‘You Just Have to Wait’: Bureaucratic Offerings and Spiritual Repertoires of Waiting in Postcolonial Paris

Abstract

ABSTRACT Egyptian migrant mothers living in Paris often advice one another that they ‘just have to wait’ and practice ‘patience’ as they navigate French migration and welfare bureaucracies. These exhortations bring into view agentive modes of inhabiting bureaucratic waiting. This paper examines the ways in which Egyptian-background working-class mothers in Paris shape their position as ‘patients of the state’. Based on informally shared understandings of waited time as the central currency to French bureaucracy’s hidden logic, these mothers engage with their time-spent-in-waiting as something that can be offered to the bureaucratic system in exchange for a possible resolution. They also draw on religious repertoires of patience and acceptance as gendered Islamic virtues, endowing bureaucratic challenges and enforced waiting with divine significance. Migration bureaucracy thus is converted into a domain of spiritual practice.