muḏakkirāt al-siǧn wa-l-manfā, “Memoirs from Prison and Exile,” also repeated by Mouad himself within the video. Moreover, through the video Mouad exploits the multimodality of audiovisual communication by adding diverse content to the memoir to present the autobiographical events and emphasize the expressiveness of his ideals. In Episode 1, for example, his narration is preceded by a screenshot of the cover of TelQuel magazine (issue published February 22, 2012),35 which reports on L7a9d’s court case, from his trial to his return to freedom. Multimodal communication makes it possible to exploit intertextuality and add not only the strictly semantic meaning (Kress 2010) of the intended message, but also its historical and social meaning. In this case, the cover of TelQuel magazine as a premise to the story performs the function of historical attestation. Anyone who sees Episode 1 immediately learns that Mouad’s autobiographical story is true, attested, witnessed. Anyone can find the sources; anyone can learn more about it. The historical function, then, is inevitably associated with the social function that the genre of (multimodal) muḏakkirāt performs. Mouad L7a9d’s memoir and its transformation into a multimodal narrative do not merely describe his autobiographical experiences; rather, they represent an invitation to users (readers/audience) to act, that is, to document, reflect, and criticize. In other words, through autobiographical narrative enriched with real-life testimonies, L7a9d’s audiovisual production invites the reader/ recipient to gain awareness of the individual’s political action within the society to which he or she belongs. In the specific case of Morocco, Mouad invites people to fight against the corruption and oppression of the system, but especially to fight for the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and democratic ideals.



“From Okacha to Molenbeek” 143

Indeed, all episodes of L7a9d’s musalsala on YouTube are enriched with realia and quotes that underscore the expressiveness of Mouad’s memoir from prison. Indeed, each episode systematically features the same soundtrack (‫ من داخل الزنزانة بصوت سجين مجهول‬،‫عذبنا الفراق‬. “Dissidence tormented us, from inside the cell, with the voice of an unknown prisoner”)36 and the same poetic quotations at the end of each video.37 In addition, as with episode 1, other episodes introduce (either at the beginning or at the end), photos (of performances or graffiti depicting L7a9d, newspaper cutouts about the L7a9d affair), as well as video recordings that bear witness to crucial moments in Mouad’s history, such as episode 3, which ends with an amateur video capturing the crowd of Mouad’s supporters after his release in 2012. From the amateur video, the crowd can be seen shouting “kullu-nā ḥāqidīn” (“we are all ḥāqidīn/indignant”), while another quotation appears on the screen, written rigorously in dārija, which is: “‫حنا عندنا تاريخ‬ ‫“( ”ماشي غير هضرة فالريح‬We have a history, not just words in the wind”), signed on behalf of Šīḫ Bilāl. So, not only the choice of language, which in the audiovisual production is also dārija (both during the actual storytelling phase and in the various quotations that appear while viewing the videos), but also the choice of multimodality (different media such as journalistic texts, photos, songs, quotations), underscores the communicative power of digital storytelling. CONCLUSION In a study referring to the context of the traditional organization of Moroccan society, Yacoubi states: “C’est à travers l’écriture personnelle, autobiographique, ou à travers le témoignage, que l’individu réussit à transgresser les règles établies et parvient à briser la domination du groupe sur l’individu” (Yacoubi, 2008, 344-345). When looking at L7a9d’s autobiographical writing through Yacoubi’s perspective, his memories and storytelling in digital space allow him to “transgress the established rules” and thus “break the domination of the group over the individual.” What in Yacoubi is defined as the “domination of the group” (traditional Moroccan society), in L7a9d would instead represent the corrupt police and political system. Therefore, his artistic productions, as well as his (written and audiovisual) memoirs, represent the means to transgress and thus assert his individual freedoms and ideals in the digital social space of the Internet. Hence, digital literature, and more specifically autobiographical writing and storytelling, on the one hand, maintain the same socio-historical functions that muḏakkirāt performed in modern times (Philipp, 1993; De Moor,

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1998; Paniconi, 2014). On the other hand, the change of modality, from written to oral (or rather from written to audiovisual modality), allows the author to experiment with multimodal communication. The interplay of monologues, dialogues, and audio tracks with quotations and images not only add semantic value to multimodal communication (Kress, 2010), but such intertextuality makes possible pragmatic strategies that are functional to the collective and participative engagement represented by digital literature (Lenze 2019; Pepe 2019; Baynham and Gintsburg 2022). Multimodality also allows the readers/users to document, to inform themselves, to reconnect with the facts and socio-political events that involved the author, but also to have empathy and interact with him. Effectively, the power of multimodal communication also lies in the participatory function of digital literature, directly involving the audience who can interact instantly. The comments left in the margins of the posts published on social media, as well as several comments on L7a9d’s videos on YouTube, show how the Internet is being used as a tool for participatory expressive-artistic production. In conclusion, just was demonstrated by Baynham and Gintsburg in their analysis of Moroccan digital artistic production and its reception by Moroccan diaspora living in various countries (Baynham and Gintsburg 2022, Gintsburg forthcoming), the autobiographical writing of muḏakkirāt and multimodal communication allow L7a9d to transform the Third Digital Space Table 6.1.  Mouad l-Ḥ Ḥāqəd’s Muḏḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” in Goud Date

Titles

Translation

1

18/02/2016

2

22/02/2016

3

25/02/2016

4

27/02/2016

5

01/03/2016

”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ شكر ممنون للحبس‬:1 Okacha to Moleenbek” 1: Heartfelt thanks from the prison. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ..‫ “نهار قالو لي البوليس عندك تحقد علينا‬:2 Okacha to Moleenbek” 2: One day ”‫ حنا كنديرو غير خدمتنا‬a policeman said to me, “You have anger toward us . . . we just do our job.” ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ سلفي ف السيلون‬، ‫ من عجايب عكاشة‬:3 Okacha to Moleenbek” 3: From the ‫ فرنسي و سينغالي‬:‫ متعايش مع جوج مسيحيين‬wonders of Okasha, a Salafist in a cell cohabits with two Christians: a Frenchman and a Senegalese. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ مع أول كَاميلة ف الحبس تعلمت ناكل‬:4 Okacha to Moleenbek” 4: With the ‫ بشوية حيث الوقت موجود‬first gamila in prison I learned to eat slowly since there is time. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ نهار كنت محبوس ف الكوميسارية‬:5 Okacha to Moleenbek” 5: One day “‫ ”وكنسمع كلنا حاقدين غير شدونا كاملين‬I was at the police station and I hear “we are all indignant, arrest us all.”

Table 6.1.  Mouad l-Ḥ Ḥāqəd’s Muḏḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” in Goud Date  6 03/03/2016

 7 05/03/2016

 8 08/03/2016

 9 10/03/2016

10 14/03/2016

11 17/03/2016

12 20/03/2016

13 24/03/2016

14 28/03/2016

Titles

Translation

”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ الحبس هو البالصة الوحيدة ف المغرب‬:6 Okacha to Moleenbek” 6: prison is the ‫ اللي متعايشين فيها السلفيين مع المثليين‬only place in Morocco where Salafists cohabit with homosexuals. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ كواحد من والد الشعب كابر فحي شعبي‬:7 Okacha to Moleenbek” 7: As any ‫ ف كازة ماكنعرفش شي حاجة سميتها الحرية‬guy from the people who grew up ‫ كنعرف غا لوبيا‬. . . ‫ الفردية وال المثلية‬in a working-class neighborhood in ‫ خاصو يموت‬Casablanca, I don’t know anything called individual freedom or homosexuality . . . I only know that the faggot must die ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ جوج كانو كايخرجو للساحة‬:8 Okacha to Moleenbek” 8: Two were ‫كوميسير سابق و المجدوب اللي‬،‫ بوحدهم‬going out into the square alone, the ‫ جابت ليه اختو جنوية ذبح بها شي سلفيين‬former commissioner and el-Majdub to whom his sister brought a blade with which any Salafist would slit the throat. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt ‫ فرنسي أسلم ف الحبس مع السلفيين وهما‬:9 “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 9: A ‫ يسرقو ليه فلوسو وقالو عليه كافر خنزير‬Frenchman converted in jail with Salafists and they stole his money and told him infidel pig. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ بعض المرات كنقول الحمد لله أن الوالدة‬:10 Okacha to Moleenbek” 10: Sometimes ‫ ماتت كون بقات عايشة كون تعذبات معايا‬I say to myself, thank God my mother ‫ مسكينة‬is dead, if she were still alive she would have suffered with me, poor thing. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫كتبت‬. ‫ لكتابة فالحيوطة عندي فالدم‬:11 Okacha to Moleenbek” 11: Writing on ‫ فالطاولة ديال لمدرسة فالحيوطة ديال الدرب‬walls is in my blood. I have written on ‫ فالكراسة ديال طوبيس‬school desks, on neighborhood walls, and bus seats. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ كيفاش بدينا عكاشة فاميلي و الراب‬:12 Okacha to Moleenbek” 12: How we ‫ المحابسي‬started Okacha Family and prisoner rap. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ هذي هي التهمة الي لفقو ليا وعالش‬:13 Okacha to Moleenbek” 13: This is the ‫ دخلت الحبس‬charge they came up with for me and why I entered prison. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ لشعار ديالي ” الربح ربح والخسارة حتا‬:14 Okacha to Moleenbek” 14: My slogan ‫ هي ربح “نموت حر واخا نبان غريب لشي‬is “gain is gain and loss is also gain,” ‫ ناس ولفو العبودية والنفاق ويكونو مع الجهة‬I die free even if I appear strange to ‫ الغالبة‬some people attached to slavery and hypocrisy who are the majority. Continued

Table 6.1.  Mouad l-Ḥ Ḥāqəd’s Muḏḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” in Goud Date 15 01/04/2016

16 08/04/2016

17 12/04/2016

18 15/04/2016

19

Titles

Translation

”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ نهار تالقيت المهدي المنتظر ف الحبس‬:15 Okacha to Moleenbek” 15: One day I met Mahdi Mandour in prison. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ نهار الزيارة كلشي كايحط الرشوة ف‬:16 Okacha to Moleenbek” 16: On visiting ‫ كل واحد على حسب جهدو وقدما‬،‫ الحبس‬day everything is corruption in the ‫ خلصتي كثر قدما كتكون عندك امتيازات كثر‬prison, everyone according to his effort, the more you pay the more privileges you get. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From ‫ وكلشي‬،‫ المغرب فروقات والشعب مفرق‬:17 Okacha to Moleenbek” 17: Morocco ‫ انا ختاريت‬،‫ كيحاول يكون مع الفرقة الغالبة‬is diversified and people are divided, ‫ نكون مع الفرقة المغلوب أمرها وهاد شي‬everyone tries to be with the majority ‫ خلق ليا المشاكل‬group, I chose to be with the group of the defeated, and this created problems to me. ”‫ مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt ‫ قبل ما نسافر ألوروبا كانت عندي فكرة‬:18 “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 18: ‫ غالطة على الشعب المغربي‬Before I traveled to Europe, I had a misconception about the Moroccan people. Not available

20 01/05/2016

”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ، ‫ ملي كان عند لمگانة طعم فشي شكل‬:20 ‫والودادي كيقدر يريح حدا رجاوي ومكينش‬ ‫ وكلشي عائلة وحدة‬، ‫مشكل‬

21 14/05/2016

”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ‫ نهار تالقيت شقيف اللي‬،‫ قصص الحبس‬:21 ‫قتل امه و اختو و راجلها‬

22 17/05/2016

”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ‫ملي تالقيت‬..‫ من قصص الحبس‬:22 ‫ كيلو من الذهب ف‬11 ‫“المصري” اللي سرق‬ ‫كازا و بالنهار‬

23 23/05/2016

”‫مذكرات معاذ الحاقد “من عكاشة لمولنبيك‬ ‫ نهار تالقيت ” الذئب المنفرد” و عرفت‬:23 ‫بلي أغلب السجناء السلفيين مظلومين‬

Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 20: When it is time to eat, somehow the Widad fan can rest next to the Raja fan, no problem, they are all one family. Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 21: Tales from prison, one day I met a wretch who killed his mother, sister and husband. Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 22: Tales from prison . . . when I met “the Egyptian” who stole 11 kilograms of gold in Casablanca in the daytime. Mouad l-Ḥāqəd’s Muḏakkirāt “From Okacha to Moleenbek” 23: One day I met “the lone wolf” and learned that most of the Salafist prisoners are wronged.

‫‪Table 6.2.  Audiovisual Corpus—Digital Storytelling‬‬ ‫‪Translation‬‬ ‫‪  0 Smell of the country‬‬ ‫‪  1 Chief of police Bahja‬‬ ‫‪  2 The mystery man‬‬ ‫‪  3 “The Prince” Rachid‬‬ ‫)‪  4 The road to prison (part 1‬‬ ‫)‪  5 The road to prison (part 2‬‬ ‫!‪  6 Hello Okacha ‬‬ ‫‪  7 Isolation cell‬‬ ‫‪  8 Touching the saints‬‬ ‫‪  9 The Secret Kingdom of‬‬ ‫‪Okasha‬‬ ‫‪10 He was close to running‬‬ ‫‪away‬‬ ‫‪11 The end of the king’s‬‬ ‫‪bodyguard‬‬ ‫‪12 The trial and masturbation‬‬

‫‪Playlist YouTube L7A9D‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة‪_0L7a9d Èpisode 0 Ramadan 2021‬‬ ‫‪ 0‬ريحة البالد‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة‪_1L7a9d Èpisode 1 Ramadan 2021‬‬ ‫‪ 1‬الكومسير البهجة‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة‪_2L7a9d Èpisode 2 Ramadan 2021‬‬ ‫‪ 2‬الرجل الغامض‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة‪_3L7a9d Èpisode 3 Ramadan 2021‬‬ ‫‪ ( 3‬االٔمير ) رشيد‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪_4L7a9d Èpisode 4 Ramadan 20214‬‬ ‫( الطريق ٕالى الحبس الجزء ‪1‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪_5L7a9d Èpisode 5 Ramadan 20215‬‬ ‫( الطريق ٕالى الحبس الجزء ‪2‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة‪L7a9d Èpisode 6 Allo Oukacha 6‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 7‬جناح العزلة‪L7a9d Èpisode 7‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 8‬المس بالمقدسات‪L7a9d Èpisode 8‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 9‬مملكة عكاشة السرية‪L7a9d Èpisode 9‬‬ ‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 01‬كاد أن يهرب‪L7a9d Èpisode 10‬‬

‫من عكاشة ٕالى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 11‬نهاية الحارس‪L7a9d Èpisode 11‬‬ ‫الشخصي للملك‬ ‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 21‬المحاكمة‪L7a9d Èpisode 12‬‬ ‫واالستمناء‬ ‫‪ 13 Prison anxiety‬من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 31‬مساوس الحبس‪L7a9d Èpisode 13‬‬ ‫‪Not available‬‬

‫‪15 A love in the visiting‬‬ ‫‪room‬‬ ‫‪16 Types of prisoners‬‬ ‫‪17 Salafism / We will fight‬‬ ‫‪our battles with them.‬‬ ‫‪18 The gang‬‬ ‫‪19 The anxiety of February‬‬ ‫‪20 and their Tata Mounib‬‬

‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 51‬حب في قاعة‪L7a9d Èpisode 15‬‬ ‫الزيارة‬ ‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 61‬أنواع الحباسة‪L7a9d Èpisode 16‬‬ ‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 71‬السلفية‪/‬سنخوض‪L7a9d Èpisode 17‬‬ ‫معاركنا معهم‬ ‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 81‬العصبة‪L7a9d Èpisode 18‬‬ ‫من عكاشة إلى مولنبيك الحلقة ‪ 91‬مساوس ‪ ٠٢‬فبراير‪L7a9d Èpisode 19‬‬ ‫وطاطاهم منيب‬

148

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into a hybrid Moroccan meeting space. From the diaspora, Mouad maintains a strong link with Moroccan society through his online production, which also represents linguistically and stylistically the instrument through which he asserts his identity and social ideals. NOTES   1.  https://quran.com/yusuf/33 [accessed 16 March 2023].   2.  We should consider the exponential growth of autobiographical writings that has marked the cultural and intellectual landscape of modern Arab societies, some of the most famous of which are Muḏakkirāt al-šabāb “Memoirs of Youth” (published posthumously in 1996) by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal; Siǧn al-ʿumr “The Prison of Life” (1964), by Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm; Muḏakkirāt Naǧīb al-Riḥānī “Memoirs of Naǧīb al-Riḥāni” (1946).   3.  It should also be noted, in reference to the memoirs of Haykal (an Egyptian writer, intellectual, and politician of the early 1900s), how Paniconi (2014) points out that Haykal’s son’s transformation of the title for the posthumous publication of his father’s memoirs, from Yawmiyyāt Barīs (Diaries of Paris) to Muḏakkirāt al-šabāb (Memoirs of Youth) can be understood as a desire to celebrate the public figure, and not recount the private past.   4.  Note that specifically among Moroccan authors of the 1970s, the prose literary output of Muḥammad Zafzāf, or the celebrated novel Al-ḫubz al-ḥāfī ‘For bread alone’ (1973) by Muḥammad Šukrī, oriented toward neo-realism.  5. Similar techniques are used in other genres that can be largely defined as prison literature and that are becoming increasingly popular in the Arab World. For instance, in order to problematize similar issues in the Egyptian society and call for peaceful reconciliation, the Egyptian writer Khairy Shalaby in The City of the Enslaved (Sahrā al-Mamālīk, 2007) used sudden shifts of linguistic registers, allegories and humor, as well as the presence of multiple narrators (Gintsburg forthcoming).   6. The term “L7a9d” is the result of transcription from Moroccan Arabic into Latin characters mixed with numerals, referred to as Arabizi, or more specifically aransiyya or e-darija for the realization of written Moroccan Arabic (Caubet, 2018). L7a9d comes from the term in Arabic al-ḥāqid (l-ḥāqəd in Moroccan Arabic), “the Indignant.”  7. Episode 17, 12/04/2016 (https://www.goud.ma/-‫عكاشة‬-‫من‬-‫الحاقد‬-‫معاذ‬-‫مذكرات‬ 17-212201‫لمولنبيك‬/), [accessed 1 February 2023].  8. Episode 12, 20/03/2016 (https://www.goud.ma/-‫عكاشة‬-‫من‬-‫الحاقد‬-‫معاد‬-‫مذكرات‬ -12-207503‫لمولنبيك‬/), [accessed 1 February 2023].   9.  In particular, the song Baraka man skat, ‘No more silence’ in which we find the words of the refrain “They exploit our wealth and leave the crumbs for us, while so many freedom fighters died on our behalf” (https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ pro-democracy-moroccan-rapper-given-four-month-jail-sentence [accessed February 1, 2023]), is a veritable incitement to reflection and rebellion against the oppression



“From Okacha to Molenbeek” 149

and sense of powerlessness of the people and ordinary people who would like to improve their quality of life. 10.  An article published in TelQuel, on L7a9d’’s last arrest in 2014 on charges of a further assault on two police officers denounces the procedure in the trial, which was held without a civil party or witnesses, in https://telquel.ma/2014/07/02/prison-fermepour-le-rappeur-l7a9d_140860 [accessed 1 February 2023]. 11. See the news on bladi.net: https://www.bladi.net/condamnation-lhaqed.html [accessed 1 February 2023]. 12. See the article of Index on censorship, https://www.indexoncensorship. org/2015/02/indexawards2015-arts-nominee-mouad-el-haqed-belghouat/ [accessed 1 February 2023] 13. Although it is an acronym, the sequence of letters composes a root word in Arabic (and in Dāriža), which is muʿallim “master,” a typical self-praise term used in slang between rappers. 14. Note, too, how the publication of contemporary Moroccan muḏakkirāt in L7a9d’s narration follows the same dynamics as the traditional muḏakkirāt of the modern era, namely their dissemination through literary journals or progressive newspapers. 15. In particular, Goud is a continuation of the editorial experience of another famous Moroccan weekly called Nichane (nīšān, ‘direct’), which was in circulation between 2006 and 2010 and covered sensitive and topical Moroccan issues, using dārija in Arabic characters, especially in the covers and titles of articles. See Miller (2012) and Hoogland (2018) on the linguistic characteristics of Nichane. 16.  Following the 2011 demonstrations, King Mohamed VI initiated a process of constitutional reforms that led to the new constitution that contemplates (standard) Arabic and Amazigh (the Berber language) as official languages of the Kingdom of Morocco. For more information, see Article 5 of Morocco’s 2011 constitution. (http:// www.amb-maroc.fr/constitution/Nouvelle_Constitution_%20Maroc2011.pdf ) and Ziamari & De Ruiter 2015). 17.  See, in this regard, the evolution of Moroccan Arabic’s transition to writing from early text messages and messages in chat rooms and forums (Caubet, 2004, 2012, 2013), to more elaborate forms of written production aimed at artistic expression and identity claims (Caubet, 2017a-b, Caubet, 2018). 18. The Goud newspaper website is www.goud.ma. 19. All episodes are available on the playlist dedicated to L7a9d’s musalsala on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyBPywAxXuuIJJtM5wcolB57bZXHbQrY [accessed 16 March 2022]. 20.  In fact, all titles are numbered in ascending order; however, in the archives of the Goud newspaper website, episode number 19 could not be found. 21. Published on 18/02/2016 in https://www.goud.ma/-‫عكاشة‬-‫من‬-‫لحاقد‬-‫معاذ‬-‫مذكرات‬ -1-201284‫لمولنبيك‬/ [accessed 16 March 2022]. The examples cited, including episode titles, are not transliterated to avoid over-interpretation. The texts are written in Moroccan Arabic in Arabic script, i.e., in a language that is not standardized for written purposes. Moroccan Arabic is also characterized by high phonetic and phonological variation, so it was considered more effective to keep the original written text in Ara-

150

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bic script, followed by a translation as close as possible to the meaning of the original text. Any transliterations are used only to make explicit interpretations of a strictly linguistic or stylistic nature. 22.  Ibidem. 23.  Translations are by the author and are limited to reproducing the content and/or emphasizing the linguistic and stylistic aspects made explicit in the analysis. 24. Episode 11, published on 17/03/2016, in https://www.goud.ma/-‫معاذ‬-‫مذكرات‬ 11-206936‫لمولنبيك‬-‫عكاشة‬-‫من‬-‫الحاقد‬/ [accessed 16 March 2022]. 25.  Ibidem. 26.  Ibidem. 27.  Ibidem. 28. Published on 15/04/2016 in https://www.goud.ma/-‫عكاشة‬-‫من‬-‫الحاقد‬-‫معاذ‬-‫مذكرات‬ -18-212816‫لمولنبيك‬/ [accessed 16 March 2022]. 29.  Ibidem. 30.  Ibidem. 31.  https://www.youtube.com/@mouadl7a9d [accessed 16 March 2022]. 32.  Details on the audiovisual corpus are provided in Table 2 of Annex B. 33.  As with the written corpus, the episode playlist on L7a9d’s YouTube channel includes 19 recordings numbered in ascending order in which episode number 14 is not present. 34.  In the Arab World there existed a similar tradition of using a daftar, which was used by ḥakawātī (“storytellers”) during public performances of reciting epic novels. 35.  The cover title, in which a picture of L7a9d in the foreground also appears, is “Mouad L7aqe9 libre. L’autre (notre) Maroc a gagné !” (‘Mouad L7aqe9 free. The Other (Our) Morocco Won!’), in https://telquel.ma/2012/02/22/mouad-l7a9ed-librelautre-notre-maroc-gagne_419 [accessed 16 March 2022]. 36. It is a poignant song by an anonymous prisoner circulating in the popular cultural traditions of the Arab world. Several recordings famously circulate on social media. The short text heard in L7a9d’s musalsala says: “Oh, my heart, the distance has tortured us, the fire of the heart has increased, if it hits us, if we become ashes, the homesickness of your breath, your sensation makes it pleasant.” 37.  This is the Quranic quotation proposed as the incipit of this chapter, but also a series of verses in Moroccan Arabic, as follows: ‫عاشو القمع‬ ‫شافو العذاب‬ ‫عندهم غصة فالحناجر ديالهم‬ ‫باقي مجاتهمش الفرصة يعبرو عليها‬ ‫كل لي قالو كلمة حق والحوهم فالحباسات‬ ‫وخالو أمهاتهم فالمحنة‬ They have experienced oppression They have experienced torture They have a knot in their throats Some of them have not had the opportunity to overcome it All those who told the truth are rotting in prisons They left their mothers in suffering.



“From Okacha to Molenbeek” 151

REFERENCES Baynham, Mike and Sarali Gintsburg. 2022. “Tar or Honey? Space and Time of Moroccan Migration in a Video Sketch Comedy ‘al-Kāmīra lakum.’” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatiotemporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 157–74. London: Bloomsbury. Caubet, Dominique. 2004. “L’intrusion des téléphones portables et des SMS dans l’arabe marocain en 2002–2003.” In Parlers jeunes ici et là-bas, edited by Dominique Caubet, Jacqueline Billies, Thierry Bulot, Isabelle Léglise, and Catherine Miller, 257-270. Paris: L’Harmattan. Caubet Dominique. 2013. “Maroc 2011—Messagerie instantanée sur l’internet marocain : facebook, darija et parlers jeunes.” In Évolution des pratiques et des représentations langagières dans le Maroc du XXIe siècle, edited by Jan Jaap De Ruiter, Youssef Tamer, and Montserrat Benítez Fernandes, 63–87. Paris: L’Harmattan. Caubet, Dominique. 2017a. “Morocco: An Informal Passage to Literacy in dārija (Moroccan Arabic).” In The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World–Writing Change edited by Jacob Høigilt, and Gunvor Mejdell, 116–41. Leiden: Brill. Caubet, Dominique. 2017b. “Darija and the construction of ‘Moroccanness.’” In Identity and Dialect Performance. A study of Communities and Dialects, edited by Reem Bassiouney Reem, 99–124. Abingdon, Oxon / New York: Routledge. Caubet, Dominique. 2018. “New elaborate written forms in Darija. Blogging, posting and slamming in Morocco.” In The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, edited by Elabbas Benmamoun, and Reem Bassiouney, 387–406. London and New York: Routledge. De Moor, C. M. 1998. “Autobiography, modern.” In Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature vol. 1, edited by Julie Scott Meisami, and Paul Starkey, 112–13. London and New York: Routledge. Gintsburg, Sarali. Forthcoming. “Hilarious, sad and didactic: Hanane el-Fadili’s tribute to older unmarried women in her comedy show ‘The daughters of Si Taher.’” In The Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing, edited by Ina Seethaler, and Tripthi Pillai. London: Routledge. Gintsburg, Sarali. Forthcoming. “Khairy Shalaby’s novel ‘The City of the Enslaved’: Egyptian prison literature with a Russian twist.” CLC Web. Gintsburg, Sarali. 2021. “Living through Transition: The Poetic Tradition of the Jbala between Orality and Literacy at a Time of Major Cultural Transformations.” RILCE. Revista de Filologia Hispanica 36, no. 4: 1434–54. 10.15581/008.36.4.1434-54 Gintsburg, Sarali. 2013. “Yo! I’ll spit my rap for y’all . . . in darija: Local and global in Moroccan hip hop culture.” In Evolution des pratiques et représentations langagières dans le Maroc du XXIè siècle, edited by Montserrat Benitez Fernandez, Catherine Miller, Jan Jaap de Ruiter, and Youssef Tamer, 186–207. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hoogland, Jan. 2018. “Darija in the Moroccan Press: The Case of the Magazine Nichane.” Sociolinguistic Studies 12, no. 2: 273–93.

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Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lenze, Lele. 2019. Politics and Digital Literature in the Middle East. Perspectives on Online Text and Context. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Catherine. 2012. “Observations concernant la présence de l’arabe marocain dans la presse marocaine arabophone des années 2009–2010.” In De los manuscritos medievales a internet: la presencia del árabe vernáculo en las fuentes escritas, edited by Mohamed Meouak, Pablo Sánchez, and Ángeles Vicente, 419-440. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. Miller, Catherine. 2017. “Contemporary dārija Writings in Morocco: Ideology and Practices.” In The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World–Writing Change, edited by Jacob Høigilt, and Gunvor Mejdell, 90–115. Leiden: Brill. Paniconi, Maria Elena. 2014. “Scrivere di sé. Esperienze di modernità culturale in muḏakkirāt al-šabāb (memorie di gioventù) di Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 9: 295–313. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24640448. Pennisi, Rosa. 2020. “Written Dārija: ‘māšī məʿqūl tǝktəb-ha bi-ḥurūf al-luġa alʿarabiyya!’ It Is not Logical to Write It with the Arabic Letters! Media Reception of the Zakoura Dictionary Project.”Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale 56: 129154. DOI 10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/56/005. Pepe, Teresa. 2019. Blogging from Egypt. Digital Literature, 2005-2016. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Philipp, Thomas. 1993. “The Autobiography in Modern Arab Literature and Culture.” Poetics Today 14, no. 3: 573–604. Suriano, Alba Rosa. 2019. “La modernità nel teatro egiziano: l’esempio di Naǧīb alRīḥānī.” Oriente Moderno 99: 203–19. http://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340214. Yacoubi, El Hassan. 2008. “L’écriture de soi comme modèle de contestation et d’affirmation de l’individu dans la société marocaine.” Chimères 66–67: 315–47. https://doi.org/10.3917/chime.066.0315. Ziamari, Karima, and Jan Jaap de Ruiter. 2015. “Les langues au Maroc : réalités, changements et évolutions linguistiques.” In Le Maroc au présent : D’une époque à l’autre, une société en mutation, edited by Baudouin Dupret, Zakaria Rhani, Assia Boutaleb, and Jean-Noël Ferrié, 441–62. Casablanca: Centre Jacques-Berque.

Chapter Seven

Caribbean Canadian Writers of African Descent The Legacy of “the Door” Judit Nagy INTRODUCTION Africans “torn away from their native languages and cultures and transported to colonial America” through slavery have produced a vast body of prose in English, ever since Britton Hammon’s pamphlet appeared in 1760 and autobiographical narratives became the first prose subgenre to bear testimony to the enslavement of people of African origin.1 In some of their works, both Barbadian-born Austin Clarke and Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand discuss the trauma of the Middle Passage and its aftermath. As a starting point, this chapter will introduce the most significant Middle Passage–related works of the two authors. Next, it will move on to discuss Brand and Clarke’s insights into their African descent as put forward in their respective autobiographical works Membering (2015) and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001). The second part of the chapter aims at exploring how the trauma of the Middle Passage and its aftermath are reflected in two selected short stories, “Sans Souci” and “Griff!” Special attention will be paid to the concept of the door coined by Brand and how it affects the life of her and Clarke’s protagonists.

Austin Clarke One of Austin Clarke’s works of prose, the Giller Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize–winning novel The Polished Hoe (2003), has slavery as a focal theme: through Mary-Mathilda’s confession of a crime, the legacy of Bimshire (Barbados)’s African past and references to the community’s collective experience of slavery and colonialism surface. “The Polished Hoe’s meandering orality, its slow-burning power, succeed movingly in asserting memory over the silent gaps in recorded history,” critic Maya Jaggi remarks.2 In Clarke’s autobiographi153

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Chapter Seven

cal Membering (2015), the author reveals that the plantation he describes in the novel was modeled after Wildey Plantation: “Mr. Webster was the brother of the owner of Wildey Plantation, of vast fields of sugar cane, and which produced raw sugar and crack liquor, another name for molasses, and which is the model, only in its physical dimension, though not in racial and moral disposition, of the plantation in my novel The Polished Hoe.”3 In Membering, Clarke also provides insight into his quest to explore his African roots. He uses the expression journey going backwards to signify his contemplations, which were inspired by a Friday class at Combermere (“Cawmere”) School for Boys and continued for the rest of his life. Clark stresses that the discoveries these classes triggered signified an irreversible process that fundamentally changed his concept of himself and his people: “a Friday [. . .] marked the change in my life which cannot be altered now; and in some cases, be redeemed. But in this journey backwards, I am discovering more about myself and the heritage that brought me, through ancestry, to this part of the bigger world, the First World.”4 Interestingly, Clark also points out that slavery and its legacy did not mark a pivotal point concerning either the education he had received, or his upbringing at home: “I have never been concerned with the history of my hijacking from some place in Africa, to the West Indies; and I have never really contemplated that I was a slave, even though that ancestry, and association with slaves, in history books, and in fact, even though former slaves and slavery are painted in the picture of my origin. We were brought up to imagine that the page had not been stained by this passage.”5 However, this does not mean that Clark was completely unaware that his family was affected, too. In fact, it was known to Clark that his great-grandmother was a slave. What surprised him though was how his grandmother could live a happy life in the shadow of that past. Her example also made him suspicious that following the colonizers’ faith and ways will not ensure either happiness or success in life: But it did not mean that I could not see, as I did, traces of this terrible experience in the body and physical and mental disposition of my grandmother, Miriam. I do not know whether she regarded, and could remember when her mother was a slave. Or if she herself was a slave. But there was something about her complete satisfaction with her life, her acceptance of it, whatever it was—mostly a terrible, spare, and bare existence—that alarmed me into thinking that I had been hoodwinked in those Sunday School classes by parables and Christian tracts; seduced into feeling that I would inherit the earth because of my injection with Christian principles.6 Clark sums up the ultimate goal of the quest that the legacy of the Middle Passage started him on as follows: “Since then, my search in life and in literature



Caribbean Canadian Writers of African Descent 155

has been to find the meaning of myself, my personality, my reason for entering the relationships I have formed, with friends and enemies and lovers. [. . .] quite simply I wanted to know what would become of me, with the decisions I have made. And this search, though not of the kind that I see in historical inquiry, I am reminded of it, in the retelling of that very history, narrated from the mouths of the women who have lived through it.”7 Clark’s powerful description of how he felt when the news of the decolonization of Barbados reached him also bears testimony to the strong presence of the past in the life of the island. He presents gaining independence from the colonizers through the images of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Employing these images, Clark equates Barbadian independence with freeing their African past from the painful and burdensome memories and whatever else came with that baggage, while symbolically being given the opportunity to start afresh on the island simply as Africans: “[i]t seemed to us as if the Caribbean Sea had changed into the Atlantic Ocean, washing us with the skeletons and bones and myths of its importance as a conveyor of men and women in bondage, but being cleansed by the currents and lashing of that ocean, against our bodies to make us alert to the changes happening round us. We were once more living upon the waves of an ocean. The Atlantic Ocean.”8 For Clarke, another related and oft-discussed issue is his characters’ Britishness as colonial subjects. Speaking of his early years at school in Membering, he describes how this aspect permeated Barbadian society: “We were English. British. Britannia ruled the waves. This was our virtue. And it became through indoctrination our historical and ideological liability.”9

Dionne Brand Brand also dwells upon the impact of the Middle Passage on people of African descent in her poetry, prose, and essays. For example, in her volume No Language is Neutral (1990), some of the poems focus on the connection between the depicted landscape and an identity that has been “shaped by the traumas of slavery.” In the same volume, slavery also manifests through the enslavement by language in the face of the “white, male, heteronormative master narratives” of others.10 Similarly, Brand’s prose, such as the short story collection Sans Souci and Other Stories (1989) or her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (2000), equally contains references to the impact of the Middle Passage on the protagonists’ mind. Inspired by her grandfather’s stories, the nonfictional A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) is perhaps Brand’s work which deals most extensively with the legacy of the “pain and sadness of the door.”11

Resulting from a long-standing struggle with her grandfather about her ancestral roots and her desire to know her ancestry, “a small space opened in

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her.”12 Brand describes this recognition as reaching the door of no return, her ancestors departing one world for another. She perceives it as a never-ending battle to “complete her identity.”13 Brand recalls, “[w]e were not from the place where we lived and we could not remember where we were from or who we were. My grandfather could not summon up a vision of landscape or a people which would add up to a name. And it was profoundly disturbing.”14 (12). It is the kind of homelessness where the lost home is no longer retrievable, not even traceable. And it is exactly through the untraceable nature of what was once beyond it that “the door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the diaspora.”15 As Brand herself explains in an interview with da Costa, “I think [rootlessness] has to do with that door. I think that after that door, rootedness is impossible. I think that rootlessness is origin for some. How can you face that history and feel any rootedness?”16 As a result, people of African descent live in a world that will never become full, that will always be lacking an important part: the origins, that ultimate point of reference, the grounding, the foundations, the roots, the source. “Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space. That space is the measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship. One is caught in the few feet in between.”17 In an interview with Maya Mavjee, Brand further elaborates the concept of the door: The Door of No Return is a collective phrase for the places, the ports where slaves were taken to be brought to the Americas. [. . .] The language of the phrase begins from simple description but it collects multiple meanings as we enter it. It allowed me to begin a journey to create a map to a place where a search for identity or the nature and quality of existence would begin. Because time and history separate us from that place it is therefore a space in the imagination. I felt I was connected to this door, this space. This journey would be to create a map to that place, which is both a map to a place in history and a map to a place in the imagination.18

What Brand suggests here is that the door is not just a physical entity over the threshold of which someone coerced to depart for another world steps, it also has accumulated a set of symbolic meanings. Similarly, the quest for finding one’s origins through the act of charting those territories, through mapmaking, may have both physical and spiritual dimensions. And when it is impossible to go back in time to the origins physically, only the spiritual journey remains: The journey to Africa is not a temporal journey to a physical homeland but a journey to a spiritual one which has elements of the past that was broken and tragic. The age of map-making coincides with this tragedy too. To make a map is



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to create a definition of a place. Some maps are made to places you don’t know even exist – to a new place. I wanted to lift that idea of map-making. I want to live in another kind of world. In a sense, that is the map I am writing.19

The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to achieve some sort of a selfdefinition. Thus the meaning of Brand’s book is to see “how one defines one’s own existence within history [. . .] How existence is constructed for you.”20 The visual artist Annalee Davis proffers a similar stance, “we are all forced to reckon with the fact that home may no longer be a real physical space but a notion we carry deep within our selves. The ultimate journey is within.”21 In “Bread Out of Stone,” Brand proposes that, curiously, the lack of knowledge about one’s origins as defined through the door does not necessarily mean that one does not have any memory of where one comes from. Rather, this memory inhabits the deepest recesses of the unconscious. Moreover, it also exerts an influence over one’s actions, whether one is aware of it or not: “[a]ll the Black people here have a memory whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, whether they remember it or not, and, in that memory, are words such as land, sea, whip, work, rap, coffle, sing, sweat, release, days . . . without . . . this . . . pain . . . coming . . .We know . . . have a sense . . . hold a look in our eyes . . . about it . . . have to fight every day for our humanity . . . redeem it every day.”22 As the above implies, the door brings pain and sadness, it is both a metaphorical and a physiological place, imaginary and real at the same time. It also symbolizes “lost historical and familial memory”: “[w]hen passing through the door, people lost their history, humanity and ancestry. This trauma is still felt by black people today.”23 As such, it has substantially impacted life in the Caribbean. The region’s inhabitants of African origin have experienced linguistic and cultural displacement, further diversified through Caribbean migration to North America. These issues inevitably surface in Brand and Clarke. Consequently, the feeling of entrapment and a sense of loss and longing appear to be inherent themes in many of their stories. In Brand’s case, as Goldman suggests, “[v]irtually all of [her] characters are denied, or willfully refuse, the solace of home and the experience of belonging, compelled, as they are, to navigate the flux and change instigated by the Middle Passage.”24 In addition to this kind of homelessness tinged with the pain and sadness of the door, the mother-child, and often specifically the mother-daughter relationship is also subject to disruption: “the repeated rejection of daughters by mothers functions as a marker of the devastating effect of the Middle Passage. [. . .] the corrosive legacies of slavery and sexism is their impact on inter-generational bonds between women.”25 Both Brand and Clark’s characters live their quotidian lives in a world where violence is not infrequent. Black women are even more vulnerable to

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violence as they are unwilling to give up a brother who walked through the door with them, however brutal, offensive, or hurtful his behavior may be. As Brand puts it in “Bread Out of Stone,” “Black women cannot, won’t throw Black men to white men. I stare the brothers back. They see my sex. My race is only a deed to their ownership. Their eyes do not move. If some of this finds its way into some piece of fiction, a line of poetry, an image on a screen, no wonder.”26 It is also important to mention that Brand’s and her characters’ inner journey to find belonging and their quest to retrieve in the next best possible way what has been lost “occurs in an entirely black space.”27 These two characteristics may come across as instances of the peculiarities of the Afro-Caribbean female point of view, from which Sans Souci is also told. Brand’s “Sans Souci” is narrated by the female protagonist. However, she begins her story by referring to herself as she and uses third person singular narration: “She ripping it out; shaking the roots of earth,”28 and it is only later that the reader learns her name, Claudine, from the mouth of the man who raped her. This resonates well with Brand’s above remark “[m]y race is only a deed to their ownership,” quasi-legitimizing sexual violence on the grounds that these women are their African brother’s possessions, they walked through the door together, and as such, these brothers are entitled to act like that. In accordance with this, not giving the protagonist a name at the beginning may imply that her suffering is not unique, she is just one of the many whom her fate befalls. Also, referring to her as “she” renders her and her never-ending struggle invisible. Similarly, Mama—the embodiment of the African American fictionalized mammy character—consoling the female protagonist in the bar after her abortion lacks a proper first name. The name of the male protagonist, Prime, meaning of first importance, main, of the best possible quality, excellent, further reinforces the stance that Sans Souci nurtures a male-dominated society where women can only be possessions, childbearing machines and housekeepers, with their creativity stifled in the shadow of the door.29 Claudine’s very name (cloud + dine) destines her for the domestic sphere, with her unwanted “boy with his glum face turning cloudier and the girl and the little boy looking hungry.”30 Claudine is expected to comfort and feed her children, demands she finds hard to fulfil given that she has been raped and forced into the kind of motherhood akin to slavery. Her victimization is also expressed through the image of slaughtered pigs in the story, “she was thirteen, she felt like the hogs that were strung on the limbs of trees and slit from the genitals to the throat.”31 In the same manner, Prime, the father of Claudine’s children, is compared to “the man who slaughtered pigs for the village.”32 Like slavery where there is torture and shrieks of pain, and death is a natural corollary, “the pig’s squeal [is] at once mournful and brief in its urgency. The startling incidence of its death mixed with commonplaceness and routine.”33 The door is that of a slaughterhouse in this respect.



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Brand uses a stream of consciousness-like puzzle to unfold the victimized protagonist’s story. Her text is divided into five parts separated by Roman numerals. It is only at the end of the story that the order of happenings is put into place. First in chronology is the last part of the story (V.), in which Claudine is first raped by Prime. The local Afro-Caribbean community accepts this as natural, “[f]rom then, everyone explained the rape by saying that she was his woman,”34 following the logic Brand put forward in “Bread Out of Stone,” “my race is only a deed to their ownership.”35 Once Claudine realizes it is impossible to tell her mother what has happened, she contemplates taking her own life through “a free fall” into the sea.36 The subsequent part (I.) zooms in on Claudine’s current life, which is marked by futility, unhappiness, being suicidal, giving up on her own children all born out of wedlock, and alienation from the father of her children. Part II, which follows, reveals a conversation between Claudine and Uncle Ranni, who also sides with Prime in the matter of the rape but helps Claudine arrange an illegal abortion. The actual abortion takes place in part IV. This can be conceived as Claudine’s ultimate denial of motherhood. Finally, part III describes the aftermath of the abortion. The effect of this way of structuring the story is to invite the reader on a journey to create a map of Claudine’s life, to chart her story. The repeated suicidal impulses are presented in such a way that they can be seen as affective repercussions of the door to be detailed in the next section. Brand’s story is set on a Caribbean island in a settlement called Sans Souci. Contrary to the French meaning of the place, without worry, the environment surrounding the female protagonist is presented as oppressive right from the opening passage on: “Rough grass asserted itself everywhere [. . .] It inched its way closer and closer to doorsteps and walls until some hand, usually it was hers, ripped it from its tendrilled roots. But soon it grew back again. It kept the woman in a protracted battle with its creeping mossyness.”37 It is a never-ending, futile struggle. And not just with nature, as in Sans Souci, “the people were as rough as the grass.”38 Both “weigh down” on her. The houses down the hill are “like spiders crawling towards her,”39 the inhabitants spread evil gossip that “she was minding snakes”40 and she feels that she “was not her mother’s child nor her sister’s sister nor an inhabitant of the place.”41 As will be demonstrated below, the displacement Claudine experiences has to do with the sadness of the door. In its wake, she is unable to make Sans Souci her real home as “at times, home is nowhere.”42 As has been discussed above, Goldman suggests that the rejection of children is symptomatic of people living in the shadow of the door. Claudine’s own mother threatens to cut ties with her for her pregnancy, even though she has fallen victim to rape. At the same time, Claudine herself neglects her own unwanted children: “Then they were not good to play with any more. They

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cried and felt her hands. [. . .] After a time the children did not get bathed and dressed and after a time they did not get beaten, either.”43 As a routine, Claudine sends the children off to their grandmother’s or just leaves them in the house while she goes to the top of the hill pretending to be fetching water, and contemplates committing suicide. Moreover, Claudine opts for an abortion with the fourth child, who feels “green and angry” moving within her.44 For a moment, let us dwell on the description of the attempted suicide scene, which is repeated also at the end of the story. Heading for the top of the hill, Claudine “would look down to the sea and rehearse her falling—a free fall, a dive into the sea. How fast the sea would come toward her—probably not—the cliff was not vertical enough. Her body would hit tufts of grass before reaching the bottom. [. . .] Musing on whether it would work or not she would lie down on the ground, confused.”45 Symbolically, water would be the element that would take Claudine back to the origins from a world where she feels utterly homeless and lost. “Our origins seemed to be in the sea. It had brought the whole of Guayguayare there from unknown places, unknown origins. Unknown to me at the time and even more unknown now.”46 To further reinforce this stance and to come full circle, Brand quotes Walcott, “Derek Walcott wrote, ‘the sea is history.’”47 On each occasion Claudine is suicidal, she gives up the thought of taking her own life in the end and lies down in the grass: “[s]he would be faced by the sky. Then her eyes would close, tired of the blue of the sky zooming in and out at her gaze.”48 She would fall asleep, escaping until the world let her know through raindrops or her children’s cries that she was still somewhere else. This place, Sans Souci, therefore represented Claudine’s surrendering to her doomed fate and powerlessness, acknowledging her failed attempts at permanently breaking with her current life and successfully integrating present and past: “She pretended to live in the present. She looked at the awful sky. She made its insistent blueness define the extent of what she could see.”49 BARBADOS—TRINIDAD AS THE DOOR OF NO RETURN In “Sans Souci,” Claudine speaks of the awful sky, desires the sea through contemplating suicide and gives up by gazing at the sky until she falls asleep. The sky reflects in the sea, and, it seems, the sea also reflects in the sky. As Brand puts it in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging: “Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time. In the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. It seemed to be made of the same substance. The same substance which carried voices or smells, music or emotion.”50 Water making up the



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sea and air making up the sky can be symbolic of the past and the present respectively. Voices, smells, music, and emotion can both attach to memories of the past and be part of our present experience of life. Moreover, for Brand, water seems to be definitive: “Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there was still more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water.”51 At the same time, it also connects to some inherent doom: “I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way. [. . .] These things I knew before I knew they had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea. [. . .] I had a visceral understanding of a wound much deeper than the physical, a wound which somehow erupted in profound self-disappointment, self-hatred, and disaffection.”52 Later on Brand goes on to deem the door responsible for causing a “hereditary epidemic sickness with life,”53 that is, a curse-like malaise generations of African origin pass down to the next ones in turn. Austin Clarke’s “Griff!” is told in third person singular through an omniscient narrator, who fills in on the protagonists’ character and background providing information on Griff’s schooling, his wife’s hysterectomy, his friends and so-called friends, Clynn, Stooly, and Masher. Direct words coming from the characters are put in quotation marks. The linear story is centered around Griff, a former Ascot graduate who moved from London, England to Toronto, Canada. His passion for betting on horses and gambling often leaves him broke, he is always late paying the rent and is frustrated by having to pay the installments for the couch his wife begged him to buy. He looks forward to weekends when he meets his friends to go dancing, drinking, “his only consolation,” and to the racing tracks.54 On one occasion at the tavern, a Jamaican man dances with his wife and is surprised to find her with Griff, and it turns out it is not the first time they have met. The story reaches its climax when Griff—feeling greatly insulted, in the heat of the moment— strangles his wife. The next passages will be an attempt to show how the door is present in Griff’s life, and how as such, it contributes to the tragedy. Griff likes “to identify himself as a black Englishman,” “he flaunted his British experience and the civilized bearing that came with it.” He thinks highly of himself as he went to university in England, “a West Indian who had lived in London, [. . .] he hated to be regarded just as black.” He thought he was better than his fellow-countrymen “from the canefields in the islands.”55 As was hinted in the introduction to Clarke, his characters often considered their Britishness as virtue and also a ground for superiority. The narrator adds, “[h]e was blacker than most immigrants. In color, that is,” and his friend, Clynn refutes him each time he brings up the matter, “but you’re blasted black man and the sooner you realize that fact, the more rasshole wiser you would be!”56 Griff’s character does reveal traits that can be connected with his

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time in Britain. He is the best-dressed man among his friends and expects his home and wife to be neat and tidy, she must “dress well, look sharp even in the house.”57 He keeps repeating “money is naught all”58 and that he doesn’t have to “come on strong” each time he faces a conflict,59 which his friends interpret as cowardly behavior. Deep inside he knows he has failed in life, “[w]hat bothered Griff along with his blackness was that most of his friends were getting through” but he is struggling to keep up appearances in order to demonstrate that he has a decent and prosperous life,60 “his manner and attitude towards money, and his wife’s expressionless smile, were perhaps lying expressions of a turbulent inner feeling of failure.”61 The door may also be blamed for Griff’s failure: the British identity and mannerisms Griff was trying to internalize were not his own. As he lacks any natural access to his own roots, he will always borrow identities throughout his life, his color keeps “changing color.”62 This way he remains homeless in the sense Caryl Phillips suggests, “‘I recognize the place, I feel at home here, but I don’t belong. I am of, and not of, this place. [. . .] I have chosen to create for myself an imaginary home, [. . .] [m]y increasingly precious, imaginary, Atlantic world’ - a place he locates somewhere in between the coordinates of West Africa, Britain, and the Americas.”63 Griff’s gambling may also result from his lack of roots as obstructed by the door. He is not taught the value of money or how to use it wisely, so it slips through his hands. In response, he rejects it and deems it unimportant, making remarks such as “Canada has money but not the culture”64 or “money is naught all.”65 As was pointed out in the analysis of Brand’s story, the disruption of motherhood can also be symptomatic of the door. The reader is given the information that—due to hysterectomy—Griff’s wife is unable to conceive and produce offspring. In addition, she has a scar around her neck, which she covers with a shawl in public, the symbolic representation of the abuse her people had to suffer in the wake of the door. Her life is full of compromises and disappointment, but she chooses to stay pretty, she keeps smiling like Clarke’s grandmother, Miriam. Her smile was “a smile that told you she had been forced against the truth of her circumstances to believe with him that money was not all, at-all”66; she “carried many burdens of fear and failure for her husband’s apparent ambitionless attitudes” but “she was breathing as her yoga teacher had taught her to do”67 and “her Scotch seem[ed] to absorb her arising unhappiness.”68 On one occasion, Clynn’s sister, Princess mentions that Griff is gambling away his own wife’s life adding that she would not be surprised if his wife left him. Griff holds his wife to be “just a nice kid”69 but, as a trace of his British ways and in compensation for her lost fertility, he “clothes [her] in the “cloud



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of virginity and sanctity.”70 Yet, he deceives her on numberless occasions: he takes her home from the club by feigning sickness but sneaks back in spending time with other women in the “happy absence of his wife.”71 He conceals his gambling and the extent of his financial losses from her, too. He considers the motto “Christ is the head of this home”72 as an empty bargain that came with his wife and his life in Britain. He is “centered so much around his own problems” that he ignores those of his wife,73 like so many of his compatriots. In the male-dominated society of Caribbean immigrants, many men are boastful of their manliness, deeming infidelity natural on their own part but an unforgiveable act when it comes to their spouse, just as they pride themselves on disciplining, breaking their wives. Again, this way of considering women may be the aftermath of the door: they must be broken to obey like the slaves. In the beginning, Griff seems different, coming up with the excuse that his wife is weak. In addition, he also lacks the moral grounds for such behavior. However, there comes a point when he goes through a transformation and his Barbadian self—and the unconscious heritage that comes with it as represented by the door—gets the better of him. Let us investigate the related series of incidents that escalate into a tragedy. As was hinted above, Griff is easily influenced by his friends. He lacks access to his own ultimate roots, which would give his personality its own integrity. As such, it comes as no surprise that he is subject to peer pressure. At first, when his friend, Clynn’s sister, Princess confronts him about how he is spoiling his wife’s life, Griff retorts, “if I was a different man, I would really show these West-Indian women something.”74 Nobody takes his words seriously, his behavior is perceived as cowardly. On the night of the tragedy, cherishing the long weekend, “[t]hey had all forgotten [. . .], through the flavour of the calypso and the peas and the rice, [. . .] that they were still living in a white man’s country. [. . .] Tonight was [. . .] West Indian night [. . .] Tonight, they would forget and drink, forget and dance, and dance to forget.”75 Clarke compares the dances to fishing where fishermen lay their bait and wait for their catch of a woman regardless of the marital bonds they may have. Griff and his wife go to the Cancer Club, where a friend, Stooly makes passes at his wife. Even though his behavior irritates him, he tolerates it under the pretext that Stooly was from the same Caribbean town as his wife: “Griff would stand and stare, and do nothing about it, because his memory of British breeding told him so.”76 Yet, “he would feel mad and helpless afterward [as] he was not strong enough to rescue his wife from the rape of Stooly’s arms.”77 Observing them, a stranger walks up to Griff denouncing him as a coward: “[y]ou isn’ no blasted man at all, man.”78 Next, a Jamaican man asks Griff’s wife to dance with him. At this point Griff “was upset. But he tried to be cool.”79 Faced by Griff’s resentment, the Jamaican man apologizes:

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“I am sorry, suh. I din’t know you was with the missis. I thought the missis was by-sheself, tonight, again, suh.”80 Overhearing the conversation, Griff’s other friend, Masher accuses Griff’s wife of cheating on him, putting forward three words as evidence: by-sheself, tonight, again. Unwilling to confront the Jamaican and his wife’s assumed infidelity, Griff attributes what he has said to his bad grammar, and he also explains to Clynn that “he’s a brother” referring to a CBC news report on American Black Power nationalism.81 Here the same thing can be observed as with Brand: another form of the shared bond of Black solidarity, which also results from the door. But Masher is unconvinced. “If I had a woman like that, I would kiss her arse, by-Christ, just for looking at a man like that Jamaikian-man!” he contends.82 Griff is left alone observing the dancing crowd, which conjures up the image of a Barbadian beach at sunset in him, with “waves of the calypsonian, [. . .] the rumbling of the congo drum” and the surf of human conversation breaking on the shore.83 The figure of the calypsonian brings the Caribbean into mind, whereas the congo drum provides a mental link to West Central Africa. Thus, the music the band produces boasts both Caribbean and African elements. Similarly to Brand’s imagery, the sea plays an important role in integrating the two, also bringing into play the times of the door when “the Transatlantic Slave Trade brought an estimated 6.5 million enslaved Africans to the Caribbean” with West Central Africa (Congo) being the geographical source of the highest number of slaves.84 In accordance with the above, Griff uses the name Jamaicancongoman to describe his wife’s suitor, potentially implying that originally, he was from Congo and, in turn, was taken over to the Caribbean through the door. The reference to the traces of the hidden English accent in his pleasant voice is further in support this idea.85 Moving on toward the climax of the story, Clarke draws on popular culture, citing a line from Mighty Sparrow’s song entitled Benwood Dick, in which a man no longer attractive revisits his ex-lover. The implications of the lyrics are unsettling for Griff, more so as Masher laughs in his face and Stooly despises him for what he has allowed to happen to his wife. In their eyes, Griff lacks the qualities of a real man as they expect him to teach both his wife and the Jamaican man a lesson, which expectation Griff fails to fulfil. Griff’s emotional turmoil is echoed in the images of the sea at storm, the water swelling and roaring, the waves rushing, lightning jigsawing over the waves.86 Quite contrary to Griff’s state of mind, his wife—having come off the dancefloor and completely unaware and unsuspecting of his dark mood— has a smile on her face which is compared to “the everlasting sea at calm.”87 In addition to the peer pressure exerted on him by his friends, this calm smile triggers Griff to strangle her wife in the end as they are preparing to leave for home from the dances: “He had killed her. But he did not kill her smile. He wanted to kill her smile more than he wanted to kill his wife,”88 as her smile



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on the one hand represented his failure to succeed in all areas of life, career and family alike, on the other the cover-up, the pretense, doing pretty in the wake of his failure, which all at large can be written down to the door: his lack of a firm grounding only a real home could provide. Instead, he only had the sea. “He was like the sea. He was a man at sea.”89 CONCLUSION It has been demonstrated that both for Brand and Clarke, the sea provides an important source of imagery to express various aspects of their protagonists’ life. As such, it is also in close connection with the door thus it is the next best thing to the trace of the ultimate home the protagonists lost in the past. Through the different ways in which the door and its legacy manifest in Brand’s “Sans Souci” and in Clarke’s “Griff!” the chapter revealed how “the language of the phrase begins from simple description but it collects multiple meanings as we enter it.”90 As epitomized by the door, the coerced migration of African people through the slave trade has made its mark on the life of the members of African diasporic communities. The resulting complex hybrid identity is not without traumas, some of which reside in the unconscious; the legacy of the door continues to disrupt the lives of generations of immigrants of African origin, to which both Brand and Clarke’s protagonists bear testimony. NOTES   1.  Abraham Chapman, Black Voices – An Anthology of African-American Literature (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), 21–24.   2.  Maya Jaggi, “Swimming with Barracudas,” The Guardian, April 3, 2004.   3.  Austin Clarke, Membering (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2015), 4.  4. Clarke, Membering, 5.   5.  Ibid. My emphasis.  6. Ibid.  7. Ibid.   8.  Ibid, 11. My emphasis.  9. Ibid, 9. 10.  Robert May and Jessica Young, “Dionne Brand,” The Canadian Encyclopaedia, accessed January 31, 2023, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ dionne-brand 11.  Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

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14.  Ibid, 12. 15.  Ibid, 16. 16.  Paulo da Costa, “Dionne Brand – A Map to the Door of No Return,” accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.paulodacosta.ca/a-map-to-the-door-of-no-return/ 17. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 20. 18.  Maya Mavjee, “Opening the Door – An Interview with Dionne Brand,” Read, no. 2 (2001): 1. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21.  Annalee Davis quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, “Bodies on the move: A poetics of home and diaspora.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23(2) (Fall 2004): 189–212. 22.  Dionne Brand, “Bread out of Stone,” in In Visible Ink: Crypto-Fictions, ed. Aritha van Herk, (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1991), 52–53. 23. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 16. 24.  Marlene Goldman, “Mapping the Door of No Return - Deterritorialization and the Work of Dionne Brand,” Canadian Literature. no. 182 (Autumn 2004): 7. 25.  Ibid, 25. 26. Brand, Bread out of Stone, 47. 27. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 16. 28.  Dionne Brand, “Sans Souci,” in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, ed. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), 390. 29. Alison Blunt and Robin Dowling, Home: key ideas in geography, 2nd Ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 53. 30.  Brand, “Sans Souci,” 391. My emphasis. 31.  Ibid, 396. 32.  Ibid, 397. 33.  Ibid, 392–93. 34.  Ibid, 397. 35. Brand, Bread out of Stone, 47. 36.  Brand, “Sans Souci,” 391. 37.  Ibid, 390. 38. Ibid. 39.  Ibid, 391. 40.  Ibid, 390. 41.  Ibid, 391. 42.  Bell Hooks, quoted in Friedman, “Bodies on the move,” 195. 43.  Brand, “Sans Souci,” 391. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ibid, 390–91. My emphasis. 46. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 8. 47. Ibid. 48.  Brand, “Sans Souci,” 391. 49.  Ibid, 394.



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50. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 5. 51. Ibid. 52.  Ibid, 7. 53.  Ibid, 13. My emphasis. 54.  Austin Clarke, “Griff!,” in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, ed. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), 156. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57.  Ibid, 159. 58.  Ibid, 157. 59.  Ibid, 158. 60.  Ibid, 156. My emphasis. 61.  Ibid, 162. 62.  Ibid, 157. 63.  Caryl Phillips, quoted in Friedman, “Bodies on the move,” 196–97. 64.  Clarke, “Griff!,” 161. 65.  Ibid, 157. 66.  Ibid, 157–58. 67.  Ibid, 156. 68.  Ibid, 158. 69.  Ibid, 157. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72.  Ibid, 160. 73.  Ibid, 157. 74.  Ibid 163. 75.  Ibid, 163–64. 76.  Ibid, 164. 77. Ibid. 78.  Ibid, 165. 79.  Ibid, 166. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82.  Ibid, 167. 83.  Ibid. My emphasis. 84. “Sold into Slavery,” National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, accessed February 10, 2023, https://www.natt.gov.tt/sites/default/files/pdfs/Emancipation_-_ SOLD_INTO_SLAVERY.pdf 85.  Clarke, “Griff!,” 168. 86.  Ibid, 167. 87.  Ibid, 168. 88.  Ibid, 170. 89.  Ibid, 168. 90.  Mavjee, “Opening the Door – An Interview with Dionne Brand,” 1.

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REFERENCES Blunt, Alison, and Robin Dowling. 2019. Home: key ideas in geography. 2nd Ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Brand, Dionne. 2001. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Brand, Dionne. 1991. “Bread out of Stone.” In In Visible Ink: Crypto-Fictions, edited by Aritha van Herk, 45–53. Edmonton: NeWest Press. Brand, Dionne. 1990. No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press. Brand, Dionne. 1995. “Sans Souci.” In The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, edited by Margaret Atwood, and Robert Weaver, 390-397. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Chapman, Abraham. 2001. Black Voices – An Anthology of African-American Literature. New York: Signet Classic. Clarke, Austin. 1995. “Griff!” In The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, edited by Margaret Atwood, and Robert Weaver, 156–70. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Clarke, Austin. 2015. Membering. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Clarke, Austin. 2003. The Polished Hoe. New York: Amistad. da Costa, Paulo. 2011. “Dionne Brand – A Map to the Door of No Return.” Retrieved from: https://www.paulodacosta.ca/a-map-to-the-door-of-no-return/ [11/02/2023]. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2004. “Bodies on the move: A poetics of home and diaspora.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23(2): 189–212. Goldman, Marlene. 2004. “Mapping the Door of No Return - Deterritorialization and the Work of Dionne Brand.” Canadian Literature 182: 13–28. Jaggi, Maya. 2004. “Swimming with Barracudas.” The Guardian. April 3, 2004. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/03/ [08/02/2023]. May, Robert, and Jessica Young. 2012. “Dionne Brand.” The Canadian Encyclopaedia. Retrieved from: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/dionnebrand [04/02/2023]. Mavjee, Maya. 2001. “Opening the Door – An Interview with Dionne Brand.” Read 2: 1–4. National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. n/a. “Sold into Slavery.” Retrieved from: https://www.natt.gov.tt/sites/default/files/pdfs/Emancipation_-_SOLD_INTO _SLAVERY.pdf [31/01/2023].

Chapter Eight

Moroccan Women in Rural Spain Intimate Heterotopias Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze

INTRODUCTION The continuous waves of migration from the Middle Eastern and North African regions to Europe have given rise to an impressive volume of research coming from various fields, beginning with anthropology, sociology, international relations, global security, and linguistics. This research, however, is often focused on men, perhaps because traditionally it has been men (coming from North Africa) who start a migratory trajectory, while the women remain in their place of origin waiting for the man to initiate “family reunification” (see research by Pumares Fernández and Iborra Rubio (2008) and TEIM (2004)), or perhaps simply because research access to male Arab migrant populations can be achieved more easily. Considerably less attention has been dedicated to immigrant women in this context, since they often remain invisible to researchers. At the same time, the research that is available demonstrates that immigrant women have a harder experience of migration than immigrant men do, specifically in the context of migrants of Moroccan origin. Such women often end up living in poverty and isolation, and experience acute separation from the social circle they used to have in Morocco (Sadiqi 2010; Gintsburg and Breeze 2022). At the same time, they salvage aspects of their Moroccan lives and recreate them in their new homes, living out of pace with their surroundings but in tune with distant realities (Gintsburg and Breeze 2022). They indeed appear to live in a separate space within a space, resembling Foucault’s heterotopias of compensation which, like the ship, exist as “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (1967/1986, 27). In this chapter, we continue this conversation on the private and public spaces of Moroccan immigrant women living in rural 169

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Spain by illuminating their lived experiences of heterotopia with the concept of intimacy. We begin by introducing the notion of intimacy and its characteristic parameters in the Muslim world. Then we examine various manifestations of interactions that can be described as intimate, first between female and male members of the Moroccan community and then between the Moroccan population of rural Navarra and their Spanish counterparts. In addition, we explore the physical manifestations of intimate interactions (and lack thereof) and discuss manifestations of intimate relationships in digital spaces. The notion of intimate relationships between a group of immigrants and their new host country can be understood on several levels. The immigrant space is often classically heterotopic, as incomers seek to preserve what they can of their culture of origin and even cling more firmly to the “old ways” of living than they did in their former homes. Migrants often seek comfort and reassurance in a strange environment, building close social networks principally with their families (see Amorós, this volume) and then with other community members who share some cultural aspects such as religious practices, family values, ways of socializing, and so on. This natural tendency often means that migrants live in a highly ordered way that is completely out of synchronization with the society around them, like the Ethiopians following their Christian calendar in Muslim Sudan described by Le Houérou (2022). This heterotopic existence hinders interaction with their social surroundings and may even preclude certain types of intimacy. When engaging with Moroccan women in Spain, we need to think first of relationships/interactions between different members of the immigrant community. However, human beings seek sociality, and over the years different patterns emerge in which even strongly delimited immigrant communities such as this one begin to engage with their surroundings. In all these cases, the potential for intimate relationships is influenced by the possibilities of the physical spaces available and the presence or absence of shared spaces. Finally, we should also remember that today, any analysis of intimacy should also take account of virtual relationships and interactions occurring through Internet-based applications and social media. Access to this opento-all, all accepting “thirdspace” (Soja 1996) or, using Oldenburg’s terminology, new “third places” (1999), ostensibly offers new opportunities for social interaction that overcome distances and spatial barriers, perhaps paving the way to liberation from isolation and marginality. In what follows, we first discuss the connections between intimacy and space(s). We then explain the sample and method used for our research and present the results of our analysis. The main themes that emerge during this exploration are discussed in the conclusions.



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THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Intimacy as a Product of Interaction between Private and Public Spaces The question on the interaction of private and public spaces has a very long history—where does the border lie between private and public life? This touches on practically every aspect of human life--political, legal, economical, spiritual, and, of course, the aspect of personal, that is intimate, relationships. However, numerous attempts to define the borders between private and public aspects of life have ended in failure, not least because human societies tend to revise their previously defined norms every now and then (Bensman and Lilienfeld 1979). One of the reasons why this mission seems to be impossible is that concepts of private and public are closely related to the interplay of physical and emotional spaces, i.e., their physical and emotional proximity or remoteness. This paper focuses on the personal aspect of human relationships or intimacy. We understand intimacy as precisely this combination of public and private, following the idea of Bensman and Lilienfeld who suggested that privacy is the relationship of an individual with him/herself, while intimacy describes an “individual in close, continuous, and relatively deep association with others over a wide range of behavior” (1979, 28). Bensman and Lilienfeld (1979) argue that there is always tension between public and private, as public roles allow us to demonstrate only a limited fraction of our personality, while interactions in more private spaces allow us to demonstrate more aspects of our individuality. This is even more so in the case of immigrant communities, in our case the Moroccan community in rural Spain, where the traditional balanced Moroccan dichotomy of public and private is distorted due to new heterotopic living conditions and therefore has to meet new challenges. Since the focus of this paper is the community of Moroccan immigrants, before we begin our analysis, it is useful to outline the most specific culturally embedded characteristics of public and private spaces, and their associated intimacy practices, which are specific to the Muslim world in general and Morocco in particular. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC AND MOROCCAN CULTURES In the context of the traditional Middle Eastern/North African Culture, private and public spaces are marked so clearly that they almost become a dichotomy. The Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi in her The Harem Within

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(1994), describes the concept of harem, or the women’s half of the house through her own experience when she was a young girl. The word harem, used to describe a private space designated for women and their close male relatives, Mernissi reminds us, is semantically connected to the word haram (ḥarām), which means both “forbidden” and “sacred.” She then explains in a quite critical and somewhat ironic manner how in traditional rural society the harem does not need to have physical walls, as it is “inscribed somewhere under [individual’s] head” (1994, 66). While describing the lifestyle of her female relatives, Mernissi mentions on a number of occasions how the public spaces that were available to them were highly constrained. More specifically, spaces are gender marked to the degree that, as Mernissi puts it, “there is a cosmic frontier that splits the planet in two halves” (1994, 254). In her earlier work, Beyond the Veil (1983), Mernissi makes a strong argument about how men in Moroccan—and in a wider context, Muslim— society, control women’s access to non-domestic, i.e., public spaces. Sadiqi (2019) makes similar observations, explaining this by the long-standing vertical system of patriarchal control which she traces back to early Islamic Morocco. In traditional Islamic culture, the ways of expressing and sharing personal opinions and sentiments, i.e., what can be defined as one’s intimate inner world, are also strongly marked by gender. Abu Lughod, for instance, in her seminal Veiled Sentiments (1986), mentions that women produce short, improvised poems of a personal character known as ghinnawa, only when they are alone or with other women, while ghinnawas that have more formal content are freely performed at social events. Similar observations are valid for the tradition of improvised poetry in northern Morocco, known as ayyus, where women produce intimate verses only when they are with other women (Gintsburg 2014). Abu Lughod links this strict limitation conditioned by gender norms to the code of honor (‘irḍ)1 intrinsic to Bedouin society, where both men and women are supposed to be in control of their emotions, so that they do not cause any embarrassment (ḥašam). Intimate sentiments (among both men and women) therefore can be shared only with those who do not perceive them as a sign of weakness. Fear of being embarrassed imposes the rule of maintaining social distancing in both public and private spaces. These concepts of honor and embarrassment among Egyptian Bedouins correspond to the concepts of honor (šaraf) and shame (ḥšūma) existing in contemporary traditional Moroccan culture. In what follows below we will see how šaraf and ḥšūma, when taken out of Morocco, continue to influence intimate interactions among female members of the Moroccan diaspora in rural Spain.



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METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH The data we use in this chapter comes from two major sources. The first is the project carried out by the first author in rural Navarra in 2019–2020, in which we investigated the identities of Moroccan immigrant women living in four particular small towns/villages in the southern region of Navarra along the River Ebro known as the Ribera, namely Tudela, Castejón, Cintruénigo, and Fitero. In the course of the project, we conducted lengthy interviews with forty-two women consisting of questions on a wide range of topics. The age of the participants was 18 to 70, while the number of years spent in Spain varied between 6 months and 27 years. More than two-thirds of the participants originated from the Eastern region (l-jiha š-šarqiya) of the Moroccan Kingdom, but there were also participants from Rabat-Salé-Ammour-Zaer, Chaouia-Ouargha, Tangier-Tetouan, Sus-Masa, and Fes-Bulmán. For full demographic details see Gintsburg et al. (2020). Our second source is data gathered from the online open access channels and vlogs created by other Moroccan immigrants living in the Ribera area of Spain gathered during the MYOUROPE project.2 EMERGENT THEMES This section is organized according to the main themes that emerged from our interviews and media analysis in terms of intimacy and space, looking first at physical spaces, and then at digital environments. Negotiating Intimacy in Physical Spaces: Between Private and Public. In order to get a better understanding of how these Moroccans define private and public spaces and, consequently, use them, we asked the participants a number of questions related to their everyday activities and the places they frequent. Private Spaces as Refuge Unemployment rates for Moroccan women are high in this area, and most of the women we interviewed led lives that center strictly around domestic activities. In fact, nearly half of our respondents indicated that they regularly experience anxiety (l-qalaq) when they need to leave their home. At the same time, the women complained that they feel anxiety because they have no place

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they could call their home—many live in rented property and sometimes they share it on a temporary basis. This is especially true for single and divorced women who have no income and, in some cases, even no legal documents. The private spaces of such women obviously shrink down to a minimum. It is probably for this reason that when asked to describe their current home, many women offered highly concise descriptions, such as the following: “I live like a guest” (ana ā’iša ka ḍeyfa) (28 years old, originally from Agadir, now lives in Tudela); “regular home” (beyt ‘ādi) (33 years old, originally from Casablanca, now lives in Tudela); “small room, regular home” (ġurfa ṣaġīra beyt ‘ādi) (45 years old, originally from Tetouan, now lives in Castejón), etc. Coping with Precarity in Public Spaces It should be noted that our interviewees live in small villages with hardly any history of racism or overt hostility, and that the Moroccan population constitutes 30 to 50 percent of inhabitants. Nevertheless, the women we interviewed feel that entering public spaces such as a village square or shop entails risk, and they accord particular importance to women’s dress when they venture outside the private space, showing acute awareness of their heterotopic, “outof-place” condition. In her work on Moroccan immigrant women living in Madrid, Thao Pham (2014) argued that to obtain the right to go out and claim public spaces, such women are supposed to put on a veil, so that the honor of their family will be preserved. Indeed, we found numerous confirmations of this in our data, with the difference that all the Moroccan women in the Ribera area feel the need to wear the veil to get access to any public space at all. In our previous publication, we noticed that these Moroccan women in the Ribera often describe the hijab both as a means of protection and a barrier (Gintsburg and Breeze 2022; see also Hassan 2022 on a similar situation among Afghan refugees in Pakistan). This is in line with another observation by Thao Pham: in Madrid, Moroccan women wore the hijab even when they were in the company of other Moroccan women, whom they did not fully trust. The hijab, concludes Thao Pham (2014), can be seen as protection from the potential of shame incurred when entering even the most (seemingly) unthreatening public space. Our interviews did not include any specific question on the hijab. Instead, we had an open question, asking the participants to mention things that Spanish people should know about Morocco, the people of Morocco and the culture of Morocco. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of informants used this question to bring up the topic of the hijab. Among explanations given on its role were the following:



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[that] every woman has freedom of self-expression [when it comes to] clothing style (kull insāna ḥurra fi ta’bīr ‘an dātha ‘an ṭarīqat labasha) (33 years old, originally from Casablanca, now lives in Tudela)3; that hijab is obligatory for Muslim woman » (anna-l-ḥijāb wājeb le-l-mra l-muslima) (50 years old, originally from Taourirt, now lives in Castejón); I want them to accept me as I am—a Muslim woman (bġītum yetqebbalūni kīma ana mra muslima) (31 years old, originally from Oujda, now lives in Fitero).

By inference, then, we can perceive the ironic double significance of the headscarf: the hijab is understood both as a protection against exposure and shame, and as an obstacle to relations with local people (see Breeze 2013 on Western attitudes to the hijab). In the case of these women, they would not be prepared to relinquish this garment in order to gain full access to public spaces—rather, the headscarf is understood socially as a necessary condition for venturing out of the heterotopic home, even though it severely limits the possibilities of what one can do when one enters the public space. Interactions between Members of the Moroccan Community These interactions seem to be quite strongly marked by gender and family on one hand, and by language and culture on the other.4 A considerable number of our informants mentioned that they maintain strong ties with other Moroccan women living nearby because “they are like me [when it comes to] language, customs and traditions” (huma bḥāli fi l-luġa w-l-‘ādāt w-ttaqālīd) (40 years old, originally from Beni Mellal, now lives in Cintruénigo) but they did not mention Moroccan men. Another respondent indicated that she interacts with fellow Moroccan women living nearby a lot because she lives in Spain alone with her young child, does not have her husband and her family around and must rely on other Moroccans when she needs help. Often women expressed the need to have more interactions. The reasons that they gave to explain why they need this varied considerably, but a need for friendship and social support seemed to underlie their answers. None of the participants, however, mentioned that she would like to interact more and at a more personal level with Spanish people. Many participants were in favor of the idea of having associations of Moroccan women. Perhaps the reasoning offered by one of the participants, explains this the best: We need to have associations for Moroccan women because I see that many of these women need encouragement because they speak neither proper Arabic, nor proper Spanish and can’t express their opinions without feeling embarrassed.

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naḥtāj li jam’īya diyāl n-nisā al-maġrībiyāt lianni ara anna l-katīr men annisā muḥtājīn ila tawbīya wa la tadrina ila al-itqān al-luġatayn al-‘arabīya wa-l-ispānīya li-t-ta’bīr an arā’ihim dūn ḥaraj. (56 years old, originally from Guercif, now lives in Tudela).

Only one informant, a forty-five-year-old woman who is married to a Spanish man, insisted that she had cut off all her ties with Moroccans (both family members and friends) and sees herself as a member of Spanish society. Ironically, her case supports the idea of the impossibility of mixing, of breaking down the walls of the heterotopic bubble: once she had left, there was no way back. Interactions between Moroccans and Spanish: Third Places as A Potential for Intimate Interactions? Public places beyond the home or workplace were defined by Oldenburg as “third places,” i.e., “the core setting of informal public life” (1999, 16), which could be used by various groups of people, foreigners included, for the casual interactions that ultimately form the basis for communal life and new social alliances. In a similar vein, Soja introduced the term “thirdspace,” i.e., a “real and imagined” urban space, where “everything comes together” (1996, 57). Nicolas Puig in his Villes intimes does not use the term “third place” or “thirdspace” but he appears to mean the same thing when he talks about urban syncretism applied to public spaces (242), and when he describes outings of Palestinian youth to “Lebanese spaces,” where these young people could taste a bit of “human diversity” (250). However, the “third places” he describes, we understand, offer only limited opportunities for interactions between Palestinian and Lebanese interactions. This is like the experiences of Moroccan youth in the Ribera documented in our interviews. It is significant that the interactions of both first- and second-generation Moroccans remain highly circumscribed. In their interviews, these women subconsciously express their detachment from communal life in Spain, so that the potential of “third places” remains practically unused. For instance, one of our interviewees, when she was asked to describe the neighborhood where she lives in Spain, offered a description in which she excluded herself from the activities she chose to mention as a characteristic of the place where she lives: My neighborhood is in the center of our village there happen a lot of los paseos and playful activities during fiestas. ḥayy fi wuṣṭ el-qarya los paseos fī l-ktīr men el-ḥaraj fi waqt el-ḥaflāt (47 years old, originally from Debdou, now lives in Cintruénigo).5



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Her description is an almost perfect rendering of the view from an “other” space, from the place that is close, yet located quite outside the bounds. In a context that offers some similarities to this, namely the problematic interactions between Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the local population, Puig introduces the term étrangeté, which means both “strange” and “foreign.” Étrangeté, says Puig, forms a continuum with intimacy and enables us to define various degrees of uncertainty in possible interactions with strangers (foreigners). This is in line with the neutral Spanish term extranjero used by authorities and in formal conversations and is routinely applied to any foreigner. In casual conversations, however, there exist numerous ways of marking particular communities of foreign (and not only foreign) population that activate certain stereotypes. In relation to members of the Moroccan community in Spain, the most typical term used on the village streets would be moro (“Moor”)6. Although the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary, which is the most authoritative source for language norms in the Spanish-speaking world, offers eleven meanings for this entry and none of the meanings is marked as derogatory or offensive,7 various organizations regularly send petitions to the Royal Spanish Academy, asking them to include one more meaning that would reflect the xenophobic connotation moro has in modern Spanish. Regardless of how we define intimacy—be it through public-private or strangeintimate continuum, the negative precision of the word moro used to describe Moroccan immigrants living in Spain seriously limits the potential of building intimate relationships that the neutral word extranjero (“stranger”) offers. Indeed, a number of informants, when asked about their relationship with Spanish people, answered that there is no intimate relationship because “they [the Spanish] do not want any mixing with us” (la yeḥebbun l-ixtilāṭ m’āna) (47 years old, originally from Oued Zem, now lives in Castejón), and even that “they are scared of interacting with us” (yexāfūn men at-ta’āmul m’āna) (34 years old, originally from Tangier, now lives in Castejón). Some also add the gender factor, stating that Spanish people “ignore [Moroccan] women because of the hijab” (be sabab el-ḥijāb ka-yet’āmel ma’a n-nisā’ be-t-tahmīš) (33 years old, originally from Oujda, now lives in Fitero). One participant stated that she interacts with only those Spanish people who respect her as a free woman8 (at’āmul m’a l-isbān lli yeḥtarmūni ka mra ḥurra) (47 years old, originally from Debdou, now lives in Cintruénigo). Some informants described their relationships with Spanish people as “normal” and then explained that they communicate with them only in that their interactions are conditioned by “work, study and being neighbors” (bi ḥukm el-‘amal w-d-dirāsa w-l-jiwār) (40 years old, originally from Beni Mellal, now lives in Cintruénigo). Such answers, as we see, make no provision for

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third places from the list of places where immigrants and locals might have encounters. Curiously, a number of participants mentioned that they would like to have a women’s association for Moroccan and Spanish women but indicated as a reason for having this association only the practical need to have Spanish language classes or to get help with paperwork, not the desire to get to know local people better on a more intimate level. Negotiating Intimacy in Digital Spaces: Between Public and Private As the previous sections suggest, the physical spaces inhabited by Moroccan immigrants in rural Navarra are somehow reminiscent of refugee encampments, even though their inhabitants are legally entitled to freely circulate and get involved in any kind of societal activities. However, as one of our informants put it, the Moroccan community from the Ribera sees itself as invisible (ġeyr mar’īya), that is, they feel that public spaces shrink to the degree that they become nearly non-existent. We also saw that the private spaces of these Moroccans are also very limited, perhaps even more limited than they were back home. It would be reasonable to think that it is natural for human beings to start seeking for means to restore the balance that was lost, and with easy access to Internet technologies, digital spaces seem to be a good option for achieving this. Can we assume then that access to the digital world might help the immigrant community to increase the size of their private/public spaces? Would their heterotopic island become connected up to an archipelago of similar places, thus enabling them to transcend their isolation and build wider networks? Wright (2012), for instance, suggested that the Internet has a good potential to become an alternative to the physical third places, or Soja’s all-accepting real and imaginary “thirdspace,” we mentioned earlier. In the context of the Arab world and in a similar vein, Fatima Mernissi, argued in the early 2000s that both mass media and social media had been taken over by women and young people, who suddenly took an active stance and openly discussed the most private topics (2004). In fact, recent research on digital spaces in the Arab World has demonstrated that the Internet offers Arab populations considerable opportunities for communicating opinions and getting heard. During the Arab Spring and afterwards, social networks were used by political activists and intelligentsia, including women, who used various platforms to voice their opinions about both public, i.e., social and political, and private issues (Bernardi 2019; Sinatora 2022; Esposito and Sinatora 2022). In the post-revolution world, the internet is actively used by media personalities, who use it for communicating their political views and general opinions, but also as an art arena, through which the artist (actor) builds digital ties with his/her audience (Baynham and Gintsburg 2022).



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However, these are examples of educated, socially active members of Arab society. Would Moroccan agricultural workers in Spain use this empowering opportunity and compensate for the lack of private space and potential for intimate relationships using digital space? In order to find out more about the digital behavior of Moroccans in the Ribera, we asked several questions on the use of social networks. This was especially interesting because large numbers of first-generation Moroccans in this area (especially women) are illiterate. In fact, all forty-two of our participants indicated that they use social networks (WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube) at least once a day, mostly in Arabic and, on a few occasions in Spanish/French. We also asked about their reason for using the Internet and social networks. The answers we received were quite formal: one informant stated that they used them mostly to search for information, such as: general information and enquiries (ma’lūmāt ‘āmma wa istifsārāt), common knowledge (taqāfa ‘āmma), cooking (aṭ-ṭabx), as well as to translate things. Digital Spaces Mirror Physical Spaces Since our informants are naturally reluctant to reveal information about intimate interactions online to complete strangers, we tried to triangulate our interview data by conducting our own research in social networks. We were able to locate a few YouTube channels run by other Moroccan women who live in the Ribera area. Most of these videos disappear from the channels almost as soon as they are posted. More importantly, however, their presentation contrasts sharply with the style of intimate self-representation adopted by many Western bloggers and “influencers,” and instead reflects the behaviors we documented above in physical space. The videos never show the face of the owner of the channel, they are dedicated mostly to shopping and cooking and, even more interestingly, videos posted on these channels are accompanied by music and have no author text. This is, for instance, the case of sara hanidi,9 an open access YouTube channel, whose owner, as we understand from the titles of videos posted on the channel, lives in Tudela or nearby.10 We see therefore that although digital spaces offer more opportunities to have both privacy and social exposure than in “real” life, this does not seem to happen—the digital spaces of Moroccan women are also controlled by the concepts of honor (šaraf) and shame (ḥšūma), in a way that shows a tantalizing resemblance to the honor system underpinning the love poetry of the Egyptian Bedouin tribe of Banu Ali recorded and studied by Lila AbuLughod back in the 1980s: this tradition was ruled by curiously similar concepts, which formed the cornerstone of Bedouin society at that time.

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The way digital self-representation reflects the norms of intimacy and self-revelation observed in physical spaces becomes even clearer if we also consult the videos produced by male members of the Moroccan community in Navarra. As we noted above, the women seem to carry into their digital spaces the concepts of šaraf and ḥšūma as key factors that define what is private/intimate and what is public. In the case of the men, there are numerous Moroccan vloggers residing in Spain who broadcast their experiences and stories to their Arabic-speaking audiences—stories they cannot share with their Spanish neighbors or colleagues. Although these stories do contain a certain degree of intimate content—vloggers refer to their audience as xūti (“brothers”), and discuss various aspects of their daily lives—their authors carefully filter the content they share.11 This is the case, for instance, of Abou Ali, who runs a channel on YouTube titled Abou Ali qanāt tarbīyat el-ġanam fi šamāl Ispānya (“Abou Ali: the channel on breeding sheep in northern Spain”). The channel has over 200,000 subscribers and is entirely dedicated to the topic of agriculture. Abou Ali, who comes along as a friendly Moroccan bloke, practically never discusses his private affairs with his audience. His young children, male relatives and friends occasionally appear in Abou Ali’s videos—in 2021 when this vlogger reached 100,000 subscribers and was presented with the YouTube Silver Button to recognize his achievements, he produced a video in which he thanked his subscribers and celebrated the event in his circle of family and close friends. However, Abou Ali’s wife never appeared on the screen and her name was not mentioned publicly.12 This kind of intimacy could therefore be understood as rather superficial—on one hand, the vlogger does use the online space to connect to those he can easily communicate with, i.e., to speakers of Moroccan Arabic living either in Morocco, or in Spain. He receives numerous comments, practically all of which are in Moroccan Arabic, and he replies or reacts to some of them. On the other hand, the space is used for strictly professional purposes and provides little access to the blogger’s private space. In short, then, rather than transforming social relations, these digital performances both reflect and reproduce existing cultures and social relations, since they are vertically integrated into the physical spaces where they originate (Costa 2016; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Digital Spaces Strengthen Ties with Morocco As we mentioned earlier, most current research about Muslim/Middle Eastern women and digital technologies is focused on political activists or women who already have fairly well expanded private and public spaces (e.g., Sina-



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tora 2022; Esposito and Sinatora 2022). However, these women are very much the exception. So, what can we say about the majority? Although some of our informants stated that they have numerous family members living in Spain alongside them, they turned out still to be in a minority because a considerable proportion of those who participated in our study indicated that most of their family and friends continue to live in Morocco or elsewhere (not Spain). It is only logical then that the vast majority of immigrants should maintain ties (both digital and physical) with their home country. The answers we received from our informants confirm this: when asked if they maintain contacts with their family and friends back in Morocco, nearly all answered that they do this frequently/all the time, and they chose WhatsApp as the preferred way of communication. Only three of our informants answered that they communicate with their loved ones who stayed in Morocco only from time to time. Since WhatsApp is strictly private or limited to small groups, it was not possible for us to gain access to their communications, but self-reported data suggests that their interaction consists mainly of exchanging photographs and voice messages, and thus mimics intimate conversation in the private domestic space. Use of this medium thus enables them to maintain intimate ties, but fails to open up channels for participation in public spaces. Viewed in a different perspective, the phenomenon of the “connected migrant” (Diminescu 2018) suggests that the increased ease of access to digital technologies among migrants may actually reduce their ability to integrate into the fabric of the host society so that, as Leurs and Ponzanesi put it, migrants can become “encapsulated” (2018) or, as we could say, tend to avoid building intimate relationships with the members of the host society. In Foucaultian terms, their “floating piece of space” might join up virtually with other rafts irrespective of latitude or longitude and build a loose fleet of boats large enough to simulate a whole society. Such inter-migrant connectivity might, indeed, preclude the need for greater integration into the host community. At the same time, however, it appears that unrestricted, immediate digital access to friends and families might have decreased the level of intimacy in a relationship with loved ones left in the home country, precisely because it creates an illusion of maintaining ties. This goes in line with some of the observations made by Justin Smith in his recent book The Internet is not what you think it is (2022), who wrote that the dreams of “strengthening the social fabric” through social networks are utopian (2). We assume that this is because the basic function of the Internet that feeds digital spaces and enables them to grow and develop is to transmit and transform information but not emotions. Since Internet is an infrastructure that primarily deals with infor-

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mation, it appears to be less satisfactory for transmitting aspects of human life that that belong to a different sphere (see Breeze and Fernández Vallejo 2019 for a discussion of how the medium affects the message in a number of spheres of life). Although users employ emoticons and other graphical devices intended to signify emotions, the real sharing of intimate feelings seems to be restrained or even superficial. It thus appears that the digital relationships generated and maintained through social media are instances of pseudo-intimacy rather than real intimacy. SOME CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS We have explored the nature of intimacy and the related concepts of public and private space using the example of Moroccan immigrants living in rural Navarra. Taking intimacy as a product of interaction between private and public spaces, we have examined how immigrants negotiate intimate relationships with each other and with Spanish people both physically and digitally. Our research suggests that manifestations of intimate relationships taking place in shared public spaces are limited—on the one hand, immigrants, especially women, often do not feel accepted by the host society, while on the other, they continue to define their culturally embedded practices of dividing spaces into private and public mostly based on gender affiliation. This, as we concluded, leads to further shrinkage of the physical spaces available to female immigrants, who demonstrate difficulties in even describing the public and private spaces they inhabit in Spain and, in some cases, formulate phrases that patently demonstrate their exclusion from everyday life in their new home country. We have also explored some aspects of the immigrants’ intimate relationships and behavior in digital spaces, probing whether they use social networks to restore the public-private balance. Our conclusion is that formally, the Moroccan immigrant population demonstrates an active use of social networks, which is not only limited to the purposes of connecting with their family members and friends who continue to live in Morocco. In fact, we also discovered open access YouTube channels run by members of this community. We found, however, that both the public and private spaces represented in these digital environments—and therefore the manifestations of intimacy found on those platforms—appeared to be very limited, presumably because participants continue to apply the traditional concepts of honor and shame online. As Mernissi put this years ago, they keep “going around with a frontier inside the head” (1994, 66).



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To finish, we should perhaps return to Foucault (1967/1986, 27) and his sixth principle of heterotopias, which is that they “have a function in relation to all the space that remains.” Foucault links this to the nature of the colony that creates “a real space that as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” In these small “heterotopias of compensation” across the rough landscape of rural Spain, Moroccan settlers recreate the order that governed their lives in an idealized vision of home, orienting their behavior according to values of honor and shame that at once provide meaning and preclude wider social integration. NOTES   1.  Abu Lughod does not use the term ‘irḍ, however, this lexeme is widely used across the Arab world to define concepts related to honor.   2.  MYOUROPE (duration: 2020-2023, financed by the ICS, University of Navarra) is an internal project dedicated to studying vlogs produced by Maghrebi immigrants living in Spain. For further details related to MYOUROPE, please see https:// www.unav.edu/web/instituto-cultura-y-sociedad/proyectos/myourope.   3.  In this article, all personal details of the respondents, such as age and place of living in Spain, repeat the information we collected in 2020. Some informants chose to answer in Standard Arabic, some—in Moroccan Arabic, and some—in a mixture of Standard and Moroccan Arabic. We cite the informants’ answers as is, i.e., without any prior editing. To preserve the informants’ privacy, their real names are not shown, which in many cases were chosen by the informants themselves.   4.  See a detailed discussion on gender marked spaces in the Moroccan community in the Ribera in Gintsburg and Breeze (2022).   5.  For a detailed discussion, please see Gintsburg and Breeze (2022).   6.  None of our informants used the word moro while answering our questions in writing. Instead, as we demonstrate in this section, they used descriptive ways to reflect the attitudes the Spanish have toward them. However, during our informal inspirations, moro was used by our informants routinely.   7.  Real Academia Española, s.v. “moro.”   8.  Here, “free woman” of course, means “Muslim woman who wears hijab.”   9.  In our chapter, we maintain the original orthography used by the vloggers. 10.  Hanidi 2021. 11.  See, for instance, the discussion on these aspects by Gintsburg and Waisman (forthcoming) featuring another Moroccan vlogger from Valencia. 12.  Abou Ali 2021.

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REFERENCES Abou Ali qanāt tarbiyat el-ġanam fi šamāl Ispānya. “Šāhidu akhīran taḥaqqaq el-ḥulm bi faḍli llah wa-bi faḍlikum ḥaṣalt ‘ala al-dar‘ al-fiḍḍi min šarikat al-yūtyūb.” July 5, 2021. Live stream, 8:03. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7KVhnk5Y27c&t=353s Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, Los Angeles CA: Berkeley. Baynham, Mike and Sarali Gintsburg. 2022. “Tar or Honey? Space and Time of Moroccan Migration in a Video Sketch Comedy ‘al-Kāmīra lakum.’” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatiotemporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 157–74. London: Bloomsbury. Bernardi, Chiara. 2019. Women and the digitally mediated revolution in the Middle East: Applying digital methods. London: Routledge. Bensman, Joseph and Robert Lilienfeld. 1979. Between Public and Private: The Lost Boundaries of the Self. New York: Free Press. Breeze, Ruth. 2013. “British media discourse on the wearing of religious symbols.” In Verbal and visual rhetoric in a mediatised world, edited by Hilde van Belle, Paul Gillaerts, Baldwin van Gorp, Dorien van de Mieroop and Kris Rutten, 197–212. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Breeze, Ruth, and Ana María Fernández Vallejo. 2019. Populist Discourse across Modes and Media. Bern: Peter Lang. DOI 10.3726/b16306 Costa, Elisabetta. 2016. Social Media in South-East Turkey, London: UCL Press. Diminescu, Dana. 2008. “The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto.” Social Science Information 47(4): 565–79. Ennaji, Moha. 2014. Muslim Moroccan Migrants in Europe: Transnational Migration in Its Multiplicity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Esposito, Eleonora, and Francesco L. Sinatora. 2022. “Social Media Discourses of Feminist Protest from the Arab Levant: Digital Mirroring and Transregional Dialogue.” Critical Discourse Studies 19(5): 502–22. Foucault, Michel. 1967 [1986]. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Republished in Diacritics 16(1): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 Gintsburg, Sarali, 2014. Formulaicity in Jbala poetry, Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Gintsburg, Sarali, Edgar Benítez Sastoque, Ana-Maria Fernández-Vallejo, and Karima Tayaa. 2020. “Identidad y expectativas en la comunidad marroquí de Navarra: la perspectiva de las mujeres.” Pamplona: Observatorio de la Realidad Social. Retrieved from: https://www.observatoriorealidadsocial.es/es/estudios/ identidad-y-expectativas-en-la-comunidad-marroqui-de-navarra-la-perspectiva-delas-mujeres/es-557050/ [12/05/2023]. Gintsburg, Sarali, and Ruth Breeze. 2022. “Circumscribed transnational spaces: Moroccan immigrant women in rural Spain.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: a Spatiotemporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 121–43. London: Bloomsbury.



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Gintsburg, Sarali, and Orit Waisman. (forthcoming). “Many faces of Omar: integrative multi-modal analysis of a story of migration found on Youtube. Focus on Positioning.” The Journal of International Migration and Integration. Hanidi, Sara. “Lluvia con truenos en Tudela ⛈⚡️.” June 1, 2021. 9:14. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CVxLIrWKHio Hassan, Saqlain. 2022. “The Behaviour of Public and Press towards Burqa: A CorpusAssisted Discourse Analysis.” CORPORUM: Journal of Corpus Linguistics 5(1): 24–39. Khosravinik, Majid, and Eleonora Esposito. 2018. “Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally-mediated discursive practices of gender-based hostility.” Łodz Papers in Pragmatics 14(1): 45–68. Le Houérou, Fabienne. 2022. “Exile, time and gender: time negation and temporal projection among refugees from the Horn of Africa.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatiotemporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg, and Mike Baynham, 51–65. London: Bloomsbury. Leurs, Koen and Sandra Ponzanesi. 2018. “Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization.” Popular Communication, 16(1): 4–20. Mernissi, Fatima. 1983. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. The Harem Within, London, Doubleday. Mernissi, Fatima. 2004. The Satellite, the Prince and the Scheherazade: The Rise of Women as Communicators in Digital Islam. Arab Media & Society. Retrieved from: https://www.arabmediasociety.com/the-satellite-the-prince-and-scheherazade-therise-of-women-as-communicators-in-digital-islam/ [12/05/2023]. Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (2nd edition), New York: Marlowe & Company. Puig Nicolas. 2012. “Villes intimes. Expériences des réfugiés palestiniens au Liban.” in L’urbanité des marges: migrants et réfugiés dans les villes du Proche-Orient, edited by Puig Nicolas and Doraï Kamel, 235–56. Paris: Théraèdre. Pumares Fernández, Pablo and Juan Francisco Iborra Rubio. 2003. “Población extranjera y política de inmigración en Andalucía.” Política y Sociedad 45(1): 41-60. Real Academia Española, s.v. “moro.” Retrieved from https://dle.rae.es/moro [26/05/2023]. Sadiqi, Fatima. 2010. “Considering the Gender Dimension of Moroccan Migration: A “Win-Win” Approach to North/South Migration in the Mediterranean.” In Middle East Institute Viewpoints: Migration and the Maghreb, 17–19. Washington DC: The Middle East Institute. Sadiqi, Fatima. 2019. “The sources of public patriarchal authority in Morocco.” In Arabs at Home and in the World, edited by Karla M. McKanders, 57–90. London: Routledge. Sinatora, Francesco L., 2022. “Digital Narratives of Syrian Political Dissidence in the Diaspora: Chronotopes of the Syrian Revolution and Transnational Grassroots Activism.” In Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East A Spatio-

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Temporal Approach, edited by Ruth Breeze, Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, 191–212. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Justin. 2022. The Internet is not what you think it is: a history, a philosophy, a warning. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell. TEIM. 2004. Atlas de la inmigración marroquí en España. Madrid: UAM Ediciones. Thao Pham, Theresa. 2014. Moroccan Immigrant Women in Spain: Honor and Marriage. Lanham: Lexington Books. Wright, Scott. 2012. “From ‘third place’ to ‘third space’: everyday political talk in non-political online spaces.” Javnost – The Public, 19(3): 5–20.

Chapter Nine

Mwinda, “Light of the World” Healing Among Congolese Diasporas in Massachusetts Carolina Nvé Díaz San Francisco HEALING: AN INTRODUCTION This chapter explores perceptions of healing among Congolese diasporas in Massachusetts. The ethnographic inquiry (Creswell et al. 2004) focused on an African diasporic church called mwinda, a Lingala word that refers to “light” or “spiritual light,” which emerged in Lynn in the late 1990s with the mission of illuminating and inspiring others or “the world.” Congolese members of the mwinda church referred to themselves as “light of the world” and “exemplars to the world.” The work of charismatic religious healers and Mamas, respected Congolese-born, first-generation women who assumed community leadership responsibilities, unfold mwinda’s outstanding efforts to enhance physical, mental, spiritual, and communal healing in the United States (US), the host country. Mwinda’s collective efforts also attempted to achieve stability and development directed toward the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the homeland, an “ill country” (interview, fieldwork, 2015, young Congolese man), with a complete failure of leadership to deliver national security, public safety, the rule of law, human development, and the ability of citizens to participate in the political process freely and fully (Twagiramungu 2013). This inquiry on the perceptions of healing among Congolese diasporas in Massachusetts considers perspectives in medical anthropology that investigate the concept of healing as a subjective, social, and culture-specific meaning, conceptually framed in experience and expressions, and patterns and processes of human actions and epistemologies (Womack 2009; Apud and Romaní 2020). The medical anthropology of healing studies the human body as a cultural vessel for compendiums of expressions, narratives, and phenomenological experiences that interrelate with cultural knowledge, theories, and 187

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practices about what it means to be healthy or ill (Mattingly and Garro 2000). Healing may be interpreted, expressed, or embodied as a positive change or state, an alleviation, or forms of coping, uplifting connections, empowerment, and wholeness, whether emotional, social, spiritual, or physical (Barnes and Sered 2005). Healing may serve as a counterpart of understandings of discomfort, suffering, or expressions born out of experiences of socially disvalued states, including, but not limited to, maladies when referring to extenuating and precarious social contexts (Langwick 2011) or “disease [. . .], biological elements shaped by culture, or abnormalities [. . .], or pathological states” (Singer and Baer 2007, 65–66). The ethnographic focus on bodily expressions of the meanings of healing among Congolese diasporas in Massachusetts included socio-cultural and historical contextualization. This work considered experiences of migrations and transnational movements, local and global conversations over continuous timelines and streams of African traditions, and centered practices (Bauböck and Faist 2010) based on ideas of the body that constructs and experiences healing according to social contexts (Csordas 2002). African spirituality and religious philosophies embedded in the fabric of African societies (Gallego 2020) ultimately land in fields of historical depths of human suffering, affliction, misfortune, and responses and efforts of restoration to achieve wholeness and desired well-being (Janzen 2017). The visions of contemporary African diasporas, or “new African diasporas” (Konadu-Agyemang et al. 2006; Koser 2003), align in therapeutic systems and “cultures of healing” through the interconnection to genealogies of diasporic experiences of resistance and spirituality (Gallego 2020). Religious and spiritual performances can translate into healing and therapeutic systems that promote the well-being of individuals and communities. In the literature on contemporary social upheavals in the DRC and migratory experiences, Congolese in Quebec joined local Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, for example, to receive healing sessions for physical and symbolic pains, and practical programs aid those struggling toward personal (soul and spiritual) salvation. “Awoken” churches expressed the power of the Holy Spirit as spiritual gifts for the family of Christian Sisters and Brothers to motivate the mission of evangelizing the world and fulfilling God’s work in the host country and homeland, the DRC (Mossière 2010). At the intersections between the global religious missions of the Kimbanguist, Pentecostal, and Pentecostal Catholic Charismatic Churches (Kalu 2013), Congolese in the diaspora represented themselves as spiritual combatants (Ndaya 2007), or “Children of God” caught up between the interwoven processes of geographical shifts, missionary duties or “divine” actions tailored toward fellows’ migrants and the homeland (Maskens 2012). African diasporic



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Christianity, religion, and spiritualism often intercede with political efforts. Congolese diasporas and collective politics mobilized to improve the DRC’s social, political, and economic life (Godin and Doná 2016). Religious and spiritualism at the intersections of political involvement motivated the transnational missionary circuits of pasterus combatants to navigate diasporic communities and the homeland at Congolese Kimbanguist and Pentecostal Congolese churches in the United Kingdom and Belgium (Garbin and Godin 2013). Congolese leaders at Catholic and Kimbanguist diasporic Pentecostal churches in London and Atlanta followed divine callings and advocated social movements to “save the Congo” (Garbin 2014). CONGOLESE DIASPORAS IN MASSACHUSETTS Before entering the field, I began learning everything I could about the DRC, post-colonial Congo, and Congolese diaspora while drafting my research methods. I learned about the homeland’s historical complexity, fragile political apparatus, deadly armed conflicts in the East, perpetual economic crises, and detrimental impacts of war and human displacement on the population and biodiversity (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Freedman 2016). Congolese diasporas in Massachusetts belong to significant series of mass migratory waves in the United States from the mid-1960s onward (Swyngedouw and Swyngedouw 2009; Congolese Americans 2013; Flahaux and Schoumaker 2016). The Congolese arrived in the United States primarily for educational reasons, and some stayed because of the exacerbating instability after independence in the DRC, with social stagnation, dictatorship systems, internal wars, and the progressive deterioration of the economy (Schoumaker et al. 2013; Flahaux et al. 2013). By the late 1990s, secondary re-settlements occurred as more Congolese joined family members scattered across the country (Congolese Americans 2013). By 2010, about 11,000 Congolese Americans lived in the United States (Flahaux and Schoumaker 2016). In 2012, the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) announced a new initiative to resettle approximately 50,000 Congolese refugees through 2018 (Congolese Americans 2013). By 2013, about 20,000 Congolese migrants lived in the country, and by 2015, the steady flow had increased to 34,000 across Texas, New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia (Anderson 2017). In Massachusetts, the population of Congolese individuals, including those under the status of refugee, increased from 1991 to 2015 across Worcester, Westfield, and Lynn (Fábos et al. 2015; Mass Gov. Department of Public Health; News Star). Lynn is the third city in Massachusetts where most

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refugees settled and ha the largest Congolese population. Despite later moving out of the city, Lynn remains the place where some Congolese men and women, along with their families, keep returning:1 When they arrive, Lynn . . . the first immigrants—their families, other family members—tend to stay together based on affiliation. They say: “Ok, I have a brother who lives there, I have a sister or cousin,” and then they aggregate around the people who came earlier. (Interview, July 2015, Lynn Immigration Center, Congolese Development Center)

The ethnographic research study started in Lynn. From Boston, I started inquiring about Congolese communities. I joined an event dedicated to the African diaspora in the city, and there I met a Congolese woman, a nurse, who was pleased to hear that I was interested in learning about healing perceptions from Congolese communities in Massachusetts: I suggest you meet the leaders at our places of gathering. Churches and soon, the community will have a town hall meeting to vote for their next government. It will be a great thing if you vote for their next government. It would be great if you could develop contacts with these leaders and let them help you encourage others to meet with you and answer your questions. [Name] church is an excellent place to start. The priests are especially helpful and a great gateway to other community members. (Field notes, 2014, Congolese woman, nurse)

To Lynn, I went, and I learned that the city became a significant receptor city for Boston’s settlement agencies services that provided affordable housing to new migrant communities, as a Congolese woman expressed when I met her at the Congolese Development Center in Lynn, an original initiative from mwinda and Lynn Immigration Center: Settlement agencies in Boston have re-settlement branches in Lynn because the cost of living is high in Boston. [. . .] We have an office here because they have been relocated here in Lynn and the surroundings, but most of the leading offices are in Boston. (Interview, July 2015, Lynn Immigration Center, Congolese Development Center)

As recommended, I reached out to Congolese “places of gathering” and mwinda, the Congolese Catholic Charismatic Church. From there, I started conducting participant observation and informal and semi-structured interviews. I had the opportunity to meet with the “leaders,” individuals who cared for the church. They were the caretakers. I also met with the priests, the spiritual leaders, and men “close to God.” I met with the Mamas, mature women who knew the meaning of community and the existing diasporic churches and



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community organizations across Massachusetts and beyond. Through those leaders, I navigated gathering spaces and had opportunities to engage with other church members. Leaders, diverse individuals of Congolese descent of all ages, elders, the youth, and the first- and second-generation born in the DRC and the United States met with me during fieldwork at different churches, community centers, immigration centers, community gardens, and private homes. I moved between the cities of Lynn and Boston and other nearby towns such as Malden and Everett. Through interviews, participant observation, focus groups, and recruitment based on the snowball sample technique built “using each participant as part of the recruitment team” (Sobo 2009, 136), a total of fourteen Lingala, French, and English-speaking individuals (five women and nine men), with ages ranging from twenty-four to sixty years old, directly, or indirectly from the DRC, participated in this study. This chapter will use ethnographical research to argue that understandings of human discomfort do not necessarily pertain exclusively to the physical, organic, and natural body. At the intersections of illness narratives (Andersen and Thomson 2020) or “discourses featuring human suffering” (Mattingly 1998, 275) associated with immediate personal experiences and broad human problems caused by the exercise of structural violence and political and economic power (Das et al. 2000), the medical anthropology of healing investigates provocations of balance and life, resistances, signs, warnings, and effects of violent power over human bodies (Kleinman et al. 1997). The interest in deciphering meanings and expressions of healing among Congolese diasporas situates the present, or the time of the ethnographic inquiry, within the contexts of post-colonial DRC and the contemporary worlds of African diasporas. Mwinda, “Light of the World” I became immersed in new realities. Individuals expressed how they felt about the DRC, Congo, or home. From the beginning of fieldwork, I knew the church community and others orbiting around it thought about Congo often. “Congo is in my heart,” said a man born in Kinshasa who grew up in Lynn and moved to Boston later. Individuals were concerned about Congo, conflicts, and wars: We don’t like what has been imposed on us, a war that is not our war. [. . .] Those fighting can just go on fighting, but if they left us alone, that would be great. (Interview, June 2015)

Members from mwinda often found the news about the DRC “too exacerbating” (Interview, June 2015). While myriads of issues related to the country’s

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health systems and sexual violence surfaced, individuals also referred to changes or “newly experienced” physical illnesses or diseases encountered in the United States, such as stress, high blood pressure, obesity, and in some cases, cancer. Congolese refugees, as noted by a Congolese woman, arrived with “non-typical illnesses” (Interview, June 2015): Some will come with scars, some will come with seizures, and some will come with mental schizophrenia or chronic diseases like HIV could be TB. Another person will come trying to manage high blood pressure, or arthritis, severe arthritis. (Interview, July 2015)

In addition, respondents expressed that they experienced distrust in the medical system, lack of affordable housing, language barriers, exacerbated trauma, problematic identity standpoints within new spaces, and difficulties in adaptation. When I inquired about healing perceptions, mwinda pointed out the worship of God, social cohesion, support, and connection with the DRC. The church established spiritual and community healing procedures but kept active with political organizing in collaboration with the larger community in Massachusetts. On one occasion, mwinda organized “a town hall meeting to vote for their next government” (Fieldnotes, 2014, Congolese woman, nurse). Congolese gathered in the early spring of 2015 to discuss DRC president candidacies. A few members and leaders of the Congolese Catholic Church met with Congolese Pentecostals at a Parish in Everett to receive Congolese touring candidates in the United States for the presidency in the DRC and introduce their political party. This meeting was delivered in French. All the Congolese reunited in the basement of the Parish and attentively listened to remarks concerned with the Constitutional policy that requires the government to step down by the end of 2016. During this research, I was unaware of the imminent roles of religion in the healing I sought. I learned that healing for mwinda in the Catholic Charismatic Church revolved around looking after Congolese communities’ physical, mental, and spiritual health, fortifying communities, and the collective contribution to reconciliation in the DRC. I started attending Mass every Sunday at three in the afternoon. I always sat at the back. I was a stranger. At first, all I could do was observe. Over fifty Congolese families and individuals gathered at the iconic church downtown Lynn’s center to sing, pray, and celebrate the Holy Spirit. The priests, whom I later learned alternated delivering Mass with other priests, and were reelected biennially, always commenced the sacred service with prayers while holding their copy of the Bible. They delivered their speeches in Lingala and French. I always saw how two young Congolese, often a boy and a girl, dressed in white gowns, brought the priest to the podium before returning to



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their seats, water and a white towel so that they could wash their hands and purify their soul, at the start of every spiritual session. I found myself constantly taking notes. I remember that sometimes, attendees would look at me and smile warmly. It was a special moment to hear the priests vocalizing essential words. I later learned that the priests’ words symbolized reminders, encouragement, and biblical passages that praised responsibility, wisdom, and knowledge. The word mwinda was pronounced several times. Attendees, families, and individuals, including children, listened attentively and often joined the priest’s voice by repeating his pronunciations. Some lowered their heads; others raised their hands. At least once at each gathering, the priest on duty that Sunday named one or two community members. They knew each other. Those who were named stood up and started speaking. They were telling stories, their own stories, and highlighted positive lived experiences. They recounted stories about overcoming difficult obstacles with the help of God. The spiritual family celebrated those who spoke, clapped, and rejoiced along with their stories. Then, there was the music. About five women always sat in the front, holding small drums in their hands and accompanying the organ player. These women sang in Lingala throughout the entire ceremony. Their singing alternated in between the speeches of the priest. Sometimes, the women sang along; we, the attendees and observants, followed their rhythms at intervals by standing up, singing, and clapping. By the middle of the ceremony, the priest often requested us to stand again and greet the person next to us. By the end of the ceremony, the young children sitting next to the priest brought him a golden plate containing sacred bread and a cup full of red wine. The priest rewashed his hands, sipped the wine, and fed the holy bread to the adults that had already started to line up in front of him to receive the blessings of the Holy Spirit. Mwinda is a Lingala word that means “light.” Such a word was pronounced repeatedly during Mass. The Congolese applied their understanding of the concept and meaning of mwinda as the “light of the world.” One elder explained that the biblical passage of Matthew 5:14–16 states, “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, giving everyone in the house light. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Mwinda reminded them of their identity and purpose: to be exemplars for the world. It represented guidance for a life dedicated to others as “enlightened” and “empowered servers that shed light on darkness” (Field notes, 2015). The elder explained the following: The Holy Spirit, the unity of God, brought us together. When we moved our church to Lynn, we decided to work as an organization. We needed to give

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our organization a name. We called ourselves mwinda. In Congo, the primary community in the city is the churches and structures. That’s what you call the immediate community in the town. Besides the church, people will meet in the community. They also have their leader in the community, in the city. We transferred all here. (Interview, July 2015, elder)

As an African diaspora Church with some of the African religious and African Christianity ramifications present in the diaspora (Ter Haar 2008), mwinda originated from the Christian tradition in the DRC of naming the youth in the church mwinda and was “transferred all here” through a few scattered Congolese families that arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1990s. As described, they first got together because “new Congolese always came looking for somebody in the community. Congolese emigrate to the church and where their families gather” (Interview, June 2015, elder). The social cohesion and the building of their church started when about fifteen Congolese, along with several Christian Jesuit pastors from Boston and Lynn, met sporadically for Mass at random Catholic American churches across Boston. As a community, they drew closer to each other because they wanted to pray together in both French and Lingala and experience Mass as they did in the past back in the DRC: Yes, it is part of the tradition because you bring your traditions when you move. That’s how we celebrate Mass. We gave ourselves a name to allow these people to celebrate Mass the way they celebrate back home. They may not be as comfortable in English. They may need integration. When they are with their people, they feel more comfortable [. . .] There are other Catholic churches, but this one is hundred percent Congolese. (Interview, July 2015, elder)

To families and individuals who identify as “one hundred percent Congolese,” mwinda became a “centered, sacred space” (Dawson 2010) for the Congolese Catholic community in consortium with the larger community: We are talking about three things here: the Congolese Catholic community and the non-Congolese Catholic community originate from the church. Then you have the Congolese community, which includes all the Congolese. Mama is now the leader of the Congolese Catholic and the neighborhood. (Interview, July 2015, elder)

The Congolese Catholic community turned into the movement of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that emphasized each member’s suffering and self-mortification to be acts that imitate Christ, The Son of God. The qualities of mwinda offered during the healing ministries and prayer groups included the possibility of the benefit of divine healing as practiced by The Son of God



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in the Gospels, the integration of the Baptism in the Spirit, and the infusion of the power and blessing of God (Good 2010, 92). Mwinda’s social structures positioned community priests as spiritual healers. The Mamas, community women, dedicated efforts to “keep the community together and provided healing across faiths” (Field notes, 2015). Through transmission and transferences of worship and charitable natures that transcended from the DRC (Wild-Wood 2008), processes of renegotiation within localities, territorialization, and intersectionality (La Barbera 2014, 92), mwinda asserted its rightful place in the city (Adogame et al. 2008) to exert forms of healing at the intersections of the local and the global (Garbin 2014), as one Congolese man expressed: [The church] likes to focus on Congolese empowerment. They are concerned about the Congo. They deal with immigration issues. The church gives a force to the Congolese. It is through the church that they empower each other. (Interview, July 2015, Congolese man)

As a sanctuary, a place of worship, a refuge, a place for solidarity and community, and a family in Christ (Garbin 2014; Bandele 2010), mwinda contributed to togetherness among Congolese communities, which also included “sister” churches, members from the Pentecostal Catholic Church in Lynn, the Pentecostals in Everett, and other Congolese attending American Catholic churches spread out across Boston, the State of Massachusetts, the United States, and the DRC. “That’s the Way of Healing”: Spirituality and Social Reconciliation Mwinda’s priests were charismatic Congolese-born leaders, educated in the DRC and the United States, and full-time religious specialists (Stein and Stein 2005) that strived to fulfill their role in the diaspora as responsible holders of the globalization of Christianity and the sacred (Dawson 2010). As priests native to African countries, emigration led them to other parts of the world. Through godly mobility and divine patterns impulsed by the Lord (Maskens 2012), the mwinda priests’ goal was to maintain “spiritual continuums” (Muthuki 2014, 126): This is not to say that I don’t send them to the doctor when a person needs surgery or something like that. They need more than prayer. My role is spiritual. (Interview, June 2015, priest, leader)

Just as the priests at healing churches in Washington DC recognize complex social challenges within migration and transnational contexts (Janzen et al. 2005), mwinda priests here expressed concerns primarily because the Congolese in particular dealt with diverse adversities:

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Some may need medical care. Those who have been traumatized by those events need psychological care. People who have experienced all of these atrocities and abuses at a particular moment see them starting to doubt the presence of God. If God is a merciful God, how is it that he allows all these terrible things to happen? They have troubles with themselves, which is a challenge for their faith, and they will need that healing. (Interview, 2015, priest, leader)

Trauma, deaths in the family, suicide, and abuse represent some of the effects of faith loss or restrained spiritual growth. Participants corroborated that some have witnessed severe traumatic experiences in the DRC and that psychological trauma is the gravest issue. One young Congolese woman expressed: But one of the things I was saying—mentally, they experienced all this violence—and the atrocities—the trauma is a big problem. (Interview, June 2015, young Congolese woman)

Spiritual priests addressed trauma during Mass, collectively, and in one-onone meetings to attempt to restore balance: They need to know how to balance embracing their own culture and taking what is valuable in their own culture. Don’t forget that these people are the sons and daughters of their culture. They are precisely the church people. In church, you have this culture. (Interview, June 2015, priest, leader)

As the “sons and daughters of their culture,” some Congolese may have felt lost and not open to other cultures despite having moved out of their “culture,” but they still behaved like they lived back home or thought about home. The promotion of African healing traditions toward the collective and one-on-one included prayer and anointments to actively respond to trauma, faith loss, and life imbalances (Janzen et al. 2005). The promotion of African healing traditions toward the collective and one-on-one highlighted the healing elements of the Baptism in the Spirit, infusions of energy and power, blessings of God, healing ministries, and prayers accompanied by the laying on of hands for the treatment of physical, emotional, or religious or evil illnesses. Inner healing may be aimed at removing the effects of a particular life trauma by eliciting “supernatural guidance from God” (Stein and Stein 2005, 130): I refer to the kind of energy I have within me and how I generate and channel that energy. So, when this energy is disrupted, you need that healing to return to the right track, trust again, and let people believe in themselves. That’s spirituality. (Interview, June 2015, priest, leader)



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The priests’ energy ultimately empowered the “Congolese faith” and “healed suffering” (Field notes, 2015). According to respondents, the Congolese have the potential to use healing power or healing energy, but they also recognized that the ability to use such power could be broken. The use of healing energy is similar to soul retrieval in therapy rituals (Stein and Stein 2005). Individually and collectively, “soul retrievals” are also needed in contexts of social conflict, as one of the Mamas expressed: Maneuvering the different kinds of the mentality of the Congolese who had come from various regions and tribes can be challenging. We notice that the Congolese community is divided into small groups. Like we have churches we have different churches; we have the Protestant and Catholic churches. (Interview, 2015, Mama)

Priests and Mamas addressed personal and social dilemmas, maladies, or controversies in the host country, the United States, but also from the DRC. Mwinda maintained open lines of communication with religious entities and communities “back home” across the country, including at least fifty churches, as well as faculties of philosophy, universities, high schools, and parishes that solidarized with global and local religious, spiritual, and civil society movements. Through transnational relations and regularly traveling to the DRC, priests expressed their engagement in Catholic activities, government actions, and policy, different churches and associations, organizations, other religious groups across the globe, and communities’ initiatives at large. That sort of globalized sacred role proved beneficial to spread the word of God and humankind’s salvation. Mwinda priests saw themselves as intermediaries of healing and community reconciliation. Expressions like “coming together” (Mubelo 2010, 32) and “we can find elements of peace in every religion” (Field notes, 2015) represented the essence of their core service and the belief that a religious community is capable of sustaining reconciliation, a strategic model directed to conflict resolution inspired by the 1994 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa (Mubelo 2010). The existing religious, spiritual, and transnational connections that I found between mwinda and the DRC, as a trans-Atlantic dialogue (Bekoe and Swearingen 2009), aimed at reconciliation, or forms of well-being within communities through the promotion of values and justice, truth, the duty of memory, open and shared acknowledgment, restoration, and forgiveness. In this manner, civic forums were encouraged in the United States and the DRC, that is, spaces where people needed and wanted to be responsible for their own lives, where people had the chance to talk, and where people came together: Through engagement, it is possible to actively resolve social conflicts that do not depend entirely on political systems and international agencies. The political

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approach quickly falls into retribution: “Ok, you did this, you have to be punished.” But bringing religion means possibilities of restoration and community. It is about religious spirituality and energy and how the community channels that power constructively to heal. (Interview, 2015, priest, leader)

Priests encouraged individuals to speak up, express their sorrows and experiences, and “tell their side of the story” (Interview, June 2015, priest) so that each individual and the entire community could understand their living situation. Communion and understanding are realized through reconciliation and its multiple elements combined. “That’s the way of healing”: People who listen to one another build a community by telling their side of the story. Some come out of shame; others acknowledge and accept they have done something wrong. Through this process of reconciliation, people decide to repair. But repairing does not mean you will replace what has been broken or bring back our lost lives. Still, at least you are telling the people there is a possibility to get the community together again, and from there, you build the community. So, it is a critical process to talk and share a story. Not only are other people telling the story on their behalf, but listening is also the most important thing. You listen to people and allow them to talk about their problems. When individuals tell their side of the story, that’s the way of healing. (Interview, June 2015, priest, leader)

“People have a sense of solidarity”: Community and Political Activism African diaspora churches, such as the Nigerian Catholic Church in Riverdale, California, offer local services and “social insurance” by helping individuals with barriers they may confront in their host countries as immigrants (Arthur 2010, 133). Likewise, mwinda Mamas expressed that healing meant community concerted efforts to support physical and social health in the diaspora and the DRC. Accordingly, they took the lead in helping the community: We notice that the Congolese community is divided into small groups. Like we have a church, we have different Protestant and Catholic churches: this pastor and that pastor. And then you have the Congolese New Women, so you have those NGOs but no coordination. (Interview, June 2015, Mama)

Community organizing efforts included concerted solidarity that aimed to collect resources to address the needs of families and individuals: People have a sense of solidarity. If a community man does not have the necessary means to go to the doctor, you see people contributing to help that person.



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Then some people know doctors or referrals to ensure that this person or family is being allowed. The generosity is expressed by taking care of their members. You do that, and you see people generous to provide what they provide. So is sick, for instance; if they don’t have enough sources, the community contributes. (Interview, June 2015, Mama)

Concerted solidarity included caring for the health of members of the community. Some of the assistance in the navigation through medical healthcare systems includes care toward individuals who have cancer (“When three members die of cancer in a small community, it is striking”; Iinterview, July 2015, Congolese woman, mwinda), and other physical issues, for example: “things around the heart” (Interview, May 2015), “high blood pressure issues” (Interview, May 2015, Congolese woman, mwinda): For all the people, it is high blood pressure because most of the time . . . I don’t know eh—in Africa, being fat is associated with good, and it is here that we learn it is not, that it is not good, you are supposed to keep fit. (Interview, 2015, Congolese woman, mwinda)

Given the physical and biological changes that some Congolese go through when adapting to the host country, Mamas recognized the need for assistance. But challenges and impediments of healthcare navigation also included the consideration of support language proficiency. Non-English-speaking, newly arrived migrants had difficulties communicating in English, a state that tended to intimidate and problematize smooth transitions. Congolese individuals, skilled and qualified professionals “back home,” experienced language limitations preventing them from obtaining competitive positions. Mamas supported mwinda and community-based organizations that originated as emergency aid and charitable initiatives in the United States and the DRC. For example, the Congolese Women Association of New England (CWANE) assists refugee and Congolese immigrant women and their families to adjust to American life, achieve self-sufficiency, and improve their welfare. CWANE combines efforts directed at the DRC by sharing the understanding that their home country suffers from social conflicts and divisions, infectious diseases, poverty and starvation, and violence. CWANE offers various programs and referral services related to social, educational, medical, and economic assistance. Another organization supported by the Mamas in mwinda is the Congolese Development Center (CDC). This organization provides essential resources, services, information, and skills to facilitate the transition and integration of Congolese people into life in the United States. At the same time, the DRC program collaborates with trans-local NGOs that work directly with farming communities and community-based organizations such

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as St. Dominic Health Care (a community health center) to promote the health of individuals in the community and surrounding areas, particularly children, women, and those who are chronically ill and economically disadvantaged. Mamas organized, collaboratively with other mwinda members, the annual commemorations of Independence Day on June 30, celebrated yearly at the church or in private homes. Mwinda also organized events and gatherings for the community. From 2015 to 2018, mwinda and the Congolese community in Massachusetts gathered once a year during Fall at different sites in Lynn and Boston to participate in the charitable event Boston Congolese Gala. About four hundred Congolese from all over the state of Massachusetts shared emotive evenings, listened to music, and danced, but also reflected on the crisis in the DRC. In 2015, the concerns revolved around corrupt power. The Congolese community helped raise funds to support organizations that prevent children from laboring in the mines back in the Congo. In 2016, the worries during the Gala revolved around assisting family members and confronting the challenges experienced by schools in the DRC. According to the Mamas, healing meant direct support to DRC from the diaspora. One of the highlights of community healing directed to the DRC was when mwinda organized a meeting to bring awareness about the complexity of mineral exploitation and the corrupted and illegal contracts between Congolese nationals, the military, and international mineral-extraction companies. In the early spring of 2016, mwinda, the larger community, the Catholic Pentecostals, the Pentecostals from Everett, members of American Catholic churches, activists, and organizations formed and sustained by Congolese and non-Congolese individuals in Boston and Washington DC, as well as senior representatives of the Obama administration from the Senate gathered at a high school hall near their church in Lynn. About sixty individuals, including families with children and older adults, discussed the social dynamics at various mines in Eastern and Southern DRC. The call for revision included the reality check on the impaired wealth distribution, the built-up of self-financing economies centered around mineral exploitation, and international mandates, such as the US Chamber of Congress requirement for all US companies and corporations trading with natural resources in the DRC to report transparency in all commercial activity (Engström 2017). The meeting concluded with the prayer of a mwinda religious leader: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We thank you for this day. On this day, we pray for peace in our country; we pray for peace in our hearts. The kind of peace we want for our nation depends on the peace we wish for our souls. We ask you for your Spirit of Wisdom. We invite you to inspire us and inspire our leaders so that they can build a country where everyone can find their place—a country where everyone is happy and proud to be Congolese. (Field notes, 2016)



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All panelists and attendees at that meeting agreed that the DRC has abundant resources but suffers from illegal and international exploitation of minerals and consequential wars and violence (Nzongola 2002; Cuvelier et al. 2013). It was also agreed that all diasporic communications and activism toward the DRC can come to terms through democratic and constitutional elections and government transparency. Later on, I learned that the social and political movement that came about at the 2016 gathering in Lynn led to further united efforts of activists and members of mwinda and several Boston-based NGOs to organize educational workshops and public awareness events, such as “The Conflict of Minerals in the Congo: Does your Cell Phone have blood in it?” held at a Black church in a South Boston neighborhood, or universities in the city of Boston: Many people don’t know about mining people, so many mines. During Technology Week, my goal is to educate on the issue of tech, which is unknown; coming through arts, conferences, and workshops for children and women, breaking the silence brings awareness. (Interview, 2016, Congolese man, activist)

The united efforts of activists and members of mwinda and several Bostonbased NGOs led them to ultimately propose the Mineral Conflict Resolution model, which attempted to implement global awareness, education, and a code of conduct related to the negative repercussions of illegal exploitation upon populations in the DRC. Through institutional exchanges that started in 2013, Congress enacted the Congo Conflict Mineral Bill Section 1502, requiring US-regulated manufacturers to use minerals from Central Africa. Section 1502 is the latest in a series of measures using common legal standards to shrink international black markets (Whitney 2015). In January 2017, the US Court approved the law to check up on materials from the DRC. A month later, members of mwinda, supporters, diverse lobbying organizations, governors, mayors, legislators, and news cameras celebrated the signing of the Massachusetts Congo Conflict Minerals Bill on February 2, 2017. The bill requires the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to contract with electronic companies to verify compliance with the federal law 2010 that requires transparency (Kabukanyi and Aron 2017). HEALING AND THE FUTURE The results of this study suggest that the healing perceptions of the Congolese diasporas in mwinda revolved around caring for Congolese communities’ physical, mental, and spiritual health, as well as the fortification of communities, and the collective contribution to social reconciliation in the

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DRC. Contemporary perceptions of recovery among the Congolese diaspora included the spiritual and community therapeutic systems that emanated from mwinda. Through spiritual and community leaders, mwinda promoted the well-being of the self and society, restoration across the state, and joint transnational stability and development directed toward the DRC. Spiritual leaders fulfilled their divine calling and used energy healing to restore faith and balance. Mamas worked to encourage solidarity and concerted efforts through organizing and connecting resources to fulfill obligations in the host country and “at home,” a phenomenon referred to as states of leadership and diaspora engagements (Bongila 2017; De Bruyn et al. 2008), diasporic work (Mercer et al. 2009), and transnational politics (Lampert 2012). Mwinda represents a community church that delivers a subjective culturespecific meaning of healing based on its historical formations and social structures that define identities in movement and lived experiences related to migration, territorialization, and memory. The worlds that mwinda render meaningfully and concretely from phenomenological standpoints or narratives of lived experiences (Germond and Cochrane 2010) reflect post-colonial social affliction, misfortunes, and social maladies or conflicts (Langwick, 2011). The possibilities of healing from past violent experiences, or the making and unmaking of violence in terms of aftermaths, manifest as resilience, resistance, reconciliation through the shifting of traditional practices, and spiritualism, often involving politics (Jenkins 1998). The understanding of human discomfort does not necessarily pertain to the physical body. The meanings and practices of healing that mwinda reflects offer examples of consolidation and reestablishment of life, diasporic identities, and purposes embedded in contemporary African diasporic experiences and transformations. Other similar studies highlight that Kimbanguist Churches, the “Maman Olangi” church, and the Combat Spirituel feel tasked primarily to liberate individuals from affliction and spiritual bondage so they can lead healthy and prosperous lives (Garbin 2014). Spiritual and political movements such as The Awakening Movement (Mouvement de Réveil) and the nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Citadelle de L’espoir (Citadel of Hope) among a Congolese Pentecostal congregation in Quebec fulfill the mission to expand the universal family of the Children of God globally and revitalize Congolese civic society (Mossière 2010). The Kimbanguist church “La Nouvelle Jerusalem” or “Le Ministe`re du Combat Spirituel,” led by pasteurs combattants, envisions the development and moral liberation of the homeland: We, in the diaspora, can work for the Congo in different ways: political, economic, sending money, and spiritual, by praying and transmitting spiritual energy to our country. [. . .] It’s a spiritual battle [. . .] God reveals my vision for our country. (Garbin and Godin 2013, 7)



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These findings reveal how healing takes shape and form through social processes (Joralemon 2017), bodily experiences, and embodied expressions (Csordas 2002). It is possible to pay closer attention to notions of human suffering (Green 1998; Rothenberg 2006), alternative discourses of healing situated within the timeline of African diasporas’ spirituality and Christianity, and the confronting of change and struggles for freedom (Kalu 2013). Lessons of healing through mwinda demonstrate that African diasporas can be political enterprises that “sustain and grow the economic well-being of their communities, and if resources allow, help their homeland. Political networking developments between those communities within the diaspora are well connected and interested in collective political activism” (Bandele 2010, 745). This chapter has considered mwinda’s spiritual and religious activities embedded in political campaigns as forms of consolidation and reestablishment of life, consolidating diasporic identities, and defining the duties of those Congolese who are concerned about their home country, the DRC. These primary findings show the presence of innovative healing strategies that invite the study of embodiments of cultural violence and healing within contemporary African diasporic experiences and transformations. They also provide suggestions for further explorations of narrative and performance contradictions and differences among individuals and communities. There is still so much to understand. Here I recommend further investigating healing perceptions among all mwinda members by taking an in-depth look at language and ethnicity perspectives. In addition, there is a need to understand more profoundly how social stratifications are involved in healing work through the lenses of gender and youth groups (Bernstein and Ndinda 2008). The consideration of subtle and specific contradictions and differences in views and perspectives among priests, Mamas, other mwinda members, and “sister” churches, for example, such as the Pentecostals in Everett and American Catholic churches spread out across Boston, deserves attention. These fields needing exploration can be discussed as diasporic entanglements (Hesse 2002; Shain 2002) or related social phenomena that can unfold comparative perspectives about, for example, the Congolese socio-political movements called combatants and anticombattants in Pretoria, South Africa (Inaka 2015). This chapter encourages the opportunity for anthropology to continue developing qualitative research based on phenomenological perspectives of oppression and visions of healing. The goal is to understand how challenges in human life, as exemplified by approaches to cultures of violence, culminate in “crosscurrents of change” (Jenkins 1998, 125) and social movements and counteractions (Rylko et al. 2011; Inhorn 2008).

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NOTE 1.  To preserve the interviewees’ privacy, their real names are not shown and, where appropriate, pseudonyms are given instead, which in many cases were chosen by the interviewees themselves.

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Langwick, Stacey Ann. 2011. Bodies, politics, and African healing: the matter of maladies in Tanzania. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Maskens, Maïté. 2012. “Mobility among Pentecostal pastors and migratory ‘miracles.’” Canadian Journal of African Studies/La revue canadienne des études africaines 46(3): 397–409. Mass Gov. Department of Public Health. “Refugee arrivals to Massachusetts by country of origin. Regional Statistics.” Retrieved from: https://www.mass.gov/lists/ refugee-arrivals-to-massachusetts-by-country-of-origin [10/04/2023] Mattingly, Cheryl, and Linda C. Garro (eds). 2000. Narrative and the cultural construction of illness and healing. California: University of California Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 1998. Healing dramas and clinical plots: The narrative structure of experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, Doctor Claire, Ben Page, and Martin Evans (eds). 2009. Development and the African Diaspora: place and the politics of home. London: Zen Books. Mossière, Géraldine. 2010. “Mobility And Belonging Among Transnational Congolese Pentecostal Congregations: Modernity And The Emergence Of Socioeconomic Differences.” In Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Religious and Social Dynamics in Africa and the New African Diaspora, edited by Afe Adogame. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Muthuki, Janet. 2014. “Religion as Mechanism of Adaptation for Immigrants: The Case of African Migrant Students in a South African Tertiary Institution.” Journal of Social Development in Africa 29(1):109–32. News Star. “Refugees among us: Westfield, Massachusetts.” Retrieved from: 10/04/2022. https://data.thenewsstar.com/refugee/massachusetts-westfield/all/ [10/04/2023] Ndaya, Julie. 2007. “‘Prendre le bic’: Le Combat Spirituel’congolais et les transformations sociales.” PhD diss, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. 2002. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: a People’s History. London; New York: Zed Books. Mubelo, Willy Moka. 2010. Justice and Social Reconciliation in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The Church’s Contribution to the Building of a New Society. Ph.D. diss., Santa Clara University Berkeley, CA. Rothenberg, Paula. 2006. Beyond borders: Thinking critically about global issues. New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Rylko–Bauer, Barbara, and Merrill Singer. 2011. “Political violence, war, and medical anthropology.” In A companion to medical anthropology, edited by Merrill Singer, Pamela I. Erickson, César E. Abadía-Barrero, 219–49. Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Schoumaker, Bruno, Marie-Laurence Flahaux, M. Mangalu, and J. Agbada. 2013. “Changing patterns of Congolese migration.” Paris: MAFE Working Paper 19:1– 32. Shain, Yossi. 2002. “The role of diasporas in conflict perpetuation or resolution.” SAIS Review (1989-2003) 22(2):115–44. Singer, Merrill., and Hand Baer. 2007. Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Sobo, Elisa Janine. 2009. Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research: a Practical Field Guide. Oakland: Left Coast Press. Stein, Rebecca, and Philip L. Stein. 2005. The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft: Fourth Edition (4th ed.). Oxfordshire: Routledge. Swyngedouw, Eva, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2009. “The Congolese diaspora in Brussels and hybrid identity formation: Multi-scalarity and diasporic citizenship.” Urban Research & Practice 2(1):68-90. Ter Haar, Gerrie. 2008. “Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London.” African Studies Review, 51(1):181–82. Twagiramungu, Epimaque. “A phenomenological study of lived experiences of Congolese refugees resettled in the United States.” Ph.D. diss., University of Phoenix, 2013. Whitney, Toby. 2015. “Conflict minerals, black markets, and transparency: The legislative background of Dodd-Frank Section 1502 and its historical lessons.” Journal of Human Rights 14(2):183–200. Wild-Wood, Emma. 2008. Migration and Christian identity in Congo (DRC). Leiden; Boston: Brill. Womack, Mari. 2009. The anthropology of health and healing. Lanham MS: Rowman Altamira. Word Press.“Why is it so hard to find this Diaspora?”: Congolese Americans: Finding a Home in New England. Word Press. January 30, 2013. Retrieved from: https:// congoleseamericans.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/diaspora-statistics/ [10/04/2022]

Index

African ancestry, 122 African-Caribbean, 109, 113–14, 120, 123. See also Afro-Caribbean African roots, 59, 119, 154 Afro-Caribbean, 158, 159 Afrodescendants, 6, 15–17, 19–21, 23–24, 32–33 Angola, 6, 17–18, 23–26 Arabs, 7, 38, 41–46, 48, 51, 53, 54n2, 54n8, 130 Arabic language, 10, 41, 44–46, 51–53, 54n11, 55n14, 89, 101–104, 131, 134, 140, 150n6, 151n13, 151n16, 151n17, 151n21, 152n37, 175, 179– 80, 183n3 autobiographical, 87, 129–32, 135–36. 140, 142–44, 148, 150n2, 153–54 autobiography, 8, 18, 24, 130–31 Barbados, 153, 155 barrier, 4, 8–9, 116, 170, 174, 192, 198 Belgium, 5–6, 59–62, 79–80, 83, 130, 134, 189 biographical, 8, 87–88, 93, 95, 100, 107, 133, 135 Brazil, 15–16, 18 Black British, 8, 110, 119, 122, 124–25 Britishness, 121, 124, 155, 161

Canada, 6, 161, 162 Caribbean, 6, 8–9, 113–15, 119–24, 157, 159, 163–64 Caribbean-African, 5, 115–16. See also African-Caribbean Catalonia, 93, 98 Christianity, 61, 80, 189, 194–95, 203 colonialism, 15, 17, 23, 25–26, 44, 153 community, 7–10, 12, 28, 40, 42–43, 49, 53–54, 54n2, 97, 100, 102, 105, 109, 118, 125, 165, 181: AfricanCaribbean, 113–14, 159; Black, 117, 120; Congolese, 187–203; Hadhrami, 42, 46–47; immigrant, 21, 82, 170–71, 178; LGBTQIA+, 79, 81; Moroccan, 170–71, 175, 177–78, 180, 182, 183n4; religious, 78; Zanzibari, 53 Congo, 6, 59, 164, 187, 189, 191, 194– 95, 200–2 Congolese Americans, 189 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 187–89, 191–92, 194–203; See also Congo diaspora, 5, 7–12, 19, 28, 42–43, 53, 109, 113, 120, 122–124, 132, 135, 135, 148, 156, 172, 188–90, 194–95, 198, 200, 202–3

209

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Index

diasporic, 1, 5, 9, 135, 165, 187–90, 201–3 digital, 2, 5, 8, 12, 129–36, 141–44, 148, 170, 173, 178–82 discourse, 26, 51, 60–62, 110–11, 113, 124, 203 displacement, 17, 26, 38, 157, 159, 197 diversity, 5, 26, 43, 47, 96, 110, 176 East Africa, 5, 7, 37, 41–42, 44–46, 51, 54n4, 54n6 Egypt, 42, 131 employment, 59 ethnic, 2, 20, 38, 42–43, 54n8, 116–117, 119 ethnicity, 29, 47, 123, 203 ethnographic, 2, 5–7, 187–88, 190–91 ethnography, 23 Europe, 1, 7, 15–16, 18, 23, 25–26, 33, 73, 136, 139, 146, 169 food, 97, 99, 113, 116, 118, 120 freedom, 116, 129, 133, 142, 143, 145, 150n9, 175, 203 gender, 6, 18, 19, 21, 30, 92, 172, 175, 177, 182, 183n4, 203 Hadhramawt, 37, 41–42, 46, 54n2 healing, 9, 12, 115, 187–88, 190–92, 194–98, 200–3 heterotopia, 4, 7, 9, 11, 38–41, 45–47, 50–51, 53, 170 heterotopic, 3, 8–9, 39, 46, 55n15, 170– 71, 174–76, 178 hybridity, 2, 5, 7–8, 11–12, 18–25, 110 identity, 2–5, 6–10, 16–19, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 30, 32, 38, 41, 43–47, 53, 79, 100, 109–10, 113, 117, 119–24, 130, 132, 135, 140, 148, 155–56, 162, 166, 192–93 ill, 47, 188, 200 illness, 191–92, 196

immigrants, 7, 21–22, 24, 41–42, 44, 59–60, 81, 89, 104, 161, 163, 165, 170–71, 173, 177–78, 181–82, 183n2, 190, 198 inequality, 122–24, 135 Indian Peninsula, 37, 43, 47 integration, 1, 7, 59–60, 81, 123, 181, 183, 194–95, 199 Islamic, 41, 42, 50, 54n3, 172 Jamaica, 109, 116, 118, 121 Lingala, 187, 191–94 Lusophone, 19 lusotropicalism, 26 marginal, 23, 116 marginalization, 24, 130 marginalized, 25–26, 29, 40, 44 memoir, 5, 8, 129–137, 139–44, 150n3 métissage, 1, 5 Middle East, 5, 59 migration, 1–3, 5–8, 12, 17, 19, 20, 32, 42, 59, 61, 83, 87–90, 95–97, 100, 102–105, 107, 116, 157, 165, 169, 195, 202 migrants, 1–8, 10, 12, 37, 93–94, 102, 104–105, 123, 169–70, 181, 188–89, 199 minority, 109–110, 115, 117, 122–23, 181 mixed-race, 19–20, 25 mixing, 1–2, 5–6, 93, 132, 176–77 Morocco, 6, 59, 88, 93–98, 101–6, 129, 132–35, 137, 139–141, 143, 145, 146, 169, 171–72, 174, 180–82 multicultural, 3, 7, 20, 25, 37–38, 40, 45, 47, 53, 55n15 multimodal, 8, 62, 65, 67, 129–30, 132– 133, 136, 141–42, 144, 148 multimodality, 142–44 Muslim, 54n12, 79, 170–172, 175, 180, 183n8 music, 22–23, 102, 113, 120, 134, 135, 139, 160–61, 164, 179, 193, 200



narrative, 8, 17, 18–21, 23–25, 28, 31, 33, 40, 75, 77, 98–99, 112, 116, 129–31, 136, 139–40, 142, 203 North Africa, 7, 104, 169, 171 Oman, 6–7, 37, 41–43, 45–50, 54n5 otherness, 38–41 Persia, 7, 37, 47 Portugal, 6, 15–20, 22–26, 28–31, 33 positioning theory, 5, 107, 110 postcolonial, 3, 6, 11–12, 17, 19–21, 23–26, 28, 30–33, 50, 202 race, 6, 16, 18, 21, 23, 29–30, 47, 121, 158–159 racism, 16, 26, 113, 117, 120–122, 174 religion, 12, 47, 61, 63, 67, 73, 78, 80, 189, 192, 197, 198 rights, 11, 111, 122, 129, 133, 143 sick, 23–24, 30, 33; See also ill sickness, 161, 163, See also illness Sierra Leone, 6–7, 62, 79 slavery, 8–9, 110, 120–121, 124, 145, 153–55, 157–58 South Africa, 197, 203 space: and time, 3, 5; digital, 135, 136, 141, 143, 148, 170, 178–82; private, 171–174, 178–80, 182; public, 9, 169, 171–76, 178, 180–82

Index 211

Spain, 6, 9, 89, 94, 169–77, 179–83, 183n3 stereotype, 8, 19, 20–21, 32, 90–91, 94, 116, 177 Swahili, 43–46, 51–53, 54n10, 55n14, 55n15 Tanzania, 6, 41–43, 45, 47–48, 54n5, 54n8 third place, 170, 176, 178 “thirdspace,” 170, 176, 178 transit, 17, 19, 21–23, 25–26, 31 trauma, 9, 23, 30, 131, 153, 157, 192, 196 United Kingdom, 6, 38, 43–44, 49, 109, 113, 120–123, 189 United States, 6, 9, 18, 113, 123, 187, 189, 191–92, 195, 197, 199 utopia, 5, 38–40, 45, 49–50, 53 utopian, 5, 38, 50, 54, 181 violence, 9, 30, 121, 157–158, 191–92, 196, 199, 201–3 West Africa, 9, 109, 162 West Indies, 109, 113, 154 Yemen, 6, 7, 37, 41, 42, 43–44, 45–47, 54n1 Zanzibar, 5–7, 37–39, 41–51, 53–54, 54n2, 4, 5, 8, 13–15

About the Contributors

Ruth Breeze is Full Professor of English at the University of Navarra, Spain, and PI of the Public Discourse Research Group in the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad. She has published widely on scientific discourse, legal discourse, and specialized communication. She recently published Teaching English Medium Instruction Courses in Higher Education. (Bloomsbury, 2021) with Carmen Sancho Guinda. Her most recent edited books are Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with Sarali Gintsburg and Mike Baynham, Bloomsbury, 2022), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (with Andreas Musolff, Sara Vilar-Lluch and Kayo Kondo, Bloomsbury, 2022), and Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum (with Jan Zienkowski, John Benjamins, 2019). She is co-editor in chief of the Ibérica journal. Melina De Dijn works at the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven, Belgium. She became fascinated by the transitioning process to the labor market because of her work on educational research projects on the topic of employability. She is currently working on a PhD on job interviews and has published a few peer-reviewed articles on that topic together with her supervisor, Dorien Van De Mieroop (e.g., in Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication (2020), in a special issue of Identity, Language and Diversity (2021) and Linguistic Vanguard (forthcoming)). Jessica Falconi is an assistant researcher at the Centre for African and Development Studies (CEsA) of the University of Lisbon. PhD in Iberian Studies (2007) from the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Post-doctoral fellow (2010-2017) funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portu213

214

About the Contributors

gal). Visiting professor (2018/2019) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she directed the Portuguese Language Center/Instituto Camões. She has participated in several research projects and has published in national and international journals on Lusophone ​​ African literature and cinema. Sarali Gintsburg is researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (University of Navarra). Sarali is a philologist of Arabic with a focus on Arabic sociolinguistics, identity studies and literary canon. Her recent publications include: “Arabic Language in Zanzibar: Past, Present, and Future” (Journal of World Languages, 2019), and “The Asymmetric Linguistic Identities of African Soqotris: A Triadic Interaction” (with Eleonora Esposito, in Language and Identity in the Arab World (Rushdi, F. & S. Mehta, eds. Routledge, 2022). Dorien Van De Mieroop is a Professor of Linguistics at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her main research interests lie in the discursive analysis of identity in institutional interactions and narratives, about which she published more than 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and co-authored or co-edited a few books and special issues (e.g., “The language of leadership narratives” (2020, with Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr), “Identity struggles” (2017, with Stephanie Schnurr)). She is co-editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry. Judit Nagy is full-time associate professor, director of the Canada Center and vice-dean for international affairs at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Budapest-based Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. Her research focuses on literary multiculturalism in Canada, East Asian Canadians, and teaching material development. Rosa Pennisi is an affiliated researcher at the IREMAM of Aix-Marseille University and an adjunct lecturer of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Catania. Her research interests are dialectology, sociolinguistics, and Arabic literature. In particular, she deals with issues of linguistic and stylistic variation in Moroccan media production, the representations of linguistic ideologies in Moroccan digital production, as well as modern and contemporary Arabic literature. Carolina Nvé Díaz San Francisco, born and raised in Spain, completed a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology at the University of East London (United Kingdom) and a Master of Science in medical anthropology at Boston University School of Medicine (Massachusetts, United States). She is a researcher at the Disparities Research Unit (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School). She is Health and Wellness coordinator for the



About the Contributors 215

Massachusetts Women of Color Coalition (MAWOCC), adjunct anthropology faculty at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), and a PhD candidate in anthropology at UNED, Spain. Her research interests include mental health and Equatorial Guinea. Marta Amorós Torró obtained her PhD in Social Sciences, Health, and Education at the University of Girona in 2017; her MA in Citizenship and Human Rights: Ethics and Politics at the University of Barcelona in 2010; and her BA in Arabic Philology at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Barcelona in 2008. Her research focuses on migration, identity processes in migrant contexts, biographical research, life stories and memories of migration. She participated in various scientific dissemination activities and is the author of various articles. She works as a research assistant at the Open University of Catalonia in a participatory action research to engage with (socio-)linguistic inequalities.