Marriage Without Borders - Dinah Hannaford Contemporary Ethnography

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Hearing that she knew an American, the neighbor asked my friend to show me a letter from the U.S. embassy sent in 2001 informing the neighbor that he had won the “lottery,” the U.S. Diversity Visa program which distributes diversity visas to would-be migrants of select countries. At the time, the neighbor could not afford the other elements that would make migration possible—such as an international plane ticket—but he held onto this now irrelevant paper for nine years, hoping that it would one day be his ticket out. I marveled at the pristine letter and the crisp white paper—clearly the neighbor had been guarding this letter delicately, and pointlessly, for nearly a decade. In Senegal’s culture of migration, he had won the lottery but couldn’t cash in.

       Conclusion

      In Senegal, men are migrating to fulfill gendered ideals of masculinity including becoming husbands and household heads. For non-migrant Senegalese men, finding a foothold in the Senegalese marriage market is not easy despite the continued compulsory nature of marriage for social adulthood. Non-migrant men from middle-class families, like Momar, find it difficult to compete with those living overseas who seem to be a safer bet for a stable financial future for women also navigating economic hardship and social pressure to marry.

      While Momar dreams of taking his soccer skills abroad, his younger siblings are trying other tactics to achieve full social adulthood. One of his brothers married a woman from a lower-class neighborhood, where his residence of origin—the middle-class Sicaps (an administrative district of Dakar)—still carries some prestige. The couple has moved into the crowded household with Momar’s family, and they have no clear plans to establish a household of their own. Another brother has been accumulating degrees in business administration. He wears a tie daily and carries a briefcase with him on most occasions—an ostentatious display of his own middle-class station—though he has no job at present and has few prospects for employment.26

      The eldest of Momar’s two sisters is the one sibling who no longer lives under her mother’s roof and who is financially independent from her family. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a model and an actress and regularly contributes financially to her mother’s household and her siblings’ activities. How did she achieve this? She married an elderly French man and moved with him to Europe.

      In Chapter 2, the focus turns from non-migrant Senegalese to migrants themselves. Just as it is argued here that neoliberal reforms in Senegal have driven many men into international migration and changed non-migrant perceptions of status and success, the next chapter shows that neoliberal restructuring abroad has also profoundly shaped migrant trajectories and orientations, making transnationality an imperative of contemporary Senegalese migration. Chapter 2 also examines the consequences of the myth of migration-as-wealth for the overseas-earners who struggle to remit adequately to their loved ones at home. Gendered ideals are not only a stimulus for men to migrate, but a source of motivation for most of their transnational activities in which they attempt to gain status and provide care from abroad through remittances, marriage, and other highly gendered activities in an unstable economic and legal climate.

      CHAPTER 2

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      Precarity, Care Work, and Lives Suspended

      In a focus group I held with a group of factory workers in the industrial town of Lecco, Italy, several of the men began mocking the only unmarried man in the group who was complaining about pressures from home. “You don’t have any problems,” they teased. “You don’t have a wife; you have no problems at all.”

      When the laughter died down, one of the married men, Moussa, continued seriously. He said that not only does your financial burden increase when you marry, but the psychological pressure intensifies as well. Migrants struggle to save enough money to return to Senegal to visit, when “enough” entails not only transportation and living expenses for the trip, but also the funds for an impossible number of gifts and cash handouts expected from a migrant on his return. For migrants who struggle to live and remit on meager earnings, saving for a month-long trip can take several years. “But if you’ve left a wife behind, for one, two, three years, because you can’t go home,” Moussa explained, “your family starts to say, ‘hey, you have to come visit this doomu jambor [daughter of another/a stranger] who’s in our house.’ ”

      In all Senegalese marriages, husbands seek to prove to their wives’ families that they are pious, hardworking men and good providers—that they are, in essence, goor jaarin, or men of value. In transnational marriage, migrant husbands seek approval and admiration from their in-laws even as they live and work miles away. The migrant men I spoke to had their in-laws and their own relatives very present in their calculations and plans for their wives.

      A man’s own family members represent him not only in negotiations for the marriage and in the exchange of kola nuts at the mosque on his wedding day, but also throughout the marriage. When conflicts arise, family members are expected to make peace and settle the married couple’s dispute. Thus, a migrant’s family also feels responsible towards his wife’s family when a groom’s absence begins to seem like neglect. “Her family starts to say, ‘Hey,what’s he doing over there? He’s been there a long time.’ ” Moussa made clear that, as a migrant husband, you worry not only about your wife’s feelings of abandonment, but about what that abandonment might mean for your reputation and that of your family in the eyes of her family and the community at large.

      Such concerns led Badou, another migrant in the focus group in Lecco, to wait years to finally marry his intended. Before he left for Italy in 2000, he gave her family what is known as the “premiere cadeau,” or first gift in a marriage negotiation—the cash that symbolizes a deposit on a wife, reserving her for marriage.1 He said he was reluctant to officially marry her before he left Senegal because he could not predict what awaited him in Italy. He did not want to tie up2 “someone else’s daughter” before he knew what his situation would be. Badou moved in with his uncle who had been living in Italy for several years and, with his uncle’s help, found work and got his paperwork in order rather quickly. Still, it took him until 2004 to save up enough money to make his first trip home to Senegal and finalize his marriage.

      A desire to visit their wives as frequently as possible leads some migrant men to prioritize saving for future visits home over other financial goals. As they balance the need to send remittances to a wife (or wives), family, and friends, migrants also must take care to put some of their money away for the future. This causes conflict with wives and family, as migrants struggle to meet outsized remittance expectations while also saving for periodic returns and other projects.

      This chapter contextualizes the choice among migrants to marry transnationally. It first details the conditions that make transnationalism an imperative for Senegalese migrants, including the precarity of their residence and working conditions abroad, as well as their social goals of reputation-building at home. The decision to marry transnationally and more broadly to invest at home can be seen as much as a rational response to state economic and political pressures at home and abroad as a sentimental choice. Secondly, it shows that transnational marriage itself can fulfill multiple transnational goals, including representation, providing care for parents, and setting the stage for a desired return. It further addresses how migrants struggle in their efforts to perform affective labor from abroad—for wives, children and other relatives—drawing from discourses of transnational care work in migration studies. Finally, this chapter argues that migrants’ struggle to fulfill moral obligations to wives and family directly intersects with neoliberal discourses and practices coming from both the home and the host nations. The narrative of a transnational workforce benefits both the sending and the receiving nations, but the migrants themselves find that wearing the mantel of transnationalism puts them under enormous emotional and financial strain.

       Flexible Accumulation and Instability

      The focus group in Lecco was held in the kitchen area of a small

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