in touch daily, primarily through telephone calls, and increasingly also use other communication media such as Skype, WhatsApp, and instant messengers. With a few rare exceptions, all Senegalese migrant husbands send remittances home. They do this through agencies such as MoneyGram and Western Union, or through more informal channels, such as a gift or cash sent with fellow migrants making a journey home on vacation, or via particular religious networks of exchange (Tall 2002). These remittances finance everything from home construction to laundry detergent, from school fees to breakfast—and many households in Senegal depend on support from overseas to function on a day-to-day basis.
Romance and Finance
Anthropologist Jennifer Cole critiques recent work on African intimacies as foregrounding the instrumental and emphasizing the strategic. Researchers—especially those studying the spread of HIV in Africa—describe intimate relationships as transactional and devoid of sentiment. Though Cole recognizes that scholars often do so either to highlight African agency or to show the logic behind seemingly promiscuous behavior in a context of poverty, “nonetheless, the effect is simultaneously to downplay the affective dimensions of these relationships and to give academic credence to a view frequently espoused by African men that they are ‘used’ by African women” (Cole 2009: 111). Certainly the present discussion of Senegalese transnational marriage, in which women choose to marry migrants for their potential as providers and migrants make strategic choices about partners in light of considerations such as personal status building, could echo a similar overshadowing of affect. This is particularly a danger because Senegalese men (and women) themselves often link the phenomenon of transnational marriage to women’s materialism and men’s self-indulgence.
I seek to avoid a reductive approach to marriage and its dangerous associations with a history of exoticizing and “othering” African sexuality in two important ways: by linking Senegalese transnational marriage to discussions of contemporary love and marriage outside the context of Africa, and by offering a more nuanced picture of love in Senegal and its relation to material exchange. Rather than presenting transnational marriage as a case of African exceptionalism or exoticism, this book argues that Senegalese transnational marriage is reflective of a contemporary global rupture in family relations for those in the Global South. In Senegal, this rupture signals a move away from more traditional companionate values for marriage, in which love and emotional closeness long have been seen as constitutive elements of a successful marriage.
Cole and Thomas, in their edited volume Love in Africa, emphasize that, like others across the world, “Africans have long forged intimate attachments through exchange relationships” (2009: 13). I join Constable (2009) and Zelizer (2005)7 as I depart from a tendency to dichotomize or polarize economy and intimacy as if, in the final instance, they were mutually exclusive causes (or results) of transnational marriage. By contrast, this text shows, for instance, that in Senegalese courtship and marriage, economic motives and forces are deeply intertwined with the construction and configuration of romance.
Married life in Senegal has always been linked to material value. Senegalese culture traditionally has emphasized the importance of a husband as provider and, although this quality has been given equal value to other characteristics—such as provenance from a good family, strong character, and religious piety—women always have sought to attach themselves to “goor jaarin” (Hannaford and Foley 2015). Goor jaarin literally means a man who is worth something; it conveys a masculine form of honor that rests in large part on financial success. In addition to initial marriage payments, husbands are expected to provide for (“yor”) their wives and children.
Husbands are expected to provide not just out of duty but as an act of care—financial support is part of what Catie Coe has deemed “the materiality of care.” The provision of material resources carries a “signal of emotional depth and closeness” (Coe 2011: 21). Affection and emotional closeness also have been emphasized as key to a successful Senegalese marriage, modeled in part after the Senegalese understanding of the Prophet Mohammed’s relationship with his wives. Acts of care and generosity between a husband and wife become the context within which a long-term marital bond develops. Transnational couples have fewer opportunities for gestures of care and intimacy than do couples that live side by side. Thus a husband’s acts of providing through remittances—and a wife’s response to these remittances—represent key sites of spousal support and care (Hannaford 2016).
What often is misinterpreted as prioritizing money over relationships—a wife’s voracious desire for more remittances or a husband’s failure to remit adequately—upon further examination reflects decisions that prioritize a couple’s relationships with others over their relationship with one another.8 Migrants juggle other familial obligations along with their duties as husbands and fathers, including playing the roles of supportive sons, brothers, cousins, and nephews. Like their migrant husbands, non-migrant wives face requests for loans and gifts from those around them because of their ties to overseas wealth, in addition to pressure to keep up an appearance of affluence and comfort. This distinction often is underemphasized—including by most Senegalese themselves—in the attention given to the role of money and remittances in transnational migration. In examining these intensified interactions ethnographically, we understand that money and gifts function as a type of emotional currency that both parties use not only in their own marriage but also to participate in a larger moral economy. In these marriages and in marriage in Senegal more broadly, caring, family, and finances are inextricably linked.
Globally Flexible Families
As elsewhere in the developing world, men and women in Senegal are finding it necessary to create new flexible forms of kinship that respond to the structural imperatives of neoliberal globalization. Marriage is socially compulsory in Senegal, and many men migrate with the primary goal of accumulating the resources for marriage and family formation. Due to changes in labor restructuring and obstacles to legal migration status, however, they often find marriage to women in the host country or diaspora untenable and—because of gendered and religious ideologies of womanhood—undesirable. Senegalese women, also facing social and financial pressure to marry, find that non-migrant men are delaying marriage—what scholars elsewhere in the region have called a matrimonial crisis (e.g., Masquelier 2005)—and migrant men appear more likely to be good providers. Thus, women marry migrant men, non-migrant men believe they must migrate to marry, and transnational marriage becomes a new endeavor to make marriage tenable in insecure times.
A number of sociological and anthropological studies have emerged in recent years that focus on long-distance familial relations.9 Migration has become an essential aspect of successful mothering in the Philippines (Parreñas 2005a, Lan 2006, Madianou and Miller 2012). Being a dutiful child in Central America now entails crossing into the United States as an unaccompanied minor (Heidbrink 2014, Yarris 2014). To be a desirable husband (and honorable son and father), South Indian men become labor migrants to the Middle East (Desai and Banerji 2008, Gulati 1993). The rise in practices of transnational kinship can be tied to a neoliberal demand for flexibility in all aspects of life, especially for citizens of the Global South. The squeeze of the retraction of the welfare state and the pull of forces of global labor restructuring engender new types of affective practices and a reworking of older conceptions of familial care.
All the studies of contemporary transnational kinship noted above reveal a common element of strain and disappointment. Though older forms of transnational kinship can be found in historical accounts of colonial life, in centuries of trade, and in military movement, the current global technoscape (Appadurai 1996) adds new expectations for the quality and intimacy of these new iterations of long-distance relationships. These expectations stem from the potential for connection promised by the immediacy of communication technologies, the speed and relative low cost of international travel, and the instantaneity of electronic money transfers. As families improvise newly mobile approaches to kin relations, they must grapple with impossible expectations to be both “here” and “there,”10 they face a burden of playing traditional
