BY ARIEL ALEXOVICH, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[to the companion story, Coca-Cola, red wine or mint tea? A Moroccan woman decides where to live]

"Sale Arabe!" shrieked the furious middle-aged French woman to the heavy apartment door in front of her. The expression - commonplace in France nowadays - means, literally, "dirty Arab." "You turn down the music! You should stay in your country! Here in France we don't listen to our music that loud ..." She went on and on.

Fed up by the loud pop tunes blaring from the Bordeaux flat where Moroccan-born college student Meryem Laachi lived, the woman went next door and started shouting racial slurs without even knocking. If she had bothered to confront the offender face to face, the woman would have been surprised to see that Meryem wasn't home. Inside the apartment were two of Meryem's friends, two porcelain-skinned Caucasian French girls.

"Susanne was crying," Meryem says of her friend's reaction to the insults. As she sits in her new apartment in Rennes, a medium-sized city in the northwestern French province of Brittany, Meryem seems to let the incident roll off her back. "I just think my neighbor in Bordeaux was unhappy. She was living alone, she was 40 - I was thinking she had psychological problems."

That was about two years ago. Meryem, 22, has since finished her coursework in Bordeaux and is working on a finance degree at a specialized college in Rennes. She is tall, well-dressed and in fact, not dirty at all. What she doesn't have on her side, at least not according to French society, is shoulder-length coarse, dark hair and a long face shape that comes to a point at her chin. In other words, she looks Arabic, which in France automatically earns her a label as "the other." Compared with other instances of discrimination she's faced, however, being called "dirty Arab" isn't so bad. Especially compared with the hardships faced by French-born youths of Arabic descent, Meryem's situation is downright tolerable.

According to Eurostat, the European Union's official bureau of statistics, 51,092 Moroccan nationals were enrolled in the EU's institutes of higher education in 2003, the most recent year for which data is available. 34,826 of them studied in France, since French is taught along with Arabic in Moroccan schools, a reminder of the days when the North African country was a French protectorate. Even today, the cultural ties between the two countries are obvious. Warm baguettes fresh from the oven can be bought in boulangeries in Casablanca, and young people gather at tea salons to smoke hookah pipes all over Paris.

Meryem claims that her position as a Morocco native attending university in France protects her from much of the discrimination faced by French citizens of Moroccan descent. The Caucasian French see her as a temporary resident of their country, and they assume she comes from a well-off family because she is paying college tuition. "Because of the fact that we came to France, we came from a rich family," she says. "They don't have any apprehension about us. But for the Moroccans born in France, they have more problems."

Arabic-looking youth are often stopped by police officers and asked for identification, especially in areas where lower-class Arabic immigrants live. The police have never stopped Meryem, and as long as she stays out of the hot public housing developments where many poor immigrants live, they're not likely to, says Meryem's friend and former teacher Ludovic Subran, an economist for the French Ministry of Finance.

"For a student like Meryem and her situation, she is from some kind of upper-middle-class family in Morocco, so she is never nagged like that by the authorities. She's like, cherished." This rule only works in towns with dominant student populations, like Bordeaux or Rennes. "In France, some people know that she's a student, and of course see her as someone that is more upper class, and not these baddies that are always looked down on," Subran says. "But other people don't really know the difference and just see that she's Arabic in origin, and the image is not that good."

Meryem has fielded her share of racial insults, but she had never really been touched by what she considers racism until last fall, when she was trying to rent an apartment for herself in Rennes. After living with some French friends didn't work out ("There were many points we disagreed on," she says), she sought the help of a local realtor to find her a new home. The realtor, a French woman, showed Meryem a place that she absolutely fell in love with. Meryem said she'd take it, and, according to Meryem, the realtor promised to lease her the room and take the listing off the market.

Since Meryem's parents lived in Morocco, she would need a co-signer that lived in France. She asked her finance professor, Mohammed El Haj Tirari, who is also from Morocco, to help her out. He agreed. "They can see that he has a salary and that he lives in Rennes," Meryem asserts. Unfortunately, the realtor also could see Mohammed's undeniably Muslim name. The realtor called Meryem the next day and - in a voice message - said the apartment had been taken. Meryem says she was never even issued an apology.

"Meryem was quite upset because she was refused the apartment, and she was more or less convinced that it was because of her being Arabic," says Subran, who Meryem called shortly after her housing fell through. "So what I did was I just called them, saying that I was like an executive civil servant and that I could sue them if it was racial discrimination."

According to him, the agency said Meryem didn't turn in the right paperwork for it to hold the apartment that additional day, and someone else simply snapped it up. "It's too easy to say that it's just a question of racism," Subran rationalizes. He thinks the agency might be telling the truth, but he can't ignore the fact that his Arabic friend was denied an apartment after she offered an Arabic professor to be her co-signer. "It was more or less the first really shocking time that she was faced with (prejudice), so that is why she was quite upset," Subran says. "It was like she suddenly realized that it was not that easy for her to be a normal citizen in France."

Still without a home of her own, Meryem tried a different real estate agency. "My mom would say it's God," Meryem says, "but there was a woman in another agency who found me another apartment." She told the new realtor that she would like to use her professor, Mohammed, as her co-signer.

This time, the realtor admitted to Meryem up front that she wasn't sure that the building's landlord would be keen on the idea of a Muslim co-signer. The realtor's honesty and genuine concern appeased whatever anger Meryem felt toward the landlord. Meryem asked Subran to be her second co-signer, even though he was only 24 years old and lived in Paris. "I went back to the agent, and because his name is Ludovic Subran and not Mohammed, she said that's OK."

Where does this French apprehension towards its Muslim population come from? As of 2005 figures, France's population includes about 5 million Muslims, but there are almost certainly millions more living in the country illegally. France is approaching a 10 percent Muslim demographic, with the clear majority of those people being of North African heritage, as a result of France's control of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during the 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast, the United States is about 1 percent Muslim, a varied mix of Bangladeshis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks and more.

But even if the immigration figures were frozen, France's Muslim population would continue to grow steadily by the birth rate of the new immigrants. Muslims reproduce at three times the rate of non-Muslims in Europe. All the racial slurs towards Arabic and African Muslims in France likely stem from a very real fear that Mohammed and Abdul could replace Pierre and Jean-Luc as the stereotypical Frenchman.
************************************
One kiss on the right cheek and two on the left. That's the standard greeting between family and friends in Morocco. When Meryem steps through the doorway of her family's Casablanca apartment in December, however, her mom plasters her face in kisses and envelops her in a hug that lasts longer than the time it takes to enjoy a glass of mint tea.

The reunion with her mother is bittersweet, though. Meryem has a year and a half left at her university in Rennes. Then she must decide whether to look for work in France, return to Morocco, or try her luck in another country. Her heart leans towards coming home - and these between-term trips don't do much to squash that feeling - but her head tells her that a better future can be found in the rich European Union, despite the West's prejudices towards Muslims.

Some children who grow up in poor countries dream their whole lives about leaving. That's not how Meryem feels about Morocco. As a kid, Meryem witnessed first her older brother, then her older sister pack their suitcases and head to universities in France. But up until the month before Meryem herself was to start college, she thought she would follow her own path and stay in Casablanca, studying finance at the elite Institut Superieur de Commerce et d'Administration des Entreprises (INCAE), Morocco's best business university. "At first I thought I would stay in Morocco because I would see my mom every week crying on the phone (as she spoke to her children living abroad)," Meryem says. "I used to pray every day that I would get accepted to this school in Morocco."

While Meryem was content and confident in her choice to stay in Casablanca, her father, a lawyer, urged her to study abroad. "He told me that he would prefer me to go to France. I think for three days he stopped talking to me," Meryem says. Finally, her mom, the person Meryem thought would most want her to stay at home, pushed Meryem fully toward the decision to go to France. "'Maybe your father is right,' my mom said."

Unsure about making such a monumental life change, but trusting the advice of her parents, Meryem spent three years at the Lycée Michel Montaigne in Bordeaux, the city in the west of France where her brother and sister chose to study. "No regrets," she says. After finishing her specialized baccalauréat in math, she progressed through the French higher education system to earn a Diplôme Universitaire d'Etudes Générales (DEUG). Now Meryem is working towards a master's degree in finance at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information (Ensai).

She feels strongly that her degree from a French university will give her more of a professional edge than any diploma she could have earned in Morocco. "The diplomas in Morocco don't have great value," she says. But will Meryem go back to her beloved Morocco after she finishes at the Ensai?

"In general the trend is that many, many students tend to stay in European countries, but there is a growing trend that if they're on a higher level, there's a trend to go to the U.S.," says Heidi Jakobsen, social affairs policy officer at Eurocities, a Brussels-based think tank network of European cities. Certainly, Islamic-American relations have suffered since 9/11 and the Iraq War, but there's a certain anonymity that Muslims have in the United States that is unattainable in France. The United States is just so big, and the greatest domestic racial issues these days deal with the briskly increasing Hispanic population. In France, a girl like Meryem falls into the most-discriminated-against racial category. In America, she would be one of many minorities, no more threatening than any other one.

Meryem's brother, Nabil Laachi, is one such trendsetter who moved to the United States after earning his French diploma. Nabil, now a chemical engineering PhD. student at the University of Minnesota, elected America as the next stop on his life course, not in small part because of his fluency in English. "This old burning desire of 'voir du pays' (seeing the world) kept consuming me and was insatiable," he says. "I decided to come to the U.S., experience new things, see different people, eat different food, speak a different language and think differently. Here I am, starting my PhD. program and willing to stay here for at least four more years. After that, the wind might change its direction again, and who knows where it is going to lead me."

Meryem feels a tug to go to the U.S., but she's unsure about a multiyear commitment like her brother's in the States. Nabil says the discrimination he faces as an Arab in the U.S. is "not negligible," but "irrelevant," since he says he is too liberal to be mired by small annoyances from ignorant people. "The nice picture of immigration is not always rosy, or une image d'epinal. It is altered by other aspects being just who I am, a Moroccan dusky male Muslim Arab." He gets patted down at airport security checks more often than white Americans, but so be it, he says.

Ultimately, Meryem would feel more comfortable following the footsteps of her sister, Safaa Laachi, and Safaa's husband, Karim Diouri, who both earned their diplomas in France and then moved back to Casablanca. The couple met in Bordeaux, and they were always in agreement that they'd eventually end up back in Morocco. "I had always projected to return because in my mind a degree is better to use for the development of my country," says Safaa, 25. "If I don't make the effort to improve it, nobody will do it."

For her part, Safaa says she never experienced even the same moderate level of racial discrimination as her little sister. "I don't look very much like an Arabic girl," says Safaa. It's easy to see how she, sporting light brown hair tinted with blond highlights and a chubby round face, could be mistaken for a young woman from Eastern Europe or a European Mediterranean country.

Safaa agrees with Meryem that being an Arabic student in France provides decent protection from racism. "Basically people who study are more open-minded, and even if they are not, they know that they shouldn't pay attention or show that because they know the law," Safaa says.

Karim, 27, says he never faced much discrimination in France because he, like his fiancée, doesn't look like a typical North African. He says people often assume he's Spanish or Turkish because of his tan skin, square face, husky frame and dark, gelled hair. At least, no Americans could pinpoint his ethnicity while he studied abroad at North Dakota State University in Fargo during the 1999-2000 school year.

Even surrounded by the white faces of rural America, Karim says, he was just another international student. He enjoyed immersing himself in American culture, visiting the welcoming homes of the North Dakotan friends he made and eating American home cooking. Being Arabic and Muslim was not an issue. "I didn't tell them that I was Muslim, actually," he says. "I don't think they cared to know. It was before 9/11, so people weren't very conscious of asking about it."

Piled in a car with friends from Turkey and Uzbekistan, Karim took road trips as close as Minneapolis and as far as Florida. Criss-crossing the United States from north to south gave Karim a valuable look into how the different regions of the country could share a basic similar attitude toward diversity. "What I appreciated is that people could behave the way they want and live the way they want, and there's a lot of freedom and nationalities."

Karim says the tight French job market made Morocco more appealing when he graduated in 2002. He moved back to Casablanca while Safaa finished the last two years of her degree. "We would have stayed maybe two or three years for experience, but I couldn't get a job. I took it as a message from God that I should come back, and eventually I wanted to come back, so it was OK."

But Meryem doesn't have a fiancé or marriage to consider into her post-college plans, at least not for now. She has more freedom than her sister, and more of a reason to assert her independence in a big foreign city. "After I finish school, I think it would be cool to work in Paris," she says. Cool, indeed, but not cool enough to live abroad permanently. Meryem insists that in the long run, she'll live in Casablanca.

"There is some competition to keep students after they graduate. There is a growing realization on a greater scale that you need to compete with the U.S. to attract the brains - the good brains," Jakobsen says. "Whereas there was a strategy early on to get these students to go back to their country of origin, there's a great value to society to have them here."

Meryem hasn't been burdened with enough prejudice in France to make her not want to stay. Two incidents - the "dirty Arab" comment and the questionable apartment fallout - in four years isn't bad, she says. Her closest friends in France are Caucasian. One doesn't see many other Arab faces around the Ensai - which Meryem insists is not a problem - but one wonders if other higher-education seekers with Arabic names were denied entrance to her prestigious school.

The British newspaper, The Guardian, points out that, in France, the most successful ethnic minorities are found in sports, entertainment (particularly, hip-hop music) and entrepreneurship. The proportion of Arabic and African people with white-collar jobs in France is misaligned. There are calls for France's education system to admit more qualified non-white students to the elite colleges with reputations for producing politicians and leading civil servants. The government has yet to take any steps towards affirmative action in education.

The Ensai accepted Meryem, so the larger hurdle in her way is navigating the French system of issuing visas if she decides to stay in France post-graduation. Moroccans always need a visa to enter France, even if they are merely jetting away for a holiday weekend. Meryem says it's getting more difficult to obtain this minor documentation, much less a work visa. Since she has credentials affirming that she is a tuition-paying student at a French university, she doesn't get hassled by customs right now. Her parents, however, would have to fill out headache-inducing paperwork far in advance of a planned trip to get a travel visa. That's why her parents haven't visited Meryem in France since she's been in Rennes, although they came years ago when her siblings were in Bordeaux.

Meryem obviously feels torn about what to do post-graduation. On one hand, Casablanca is her home. During those December weeks in Morocco, she hosted one friend after another in her home and enjoyed daily Moroccan brown bread and mint tea prepared by her mother and her housekeeper, Hasaama. She giggled with her favorite cousin, Sanai, every day, and poked fun at the ambitious, if not spastic, break-dancing of Sanai's 10-year-old brother.
In contrast, Meryem lives alone in Rennes, on a quiet street away from the busy downtown area. Her new, two-room apartment isn't glamorous - it has a stand-alone shower in the kitchen/living room - but at least it is hers. Her best friends in France don't live in Rennes, but they come from Paris and Nantes to visit some weekends. School keeps her busy, and though it's more solitary than her life in Casablanca, Meryem is content in Rennes. "My mother is sure that I'm going to come back to Morocco. She never asks me, 'Will you come back to Morocco?' I think it's because of my sister. She came back, and so of course I will," Meryem says.

Ludovic Subran, however, raises some doubts. "Of course when there are students coming to France to study, sometimes they are staying a bit longer than for their mere studies," he says. Not that he minds. "But we need most of them. It's just a question of them being gifted and if ever they want to stay, I personally think that it's a win-win agreement. ... They're working for our banks, for our big companies, and they're giving their brain cells."

Graying Western Europe needs qualified young foreigners to fill jobs as increasing numbers of Caucasian French people retire. As in the United States, pensions will be tapped out in the foreseeable future, and immigrants are needed to correct the deficit. Morocco is just one of many African or Middle Eastern countries that may be able to spare some of its own citizens. Half of the country's 33 million people are under 25, and since 1990, its population has grown by 6 million. This number is 40 percent of the population growth in the same period for the entire 25-nation European Union, which boasts 456 million residents.

The allure of the hedonistic French way of life is undeniable for students like Meryem who come from poor nations. Safaa resolutely says that the leisure options in France are incomparable to those in Morocco, where she says that apart from the cinema, there is nothing to do. "If you ask Moroccan people on the street what's their favorite pastime, if you ask 10 people, none will say that it's art or culture. The main hobby here is eating. Or working hard or looking for work," Safaa explains.

Squinting her eyes at her little sister while scrutinizing Meryem's slight smile when France is mentioned, Safaa says, "I think she will stay in France."

After spending time with the Laachi sisters, one gets the sense that since truly grim things haven't happened to Meryem or Safaa while studying in France, the pair is willing to dismiss racism as not a big deal. "In four years, I haven't had really many problems with it," Meryem says. "We know racism exists. I don't think it's really grave."

For Meryem, maybe racial discrimination is not so bad. The sentiment is assuredly worse for primarily young, male and poor French-born Arabs. Many angry members of that demographic burned cars in suburban Paris in November 2005, in protest of their bleak social situation, inspiring other Arabic youth riots across the country. Moroccan-born students like Meryem work to distance themselves from these French-born Moroccans as much as possible, even though they share physical features and a similar heritage.

"We don't like those people because sometimes we are even frightened by those behaviors," Karim says. "Those guys are not accepted either in France or by Moroccans. Moroccans just consider them people who send a lot of money to their families."

After the Paris riots had carried on for 18 days, French President Jacques Chirac reacted by outlining a series of programs designed to provide work for low-income children of immigrants, and called on his countrymen to be more tolerant of racial diversity. The violence, Chirac said, showed a "profound malaise" in France's model of liberté, egalité and fraternité. Caucasian French citizens must end the "insulting look or word" if France's problems are to be assuaged in the long run.

Meryem and Safaa are amivalent about efforts to reduce the amount of anti-Arab sentiment in France. No matter what the French government tries to do, racism will always exist, they argue. They even say that some Arabs exaggerate the discrimination inflicted upon them.

"I think if you go to a country where you think they won't like you, you think everything bad that happens to you is a racial thing," Safaa says. "If people have racism in their minds, you can't do anything. No society is perfect. It's up to us to find our place in society, whether it's Morocco or France. In Morocco maybe there aren't a lot of racist people, but there are people who are stupid in other ways."

July 2006

[to the companion story, Coca-Cola, red wine or mint tea? A Moroccan woman decides where to live]

19-Jul-06 | 7:19 AM
Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Filed under: Feature Stories, France, Morocco



E-mail this page | Printer-friendly version

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):

TrackBack URL for this entry