“I
came here with the hope of a better future, nothing more than that. I couldn’t
study because of poverty”. These are the exact words of Ram, a young male
Nepalese migrant working in Japan, in the short film ‘After Ram Left Home’,
which was screened at Migrating out of poverty’s gender conference in
Singapore, 30 June – 2 July.
The
film managed to capture some of the most powerful dynamics at play in the
process of the migration of young males in Asia. These included the sacrifice
of borrowing money - up to US$20,000 - to pay recruitment fees required to
secure work in a restaurant; the tribulations of the left-behind wife and
parents; and the promising yet lonely and uncertain life of the migrant seeking
a better life elsewhere. The migration of Ram was undoubtedly informed by
gender roles and expectations based on what I perceived to be the instinct to
provide for his family and himself in order to make the statement “I am a man”.
In many ways, Ram’s migration symbolised a rite of passage, of a sort.
Yet
that social statement was underpinned by certain presumptions about how Ram was
behaving in his host country, particularly on the part of his wife. She was
very suspicious and convinced that he may be cheating on her with a more
beautiful and younger girl (because that is ‘how man roll’). In as much as Ram
felt that his manhood could be qualified and asserted through economic prowess,
the migration that this entailed produced certain household challenges that were
not easy to deal with.
Ram’s
dad, on the other hand, felt that if only he had been a better man financially,
his son would not have had to go through the process of migration that brings
with it insurmountable debt and uncertainty. He must have thought that his son’s
migration was a challenge to his own gender ascribed role: providing for his
own kin and maintaining his nuclear family intact. In the film, he lamented
over this and his sentiments, which many
sons growing up in nuclear families would also get from their dads, resonate with
me. Ram’s wife, besides being continuously insecure about her husband’s degree
of faithfulness, also had to grapple with adjusting to her new role of heading
the house and supporting her in-laws which was not an easy task as it had previously
been Ram’s role.
In
as much as migration yields benefits as seen in Ram remitting money here and
there, it is clear that it challenges the concept of family life as we are
raised to understand it. Migration questions norms, brings us out of our
comfort zones, and presents us with potentially newer ways of understanding and
negotiating gender roles and the family. This is not limited to male migration
as in Ram’s case. It is also a similar challenge in female migration.
In
Zimbabwe for example, female domestic and cross-border labour migration were
traditionally associated with prostitution. I’m certain that this is not unique
to that context alone. Predominantly, women on the move are seen as deviant and
are often ostracised and labelled as incorrect. However, I have seen many
instances where female ‘cross-border’ migrants lift families from poverty and
increase the family’s upward social mobility. During Zimbabwe’s economic crisis
from 2000 to 2008, it was the women that dared to pick themselves up,
challenging the status quo by migrating to sell baskets in South Africa.
Leaving their children behind in the care of their grannies and fathers,
through their agency these female migrants both challenged societal, cultural
and economic structures, and facilitated household subsistence and development.
Nonetheless, this migration presented challenges to the nuclear family as some
men ended up taking up female-ascribed roles of caregiving and cooking.
Evidently,
both male and female migration is equally problematic. So the end question
is; given the challenges that migration presents to the domestic setup is
migration necessarily a bad thing? I don’t think so.
Through
migration, individuals are able to shape their own lives beyond the scope of
the conventional. We begin to understand gender and family in nuanced ways, if
we allow ourselves to, that is. Poverty is one of the greatest challenges
facing mankind today. It incapacitates families to an extent where there is
ultimately no gender or family to talk about. So if migration can help with
this, what should take precedence: the order of things or livelihood? I would
argue that livelihood should come first. I think that the evidence speaks for
itself.
So,
what are the key lessons from all this? Migration is not without its
challenges. But what does it challenge predominantly? It challenges how we do
things, what we tell ourselves is the domestic order of things. But
interestingly, it questions our gender ascriptions about who should be cooking
and caregiving against who should be working outside the home; who should be
making decisions in the household and who (if anyone) should be subservient.
More importantly however, by challenging the status quo, it illuminates. It
does so by showing us that daddy is actually a good cook after he cooks the
food that mummy sent from her income using the cross-border bus (and that that
food still tastes the same). It shows us that women are equally good decision
makers in the family when daddy is working in another country. Most of all,
migration is key to development in contexts where there is not enough on the
table. If we adequately harness it and allow ourselves to see the family beyond
traditional gender roles, norms and expectations, there are more victories in
store for us in the fight against poverty.
Kudakwashe Vanyoro is a Research Assistant at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He was an intern under the Migrating out of Poverty RPC Research Internship Scheme from April to November 2014. His internship involved supporting all ACMS communications work, preparing and packaging policy briefs, research data capturing, undertaking desktop research and blogging on contemporary issues related to migration and poverty in Southern Africa.
