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

Abstract

This article investigates the migration stories of four Ivorian women who arrived in Europe irregularly. After claiming asylum in Italy, these women managed to cross internal European borders and settle in Paris, where they started new family lives. In the lived experience of these women, their exhausting “adventures” across and against European borders are described through the intimate relationships that they experienced during their journeys. I argue that affective labour carried out through friendship and marital and reproductive care allows migrant women to disrupt the spatial containment enforced by asylum and border regulations. I address migration from a phenomenological perspective that sees intimacy and border mechanisms as powerful forces that shape my interlocutors’ bodies and subjectivities.

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.”

Ludovico Ariosto

Orlando Furioso

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

Alcyne

It was an evening in January 2020, and Alcyne’s voice was trembling with emotion as she told me her asylum application had been accepted. Alcyne had resigned from a Centro di Accoglienza Straordinaria (CAS) ¹ more than a year before. After a long search, she had finally signed a contract of undetermined duration as a caregiver, with full housing and a day off on the weekend, in a small town in Romagna. Through that job, she was able to rent her own apartment, and she could also send more substantial support to her children in Abidjan: two boys and a younger daughter, all in their adolescence.

Alcyne is a woman in her mid-40s from a less privileged neighbourhood in Abidjan, where she previously ran her own business as a hairdresser and tradeswoman. Like my other interlocutors in this article, she arrived in Italy irregularly by sea in early 2017. During her stay in the CAS, I heard rumours that Alcyne was engaging in parallel intimate relationships with three Ivorian men residing in the same region, though in other cities. The rumours were spread from the social service workers as well as from within the Ivorian community. Even if some rumour would maliciously refer to these relationships more as sexual encounters, no moral judgment was actually expressed to slander the public figure of Alcyne. She would herself be ambiguous with me while referring to her relationships with those men, who apparently knew of each other. The term “intimacy” accurately describes these relationships as it blurs friendship, sexual and affective dispositions together. She would refer to these men as “amour”, “copain” or even “fils” when the man was substantially younger. However, Alcyne was able to engage in intimate relationships based on mutual support, disregarding the importance of the actual nature of these encounters. The job as caregiver was offered to Alcyne through a contact of this network, which involved intimate relationships of a varying nature along with informal economic exchanges as observed in a wide array of African social contexts (Cole and Groes, 2016; Cole and Thomas, 2009; Parry and Bloch, 1989; Tamale, 2006). The relationship to the Italian family that hosted her as a caregiver can also be framed within this network of “affective circuits” (Cole and Groes 2016) as Alcyne was able to shape social relationships and the means of belonging to local Italian and transnational Ivorian networks of mutual affective and material support.

As a social operator, I helped Alcyne draft her testimony for the asylum interview with the Commissione Territoriale ² and collect pictures and other evidence that had been sent from Côte d’Ivoire via email and social networks. Before she left the project, we used to meet almost 5 days a week in the house where she and the other girls were hosted, a routine that continued for over two and a half years. Because of this circumstance, she shared with me, sometimes forcedly and at other times willingly, many moments of joy and sorrow, which was why she wanted to meet and inform me about the positive result of her asylum application. This must also be understood as an intimate relationship. As we met in January 2020, she pulled some receipts from the post office from her purse: “I already paid the bills to get the 5-year plastique ³ and the Blue Passport ⁴ ”. We allowed ourselves a high-five and a hug. In that meeting, Alcyne and I were looking for new shapes of the intimacy that was still between us and that continues in her support of my ethnographic study.

We spent the afternoon talking in a mix of malice and wistfulness about the girls that were once hosted in the apartment project with Alcyne until she left in 2019: Bradamante, who had left a couple of months after her, and the “troublemaker” Angélique, who must have left by the end of summer of the same year. We then said goodbye amidst the drizzle of that winter evening.

In summer 2021, Alcyne called me again, saying that she was pregnant and planning to move to France. I felt a little puzzled since she had reached a stable economic situation in Romagna that was also well-acknowledged among the local Ivorian community. She told me she had a new “mari” who was a serious person and that was why she had decided to get pregnant with her fourth child. Later the same year, I decided to pay a visit to Alcyne and Bradamante in Paris to see if it was possible to involve them in my research. Alcyne sounded enthusiastic about the idea of meeting again now that she had started a new life in France:

[11:23, 22/12/2021] Alcyne: Gianmarco! How are you doing? Is everything ok? Yes, we are living here [in Paris] now. Let me know when you arrive, okay? Alright, capo? When you arrive just let us know so that we can see what can we do for the [New Year’s] party, okay? Bradamante and I. Perhaps Bradamante will be busy with her work at the restaurant… Now it’s me who… I’ll be free for sure. Even if I have my newborn baby now! You heard about her, right? Maybe you can come and visit us! We will see once you’ve arrived. Okay. Bisou Bisou Gianmarco. We’ll meet here in a week.

Private WhatsApp audio message. Translated from Italian by Gianmarco.

Bradamante

While I was packing the luggage for my trip to Paris, I got a message from Bradamante:

[19:39, 27/12/2021] Bradamante: Gianmarco, bonsoir! How are you doing? Is everything ok? And your family? Gianmarco you must come to my house. You are invited together with Alcyne and Marfise. Do you remember my friend Marfise? They will all be here for the party, and you also must come, wallahi! You have to come Gianmarco. Astolphe wants to see you and my husband as well. We are waiting for you, okay? You cannot decline.

Private WhatsApp audio message. Translated from French by Gianmarco.

It followed a merry exchange of messages and colourful stickers. Bradamante also arrived in Italy by sea in 2017. She is a woman in her late-30s from the interior of Côte d'Ivoire. Unlike Alcyne, Bradamante prioritizes family life, using her home as a hub for informal trade over seeking full-time work. At the New Year’s party, I would finally get to meet little Astolphe—her two-year-old son—and the mysterious “mari” whom I had never met before—the “tall and too slim” Ivorian man whom she used to visit in Padua, as she declared in the many prefecture forms for weekend leave that she used to fill out when she was still hosted in the apartment project. Luckily, the prefecture did not thoroughly investigate the accuracy of the forms, which required the address, telephone contact, and degree of kinship of the person hosting the asylum seekers during their time away from the project. I had the impression that Bradamante was not merely going to visit her “mari” in Padua, who was not formally married to her, but sometimes she would also travel to other cities to visit her “sœurs”, girlfriends from Côte D’Ivoire who would help buy new attire and manufacture complex hairstyle work. All these activities included informal economic exchanges of make-up, materials for traditional dresses, accessories and merchandise that were embedded in the intimate relationships between Bradamante and her “sœurs” and “mari”. Italian institutions like the local prefecture office would probably not have understood what these activities meant for Bradamante and the “family reasons” that underlaid these circuits of affective support and material goods. As observed above in the case of Alcyne, these networks are of prime importance in configuring social relationships and means of belonging for Ivorian women in Europe. Similar to what Gores observes in the migration of Mozambican women in Portugal and Denmark, “these women’s migratory projects relate to their broader goal of achieving full personhood” (Groes, 2016: 172) within networks of affective and economic exchanges.

Angélique

While preparing for my trip to Paris, I felt a constraint in contacting Angélique. The truth is that Angélique had always been making trouble when she was staying in the CAS. A woman in her early-30s, Angélique is a free-spirited adventurer. In the apartment project, she did not really make problems for my colleagues and I; rather, she had caused issues with her housemates and her multiple intimate partners in the city, men and women alike, because she had to “try it out”. “Why not? It would help also with the documents,” she said once, meaning that a homosexual relationship would probably be helpful in her asylum application. To this end, she had found a girl with a nice summer house in Rimini. Nonetheless, Angélique was not completely satisfied, so she started a spirited love affair with a guy who shared a similar migration experience to her. Her new “mari” was hosted in a CAS project in Calabria. She then asked me to start a family reunification process to recognize him formally as her husband. A week later she changed her mind: she was not willing to live underneath the same roof as him. She just wanted to help him out, as an old journey companion: “C’est juste un ami qui m’a aidé à traverser.” Traverser refers to the life-threatening crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, mostly by dinghy. It constitutes the major turning point on the migration journey marking the entrance to Europe. To celebrate their adventurous partnership, Angélique wanted to help him cross the internal asylum geographies in Italy and take him to Emilia-Romagna, where job opportunities are known to be better than in Calabria. She used to take great delight in sharing with me and her flatmates detailed accounts of her intimate adventures. During my experience as social worker, I realized that it was unusual for all my interlocutors to have a male acquaintance like me, of more or less the same age, who would not (and could not, given his professional role) judge or moralize their sexual and intimate conduct. Letting me know about her affairs was a way for Angélique—and for the other women alike—to display herself as powerful, as a dangerous femme fatale. Besides abuses and vexations that she had suffered in some cases, Angélique could indeed make use of men as she liked for the time it would please her and then dump them once she had lost interest. Establishing intimate relationships with multiple partners was for her a display of power and a way to acquire more affective and material resources through what Groes called “affective exchanges,” that is, “transactions that are at once emotional, social, corporeal and material and in which qualities such as love and desire and obligations are entangled with monetary, consumer and material interests” (Groes, 2016: 173).

After Angélique left the integration programme in summer 2019, we remained in touch and exchanged some messages. She kept me up to date as to her new intimate partners, who were also appearing constantly in her WhatsApp status together with the formula “homme de ma vie”. In summer 2021, Angélique sent me a picture of an echography, letting me know that she was pregnant, clearly happy and proud of this. She also sent pictures of the father-to-be: a White French man full of scars and tattoos and the same age as herself. Sadly, things did not go well, and after a couple of months, another homme de ma vie appeared in her WhatsApp status, this time a Black Muslim man with an elegant and modest attitude. Angélique would go on to marry him and convert to Islam. Her new name is Rachida. She never mentioned the pregnancy again. I do not know what happened, and I never saw a recognizable sign of pregnancy on her body in the pictures she posted on WhatsApp, nor have I asked about that issue since. In spite of all that, she displayed herself as a successful benguiste—an adventurer in Ivorian slang (Bredeloup, 2008; Newell, 2005). From the messages that she sporadically sent me, I understood she had acquired a valid residence permit through her marriage and that she had opened a semi-legal beauty salon in Château Rouge.

After my first few days in Paris, I decided to contact her. I wrote Angélique with a certain compulsion, and she replied immediately and seemed happy to meet. Angélique proposed we have dinner in Châtelet, the very heart of Paris. Our encounter was both touching and discrete at the same time. My attire must have come across as very casual to her: black trousers, very common boots, a close-knit wool sweater and a bomber jacket. She, on the contrary, was dressed extremely elegantly, with long black hair that fell straight down the centre of her back. She had applied gentle hues of make-up to enhance the outline of her eyes and mouth. The scar on her chin was there, appearing a little from underneath the foundation layer as she did even not really care to hide it effectively. She was radiant.

“So… I should call you Rachida now?” “I converted, yes,” she laughed. Her laughter was a mix of embarrassment and sarcasm. “Paris is so beautiful, n’est pas? Did you go to the Eiffel Tower? It’s magnificent. These days, they are lighting it up in blue. It is really amazing.” She led me through the crowd towards a restaurant that she had chosen: an Italian pizzeria to remember the good old days. “I already know what I’ll have: an entrecôte. And an alcohol-free caipirinha.” I wanted a beer, and I asked Angélique if it would upset her. She looked at me and winked, then smiled and moved her head in a manner that appeared to me as “a very Italian gesture”. It was a way to say, with elegance, that she appreciated I had asked her about the beer but that obviously, she had nothing against me having an alcoholic drink that night: I had been given to understand from her gesture that, after all, for better or for worse, she was always the same.

On that occasion, Angélique was presenting herself as a serious and elegant married woman who had started a promising activity in the field of cosmetics. Looking at her, it was evident that Angélique’s body had been constantly shaped and refashioned over the course of her adventure through intimacy and border control. Intimate relationships have been something inscribed onto Angélique’s body and the way she decides to display herself in new attire, accessories and make-up. The marks of her adventurous journey can still be seen, not only in the scar that appears under her make-up but also in the range of accessories that qualify her as a successful benguiste, one who has “monté” (completed the trip), is engaged in “bizness” (legal or illegal activities) to achieve “bluff” (success), as Newell observed when focusing on the consumption of goods and symbolic value of the Ivorian adventure (Newell, 2005: 164-167).

In this framework, pregnancy appears as a visible mark on a woman’s body, having a strong symbolic meaning for both travel companions and border mechanisms. Scholars have already observed how women in migration might play the performative role of a deserving “woman in distress” (Feldman-Savelsberg 2016: 71; See also Huschke, 2014). In the migration experience of the women I have accompanied, pregnancy appears as a compromise that bonded personal ambitions, promises of welfare benefits and sentimental and intimate aspirations together, bestowing a power that allows them to trespass frontiers easily and create new means of belonging. As a matter of fact, Bradamante, Alcyne, Angélique and Marfise all went through pregnancy while facing the bureaucracies and subterfuges of European asylum. Most importantly, pregnancy prevents the execution of the “take back” procedure under Dublin III (Regulation EU 604/2013, Section III), which would result in a forced return to Italy, compelling France to take charge of the woman’s asylum application.

During my rendezvous with Angélique in Paris, I chose not to ask about the pregnancy she had told me about almost 6 months beforehand. It was obvious that it was not carried to term, yet the elegant formality in which she decided to frame our encounter in the Italian restaurant in Châtelet kept me from inquiring into the delicate issue. Nonetheless, we had the chance to laugh together about a couple of episodes from her past. We recalled the time she learned a Burkinabe lover had stolen all her savings on her bank card or the time she dismissed an Italian lover because “he was not good at sex”, telling me, maybe provocatively, that in her opinion, White men do not excel in sexual performance. She finally told me about her new husband, Médard: “I have been very lucky to meet someone who is earning well and, on top of it, has French nationality. I have no problem now staying here. I just started a new life.” Angélique’s new husband was born in Overseas France acquiring French citizenship by birth. Moreover, he is a Black Muslim with a good working contract with a company in the service sector. Médard possesses all the qualities and attributes that make Angélique happy as a woman and as a benguiste and ensures her stability in Paris.

“Is he respectful? Does he treat you well?” “There is no problem at all Gianmarco,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “You really don’t have to worry after me this time,” she smiled. Before we said goodbye, she wanted to take a picture with me in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Châtelet, which was decorated for Christmas and glowing in blue LED lights.

Marfise

On the way to the New Year’s party, I met Marfise at the Gare de l’Est. She had been sent by Bradamante to meet me there and help me reach her new apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Marfise has always been one of the closest “sœur” in Bradamante’s life, and I had met her with her husband Ferragut and their son Marsil once in Italy, at one of Bradamante’s monumental birthday parties. Yet with a face mask on and in a hurry to catch the right train, I had not recognized her that morning at the Gare de l’Est. Only later, as she sat on the train breathing heavily to recover from the race with Marsil and his younger brother, Rodomont, did we lift our face masks and recognize each other. “Madame,” I asked. “You were also living in Italy, right?” She smiled: “Yes, indeed. I used to live in… what was the name of the city? Lecce!” “Ah ok! So, you were not living in Emilia.” “Yes, I was, as I was reunited with my husband.” Marfise then started enumerating all the vicissitudes she went through to put all the pieces of her family together: first, Marfise and her husband Ferragut started a family reunification process, and then they started travelling within Italy in order to find a suitable place to form a family. Ultimately, Marfise told me that it was Ferragut who decided to move to France after many years spent in Italy as a refugee and she just decided to follow him: “C’est mon mari qui é venu en France pour travailler, donc je l’ai suit.” While recounting her family’s journey, she named all the cities where they have lived: Lecce, Cagliari, Perugia, Ferrara. It seemed that Marfise and her husband had fully experienced Italy, from the bootheel up to the Po Valley.

I later found out that Marfise and Ferragut had begun their relationship in Côte d’Ivoire, fleeing her family’s pressure for a forced marriage. Their story reveals a migration pattern where intimacy intersects with border and asylum regimes on different levels. They crossed Europe’s external border—a near-impregnable barrier for the spouses’ families, which were left behind in Côte d’Ivoire—seeking emancipation though risking their lives on a perilous journey. However, European internal border regulations became also an impediment for them: while the difficult parts of the journey in Africa were not directly mentioned in Marfise’s account, the exhausting temporalities and the curtailment of spatial mobility enforced by the European asylum system (Tazzioli, 2018) became daring exploits in the story Marfise shared with me, which involved her undergoing the family reunification process, experiencing fragmented mobility within Italy, and ultimately moving to Paris coinciding with the birth of her second child, Rodomont.

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.