Lose Your Son: Hope, Grief and the Impossibility of Identifying Missing Migrants in Morocco

The increased border control in the Western Mediterranean Route has redirected migrant crossing to more dangerous sea routes in the Atlantic. The comeback of Europe-bound Moroccan harraga (following sociopolitical uprisings e.g., Hirak Rif, Jerada upheaval, and, more recently Fguig), has reactivated the social imaginary of leaving home, switching gears and seeking a better future beyond national borders. Boatloads of Moroccan migrants crossing from the Atlantic sea routes—or from Central Mediterranean Routes through the Moroccan-Algerian border—leave behind a contrail of migrant death and disappearance in North African countries with relatively weak forensic infrastructures. When death happens out of place, when human and non-human actants are mobilized at full tilt by border regimes, death and disappearance of migrant bodies are the twin technologies of deterrence. Bodies dying along sea, desert, and forest routes are instances when death occurs out of place and out of sight. Families are, consequently, left behind battling with an ambiguous sense of loss, grief and mourning. Building on extensive fieldwork in Morocco, this paper looks at the experiences of loss of families of missing migrants when the right to look for their sons is inhibited by the hyper-securitized approach to migration governance in Morocco. The impossibility of identification and end-of-life, funerary practices are unobserved, and families of missing migrants are impaired by unresolved grief and mourning and paralyzing senses of hope and waiting. In particular, drawing from classical and contemporary accounts of anthropology of death and funerary practices, this paper examines alternative ways of coping with loss and unknowability. Divinatory practices like dreams, fortune-telling, and social mobilizations are tactical practices families embrace to claim justice and establish truth concerning the whereabouts of their loved ones.