“We are adventurers here,” Lassana used to say—not foreigners, guest workers, refugees, or migrants. Many West Africans I met in France used the terms l’aventurier (adventurer) and l’aventure (adventure) to describe themselves and their situation. It was not just an attempt to romanticize difficult journeys and hard times.2 These terms and their equivalents have long been used among West Africans to signify that migration is an initiatory journey, a rite of passage.3 Seeing their voyages as part of a broader tradition helped to maintain connections to their families across long distances. It gave migrants a way to find meaning in risky travels and misfortune abroad.4 “Soninke are the greatest adventurers,” Lassana once bragged, referring to his ethno-linguistic group that comprises about two million people in the Western Sahel (a semi-arid region just south of the Sahara including parts of Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Gambia, and Burkina Faso) but which also has a significant global diaspora. His father and uncles all had left on adventures in their youth; most of his brothers and cousins were on their own adventures in central Africa and Spain. The notion of migration as an “adventure” was widespread among migrants at the Gare du Nord as it is with migrants from this region living across the globe.5
Lassana’s vision departed from the assumptions of so-called “economic migration” applied to migrants like him, which assumes that migration is a relatively new phenomenon where poor people are forced to leave underdeveloped villages in Africa and go to work in European capitals.6 Lassana, rather, saw migration as a necessary stage of life and the continuation of a long tradition. He was not alone. Many West African migrants come from places where “not migrating is not living,” as anthropologist Isaie Dougnon puts it.7 The idiom of adventure is a way for Lassana and other West Africans to conceptualize their journeys. It also provides a new perspective for understanding migrant lives and struggles more broadly.
The notion of migration-as-adventure challenges the nation-state definition of immigration, which presumes that the migrant moves from one bounded entity into another with the goal of settling and attaining citizenship, and often, in the xenophobic imaginary, of relying on state subsidies. Instead, adventurers live by the ethic of mobility, producing social and economic value by creating new networks for exchange, and making the most of what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “encounters across difference.”8 Lassana and his friends see the Gare du Nord as the ultimate place to carry out their adventures. Instead of remaining within the well-trodden paths of kinship and village ties, they use the station to meet people outside of their communities, people who might help enable their onward mobility and realize future-looking projects. Adventurers have transformed the largest rail hub in Europe, and the Gare du Nord has changed their life course.
On the day we met for coffee across the street from the station, Lassana asked me how my research on the station was going. “Bit by bit,” I responded, some of the discouragement coming through in my voice.
“It’s good you’re writing a book. This is what matters,” Lassana replied reassuringly. “The important thing is to have projects, to think of the future, keep moving. Avoid getting stuck.” This advice reflected Lassana’s adventure ethos, which sought constant forward movement: he told me that he hoped to meet a German woman at the Gare du Nord, move to Germany, and find something better than underpaid construction jobs in France. Now that he had the resident permit, he wanted to go elsewhere.
As we sat at the café, a small TV set above the bar drew Lassana’s attention, interrupting our conversation. The screen showed a few white people on a boat throwing life-vests toward hundreds of black people in the water. The disembodied journalist’s voice intoned: “In the Mediterranean Sea between Africa and Europe, a boat filled with migrants has sunk. The nearest coast guard mounted a rescue, saving some, but many have drowned.”
“We already know this story,” Lassana said.
He was right: the sinking of unseaworthy vessels “filled with migrants” was frequently reported in the media in this way. In this saga linking two sides of the Mediterranean, we knew the tragedy’s denouement: survivors would bring the terrible news to their villages, and families would try to locate their kin from afar. In the days that follow, bodies would wash up on pristine European beaches, or would be tugged out of the water by Frontex (European Union border control) ships. Many would never be found.9
Lassana narrowed his eyes at the screen, furrowing his brow. It was as if he were trying to see whether he recognized anyone. I learned later that he was trying to see if he could tell where the surviving “Africans” had come from by looking at them. But the camera panned over the migrants, returning to focus on the people in the boat as they pulled men, women, and young children aboard.
We already knew this story, as Lassana said, because of how dangerous Africa to Europe migration routes have become. European Union and member-state policies have criminalized migration by shutting down legal pathways to Europe, reinforcing border control, and detaining and deporting undocumented migrants.10 Rather than dissuading people from migrating, these policies have led migrants to seek more perilous routes, such as crossing the Mediterranean in ill-equipped and unseaworthy vessels. Between 2000 and 2014, it is estimated that 22,400 people died attempting to enter Europe; more than 5,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2016 alone.11
For Africans who have made it to Europe and have been living there for years or even decades, the tragedies in the Mediterranean strike close to home. Their brothers and sisters are taking grave risks to go abroad. Like Lassana, many West African migrants in France come from places where migration abroad is a rite of passage for young men: to remain at home is to feel stuck forever.12 When they are denied visas at the consulate in their home countries, as most poor migrants from the global South now are, they will set out for the desert and march toward the sea, paying smugglers and joining the many refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
As many scholars and activists have shown, the EU could prevent these deaths in border zones (such as the Mediterranean and the Saharan desert) by providing legal paths for those who migrate. Instead, EU policies make migrant death more likely as European border control creeps further into the African continent.13 Those who make it across face detention, deportation, and perilous onward journeys. Even those who get papers feel trapped, unable to return to their villages for fear that their temporary resident permits would not allow them to reenter Europe.14 Some migrants will make their way further north with the hopes of gaining passage to England. They set up makeshift camps, a few around the Gare du Nord and others in northern French towns like Calais, which get periodically torn down. Several people have died trying to get to the United Kingdom via the underground tunnel built for the Paris-London Eurostar train.15
The Gare du Nord has become part of these border zones and the violence they enact. Despite being thousands of kilometers from the Mediterranean, and three hundred kilometers from France’s northern border, the station operates the Eurostar rail line that takes passengers through the Channel tunnel to London. As a result, there is a legal border within the Gare du Nord that passengers to the United Kingdom must pass through before they board. In May 2017, an unidentified refugee was electrocuted and died at the station while trying to jump onto a London-bound train. He was not the first to die this way. The trappings of the border and those who enforce it are everywhere in the rail hub, including military patrols and customs agents, British immigration officers, two types of the French national police, railway police, and private security.
Like many railway stations across the world, the Gare du Nord has also been a magnet for those who exist on society’s margins, often excluded from full participation in urban citizenship. More than any other Parisian railway station, the area is known as a site where homeless people, sex workers, teenage runaways, petty criminals,