This paper explores the social worlds and vocabularies surrounding clandestine migration in a rural region of Central Morocco. Focusing on Kamel’s narrative, I show how he mobilizes ideas of ‘risk’, ‘gambling’, ‘adventure’, ‘luck’ and ‘destiny’ to tell his experience and to reflect on the constraints and possibilities in life. Whereas the Islamic notion of ‘destiny’ (maktūb, qadar) evokes events that go beyond personal control and understanding, folk ideas of ‘luck’ (zahr, l-ḥḍ) propel the individual search for money and adventure in the ‘outside world’, a foreign land of socioeconomic possibilities and moral threats. Navigating the creative tensions between ‘luck’ and ‘destiny’, he explores the limits of his action in the face of broader social and transcendental forces. Tracing how Kamel interweaves different vocabularies in his narrative, the paper aspires to capture young men’s gendered and existential anxieties about the future, faced as they are by the combined effects of neo-liberal restructuring, rising unemployment and the increasing ‘illegalization’ of migration.

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