Introduction

Having described in the previous chapter migrants’ political, economic and social conditions of non-citizenship, in this chapter I want to analyse migrants’ own perceptions of ‘being stuck’ in Morocco. In so doing, I will provide a glimpse of how living in limbo becomes a way of ‘being in the world’ and represents a fundamental break with previous values, beliefs and feelings of belonging.

While the existential feeling of ‘being stuck’ can be a trigger for contemplating migration, as indicated in Chapter 3, Hage (2005: 474) is right to argue that the real drama of ‘being stuck’ is when one becomes ‘stuck’ having left one's country of origin. He points out that the trauma of migration sets in when one realizes that one has ended up being stuck in the host country too, in unfamiliar, rather than familiar surroundings. This is exactly the situation of the migrants I interviewed in Morocco. In the following pages, I intend to link migrants’ feeling of ‘being stuck’ and their long stays in Morocco to their perspective on time. In so doing, I describe the processes whereby migrants must alter their perspective on their own present, past and future in forced immobility. ‘Being stuck’ in Morocco marks a period in their lives in which they start to rethink their relation to life, death and belonging.

I begin from the premise that our experience of time is shaped by our social, economic and political environment and the social and cultural practices we draw on to engage with different time perspectives (Adam 1994). From this follows the notion that time is not experienced equally by everyone and is dependent on one's social position within unequal structures of power. In order to highlight the changed experience of migrants’ time, I will draw particularly on the different accounts of women and men with respect to how they experience time in the present and the past and how they imagine their futures. This is followed by a discussion of liminal times and migrants’ connection to the feeling of absurdity, a term borrowed from the French writer Albert Camus (1991).