It is often argued that national identity becomes consolidated through migration. Pratt (2002a) records that it was Italian migrants in the USA who constituted Italianness. Stevenson (1988) says the same about Yemenite migrants and Saad (1998) about Egyptians in Iraq who returned with cosmopolitan experiences enabling them to make comparisons with other nationalities but also with fellow countrymen. Shared national identity was reinforced, adding the national to the previous peasant/local/ethnic affiliation. Ferme (2004) shows how movement from Sierra Leone, with all the identification documents needed to pass through various states on the way to Egypt, facilitated the formation of a national identity. Van Aken (2005) highlights both the journey of Egyptian migrants across borders on the way to Jordan, and their relation with Jordanians, in the formation of a stronger national identity. Moreover their stay in a transcultural environment and the exchange with people coming from the same country create more links with the national identity than to the localised one of the village.
Eritreans who have experienced journeys across borders requiring the specification of identity have continued to reflect on their national historical and political milieu and become increasingly aware of it. Experience of other migratory contexts in Milan and the constitution of an Eritrean community have further developed their Eritrean affiliation, moving from a localised, ethnic and religious identity to a national one. Sometimes they fix it with rules of “how to be Eritrean”, and at other times they follow the flow of modernity and social change. The narratives about Eritrean-ness in Milan are especially constructed through the journey to exile and the struggle for remaining active in the social, economic and political affairs of their nation. The idea of their community in Milan is filled with notions of journeys and narratives of journey describing this process.
Saad (1998) contrasts the migratory experience with the experience of a war: the first is described as an individual pursuit, the second as a national project. Unlike the Egyptian migrants discussed by Saad, however, Eritrean exiles articulate a discourse in which even
migration is a national project, one through which they contributed economically and ideologically to the liberation struggle. Their different migratory experiences are linked to their reasons for leaving their country, with the various conflicts and the political, economic and security issues at stake. Leaving the home country may have begun as an individual stratagem in reaction to war and poverty, as described in Mebrat’s speech, but has become a collective strategy shared by one quarter of the population in support of a devastated country as well as their personal lives. Even today Eritrea survives thanks to taxes and the remittances from the diaspora which constitute some 80 per cent of the country’s income (Al-Ali et al. 2001a).
Among Eritreans in Milan, Eritreanness is strengthened through the journey that led them to Italy. The different experiences of that journey have shaped the different generations themselves. With this background narrative, Eritreans in the diaspora provided a nucleus of socialisation, thus integrating the new arrivals into the existing community. In forming a community, people constituted themselves through narratives based on the experience of dislocation. These narratives of journeys are thereafter relevant when describing their collective identities.
The dominant voice in this narrative has been developed through time by those of the first generation of arrival, who generalised first of all on a shared experience of journeys to exile among all Eritreans in Milan. Collective memories among Eritreans in Milan stress the unity of the community through the experience of exile, while tending to divide the community into generations of arrival, with narratives arguing that different generations had different journey experiences which then became makers of the different generations themselves. Differences normally follow Eritrean internal political tensions and divisions in the past and in the present. These differences in the past were not overtly attributed to these political divisions by my informants, who instead spoke as if journeys had an effect on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the community in Milan. They mostly spoke vaguely about “the liberation struggle”, omitting which side they supported, as if “unity” had always been
voiced by one front. During the course of the journey, and the subsequent formation of narratives around it, Eritreans have given a specific, and uniform, political meaning to their flight, which reflects present tensions and does not portray past ones. Therefore, although the first generation of migrants portrays Eritrean nationalism as a single phenomenon, there have in fact been many nationalist movements in Eritrea and abroad.
Trajectories echo the latter statement. Although differences exist, the generalised journey to exile is included in this idealised collective unity: everybody is Eritrean because they share the experience of a journey to exile. In this narrative the journey is some kind of ritual, often frightening and painful, through which one becomes part of the Eritrean diaspora and, in this specific case, an Eritrean in Milan. The worldwide Eritrean diaspora recognises itself in their shared movement from their troubled nation to other places in the world. Their nation is a constant thought and terrain for a shared identity, but is lived through the exiled identity which is perceived differently from the Eritrean identity of those who “stayed back home”.