Marriage Without Borders. Dinah Hannaford
class terms himself, Riccio described a class-based division between returning migrants of rural origin displaying and exaggerating their newfound wealth, and educated, (middle class) non-migrant men with more limited access to cash and consumer goods. Non-migrant men such as Momar and Lamine, who live in middle-class urban neighborhoods and consider themselves above their rural counterparts, accuse these migrants of rural origin—or “modou modou,” as they are commonly called—of ostentatious display. They see modou modous’ vulgar spending and peacocking as a weapon against their feelings of social inadequacy vis-à-vis their more elite and educated urban counterparts.14
What this phenomenon reveals is a complicated rupture in Senegalese understandings of social class. Whereas the urban, educated, and French-speaking15 elite were—and to some extent still are—considered cosmopolitan, Senegal’s contemporary “culture of migration” increases the standing of even the least-educated rural migrant to levels that make urban, educated non-migrants very uncomfortable.
In recent years, modou modou as a category has expanded as more middle-class and educated men turn to migration. Though modou modou was the shorthand for rural-born migrants who do manual labor abroad, the term has widened to encompass a range of different migratory identities and trajectories. With few viable economic opportunities in Senegal, urban, educated men are taking their chances on migration and moving abroad to do the same types of work as uneducated rural men do—including ambulant selling and factory work. Simultaneously, some young rural men with limited education who migrate to Europe and the United States as modou modous are continuing their education, even getting university degrees and moving into professional jobs (see Hannaford 2008). As is the case in many stories of migration, class categories in the host country often do not correspond with class categories in the community of origin.16
The lines between men of rural origin with little education and urban-born men from middle-class families are eroding when it comes to migration. Both aspire to leave Senegal; both have goals of achieving masculine high status by providing for their families, marrying, and establishing a reputation in Senegal as pious, financially successful, and generous men. The term “immigré” is starting to eclipse the term “modou-modou” and its class-bound associations. Both the restaurant owner in Normandy and the key chain vendor in Milan fit into the category of immigré. Consequently, their wives all could be considered “jaabaru immigré,” with the accompanying expectations among non-migrants in Senegal about their access to wealth.
Yet, because so many of Senegal’s migrants still hail from rural regions, important distinctions and class-based divisions do remain, and these significantly impact the experience of transnational marriages between migrants of rural origin and urban women. Fatou Binetou Dial in her study of marriage in Senegal observed that most marriage matches are made in light of class and even neighborhood homogamy; spouses usually have grown up near one another and their families have similar class backgrounds. When a mismatch occurs, it has traditionally been the husband practicing hypogamy, or marrying a woman of a lower class (Dial 2008: 70). Antoine et al. in 1995 also noted that, for generations, Dakar-based women had rarely married men from outside of Dakar (1995: 67). In recent years, however, it has become increasingly common for middle-class, Dakaroise women to marry rural men of lower-class origin when they are overseas migrants (see M. Tall 2002, Riccio 2005).
The perception among many marriageable women and their families is that purely by virtue of being a migrant, a suitor is in a better position to provide for his wife than a non-migrant, regardless of his education or upbringing. Non-migrant middle-class men find it hard to compete on the marriage market and that is a large part of why they, too, are turning to menial labor overseas. Migrants—almost regardless of their rural/urban origin, caste, pre-migratory class status, or actual job/migration status overseas—find themselves in a position to marry Senegalese women who might not even have looked in their direction before they became migrants.
That international migrants expand their opportunities for marriage is in no way a purely Senegalese phenomenon. Other studies in vastly different places have shown this type of hypergamy due to migration; otherwise ineligible spousal candidates become marriageable because of their location in the diaspora.17 Thai’s study of Vietnamese brides and migrant grooms illustrates how a Vietnamese woman might marry an undereducated man or a man from a less respectable family because his location in the diaspora elevates his marriageability (Thai 2005, 2008).18 In both the Vietnamese and the Senegalese cases, women and their families are making new choices about marriage and class due to the pervasive cultural influence of migration.
Senegalese transnational marriages are distinctive from those in Thai’s and other studies of marriage migration, however, because women who marry migrants do not themselves migrate. Wives of migrants acquire status and social personhood through attachment to men who are mobile, rather than through mobility for themselves. This fact underscores two key features of Senegal’s culture of migration. It shows that the imagined topos of the West is so powerfully associated with wealth and power that mere attachment to it through marriage or blood relations imbues status and power, and it shows just how vaguely the Senegalese understand what actually goes on abroad. Status and social personhood can result from association with any Senegalese migrant living abroad—be he a university student on the path towards a career in accounting or a clandestine migrant who is hawking umbrellas and dodging police. These dual realities—the dependence on association with the world overseas for social prestige and the persistent ignorance of the realities of life abroad—make up the core irony of Senegal’s culture of migration.
Class and Employment: “My Husband’s Job is Immigré”
A migrant’s exact employment overseas and his legal immigration status usually are of little importance to wives and their families in the negotiations for marriage. In fact, of the 51 nonmigrant women I interviewed who had married migrants, roughly a third had no idea what their husband did for work. When I asked the question, “What is your husband’s work?” several interviewees answered, “immigré” or “mingi extérieur” (“he’s abroad”). As class becomes further dissociated from the means of production, imagined possibilities abroad make the details of employment seem inconsequential to those contemplating marriage to a migrant. Being overseas is in itself a profession, as far as many Senegalese are concerned and thus immigrés have established their own class category.
In Lamine Mbengue’s film Toubab Dou Woujj (“White Women Aren’t Polygamous”) one scene in particular hits upon this concept of the immigré as a social class/profession. In the film, a Senegalese migrant’s French wife discovers her husband is polygamous and decides to move to Senegal and live alongside her co-wives. The protagonist protests and says he must return to France, “What about my job in France?” She responds, “What job?” and reminds him that he never worked when they lived in France. He says, “Yes, but for the people here, being in Europe means having a job.” The man’s identity and status—his belonging to a certain class of men—are wrapped up not in an actual career, not in access to the means of production or even in wages, but in his residence overseas.
Migrant suitors can benefit from being lumped into an amorphous immigré professional category and most keep the details of their overseas lives vague when pursuing a potential wife, as the 16 of 51 wives who have no knowledge of their husbands’ job suggest. A Senegalese factory worker I interviewed in Northern Italy in 2011 rebuffed my question about whether he had explained the realities of life in Italy to his new wife before he married her, claiming the details of his everyday life abroad were irrelevant. “She’s marrying me, not Italy,” he said sharply. Kane (2011: 185) notes that Senegalese migrants in the United States who pretend to be wealthy while courting their wives in Senegal fear bringing their wives abroad lest the wives should ask for a divorce or no longer be “good wives” upon seeing their husbands’ humble conditions.
Many migrant suitors in fact themselves play into the assumptions made about their wealth as migrants by performing the habitus (Bourdieu 1984) of their new social class while visiting Senegal. The stereotype among non-migrants in Dakar of migrants home on vacation and on the prowl includes wearing sunglasses