Representing disrupted identities in West-African migrants’ ELF-mediated trauma narratives: An online ethnopoetic approach

Abstract

This paper enquires into West-African migrants’ trauma narratives conveyed through uses of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (elf) and collected in Italy by means of online interviews. A model grounded on theories of Cognitive-Experiential Linguistics, Modal Logic, and Possible-Worlds Semantics is applied to the protocol analysis of ethnographic case studies investigating the extent to which such trauma narratives contain features from the migrants’ typologically-distinct native languages automatically transferred into their ELF variations at the levels of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and metaphorical patterns. This transfer is assumed to be triggered by migrants’ emotional involvement in their trauma narratives. It will be argued that the migrants’ degree of adaptation to traumatic experiences is determined by their positive, uncertain, or negative perspectives on the reaching of a ‘possible world’ that they envisage as a ‘utopia’, in opposition to the ‘dystopian reality’ of their home countries. Such perspectives are marked by a recurrent use of modal operators analyzed according to a four-level gradient ranging from possible, unreal, and impossible ‘utopian worlds’, up to a much-too-real ‘dystopian world’ as a result of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. In such transcultural psychiatric contexts, the biomedical definitions codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, issued by the American Psychiatric Association (apa), prove to be inadequate in accounting for the metaphorical and narrative representation of traumatic effects in non-Western cultures where trauma can encompass not only natural and physical causes, but also sociopolitical reasons, and even religious and supernatural beliefs, often metaphorically referred to by the use of native ‘idioms of distress’. Indeed, such idioms mark the ‘ethnopoetic organization’ of the autochthonous oral narrative of traumatic events that West-African migrants transfer into their elf variations. Such a transfer seems to be induced precisely by the online videoless mode chosen for conducting the interviews which turned out to be a kind of ‘confessional’ putting migrants at ease in reporting personal traumatic experiences by avoiding the disturbing face-to-face contact with the interviewer. Acknowledging such narrative peculiarities would mean recognizing the West-African migrants’ identity which they often perceive as disrupted and displaced from their own native injured communities.