Sub-Saharan Migrants’ Quest for Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
The present photography essay stems from my doctoral fieldwork (2011-13) in Rabat, Morocco. The pictures were taken in the marginal neighborhood of #Douar_Hajja, where the presence of sub-Saharan migrants is highly visible. Douar Hajja is a liminal space, a crossroad where migrants look for work, and mostly wait whilst healing their wounds and considering their options: keep going despite the odds, remain in Morocco if conditions improve, or go back for those who cannot take it anymore. Rather than passively waiting, and in spite of dreadful living conditions exacerbated by institutional racism, migrants there organize life in collective houses, set up businesses and political organizations. It is a place of hope where sub-Saharan migrants long for a better future, somewhere. The pictures are not meant as a contribution to an aesthetic of misery appealing to what Reuben Odoi has denounced as “philanthropy.” Rather, they illustrate migrants’ strategies, trials, and failings at coping when violence and precariousness have become ordinary.
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#photographie #migration #photoreportage #Maroc #espace_liminal #frontière #survie