Chapter 3 Articulating Mobility

From Representing to Articulating Mobility

Abdou, a slender young man from Guinea, had made his way to Kédougou from his hometown in the highlands of the Fouta Djallon mountains. Here, he worked odd jobs at the downtown market, offloading lorries and selling small Chinese electronics from a makeshift table. In Kédougou, he was surrounded by many other regional migrants who, likewise, worked as porters and merchants in this thriving road town. But while his commercial activities were enabled by these networks, he hadn’t yet managed to leverage his time there into a commercial success. In 2011, Abdou struck out for Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, in the hopes of making it in a new place. He spent four years there before returning to Kédougou. When he returned in 2015, however, he had little more than he left with. His fellow Guinean colleagues in many respects treated him as though he had never left. This chapter draws on this case study and three other examples to explore how mobility is constituted through interactions between migrants and those they left behind. In so doing, it offers a toolkit for studying mobilities interactionally and not merely as individual narratives held to represent experiences of migration.

In reading this chapter, consider the following question: Can an individual leave their home, spend four years abroad before returning, and not be considered a migrant? This might initially appear to sound like an implausible state of events. However, looking at mobility as coming into being through linguistic exchanges and not merely as a preexisting, represented experience helps resolve this apparent conundrum. That is, the perspective of mobilities is not merely one of tracing how people and things move around the world and then using language to report on this movement. Linguistic practice in interaction brings mobility into being and provides an embodied encounter through which concepts, connections, and people can be articulated across space and time.

Throughout this chapter, I analyze a series of encounters between returning migrants and those they left behind in order to examine how mobilities become instantiated through multiparty interactions. Traditionally, migrant experiences have been represented largely through short narrative texts obtained through interviews that provide readers with a summary of a migrant’s itinerant experiences. In contrast to the textual representation of this monologic individual interview as the method through which we might explore mobilities and migrations, contested encounters of social interaction show how mobilities and emergent meanings come into being. By examining language as the site of social action rather than a mere representation of preexisting experiences (of mobility), this chapter sheds light on how we can understand language and social interaction in the context of mobility studies. Most work on mobilities has tended to focus on physical movement and the geographically bounded experiences migrants had while they were away. Basing our knowledge of migration primarily on individual interviews often leads to an individualist, univocal perspective to mobility. When language does enter into studies of mobility, it is often tacked on at the end to investigate how the meanings of these mobilities as experiences are represented (Cresswell 2006). Such approaches to mobility often use terms such as imaginaries, fantasy, and representation (Salazar 2011). While such terms can be useful, they eschew the central ways in which mobility comes into being through language and mediated interactions.

As migrants return to their hometowns and talk of their time abroad with those they left behind, social interactions offer sites through which meanings are mutually negotiated. One way of understanding this constitutive role of language is to recognize that communicative acts bring things into being at the same time that they represent experiences. In this book, I therefore use the term articulating rather than representing in order to draw on the dual meaning of expressing a proposition and making linkages. Articulating mobilities entails a social practice that can shape relationships, mediate the formation of collectivities, and enable the movement of people, bodies, and ideas. While linguistic representations of mobilities might first appear to be a communicative act of reporting on existing “events” or “experiences,” these encounters demonstrate social action—a practice of mobility itself.

Thinking in terms of articulations instead of representations emphasizes the relation-making aspects of mobilities. Tracking the meaning of mobility requires more than an attention to how experiences abroad are represented as if these were answers that a single individual could simply give an answer to. Returning migrants were often thrust into encounters in which the meaning and impacts of mobility were mutually negotiated. These all happened during a series of seemingly mundane interactions in which individuals offered up and contested understandings of themselves and their experiences. These were not only opportunities for returning migrants to offer new understandings of themselves but also occasions for those who stayed behind to redefine themselves in response. Looking at the creative verbal interactions that result out of return trips like these can help us better understand how mobility affects social relationships in such communities. Tracking the central role of language in constituting mobility therefore entails an analysis of how language becomes negotiated in multiparty encounters. Not merely a narrative about faraway travels, linguistic articulations of mobility were negotiated in the action of everyday conversations. These meanings were contested and negotiated and thus out of the singular control of storytellers. Tracking this action entails a close attention to how conversations happen—how they are spatially constructed, how interlocutors draw on different linguistic stylistic features, and how individuals evaluate one another’s speech through different language ideologies. Although tracking this social action is often messier than the simple translation of a story, these approaches are critical tools in understanding the lives of migrants.

The act of becoming a migrant or refugee thus requires not only a lived experience of precarity or even oppression but also the ability to articulate oneself socially in specific contexts through the mastery of appropriate linguistic routines and embodied signs. To be mobile is to enact a reconceptualization of oneself—a kind of multiparty storytelling in practice. West African migrants achieved this through the deployment of institutionalized joking relationships, host-stranger idioms, kinship relationships, greetings, and other forms of verbal creativity I examine in chapter 2. I suggest that we think beyond abstract terms like representations or imagination and pay close attention to the embodied, performative acts that bring mobility into being. The craft of negotiating social capital (Bourdieu 1991)—the ability to successfully articulate oneself and render oneself legible in social networks—is much harder to track and to appreciate.

Conceptually separating acts of mobility and their representations also results in unintended spatial assumptions about how to map out and study mobility. Frequently, migrant experiences abroad (often an urban site) offer the subject of interviews that are reported on at home (often a rural site) in discursive form—a story told at home about faraway travels, so to speak. Yet articulating experiences of migration was not merely something done when one “returned home” and told stories of distant lands. Positing these distinct realms—one in which the act of mobility occurs and another where it is represented—sets up a priori distinctions about the sites in which mobility supposedly happens. Instead, I suggest that we track how migrants themselves constitute relations between places. (I explore these processes of distinguishing sites in more detail in chapter 5.)

Much scholarship in mobility employs short narrative descriptions to introduce migrants and exhibit migration. Instead, I emphasize interactional encounters. When scholars present these narratives, migrants’ names, origins, and short bios are usually included in their own words as a representation of their experiences. While these narratives in the words of the migrants are important, they do not fully demonstrate how language is actually used and interpreted in contexts of mobility. These representational approaches occlude the fact that “meanings” are intersubjective outcomes between people rather than the unchanging property of individuals. The meaning of migrations is thus a complex question of iterative interactions in which migrants articulate mobility at the same time that they are performing social action (such as building relationships with colleagues, hiding wealth from kin, or requesting support). In drawing attention to this dimension of linguistic practice, my work complements scholarship in mobilities that has emphasized trajectories and in-betweenness rather than merely attending to migratory points of origin and end points (Schapendonk, Bolay, and Dahinden 2020). As such, language works as a connective form of labor whose work is yet unfinished rather than a representation of mobile experiences whose arcs and endpoints have been anticipated a priori.

Cyclical mobility was not merely something that a few individuals experienced; instead, it was a social process that mediated the social constitution of transnational communities. As other ethnographers of mobility in West Africa have pointed out, a critical dimension of mobility is coming full circle and reintegrating one’s experiences, belongings, and knowledge with one’s home community—a path that often ends at home (Jonsson 2012; Whitehouse 2012; Chappatte 2022). While some might be able to return several times a year for important life cycle rituals, others only managed to return every few years. At these moments of reentry, migrants must articulate years of mobility to kin, colleagues, and strangers. This chapter captures the interactional negotiation of mobilities in the social encounters of returning migrants.

Previous research on social mobilities has usefully conceptualized the goods brought back by migrants as more than material items like money, technologies, or clothes.1 They might include ways of speaking, social perspectives, religious practices, and other cultural products, which some scholars have examined as social remittances. Scholars have reframed such transnational flows through the frame of such remittances, thereby eschewing a narrowly economic approaches (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). “Things” brought back home, such as social remittances, are not unchanged objects transported to a new setting. Instead, returning migrants embed these new norms, ideas, or representations within existing social and linguistic practices that shape their uptake. The Malian aventuriers in the work of André Chappatte (2022, 7), for instance, viewed tunga, (migration to a foreign place), as a school that “widens people’s horizons and opens their minds.” When representations of new places and experiences are brought to hometowns, these experiences must first be translated through the bodies and mouths of migrants in particular places and amid specific social relationships. Language as articulation helps account for how individuals come to be migrants and engage in creative social action as they negotiate their lives across space. The social and cultural capital enjoyed by migrants coming back to places like Taabe after time abroad or in capital cities did not happen by a matter of course. This time abroad was rendered meaningful as mobility in the ongoing communication with hometowns and during precious return trips.

Hometown community members often had strong feelings about how migration changed a person. Kédovins often said that they could immediately tell what countries returning migrants had been living in based on patterns of behavior. France and the United States as migration destinations, in particular, offered a paradigmatic distinction that brought out strong opinions. Those who were returning from France, I often heard, would often put their wealth and experiences abroad on display. They demanded to be chauffeured in cars rather than walking about and curated their dress to make their time abroad abundantly clear. In contrast, those returning from America could not be distinguished from those who had not been abroad at all. They walked rather than insisting on a car for transportation and tended to wear things that didn’t make them stand out. I often wondered whether these assessments were impacted by a long-standing familiarity with American Peace Corps volunteers who walked and rode bikes rather than using cars and put little effort into what they were wearing. While these categorical explanations clearly did not always conform to reality, they demonstrate that migrants carefully curated embodied signs of mobility and reflected on these typified styles of self-presentation.

Negotiating Mobilities through Teasing Nicknames

In the following, I discuss a genre of teasing nicknames that demonstrates how migrants in Kédougou’s downtown market came to articulate their mobilities through their complex, multiparty interactions. When I returned to the Kédougou market in 2014 to begin anthropological fieldwork, it was as though I was encountering a new place. However, I still knew a few kola nut sellers from my time in the Peace Corps. The market was now a place of linguistic and social effervescence. Amid this new din, I began to pick out unexpected names: monikers like pillow, avocado, and ten o’clock. I soon learned that the migrant merchants and laborers of the downtown market came to know one another through the exchange of nicknames. Known locally as jammooje, these nicknames harkened most frequently to moments of migratory precarity. For instance, France’s nickname alluded to numerous failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean and Avocado was so named after one of his large shipments of fruit spoiled while it was waylaid along the contentious Senegal-Guinea border.

However, these teasing nicknames could not be used by just anyone. In order to be ratified to use a jammoore, you had to acquire usage rights in one of two ways. Firstly, you could have been present at the baptismal moment of folly that led to the nickname. This means that you had to either be present at the original moment of crisis or when the jammoore nickname first materialized through a telling of this hardship (I will discuss such a case shortly). Secondly, as a kind of “pay-to-say” principle, you could become ratified to use a nickname by offering money or food to the owner of the nickname or to others who were already ratified users.2 To become known by such a nickname could be a painful experience for some migrants, but it was to be in good company. Having one’s migratory misadventures narrated through the routine of jammoore was to become wrapped up in a social network through the reciprocity of shared stories. Coming to terms with migratory struggles through this genre resonates with the experiences of migrants across West Africa. André Chappatte, for instance, notes that suffering and a shared intimacy are key aspects of Malian migrants in search of adventure abroad (Chappatte 2022). Such stories of success and failure abroad were common discussion in the downtown market. In many cases, particular parts of these narratives became entextualized—that is, cut off from surrounding text to be cited in new contexts—such that they carried along associations from these past stories (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Spitulnik 1996). It is in this way that jammoore nicknames, which were once part of larger narratives, could be lifted out of context and come to encapsulate a stance on migration.

Constructing taboo nicknames and navigating their meanings demanded feats of linguistic creativity. This entailed acts of presenting oneself, managing one’s clout, and building a social network as central to one’s status as a successful migrant. While most migrants of the downtown market readily exchanged jammooje, only some developed it into a verbal art and could truly make a name stick. Sadio was a charismatic young electronics seller from Guinea who had mastered this art. He had built his strong reputation partly from his success in selling clothes and small electronics in the downtown market. However, he was also an engaging storyteller who found an accomplice in the sweet green tea that he routinely shared in the market. It was this liquid form of sociality that brought in clients and other merchants to him in rapt circles of attention. Early one morning during his first pot, Sadio, was joined by nearby merchants Abdou, a slight young Guinean seller, and Leye, a middle-aged, Wolof-speaking merchant from coastal Senegal. The merchants were exchanging stories of adventure when discussion soon turned to the importance of learning the local languages of migration destinations. Sadio ventured that Abdou, for all his time in Mauritania, never even learned any basic greetings. After a short rebuttal, Abdou concluded, “Mauritanians are hell; why don’t you get it.” In response, Sadio launched into a story of Abdou’s time in Mauritania; he leaned over to Leye and exclaimed, “Four years in Mauritania! He was in Mauritania for four years in a towel!” This phrase would punctuate an emerging narrative about Abdou’s adventures in Mauritania.

The story of Abdou emerged in bits and pieces. It was told again and again over the course of two hours by Sadio, who found in every new interlocutor an opportunity to refine its telling. The refrain, repeated continually, was clear from the beginning: “quatre ans, sarvet!” (four years in a towel!). Abdou, who had traveled to Nouakchott, Mauritania, was “taken in” by a Mauritanian family soon after arriving in the bus station. In search of commercial opportunities, he instead found himself entrapped in the courtyard of this family where he was paid next to nothing for menial domestic work. As Sadio tells it, Abdou was clothed in nothing more than a towel (sarvet) for four years since he (ostensibly) never left the compound. Abdou’s big opportunity had turned into a tragic tale of exploitation.3 Sadio’s telling insists on the fact that for all the time Abdou spent there, he had gained nothing new. He came back after four years with only two sacks of old clothes and no more than CFA$40,000 (approximately US$70). Moreover, Abdou didn’t learn any new languages, lacked an insider’s understanding of Nouakchott’s neighborhoods, and hadn’t returned with any linguistic fluency. As I show in the following discussion, Abdou was ultimately denied migratory status, for although he had traveled somewhere, he neither changed nor gained anything in the process.

Though told in a key of conviviality, it was at times a painful story that Abdou might have covered up and carried as a secret burden. In the context of this market, however, the story of Abdou’s time was repeated alongside a host of other migratory misadventures, marking him with a badge of belonging in the idiom of a jammoore. Not merely a representation of experiences as they happened however, these linguistic practices articulated community belonging and provided a site through which individuals negotiated one another’s status as migrants. Through language, mobility was something that happened not only away in Mauritania but also here at the market.

The transcript given in table 3.1 offers some more detailed perspectives on how this emerged in interaction. Though early in its telling, lines 3 and 5 show the repetition of “quatre ans” (four years) and on line 6 we hear the refrain “sarvet rekk” (only in a towel). On line 7, Sadio begins to talk about the frail constitution that Abdou returned in—not at all the embodied figure of a successful migrant. Told in both Wolof and Pular (at times for the sake of fellow participant Leye, who spoke little Pular), Sadio’s telling embodied migratory success, partly through his facility with multiple languages. Though code-switching between Pular, Wolof, and French is not uncommon, this linguistic feat became significant here because of their earlier discussion about the importance of learning local languages as a migrant. As such, this was not only a story of Abdou’s time in Mauritania but also an opportunity for Sadio to articulate himself as a successful migrant who could perform knowledge of the world. Surrounded by other merchants from Guinea, the Gambia, and Senegal, Sadio comported himself with the demeanor of a migrant who had made it. By this time, he had almost saved up enough money to buy passage to Angola and had already learned Wolof quickly from doing business in Dakar. In fact, soon after this encounter, Sadio made it to Angola, a place of significant commercial opportunities.

Abdou’s more limited opportunities as a migrant were rendered palpable by his concomitant linguistic constraints—he could only speak Pular. His unfamiliarity with Wolof or Hassaniya (a common language of Mauritania) soon became an embodied sign of his failure as a migrant. Building on a critique of Abdou’s language skills, Sadio and other interlocutors continued to evaluate the extent to which Abdou was shaped by his time abroad. At one point, they questioned Abdou’s knowledge of Nouakchott’s neighborhoods and dismissed the faltering list he offers up. Along these lines, Sadio assessed the goods and material traces that Abdou was able to bring back as evidence of true mobility. “His clothes were all old!” Sadio explained at different points, adding that Abdou had brought less than one hundred dollars over the course of four years. In transcript provided in table 3.2, Sadio urged another migrant peer, Mansa, to talk about Abdou’s clothes. As others, such as Mansa, are drawn into this encounter, more and more passersby learn of Abdou’s fate. This provides a first cast of individuals who feel ratified to use “quatre ans, sarvet” (four years in a towel) as a nickname. This example demonstrates the importance of tracking not only who is speaking but also who is performing their involvement through backchannel cues. These old clothes and two old bags were a far cry from the ideal of “ostentatious [leather] bags” that successful migrants were expected to return with (Chappatte 2022, 9). In so doing, the storytellers collectively establish that Abdou acquired nothing new in Mauritania. This was a significant charge in a context where mobility was expected to offer opportunities for wealth accumulation, often away from familial networks that might have exerted pressures on one’s resources.

In sum, over the course of these dialogic articulations, Abdou is denied any lasting experience of Mauritania. Despite four long years, he could not successfully channel any signs of his time abroad. Although Abdou had physically traveled to Mauritania, the status of migrant was effectively denied to him as evidenced by his lack of new language skills, acquired goods, local knowledge, and clothing. Ultimately, the one thing Abdou did share with many of his peers, however, was this shared experience of failure. “Aventure no muusi” (Adventure [traveling] is painful), offered a member of the audience. His relationship with this emergent community was a nuanced one, however. On one hand, his status as migrant was cast into doubt through collaborative articulations of his failure. On the other hand, his precarity also situated him alongside many other struggling migrants whose fates were remembered through jammoore names.

It might be tempting to see this dialogic storytelling session as an act of representing through language the experiences Abdou had as a migrant. However, rather than positing ostensibly transparent experiences of mobility that are subsequently put into words, this episode shows how migrants and mobilities are constituted through language-in-interaction. Telling a story was thus not to narrowly represent an experience but to enact mobility and to mediate relationships within a community of migrants. By articulating the story, Sadio was revealing a difficult moment in Abdou’s life; Abdou was also becoming someone. In so doing, Sadio was also cultivating his status as a charismatic storyteller—a kind of person who tells it like it is. Although his voice is dominant, Sadio does not singlehandedly define Abdou’s fate. At times these stories are channeled through other interlocutors, who soak up the tale and further interpret Abdou’s travels as they translate it into other languages and perspectives. These contested meanings emerge through repeated rebuttals and retellings, which are offered to passersby who themselves interpret and pass on these stories. The dialogic nature of this story shows the significance of such articulations to be emergent and not predetermined.

Told by his own mouth, Abdou’s plight might have become a story of ethnic disdain of Mauritanians. However, the existence of jammooje as a genre of migratory suffering presented opportunities to reframe the encounter: “four years in a towel!” It is this image of a laughable and frail Abdou wearing a towel that came front and center, the figure of someone who had perhaps moved about some but not really been mobile. As articulations, routines of jammoore teasing disabuse notions that mobility constitutes experience which is merely captured by language as representation. Articulating the trauma of mobility through taboo, jammoore reveals this to be a central site of social action in which individuals came into being as migrants.

This chapter thereby illustrates the dialogic and performative work of articulating mobilities. Sadio’s tales of Abdou’s time in Mauritania were not individual verbal feats. Rather, they emerged in collaboration with listeners who ratified and shaped the story. Even if articulations of mobility do appear to take the form of stories, these narratives are told in particular times and often have a part to play in the broader interactional goals of the moment. These may include impressing one’s peers, dissuading others, or engaging in cultural critique that compares styles of living in different places. These considerations carry important implications for how we conduct research on mobilities. An interview with migrants, for instance, is not a transparent window on their experiences. Instead, it is a negotiated encounter in which different actors bring different expectations and understandings of what is happening (Briggs 1986). The kinds of stories elicited thus are shaped by the broader interactional goals, power dynamics, and social roles of those involved.

Viewing mobility as dialogic articulations shapes the conclusions that we can draw about qualitative data gathered from respondents in the context of mobility. For instance, in a recent article on mobility that encounters seemingly irrational behavior by artisanal miners, the authors note that “people looking for wealth-enhancing opportunities are enticed by overstated narratives, which in this case were ‘gold-gilded’” (Fahy Bryceson, Bosse Jønsson, and Clarke Shand 2020, 459). These are the kinds of pronouncements that we as scholars on mobility frequently encounter. Not merely narratives of success in mobility, these were forms of action that did social work. The ways in which migrant miners articulate their mining activities is a complex question that requires a look beyond the referential elements to the interactional context surrounding these responses. Complaining, bragging, and other talk about one’s successes (Fahy Bryceson, Bosse Jønsson, and Clarke Shand 2020, 459) can be understood as articulations of migratory mining practices: forms of social action that build a person’s status and situate them in relation to others. These verbal strategies can even influence one’s luck in mining. On one hand, bragging and performing largesse from small successes often form the part of a larger strategies of status negotiation or interactional one-upmanship that have the potential to mobilize clout and resources (Walsh 2003; Newell 2012). In other cases, however, West African migrants also avoid flaunting their wealth or representing their success, for fear of attracting jealous gazes and evil eyes that might make demands on their resources. Becoming a successful miner in West Africa entails the capacity to manage relationships with spirits of the earth (d’Avignon 2022), which is itself contingent on one’s ability to articulate oneself or one’s hosts as autochthonous parties who have rights to the land. Miners thus balance the cultivation of good fortune through ritual activity with the deflection bad luck and jealous eyes through the tempering of apparent successes. In the case of migrant West African miners, thinking of articulations of mobility as forms of social action in their own right rather than correct or incorrect representations helps account for language as a performative medium.

Evaluating Migrancy: Connecting Places through Language

The remainder of this chapter expands on the perspective of articulation by examining three further encounters between migrants and home communities. They explore the linguistic and relational dynamics in interaction through which migrants’ connections with places and cultural formations is evaluated. To come back to one’s hometown village, then, was to enter an arena in which traces of one’s mobility were scrutinized. Abdou’s story provides an initial case study of how this happened in the downtown Kédougou market. As such, certain linguistic performances could sediment one’s status as a successful aventurier, while others risked mockery as evidence of backwardness and migratory incompetence. These kinds of interactions were also common in Taabe. One afternoon I was listening to the radio in front of a village store when a young man I knew as Boubs showed up to greet the lot of us sitting around on rattan chairs. I soon learned that he had been away for several weeks, and various stories had been circulating about his activities. After some brief introductions, he turned to me and said, “A wallay laŋ e kele. Meŋ hawtay kele” (You will help me get a “girlfriend.” We will share a “girlfriend”). Bursts of sardonic laughter sputtered out from the mouths of my fellow companions and dislodged many from their seats. Whereas he was actually asking about a USB key, his pronunciation of this word sounded like the Pular word for girlfriend, kele (see table 3.3).

The context of this request was that I had just given to the members of the local youth soccer league several USB keys filled with video footage of their recent soccer tournament. Not interested in a girlfriend, Boubs was instead asking me whether I would help him get a hold of a USB with a video of the match on it. To Daouda and his companions, however, he had (mis)pronounced a word borrowed from French, clé (as in USB key), as kele, which means “girlfriend” in Pular. Based on Pular phonology, speakers often insert vowels between consonants, implicitly following a linguistic sound pattern that avoids consonant clusters. The loan word clé from French was thus pronounced by a rural Pular speaker as “kele” to avoid what would otherwise be for monolingual Pular speakers an awkward consonant cluster. For those mobile youth who had acquired a facility with style shifting through previous migratory experiences, to pronounce the word in this way betrayed the voice of a country bumpkin whose linguistic horizons did not stretch far out of the Fouta Djallon mountains.

Such potential missteps were often widely discussed among peer groups and could provide ammunition for teasing for weeks. Among youth who were often traveling to coastal Senegal for economic opportunities, interpretations of such linguistic displays revealed an individual’s connections to wider social worlds. Those who wielded these linguistic insights often made a showing of their broader knowledge as marks of mobility and experience of the world. In the eyes of his peers, his potential misstep demonstrated a lack of cosmopolitanism, extrapolated from his inability to produce the loan word within the flow of spoken Pular. Articulating sounds even on a phonological level thus indexes contact with broader cultural spheres. Not merely a question of communication, these sounds spoke volumes about migration histories.

Although seemingly minor, the steady repetition of these kinds of assessments could significantly alter the way in which individuals were positioned within a community. They furthermore show that it was not merely a question of accumulating “experience” as a migrant abroad. Mobilities and concomitant connections with other places and cultural forms were assessed and constituted through everyday encounters.

To offer a second example, just a few weeks before my encounter with Boubs, a young man known locally as Drogba from a nearby village began hanging out in Taabe. Drogba often played on the Taabe football team, where he received his nickname in honor of the famous African footballer. After a longer absence from the village, Drogba began to spend more and more time in the village. I often spotted him making the rounds, dropping in on various acquaintances throughout the village. In talking with his peers in the village, we soon gathered that Drogba was interested in finding a wife. Like Boubs, he had spent several months at a mining zone, where he expressed hopes of soon striking it big. I was out with a young man named Yoro when we crossed Drogba hanging out under a small baobab tree. Like the mountain path from Takkopellel to Taabe, this tree was a space of dense sociality partly because of the rare bars of cell reception one could often find there. On a plateau where the cellular network was extremely patchy, this was the most reliable place near the village center to receive signal. As such, it was a place where people were accustomed to encountering others and being overheard. When we arrived, Drogba looked at us and said, “Lu kew?” a short greeting in Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca that is so commonly spoken in Kédougou. Table 3.4 captures our short exchange.

Note: An asterisk (*) indicates the relative placement of a pronunciation of the Pular velar stop [k], as in “kettle,” rather than the Wolof velar fricative [x], as in “Bach.”

A common acquisition “error” among Pular speakers is to pronounce the Wolof velar fricative [x] (as in Bach) as the velar stop [k] (as in kettle), as Drogba had in saying “ku kew.” A Wolof greeting that could have displayed Drogba’s broader experiences had hopelessly backfired, marking him as a West African hillbilly through his Pular villageois pronunciation. After Yoro first points out Drogba’s mistake, I mindlessly repeat these two potential pronunciations to myself. Yoro, who had spent years working as a tailor in nearby villages, felt at ease speaking Wolof, which was the language of instruction in his workshop. Yoro’s intonation had made it clear that he heard Drogba’s greeting as a novice mistake. Chuckling about this confrontation, Yoro soon spread word of Drogba’s blunder. Youths could be ruthless in monitoring each other’s attempts to deploy these resources. And Drogba’s mistake was not just a meaningless error, for at this time, he was actively searching for a spouse; such missteps had the potential to incisively undermine his strategy of self-presentation. Although this example presents but one instance of an interaction between returning migrants and those in the village, the cumulative effect of these kinds of evaluations impacted the social standings and trajectories of individuals.

Examining this short encounter alongside that of the conflated girlfriend/key, we can see how mobile connections to coastal Senegal or mining regions were interpreted through everyday linguistic features. To be a mobile migrant was thus a status that one earned not through the mere accumulation of time abroad but—as with the case of Abdou in Mauritania—through the instantiation of that experience in everyday social evaluations. It was not enough to have spent time away in a number of different places. Signs of your connection to faraway places were negotiated with others in interactions that you never completely controlled. Taken together, these encounters could cumulatively articulate your connection with other people and places.

Usu Returns to Taabe: Articulating Mobility, Articulating Relationships

Return trips for migrants often became fraught encounters where interactions or gifts were highly scrutinized as evidence of success abroad. Though these trips were joyous occasions, migrants were also often compelled to navigate relationships with hometown residents with whom they held complex, crosscutting relations. The return of one villager, Usu, from the south of Spain offers a third example of these dynamics of mutual recognition. Usu was from a nearby village but had married a woman from Taabe and thus held ties of kinship and affinity with many in Taabe. Across the hoore fello plateau, anxious talk of Usu’s return from Spain circulated for many weeks. Was he really interested in separating from his wife despite the recent birth of their child? What would he bring back, and how long would he stay?

Luckily, Usu had managed to regularize his status in Spain and thus could travel back and forth between there and Senegal. Despite this, he had come back only infrequently over the past five years. He had been back in the past year, and his return was partly to baptize his new daughter, who had been born in the nearby village of Mariwuro. The draw of this life cycle ritual was strong. “Eŋ heɓay haaju” I heard repeated over and over: “We’re having an event!” In the days before this event, Usu visited the surrounding villages like Taabe, greeting his friends and kin across the plateau. Although it is not explicitly a story of Usu’s travels, the exchanges between Usu and Rune (Mamadou’s younger brother) during a hometown visit also exemplify articulations of mobility. His return exemplifies how tracking the meaning of mobilities was not merely a question of representing preexisting experiences into language. Articulations of his mobility occurred amid multiparty encounters in which acts of storytelling served as platforms for negotiating the relative statuses and relationships of those involved.

In anticipating these kinds of return encounters, I imagined that migrants would regale each other in stories of migration: the struggles they faced, their living and work conditions, or their harrowing journey abroad. What I found, however, was that such explicit stories were infrequently offered to people back home unprompted. At first, I thought this reticence might be conditioned by my positionality. However, the lack of detailed knowledge of many migrants’ everyday activities—even by close relatives—hinted that this was a broader phenomenon. As an ethnographer, I was still in the mindset of representation—thinking that these experiences would be expressed neatly in story form for me to capture. What I found instead was that articulations of migrations were slowly built up through lived encounters with people back home. Mobilities were articulated through the money sent back home, clothes worn back, gifts offered to family and friends, migrants’ demeanor during visitations, marriage opportunities, and financial investments back home (processes other anthropologists of transnational West Africa have tracked [Buggenhagen 2012; Yount-André 2018; Hannaford 2017]). The “meaning” of mobility was thus not merely something that was told in a narrow sense but something that was done. Mobility was rendered intelligible to people through these various modalities and not merely through narrative quips.

Days after returning from Spain, Usu finally made it to the village Taabe to pay his respects. His wife was in the lineage of Taabe’s chief, and as such, many in the village were his in-laws. Like others, he felt pressure to make numerous trips to surrounding in-laws, kin, and colleagues, thereby paying respect through time spent together. In Taabe, Usu was welcomed for a midmorning tea under a shade structure, surrounded by six other local youths, including Rune, who was a longtime acquaintance. Because of Usu’s endogamous marriage, Rune and Usu can trace connections with one another based on affinity and kinship. As I go on to discuss, they are ultimately impelled to negotiate this connection by the provocation of a fellow youth, whose remark stands as a challenge for them to negotiate their mutual status.

The status of in-law was an important one that drove many interpersonal relationships in this region of West Africa. In principle, among these communities of Fulɓe, there were two categories of in-laws. Esiraaɓe were senior in-laws, older than one’s spouse, to whom one owed deference. In contrast, one could cultivate more casual relationships with one’s keyniraabe, those younger than one’s spouse. At other times, however, individuals might try to base these relationships on their relative ages. While the status of such relationships should be clear in theory, in practice that status of who was an esiraaɓe and who was a keyniraawo could be a contested affair.

The flexible nature of these relationships contradicts much received wisdom that questions of affinity and kinship present unchanging principles of social constitution. As I describe in chapter 6, in-law customs not only are a narrowly rural concern but also provide a frame for individuals to creatively negotiate relationships. These considerations cast doubt on the utility of creating distinctions between kinship and fictive kinship; attempting to maintain strict, categorical separations is a practice that is difficult to square with the expansive ways in which individuals employ kinship idioms to build very real connections with a wide range of individuals (Agha 2007; McGovern 2012).

As they were sitting under a shade structure, Rune (who had never been to Spain) glanced up at Usu and said, “Hombre,” using a familiar Spanish greeting that invoked Usu’s time in the south of Spain. After a long pause, Usu replied, “C’est bon, c’est bon” (it’s good, it’s good). The presence of returning migrants like Usu conditioned others—many of whom had never migrated—to employ the linguistic and cultural capital of places abroad. As Rune and Usu began to chat, they collectively imagined a possible trip they might take together to Usu’s nearby hometown village of Mariwuro (see line 5 of table 3.5). Note that even such stories that don’t seem to describe real events nonetheless carry significant meaning. In this exchange, Rune proposes dropping off Usu at his town, situating himself as the giver of rides and the owner of a motorcycle. While it is Usu who can afford new motorcycles, Rune can articulate a reality in which he is the giver of hospitality in this friendly interaction. During these exchanges, Rune and Usu addressed each other familiarly, using a (you, singular) pronouns rather than pronouns of respect, oŋ (you, plural). For the sake of simplicity, I have omitted most conventions for marking pauses and timing between speech, which can often tell useful stories about interactions.

This imagined story offers a stage on which Rune and Usu negotiate one another’s relationship. In a state of lighthearted contention over who might front gas money for their motorcycle trip, the terms of Usu and Rune’s relationship remain implicit until the question of in-law status was raised by Baylo on line 1 in Table 3.6 Uttering, “Ah he’s your in-law too man,” Baylo’s instigation defined much of the remaining interaction by placing Usu and Rune at odds over their relative status. What had been a more egalitarian interaction among peers suddenly became an intense discussion of their affinal status. Rune vehemently disputed the fact that Usu is his senior in-law (who is to be respected) and instead invoked his own status as Usu’s senior in-law based on his kinship relationships with Usu’s wife (see line 3 in Table 3.6). The other interlocutors present did not end up buying this characterization, however, and Rune found himself unable to make his case. Rather than outright refusal, this lack of support emerged more subtly when they eschewed Rune’s eye contact and any attempts at addressing them.

Not just a dyadic affair, however, once the terms of this interaction were set, all other copresent participants provided potential resources through which Rune and Usu voiced their positions, eschewed challenges, and garnered support. Viewed merely as stories or as descriptions of relationships or states of affairs, these interactions wouldn’t make much sense. Looking at their interactional dynamics helps us understand how a migrant’s conception of self is articulated in home communities and how people make sense of such migration experiences collectively. This encounter shows several important dimensions of how mobilities are articulated between individuals who have a range of local and transnational commitments. First, such interactions can be described as dialogic in that they are the product of multiple parties. This means that representations are not merely presented but are evaluated, contested, and shaped in interactional contexts. This can be seen most clearly in the contributions of Baylo, who explicitly brings up the question of in-law relation. Any significance or resulting consequences must be negotiated through this multiparty interactional matrix.

Second, much of the action of these articulations can be tracked only by attuning to the multimodal dimensions of interaction (Stivers and Sidnell 2005). By the term multimodal, I mean embodied, complementary aspects of communication, such as gaze, gesture, and bodily alignment, through which individuals recruit addressees and contextualize meaning. In this interaction, Rune attempted to recruit the others in supporting his position of senior in-law, but he was unable to do so partly because they evaded his gaze and body alignment. Attunement to a conversation here reveals itself to be more of an achievement than a given. Finally, as sites for social action, these articulations were encounters through which individuals affected changes in one another’s relative status, moving them from being a mere representation of affairs to being the work of relationship negotiation.

Usu’s return from Spain moreover shows the importance of accounting for mobility in terms of temporality in addition to spatiality and movement. In such cases, social links lost and forgotten in one place offer opportunities for self-fashioning in another. In the greetings and exchanges of the everyday, for instance, individuals often develop habits of interaction—an interactional inertia of placing one another as particular kin or of adopting certain keys of interaction. Given these interactional ruptures, the length of time between encounters granted migrants and those they left behind a greater latitude to redefine relationships. This expansion of time intervals along with travel to distant lands thus entailed numerous implications for social relationships. It meant that news of migrants abroad was delayed, offering kin back home an opportunity to debate these missives for days, weeks, or years before they could confront the individuals about them directly.

While it is tempting to capture the meaning of mobilities in the form of individual narratives, this chapter has shown how meaning making in mobilities should also be examined through interactional encounters. Rather than representation, I have been using the term articulation to emphasize the negotiated linkages that emerge during the course of these encounters. Thinking of mobilities in terms of articulations that further social action rather than mere representation helps eschew inherited theories of meaning making in which ideas are brought unaltered to new places. As such, migration offers opportunities for broader social transformations as individuals navigate their relations between distant sites and hometowns. Attuning to the broader interactional dynamics shows how mobilities are articulated in the everyday. Moments of homecoming, such as the ones discussed in this chapter, offer rich contexts in which these dramas can unfold. Tracking these linguistic practices requires attention to the interaction as a whole rather than accounting for individual speakers and their narratives alone. To study language intersubjectively is therefore to recognize that a migrant’s ability to self-identify and present themselves is contingent on the evaluations and diversions that happen during the course of multiparty interactions. As migrants move, they also move between different, overlapping fields of evaluations and associations through which their linguistic practices come to make sense.

Notes

This chapter is derived, in part, from an article published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on May 31, 2021, available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/1369183X.2021.1924050.

1. 1. Moreover, a long-standing anthropological insight is that the exchange of things are often as much about relationships between people and groups as they are about the things themselves (Mauss 1925; Malinowski 1984; Buggenhagen 2012).
2. 2. With no fixed amounts, payment for access to nicknames is negotiated through a group-ratified acceptance of the amount paid. These negotiations often occurred immediately after the climatic utterance of the taboo name in front of the concerned individual, in which a payment was often demanded to remedy the transgression. In many cases, a third party who was ratified to say a particular taboo name would act as an instigator. They would bait individuals into saying a taboo name and subsequently attempt to extract a monetary fine for its violation. Once money is out on the table, all present participants and not only the taboo namesake could motivate a claim to the extracted payment, and thus, all present had an interest in encouraging taboo diffusion and transgression. Fine money would often be used to buy water, peanuts, or other snacks that would be distributed to all present.
3. 3. The experiences of Abdou in Mauritania resonate with broader regional histories in which white baydân Mauritanians commonly exploited or even enslaved Black Mauritanians who lived south of the Senegal River (Bonte 2002). Slavery as a local institution has often been understood as affording different kinds of rights to distinct groups rather than absolute ownership (Miers and Kopytoff 1977). In Mauritania, the legal institution of slavery was only abolished in 1980. The legacy of this exploitation and later ethnic tensions could lead to alternative interpretations of Abdou’s exploitation.