setting a proverbial or literal foot outside of the country.
Despite decades of transnational and return migration from Senegal and Europe, critical knowledge gaps lie in non-migrant understandings of life abroad. My research among Senegalese migrants in France and Italy and wives of migrants in Senegal reveals a fundamental irony about how Senegalese relate to Europe in particular, but to “bitim rëw” (“overseas”; literally “outside the country”) more generally. Though social success in Senegal increasingly depends on access to the world outside of Senegal in some capacity—such as through migration, kinship or marriage to a migrant, and remittances from abroad—most non-migrant Senegalese remain persistently uninformed about the realities of life overseas. Like the characters in Fatou Diome’s novel, many Senegalese migrate and marry migrants on the basis of simplistic and underdeveloped understanding about the relationship between overseas residence and wealth accumulation. That knowledge gap is partly responsible for perpetuating emigration and transnational marriage, as non-migrants cleave to a vague conviction of the immense possibilities that migration can bring.
In many ways, this is a regional story. Parallels of this kind of emigration and transnational kinship can been seen across West Africa.2 Moreover, this Senegalese case illuminates broader global patterns of changes in family structure, particularly for families from across the Global South, and these changes are intimately connected to the structures and regimes of late capitalism. Around the world, global neoliberal labor restructuring combines with local retrenchments of state social services and shrinking civil service sectors to create an imperative of mobility and flexibility. This imperative reaches into the most intimate aspects of life, reshaping expectations and ideals about family and love. Marriage Without Borders is an ethnography of the new kinds of kin practices created at the nexus of global neoliberal capitalism and local conceptions of gender, class, duty, honor, and care.
Introduction
Degg dooyul ma. Bëgg naa giis la.Jaabaru modou modou sonn na. Jaabaru immigré moom weet na.
Hearing you isn’t enough. I want to see you.
A modou modou’s wife is weary. A migrant’s wife, she is lonely.
—Ndickou Seck, “Modou Modou”
Across Senegal and the Senegalese diaspora, men and women are trying to make sense of a growing category of women, the “jabaaru immigré.” This Wolof label, which literally translates to “immigrant’s wife,” describes the non-migrant wives of Senegalese men who reside overseas.1 Transnational marriages between migrant Senegalese men and non-migrant women in Senegal are increasingly common in contemporary Senegal. Though some families do eventually reunite, either in the migratory context or at home, most transnational couples live the majority of their marriage in separate locations (see Baizan et al. 2014).
In popular song, televised films, in the Senegalese news media, and online, jabaari immigré are depicted alternately as opportunistic gold-diggers, forsaken lonely hearts, and naïve dupes. Their migrant husbands also face multiple representations—as profligate womanizers, conquering heroes, heartless enslavers, and exploited workhorses. These ambivalences point to fluctuating understandings of gender, status, and power within Senegalese society. They reflect an acute uneasiness within this coastal West African nation that has seen an exodus in the past 35 years, as more men and women migrate out of Senegal in search of a better financial future.
Researchers working across the globe have found neoliberal logic intertwining with the most intimate aspects of the self, including in relationship to desire, empathy, and love (Rofel 2007, Freeman 2014, Pedwell 2014, Bernstein 2007). For contemporary Senegalese, the “neoliberal mandate for flexibility in all realms of life” (Freeman 2012: 85) has reached into the very construction of what makes marriage meaningful and worthwhile. For Senegalese couples, this mandate for flexibility has overridden other contemporary and former elements of value in marriage, including sexuality, emotional companionship, class homogamy, and domestic harmony. Instead, many couples find themselves sacrificing these aspects in favor of marriages suspended between separate locales that provide other advantages in a changing political and economic landscape.
Though held up as a model of peaceful democracy in the region, Senegal fails to offer viable pathways to economic stability and social reproduction to all but the elite of this francophone, Islamic2 nation. In the years since the economic crisis of the 1980s, emigration has become deeply embedded in the Senegalese national ethos. Lacking many of the social services and civil-sector employment opportunities to advance, citizens reach outside the country in an attempt to procure means for building successful social lives within Senegal. For many Senegalese men (and a much smaller but growing number of women3) this entails migration in an attempt to find work abroad4—while continuing to invest in social life at home.
One Senegalese household in ten counts an emigrant among its members (Daffé, 2008), and an estimated half of all households have a relative living abroad (Beauchemin et al. 2013). The physical evidence of transnational migration is visible across urban and rural Senegal in the form of half-constructed villas being built piecemeal through migrant remittances, representing absent migrant owners and their successes overseas (see Melly 2010). Their remittances also fund village-level projects including wells and mosques, and national development projects; the Senegalese economy benefits enormously from the overseas earnings of its citizens.5 Like constructing a home in the homeland, marrying and forming families with women back in Senegal is a common form of investment at home for migrants as well as a means of exhibiting achievements.
The same pressures for financial and social advancement and the disruptions in family life created by neoliberal reforms that lead men into migration also encourage Senegalese women to willingly marry men from Senegal who live overseas. Gaining a connection to the world outside Senegal through marriage can offer a better chance at fulfilling women’s goals of representation and respectability, as well providing a potential avenue to migration for themselves. Thus, many Senegalese men and women find themselves married to spouses who live thousands of miles away, negotiating newly flexible definitions of spousal harmony, intimacy, and care.
It is difficult to get clear numbers of transnational couples in Senegal, as few reliable statistical surveys exist. One study of households in Dakar estimated that 23 percent of female household heads had a spouse abroad (Beauchemin et al. 2013). This figure, however, fails to count wives who are not household heads, and many migrants’ wives are likely to live with their own parents or their in-laws in the absence of their spouse. Thus, this number fails to capture a useful approximation of the extent of transnational migration nationwide. A number of factors make collecting data on transnational marriages difficult—many Senegalese marriages are not legalized and are only preformed in the mosque; migrants frequently do not list Senegalese spouses (particularly in plural marriages) on their immigration paperwork; divorce and remarriage are common and quick in Senegal in general, and are especially so in the case of transnational marriage.
The frequency of an absent husband’s visits varies widely, depending on his legal migration status, his employment, and his financial resources. At one extreme, couples go many years without seeing one another because husbands do not have their kayt (immigration papers) and thus cannot leave their country of residence without being blocked from returning. At the other extreme, there are husbands whose work in import/export facilitates a return every four to six months. Factory workers in Europe usually have Christmas closures and a long August holiday from work, though trips home are too expensive for most factory workers to return on a biannual basis. Many Senegalese migrants belong to the Mouride brotherhood,6 and those who are able often return yearly for the Magal, the annual pilgrimage to the Mouride’s holy city of Touba in the north of Senegal. Others return yearly for the important Muslim holidays of Eid Al-Fitr (tabaski) or the end of Ramadan (korité).
Many
