Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other: Moroccan Migrant Women in Italy

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Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other Moroccan Migrant Women in Italy

Ruba Salih UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

ABSTRACT This article suggests that both the multicultural perception of ‘community’ as a bounded and internally homogeneous body and the celebration of migrants as hybrids and anti-essentialist actors fail to acknowledge the complexity of processes of identity construction. The first reifies and essentializes migrants’ cultural identities, denying subjective contestations over notions of cultural and religious authenticity. The celebration of migrants as progressive and counterhegemonic ‘hybrids’, however, reinforces essentialist understandings of ‘migrants’, producing a hierarchy between experiences of displacement. The article suggests that it is essential to understand the ways in which migrants con- struct imagined, transnational and local communities. It provides a picture of the ways in which Moroccan migrant women in Italy draw and experience boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, of Self and Other in their day-to-day practices and discourses. In particular, it argues that Moroccan women define themselves both vis-a-vis Italians as well as by drawing boundaries between themselves and other Moroccan women and men.

KEY WORDS ethnicity hybridity identity Islam Moroccan women

COMMUNITY, HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY

Two main trends characterize the ways in which migrants are increasingly portrayed in Europe. The first, an expression of multicultural perspectives in Italy and elsewhere, tends to define migrants in terms of their belonging to ‘communities’. Within this perspective, migrants are perceived as members of homogeneous ethnic groups sharing a rather bounded and static ethnic culture, whose meanings are interpreted in a universal way by all the members who, as Yuval-Davis (1993: 627) aptly puts it, are supposed to ‘speak with a unified cultural voice’.

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 7, 2000: 321–335 [1350-5068(200008)7:3;321–335;013658] 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 322

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Critiques of the perception of migrants as homogeneous ethnic communities have prepared the ground for the second main paradigm in which migrants are perceived, influenced by recent Anglo-American academic literature (see Bhabha, 1990; Clifford, 1994; Gilroy, 1993). Post- modern accounts propose de-essentialized representations of cultures and identities where migrants, displaced people and refugees epitomize hybridity as resistance to bounded constructions of ‘communities’ and where the latter are replaced by the notion of diaspora (Gallissot and Rivera, 1996). Rather than the fusion of two cultural systems or identities, hybridity is better conceived as a ‘third space which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives’ (Bhabha, 1990: 211). Living as diasporic subjects implies a radically different experience of displacement than migration. While immigrants’ communities may be assimilable in such a way that they can constitute ‘a new home in a new place’, a diaspora culture ‘mediates, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remem- bering/desiring another place’ (Clifford, 1994: 307). This article criticizes attempts to describe experiences of identity construction in such binary categories. As Kaplan (1998) has suggested, these interpretations run the risk of producing a hierarchy between experiences of displacement where the representation of ‘hybrids’ as progressive subjects reinforces essentialist understandings of ‘migrants’. The latter are seen as either reproducing traditional cultural values and roles or as assimilating into western cultural frames. This article argues that there are multiple paths through which migrants renegotiate their cultural identities, and suggests that the rejection of assimilation does not bring them necessarily to hybridity. My argument is that naming migrant women and men in terms of their belonging to a ‘community’ often leads to hom- ogenizing the varieties of cultural experiences and subjectivities they embody, and it hinders processes of rooting and uprooting beyond fixed relations to local places and bounded cultures. However, it is also important to explain the ways in which ‘communities’, in terms of shared identities, are constructed or imagined by migrants themselves, by highlighting how gender and ethnicity operate and intersect. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) have pointed out, women play a crucial role as transmitters and signifiers of ethnic identity and culture, which boundaries are defined around issues such as sexuality, marriage and family. In fact, notions of cultural authenticity and purity revolve fre- quently around the control of women’s bodies and behaviour (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Saint-Blancat, 1999). By drawing on a larger study (Salih, 1999), that explores the transnational lives and identities of a group of Moroccan women living in the region Emilia-Romagna (Italy), in a context of increasing global cultural 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 323

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connections and movements, this article analyses the testimonies of three Moroccan migrant women.1 The narratives of Jamila, Amal and Ratiba have been chosen among others because they disclose different ways of renegotiating cultural identities which contest essentialism from within and from outside their ‘community’ without endorsing hybridity. Rather than rejecting altogether the idea of ‘community’ driven by anti- essentialist purposes, Moroccan women often exhibit a shifting and contextual negotiation of the boundaries of their ‘community’, contesting dominant notions around cultural authenticity and competing for afﬁrm- ing their own. One of the arguments of this article is that migrant women contextually negotiate boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of Self and Other, according to the diverse and sometimes intersecting hegemonic discourses that they may be facing in different places and phases of their lives. Indeed, Moroccan women deﬁne themselves vis-a-vis Italian society and by drawing boundaries that include or exclude ‘other’ Moroccans or Muslims, located within and outside their local, face-to-face relations. A picture of high heterogeneity among Moroccan migrant women emerges, which shows how multiple boundaries of ‘communities’, imagined or real, are drawn, where different conceptualizations of Islam also play an important role.

RENEGOTIATING ISLAM, AUTHENTICITY AND TRADITION

At a general level, the ‘new migration’ ﬂows to Italy occur within a frame- work of changing socioeconomic conditions in comparison with the industrial expansion of the 1950s and the 1960s in Europe (Koser and Lutz, 1998). Italy represents a postindustrial society which is undergoing a process of economic restructuring with contradictory implications for migrant women and men’s insertion in the labour market. In this context, Italian migration policies have changed considerably in the last 10 years, increasingly linking a politics of control and restriction of immigration with the development of a multicultural agenda aimed at recognizing migrants’ cultural difference2 (Melotti, 1997). However, very often the rubric of the respect for cultural difference has reinforced the representation of Islam as a set of static and immutable practices that members of the ‘Muslim community’ are expected to automatically and uniformly reproduce in continuity with supposedly past practices and beliefs. As the affaire du foulard in France, and also similar debates in Italy, have con- ﬁrmed,3 in the European imagination Muslim women are constructed as the ‘traditional’ women and as the ‘miserable victims par excellence’ (Lutz, 1997: 96), as opposed to women who do not adopt religious symbols or do not practise Islam who are portrayed as modernized, that is ‘westernized’. This portrayal reproduces binary categories where the 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 324

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‘West’ is associated with modernity and secularism, whereas the ‘rest’ is coupled with tradition, backwardness and religion.4 In this article I wish to challenge such assumptions by providing a picture of the different role played by Islam in women’s assertions of their subjective cultural and religious identities. It will emerge how the various ways of experiencing Islam lay bare multiple identity renegotiation processes and may reveal women’s diverse relations with the new place they inhabit. Whereas some women renegotiate Islamic practices in various ways and display a certain degree of plasticity (lived more or less painfully), others adopt Islam as the main sign of their identities, sometimes in continuity, but more often in discontinuity with attitudes and affiliations they held in their country of origin. Elsewhere (Salih, 1999) I have conceptualized these different ways of conceiving of and practising Islam in Italy as expressions of opposing representations of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ and their complex articulation with ‘authenticity’. For Islamist women, modernity is possible only through knowledge and devout practice of Islam, which is nonetheless invoked as a break with past traditions. This new Islam represents their way to progress and to social, cultural and spiritual self-fulfilment. Other women, on the contrary, are engaged with modernity as a fracture, a process of ongoing crisis between past certainties (or habitus) and current challenges, between the refusal of assimilation and the impetus for secu- larization, and they express this through a continuous negotiation and reflection around different cultural models.

CONTESTING LOCAL COMMUNITY AND RECREATING AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Out of a population of roughly 130,000 Moroccans in Italy, 13.5 percent reside ofﬁcially in the region Emilia-Romagna (Carchedi, 1994; Caritas, 1998). Moroccan women represent 20 percent of the Moroccan population in Italy. About 11 percent of them live between Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Modena, some of the areas where my ﬁeldwork was conducted (Kuider and Calzolari, 1994). In contrast with a common stereotype that perceives them as followers of their husbands, many Moroccan women migrated to Italy as single migrants in the course of the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s (De Bernart et al., 1995). In 1994, data showed that 48.6 percent of Moroccan women living in Italy had a resident permit for work reasons, while 43.8 percent were in Italy for family reunion. The rest had a visa for tourism or study (Kuider and Calzolari, 1994: 423–7). Other studies show that, even in the context of family reunions, Moroccan women are often involved in the family’s strategy and decisions (Schmidt di Friedberg and Saint- Blancat, 1998). 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 325

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Emilia-Romagna is one of the most flourishing economic regions in Italy with the peculiarity of having been historically the domain of the former Italian Communist Party (PCI), now Democratici di Sinistra (DS).5 The region owes its economic success to the development of small inter- dependent industries, supported by strong intervention by local authorities (Bianchi, 1997). Partly as a consequence, in comparison with the phenomenon in other regions, immigration in Emilia-Romagna has been described as more stable, and from the outset it was characterized by a high number of family reunions and of ‘legal’ migrants with long-term settlement projects (Pepa, 1996). Moreover, most city councils in this region have proved to be more dynamic and receptive to the phenomenon of immigration as shown by the numerous initiatives aimed at addressing race relations issues developed in the course of the last years (see Pepa, 1996; Pinto and Bruni, 1993). However, in many domains, from housing to education, migrants have been dealt with as an emergency. Temporary arrangements like hosting immigrants in decrepit buildings confined to the hinterland of major towns have slowly turned into permanent solutions (Hoskyns and Orsini- Jones, 1995), which have profoundly affected the degree of migrants’ ‘integration’ in urban contexts (see Ismu, 1998). ‘Stalingrado’ is one such local council housing provision for migrants in Bologna, where 90 percent of the residents are Moroccans; a place that is defined even by local authorities as a ghetto.6 The centre, where around 50 Moroccan families live, consists of two large buildings located in a very polluted area of town and it looks old, dirty and badly kept. It was first created as council housing for locals, who left after some years because of the pollution produced by the tobacco factory located nearby. From outside, it looks like an old telecommunication station. Each window or balcony exposes its own satellite dish and people living here use to say that ‘Once you enter this place you are in Morocco’. Here, the feeling of a visitor coming for the first time is of being in a separate world from the rest of the town. Nevertheless, a deeper knowledge of the dynamics reigning in the buildings quickly dismisses this first impression of homogeneity. Jamila lives with her husband and her little child in ‘Stalingrado’. She always expressed profound distress about her life there, complaining about the lack of relationships due to incompatibility with other Moroccan families. She can not accept women’s relations with their husbands and she is very critical of the way in which most women living in the houses raise their children, which is, in her view, different from Morocco, where children are keen on studying and women educate their children better: ‘Here [in Italy] women are too interested in making money, leaving their children alone most of the time to go to work.’ Most migrant women in Italy are employed in the cleaning sector, where they are usually subjected to stressful shifts, from 5.30 to 7.30 a.m., and in the 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 326

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evenings and weekends when factories, offices and schools are closed (De Bernart et al., 1995: 162; see also Alemani, 1994). According to Jamila, these conditions, together with the general state of decline and abandon- ment of ‘Stalingrado’ are likely to favour a problematic predicament, with children easily turning into delinquents when they grow up.7 When she first arrived in ‘Stalingrado’, Jamila tried to join other women during their tea and chats, but she soon became very disappointed. She recounted how, during these meetings, women advised each other on how to empower themselves by, among other things, opening their own bank accounts to keep some money away from their husbands’ control (see Saint-Blancat, 1999). Jamila expressed deep disapproval and felt alien to the ways women challenged family intimacy by exchanging confi- dences and talking overtly about their private lives and their husbands’ behaviour. Moroccan popular narratives on women’s power of subversion often relate to their performance of magical rituals in order to manipulate their consorts (see Kapchan, 1996: 235–6; Maher, 1974). Many women living in ‘Stalingrado’ come from Safi (but not Jamila, who is from Casablanca), a small town on the coast, 200 km from Casablanca. More than once I heard Moroccans essentializing women from Safi as ‘shameless’. One male informant even stated that most women induced their men to marry them (to come to Italy) through the performance of magical rituals. However, Jamila also operates an essentialization by describing the majority of Moroccan women in ‘Stalingrado’ as surrendering to the western hegemonic principle of working outside to earn as much money as possible and challenging the imperative of being a good mother. The link between tradition, modernity and Islam is much more complex and varied than it is usually assumed. For example, Islamist women may reject tradition in the name of an alternative Islamic modernity, while women who display a rather secular behaviour may be more embedded within traditional practices (Salih, 1999). Jamila’s rejection of the company and lifestyles of the Moroccan women living in ‘Stalingrado’ does not simply signal a rejection of forms of emancipation to retain female traditional roles. On the contrary, it represents the refusal of what Jamila conceives of as traditional and backward practices (magical rituals and challenge of the nuclear family) and to which she opposes the ideal of the harmonious modern nuclear family renegotiated in an Islamic way (see Abu-Lughod, 1998). This clash reflects a general collision in Morocco and in several other Arab countries between the young generation of educated Muslim women, who increasingly identify with a transnational and modern Islam cleared from local varia- tions and traditional performances, and less educated and often rural women, who challenge their male’s domination by performing magical rituals or, once in Italy, by securing a living for themselves, independently 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 327

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from their husbands. Jamila, however, urban, well-educated and an adherent of this new form of transnational Islam, conceives of these practices as backward and anti-Islamic. Since she got married and arrived in Italy, moreover, Jamila began wearing a hijab, wishing to assume a rather defined Islamic identity to differentiate herself from the other Moroccan women, with whom she does not want to be conflated, but also to make her Muslim identity before Italian society more visible. Although Jamila now works for a few hours a day, during the rest of her time, television is her only company. Jamila watches almost exclusively Arab broadcasts. One of the programmes she enjoys most is on the Egyptian channel from 12.30 to 13.00 every day. During this programme, ulamas (authorities in Islamic doctrine) answer phone calls from people in different parts of the world, who ask for advice on the correct behaviour to adopt as Muslims. Usually, Jamila explained, the problems are con- cerned with failing mixed marriages, the education of children in a non- Muslim environment and general advice on what is ‘wrong behaviour and right behaviour’. Jamila argued that she really likes the programme because ‘they give you time to speak, to explain your problems’. In these cases, satellite television might play a role in forging a sense of belonging to an imagined community of Muslims dispersed around the world, which replaces the lack of a real, local one (Giddens, 1990: 18). Television, providing a virtual socialization, might thus enable a reaction to the condition of isolation some women experience in their everyday reality (Abu-Lughod, 1995). For Jamila, the need for such virtual socialization emerges in the context of self-isolation, due to lack of positive models and fear of being essentialized and conflated with women who Jamila constructs and in turn essentializes as Others.

ASSERTING IDENTITY AGAINST MULTIPLE OTHERS

In Moroccan women’s narratives, the Other is not a homogeneous entity. There are many Others in opposition to whom women discursively and in practice afﬁrm themselves. At times the Other is the ‘Christian’ or the ‘West’; at other times, Other is Italian society. Yet, often ‘otherness’ is embodied by some interpretations of Islam which attempt to discipline women’s behaviour or, more generally, by the several constraints imposed on women by both Italian and Moroccan societies. The following account by Amal, a woman in her late 20s, married and the mother of a young daughter, is an example of how women negotiate, adjust and challenge dominant categories by asserting speciﬁc subjective positions to legitimate their standpoints. A: You see, until some time ago my husband was working for a factory which produces ham. People use to tell him: ‘Your money is haram’ [sinful]. 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 328

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His friend and cousin, with whom he shares the same surname, said this to him! Once, by chance, my husband showed him his pay slip. He was sur- prised because my husband earned more than 2 million lire, while he was earning much less. He asked him: ‘Really, do you earn all this money?’ Afterwards, my husband took his cousin with him and found him a job in the same factory and now, he also works with pork . . . you see . . . and my husband now asks him: ‘Is it not haram anymore? Now your money is OK, only mine was haram and yours?’ But to be honest, I am fed up. They complain because my husband does not pray. He never did. He thinks: ‘I have to find someone who convinces me!’ My husband sees everybody as hypocrites. They send their wives to the [Catholic] priest to ask for money. . . . My husband knows a man whose wife wears the hijab. When they come to visit, we are obliged to sit here, while my husband and her husband go in another room, because, according to her husband, my husband should not sit near his wife. So, he does not want us to see her, although we are Muslims, we are Arabs. So, I wonder, why does he send her to the priest by herself: is the priest a saint? Q: Why does she go to the priest? A: To ask for things! Don’t you know that Moroccans go to the Church and ask for money? My husband gets so upset! People do many awful things . . . then they let their children starve! We know someone who lives in a basement. He pays around only 100,000 lire for the rent and his son is now ill due to the damp and the cold. The man does not want to change homes because he wants to save money; he does not want to pay more money. But I wonder, what is money for? What is it for? Q: Maybe some people want to save money to go to Morocco? A: And how will that son grow up? He will be sick when he is 20 years old. Q: Have you tried to convince them to change homes for the sake of their son? A: Do you think we can? No. . . . We don’t pray, I do not wear a hijab, we are worse than Christians for them . . . but we do not care. Processes of shifting boundaries of identification clearly emerge in Amal’s narration. While she recognizes herself as part of a wider community of Arabs and Muslims as opposed to the Christian Other, in day-to-day practices, she perceives herself as different from her Moroccan acquaintances, whom she also constructs contextually as Other. Women’s striving for affirming their own subjective positions discloses a power struggle to interpret and define cultural aspects and performances and highlights contestation of dominant perceptions of cultural authenticity. For Amal authenticity is not a mere hypocritical respect for some religious norms, but is rather about positioning herself through genuinely recognizing cultural negotiations as inescapable outcomes of living in a different society. Moreover, Amal claims her subjective conceptualization of authenticity by pointing to the numerous contradictions she finds in the behaviour of her fellow Moroccans, who do not deem her reliable since she 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 329

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refuses to comply with essentialist assumptions on cultural and religious behaviour. This subversion of the notion of authenticity is particularly interesting and emerges often in Moroccan women’s narratives. Neverthe- less, in Amal’s account, most of the issues are raised through the voice and actions of her husband, as if she did not want to assume the entire responsibility in challenging the normative behaviour she is criticizing. While dominant perceptions within the ‘community’ require women to be symbols of the continuity of culture, compelling them to adopt customs alien to their own notions of cultural authenticity, the host society also essentializes Moroccan women, causing their feelings of alienation and anxiety.

Here, women sometimes wear the hijab to please their husbands or their husbands’ friends. I would not wear it here. I think that the hijab is a nice thing . . . but . . . it has . . . it draws attention to you. I don’t like this. I already have a dark skin . . . for example when I go around . . . I always take the same bus you took . . . everybody looks at me. And I am always doubting myself, I start thinking: ‘What do I have, I am dressed like them, what do I have?’ And also when I speak, because obviously I cannot speak as an Italian born and brought up here; people turn to me and say: ‘ah . . . so you are not Italian?’

In this quotation, Amal discloses her frustration over the double essentialization women are confronted with. On the one hand, she rejects Moroccan hegemonic constructions of gender roles and expectations that push some women to wear the hijab ‘to please them’. On the other hand, Amal’s choices are mediated by the feeling of embodying ‘otherness’ within the host society, which ultimately drives her towards a certain degree of assimilation.

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND CHILDREN’S EDUCATION

Ratiba engaged in the migratory experience alone, arriving in Reggio Emilia in 1989. Then she met Muhammad, a fellow Moroccan, and got married in Morocco. They now have two small daughters who were born in Italy, one of whom is already attending primary school. In one of our ﬁrst meetings, both expressed severe criticism of what they perceive as forms of traditionalism and backwardness in their country of origin and of the cultural attitudes of some of their Moroccan acquaintances in Italy. During a subsequent encounter, Muhammad and Ratiba had an intense and at times harsh discussion on whether religion and a Moroccan identity should be transmitted to their daughters and in what ways. That dialogue was particularly revealing of how migrants’ perceptions and ideas about how they should live in Italy, and what kind of identity and references they want their children to grow up with, are far from being 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 330

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stable and clear issues. In the case of Ratiba and Muhammad, identity construction emerges as an ongoing field of negotiation between their divergent strategies of re-territorialization. It could be said that the construction and renegotiation of identity through non-linear trajectories is not experienced only by migrants. Con- tradictions and fractures mark people’s existences. As Kobena Mercer has argued, ‘identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when some- thing assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty’ (Mercer, 1990). For some migrants, this process may be in continuity with previous experiences in the country of origin. More often, however, the shift of place due to the migratory experience represents a moment of discontinuity with respect to the previous life, a situation when reflections and discourses around the self are particularly intensified and challenged. During the discussion, Muhammad very forcefully expressed the position that it was not so important that his daughters learnt Arabic at that stage, but rather, first and foremost, that they master perfectly the Italian language. The simultaneous teaching of Arabic and Italian, according to Muhammad, would compromise and affect their capacity to speak Italian as the mother tongue and, eventually, would lead to confusion in their minds. In a way, he was denying the possibility of a bilingual and bicultural model for his daughters. This attitude signified his inability to cope harmoniously with the increasing complexity, in terms of sense of belonging and identity, that the experience of migration exacerbated in his own life. On more than one occasion, Muhammad appeared to perceive his identity as composed of dual and irremediably separate belongings. This disposition was reflected also in his simple, daily practices, where he would choose between one and the other of what he perceived as two separate components of his identity. Once, for example, accounting for what he was wearing during a wedding ceremony in Meknes, Morocco, he referred to his ‘Moroccan clothes’. On another occasion, visiting some rich relatives in Casablanca, keen on giving a different image of himself, he wore what he termed his ‘Italian clothes’. The fear of creating confusion in his daughters’ process of acculturation by talking to them in Arabic implied, to an extent, a vision of mutually exclusive alternatives: either Arabic or Italian. During the discussion with his wife Ratiba, moreover, Muhammad defined himself as secular and argued that he refused to explain to his daughter what Ramadan is. He added that when he talks to fellow Moroc- cans who live in Italy and dress according to the latest western fashion, he still feels very uncomfortable. ‘They are very traditional and when you ask them about certain issues, they all answer that they want halal meat, no pork etc.’ Ratiba contested Muhammad’s claims, arguing that whereas in Italy he 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 331

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acts as a secular person, in Morocco he deferentially does what his family wants him to. He celebrates Ramadan and he respects his mother and her prayers. In contrast with Muhammad, she argued that children understand everything and that it is important to explain to them what Ramadan, Eid, and so on are. They see their grandmother doing it and they should know what it is. Ratiba herself, however, has not practised any of the religious duties since she came to Italy. She observed Ramadan only the ﬁrst year, but a particular incident deeply affected her. It happened when she was working as a care assistant for an elderly Italian woman, with whom she was also living. One night, during Ramadan, Ratiba woke up to eat. The old woman, who was woken up by the noise, went to the kitchen and asked her what was she doing in the middle of the night. When Ratiba answered that she was eating because it was Ramadan and that she had interrupted the fast, the woman retorted, ‘If you want to do Ramadan, you’d better go back to your country’. On another occasion, Muhammad and Ratiba invited Muhammad’s cousin’s family, who live in the same town, to celebrate Eid together. That day, they killed the lamb. However, that was the ﬁrst and last time. Muhammad tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to establish relationships with other Moroccan families to celebrate Eid together. Ratiba thinks that, possibly, other Moroccans do not like them because, they are ‘different’. As in the case of Amal, their indeterminate demeanour towards Islam in their daily life and their uncertain cultural locations make them feel as Other with respect to most of the Moroccans around them. Although Ratiba thinks that schools in Italy should recognize Muslim feasts, she always prepares the Christmas tree at Christmas otherwise her eldest daughter is very disappointed. However, she reported that once, after she had bought a Christmassy red tablecloth and candles and prepared the Christmas tree, Muhammad reacted angrily and shouted at her: ‘What are you doing? Are you a Muslim or a Christian?’ Ratiba maintained that it was not fair to do nothing and added that they should tell their daughters about their roots:

We should tell them that they are from Morocco and that they are Muslim. Otherwise they will end up by being nothing, neither Christian nor Muslim. I do not want to force them in one way or another, yet I want to explain everything to them.

Finally, Ratiba asserted that roots are important because it is all that they have: ‘At the end we will always refer to them.’ Muhammad and Ratiba represent two different ways of coping with the fractures and ambivalence that the experience of migration intensiﬁes in the life of Moroccan migrants. Both experience ‘otherness’ not only in relation to Italian society but also in opposition to other Moroccan women 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 332

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and men. For example, for Muhammad, Others are the young Moroccans who dress according to the latest fashion but who are, in his view, deeply traditional. But Others are also, and indeed more profoundly, the alien Christian or western cultural traditions introduced by Ratiba with the Christmas dinner and tree. For Ratiba, Other is certainly first and foremost the old woman for whom she was working, but also her Moroccan acquaintances in Italy, by whom she felt excluded and margin- alized, since, as Ratiba said, her way of coping and negotiating her cultural identity in the context of migration led her to behave differently from mainstream demeanours. However, whereas Muhammad seems to find arduous the harmoniza- tion of his ambivalent feelings and his multiple subjective positions, Ratiba’s process of renegotiation is characterized by attempts to reconcile them. In trying not to disappoint her daughters, she actively tries to perform diverse cultural and religious repertoires, finding her own subjective way of re-territorializing and giving subjective meanings to new and old cultural practices.

CONCLUSION

This article has attempted to provide a picture of the complex and hetero- geneous nature of Moroccan women’s negotiation of their identities in their experiences of migration. The narratives of Jamila, Amal and Ratiba show how boundaries of Self and Other are experienced in complex and varied ways and, most import- antly, how these are contextual to the diverse pressures women perceive as hegemonic and which urge them towards the assumption of certain symbols or behaviour. Moroccan migrant women, in fact, face opposing pressures which pull them in different directions by making their bodies become symbols of the purity of culture, on the one hand, and of success- ful assimilation, on the other hand. In their day-to-day practices and discourses, Moroccan women con- struct their identities in different ways, often by displaying counterhegemonic narratives to oppose both the ‘Moroccan’ and the ‘Italian’ dominant discourses and representations of them. Through the stories of Jamila, Amal and Ratiba, I have illustrated the existence of gendered responses which intersect with women’s subjective experiences of ethnicity and religion, producing a multiplicity of different positions on cultural authenticity and identity. Jamila draws a boundary between herself and those Moroccans whom she perceives as Others (but with whom dominant discourses and practices tend to conﬂate her) by constructing an identiﬁcation with an imagined community of Muslims spread all over the world and rejecting 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 333

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her local community. Amal and Ratiba, on the other hand, resist essentialism by renegotiating their day-to-day relationships and cultural practices, contextually shifting arguments and positions in relation to their multiple Others. In this context, it was my aim to suggest that both the multicultural normative and conceptual construction of migrant groups in terms of homogeneous ‘communities’ and the opposing representation of hybrids who refuse authenticity and essentialism fail to acknowledge this complexity. The definition of Moroccans as a ‘community’ denies the existence of gendered differences and the heterogeneity of Moroccan migrants (both men and women) in terms of social background, areas of origin and cultural habits. Yet, it also ignores their varied and clashing cultural responses to the experience of displacement in Italy. However, Moroccan women do not perceive themselves as hybrid, nor do they conceive of their experiences of rupture as a state of in-betweenness (Bhabha, 1996: 58). Although the fusion of different cultural styles and traits could give birth to a combination of cultural forms, as in the case of Ratiba, or may convey a contradictory rejection of essentialist behaviour, as in the case of Muhammad, the messages played out are not meant to reject cultural roots in favour of new hybrid identities. Similarly, despite challenging hegemonic constructions, Amal’s narratives strive for alternative definitions of authenticity and for the construction of a coherent identity. I have shown how Islam plays a significant role in these processes of identity renegotiation. Women’s diverse approaches to Islam convey first and foremost their different interpretations around cultural authenticity and identity, but Islam plays a significant role also in women’s definitions of who their multiple Others are. While some women identify with a global Muslim community, the umma, and refuse contact with non- practising Muslims, other women redefine or locally challenge religious meanings and combine different cultural and religious repertoires.

NOTES

1. This article draws on extended research on Moroccan migrant women in Italy conducted for a doctoral dissertation in social anthropology. Fieldwork was carried out between the end of 1996 and 1998 in Emilia-Romagna (Italy). A part of my research was also conducted in Morocco, where I spent time with some of my informants while they were visiting there during the summer of 1997. In particular, the research explored the ways in which transnational social, economic and symbolic activities affect the identity narratives and cultural renegotiation processes of Moroccan migrant women in Italy. 2. Attention to cultural difference and intercultural education is particularly evident in the 1998 law, known as ‘Turco-Napolitano’. This bears witness to a shift in the political perception of the phenomenon of immigration in Italy, 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 334

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which is now accepted as a structural feature of Italian society. However, this focus on recognition of cultural difference has been at the expense of migrants’ exclusion from the political sphere. 3. See the debate in the Italian magazine Liberal (No. 30, September 1998). 4. Also in academic writing on Muslim migrant women in Italy, tradition is often conﬂated with Morocco and modernity with Italy (see, for example, Saint-Blancat, 1999). 5. In the last few years the DS have lost in local elections in many towns traditionally run by left-wing coalitions. Parma and, most notably, Bologna are now run by right-wing coalitions. 6. The estate is known as ‘Stalingrado’ from the name of the street where it is located. 7. In June 1998, after I left, there were riots and demonstrations in ‘Stalingrado’. The inhabitants of ‘Stalingrado’ had protested in the streets against the state of neglect and abandon in which the council left the building. Drug sellers had appropriated the building, aided by some tenants, imposing their rules through violence and harassing those who tried to oppose them.

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Ruba Salih is a social anthropologist and has just completed her PhD at CDE, University of Sussex under a European ‘Marie Curie’ fellowship. Her dissertation, ‘Trans- national Lives, Plurinational Subjects: Identity, Migration and Difference among Moroccan Women in Italy’, analyses Moroccan women’s experiences of migration, focusing on issues of Islam, gender and transnationalism. In particular, it highlights the cultural meanings and identities that are negotiated through transnational practices and shows how binary categories such as local/global or modern/traditional come often to be dissolved or reformulated. Previously, she has conducted research on Palestinian women’s organizations in the Occupied Territories. Address: Stradello Guiard, 2, 43100 Parma, Italy. [email: [email protected]]