‘When Mom left for Mars’: Life narratives of first-generation Moroccan migrant mothers in Flanders

Abstract

Current discourses in Belgian politics about Moroccan Muslim women are deeply rooted in the first-generation family reunification policies of the 1960s. Today, (marriage) migrant women are still commonly described as victims of their ‘backward’ religious traditions and in need of protection for the sake of themselves, their children and society. Looking at the implications of these views for the women concerned, this article discusses the unique docufilm ‘When Mom Left for Mars’, which documents the life narrative of a first-generation Moroccan woman in The Netherlands. Based on this docufilm, we aim to (1) document how Belgian and Dutch first-generation migrant women can be compared with each other using Karl Mannheim’s ‘theory of generations’ and (2) engage in an intergenerational conversation with first-generation mothers and their daughters, as well as with mid-generation mothers, to gain more insight into their similarities, heritage and differences. More specifically, we explore the agency of these mothers using the analytical lens of ‘affective citizenship’, particularly attending to how they centralise mothering and care work to negotiate gender and belonging, and counter the challenges of marriage migration, motherhood and integration. The docufilm is, thus, used as a case study from which we consider the first-generation women as ‘cultural archives’, and as a methodological tool in facilitating in-depth interviews and group discussions.

Introduction

‘Third-country migrants’, as immigrants from outside of the European Union are typically described in migration regulation literature are, and have often been, given negative attention in Belgium and the Netherlands. This is especially the case for immigrant women with a Muslim background, who are often stigmatised in current gendered, culturalist and homogenising discourses (De Bock, 2014). Until today, gendered and culturalist assumptions persist about first-generation Moroccan migrant women who arrived in the comparable contexts of Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands between the 1960s and 1980s. This has led to the continued denial of these women’s agency and their portrayal as ‘traditional’ or ‘backward’ (Van Es, 2016; Van Es and Van den Brandt, 2020). Within broader research on (marriage) migration, motherhood and integration in the Flemish context, we encountered a general void within academic research regarding first-generation migrant women. In addition, we found that this first generation’s children and grandchildren perceive their (grand)mothers as a ‘forgotten’ or a ‘lost generation’, which prompted us to further investigate these women’s social positions and lived experiences by presenting their own versions of their trajectories, struggles and aspirations using the analytical lens of affective citizenship (Mookherjee, 2005). From this affective lens we perceive motherhood as an important component of meaning-making in these first-generation women’s lives (Miri et al., 2021).

This research, therefore, has the potential to influence existing discourses about these women in particular, and change hegemonic understandings of female marriage migrants’ citizenship and belonging in general. The term ‘marriage migrant’ generally refers to an individual who migrates to another country primarily for the purpose of getting married. In this sense we believe that this research is necessary and relevant in several ways. First, the women’s forgotten status is palpable as these women’s voices and narratives have largely remained absent from elementary and secondary history education (Puwar, 2015), from popular cultural and artistic productions, and from current and past marriage migration regulations. Not only has the discourse or narrative of victimhood, which had been at the root of policy makers’ convictions, become even more consolidated in immigration regulations (Miri, 2020), it has ignored the women’s reproductive labour power and, in so doing, their affective citizenship. This is related to another, second, point: this study is relevant as it places the forgotten status of, and the discourses about, first-generation migrant women within the scholarly development of social theory about gender, family and migration. We aim to engage in an (inter)generational conversation about gendered vulnerabilities within the historico-political context of labour and family related migration, given that first-generation women both in Belgium and the Netherlands were greatly affected by labour migration policies (Moloney and Schrover, 2013).

The major incentive to undertake this research is to learn from these women’s narratives, which can be thought of as ‘cultural archives’ (Puwar, 2015) that disclose specific, ‘localised knowledge’ (Harding, 2004) about the largely forgotten trajectories and life stories of first-generation women (in Flanders). To bring this situated knowledge to the fore, this article further aims to contribute to a ‘generational’ reading (Mannheim, 1952) of marriage migration history and the related lived experiences using the Dutch docufilm ‘When Mom Left for Mars’. To accommodate these women’s narratives, we based our discussions on this docufilm serving both as a case study and as a methodological tool to facilitate group discussions and in-depth interviews with our respondents.

A theory of generations: ‘When Mom left for Mars’

In accordance with the central link between both kinship and social class position in the sociology of generations (Pilcher, 1994) we can justify the choice of this docufilm as a means of gaining more insights into the similarities, heritage and differences within the narratives discussed in this article. Using a ‘cohort sense’ reading (Pilcher, 1994: 483) we can distinguish three different generations of class difference: (1) the main character of the docufilm as well as the first-generation participants of this research as first-generation migrant woman, (2) their children who mainly participated in this research – including the producers of the docufilm, who are children of the main character – and (3) so-called mid-generation migrants and migrant mothers who immigrated to the Low Countries in the specific politico-historical environment of the 1990s, signifying the start of integration policies, (which offered more opportunities for a better socio-economic position compared with the first generation). From this cohort sense (Pilcher, 1994) we can perceive these three different generations as quite comparable in Belgium and the Netherlands when it comes to their socio-economic or class backgrounds. In addition, from a ‘kinship sense’ (Pilcher, 1994: 483), the differences in socio-economic positions of first-generation mothers and their second-generation daughters are quite significant and comparable in the two countries.

According to Mannheim’s (1952) theory generations are formed through two important elements: common and shared events and experiences in historical time and an awareness of this historical location. First-generation migrant women in the Low Countries, and beyond, experience shared events and feelings like migrating for the first time, becoming a mother in a new place, leaving behind family and friends, feelings of loneliness. However, when it comes to the awareness of a specific historical location, the second generation seems to be more aware of this historical location. In this sense, the makers of WMLFM draw attention to the challenges and agency in the arguably ‘small-scale’ life of the main character and in doing so pay tribute to the first-generation Muslim women who came to Belgium and the Netherlands to join their husbands. As a timely and artistic creation of second-generation youth, this docufilm is the work of Dutch Moroccan producers Abdelkarim El-Fassi and his sister Asma El-Fassi, who decided to present the life narrative of their mother, Noha. In this film, we see and especially hear how Noha followed her husband from the Moroccan mountains to a small village in the Netherlands in the 1970s, leaving everything behind to start a new life. Noha, the unconventional – because largely invisible – main character (due to her reluctance to be filmed), did not see the relevance of her own story and even considered her own migration process as a ‘failure’. Like many women of her generation – both in the Netherlands and in Flanders, Belgium (cf. infra) – Noha nonetheless values her role as a mother and finds satisfaction in being married and having nine children.

Taking the docufilm as a starting point, we lay out two research aims in two empirically grounded parts: at a first level, we will situate the production and reception of the docufilm in a political and historical context – which appears to be quite similar for Flanders and the Netherlands (cf. infra) – to gain a better understanding and recognition of first and later generations of marriage migrant women. At a second and more intergenerational level, the narratives of both first-generation migrant women, mediated through their daughters, and mid-generation women will be presented. As these first-generation (Moroccan) women have been silenced and silent for decades and as many of them do not recognise, or underestimate, the value of their narratives, access was difficult. Therefore, we want to emphasise the important role of the daughters in creating awareness about and encouraging their mothers to share their stories. This was done via in-depth interviews and focus group discussions that took place after several (collective) screenings of the docufilm. In this last section, we will, thus, focus on the way in which the participants relate to Noha’s story and on the agentic modalities that the participants themselves foreground.

Situating the docufilm in a politico-historical context (1960s–2010s)

The docufilm WMLFM was made about 3 years after Abdelkarim El-Fassi had portrayed his father’s life story in ‘My Father, the Expat’. El-Fassi (2018) stated in an interview that he conceived of these stories as an important ‘heritage for future generations’. That the docufilm about the father preceded the one about the mother is not surprising. Indeed, there exist several Belgian and Dutch documentaries on the arrival of male guestworkers, such as ‘Triq Slama Mohamed. Travel in peace’ (2011), a Belgian documentary, based on a low-budget documentary by Mohammed Ihkan and Chris Schillemans: ‘My story’ (2007). In addition, the work of second-generation Dutch Moroccan historian Nadia Bouras also focuses on first-generation Moroccans, but again mainly from a male perspective. Documentaries about the women or families who accompanied the workers, however, were for a long time virtually absent. One exception is the Dutch book ‘Land van Werk en Honing’ by Ajarai and Heemstra (2006) on the migration narratives of Moroccan mothers in the Netherlands. In Belgium, there has only been one (low budget) documentary, also by Ihkan and Schillemans, on first-generation migrant women in Belgium: ‘Life in Belgium as a migrant woman’ (2012). In 2015, the Belgian-Algerian journalist Hadja Lahbib produced the docufilm ‘Patience, Patience, You’ll Go to Paradise!’. Lahbib wanted to illuminate ‘the lives of women who are aging in a country that they (. . .) are not familiar with. It is a social drama that is playing right in front of us and goes almost unnoticed’ (Lahbib, 2015). This lack of recognition illustrates the gendered dimensions of knowledge-production and history-making with respect to marriage migration. To develop this claim, we will situate the docufilm within the Low Countries’ historical-political dynamics with respect to immigration and integration.

WMLFM documents Noha’s arrival in the Netherlands, reuniting with her husband Ali. Together with her young children she trades the Moroccan Rif mountains for a small rural village in Zeeland, in the Netherlands. Noha’s lack of social, cultural and geographical orientation turned her host society into an equivalent to planet ‘Mars’, where she would, nonetheless, eventually raise her nine children. The general drift of her life narrative is, rather than unique, mostly the result of state regulations. National regulations controlled the influx and outflux of migrants and in this sense engendered a ‘shared fate’ for many migrant women and men in Belgium and the Netherlands. Belgium and the Netherlands, long established countries of emigration, had both become countries of large-scale immigration by the early 1960s (Foblets in D’Haenens et al., 2006; Zorlu and Hartog, 2001). Besides the guestworker system, the system of ‘family reunification’ also enabled immigration (Castles, 1986). From 1955 to 1975, during the years of large-scale labour recruitment in the Netherlands, foreign workers were offered the possibility of bringing their families (Bonjour, 2009). This plea especially came from confessional political parties, which particularly deemed it morally inadmissible to keep fathers and husbands separated from their families (Bonjour, 2009). In Belgium, a similar regulation in 1965 actively mobilised families to reunite, and even provided reimbursement of half of the travel expenses for the spouse and children who were to accompany a worker, on the condition that the family had at least three children under the legal age of majority (Martiniello and Rea, 2003). In the Walloon region of Belgium, migrant workers were thus not only viewed as the answer to labour shortages in certain sectors, family reunification also demonstrated another objective – that of demographic recovery (Delperée and Nols in Ouali, 2012; Martiniello and Rea, 2003). Family reunification was also implemented since migrant women were considered to be vehicles for integration, enabling men’s acculturation in the new society (Martens, 1973).

However, as a result of the 1973 oil crisis and its subsequent global recession, almost every Western European country abandoned state-sanctioned policies of labour migration. Both Belgium and the Netherlands intensified their interference with migrants’ comings and goings (Martens, 1976; Schrover, 2008). Yet marriage migration was not so easily stopped, and permanent settlement became increasingly likely. Belgium and the Netherlands responded quite differently to this reality. Whereas the Netherlands was faster to recognise that migrants would not return and that the state had to envision a multicultural politics (Castles, 1986), Belgium, however, did not imagine the reality of permanently remaining in the country until the late 1970s and early 1980s (Mandin, 2014).

During the 1990s, the Netherlands replaced a long tradition of multicultural politics by a solid assimilationist agenda that emphasised individual migrants’ socioeconomic participation as the key to their integration (Bonjour, 2009). Whereas Belgium only started to develop an integration policy in the mid-1990s, the Netherlands was already several steps ahead in its reflection on, and development of, integration strategies. Belgium would eventually follow the example of the Netherlands by creating a ‘citizenisation policy’ that only came into effect in 2004 (Braet, 2017; Loobuyck and Jacobs in D’Haenens, 2006). Despite these efforts, first-generation women did not ever benefit from these integration regulations as their initial exclusion from language training and education – and in that sense financial independence – had often already resulted in an economic and cultural capital backlog, which proved difficult to overcome, and which has isolated many women.

This, in turn, gave rise to the idea that these women were somehow ‘backward’ or too traditional – projections that still exist and operate in political discourses today (Miri, 2020; Miri et al., 2021). In contrast to first-generation Turkish women in Flanders – who more often reclaim their reproductive labour power (De Bock, 2018) – Moroccan women are seldom consciously aware of their valuable roles as carers.

In this sense, the docufilm may demonstrate the power of autobiographical narration, as these stories may challenge stigmatising projections, contextualise life decisions, and demonstrate intergenerational differences and continuities. Foregrounding their diverse and meaningful experiences as mothers, the women may become more aware of the importance and benefits of their mothering and care work to society at large (Miri et al., 2021).

Intergenerational life narratives: Methodology

As stated, the main aim of this article is to honour, present and research the life narratives of first-generation Moroccan migrant women in Flanders. In so doing, we simultaneously aim to highlight the docufilm as a methodological tool in participatory research. The docufilm served as a catalyst for our research participants’ own life narratives. The participants were almost all, but not exclusively, first or mid-generation ¹ Moroccan mothers. Combining the analytical lens of ‘affective citizenship’ and the sociological theory of generations we will analyse the similarities and differences in the experiences and life narratives of first-generation mothers, and to a lesser extent their daughters and other mid-generation women.

For the empirical study, ² the first author did participatory research with three different groups of first- and mid-generation marriage migrant women in Antwerp, Belgium (thirty in total). The research participants were primarily recruited through their daughters who were mostly involved in civil society organisations concerned with the inclusion and empowerment of ethnic minority women. In addition, the first author also directly contacted and involved other civil society organisations and women’s associations offering language classes and creative workshops to recruit research participants. The research participants of the first generation were mainly aged between 60 and 80 years old; mid-generation women were aged between 40 and 60 years. Almost all of the women were low-skilled but not all had low literacy. All of the women had lower socio-economic backgrounds and came from the Northern part of Morocco, except for three women who came from regions around Marrakech and Casablanca, which are located more inland.

The principles of participatory research require that research not be conducted on people but with people. Co-operative enquiry is, therefore, key (Heron and Reason, 2006). Together with the women, the first author co-developed the conversation topics and the interpretations of the life stories that were shared by the participants with the first author during the data collection process. More specifically, the first author conducted – in Moroccan-Arabic dialect or darija -1) five in-depth interviews (averaging 1.5 hours) with first-generation Moroccan mothers who migrated during the 1960s and 1980s to Antwerp, in the presence of their mediating daughters; 2) two focus groups in Dutch conversation classes, conducted with both first and mid-generation Moroccan women and of which one class was organised in a local mosque in Antwerp, and 3) one focus group with first-generation Moroccan mothers, after an audience screening of WMLFM in the Arenberg theatre in Antwerp.

The public premiere of WMLFM was in February 2018, but due to its great success at a fully booked venue, the theatre planned another screening in February 2019. Given that the premiere hosted a large multigenerational public of Moroccan descent (first-generation migrants with their offspring and mid-generation migrants), the first author seized the opportunity to invite 10 women participating in the research to attend the screening in February 2019, and to plan a group discussion afterwards. Here, the women’s daughters facilitated both their mothers’ going to the theatre and their participation in the group discussion afterwards. Many daughters encouraged their mothers to speak as they too found it important to share these stories. The other group discussions and in-depth interviews were also held after a joint or separate screening of the docufilm (some women watched the docufilm when it premiered on Dutch television). The questions that were asked during the group discussions related to the docufilm and sought to invite the women to narrate their own stories, to give their views on existing gender relations within the household, to recall specific affects of their primary and secondary families, and to address the potential tension between different forms of belonging back then and now.

During the in-depth interviews, the participants (accompanied by their daughters) were invited to talk about their past, present and future ambitions and to share how their first days in or impressions of Belgium (Antwerp) were; how giving birth, motherhood and childrearing were experienced in the new setting; which changes motherhood brought about in their lives, and which ambitions they foster/ed. Here, the women’s daughters helped to create group dynamics that enabled conversations, as the older women were often too shy and insecure to share their stories. We are aware of the fact that without the daughters present, the mothers’ stories might have been told differently. Nonetheless, we believe that the intergenerational contact enabled more insights benefitting the research and observed that the mothers experienced it as a source of support and encouragement.

Mapping similarities and connections

When we got here, I felt like falling from the sky and crashing hard. (. . .) There were no other Moroccan women around at the time. Then you get lonely pretty easily. Not many men had moved their families here yet. (. . .) I often said in the beginning: ‘Take us back’. (. . .) [The children] cried, ‘Why did you take us here?’. Aicha, my daughter, blamed me. (. . .) But after a while we got used to it. And now? If your father asked me to go back, I wouldn’t want to (Noha).

Even though the docufilm’s main characters speak Amazigh, a minority language in Morocco, many non-Amazigh speaking Moroccan women were present during the second screening. Among them, many (mostly first-generation women) cried, despite the fact they could not understand the spoken language or read the Dutch subtitles. Later, during the focus groups and interviews, the women clarified that they were moved because it was simply the first time that they saw a film, which documented their story. The sense of recognition, that is, the women’s degrees of identification or disidentification with Noha’s story, depended on variables such as age and generation. Whereas the first generation, who are also senior women, recognised much of themselves in Noha, their daughters and the mid-generation less so, even though they showed the utmost respect for women like Noha. In the docufilm, daughter Zoulikha, likewise, demonstrates the ways in which she is different from her mother. Unlike her mother, who has not had the opportunity to fulfil her individual life dreams, Zoulikha lives in Hong Kong to pursue her personal development and career. Despite the obvious physical distance between mother and daughter, and the equally obvious differences in their lived experiences, a powerful connection radiates from the screen. Zoulikha feels deeply indebted to her mother, who raised and lovingly cared for nine children. During our mother–daughter interviews, the same pattern of divergence and reverence could be observed but, in this section, we focus on the narratives of the senior, first-generation mothers.

During the interviews and group discussions, the first author enquired how the participants felt about the docufilm as a starting point for their own migration stories. In what follows, we will discuss some of the topics that were often raised during group discussions and interviews. ³ Some of the main themes that we will discuss – each one inextricably entangled with religiosity – are care and community, gender and motherhood, education and self-development.

Care and community

Like Noha, many of the participants identify care as a vital element in their personal, family and community life. Care, which involves various kinds of reproductive labour – ranging from feeding to providing safety and affection, from transmitting ethics to encouraging development – functions as a civic form of ‘capital’ that the women are able to mobilise (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2016; Miri et al., 2021; Mookherjee, 2005; Rye and Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2016). In addition, care is important from a religious perspective: family care is much endorsed in Muslim families, as it is an important aspect of the Islamic faith (Berdai, 2005; Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2016; Erel, 2007, 2011; Rye and Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2016).

Nassira, for instance, is a confident, perky woman who has self-reportedly always enjoyed the freedom in her marriage to socialise with friends, or to go outside as she pleases, much like the other women from her region (Chefchaouen). Regardless of this background of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, her analysis of Noha is that of a happy woman, not of a confined woman, as she has been portrayed in popular reviews (de Volkskrant, 2018). During the conversation, Nassira demonstrated her supportive role in the community, that is, the migrant women in her neighbourhood:

Going outside was no problem and the same was true for the other women. They weren’t imprisoned at home. We come from another region in Morocco where women have more freedom. Here, I first lived near the Annour mosque in Antwerp, where many Jbella (population from north-western Morocco) lived. (. . .) It was fun with them. Thanks to them, it was easier to get used to living here. (. . .) I didn’t go to school so in some way, I was like them in this country. But as we went shopping, I could count – unlike them; they didn’t know how much anything cost (. . .). They didn’t go outside without me.

As we clearly see in the docufilm, caregiving often takes the form of providing food. Fatima, for instance, narrates nostalgically about inviting and being invited by neighbouring friends and family for shared meals:

When I was still in Morocco, my husband’s friends married women from Morocco. My husband was left here alone, so he brought me over too. The wives of those men invited us, and we spent our evenings pleasantly together. We were many. Now all that has changed. (. . .) They used to live next door and we often visited each other. (. . .) Once there were three birth parties in one day so they had discussed in the mosque that they would divide it over three days so that everybody could visit and celebrate with each family.

When Fatima and her family travelled to the Netherlands to visit her husband’s family for a couple of days, food was the cornerstone of conviviality and bonding in the family:

We stayed up late and played the darboeka, we laughed and told jokes. Downstairs, the men were playing checkers. And we women were laughing. And when we joked that we wanted to eat msemmen in the morning (. . .) and we woke up at nine the next day, the msemmen were ready and the coffee was boiling.

Food was also served as a vector of intercultural curiosity, community-building and a sense of belonging:

Our Belgian neighbour always observed us doing stuff. During Ramadan she enjoyed watching the food that Moroccans prepared. When I once made harira, she asked what it was (. . .) and if she could taste it. (. . .) I let her taste all sorts of Moroccan dishes, whenever she stopped by (Fatima).

I had an elderly Flemish neighbour in Deurne. (. . .) She was a wonderful woman. I had a young daughter whom she wanted to see and play with every day. She also sat and ate with us at dinner time. She’s a woman I’ll never forget. (. . .) After her husband [who was very ill] died, she still visited us and even when we moved, she continued to do so: my husband picked her up and she stayed over for the weekend and drank and ate with us (Halima).

Even though many of the women experienced a greater sense of community when they had just moved to Flanders, feelings of isolation were not uncommon. In fact, previous research on first-generation migrants in Brussels also acknowledges the issue of loneliness (Berdai, 2005). In the docufilm, Noha even expresses her lack of cultural connection by referring to her new surrounding as the ‘backwoods’. However, almost all participants, as well as Noha, find relief, joy and strength in family life.

Gender and motherhood

In fact, there is a strong interconnectedness between the women’s wellbeing and the presence of their family and, more specifically, of their children. Like Noha, Halima explained that her children were a safe haven as well as a source of strength.

When I gave birth to my first daughter, only my husband came to the hospital. I didn’t know anyone. [My husband] did not want me to have contact with other people and he too preferred to be alone. I just had to get used to that. After a while you do. When my daughter was almost two, I gave birth to a son. After that, I just kept busy with the children. [The isolation] didn’t matter to me anymore.

For the sake of the children, Halima felt that she needed to cope with the difficulties in her marriage. She explains: ‘I was thinking about my children. They shouldn’t be living away from their father. I was afraid that I had to go back to Morocco’. The fact that the children’s welfare was seen as a moral guideline, is illustrated in her fight for schooling opportunities for her daughters.

My husband claimed that the girls were not allowed to study. He said: ‘they are not allowed to go to secondary school. They have to stay at home’. I replied, ‘Why are the girls not allowed to study? Didn’t God create girls?’

After her husband’s death, Halima was left with four young children, whom she sent to school and stimulated to do well.

I took care of them all by myself. Thank God, I was assisted by God. I’ve had to work hard. Now I can’t do that anymore. My body is broken. Going to physiotherapy, I learned that I put too much pressure on myself when I was both a mother and a father. My shoulders, my back, everything is broken. But I am grateful to God. (. . .) I wanted to give my children everything they needed. Thank God, they made me proud. They studied well.

An essential task of ‘motherwork’ (Hill Collins, 1994), is the bolstering of the child’s cultural identity as a means to survive in a structurally discriminatory society (Reynolds et al., 2018). Several participants wanted their children to be competent on two cultural fronts: they stimulated their children’s identification as (Moroccan) Muslims to feel rooted in a community, and as fully linguistically and socio-economically equipped ‘Belgians’ who can access good jobs and housing. These findings have also been confirmed in earlier research on the first-generation elderly (Berdai, 2005).

Education and self-development

Seeing their children acquiring education and developing into healthy and steady adults, was experienced by the mothers as their own personal development. Some mothers illustrated the (cultural) tension between their children’s development and education and their own:

I heard that some people went to school to learn Dutch, but that was kind of taboo, you see. People gossiped; I don’t know why. People were stupid. If you were illiterate, you had to stay that way . . . [The idea was] come to work here and then go back (to Morocco). But we liked it here. (. . .) When my daughter went to kindergarten, I too wanted to go to school. My husband warned me not to neglect the children, but he allowed me to go. (Nassira)

Nassira also added that ‘even though it used to be easier to work here, I didn’t work. If I had, my life would be different now. I would also have learned the language’. Like most of the women, she expressed the desire to learn the language (via jobs) to enhance her belonging in society. The general unease that education evoked in the first-generation community resulted in the women falling behind linguistically and a continued under-investment in their own development. The women did not even talk much about their own aspirations or ambitions. Nevertheless, it became clear that work and hobbies were important to the women. During the focus groups, Jamila, for example, discussed how she learned to prioritise her own aspirations given the fact that ‘children grow up and, in the end, you find yourself alone’. Consequently, she found it important to invest in her personal growth. Together with Halima and other women, she takes conversation classes. Even though Halima thinks of herself as too old to learn how to write or read in Dutch, she likes to learn how to have conversations in Dutch. The conversation classes also function as a safe space where the women come together and do outdoor activities. For instance, some women take weekly ladies-only swimming classes or partake in ladies-only gym classes.

Today, homesickness doesn’t exist anymore. (. . .) when we walked on the streets in the 1980s, you didn’t see any other Moroccan. (. . .) Certainly not Moroccan women (unless you went to Carrefour, ⁴ there you could meet women). Now, everything is available: a swimming pool for women only, a fitness centre for women only, telephones, WhatsApp . . . (Halima)

The women repeatedly emphasised the drastic changes that have taken place in society and, therefore, in their lives. One of the main values that have changed according to the women has to do with community. Talking about feasting, eating and drinking together, Fatima laments that ‘the times have changed. When we were younger, we got together much more frequently’. She admits that this is partially because they themselves have changed with ageing, but she also perceives it to be structurally related to the individualisation that increasingly invades Moroccan communities:

Our friends were our neighbours and we visited each other frequently. But whenever we or they move, one forgets one another. (. . .) Now, when we have a feast, we invite our neighbours, but we will not casually visit each other’s home.

This is consistent with research on first-generation elders in Belgium (Brussels), in which 80% of the participants bemoaned Western individualism, stating that it corroded their communities (Berdai, 2005).

Relations between Moroccan and non-Moroccan people are also commonly felt to have changed. Nassira compares women’s treatment in the hospital then and now:

To be honest, they treated us (Moroccan women) really well. Even though we could not express ourselves very well, they helped us (. . .), they understood our wants and needs. Let’s be clear about that. Today, that’s different. I know someone who is schooled and who came from Morocco. If she can’t reply, she is frowned upon.

This is also corroborated by Halima’s view that, even though there was also covert or overt racism in the past, it has become more structural:

It used to be different than it is now. You could just go outside and be at ease. Everyone minded their own business. People were decent. The things you see today were inconceivable back then. Sitting on a bus, they don’t want to sit next to you anymore. Many things have changed.

From these stories, it becomes clear that the improvement of means and modes of (transnational) communication and travelling, and the expansion of local Islamic and Moroccan facilities, go hand in hand with individual women’s feelings of loss of social spontaneity and proximity. One world is won, and another is lost.

Throughout the discussions, it became clear that whereas the older generation understood and related to Noha’s coping strategies in a new society with no social network, the mid-generation women could hardly understand how first-generation women endured a life without any education, citizenisation programmes, or social networks.

These differences between generations are partially produced by the important changes in citizenisation and migration policies in Belgium (Jacobs, 2000). Whereas the first generation had no chance to appeal to citizenisation – since there were no citizenisation and insufficient language programmes – younger generations are now faced with mandatory programmes. Rapidly changing social values also contribute to differences between the generations, such as the simultaneous individualisation tearing up the fabric of Belgian-Moroccan communities (as several first-generation women lament) and increased technological possibilities to communicate with local and transnational communities (as later generations are more familiar with). This illustrates that socio-political developments are formative influences on intergenerational differences and similarities, and that these dynamics require nuanced and experience-based analysis.

Conclusion

Answering the question of whether first-generation migrant Moroccan women in Belgium are a ‘forgotten generation’ largely depends on how the question is framed. There have been studies from the 1970s onward, which paid attention to first-generation migrant women, but mainly from a male perspective and influenced by a discourse of emancipation from their husbands. These publications (Foblets in D’Haenens et al., 2006; Castles, 1986) were, thus, often concerned with the demographic motives and legal status of immigrant women. Very few studies focused on these women as a heterogeneous group of active agents in how they navigated gender and unwaged care work in and beyond their own households: supporting their working husbands and other male family members, building communities and engaging in ‘motherwork’ (Hill Collins, 1994).

Watching screenings of the docufilm WMLFM together with a group of first-generation women and two groups of mid-generation women in Antwerp (Belgium) proved to be an effective way of initiating group discussions and interviews with the women. The aim was to use the discussions that would result from individual and collective screenings as starting points for the participants’ own narratives to emerge. Many participants could relate to Noha’s story, and those who could not were equally motivated to tell more about their own lives and how these differed from the experiences of the main protagonist in the docufilm. Our analysis of Noha’s and our participants’ life stories, which can be seen as recollections in the embodied ‘cultural archives’ that the women are, has yielded some insights into the lived experiences of these women, which may otherwise have never been spoken of. By focusing on the mothers’ narratives, the study aimed to add nuance to existing discourses about women such as the participants, and to challenge contemporary hegemonic understandings of first-, second- and mid-generation Moroccan marriage migrant women’s citizenship and belonging in Flanders.