Famiglie a distanza, distanze nelle famiglie: Frontiere e legami affettivi tra i migranti eritrei
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3803
Questo articolo indaga il modo in cui i regimi di mobilità e le specificità dei Paesi di destinazione contribuiscono a rimodellare i legami familiari transnazionali all’interno della diaspora eritrea. Quest’ultima costituisce una comunità geograficamente dispersa, ma unita da forme di solidarietà, sentimenti di appartenenza e relazioni parentali. Sulla base di un’etnografia multi-situata, piuttosto che focalizzarsi sui rapporti tra i migranti e il contesto di origine, il lavoro esplora i legami parentali tra migranti che non vivono nello stesso Paese (ossia Etiopia, Italia, Regno Unito, Svezia). L’analisi delle pratiche matrimoniali e di genitorialità e delle relazioni tra coniugi e fratelli consente di fare luce sulle esperienze di famiglia vissute da soggetti che si trovano in vari ruoli familiari, con obblighi morali talvolta in contrasto tra loro e in posizioni disuguali rispetto ai regimi di frontiera. L’obiettivo è mostrare come, oltre alla distanza geografica, le limitazioni e le opportunità migratorie e lavorative svolgano un ruolo fondamentale nel plasmare le relazioni familiari dei migranti, e come questi ultimi navighino questo scenario, in un intreccio tra lontananza e vicinanza, affetti e inadeguatezza. Concettualizzando i legami familiari non come “dati” ma come “fatti”, questo studio analizza le forme di soggettività che emergono nell’intreccio tra strutture sociali e desideri.
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Aurora Massa
Anuac
Families at a distance, distances within families: Borders and emotional bonds among migrants from Eritrea
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
9
Thematic section: Kinship ties on the move
2020-07-29
2019-06-25
2020-07-29
2020-07-29
135-157
1
Aurora Massa
2020/07/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3803
135
Università di Napoli “L'Orientale”, Italy
2239-625X
1
en
157
Families at a distance, distances within families: Borders and emotional bonds among migrants from Eritrea
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/3803/3819
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                                           2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 135-157




Families at a distance, distances within families
Borders and emotional bonds among migrants from Eritrea
Aurora MASSA
Università di Napoli “L'Orientale”




ABSTRACT: This article investigates how mobility regimes and destination countries
contribute to reshaping transnational family ties among refugees from Eritrea. Due to
protracted political violence in the country, Eritreans are a geographically dispersed
community, bonded together by solidarities, feelings of belonging and kinship
relationships. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, this article sheds light on migrant
family members living in different countries (Ethiopia, Italy, UK, Sweden), rather than
on the relationships between migrants and their family members back home. By
focusing on three case-studies and including vertical and horizontal family ties, it
explores marriage forms, practices of parenthood and relationships among spouses and
siblings, to show the phenomenological experience of family by refugees who find
themselves in various family roles, with contrasting moral obligations and in unequal
positions with respect to border regimes. The aim is to show how policy and labour
constraints play a role in moulding migrants’ family relationships, in addition to the
geographical distance, and how people navigate this scenario through confronting
dilemmas and taking decisions. While conceptualizing family ties not as “given” but as
“made”, this study analyses the forms of subjectivities which emerge in the inter-
connections between social structures and desires.

KEYWORDS: ERITREAN REFUGEES; TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES; REGIMES OF MOBILITY; MORAL OBLIGATION;
MULTI-SITED ETHNOGRAPHY.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Aurora Massa
Families at a distance, distances within families: Borders and emotional bonds among migrants
from Eritrea
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 135-157.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3803
136                                                                         AURORA MASSA




   “My wife and daughter have arrived, thank you!”1. With these words and
with a smile Samuel2 entered the Rome office of Associazione Libertà (The
Freedom Association) where I was conducting my first days of ethnography
in June 2017. Samuel is an Eritrean refugee and Associazione Libertà had
been supporting him through the family reunification process. I met him a
couple of months later in a cafe in the historical Eritrean neighbourhood in
Rome, near the main railway station. He showed me pictures of the
welcoming party organized for them, and of their journeys to Milan to meet
their relatives. However, he stunned me when I asked how their life in Italy
was going: “They are not here, they live in France”, he replied. He explained
to me that in Italy he could not offer them much, since he did not have a
regular job and lived in a squatted building, whereas in France they could
rely on a better reception system and family networks. In the following
months of fieldwork, I realized that this arrangement is not unusual. Many
Eritrean family reunifications I encountered did not lead to the reunion of a
family group but were followed by new departures and separations.
Interestingly, these separations did not necessarily cause (nor are caused by)
a rupture of affective ties but rather bring about their reconfiguration.
Putting a distance between himself and his wife and daughter, Samuel had
not escaped his roles as father and husband but instead reinterpreted them
from afar. Through the family reunification process, he was able to save
them from life in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, bringing them to Europe and
allowing them to reach France where they expected life would be better than
in Italy.
   This article explores the ways in which refugees from Eritrea rearrange
family ties at a distance in the context of the limitations imposed by the
current “regimes of mobility” (Glick Schiller, Salazar 2013), and according to
the degree of desirability of the different destination countries. These
degrees of desirability are based on both the structural characteristics of
each country (reception systems, job opportunities, etc.), and migratory
imaginaries. The aim is to show, on the one hand, how policy and labour
constraints and opportunities play a role in moulding migrants’ family


1. I am grateful to all my research participants for sharing with me the intimacy of their
family lives; to the three anonymous reviewers for their inspiring suggestions that help me
in making my argument clearer; and to Lorenzo D’Orsi for his insightful comments.
2. Personal names, biographical details and names of associations have been changed to
ensure anonymity.


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FAMILIES AT A DISTANCE, DISTANCES WITHIN FAMILIES                                      137


relationships, in addition to the geographical distance, and on the other how
people navigate this scenario through making choices, confronting dilemmas
and taking action, thus reshaping their experiences of family. In doing so,
this paper breaks away from a consideration of the modern Western middle-
class model of the nuclear family as universal. Rather, it looks at the wider
webs of relatedness and kinship, solidarities and responsibilities, and
feelings and moralities that make “family” a fluid entity, re-adapted across
spaces, times and contingencies (Carsten 2004; Declich in this issue).
   The ethnographic material presented here sheds light on both vertical and
horizontal relationships, namely among spouses, children and parents, and
between siblings – all of them part of what my interlocutors consider as
sidra (family in Tigrinya, the mother tongue of my research participants).
Although marriage forms, practices of parenthood and relationships among
spouses and siblings could be single topics in themselves, I have included
them all in my analysis in order to comprehend the multiple and contrasting
implications that the obstacles to mobility and the hierarchies of destination
countries have in a variety of long-distance family ties. This broad approach
is also useful for looking at the phenomenological experience of refugees
who, in the course of their migratory trajectory, can find themselves in
different roles (for example being spouse and sibling) and in different
positions in respect to border regimes. While most investigations into long-
distance family ties focus on the relationships between migrants and family
members back home, this article chooses a different perspective by
considering migrant family members who do not live in the same country.
Based on a multi-sited ethnography which I conducted over the last 7 years,
it brings together Eritrean refugees who are located in different countries of
transit or (at least preliminary) arrival, namely Ethiopia, Italy, Sweden and
the UK.
   Eritrean migrants represent a privileged case study, as they are geographically
very dispersed. Since 2001, due to the ruling regime’s authoritarianism
(Hepner, O’Kane 2009), half a million Eritreans have fled, going to Sudan
and Ethiopia, but also to Europe, North America, the Middle and Far East.
These migratory flows follow paths well-worn by previous generations of
Eritrean transnational migrants, who had left the country from the 1950s
onwards for political and economic reasons. Due to the current lack of legal
migratory channels from Africa to Europe, contemporary Eritrean migrants
have to adapt to the obstacles they encounter along their journey.
Consequently, their trajectories are rarely linear and family reunifications
are often not a significant determining factor in shaping their migratory
paths.

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138                                                                 AURORA MASSA


   The remainder of this article is organized as it follows. Firstly, it offers a
review of the interdisciplinary debate on transnational families, distance and
inequalities; secondly, it introduces the socio-political configurations of the
cases of Eritrean migration and family ties included in the study. After
presenting in the third section the settings of my ethnography and
discussing my methodology, I then focus on three case studies. The first one
reconstructs the experiences of two women who have taken advantage of
kinship ties in particular historical moments in order to cross semi-closed
borders. Through the story of a nuclear family living between Rome and
London, the second case investigates how visa systems can lead to new ways
of being a father and can influence relationships among couples. The third
case focuses on how the inequalities between European countries of
settlement can mould relationships among siblings. In analysing how
individuals reshape (and are shaped by) their changing positions within
family ties, this article interprets subjectivity as “the ensemble of modes of
perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting
subjects […] as well the cultural and social formations that shape, organize,
and provoke those modes of affect, thought and so on” (Ortner 2005: 31). In
this perspective, subjectivity refers to the configuration of the ways through
which people have historically experienced the world and acted in it, within
the constraints of certain power relations (Moore 1994; Pinelli 2013).
Through this perspective, individuals emerge at the intersection of multiple
positions, social roles, ways of being and acting, which are always situational
and relational.

Migration, family and inequalities: a background
    Family relations play an important role in migratory projects, influencing
the decision to migrate, the routes taken and the destination countries.
Likewise, kinship in migratory settings is not simply a “resilient field”, that
is to say it is not an autonomous space that reproduces itself across and in
spite of borders (Decimo, Gribaldo 2016). As the critical and reflexive
perspectives on kinship studies have demonstrated, family configurations
not only are historically and locally variable symbolic constructions, but
change according to many factors – such as political configurations (i.e.
border regulations), technological innovations (i.e. ICT) or social changes
(i.e. driven by migration) – as well as according to people’s practices and
choices (Carsten 2004). In this perspective, relatedness within “trans-
national families” (Bryceson, Vuorela 2002) is not something “given”, but is
rather “made” and even “unmade”. While dispersion across long distances,

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lasting separations and lack of face-to-face interactions may fragment pre-
existing family ties, people can actively work to keep them alive and to retain
a sense of collectivity and intimacy in spite of being apart (Chamberlain,
Leydesdorff 2004; Riccio, Giuffré 2012). In the same way, transnational
families problematize the Western image of “normal” nuclear family life,
composed of a two-parent household with children under the same roof
where physical distance among members is assumed to be undertaken only
out of extreme necessity (de Guzman et al. 2018). Transnational families
show instead how family unity is an ideal that can be informed by other
factors, such as job opportunities, educational chances for children, safety,
and availability of caregivers. These factors may lead to consider parenthood
from afar a viable option (Parreñas 2005; Millman 2013).
   As a number of empirical investigations have shown, long distance
kinship ties and family care are cultivated in several ways: by travelling back
home (Mason 2004), sending remittances, building “palpable connections”
through parcels (Povrzanović Frykman, Humbracht 2014) or virtual ones
through ICT (Madianou, Miller 2012). While keeping their long-distance
relations with spouses, parents and children, migrants refashion the
meanings and practices of relatedness along transnational lines (Gardner,
Grillo 2002), with a profound impact on the emotional field (Svašek 2010;
Boccagni, Baldassar 2015). Regardless of whether these shifts are considered
capable of changing conceptualizations of family life, or rather regardless of
whether family life is believed to remain stable to some degree (de Guzman,
Brown, Edwards 2018), undoubtedly notions of belonging and familyhood in
transnational families entail choice and negotiation, effort and cultivation,
as well as conflict and constraint. Indeed, networks of reciprocity and
obligation, love and trust, are fraught with tension and relations of unequal
power (Baldassar, Merla 2013). Thus, the inequalities and dependencies
which usually characterize the relationships between family members, in the
case of transnational families can be reinforced or reshaped by distances and
by the migrants’ destiny (Drotbohm 2009). In this process, visa regulations,
telecommunication and the economic conditions and nature of state
institutions in the receiving countries play an important role in favouring or
hampering transnational care, and in moulding familial dependencies and
hierarchies. While these aspects are crucial for analysing the Eritrean
families living apart, it is also important to shed light on the historical,
cultural and political elements that characterize Eritrean migration and that
influence family ties.



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140                                                                AURORA MASSA


Migration and family ties in the Eritrean transnational social space
   Current Eritrean migratory flows are deeply interconnected with the re-
pressive turn that occurred in the aftermath of the Ethiopian-Eritrean war
(1998-2000), and that has imposed on its citizens a poorly remunerated and
indefinite national service and one of the most illiberal regimes in the world.
However, migrants are driven not only by political oppression but also by a
“culture of migration” (see Cohen, Sirkeci 2011; Degli Uberti 2014), which is
rooted within the long history of Eritrean transnational migration (Kibreab
1987; Hepner 2009), and which shapes the aspirations of would-be migrants
and the expectations of those left behind. For a long time, this culture of mi-
gration has imbued both the Eritrean nuclear family – that traditionally
makes up the household (sidrabet) – and the extended family. In a context
where each individual is part of concentric collective groups (from the family
to the lineage, from the village to the nation), the family constitutes the ba-
sic social unit, which has historically allowed access to the land, and more
recently has been involved in the construction of nationalistic sentiments
(see Tronvoll 1998; Smidt 2007). In this context, current migrants often
leave with the moral obligation to relieve their kin (parents, siblings but also
nephews, nieces, cousins) from material precariousness and to help other
family members to migrate (Treiber 2014; Costantini 2017). Eritrean
transnational family ties are thus based on a moral economy which estab-
lishes bonds of solidarity with kin members back home. These moral solidar-
ities both help and constrain, can be transgressed and can also be unfulfilled,
provoking a sense of personal failure (Belloni 2019).
   In the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture, the migration-family nexus
is also interlaced with regimes of mobility, namely the relationships between
the privileged movements of some and the forbidden migration of the
powerless and exploited (Salazar, Glick Schiller 2014). These regimes monit-
or, filter and decelerate the movements of large sections of the global popu-
lation, usually coming from the so-called Global South (Shamir 2005; An-
dersson 2014). In the case of Eritreans, these obstacles force them to rely on
the help of family members abroad both to live in refugee camps in neigh-
bouring countries (Ethiopia and Sudan) where they find themselves stuck,
and to travel irregular and dangerous paths to wealthier or more secure des-
tinations.
   Moreover, close family ties can themselves be a resource for mobility, as
in the case of family reunification. Although family reunification regulations
vary greatly among European countries, they are usually more open to hold-
ers of international protection than they are to those who are registered as


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economic migrants. In the Eritrean community, weddings are sometimes or-
ganized with the sole purpose of migrating and with the payment of a certain
amount of money (Treiber 2013; Costantini 2017; Belloni, Fusari 2018). In
cases I came across during my fieldwork, these marriages were between a
refugee or a naturalized citizen in a Western country and a refugee living in
Ethiopia or Sudan, since emigration is mostly forbidden in Eritrea.
   Once in Europe, Eritrean refugees still have limited freedom of move-
ment. As forced migrants, they cannot go back to Eritrea. Moreover, their
legal status implies some limits to transnational mobility. For instance,
refugees in Italy can travel within the Schengen area, but need visas to enter
countries such as the UK and the US, which are difficult to obtain. These bor-
der regulations have deep repercussions on family ties, their morphologies
and the possibilities for cultivation through periodic visits. As it is im-
possible to return to Eritrea, many of my interlocutors in Europe often visit
their relatives and friends living in other European countries, or more sel-
dom in Ethiopia and Sudan. Moreover, since in Eritrea those who are not en-
rolled in the national service can obtain a passport and an exit visa, it is not
uncommon for the parents of refugees to visit their children in Europe.
These journeys map a wider family space which goes beyond both the local
dimension and the country of departure and includes the different settings
in which family members live.

Doing fieldwork across a hierarchy of destinations
   With almost no exceptions, Eritreans are eligible for international
protection in all the countries where the Geneva Convention has been
ratified. However, the kinds of support they receive, as well as the
possibilities they have of accomplishing individual aspirations and family
expectations differ greatly. At the time my research was being conducted, in
Ethiopia (one of the first countries of asylum) the majority of refugees lived
in inhospitable camps and those who had a permit for living in the towns
were not allowed to work. As a consequence, they could not integrate at a
local level, nor become family providers sending money back home, but
instead depended on support from relatives living in Western countries. In
Italy too, the possibilities of realising their migratory project are scarce: due
to the limits of the refugee reception system and of the job market, even
having resided years in Italy many of my interlocutors lived in squatted
buildings and survived on irregular, intermittent work and, again, frequently
with the help of relatives who live elsewhere. This situation often fuels a
strong desire to move to Northern Europe, which however cannot be
satisfied, leaving them “stuck in transit” (Brekke, Brochmann 2015). Due to

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142                                                                           AURORA MASSA


the Dublin regulation3, migrants have to apply for international protection
and settle in the first European country of arrival. Implemented through the
registration of migrants’ fingerprints in a European database, this regulation
aims at preventing secondary movements within the EU towards those
countries which are considered to be “better destinations”. Although
Eritrean migrants are often at the bottom of the social fabric in terms of
housing, education and working conditions in Northern Europe as well, there
they can more easily attain better living conditions and experience upwards
social mobility within the Eritrean transnational social space.
   My long-term research conducted in four different countries (Ethiopia,
Italy, the UK and Sweden), has allowed me to move across my interlocutors’
hierarchy of destination countries, from the least desirable (Ethiopia) to the
most desirable (Sweden and the UK). My interest in Eritrean migration began
with my PhD research project, which led me to conduct a fieldwork project in
Ethiopia in 2013-2014 on urban refugees’ aspirations, daily life and
relationships with their host communities. Following this, in 2016 I
conducted ethnography in Rome on newly arrived migrants, looking in
particular at their travel experiences and the reconfiguration of their
sociality. More recently, I carried out fieldwork in Rome, London and
Stockholm in 2017-2019 on migrants’ ways of making and remaking home in
the countries of settlement4. Although none of these research projects had a
specific focus on family issues, sidra was a recurrent topic in my discussions
with my research participants and a determining element in their migratory
journeys, their concerns and their sense of home. In the ethnographic effort
to understand what mattered most for them in respect to their social life, the
study of family ties became a common theme running through my multi-
sited research. As Boccagni writes, in transnational migration research the
relevance of a multi-sited ethnography lies less in “the multiplication of
relevant sites (which is an unsurprising outcome of extended mobility), than
[in] the ties that enable a relational interdependence between them” (2016:
14). Thus, my aim was to explore the social practices and emotions on which

3. The Dublin Regulation is a key part of the European effort to create a common regional
asylum regime. It was introduced in 1997 and reformed in 2003 (Dublin II) and 2013 (Dublin
III).
4. My PhD research was supported by the Doctoral School in Anthropology and
Epistemology of Complexity (University of Bergamo) and was part of the activities of the
IEMET (the Italian Ethnological Mission in Ethiopia-Tigray). After that I was involved in the
project “Interview study in six transit and arrival countries”, directed by the Felsberg
Institute for Education and Academic Research. Finally, I conducted investigation in the
ERC project “HOMInG – The home-migration nexus” (European Research Council Starting
Grant no. 678456 (2016-2021)).


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this connectedness relies and to sense and understand how they change at
the different stages of people’s migratory and biographical trajectories. In
terms of methodology, I collected data through in-depth and biographical
interviews and informal conversations. The latter emerged as a powerful tool
of investigation in a community where discomfort towards direct questions,
mistrust and suspicion are historically rooted attitudes, fuelled recently by
the authoritarian government they have escaped and their condition as
refugees (Massa 2016). Beside verbal interactions, I also accompanied
migrants in their ordinary activities, attended celebrations, conducted home
visits and spent time socialising with them.

Kinship for moving or staying put
   At the beginning of 2014, Luam invited me for a tea in a fancy cafe in
downtown Mekelle, the Northern Ethiopian town where I was conducting
research. As soon as we sat down, she told me that during her stay in Addis
Ababa a week earlier, she had married an Eritrean refugee in Italy and was
waiting for an interview at the Italian Embassy as part of the family
reunification procedure. As she explained, the decision was taken together
with her parents who hoped that having a child in a Western country could
improve their living conditions. During my fieldwork Luam and I often spent
time together and this laid the basis for a friendship that allowed me to
become intimately acquainted with her personal history.
   As she explained to me on several occasions, migration was not a novelty
in her family. In the Seventies, her father, Hagos – like many of his
generation (Massa forthcoming) – had moved from the Northern Ethiopian
countryside to the city of Asmara which at that time was part of Ethiopia. In
Asmara he got a good job, married an Eritrean woman, had five children and,
following Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in 1993, became an
international migrant. His life conditions changed suddenly with the
outbreak of the 1998/2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean war, when Ethiopian
communities living in Eritrea became “enemies” and the target of violence
and deportations (Negash, Tronvoll 2000; Riggan 2011; Massa 2017a). Hagos
was forced to repatriate to Ethiopia, leaving Luam’s mother alone with their
children. As I showed elsewhere (Massa 2017b), recent political dynamics
between Ethiopia and Eritrea have made many families “transnational”,
inducing people to confront painful choices and new prospects of mobility.
While preparing bunna (traditional coffee) during one of the afternoons I
spent in their home, Luam’s mother explained me that in order to protect
their children from post-war discrimination she had registered them as
Eritrean citizens by relying on her nationality and thus transgressing the

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144                                                               AURORA MASSA


common rule of patrilineality. However, when they were about to turn 18
and to be enrolled in the Eritrean national service, she had pushed them to
restore the traditional model of lineage, acquiring their father’s nationality,
so as to have the chance to enter Ethiopia as citizens. For some years she
sent her children away even against their will and only when the last child
was safe in Ethiopia could she join them there.
   Luam, having arrived in Ethiopia at the age of 17, was aware of the ways in
which family could be a source of mobility capital for crossing semi-
permeable borders. Although we had often discussed the mechanism of
spousal migration within the Eritrean and Ethiopian communities, she
denied having paid her husband and explained to me that the man, a former
friend in Asmara, had had feelings for her since they were children. This
version of the story was contradicted by rumours in the community,
according to which her relatives abroad paid the market price for the
marriage, about 10/15 thousand dollars. Regardless of the veracity of these
contrasting versions of the story, they highlight the presence of different
conceptions of marriage (of convenience, romantic, arranged), with Luam
choosing to represent her own as romantic. To some extent, Luam’s attempt
should be read in light of what she had to prove and perform during her
interview at the Italian embassy.
   Indeed, at the time, the Italian embassy had been rejecting a growing
number of applications for family reunification because the high number of
applications for spousal reunification aroused suspicion, and these
marriages came to be considered as “marriages of convenience”. This is not
surprising. Family reunification is the predominant form of migration into
the European Union, leading EU member states to develop checks for
identifying fraudulent marriages (de Hart 2017). These forms of scrutiny are
implicitly based on contemporary Western ideas of family and intimacy
(D’Aoust 2013; Infantino, 2014), since states do not legislate in a cultural
vacuum but rather design their laws in line with the dominant values of the
national culture. As Eggebø clarifies (2013), the norms used to detect the so-
called marriage of convenience recall the idea of a “pure relationship”
developed in the late twentieth century in the West (Giddens 2013), in which
partners are bound together by love, equality and intimate sexuality, and in
which love (rather than migration) is considered as the only acceptable
motive for marriage. This idea of a “pure relationship” contrasts with other
conceptualizations of marriage whereby, as in the Eritrean case, arranged
marriages are the norm rather than the exception, and marriages for
migration become socially legitimated under conditions of migration
imaginary.

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   Luam worked hard for the interview with the Italian embassy which would
determine whether or not she would be granted an entry visa. She often told
me about her efforts to memorize the largest possible amount of information
concerning the private life of her husband to make a good impression.
Through Facebook and other social media, she tried to build a virtual form of
intimacy with her husband, as a means of proving that her marriage was
“authentic”, valid and credible. Intriguingly, she spoke of these efforts using
an ironic register which could be understood as a way of subverting the
presumed objectivity of a certain idea of the “true marriage”.
   However, Luam’s attempt to prove her marriage was not merely for
convenience was not only addressed to the Italian embassy. It should also be
understood in relation to the ways she thought of and represented herself.
As part of an educated, urbanized and Westernized élite, and in line with
Ethiopian governmental educational policies and with contemporary global
flows, Luam acted as and felt herself to be a “modern woman”, that is, as a
subject imbued by values and fantasies in contrast with a model of
femininity locally considered to be “traditional” (Adami 2018). Luam studied
in a private college to improve her professional prospects, while also
working several precarious jobs to grant herself financial independence and
to fulfil her desires for commodities her family could not afford. Moreover,
she was fascinated by the imaginary of modernity, which emerged in the
ways she dressed and in her interest in languages, people and lifestyles
coming from the West. While not abandoning but simply delaying her role as
wife and mother, Luam, together with many other young women, interprets
modernity not only in terms of consumer goods, but also through practical
knowledge made up of values and feelings, such as autonomy, personal
success and romantic love. Romantic love is a powerful vector for the
dynamics of individualisation within modernity, and plays an increasing role
in people’s understanding of themselves (Mai, King 2009). In our moments
of leisure, Luam told me without inhibition of her previous relationships
with men, portraying these relationships in contrast with the models of
arranged marriages and of marriages of convenience, a marriage type she
herself was entering into in 2014. Paradoxically, migration reshaped Luam’s
conjugal ties but in the opposite way one might have expected. Her “not so
romantic marriage” was indeed in contrast with her ideas of love which
stemmed from local dynamics of change, and was rather in continuity with
an idea of the spousal relationship she had not imagined for herself. At the
same time, this choice seemed to be the best way for her to achieve her
personal aspirations, which match with her family migratory desire.


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146                                                              AURORA MASSA


Parenthood and long-distance relationships
   Efrem is a 34-year-old Eritrean refugee who has been living in Rome for
10 years. We met in August 2017, when the squatted building in which he
had been living for 4 years was suddenly evicted by the police. Together with
his previous neighbours, Efrem participated in the protests organized by the
housing movement and shared their indignation for the injustice they
suffered as well as their concerns for the future. Nonetheless, in that same
period, another event contributed to his sense of frustration, namely the
news that the British embassy had denied him the entry visa he had
requested to attend the birth of his son in London. Before leaving Eritrea,
Efrem had married Huda, a young woman from a nearby village, who, in
2014, managed to get to London, then obtaining refugee status in the UK.
The marriage had been an arranged marriage but constituted a deep bond
between the two, since “it was celebrated in the name of God” as both
explained to me.
   Efrem was upset and saddened by the visa denial. He consulted a layer but
he also demonstrated a certain degree of resignation. As a young man
coming from Africa, he was well aware of the mobility regime which forced
him to use the Mediterranean crossing to get to Europe. He was also familiar
with the limited possibility of movement he had in Europe. In the three and
a half years during which Efrem and Huda had both lived in Europe, the visa
system for refugees between Rome and London determined the location,
length and peculiarities of their meetings. Except for a two-month visit by
Huda to Rome before the Schengen visa became mandatory for refugees
travelling from the UK to Italy, the two had always met in Paris, where they
could both travel to freely. The transnational equilibrium they had
established in their intermittent relationship, however, entered into crisis
with the birth of their son Said.
   Huda also felt angry when she learned that her husband could not be
present at the birth. I met her and Said in London in November 2017. While
sipping a cup of a hot Eritrean spiced tea in the cosy flat provided by the
local council, she nostalgically compared the images of birth she had from
Eritrea, where a woman who has just given birth is able to rest for 40 days
thanks to the care of her female relatives and neighbours, with her
experience in London, where she found herself alone. Although Huda
recognized Efrem’s efforts, she also expressed disappointment with his
hesitancy in applying for family reunification to move to the UK.
   Each time I spoke with Efrem about his future he expressed his reluctance
to leave his life in Rome, his permanent job, his good salary and even the
new flat he was renting after the eviction – all achievements which he was


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FAMILIES AT A DISTANCE, DISTANCES WITHIN FAMILIES                                      147


proud of. Indeed, compared with the precariousness experienced by many
other Eritrean refugees in Rome, the level of stability he was able to achieve
was quite exceptional, to the point that he had no desire to reach Northern
Europe, as was the case with many of his peers. This stability allowed him to
accomplish his moral and economic obligations towards his parents and
relatives back home, by sending them remittances and by contributing
towards his cousin’s difficult journey to Europe. It also permitted him to take
care of his older son by another woman, meaning he could bring him to Italy
through the family reunification process when the boy was 8. Since the
minimum fingerprinting age is 14, Efrem was able to stay with his child in
Rome for some years and then, similarly to Samuel whose story opened this
article, accompany him to Germany where the boy received protection as an
unaccompanied minor.
   At the same time, he was frustrated by this long-distance paternity, which
he could experience and perform only through social media and parcels.
When we met, Huda told me about Efrem’s continuous requests for pictures
and videos of Said, so as to follow, though in mediated and fragmented ways,
his child’s development. Moreover, a few days after the birth of his son he
sent Huda a parcel of clothes, a baby carrier, blankets and toys for Said. He
explained to me that he spent days collecting all these high-quality goods.
Beside their economic price, those objects had deep symbolic and emotional
value, as they were able to densify and materialize his parental care towards
Said (see Svašek ed. 2012). However, that parcel was lost by the postal
services, increasing Efrem’s discouragement.
   Nonetheless, he knew he could not ask them move to Italy: the social
support that Huda received in London and the better possibility she had
there for social, housing and economic integration made this option
impossible. Many studies (see McSpadden 1999; Fàbos 2007; Jansen 2008)
have demonstrated how forced migration have deep consequences on
gendered subjectivities and particularly on masculinities, which social actors
often articulate in terms of the loss of social status and gendered
authenticity. In her study on migration to Denmark and the UK, Kleist (2010)
shows how in Somali narratives welfare states play a significant part in
shattering pre-existing gender relationships, by empowering women and
leading to male misrecognition and loss of authority over their families.
Within a transnational family arrangement, Efrem was experiencing a
similar situation: the British social support for refugees and single mothers
diminished the value of his achievements in Italy and his role as a
breadwinner, conversely putting Huda in a position to put pressure on him
to join them in London, remoulding the gender power relation. Moreover,


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148                                                              AURORA MASSA


Huda’s requests fuelled in Efrem a sense of his duties and responsibilities as
a husband and a father, and reinforced the social and family pressures to
move towards “better countries in the North” that many Eritreans in Italy
are subject to. Efrem often expressed the feeling of being caught between his
role towards his wife and son on the one hand, and his work, his ability to
send remittances, his social life and his sense of home in Rome on the other.
These two aspects are part of the same moral model of the “successful
migrant” but could not be reconciled due to the mobility regime that
operated between Italy and the UK that prevented him from freely moving
back and forth.

Hierarchies among peers
   My last case study is Binyam, a 34-year-old Eritrean man living in Rome,
whose story highlights how the differences between European countries can
influence horizontal ties, in this case, relationships between siblings. One
day in June 2018, when we were both attending the wedding of a mutual
friend, he told me of his discomfort in relation to his younger brother’s
request: “He lives in Sweden and wants to visit Rome with his wife and
children. How can I host them here? You know where I live”. Binyam was
living at the squatted building in the outskirts of Rome, an abandoned public
sector office which the inhabitants had turned it into a living space by
installing shared bathrooms and dividing it into small apartments. However,
the building was dirty and old and the ever-increasing number of squatters
(about 800) meant there were not enough toilets and rooms. Binyam lived in
a room with two friends and a makeshift kitchen. What is more, many of the
inhabitants suffered from forms of marginality and socio-economic
deprivation. While creating the possibility for forms of solidarity with which
to challenge the lack of work and housing support, this type of informal
accommodation also contributed towards producing forms of exclusion and
self-exclusion. Binyam went on: “My brother has a beautiful house there in
Sweden, even though he reached Europe after me”.
   Binyam is the third of four brothers, all of them in Europe, and was the
second of them to leave Eritrea in 2003, at the age of 17. At that time, the
Eritrean government had started to expel all international organizations
from the country (HRW 2009), including the German NGO for which Binyam
was working as a translator. As someone previously employed by a foreign
NGO and as a young man who should have been enrolled in the national
service, Binyam attracted the interest of the military police: “One day they
knocked on my parents’ door, but luckily I was not at home. When they told


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me about it, I decided to escape. After a few weeks, I crossed the border into
Sudan together with my girlfriend”. Binyam and his girlfriend reached Italy
six months later thanks to the financial support of his brother who lived in
the Netherlands. While Binyam’s fingerprints were registered by the Italian
authorities his girlfriend managed to evade the Italian authorities and was
thus able to move abroad. Together they decided that she would continue
her journey to Northern Europe with Binyam’s brother’s support. Then, once
she had settled somewhere, they would get married and request a spouse
visa. The young woman reached the UK, but things did not go as Binyam
expected: according to his account, after a few months she got engaged to
someone else. Binyam told me how furious he was with her, but also how
confused he felt about his life. He had already spent more than one year in
Italy but, imagining himself to be in transit, he had done nothing to
integrate. Finally, he decided to try his luck and went to the Netherlands to
ask for asylum there. In the Netherlands he stayed in a refugee centre that
was relatively close to his brother’s town, so they could meet frequently.
However, after three years, his request was rejected on the basis of the
Dublin regulation and he was forced to go back to Italy.
   Binyam did not like to talk about the first few years following his return to
Italy. As I have already mentioned, when we met in 2017, he was
experiencing housing insecurity and was surviving on precarious jobs, which
had nevertheless allowed him to economically support his younger brother’s
journey to Europe. His brother had landed in Italy in 2013 when the
procedure of collecting fingerprints at the Italian coast was less rigorous,
and thus he was easily able to reach Sweden and obtain refugee status there.
   Binyam felt a deep bond with his siblings, a bond which he expressed
through social media, posting their pictures or using a collage of photos of
them all in their countries of settlement as the wallpaper for his phone.
These kinds of collages were often present on the mobile phones and
Facebook walls of my interlocutors. They reunite siblings but also parents
and children at a distance and can be understood as a sort of “virtual
household”, where affective ties are reinforced from afar. At the same time,
when Binyam talked about his siblings, his love towards them was
intertwined with a sense of unease provoked by his less favourable housing
and economic conditions. This unease was particularly strong with regards
to his younger brother who arrived in Europe after Binyam and whose
beautiful house, job and marriage, made him feel left behind and outdone. In
Eritrea as elsewhere (Christiansen, Utas, Vigh 2006), youth is invested with a
lower level of social prestige, power and authority than later life stages, so
migration is an attempt at accessing adulthood as well as modernity.

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150                                                                 AURORA MASSA


Binyam, who refused to get married despite pressure from his older brothers,
was stuck in a condition of quasi-adulthood and frequently said he felt “old”.
This feeling of being old can be read in relation to the mismatch between his
actual life and the roles he expected to (and was expected to) achieve.
   This mismatch was also exacerbated by the difficulties he had in hosting
his siblings. In the Eritrean diasporic social space, it is very important to
host friends and family members for holidays and celebrations such as
weddings or funerals. Hosting is a way in which migrants can demonstrate
the success of their migration, but it is also a practice of family making, since
it allows people to remain in and become part of kinship networks,
performing them despite the distance. Moreover, due to the years he spent
in the Netherlands and the particulars of Italian citizenship laws, Binyam
was the only one of his siblings who still had a long way to go before
obtaining European citizenship. Becoming a European citizen has an
important symbolic value for many Eritrean refugees, not so much because it
builds a bond with the host country, but because it allows people to move
within the European space, to travel and to return to Eritrea. Binyam, for
example, often expressed the burden of not having been able to see his
mother for more than 16 years and could not hide his sense of shame when
thinking about how his younger brother would visit her before him.

Conclusion
   In this article I have tried to show how obstacles to mobility penetrate
relationships among parents, spouses and siblings at a distance, by taking
into consideration a transnational space that is wider than the one described
by the polar tension between sending and receiving countries, for it also
includes migrants’ affective geographies, namely the plurality of localities
which are linked by affective relations among dispersed migrant families. In
the ethnographic cases presented here, these locations - which include
Ethiopia, Southern and Northern European countries, members and non-
members of the EU - have different reception policies, job opportunities and
social support systems that can complicate and reshape family relationships
at a distance. While describing a landscape of legal structures, constraints
and limitations within which migrants try to move, settle and realize their
aspirations, this study has sought to shed light on the forms of agency which
emerge in the interconnections between social structures and desires. These
forms of agency are irreducible to a model of the universal and rational
individual, for they are interlaced with migrants’ subjectivities, the
emotional and social ties between them and their relatives in their country


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FAMILIES AT A DISTANCE, DISTANCES WITHIN FAMILIES                                      151


of origin, as well as with a whole web of values and duties shaping individual
and collective expectations, aspirations and moral codes of conduct (see
Thorsen 2017). In looking at Luam’s choices and reflections on her marriage,
Efrem’s dilemmas about his secondary mobility with respect to his role as a
father and husband, and Binyam’s discomfort in relation to his siblings, I
show the relevance of moral economies, feelings and desires, which guide
social action in situations of constraint, powerlessness and inequality, and
which are often inconsistent and in conflict with each other. I take into
consideration different kinds of family ties precisely to shed light on the
multiple tensions migrants face and the tactics they deploy in their efforts to
conform at a distance to the multiple kin roles they occupy, as well as on the
distress and dilemmas of those who fail.
   The first ethnographic case shows kinship as a resource for mobility and,
conversely, the relevance of the decision to migrate in forming new ties.
While it is known that people use kinship ties in creative ways to suit their
interests, the cases here presented shed light on how these ways of “playing”
with family ties are transmitted across generations. Far from being new
phenomena related with contemporary transnational migration, such
practices have historically depth and can be fruitfully approached from a
diachronic perspective (see Declich 2016) . Moreover, the discourses which
Luam, the young woman, used to talk about her marriage choice show the
complexities of a subject at the intersection of different scales of values and
moral economies (being a modern woman, going to the West, helping her
parents). This complexity suggests that rather than asking if a marriage is
one of love or convenience, we should consider the multiple social individual
expectations which are involved in both conceptions of marriage. From the
point of view of a young Ethiopian-Eritrean woman, marrying an Eritrean
refugee in Europe could be considered an attempt to escape the feelings of
abjection which characterize African youth (Ferguson 2006), and to build
connections to a globalized and modern world she feels she is part of. In the
case of Luam, her marriage is not purely romantic, but neither is it merely
instrumental, since it involves the category of desire. Desire is in fact a
privileged analytical category through which to grasp the ways in which
migrants occupy or resist the different positions in which they find
themselves placed.
   Desire also emerges as a central element in the case of Binyam who, after
being “betrayed” by his girlfriend, experienced the failure of his migratory
project in relation to that of his brothers, as well as in the case of Efrem who
pondered over reuniting with his wife and son in light of multiple personal,
social and family factors. These ethnographic materials demonstrate how

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152                                                                 AURORA MASSA


the hierarchies of destination countries and obstacles to mobility can be a
factor in putting geographical distance between families. Yet they can also
influence reciprocal expectations among relatives, and the ways in which a
person can perform a certain role towards her/his family members, such as
the one of parent or partner. Moreover, they can contribute in creating a
disparity of power between couples or siblings to the benefit of the spouse or
the brother/sister living in a better country, regardless of their age or gender.
During their migratory trajectory, people can find themselves in one or more
of these contrasting roles, revealing the complexities of the family at a
distance. From this perspective, this article describes the interplay of
distance and closeness, love and a sense of inadequacy which characterizes
many transnational families and brings into question the aprioristic
conceptualization of distance as a pure necessity (de Guzman, Brown,
Edwards 2018).
   To conclude, these pages have demonstrated how in the intersection
between legal constraints and opportunities, affections and family
responsibility, personal aspirations and subjectivities, new family
configurations emerge, which can create the premise for new mobilities or
immobilities, new proximities and new distances. Hence family ties appear
as plastic and creative, but not immune to the violence of national
categorizations. Looking at transnational conjugal, parental and sibling ties
is a vantage point with which to analyse border regimes, globalization,
unequal economic and power relations in their most intimate dimension.




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 Aurora MASSA is Research Fellow at L’Orientale, University of Naples. Social
 anthropologist with an expertise on migration studies within and from the Horn of
 Africa, she holds her PhD from University of Bergamo and was postdoctoral fellow
 at University of Trento under the ERC-HOMInG research project, and at CRN-
 IRPPS. Her fields of inquiry include migration experiences, conditions of
 im/mobility, social boundaries, nationalism, homemaking process and research
 methodology. She conducted ethnography in Ethiopia, Italy, the UK and Sweden.
 Her works are published in English and Italian, and her book Ethnographies of
 Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs (co-authored with Bonfanti and Miranda-Nieto)
 is forthcoming by Routledge.
 a.massa@unior.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Aurora Massa
Families at a distance, distances within families: Borders and emotional bonds among migrants
from Eritrea
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 135-157.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3803
