Trauma-Narrative Analysis at the Level of Text Structure

Abstract

This chapter contends that the conventional Western practice of transcribing—or ‘entextualizing’—non-Western migrants’ oral narratives into the accepted textual structure made up of ‘paragraphs’ is inadequate insofar as it does not recognize the different culture-specific patterns that migrants transfer from their native languages into their ELF trauma narratives. Hence, such a conventional entextualization practice is liable of causing serious misunderstandings in unequal encounters between Western experts and non-Western migrants and asylum seekers—as one of the case studies in this chapter demonstrates. The chapter therefore proposes an ethnopoetic approach to the institutional entextualizations of migrants’ oral trauma narratives which—as the reported case studies illustrate—appropriately accounts for the original narrative patterns of lines and embodied metaphors conveying the intended illocutionary force of such autochthonous oral narratives.