“on Earth It’s Hard and Heaven Is Far Away” Migration and the Imaginative Sphere, a Case Study Amongst Muslim Migrants in Belgium

The lived experience of migration is fundamentally characterized by ambiguities and tempo-spatial connections between an experienced past and hoped-for future that are folded together in the imaginative sphere. Despite being inherently imaginative (Salazar, 2010), this aspect of migration remains largely understudied. To address this gap, I conducted an ethnographic study in a local community centre in Belgium attended by migrants who were in the midst of their asylum procedure or continued to reside in Belgium after their residence permit expired. As imagination is culturally embedded (Appadurai, 1996), I focused on the role of religion in the lived experiences of Muslim migrants within this centre. Their narratives revealed how imagination generates different ways of being in the world, and ultimately of “non-being” as a way of being-in-the-world. After the disorienting experience of migration, my interlocutors felt trapped by the bureaucratic “architectures of waiting”. From this liminal position, entrapped between a past and a new home, they began to imagine “home” as a place of spiritual sustenance which they hoped to recreate and find amongst other Muslims. However, in this process of home-making they rather found themselves in a “non-home”, expressed as “Barzakh”, stuck in limbo. Waiting became a state of consciousness that obstructed their ability to project oneself forward in time. Yet, they appeared to counterbalance this inability and reclaim their agency by secretly sustaining aspirations, which demonstrates their resilience. Their hesitance to exclaim these aspirations suggests its intermediary role between their desires and their objective possibilities. Retaining this “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004) seems needed to break out of the “stuckedness” and participate in “normal life”, in coevalness with others in society. While my interlocutors discoursed experiences of being stuck, in practice they remained hopeful as they allowed their imagination to wander while they had to stand still.