Journeys to Exile: The Constitution of Eritrean Identity Through Narratives and Experiences

This paper shows how migration can be analysed through the experiences lived ‘from there to here’. Eritrean narratives and experiences of journeys reveal how a certain type of identity is consolidated through trajectories, and systems of movement, in time and space. However, once developed, the narratives of journeys to exile among Eritreans in Milan also become markers of difference. Eritreans produce and reproduce discourses that shape a collective identity, but which at the same time function to divide the community into various generations of arrival. Memories of journeys create ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of being Eritrean which reflect transnational politics and Italian discourses on illegal movement.