These dual realities—the dependence on association with the world overseas for social prestige and the persistent ignorance of the realities of life abroad—make up the core irony of Senegal’s culture of migration.
Class and Employment: “My Husband’s Job is Immigré”
A migrant’s exact employment overseas and his legal immigration status usually are of little importance to wives and their families in the negotiations for marriage. In fact, of the 51 nonmigrant women I interviewed who had married migrants, roughly a third had no idea what their husband did for work. When I asked the question, “What is your husband’s work?” several interviewees answered, “immigré” or “mingi extérieur” (“he’s abroad”). As class becomes further dissociated from the means of production, imagined possibilities abroad make the details of employment seem inconsequential to those contemplating marriage to a migrant. Being overseas is in itself a profession, as far as many Senegalese are concerned and thus immigrés have established their own class category.
In Lamine Mbengue’s film Toubab Dou Woujj (“White Women Aren’t Polygamous”) one scene in particular hits upon this concept of the immigré as a social class/profession. In the film, a Senegalese migrant’s French wife discovers her husband is polygamous and decides to move to Senegal and live alongside her co-wives. The protagonist protests and says he must return to France, “What about my job in France?” She responds, “What job?” and reminds him that he never worked when they lived in France. He says, “Yes, but for the people here, being in Europe means having a job.” The man’s identity and status—his belonging to a certain class of men—are wrapped up not in an actual career, not in access to the means of production or even in wages, but in his residence overseas.
Migrant suitors can benefit from being lumped into an amorphous immigré professional category and most keep the details of their overseas lives vague when pursuing a potential wife, as the 16 of 51 wives who have no knowledge of their husbands’ job suggest. A Senegalese factory worker I interviewed in Northern Italy in 2011 rebuffed my question about whether he had explained the realities of life in Italy to his new wife before he married her, claiming the details of his everyday life abroad were irrelevant. “She’s marrying me, not Italy,” he said sharply. Kane (2011: 185) notes that Senegalese migrants in the United States who pretend to be wealthy while courting their wives in Senegal fear bringing their wives abroad lest the wives should ask for a divorce or no longer be “good wives” upon seeing their husbands’ humble conditions.
Many migrant suitors in fact themselves play into the assumptions made about their wealth as migrants by performing the habitus (Bourdieu 1984) of their new social class while visiting Senegal. The stereotype among non-migrants in Dakar of migrants home on vacation and on the prowl includes wearing sunglasses indoors at night as a way to signal their foreignness and access to luxury accessories (Kane 2011: 193).19 The women I interviewed who were courted by migrant suitors said the courtship was punctuated by gifts from abroad, either cash or commercial goods that were also clearly marked as foreign—such as ready-to-wear clothes, handbags, shoes, and perfumes. Parodies of modou modous home on visits conspicuously interject Italian or English words into their Wolof conversation. I should note that this satire is meant to poke fun not only at the showiness of this linguistic tick, but also to mock the stereotypical rural-born modou modou’s ignorance of French due to a lack of formal schooling—and thus a lack of “linguistic capital” and “educational capital” (Bourdieu 1984).20
Although women might marry without regard to their husband’s actual career overseas, after a marriage takes place specific factors about employment in the host country begin to surface. A husband’s career and legal status, for example, make a significant difference in the life of a Senegalese migrant’s wife even if she never joins her husband abroad. Nearly a dozen of my Dakar interviewees’ husbands did not have immigration papers at the time of the interview. In some cases this meant that the bride had not seen the groom even once over the course of their entire marriage, as the husband could not travel back and forth without legal immigration papers. Others had waited a period of several years before their husbands eventually got the paperwork they needed to be able to come home to visit.21
Career status naturally also has an impact on the amount and the frequency of remittances that a migrant can send home to his wife, as well as on his ability to travel home. Ambulant sellers who receive no monthly salary cannot send remittances on a regular schedule. The amount of money one earns working in a print shop versus selling umbrellas in the street naturally varies, and wives see the difference in what they receive from their husbands. Migrants who work in factories commonly have a specific amount of time off each year in which they could potentially travel home—generally around the Christmas holiday if they are in countries with a Christian majority22 or, in the case of Italy, the annual August holiday “ferragosto.” Conversely, “commerçants” (tradesmen) might have to return frequently as part of their trade and, because they are self-employed, are free to come and go when they can afford the trip—though that could be less often than once a year. All these differences have significant impacts on migrants’ wives, yet they are not considered prior to marriage, nor do they push many women to press their potential spouses for details about their employment status abroad.
As mentioned above, in addition to not giving full consideration to a husband’s legal and career status overseas before marrying, many women overlook the salience of a husband’s class origins. This results in a number of marriages that are unlikely to occur outside the context of migration, such as middle-class urban women marrying men of rural origin and with little education. As Chapter 3 makes clear, however, pre-migratory class status of a husband is also a crucially important gauge of what a woman will experience as his wife because of patrilocal residence patterns, the importance of kin, and the differences in pre-migratory habitus that attends rural or urban origin.
Migration and Mysticism
There is a hole in the wall that runs around Ouakam, a sprawling Dakar neighborhood23 that abuts the Leopold Sedar Senghor airport. Through the hole you can see the airport and its runways, the planes taking off and landing, and the gateway to the world outside of Senegal. For residents of Ouakam, most of whom have never been on a plane, it is a strangely dissonant sight. How easy it would be to walk through that hole and out to the airfield, to join the lucky ones in line to board the planes to Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.
Of course, the reality of obtaining the connections, the capital, and the visas necessary to get aboard is much more complicated. For the hopeful emigrants who go through the official channels to secure a visa for a Western country, the sense of gambling is strong. Many Senegalese treat the visa process like a game of chance, spending borrowed money to file costly applications in the hopes that once they “win” they will be able to pay it back in spades, fetishizing documents like “letters of invitation” from Europeans and Americans they know, and attempting to use fraud to beat the system. The mysterious and opaque nature of how capital is accumulated makes the occult a particularly salient tool for navigating contemporary capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 27), and many Senegalese visa hopefuls turn to their “serignes” (“marabouts,” religious/spiritual leaders) for prayers, amulets, and sacrifices that will help them turn the hands of fate and of foreign embassies.
As a young man with no employment or responsibilities at home, Momar would be denied a short-term visa by most Western consulates, which would assume his intentions to be to overstay his visa indefinitely. This is why Momar’s hopes are pinned to a soccer contract—getting a visa on his own seems out of the realm of possibility. Urban legends about different embassies and strategies for getting visas circulate widely, revealing the perception that getting a visa requires some mix of magic, cunning, and connections.24
European
