“ Que Dieu facilite l’aventure! ”. Ivorian women confronting border regulations and intimate relationships on European adventures

Introduction

“Of ladies, cavaliers, of arms and love,

Their courtesies, their bold exploits, I sing,

When over Afric’s sea the Moor did move,

On France's realm such ruin vast to bring;

While they the youthful ire and fury strove

Of Agramant to follow, boastful King,

That of Trojano he’d revenge the doom,

On Charlemain, the Emperor of Rome.”

Translation was done by Temple Henry Croker & William Huggins for their edition printed in London 1757. It is taken from Canto I, Ottava 1.

A New Year’s feast

As we sat at the table, waiting for other guests to arrive, Bradamante spread forth her hands, held open. She said, “I am so happy that we can finally sit at this table to celebrate. Today my heart is filled with joy. Let me be thankful to God”. “Amin!” recited Marfise and the other girls, who were slowly approaching the living room to find their place on the sofa next to their husbands and children. The women had all dressed finely for the celebration. Those who had been helping prepare the food in the morning had changed their outfits and appeared now in elegant long dresses, a touch of make-up and fashionable hairstyles. Only a portion of the men wore traditional clothes or ceremonial suits; some were still wearing flip-flops and more comfortable sportswear. Yet the children, like their mothers, were all in nice attire. In his new suit, little Astolphe ran to his mother Bradamante, who took him on her lap and continued: “I am thankful to God for being able to gather with my friends and celebrate the new year. Let it be a joyful year for all of us.” “Amin!”, this time I was joining the choir. Some of the other guests giggled at me: “Il a dit ‘Amin!’” “May God help us and our children to have a peaceful and joyful life.” “Amin!” “May He provide us with health and friendship.” “Amin!” “I am really overflowing with joy, wallahi billah!” Other guests laughed slightly and tenderly at the impossibility of Bradamante containing her feelings. Then she said, “Que Dieu facilite l’aventure à nous tous! [May God ease the adventure for all of us!]” “Amin!” This final “Amin” was pronounced much louder than before by the whole company and broke later into sincere laughter that filled the room with a wistful tone of friendship and conviviality. It was the sign for the feast to begin.

It was the first of January 2022, and a family party was taking place in a Parisian suburb in the apartment where Bradamante had recently moved in with her husband Rogier and their son Astolphe. It was also a chance for me, Bradamante, Marfise and Alcyne to meet again after more than 2 years. Two nights before, I also had a friendly rendezvous with Angélique, another Ivorian woman I had known as an asylum seeker upon her arrival to Italy. This article is based on 3 years of work carried out in housing projects for asylum seekers in northeastern Italy between 2017 and 2020 and on interviews and fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022 occasionally accompanying Ivorian women that had been former beneficiaries.

My relationship with my interlocutors, which began within the institutional framework of the housing project where I served as a social worker, was initially shaped by inequalities of privilege and power due to my status as a White, middle-class Italian man. Over time, as my interlocutors achieved stable working and family lives and obtained long-term residence permits, our relationships became less hierarchical. They participated in this inquiry as a form of reciprocity for the trust and enduring friendship we developed. Issues of gender and age have been pivotal in the relationships we built, as will emerge in the ethnographic material presented in this article.

My interlocutors were informed of my research scope during the interviews and agreed to participate in my inquiry anonymously. The stories of Bradamante, Marfise, Alcyne and Angélique vividly capture the convoluted image of a recent gender trend in Ivorian migration to Europe: a rapid increase of women arriving in Italy as asylum seekers from 8% of all Ivorian nationals in 2015 to 46% in 2019 (IOM, 2020). Moreover, their four life stories exemplify different situations in which the intimate dimension of migration intertwines with the political dynamics of border crossing. While media and humanitarian discourses are most likely to frame this phenomenon as a recent feature of the ongoing “migration crisis” in Europe, I reject the crisis narrative, in line with critical border scholarship that interprets irregular migration to Europe as the emergence of a new racialized working class in the Global South and a direct effect of the growing inequality in the global economic and political order (Balibar, 2001; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; De Genova, 2016; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Mezzadra, 2001). Against this backdrop, asylum politics have become a major mechanism of the border regime restricting applicant mobility, forcing them into containment in, most likely, peripheral hosting facilities to replenish the ranks of the low-skilled labour force. (Astolfo and Boano, 2020; Tazzioli, 2020; Vacchiano, 2018). It is precisely within the intricate bureaucracy of the asylum system that my interlocutors first encountered the European border regime. Particularly significant to their life stories is the containment imposed by the Dublin III Regulation, which assigns responsibility for processing potential asylum applications to the European Member State where irregular migrants were first identified (Regulation EU 604/2013, Art.13). This regulation notably conflicted with my interlocutors’ plans to move to Paris after entering Europe through Italian territory.

Examining the border regime, I adopt a phenomenological perspective, highlighting how migrant subjectivities come into being through continuous confrontation with the border, being forced into a “habitus of migrancy” (Pina-Cabral, 2022). Moreover, migrant bodies are significantly impacted by the border regime, as the human body is constituted in intersubjectivity with the environment and the institutions that define it (Harvey, 1998). In this sense, border mechanisms are embodied by migrants who are “forced to be border” (Khosravi, 2010: 99). Diving into the lived experiences of my interlocutors, I note how intimacy is the dimension where the disciplining and stigmatizing forces of the border regime are confronted.

My focus on life stories builds upon a large scholarship that highlights how subjective identities emerge from practices and discourses adopted in the everyday life (Herzfeld, 1997; Hoad, 2007; Lowe, 2015). On this strain, scholars have observed how intimacy is constituted in the context of growing inequality between the Global South and industrialized countries (Padilla et al., 2007; Simoni 2015). African women assumed a leading role in this scholarship, shedding new light on how relationships with persons, communities and spaces are established and maintained through forms of affective labour carried out with children and infants, such as fostering and parenting, or with intimate relationships established with spouses and other possible partners (Cole, 2010; Cole and Groes, 2016; Cole and Thomas, 2009). Poignantly, unlike these works, which focus on African women seeking relationships with European and White men, my interlocutors deliberately engaged in diverse forms of intimacy with a broader range of partners, predominantly African, Afrodescendent, or Black men, as a matter of personal choice. This serves as a powerful starting point to address a gap in the literature and to offer new insights into intimacy in the context of African migration to Europe. Insisting on the intimate dimension, in order to look on how subjectivities and individual identities emerge among “less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center” (Lowe, 2015: 19), I will focus on affective labour. By doing that, I acknowledge the feminist critique (Harding and Hintikka, 1983; Smith, 1987) that pointed out the “invisible labour” traditionally carried out by women as a form of “labor that produces or manipulates affects” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108) with the aim of forging “social networks, forms of community, biopower” (Hardt, 1999: 96). Additionally, a focus on intimacy and affective labour in the migration of Ivorian Women poignantly challenges the traditionally male-led topos of the adventure (Bredeloup, 2008, 2014; Sarró, 2009).

As in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the duality between “ladies” and “cavaliers”, “arms” and “love”, “courtesies” and “bold exploits” are reflected in my interlocutors’ struggle for mobility as they contrast the mechanisms and regulation of the border regime by resorting to affective labour. Specifically, I analyse how the exploits of overcoming border mechanisms are blended together with experiences of love, family planning and intimacy. In a tribute to Ariosto’s epic poem, I let myself be inspired by the names of its main characters to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors. Ultimately, the women whose vicissitudes I hereby recount, like Ariosto’s heroines, embarked on adventures “Of ladies, cavaliers, of arms and love,” creating and designing relationships to persons, communities and places and establishing new means of belonging.

Starting a new life on the Parisian periphery

La fête

The train finally approached a small village just outside Paris, and Marfise guided me to Bradamante’s apartment where the New Year’s feast would take place. I could really feel the thrill in Marfise’s voice as she encouraged me to step through the threshold of the living room where Bradamante and Alcyne were sitting and doing their hair. It had been more than 2 years since we had met in person, and the two women could not contain their excitement, nor could I. They presented me to little Morgane, Alcyne’s newborn baby, the fourth of her children but the firstborn in France. I asked Bradamante if the little boy, the youngest of the children I had seen in the apartment, was Astolphe, the baby boy I had previously seen only in video calls. She nodded and finally introduced me to her husband, Rogier, the same “tall and too slim” man she used to visit in Padua on the weekends when she was still in the programme. There were another two women and two more children in the apartment, family friends who had come to celebrate. From the fragmentary conversation I had with other guests, most of the families in the room shared a common past as asylum seekers in Italy.

More guests were expected, yet the food was ready in the kitchen. It was time for the women who had prepared the food to get ready for the celebration. Bradamante was sitting in a chair while Alcyne braided her hair into a new hairstyle, just like the old days when I visited them in the apartment project. We spent some minutes informing each other about respective families and friends they had known in Italy. “I met Angélique 2 days ago,” I said. They both giggled. “Elle est devenue Sage, quoi ?” asked Alcyne. She then pulled her right hand close to her temple, spinning it to emphasize the mental process of “becoming wise”, of “making up one’s mind”. Bradamante just continued smiling. There was no blame nor malice in their behaviour, and it was not meant to offend, to be displeasing to Angélique or to make jokes about her. It was the act of acknowledging her identity, her personhood and her capacity and skills. Both Alcyne and Bradamante were happy to know that she was actually doing rather well in her new life with Médard as a converted-to-Islam married woman with her own beauty salon in Château Rouge.

Meanwhile, another couple had arrived, Zerbin and Isabelle. The TV was playing videos from an Ivorian YouTube channel. After a while an amicable quarrel started between Bradamante and Marfise about the lyrics of a song in Dyula. Bradamante involved me in the argument: “What do you think Gianmarco? The lady is singing about the fact that she will have a thing with her friend’s husband just because she has a crush on him. She is not even questioning if that’s good or bad!” “That’s not true!” replied Marfise, slightly embarrassed. “She just said that life is mean because you find yourself in these kinds of situations, and it is hard to work it out.” The conversation went on in Dyula, and I could not understand. The two friends were laughing most of the time. Rogier was looking at his phone, sitting in a corner of the room. He looked a little bored. He was still in a sporty outfit and barefoot, a contrasting image against the elegance of Zerbin, who was wearing a black suit and a pair of shiny leather shoes. “I can’t really say,” I replied to the discussants who were still waiting for me to comment. “I know too little about her situation to judge. Before talking about betrayal, it would have been better to have a full picture of the situation,” I replied, attempting to keep my verdict diplomatic. The girls laughed, and the men nodded. Bradamante started presenting her arguments to me but Alcyne, the eldest among us, pulled my arm towards her: “Just leave it,” she said. She was shaking her head gently and smiling while combing Morgane’s little head and separating her hair into a tuft bonded with colourful elastic bands. “They are just arguing about musicians. The singer is Bradamante’s favourite, and Marfise has another one.” The girls were laughing. I then helped Alcyne do her baby’s hair. As I also wore long hair when I was younger, I could swiftly set the bands around the tufts of hair. Alcyne was impressed, and she called the attention of the other girls. “Gianmarco is a fast learner. He was just observing, and now he is already doing it like a skilled mother!”

All the women in the living room looked impressed. Marfise then started debating something with Zerbin, the man in the black suit who had just arrived. His wife Isabelle had a very modest and silent attitude. She wore a beautiful handmade cotton wax dress that went down to her ankles with a colourful floral pattern, a black headcap and pearl earrings. She barely spoke a word to me. Isabelle did not take part in the quarrel between her husband and Marfise, nor did she look very interested. Every now and then she would just make faces, showing her appreciation or disagreement. Her attitude was very different from those of the other women in the house, but I cannot by any means argue that she seemed oppressed or silenced by Zerbin’s presence in the room. Rather, she appeared to feel slightly superior to that conversation. From her facial expression, I read something like: “Who knows who of you is right—probably none of you, let’s see.” At that point, I asked Alcyne to translate, and she told me that Marfise was saying that men should learn all kinds of housework just in case their women, for any reason, were not able to do it. Zerbin was disagreeing. He was of another opinion: “Men should work outside the house and bring in money. That’s it!”

I looked around, and I realized that all the Ivorian women I have known since they arrived in Italy unaccompanied were now married or formally engaged. All of them had also gone through at least one pregnancy in Europe. Alcyne got married after asylum had been granted her. Perhaps her husband had been in search of a way to stay in Europe legally or to settle down in France. I reject the idea that these people were married solely for political purposes. On the contrary, marriages and intimate relationships in general are embedded in affectivity and feelings that both condition and are conditioned by power relations (Simoni, 2015). Against this backdrop, family life and marriage appear in my fieldwork as a pivotal part of the migrants’ identity and personhood for crafting new means of belonging to kinship and transnational communities (Cole and Groes, 2016).

Additionally, I want to point out that by establishing, disbanding and manipulating intimate relationships through affective labour, the four Ivorian women I have been accompanying were able to find their adventurous way across border mechanisms and social compromises to deploy their family plans together with their capacity to overcome and redesign borders. Most of them did that alone, relying only on themselves, while encountering several—sometimes even multiple—intimate partners to accompany them on this adventure. Others, like Marfise, embarked on the adventure as part of a family project.

Alcyne already had refugee status when she decided to become pregnant again on her way to France. The pregnancy most definitely facilitated the legal position of the father of the child in France—he was also an asylum seeker but with an Italian residence permit not valid abroad. Nonetheless, the birth of Morgane fulfilled the idea that Alcyne had of herself: she could probably not find stability amid the multiple intimate relationships that she had had in Italy. Now, she could finally see herself as a mother of four, a working woman aiming to bring her three adolescent children to study in Paris and, simultaneously, making “choices for their future children and for their children’s future” (Shandy, 2008: 822). Alcyne’s ability to manage together border mechanisms and intimate networks as a wife and as a mother made it possible to readjust entire “kin groups and households, ethnic or migrant community associations, and states” (Feldman-Savelsberg, 2016: 55) to her own favour.

Angélique, the enfant terrible of the apartment project, finally also “ensnared” a husband. Yes, it is true, she needed a document to normalize her situation in France, but she also would feel fulfilled with Médard at her side, a man who satisfies her desires and aspirations, a man whom she has carefully chosen after a handful of intimate experiences that allowed her to pick “the right one.” Before marrying her Black, French high-earning Muslim husband, Angélique also managed to appropriate mechanisms of the border regime (Scheel, 2018), initially starting a family reunification request but later abandoning it, relegating her past affair to the peripheral reception facilities for asylum seekers in Southern Italy. Unlike other colleagues who have argued that nation states can turn into the “allies” of European spouses in binational marriages between European and African citizens (Groes, 2016: 180), in the experiences of my interlocutors, paradoxically, by using the border control mechanisms, African women were able to make them work to their benefit through use of their biopower while establishing a relationship with African husbands through affective labour.

Bradamante got pregnant and gave birth to her son Astolphe before receiving her documents. The birth of Astolphe enabled her to fortify her relationship with her partner Rogier in Padua, allowing him to move to Paris as well. Unlike Alcyne, Bradamante lacked the stability provided by a residence permit for political asylum, as well as a stable economic activity. She relied solely on Rogier and her informal work as a tradeswoman. For her, crossing the French-Italian border, enabling her husband to challenge Dublin III on the grounds of her vulnerability, was also a way of securing stability in both economy and affects. When I met her in their new house, Bradamante was planning to travel to Africa for the summer holidays. There, she will visit her birth family and eventually start planning to bring another of her children to France, perhaps until the end of compulsory school age, perhaps longer. As a husband, Rogier will help her financially, fulfilling their family plan.

Marfise actually moved to France after having her second son Rodomont, following her husband Ferragut and his wish for a better salary after having lived in various cities and country villages in Italy. They were both rewarded with refugee status over the years, and their choice to move to France was entirely economically driven. Nonetheless, their asylum claim leveraged the European border and asylum regimes to escape the persecution carried out Marfise’s kin, who opposed their marriage. Ultimately, they decided to cross into France, likely drawn by the allure of Paris, the archetypal destination for all benguistes from the suburbs of Abidjan (Newell, 2005).

The amusing tiff between Marfise and Zerbin did not end quickly: “My neighbours are a French married couple, and they are doing all kinds of housework together,” Marfise said. “They both have a job?” I asked. “Yes, they do!” “What about you?” asked Zerbin to Marfise. “Of course I do! That is why I wish my husband would also share with me responsibilities at home and help me with the house care.” “Then, I guess, you’re completely right!” I dared to say. “Voila, merci!” But Zerbin did not agree. “Monsieur,” I said, “I think that any kind of activity that we do with a little bit of fatigue and not just for ourselves… Well, then I think that it can be considered as work.” “Oui, ça c’est vrai!” replied Zerbin.

Still, I don’t think that he got my point. He was convinced that sharing responsibilities and duties at home is challenging gender rules and that this was the cause for the decline of the institution of marriage in France. In fact, he said shortly after, “In France, people get married as a short-term contract, just for 6 months, 1 year…” We all laughed about that. Somehow, the idea that marriage also resembled a work contract for a (mostly unpaid) life-long invisible job was not new to me. And I guess that I was not the only one to see it that way in that suburban Parisian living room in the late afternoon on the first of January 2022.

Conclusions

In the life stories of the four Ivorian women I presented in this article, the experience of confronting the regulations and mechanisms of the border regime cannot be set apart from the intimate vicissitudes experienced during the various and never-ending phases of the border crossing. I argue that intimacy marks the personhood of the migrant women I have been following, not only situating them in a thick network of circuits of affective and material exchanges that aim to achieve “full personhood” (Groes, 2016: 172), but also acknowledging the effect of the border regime on the migrants’ body and the way it is administratively framed by the nation state. From a phenomenological perspective, the migrant personhood comes into being in relation to a political order that inscribes the migrant’s body into a “habitus of migrancy”, that is, the “denial of legal rights of presence, which regularly confronts migrants in contemporary Europe” (Pina-Cabral, 2022: 86). As I could observe during my work and research, this habitus is continuously shaped intersubjectively around migrants’ bodies, primarily by border and asylum mechanisms that frame them as a workforce for a capitalist and imperialist production economy (Hardt, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2004). However, migrant subjectivities partially adapt and respond to this process, embodying the border within their life stories and personhood, hence “becoming” the border itself (Khosravi, 2010). From a phenomenological perspective, migrant subjectivities emerge as deeply influenced by both border and asylum regulations, as well as by the affective labour they perform to resist containment and exploitation.

The body of the migrant, as a prime support of personhood, is the object of constant transformation which it undergoes on the journey and which is still taking place while a new life is established in Europe (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009; Harvey, 1998; Taliani, 2012; Taliani and Vacchiano, 2006). During this process, the body is marked both physically and symbolically, as I have shown above in the vivid example of pregnancy.

My interlocutors generally frame their migration experience in the narrative topos of an “adventure”, that is, a journey of challenge and formation that, in the best cases, ends with a gain in both material terms and prestige (Bredeloup, 2008, 2014; Kleinman, 2016; Newell, 2005; Sarró, 2009). Nonetheless, while embarking on this adventure, a “magical efficacy” (Newell, 2005: 170) is at play, allowing a denunciation and distinction to be made of the unequal power relations felt between the migrant and the nation state as well as those between the migrant and his/her community (Bredeloup, 2014). The increasing number of women adventurers from Côte d’Ivoire and other West African countries contest the male-only traditional figure of the adventurer (Sarró, 2009: 517). As Jennifer Cole has already pointed out, “Women’s migration and wages reconfigure gendered hierarchies” (Cole, 2014: S86). In this vein, while embarking on “bold exploits”, the women I have been following were able, like Ludovico Ariosto’s heroine, to challenge traditions and gender roles in a continuous “cultural transformation” (An-Na’im and Hammond, 2002; Tamale 2008, 2013; Epprecht, 2010). As in Orlando Furioso, ultimately, there are two narrative threads that tower above others in the narrative stitch of my interlocutors’ adventures: the duality between “ladies” and “cavaliers”, “arms” and “love”, “courtesies” and “bold exploits.” On the one hand, border infrastructures and asylum regulations appear transformed into a dark narrative thread that my interlocutors used parsimoniously to warn about the obstacles they have had to overcome. On the other hand, Ivorian women have been magnanimous in sharing with me stories about intimacy. The self-realization and the socioeconomic acknowledgement the adventurous journey is aimed at is seen as the result of both these narrative threads, a variegated and thick stitch where my interlocutors are able to place themselves, interpreting past trajectories and foreshadowing possible futures.