Traces of ancestral customs and traditions can often be found even in second- and third-generation immigrant families. Sineb El Masrar discusses how these traditions can change over time and what’s wrong with being an inflexible “concrete block”.
Some cultural practices arise out of a mix of personal interests and social pressure. If we look at first-generation immigrants and their descendants who were born and socialised here in Germany, the second, third and even fourth generations of an immigrant family, we can always find traces of customs they brought with them.
Couscous Friday
As someone who has Moroccan roots and the daughter of two Moroccans, thus a second-generation immigrant, a few Moroccan customs have stuck with me, even though I wasn’t born in Morocco and have never lived there for an extended period of time. Friday, for example, which is the holy day of the week for Muslims, comparable to Sunday for Christians, is couscous day. This is a very Moroccan custom, celebrated everywhere from the cities along the Mediterranean coast to the Atlas Mountains and eastern Morocco.But customs are not static: they’re man-made, and people adapt to their new surroundings by blending their traditions with local customs and peoples. Because when you move from one place to another – whether you like it or not – you also get to know how the locals do things. The decisive factor is whether you’re interested in opening up to other cultures or refuse to budge an inch, like a concrete block: stolid, rigid and grey. It’s a well-known fact that traditions from our ancestral homelands can provide a sort of cultural compass in a world that may still be foreign to us twenty or even fifty years after immigrating.
Customs from an Archaic Society
But that’s precisely the problem with a concrete block. While the world around it takes an interest in one another, reinventing itself and growing more diverse, a concrete block remains unmoved and unchanged. Stolid and still grey, mostly alone and uninviting. The cause of this rigidity is usually the customs and traditions that make up the destructive side of a given culture, which may have made sense and informed cultural identity in an archaic, patriarchal society, but which have caused plenty of personal misery in the past – and still do today. Forced or arranged marriage, for example, may make sense for strategic reasons, for example for property ownership and inheritance issues concerning both families or to avert religious conflicts. But such marriages made people unhappy even in the old days.So there’s plenty of reason to re-evaluate that side of a culture – whether transplanted to the new country or not – to determine whether it perpetuates destructive traditions and customs, coercion and personal misery. Some immigrant families are like concrete blocks that stand in their own way and that of their loved ones, while others have long since come to realize that cultural particularities are always dynamic, especially in the wake of migration.
So couscous Friday may be an established Moroccan tradition, but what it’s really about is enjoying it with your loved ones – even if it’s a vegetarian or vegan version thereof. The main thing is for everyone to have a good time. Of their own free will!
“Frankly ...”
On an alternating basis each week, our “Frankly …” column series is written by Sineb El Masrar, Susi Bumms, Maximilian Buddenbohm and Şeyda Kurt. Sineb El Masrar writes about migration to and the multicultural society in Germany: What strikes her, what is strange, which interesting insights emerge?
August 2022