‘It’s not easy’. Everyday suffering, hard work and courage. Navigating masculinities post deportation in Mali

Abstract

This paper offers insight into Malian men navigating their endangered hegemonic masculinities post deportation. Being returned against their will with empty hands, many see these difficulties as a potential hindrance to their ability to stand their ground. Tracing the representations and conduct of life of these men, this article explores deportees trying to form part of their communities given financial and migratory constraints, and often collective immobilization, vis-à-vis social obligations and the expectation to re-emigrate. Based on cases primarily from rural and some from urban southern Mali, the data selected from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with former deportees and their social surroundings show how reinterpretations of suffering, working hard, and courage help to adapt to daily life post deportation. These strategies potentially allow for recovering one’s masculine dignity through a specific ‘adventure-hood’ integrated into a new masculine repertoire after deportation. This article analyzes how young and elder men’s narrations and practices contribute to a review of the norms and hierarchies in Malian society, and thus to concepts of changing masculinities and relations between men in Africa. In highlighting a little-discussed case of mostly inner African, reversed South-North migration the article goes beyond one-sided interpretations of masculine crises and hegemony. It thereby contributes to masculinities as well as post deportation studies at the intersections of age, generation, financial status and the experience of im/mobility after deportations.