Gendered Narratives of Success and Failure:
An Anthropological Analysis of Caribbean Notions of Return Migration

The image of the successful migrant, who is able to return with sufficient earnings to live a comfortable and care free life in a substantial home built on his own land, has played an important role in Caribbean migration and led thousands to undertake an arduous and uncertain journey to a far-away destination in a foreign land. Indeed, the notion of the successful migrant has received nourishment from stories of both potential and realized "betterment" abroad recounted in Caribbean sending societies, and it has been sustained in migration destinations by stories of the anticipated “glorious” returns that will be possible if not in the immediate future, then after years of hard work abroad.
In this paper I will argue that while the “male” narrative of the successful returnee has been dominant, it has never been the only one. In earlier analyses of interviews with Nevisian migrant women in the US Virgin Islands and Leeds, England (Olwig 1998, 2005, 2007), I have shown that these women's migration narratives expressed a different image of the successful return. Rather than emphasizing the building of an impressive home where they could settle as wealthy returnees, they operated with the image of the good mother, daughter or sister who migrated in order to send remittances back home and thus help the family left behind. I therefore suggest that there are two gendered migration narratives that reflect dominant social and moral values attributable to respectively men and women, such as the display in the public sphere of individual social and economic achievements in the case of the male narrative, and the sustaining and maintaining of social and economic obligations towards the family in the case of the female narrative. I further propose that men and women may draw on both narratives, depending on the context within which they present themselves, the particular part of their life story they are relating and the circumstances of life that enframe their narrative. I will elaborate on this argument through an analysis of life story interviews with Nevisian women who have returned to Nevis after sojourns to various migration destinations.