ABSTRACT
In the 20th century, French colonisation of Djibouti attracted Yemeni migration, particularly that of merchants. Some settled permanently in Djibouti, while others went back and forth, born, married and dying in Yemen and, in between, succeeding one another in running businesses in the Djibouti capital’s shopping districts. The prohibition of Yemeni women’s emigration encouraged the preservation of the link between Yemen and its emigrants and contributed to the survival of a country economically dependent on their money transfers. However, since 2014, the war in Yemen has disrupted this well-established pattern, normalising the migration of women to Djibouti and dispelling the illusion of the temporary nature of male labour migration, which has become family exile. By migrating to a city described as dirty and poor, a place ridden with danger and vices, Yemeni women not only cross territorial boundaries (in Arabic ḥadd, plural ḥudūd) but also the social and symbolic boundaries of norms (referred to in Arabic by the same term). They question their honour and the Yemeni identity of their relatives since it is women who create and recreate the Yemeni identity, an identity that is biologically, socially and symbolically protected through respect of a moral and religious order passed down by women from one generation to the next. This is a normative and discursive mechanism, constructed around migrant women, which alone should enable them to resist a posteriori crossing of the Yemen–Djibouti borders. Even more so than in Yemen, women in Djibouti take on the role of border guards of Yemeni identity. They contribute to the construction of polymorphic and multifaceted borders, such as the double boundary of ethnicity and gender, which frames the living spaces of Yemeni women and manifests a norm that is presented as Islamic. This norm, reinforced during migration, aims to distinguish Yemeni women socially, morally and above all ethnically, as described by Fredrik Barth’s ethnic boundaries in 1969. Yemenis thus play with spatial, social and symbolic boundaries as well as with the traditional and Islamic norms they inhabit, to borrow the words of Saba Mahmood, in order to deal with the constrained crossing of the Yemen–Djibouti borders.
