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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 transnational couples keep 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 gendered kin roles as well as new ones,¹¹ and they must continually reevaluate which sacrifices are worthwhile. Relationships that are stretched across space and time can be stretched thin and then buckle under the weight of obligation, expectation, and constraint.

The Senegalese case of transnational marriage further adds to the literature on transnational kinwork on the question of how romantic love gets stretched and reconfigured in transnational ways. What possibilities arise for virtual intimacy with the proliferation of technological tools to bridge the distance? What does removing the possibility for regular physical interaction do to a marital bond? How does the role of external family in marriage change when partners no longer cohabitate?

Disruptions in Romance and Finance, Status, and Power

Other studies of marriage and migration have particularly examined how migration impacts power dynamics within marriage, finding that the effects are significant as couples adjust to new roles and responsibilities.¹² As in Senegalese transnational marriages, the effects are complex. In some contexts in which a husband migrates and leaves behind his wife, the effects can be liberatory: The wife becomes the household head, she assumes new responsibilities and acquires new forms of domestic control (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992, Mascarenhas-Keyes 1990). Yet Desai and Banerji (2008) found that the potential for greater autonomy was directly tied to whether migrants’ non-migrant wives in India lived in households with their extended families, particularly senior women. In Senegalese families a tradition of patrilocality means that most married women “seeyi” or move into the homes of their husbands’ kin and, as in India, this living arrangement effectively curtails most opportunities for a wife’s increased autonomy.

Indeed, instead of accessing amplified mobility and domestic control, many Senegalese migrants’ wives instead find their power and mobility quite reduced. The present study suggests that due in part to their own legal and financial precarity, migrant husbands in transnational marriages tend to be increasingly concerned about questions of dominance in the relationship. This manifests in several ways, many of which contribute to the persistent knowledge gap between migrants and non-migrants.

Many of the migrants’ wives I interviewed were uninformed or confused about fundamental aspects of their husbands’ lives. Roughly a third had no idea what their husband did for work and many could not name the city in which their husbands resided. These women had limited means to access the details of their husbands’ life abroad and found their husbands unwilling to be explicit. Husbands might seek to hide the details of their overseas activities, including the particulars of their employment, legal status, and living arrangements for several key reasons. By keeping the details of life overseas vague they can embody the prestige associated with being abroad despite realities that are far more humble and occasionally are shameful. Many migrant husbands feel concern that their wives will have less respect for them and be less likely to obey them if they have a clear picture of their humble circumstances.

This concern over conjugal dominance also prevents many Senegalese migrants from bringing their wives overseas to join them. If wives witness their lowly conditions abroad or—worse—find employment and begin to earn for themselves, then they might flout patriarchal norms.¹³ Many migrants expressed this anxiety as fundamental to their decision to live apart from their wives.

Migrant husbands also might obscure the details of their work activities overseas in an effort to control how they remit to wives and other loved ones at home. Whitehouse (2013) uses Keith Hart’s idea of the “entrepreneur’s social dilemma”—the conflict of managing entrepreneurial interests to accumulate privately alongside incentives to give generously in a communal society—to explain West African motivations to emigrate. By putting physical distance between themselves and their loved ones, migrants are escaping one of the most compelling kinds of claims on their resources—the face-to-face request—and are able to more discreetly manage their earnings and spending away from the prying eyes of claimants. This evasion is most effective when not only are the migrants at a distance, but their kin also fail to understand exactly when, what, and how the men earn and spend.¹⁴

Questions of fidelity also strain relations between husbands and wives who are living apart, although in uneven ways. Senegal’s culture of polygyny¹⁵ removes most expectation that husbands will remain celibate in the absence of their wives—and indeed, some Senegalese migrants have wives in the host country as well as at home—while wives face tremendous social sanctions for infidelity. As many migrants’ wives move in with their in-laws and face social control from their households and virtually from husbands overseas, opportunities for female infidelity are limited. Still, migrant husbands and Senegalese society at large agonize over the potential threat of female infidelity—perhaps as reflection of displaced fears about social reproduction in the face of the societal upheaval brought about by the force and intensity of emigration.

Perhaps most critically, when marriages become transnational, conjugal intimacy suffers. Husbands and wives who are not physically co-present cannot benefit from the quotidian subtleties of traditional Senegalese married life. Senegalese women discuss at length their soft power within a marriage: using incense, food preparation, sex, and various forms of adornment as key tools of negotiation and influence within their marital unions. Women in transnational marriages cannot take advantage of these resources and thus wield considerably less power within their marriages than their counterparts in non-transnational marriages. In the vacuum, in-laws and co-wives can usurp much of that power and control, and misunderstandings and animosity between couples can flourish.

Transnationalism and Neoliberalism

The pervasiveness and stubbornness of the information gap between those who migrate and those who do not could serve a broader purpose outside of individual relationships. For the neoliberal state, an image of limitless possibility associated with overseas migration both encourages the labor migration and the remittances that are so crucial to the contemporary Senegalese economy, and provides citizens hope that there are pathways to success in an increasingly restrictive economic climate. Perhaps most importantly, the myth of limitless resources for the taking overseas displaces the responsibility for the advancement and social welfare of citizens onto individuals rather than the state.

With a nod to the current fatigue of anthropological studies that casually label everything “neoliberal” and fail to unpack the term (see Ferguson 2009: 171–72), let me explain explicitly what I mean by neoliberalism in this context and why I find the term a helpful one in understanding transnational marriage. Both specific neoliberal policy changes (structural adjustment in Africa and Thatcherite economic policy in Europe and North America) and also the so-called “technologies” or “techniques” of neoliberalism (see Rose 1999, Ong 2006) are directly connected to transnational marriage and its rise.

Structural adjustment and its consequences are centrally implicated in the exodus of Senegalese into the global workforce, as well as in the general perception in Senegal that access to Western economies—through migration or marriage—is critical to social and economic advancement. Currency devaluation and inflation lowered the standard of living across Senegal, and doubled the value of remittances. Increasing unemployment—particularly the loss of much civil-sector employment—foreclosed a pathway to professional success and economic stability. Across rural and urban Senegal the most promising opportunities for financial and social success were overseas.

Privatization and the cutback in government spending and social services that took place through structural adjustment are in part responsible for keeping migrants transnational. Non-migrants in Senegal depend on remittances from overseas for help with the expenses of healthcare, education, and supporting elderly family members in retirement. This need effectively keeps migrants tethered to home and sending their earnings through remittances, making them more likely to marry transnationally.

At the same time, the effects of privatization and the attacks on the welfare state in Europe directly contribute to new labor policies that pull migrants into unstable working conditions in the West, making them invest in transnational strategies like marriage as insurance against possible expulsion. As the Italian economy moves to more flexible labor practices in which migrants have temporary, part-time, and special contracts that must be renewed, migrants are vulnerable not only to unemployment but also to expulsion, because their legal status depends on their employment. The temporary-permanence that characterizes their work and migration status effectively prevents most Senegalese migrants from imagining their futures in Italy even after long periods of stay. Because of this status, most Senegalese abroad find themselves suspended between home and abroad—propelled out of Senegal through migration, but tethered to home through familial duty and precarity abroad. They are compelled to live their lives oriented towards Senegal and not towards their host country’s definitions of success and honor. They thus are more apt to marry transnationally.

The government of Senegal relies heavily on the “economics of exodus” (Chalfin 2010: 201), and its “techniques” for making “responsibilized” subjects of its citizens directly contribute to transnational marriages. The World Bank estimates, for example, that remittances by overseas migrants from 2010 to 2012 equaled 13 percent of Senegal’s GDP (World Bank 2013). At a time when neoliberal policies and the fallout of structural adjustment have led to the slashing of social services, the shrinking of civil-sector employment, and extreme inflation, the prospect of a mobile workforce that invests at home is both appealing and indispensable to the Senegalese government. Thus, the Senegalese government—like other governments that act as labor brokers (see Rodriguez 2010)—actively promotes a narrative of its overseas citizens as heroes, dutiful sons of their family and of the country, again putting the onus on migrants to provide social welfare services in the vacuum created by the state. This narrative directly pushes young people into migration to meet these expectations and is central to the high incidence of transnational marriage, as Senegalese migrants seek ways to provide for kin and develop meaningful social status markers from abroad.

Outline of Chapters

The following chapters examine transnational marriage from multiple angles and geographic locations. This text locates the phenomenon of transnational marriage within fluctuating local discourses of gender and social class in Senegal, the political economy both of Senegal itself as well as Italy and other destination countries for migrants, and alongside global trends toward the stretching of intimate relationships across great distances. It demonstrates how control and intimacy are navigated long-distance via remittances, international communication, and through kin and illustrates the various challenges and frustrations posed by the distance—asking who stands to benefit when marriages are experienced across national borders.

Chapter 1 argues that Senegal’s “culture of migration” not only creates paths to emigration from Senegal, but that it also promotes myths and notions of success that in turn shape the everyday behavior of those who never leave. Narratives of non-migrant men and women in Senegal, and a recent history of Senegal’s engagement with structural adjustment policies, demonstrate how interrupted pathways to financial security and social status push Senegalese men and women to look outside Senegal for opportunities to build successful social lives within Senegal. Despite years of emigration and return migration in Senegal, non-migrants remain persistently unfamiliar with the realities of life overseas and how capital is accumulated abroad; the world outside Senegal is imagined as a place of limitless wealth and reward. This “culture of migration” has troubled earlier conceptions of class, desirability, and masculinity within Senegal, which serves to further stimulate migration.

Chapter 2 shows that migrants abroad are hardly leading the lives of glamorous decadence imagined by those at home. Rather, transnational migrants face particular challenges in the quest to gain respectability and perform familial duties in precarious economic circumstances. Migrants explain their decision to marry transnationally through discourses of duty, reputation, and a desired eventual return. I combine an analysis of how the political economy of Italy impedes steady employment and residential stability for its immigrants with a discussion of the Senegalese state’s discourses about migrants as development actors to illustrate how migrants find themselves trapped in transnational limbo by neoliberal ideologies and policies.

Migrants are not the only ones who feel caught in an unwinnable game; migrants’ wives face pressures similar to those faced by their husbands. Chapter 3 illustrates how wives of migrants meet with frustration in their attempts to accomplish their own gendered projects of reputation-building and social reproduction. By examining what women wish to do with remittances, this chapter presents a nuanced assessment of migrants’ wives’ demands for material support, arguing that their reputational projects are not merely selfish but are acts of care towards their migrant husbands. Certain troublesome elements of wifehood are exacerbated by a husband’s absence. A Wolof proverb notes that harmony with the family-in-law is as essential for the success of a Senegalese marriage as salt is to a meal (Gueye 2010: 82). Though relations between a Senegalese wife and her in-laws are almost always challenging, transnational wives find it especially hard to be compatible with their “goro” (parents-in-law) and their other in-laws, such as “ñjekke” (sisters-in-law), and “wuju peccior ga” (husband’s brothers’ wives) when their husbands are abroad. Remittances raise the stakes of familial competition, and a husband’s absence can permit normal familial clashes to escalate severely, even to the point of violence. This chapter also returns to issues of class that are raised in Chapter 1. Through case studies it illustrates how newer definitions and calculi of social class produced by emigration prove ephemeral over the course of individual marriages.

One of the most common frustrations that migrants’ wives reported was being subject to extreme scrutiny by their in-laws and, remotely, by their husbands due to fears about infidelity. Chapter 4 examines the specter of infidelity in transnational marriages and argues that migrants’ wives in fact have less opportunity to be unfaithful than do their peers in non-migrant marriages because of this surveillance. It shows how many wives subject to disciplinary surveillance begin to police their own behavior and self-regulate, believing that their husbands are always watching via family, neighbors, and various technologies. Migrant husbands, however, face little restriction on their freedom of movement or the company they keep. Due to the accepted practice of polygyny, they also meet with very different expectations for their sexual fidelity.

These same technologies employed for surveillance purposes—including Skype, cell phones, webcams, and instant messaging—could provide a space for intimacy between husbands and wives living in separate countries. Chapter 5 questions how love grows within transnational marriage in comparison to marriages where couples cohabitate. Marital bonds in Senegal traditionally prize sexual intimacy and emotional sharing between partners. As men and women in Senegal find themselves caught between a desire to reach “honorable adulthood” (Johnson-Hanks 2007: 643) through marriage, and a local and global economy that make it increasingly difficult to accomplish this in Senegal, both parties are turning to transnational marriage. Senegalese express this change as a move away from what traditionally was a more balanced approach to marriage involving companionate values. Transnational marriage can be productively examined alongside other studies of transnational kinship to reassess what is known about social relations in late capitalism more broadly. For citizens of the global South, even the most intimate relationships are being stretched to their limits by economic constraints that push loved ones into global migration.

If the “everyday ruptures” (Coe et al. 2011) of migration inhibit emotional closeness, romance, and physical intimacy especially, then are new possibilities for more companionate marriages created by reunification? Chapter 6 follows one couple as they adjust to a new phase of their married life after the wife and daughter move to Italy to join the migrant husband. When life abroad proves to be lonely and expensive for migrants’ wives, returning to Senegal is not always an easy option. Though this transition from transnational marriage to cohabitation often is emotionally and financially difficult for couples, it can open new avenues for emotional intimacy and sharing between partners as they find themselves located on the same side of the transnational divide.

Most transnational couples insist that their situation is not idyllic. Many migrant men find that their wives at home represent a source of stress rather than support. Jaabaru immigré quickly discover that marriage to a migrant fails to live up to expectations for financial stability, and instead creates other sources of tension and struggle in their lives. The men and women in the study spoke of numerous problems—from loneliness and sexual frustration to in-law and co-wife drama, to miscommunication and misunderstanding. The chapters that follow, however, describe how Senegalese men and women continue to find themselves compelled to enter into transnational marriages despite these difficulties, because—as it is for members of developing nations worldwide—creating ties that cross international borders is a new imperative of social life in neoliberal, transnational Senegal.