You are about to read the story of one woman who reflects so many others. It is a story of many stories embodied in Rahma.
Her life mirrors the experience of countless immigrant women who quietly shaped Europe’s communities in the decades following World War II. Through resilience, love and memory, she bridged cultures and generations.
This story offers a glimpse into their world, a world often overlooked but essential to understanding the fabric of modern Belgium and the enduring strength of those who came before us.
If the streets of Molenbeek or the paths of Parc Marie José could speak, they would tell the story of a gentle, soulful woman. Her name was Rahma.
The woman who held many stories
Known to few beyond the Ossegem neighbourhood, she embodied the quiet resilience of countless immigrant women who helped nurture Belgian communities: dignified, unforgettable, yet largely absent from the public record.
Rahma was a humble pebble in the sand. But together with women like her, she helped shape the shore. Small alone, giants together.
Born in 1933 in the rugged Rif Mountains of northern Morocco, Rahma’s early life unfolded in the shadow of World War II and deep scarcity. Her mother died when she was just three.
Her father, away fighting in the Spanish Civil War, returned to find his wife already buried. He soon remarried and emigrated to Algeria, leaving Rahma to be raised by her maternal grandmother in the village of Sidi Issa, near Tamasint.
That early abandonment left its mark. It gave her both a fear of being alone and an unshakable self-reliance.
In the early 1970s, as a middle-aged woman with children of her own, Rahma travelled from Belgium to Algeria to find her father. The reunion was brief. A lifetime apart cannot be bridged in a single visit.
A few years later, under unclear circumstances, he came to live in her house in Tangier. Rahma welcomed him without bitterness. That was her way.
She married in 1953 and began a life that spanned continents. In 1968, in her thirties, she arrived in Molenbeek as a young mother. Decades later, she died in the same neighbourhood, in the house she had lived in for most of her life. She was 88. Her life was marked by hardship, but also joy, resilience and quiet triumph.
Though she never received formal schooling, Rahma possessed a natural intelligence and insatiable curiosity. Her memory was astonishing. She threaded stories like strands in a colourful Berber rug, making meaning from fragments of memory and loss.
“Don’t think about what you want to say while someone is speaking,” she would remind us. “If you do, you’re not really listening. Everyone deserves to be heard.”
In Molenbeek, Rahma became a quiet pillar of the immigrant community. In the late 1960s and early 70s, summers unfolded in Parc Marie José, where Moroccan mothers gathered to watch their children play, share stories and transform the park into a sanctuary of language, laughter and memory.
A summer sanctuary in Molenbeek
In a quiet clearing stood a statue of a nude woman, an unspoken presence, the proverbial elephant in the parc. Out of modesty, the mothers and children averted their eyes, though furtive glances were exchanged, followed by soft laughter. The statue remains today: weathered, wild and still politely sidestepped by a few.
On long summer afternoons, Rahma held court beneath the shade. Women gathered close, drawn by stories shaped from memory and imagination. Through her voice, old Morocco came alive once more in Parc Marie José.
One afternoon, a boy got a splinter in his eye. Panic spread. The mothers froze. But Rahma stepped forward calmly, knelt beside him, opened his eye and, using her tongue, removed the splinter with precision. Silence fell. It felt like witnessing a miracle.
Women sought her counsel when marriages frayed. My father used to say, half-joking, “Your mother knows which couples will divorce before they do.” Often, she did.
She was deeply fond of Belgian dark chocolate. “The other love of my life,” she would say with a mischievous smile. Despite her diabetes, she was often caught sneaking a square from the chocolate-stained pocket of her beloved Columbo-style coat. Now and then, she emerged with smudges of chocolat noir around her lips and face.
When my wife Robin and I gently confronted her, she would beam and say, “That’s my Belgian maquillage. I’m old, let me eat what I want.” We could only laugh as she lovingly put us in our place. “Let her have her chocolat noir,” Robin would say. “She’s earned it.”
Rahma fulfilled a lifelong dream by completing the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. Not long after, she made her first journey across the Atlantic to visit me in America. She and my father arrived in Boston, carrying two modest suitcases and hearts full of wonder.
In Burlington, Massachusetts, Rahma joined Robin, her mother Mildred and her sisters for pizza. What began as a simple outing to Bertucci’s became a humorous bridge between cultures. Between bites and laughter, and thanks to Robin, Rahma learned two English words: “Shut up,” which, with her Riffi accent, came out as “Chruup.”
Robin would lean in and ask, “Rahma, can you say ‘shut up’ again?”
Fully in on the joke, Rahma would raise her voice and declare, “Chruup!” sending the table into laughter.
On the ride home, Rahma waited for a lull in the conversation. The sisters were very loud. Turning from the front seat, where she always sat, she said to them, “Chruup!” Another round of laughter followed, growing louder and louder.
When Rahma taught Robin how to make couscous, it wasn’t just about the recipe. It was about the ritual. Despite differences in age, culture and language, a quiet bond began to grow.
With hands guided by memory and care, Rahma led Robin through each step, showing that love lives in the shared act of doing. In those moments, over frites and harira, it felt as though Rahma had carried both Belgium and Morocco into America.
Rahma was one of thousands of women who followed their husbands to postwar Europe. They learned new languages, raised children, cooked, cleaned, endured. They rarely appeared in headlines or textbooks, yet their legacies are everywhere. Her story is theirs too: the story of quiet, enduring courage.
Rahma had eleven children, nine boys and two girls. Three sons died in infancy, a loss she rarely spoke of. And yet, in her final years, she echoed an ancient lament: “One day, I shall see my sons again.”
Just as she began every tale with “Peace and good news”, it’s easy to imagine she left this world with those same words, offering them to whatever comes next.
Home, at last
Her final chapter unfolded quietly and with dignity. I was in the US when my brother called to say she was dying. I flew to Brussels immediately. She lay in a medical bed in the large room she proudly called le grand salon, once a working-class café named Le Corsaire.
When she saw me, she placed her hand on my face and smiled. Too weak to speak, her gesture was full of peace and recognition. It was her last gift.
My sister was there. The moment held us in complete silence. Profound beyond words.
Her wake and funeral took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2021. Belgium enforced strict limits on gatherings, generally allowing only one close contact per household. Yet nearly a hundred people came to bid her farewell.
Rahma’s Grand Salon, once alive with stories and laughter, now held quiet reverence. The Molenbeek police passed by the house several times but never intervened. Tact, perhaps. Or Rahma’s doing.
Though the pandemic loomed, Rahma did not die of COVID. Her passing was not marked by illness or isolation. Even in death, she remained untouched by the storm outside, departing not in fear but in peace. Everything she had given –her care, her wisdom, her love –returned to her in full.
In accordance with Islamic tradition and despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, she was laid to rest the very day she passed.
In Belgium, Providence bestowed upon her a rare and meaningful honour. Then again, Rahma had a way of being cherished by those who knew her or crossed her path.
So many people, young and old, said the same thing. “Your mother was my friend.” And they meant it.
Rahma entered this life scared and abandoned, and yet somehow built a life untouched by those early traumas.
Toward the end, she had nearly lost her sight. And yet, after fifty years of walking from her home to Parc Marie José, she could still navigate every twist and turn by instinct, guided by the soles of her feet, the scent of the air, the sound of her neighbourhood.
Her body remembered what the mind no longer needed. Streets had become memory. Molenbeek was home, not by chance but by steps repeated in faith for so long.
In many immigrant families, the question of burial is never simple. Some wish to return home in death. Others, like Rahma, spend most of their lives far from their birthplace, building lives elsewhere. Sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with grace.
During the pandemic, with borders closed, there was no choice. Rahma would rest in Belgium. And perhaps that was how it was always meant to be. Brussels, her home of over fifty years, embraced her one last time.
In the end, home was not a place but the sum of her steps, meals, stories and laughter. What she gave to others became the soil she now rests in.
Most of Rahma’s contemporaries acquired Belgian citizenship over time. It never crossed her mind. Papers didn’t matter to her. She belonged to places in spirit, not by document. She loved both Belgium and Morocco. Each held a piece of her heart. Each helped shape her long journey.
Even in death, Rahma, whose name means mercy, remained extraordinary. Her burial felt distant yet deeply familiar.
As the old Sufis say:
“The seeker who dies on the road is not lost. He is buried in the dust of longing, and from that dust, roses bloom.”
Rahma was home again.
