In detailing cruel optimism, it is important to point out that, as in the last chapter, this relation crosses divides of friendship/kinship, local/non-local, old/new relationships. Thus, one can equally enter into a relation of cruel optimism with a local, best friend as a distant mother and father. Due to limits of space, however, this thesis cannot offer an example of all relationships encountered during the fieldwork. The chapter, though, has aimed to showcase enough variety to represent some breadth of relationships in the sample.
Unbelonging does not equate to a loss of identity and belonging, but the development of a relation in opposition. This relation, though, simultaneously constructs that relationship in optimism by situating its importance. Keeping in touch marks shifts in the construction of selves and others that can serve to highlight how relationships remain familiar despite change. Giorgio, for instance, Andre’s best friend, remarked that during visits home, his understanding of Andrea had changed:
He’s the traveller now, he’s the guy who comes back to his native context of belonging.
Everyone asks him to testify, how is it to live there… but you finish this parenthesis and then you always go back to common ground.
Giorgio constructs Andrea as the exotic other, yet, who remains unchanged. In part, there is a sense though that loved ones are unable to imagine trajectories and develop a sense of belonging to those trajectories, to those who have migrated. Giorgio links visits to Andrea’s shift in identity, and an inability to discuss his new life by continually turning to familiar discussions.
In change, however, their relationship also gains further value. At the time of the interview, Giorgio himself had just returned from nine years of living in another region of Italy, where he was pursuing writing and rap music. Andrea and Giorgio, in fact, solidified their close relationship in part through Andrea’s continued assistance with Giorgio’s writing, done electronically, and during Andrea’s many visits where he would act as a music producer for Giorgio’s rap music. Giorgio explained that he stopped writing and making rap music, in part because he lost the support of Andrea after his move abroad, and generally realized the importance of their relationship:
I’ll tell you, I stopped doing everything. The total loss of a potential daily reference point
… For me it was a huge loss that I’m still living now. The tension and quality of our chats, they seem banal, but I haven’t found them with any other human relationship.
Optimism for solid relations is in part constructed through the heightened importance and quality of their relationship within a context where intimacy is actually perceived to be fading.
Thus, the discursive positioning of Andrea as a leaver is part of an identity politics that occurs within a context of rapidly shifting ties that links together ontological shifts related return migration and perceived changes in intimacy. While intimacy is understood to shift the relationship actually gains importance and in parallel to the ability to recognize familiarity in change observed in the assertion that “we always go back to common ground”.
In addition, while many informants had never migrated, they demonstrated their own projects of care for the self that connected them to the global. Alice for instance, Cadence’s sister, migrated to the South Pacific with her father. After three years, she had difficulties with her father and returned to a city in central Italy where she intended to stay: “When I came back to (city in central Italy), I stayed here. I didn’t leave again because I needed to find some stability that I didn’t find until now”. Alice expressed that she is happily married now, does not want to move again and she explained her disappointment that her sisters migrated. She made clear that she cares a great deal for her sisters, and during some difficult moments for her sisters she was upset not to be present. Because of this, and despite her opposition to relationships conducted via ICTs, she explained “I’ve tried to adapt for them”. In pushing further, though, Alice explained that keeping in touch also brought up difficulties related to contrasting identities between her sisters that limited her desire to keep in touch. For Alice, she is very different from her sisters who instead are very similar, “like twins”, and who have been very similar since childhood:
We love each other, but we’re so different in our ways of thinking. I’m really liberal. My kid could say I’m gay or be a hair dresser and I’d be happy, but Cadence is more traditional … Marg is becoming more like Cadence, more sophisticated, like dressing her kids in branded clothes.
Alice described that she is a more alternative person; “sort of a hippie” leading an alternative lifestyle while her sisters are more “serious”. She described that during visits and WhatsApp chats these differences emerge:
Once I told them (on WhatsApp) that for my health I had to follow a vegan diet, because I’m becoming intolerant to gluten and they thought it was just for a trend. I said, even if it was, what’s wrong with that? What if I do it to help animals, it’s not okay? They see it as a bit hippie.
Thus, keeping in touch intensifies longing and in concert with a stayer/leaver within the family. And in addition to how different members of personal communities appropriate divergent global discourses that extend horizons of belonging in order to forge life course trajectories.
The dimension of identity politics was clearly present in situating life course trajectories within romantic relationships. In separate interviews, Serena and her sister Silvia both explained that while the sisters were in daily contact, Silvia had nonetheless not been as close as other members of the family. During an interview with Silvia and her husband Claudio, himself being a domestic migrant, the motivation for the distance emerged in part as related to an intra-couple dynamic positioned in relation to Serena’s migration experience:
Claudio (husband): I think that she spends the whole day as a kind of foreign parenthesis to her life, or trying to stay attached to her old life I think that’s the problem, she never really migrated…I see that, as a migrant, because here I’m a migrant, she sees her situation in London as a kind of parenthesis. She never moved on.
Silvia (Sister): I know Serena well because she’s my sister. And even if he (Claudio) knows her less, he had the same perception I did… For me I want to stimulate her, saying
… we’re here if you need us, but you have to live your choice.
Serena and Silvia’s relationship, and the distance created between them, becomes linked to the construction of identity of Silvia and Claudio as a couple and is informed by domestic migration. Foucault (1986) has suggested that the formation of the ethical subject happens in part within the conjugality of a couple. Care for the self can be articulated in the manner in which
relations with a spouse are defined through guidance, training, and education. The wider relation with Serena creates a means to define that intra-couple relation and migration as an ethical form.
A similar process can emerge between couples in London attempting to build relationships between themselves and friends and family abroad. Of the five migrants who are in a romantic relationship, two discussed that keeping in touch has led to difficulties with friends and family. Giulia, Andrea’s partner, for instance described that keeping in touch regularly with Andrea’s parents created problems related to their Catholic world view. During visits or Skype calls, they would ask questions that bother her, as for instance, during a Skype call “they asked me what I was making Andrea for dinner. Why? Why am I the one making dinner?” Because of such questions she attempts to avoid a close relationship with them, which might invite further unwanted intimacy that relates to plans for children or marriage, something she knows would contrast with their Catholic worldview:
Giulia: So, I’m always a bit weary of getting too close to his family because I’m worried of getting to close too the point that they then feel like they can ask that sort of question. I think we have very different ideas on probably pretty much everything.
Interviewer: You mean different worldviews?
Giulia: Yes, I am vegetarian, I do yoga and I live with a man without being married, I don’t have kids and I moved abroad to get a better job, you know. I’m probably just what he (the father) doesn’t want for his son.
Giulia also mentioned, though, that she thinks Andrea “maybe wants me to have a relationship with his family”, and that “I do feel closer to his mom, I think I’m the only one that really listens to her”. Thus, in one way, the formation of ethical subjects developed through migration and the conjugal couple can be disrupted by potential intimacy with friends and family during visits and ICT practices. In avoiding intimacy, Giulia hopes to avert enabling conditions that might link their current project of self to previous notions of belonging in Italy. The belief in the couple and implicit expectation for relations with extended family and in combination with a felt connection with Andrea’s mom, constructs an implicit desire for further relations, which would untimely manifest in further visits and encounters with Andrea’s parents.