Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
as they explained, at home, in senegal, kitchens are often open air areas, separate
from the enclosed quarters. on the balcony, the fumes and the smell of food are
easily dispersed.
inside Residence Roma, the gendered separation between the public and the
private spheres also marked a separation between different gendered spatial prac-
tices such as operations of production and consumption. The daily practices of
senegalese male vendors, publicly visible on the streets of Rome, are very differ-
ent from those of senegalese women, who operated inside the invisible spaces of
Residence Roma, where they cooked or braided hair. f. emphasized how she did
not like to cook because she preferred to be out in the public. she would rather do
what she did in senegal, that is, work with her mother who owned a small clean-
ing service. Cooking is a hard business, f. explained, because it is very tiring and,
besides, you cannot leave home, you are always indoors, from day to night. when
it does occur that they sell in the streets, the visibility women acquire often meets
the scorn of senegalese men or, as Coumba suggests, the pity of italian women
who, out of a sense of Christian charity, constantly address her as “ la poverina
(the “poor thing”) (perrone 1995, 111-112). for women, selling more often happens
indoors, where they buy and sell goods and products for their own consumption.
This is in many ways similar to what happens in senegal, where many women
have opened their own home boutiques. in the privacy of their apartment, they
showcase and sell what they have bought during their transnational trading trav-
els, that is, cosmetics, accessories, as well as clothes and jewelry.
The gendered separation of daily spatial practices within and without Resi-
dence Roma adds an interesting dimension to our understanding of female sub-
jectivity in transnationality. The rearrangement by women of the balcony as a
cooking space constitutes one of the most creative acts of appropriation of the
space of Residence Roma. The kitchen-balcony served multiple purposes, both
economic and social. on the one hand, it transformed the alienating one-dimen-
sional monolocale into a space reminiscent of home. on the other, it also allowed
the setting up of a rather profitable indoor business for women who did not want
to or could not sell in the streets. The kitchen-balcony signals the high degree
of hybridity, flexibility, and creativity of the Residence Roma experience. Yet, as
we have seen, senegalese transmigrant women must constantly renegotiate their
subjectivity, caught in the tension between the advantages of a flexible appro-
priation of their present migrant reality and the persistent models of their role
in both western and african societies, which would like them to be invisibly
confined to the domestic walls.
The Residence Roma experience indicates that the formation of a hybrid
identity as a state of radical heterogeneity seems unthinkable, and certainly coun-
terproductive, to transmigrant politics and daily social practices. The analysis of
new sites of placements, distinct from the original ones, shows how diasporic
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