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CHAPTER 2

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 apartment shared by Badou and his uncle, both working at auto factories nearby. When we gathered together in their kitchen, uncle and nephew greeted each other and remarked that they hadn’t seen one another in over a week despite living in the same apartment. Badou worked the night shift, his uncle worked the day shift, and one of them inevitably was asleep during the few hours they overlapped at home. The apartment was tidy and sparsely decorated—a small picture of a religious leader (a Mouride marabout) was the only adornment on the white walls of the kitchen. The small kitchen table offered only two chairs, so three of the men leaned against the walls or hovered in the doorway as we discussed remittances, in-laws, and the endless miscommunications with those at home.

Many migrant factory workers I interviewed in Italy reported little pleasure in their domestic life abroad. Few put effort into decorating their spaces, choosing instead to spend that money and energy on living spaces in Senegal, either building or maintaining their own homes and those of their kin there. In my travels back and forth between Italy and Senegal, I have participated in the informal courier service that exists among migrants, packing their gifts in my luggage to distribute upon arrival in Dakar.³ In addition to bringing cash, clothing, and electronics to migrants’ loved ones back in Senegal, I also have carried many household goods—from curtains to DVD players—meant to furnish homes in which the migrants rarely spend their time.

For many Senegalese migrants, life in Italy is not really life at all, but rather a suspended period away from their real lives in Senegal. As one migrant explained to me, “I don’t live here, I work here.” This declaration came from 32-year-old Seydou, a factory worker in Verbania who had at the time been in Italy for eight years, having visited Senegal only once in that time. I pressed Seydou on this, pointing out that he had been in Italy for the majority of his adult life—was he not living this whole time? He explained to me that his real life was continuing to unfold in Senegal during this time. Seydou felt this experience was universal for Senegalese migrants.