Shared schematic structures of metaphysical discourse and gender-biased deviations in the ‘Global migrating South’: Case studies on West-African refugees’ ELF-mediated trauma narratives

Abstract

This paper explores native schematic structures of West-African oral narratives that are transferred into the ELF variations used by migrants and refugees in their trauma reports collected in Italy. Case-study data analysis reveals that these schematic structures are unexpectedly shared with autochthonous oral trauma narratives typical of economically-depressed areas of Southern Italy, thus representing an instance of contemporary ‘Global migrating South’. In this context, migration from the African Global South to Southern-European countries fosters conditions for intercultural communication, particularly with Mediterranean regions not typically categorized as part of the Global South. Hence, the deterritorialization of the ELF variations caused by the migrants’ displacement from their native contexts in the Global South – where such variations often represent official pidgin/creole forms (as in the ex British colonies of Africa) – helps identify similar schematic patterns across different settings, especially when highly-emotional reports of traumatic experiences are involved. This phenomenon is assessed by applying a model grounded on Cognitive Linguistics, Possible-Worlds Semantics and Modal Logic to the analysis of a number of case studies focused on Nigerian refugees’ trauma narratives, involving the transfer of native-language structures into their ELF variations at the levels of ethnopoetic pragmatic patterns, idiomatic lexicon, ergativity, modality, and metaphorical frames grounded in metaphysical imagery. Data reveal that West-African refugees’ trauma narratives often personify traumatic events as cruel supernatural beings or deities, such as Yoruba divine entities or other mythological hybrids shared with the host Mediterranean cultures, which assume animate, agentive roles in ergative structures. The study also emphasizes how biomedical definitions provided by the American Psychiatric Association fail to address trauma effects in the Global migrating South, where not only physical and natural causes, but also sociopolitical factors, religious constructs and metaphysical beliefs deeply influence expressions of distress. These culturally-embedded ‘idioms of distress’, therefore, necessitate an alternative interpretive framework that acknowledges both physical and metaphysical elements to enhance clinical interactions in Transcultural Psychiatry. A discrepancy in this research is finally introduced with the presentation of a parallel corpus in progress focusing on schematic divergences from the findings analyzed in this paper, occurring when judgment on women’s traumatic experiences are involved within the same regions encompassed by the “Global migrating South”.