‘Tunis is tough, but we make it somehow’: (De-)mystifying ‘transit’ through sub-Saharan female migrants’ digitally mediated stories of immobility

Tunisia’s role in the shifting dynamics of Mediterranean migration has grown significantly in the past two decades, serving both as a destination and a key transit hub for an increasing number of sub-Saharan migrants seeking to reach Europe. Among them, women have become a more prominent group, facing unique and often daunting challenges conditioned by an often unwelcoming sociopolitical climate and the gendered realities associated with intra-African migration. Against this backdrop, the article explores the experiences of twelve sub-Saharan unauthorized migrant women living in Tunis through digitally mediated storytelling workshops using Maria Tamboukou’s narrative rhythmanalysis to examine the temporal, affective and structural dimensions that shape their testimonial accounts with a specific focus on paralinguistic cues. Grounded in a decolonial framework, this study introduces the notion of ‘accented stories’, extending Shahram Khosravi’s concept of accented thinking to critically interrogate the Eurocentric imperatives of clarity and transparency that have long characterized narrative-based migration research, (re)affirming, in turn, migrants’ ‘right to opacity’. This approach thus moves beyond linear, reductionist models of knowledge production to capture the labile nature of ‘transit’ migration. Two key tropes are identified: ‘transit’ as a turbulent experience marked by (in-)voluntary immobility, and ‘transit’ as a condition that can be surmounted through acts of solidarity and strategies of ‘home-making’. Situated at the intersection of im-mobility research, digital migration scholarship and cultural studies, this article problematizes the category of ‘transit migration’, repositioning it as an embodied and affectively charged experience and a conceptual artefact produced through academic and policy discourses. As such, the dual gesture enacted in (de-)mystifying ‘transit’ encompasses both the critical dismantling of the reductive paradigms through which hegemonic actors construct it and its subversive reconfiguration through migrant women’s narratives, which imbue it with contradictions and indeterminacy. Ultimately, by reading these digitally mediated accounts metaphorically as ‘stories in transit’, I shed light on their continuous, open-ended structures, emphasizing in so doing, the migrants’ process of identity refashioning in contexts of displacement.