Recent cultural production in Morocco has emphasized the impact of migration on constructions of identity and reimagining of forms of belonging. In Abslemo al-Nasrani, a novel published in 2016 by the Moroccan writer Abdelhamid al-Bajuqi, a visit of a Spanish student from Complutense University to Morocco to attend an academic conference turns into a search for the story of his next novel which is at the same time the retelling of the complex interethnic origin and multicultural circumstances in which his parents met and his upbringing and conversion in an orphanage in Tangier. In the process of recovering the convoluted story of his complex origin of his father, a Moroccan illegal migrant and refugee in Spain, the novel not only establishes many cultural and historical parallels between different events and stories but brings together many cultural groups and ethno-racial communities across the straits of The Mediterranean, in Spain and Morocco.
In this paper, I analyze the rhetoric of transnational homemaking as a response to the realities engendered by the crossing of boundaries of insular categories of nationalism, race and ethnicity in the contemporary migratory space between Morocco and Spain. I also examine the ways the novel offers not only a postcolonial reflection on changing modalities of identity grounding but also an engagement with emergent forms of belonging that interrogate monolithic interpretations of identity that are static and rewrite belonging and otherness as an ongoing process of self-discovery that depends on developing new alliances and solidarities of values and perspective from within an evolving multi-intersectional movement towards diversity and nomadic forms of being.