Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration: Spousal Relationships among Somali Muslims in the United Kingdom

By Natasha Carver

Winner of the 2022 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize​

This ethical and poetic ethnography analyses the upheavals to gender roles and marital relationships brought about by Somali refugee migration to the UK. Unmoored from the socio-cultural norms that made them men and women, being a refugee is described as making "everything" feel "different, mixed up, upside down." Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration details how Somali gendered identities are contested, negotiated, and (re)produced within a framework of religious and politico-national discourses, finding that the most significant catalysts for challenging and changing harmful gender practices are a combination of the welfare system and Islamic praxis. Described as “an important and urgent monograph," this book will be a key text relevant to scholars of migration, transnational families, personal life, and gender. Written in a beautiful and accessible style, the book voices the participants with respect and compassion, and is also recommended for scholars of qualitative social research methods.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978805552

Book preview

Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Series Editor: Péter Berta

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts series from Rutgers University Press fills a gap in research by examining the politics of marriage and related practices, ideologies, and interpretations and addresses the key question of how the politics of marriage has affected social, cultural, and political processes, relations, and boundaries. The series looks at the complex relationships between the politics of marriage and gender, ethnic, national, religious, racial, and class identities and analyzes how these relationships contribute to the development and management of social and political differences, inequalities, and conflicts.

Joanne Payton, Honor and the Political Economy of Marriage: Violence against Women in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Rama Srinivasan, Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India

Hui Liu, Corinne Reczek, and Lindsey Wilkinson, eds., Marriage and Health: The Well-Being of Same-Sex Couples

Sara Smith, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold

Rebecca Joubin, Mediating the Uprising: Narratives of Gender and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama

Raksha Pande, Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora

Asha L. Abeyasekera, Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

Natasha Carver, Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration: Spousal Relationships among Somali Muslims in the United Kingdom

Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration

Spousal Relationships among Somali Muslims in the United Kingdom

Natasha Carver

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carver, Natasha, author.

Title: Marriage, gender and refugee migration : spousal relationships among Somali Muslims in the United Kingdom / Natasha Carver.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Politics of marriage and gender: global issues in local contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029106 | ISBN 9781978805538 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978805545 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978805552 (epub) | ISBN 9781978805569 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978805576 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Somalis—Great Britain—Social conditions. | Muslims—Great Britain—Social conditions. | Marriage—Great Britain. | Sex role—Great Britain. | Muslim families—Great Britain. | Immigrant families—Great Britain. | Somalis—Cultural assimilation—Great Britain. | Great Britain—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC DA125.S56 C37 2021 | DDC 306.872089/9354041—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029106

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Natasha Carver

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by US copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Matthew

Contents

List of Transcription Symbols

Series Foreword by Péter Berta

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Context and Narrative: Speaking With and Speaking About

Chapter 3. Atrocity Stories about Divorce

Chapter 4. Personal Accounts of Relationship Breakdown

Chapter 5. Being Responsible: Providing for Family

Chapter 6. Doing Responsibility: Caring for Family

Chapter 7. Somalinimo: An Existential Crisis?

Chapter 8. Regendering Somaliness in the British Context

Chapter 9. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Transcription Symbols

Series Foreword

The politics of marriage (and divorce) is an often-used strategic tool in various social, cultural, economic, and political identity projects as well as in symbolic conflicts among ethnic, national, or religious communities. Despite having multiple strategic applicabilities, pervasiveness in everyday life, and huge significance in performing and managing identities, the politics of marriage is surprisingly underrepresented in both the international book publishing market and the social sciences.

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts is a series from Rutgers University Press examining the politics of marriage as a phenomenon embedded into and intensely interacting with much broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes and practices such as globalization; transnationalization; international migration; human trafficking; vertical social mobility; the creation of symbolic boundaries among ethnic populations, nations, religious denominations, or classes; family formation; or struggles for women’s and children’s rights. The series primarily aims to analyze practices, ideologies, and interpretations related to the politics of marriage and to outline the dynamics and diversity of relatedness—interplay and interdependence, for instance—between the politics of marriage and the broader processes and practices mentioned above. In other words, most books in the series devote special attention to how the politics of marriage and these processes and practices mutually shape and explain each other.

The series concentrates on, among other things, the complex relationships between the politics of marriage and gender, ethnic, national, religious, racial, and class identities globally, and examines how these relationships contribute to the development and management of social, cultural, and political differences, inequalities, and conflicts.

The series seeks to publish single-authored books and edited volumes that develop a gap-filling and thought-provoking critical perspective, that are well-balanced between a high degree of theoretical sophistication and empirical richness, and that cross or rethink disciplinary, methodological, or theoretical boundaries. The thematic scope of the series is intentionally left broad to encourage creative submissions that fit within the perspectives outlined above.

Among the potential topics closely connected with the problem sensitivity of the series are honor-based violence; arranged (forced, child, etc.) marriage; transnational marriage markets, migration, and brokerage; intersections of marriage and religion/class/race; the politics of agency and power within marriage; reconfiguration of family (same-sex marriage/union); the politics of love, intimacy, and desire; marriage and multicultural families; the (religious, legal, etc.) politics of divorce; the causes, forms, and consequences of polygamy in contemporary societies; sport marriage; refusing marriage; and so forth.

Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration is an insightful analysis of how cultural, religious, and gendered identities are transformed and renegotiated in the context of (and due to) transnational migration among Somali migrants living in Bristol, United Kingdom. By outlining the nature of conflicts and tensions between these identities created through the migration process, Carver’s monograph also convincingly reveals why and how cultural, religious, and gendered identity projects reflect and shape each other.

On the one hand, Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration highlights the discursive strategies and practices through which marital breakdown and divorce are explained, framed, and justified and compares the complex and often conflictual relationship between the public narratives and personal tales focusing on these intimate processes. On the other hand, Carver’s analysis meticulously presents the ideological, emotional, and practical struggles of Somali migrants to harmonize as well as partially reformulate the socioreligious—Islamic, and so on—ideals of doing family and doing gender within the new context of living in Bristol.

By vividly demonstrating how diaspora masculinities and femininities work and change, Carver’s monograph gives a fascinating insight into the dynamics of how and why Islamic family life has been changing in contemporary Britain.

Péter Berta

University College London

School of Slavonic and East European Studies

1

Introduction

After ten months of fieldwork exploring understandings of intimate relationships among UK-Somali migrants, I had spent many hours with Somali women—cooking, eating, dancing, and drumming, as well as undertaking more formal interviews—but I had managed to speak to just two men. My attempts to snowball the sample and recruit men through existing participants had stalled, and female participants led only to more women. I asked my two main (female) gatekeepers if they would accompany me to a Somali café, a place frequented by men. The first laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion and gently shook her head. The second explained that a Somali woman should not go unaccompanied (by a man) to a café, and if she went with me, this stigma would by association taint me, and the men, therefore, would not talk to me.

Having taken care to dress conservatively in black leggings and a loose black tunic, and wearing a headscarf that partially covered my hair, I went by myself at nine o’clock on a Monday morning to a busy street of the inner-city ward of Lawrence Hill in Bristol in search of Somali men. There were three so-called Somali cafés within a short distance of each other. A small cluster of men were present in each of the first two cafés; complete silence fell when I entered. Both places were clean, bare, and functionally furnished with no decorative or sales-related adornments. The men waited expectantly for me to explain my presence. I gave them some leaflets about the project but did not feel welcome to stay in either place. The third café was brighter and more congenial, with red-and-white gingham tablecloths and wall decorations. There was a solitary female customer waiting to be served and several large cakes on the counter. The café manager—who introduced himself as half-Somali and half-Ethiopian—listened to my spiel about the project and the lack of male participants and suggested I should have a coffee and wait. The female customer eyed me up and down and, taking note of my clothing, asked me if I was "police. I explained again about my research and invited her to participate. She agreed to take part, with the reservation that she would sign the consent form only at the end, depending on the questions. We sat across a small table from one another, drinking our coffees and talking uninterrupted for nearly an hour when another customer came through the door. The café manager appeared from the back and said, Here is your first man! to which the man responded, First man? and then they talked in Somali. The female customer left the table and went to the back of the café; I explained to the new arrival that I was writing a book on marriage and was looking for Somali men to interview. He said, No. I refuse. Marriage is private. On her return, the woman asked me, Did he refuse? I said yes, he said it was private. That is silly, she said, because the questions are not difficult." She shrugged her shoulders and said goodbye.

The first man then continued, "There is no difference between marriage anywhere: British marriage, Chinese marriage, Somali marriage, it is two people. That is everything. And he proceeded to talk to—or, more accurately, at—me across the café on the topics of marriage, divorce, and cultural adaptation for forty minutes. I asked him several times if he would participate; he declined, saying that he said the wrong things (i.e., he was not politically correct). Only at the end of our conversation did he indicate that he wished after all to be included (You can write this down") and gave me some tips for recruiting male participants:

ZAHI: Next time, when you want to talk to a Somali man, you tell him it’s about the divorce problem. Marriage? No. Tell the man it’s about the divorce problem. Then he will talk to you.

The anecdote above serves to highlight two key aspects of this book about marriage among Somali migrants to the United Kingdom: the perception of a crisis in spousal relationships and the significance of gender. The project information sheet used to recruit participants was entitled Marriage Research Project, and the first sentence stated, This research is on Somali marriage. Zahi was not alone, however, in reframing the research project with marital breakdown as the object of focus. Participants spoke of marriage as the bedrock of society. They believed that the circumstances of their migration to the West had given rise to an existential crisis in gendered identities, leading to an upsurge in divorce. Unmoored from the structural and social norms that made them men and women, their displacement had resulted in everything being mixed up . . . changed . . . upside down (LUUL). Divorce, they feared, put the socialization of children at risk and threatened the reproduction of society itself.

This book considers how gendered identities are contested, negotiated, and (re)produced following refugee migration. I observe and analyze the discursive means by which cultural identity—in this case Somaliness or Somalinimo—is transformed, primarily through narratives about gender roles and gender relations that are themselves framed by religious and politico-national discourses. I examine the mechanisms of the regendering process of cultural reproduction, including consideration of what is silenced and what is articulated. The prevailing political discourse in Europe positions Muslim family life as backward and Islamic praxis as regressive and thus incompatible with so-called Western values. The findings of this book challenge this discourse, demonstrating the complexity of diaspora consciousness and transnational belonging. I show how female participants used Islam to radically alter gender ideologies and the modus operandi of intimate spousal relationships. In so doing, they premised their belonging to an imagined global religious and reformist ummah over that of an ethnic or national culture. They justified their transgression of Somali cultural norms through an increase in religiosity, and in disaggregating culture from religion, they also transformed sociocultural interpretations of gendered religious ideologies. For male participants, the predominant points of reference through which they sought to forge their masculinity were those that resonated with idealized cultural norms in both Somalia/land¹ and the United Kingdom.

The marital practices and family life of Muslims and migrants have repeatedly been a target for UK politicians concerned about the pollution (Douglas, 1966) of national culture (Carver, 2016). From this viewpoint, migrants are portrayed as being bound by their culture, which is understood as timeless and archaic. On migration they bring with them unacceptable cultural practices (Goodman, 2010), which are typically defined through examples relating to gender inequality. In this discourse, the United Kingdom and its citizens need to be protected from cultural others through restrictive immigration requirements, while those already in the United Kingdom must be encouraged to integrate so that British culture and values—defined in the Casey Review (2016:8) as respect for the rule of law, democracy, equality and tolerance—can be maintained. The markers used to measure integration (typically, levels of female employment and English language ability, the frequency of transnational marriage, and the extent and nature of practices that discriminate against women) focus on the supposedly uneconomic housewife as the exemplar of the undesirable migrant repressed by her own culture and religion (Kofman et al., 2015). It is a discourse premised on an (implicitly Christian) grand narrative of progress and modernization (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]) in which migrants are understood as being fast-forwarded through a civilizing process. Diaspora belonging and transnational connections are seen as responsible for resistance against such progress.

Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration began with the aim of exploring the effect of this discourse by examining the lived experience of restrictive immigration rules on transnational family formation. Somalis were chosen as a case study, as they were the nationality group most frequently refused entry to the United Kingdom on the basis of marriage (Charsley, 2012). My own experience from practicing as an immigration caseworker suggested that particular cultural approaches to marriage and divorce on the part of Somalis clashed with preconceived notions of Muslim marriage held by UK border officials and therefore might be a contributing factor to this high refusal rate (Carver, 2014, 2019; Shah, 2010). The research question was broadly framed as How is marriage perceived by UK-based Somalis? with aims to consider the role played by immigration regulations, transnational networks, and gender on choice of partner and lived marital practice. However, when I asked about marriage, I was told repeatedly about a high rate of divorce due to disagreements over gender roles. The crisis in marital harmony was explained to me as a consequence of the dramatic upheaval to previously fixed gendered identities brought about by migration: a crisis of masculinity and a metamorphosis within womanhood. My research took an inductive approach and followed this lead. The stories I heard and the narratives used to explain decisions around marital practice and gender roles both upheld and simultaneously subverted the prevailing political discourse. Certainly, notions of gender were perceived as having been thrown into flux such that, as one participant put it, everything is questioned, and diaspora belonging did provide an important link for the reproduction of culture. But this was far more complex than such discourse would suggest, and men and women diverged with regard to the significance they placed on ethnonational culture and religion, respectively. The book finds that the most significant catalysts for challenging and changing harmful gender practices are a combination of the welfare system and Islamic praxis.

The research involved over three hundred hours of participant observation across an eighteen-month period along with forty-four semistructured interviews. Feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist principles formed an integral part of this process, as well as delineating the multimethod approach to the analysis and representation of narratives, which falls under the umbrella term linguistic ethnography (Rampton et al., 2004) and is detailed in chapter 2. In the rest of this introduction, I outline the central themes of this book: marriage and its corollary, divorce; the inseparable and interwoven qualities of gender and culture; and the significance of transnationalism and diaspora to refugee migration.

Marriage, Divorce: A Crisis in Spousal Relationships?

A grand narrative is a metanarrative or master narrative that is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience (Stephens and McCallum, 1998:6). The story of the decline of marriage is often presented in such terms. Like many narratives of crisis, its orientation claims a stable, golden-age past in which the nuclear family (comprising a male breadwinner and a female homemaker and their children, hereafter The Family) reigned not just as the normative global model but also as the ideal family form for the functioning of democratic capitalism (cf. Murdock, 1949; Parsons, 1951). The evaluation of what went wrong depends in part on political outlook, but across the board, social theorists and politicians agree that there has been a dramatic and shattering (Giddens, 1992:13) sea change so that families now come in many shapes and sizes and are impermanent and unstable social institutions. At the heart of this perceived crisis lies the relationship between the spousal couple whose decisions to cohabit rather than marry, to both be workers, to reject heteronormativity, and, above all, to separate and divorce are seen to threaten the reproduction of society (Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Kirkwood, 2015). Everyday understandings of divorce, as Zahi inferred above, see it as lamentable for the individuals concerned but worryingly problematic for society.

Social theorists such as Giddens (1992), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2013), and Bauman (2003, 2007) have provided a more complicated picture. They view the cereal packet idealized nuclear family (Leach, 1967) of the 1950s as a product of its time, and following feminists such as Firestone (1970) and Dinnerstein (1976), they recognize The Family to be an unequal and potentially damaging institution and the primary site in which patriarchal gender roles are created and upheld. Nevertheless, they maintain and reproduce the orientation to a traditional and stable past in which individual choice is understood as largely predetermined, in part by rigid human customs and in part by the dictates of nature and environment. Contrasting late or postmodernity with the (European) premodern, they argue that there has been a significant weakening of the influence of structural forces over the individual’s capacity to enact choice. Norms have become flexible and prolific: we can choose whom, when, and if to marry, to cohabit, to live-apart-together, or a combination of these over time. The Family has been, or should be, replaced by the pure relationship, defined as a relationship of sexual and emotional equality, which is explosive in its connotations for preexisting forms of gender power (Giddens, 1992:2). Freed from their prescriptive gender roles, Giddens (1991:9) rejoices, couples (will) come together and stay together based on what they as individuals get out of the relationship as part of the reflexive project of the self. For other individualization theorists (Bauman, 2003, 2007; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, 2013), there is less to celebrate in this age of risk and precarious freedom (Lash, 2001:vii), which heralds an increase in marital breakdown as evidenced by the divorce rate.

But just how dramatic or shattering these changes to intimate relationships have been is disputed. Historians have questioned the premising of a simple dichotomy of past and present, arguing that cohabitation was in fact quite common in the early 1900s (Lewis, 2001) and that modern divorce is little more than a functional substitute for death (Stone, 1977:46). While acknowledging the significant changes occurring within law and the major changes to the gendered breadwinner/homemaker binary of the married couple (Dermott and Miller, 2015), sociologists continue to challenge the notion of a democratization of relationships (Duncan and Smith, 2006; Hochschild, 2012; Van Hooff, 2013) and demonstrate that notions of romantic love and the nuclear family model continue to persist as powerful cultural ideals (Morgan, 2011; Wilding, 2018).

But the most damaging critique relates to the assumption of uniformity of experience (Jamieson, 2011), for although the individualization theory takes the passing of time into account, it does not give place the same attention. The past may not be entirely a foreign country, but just as with Murdock’s appropriation of the nuclear family as a universal norm, foreign countries are subsumed into what is essentially a narrative about Europe’s past. The pure relationship becomes a symbolic and moral destination in an Enlightenment history of cultural progression. This is in part because, as Smart and Shipman (2004:494) argue, the individualization thesis presents a homogenous picture of family and married life that is culturally monochrome. Alternative family models of racialized others are positioned as the negative foil to the pure relationship—as culturally backward, involving and perpetuating unequal gender relationships (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Grillo, 2011; Reynolds, 2009; Spencer and Charsley, 2016). While emotion and emotive ties are given undue prominence at the expense of structure in the individualization thesis, the significance of emotion and emotive ties as explanatory factors in the maintenance or breakup of the marriages of cultural others are often overlooked in favor of an emphasis on gendered social structures and religious practice (Charsley, 2013; Qureshi et al., 2014). The marriages and intimate relationships of ethnic and religious others are rarely incorporated into theoretical literature, which nevertheless presents itself as universally applicable.

A superficial glance at some of the data gathered for this book would reinforce both the everyday narrative of crisis in spousal relationships and the grand narrative of progress (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]) as presented in the individualization thesis. The participants all adhered to the principle of marriage as the sine qua non of society and presented divorce as a worrying and increasing phenomenon brought about by the structural destabilization of gender roles following migration to the West. Indeed, academics as well as Somali migrants have been quick to claim an increase in divorce among Somali refugees in the West and to explain this increase as female initiated due to an uptake of Western values (cf. Affi, 2004; Engebrigtsen, 2012; Harris, 2004; Hickman et al., 2008; Hopkins, 2010). The limited data available from Somalia/land suggest otherwise, painting a picture of a culture in which divorce is both easy and normal (Luling and Adam, 2015:142; Lewis, 1960; Johnson and Elmi, 1989) and increasingly initiated by women (APDS, 2002). In a discussion of gender role change, Harris (2004:63) presents quotes from a theatrical performance by Somali women in London. One tells the story of a great aunt who acts like a man, marrying and divorcing thirty-seven times. Overlooking the fact that the marriages were conducted in Somalia, Harris (2004:63) employs the story to illustrate Somali women’s uptake of divorce as a freedom gained in the United Kingdom, along with their apparent lack of emotional investment in marriage: So, in the UK, divorce they do—the rate is high. If a man is unemployed, brings in no income, spends what his wife earns or receives from social security on khat, will not help with domestic chores, and colludes with nagging in-laws—then a woman may feel better off without him.

In this way, common stories that circulate among Somali participants across these studies and that are told to non-Somali researchers are re-presented and represented as transparent explanation and elevated to a truth status. In such an interpretation, migration removes women from the social and structural constraints that committed them to lifelong unions. Suddenly experiencing the unprecedented level of agency (now) granted to Western women but not (yet) inured in the emotional investment and disclosing intimacy (Jamieson, 1998) of the pure relationship, divorce they do (Harris, 2004).

Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration apprehends the stories and conversations I heard about marital life and practices first and foremost as narratives rather than unmediated truth. This allows for a reconsideration of the role played by migration in the apparent disruption of marriage and intimate relationships and the centrality of narratives about marriage and intimate relationships in reimagining group identity. Unpicking the discursive functions of these migrant narratives and narratives of migration sheds light on the normative positions that underpin them and makes strange the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in Western grand narratives about marriage and relationships, including the individualization theory. The participants did present marriage in terms of a narrative of crisis, but their experiences and how they framed those experiences challenged discourses about spousal relationships even as they reproduced them. This book documents the participants’ reevaluation of marriage through the stories they told about this perceived crisis, analyzing both the social and cultural norms that are (re)produced through these stories and the political and legal constraints in which these norms are produced. As other scholars

Reviews for Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration

[Muna Barasab · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The book does not represent somali people, it's baist points of view, to use a quote that's out dated from another book to represent somali men saying if they are unemployed they eat khat, no it's faults to only go to three cafes and say the men were unfriendly and would not answer your question because u showed them a flyer. You really need to speak to a wide range of people from all walks of life to understand somali marriage. Did not like this book and would love to talk to this author about somali and marriages and even introduce her to somali men who will talk to her about there marriages. I would not even give it a star but page won't let me post without it.