Marriage Without Borders. Dinah Hannaford
(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 and U.S. embassy officials stationed in Senegal tell humorous anecdotes among themselves about immigration fraud attempts that happen in their consular offices in Dakar. Though they believe—and express repeatedly in information sessions to aspirant Senegalese emigrants—that the path to a visa is very straightforward, they see countless examples of would-be migrants trying to game the system. Exaggerations, overstatements, and outright lies are remembered vividly, particularly when they border on the fantastic. Consular officers in the U.S. Embassy in Dakar are trained to ask pointed and unexpected questions to catch these tall tales. One consular officer told me about the man who claimed to be a medical student in his last year of school. The officer asked him to tell her how many bones were in the human body. After a long, nervous pause, the man replied, “Three.”
The same consular officer recounted the episode of another group who claimed to be a dance troupe, applying for a visa with a famous Senegalese musician to accompany him on his U.S. tour. This type of fraud is common, she said, and often half of the “band” or “backup dancers” are merely friends or paying clients of the headliner and his staff who will disappear in the United States immediately upon arrival and remain in country after their artistic visa expires. The officer asked this alleged dance troupe to perform something for her right there in the consular section of the Embassy. The group looked stunned and, as the officer recounts, they gave a half-hearted attempt at uncoordinated dance movements, bumping into one another and generally looking like a sloppy mess. Needless to say, their visas were denied.25
Another form of fraud that embassy officials are trained to spot is marriage fraud. As most destination countries of Senegalese migration have some type of spousal reunification program, and because marrying a national of a given country is a simpler path to access to that country than most, marriage seems like an effective means to migration. While in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, I once overheard a particularly uncomfortable visa interview for a young American woman and her Senegalese fiancé. The consular officer asked the Senegalese half of the couple questions including, “What do you like about each other? What is her mother’s name? Are you marrying her just to migrate?” while the American woman sat and fumed.
A U.S. embassy employee told me that the most common kind of marriage fraud that she sees is cases between Senegalese men and women. Someone wishing to migrate pays an agent to find a visa applicant who has a good chance of getting a visa. The agent will create false marriage documents, even staging wedding photos, and pay a fee to the viable visa candidate to go along with the ruse and include the customer in his or her visa application as a spouse. This consular officer said that sometimes she sees a stack of different applications in which the wedding date is the same and the wedding guests in the pictures are the same people in the same clothes for a series of supposedly unrelated marriages. Because marriage fraud is so common, the United States has a policy of crosschecking information about marriage dates with previous records. If an applicant has previously applied for a visa and included different information—for example applying in 2007 and saying he or she was unmarried, then applying again in 2011 and including a marriage license that states that he or she has been married since 2004—then the application immediately is rejected as fraudulent.