Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives: Crossing Borders and Telling Lives 3030891089, 9783030891084

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Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives Crossing Borders and Telling Lives Edited by Pia Lane · Bjørghild Kjelsvik Annika Bøstein Myhr

Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives

Pia Lane · Bjørghild Kjelsvik · Annika Bøstein Myhr Editors

Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives Crossing Borders and Telling Lives

Editors Pia Lane Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies University of Oslo Oslo, Norway

Bjørghild Kjelsvik Department of Teacher Education NLA University College Oslo, Norway

Annika Bøstein Myhr Department of Languages and Literature Studies University of South-Eastern Norway Kongsberg, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-89108-4 ISBN 978-3-030-89109-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Victor Mutelekesha 2015 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This volume emerged from the collaborative project Language, culture and identity in migrant narratives, directed by Elizabeth Lanza and funded by the Research Council of Norway (2008–2013). The project funding facilitated participation at numerous national and international conferences, and we are grateful for these opportunities to share and develop ideas with our colleagues across the world. We are particularly grateful to Anna De Fina and Aneta Pavlenko who participated in project workshops and whose insightful and to-the-point comments helped us refine our ideas and move the project forwards. The editors were junior scholars of the project, and we thank our colleagues Elizabeth Lanza, Anne Golden, Ingeborg Kongslien and Saphinaz Naguib for their support and engagement with our individual projects and for entrusting us with the task of editing this volume. We are also grateful to the external reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the chapters of this volume, and we extend our thanks to them and also to Cathy Scott at Palgrave for her guidance and replies to our many queries. We would like to thank Victor Mutelekesha for his generous permission to let us use his art on the volume’s front cover, Zahir Athari for

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his assistance with formatting the chapters and the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, for facilitating this support and for backing this publication project in general. Finally, we are indebted to all those who have migrated to and within the Nordic countries and who have lent their voices to the various projects which are described in this volume.

Front Cover Image: Awaiting Victor Mutelekesha Photographed by Victor Mutelekesha Photo performance. Dimensions: 120 by 70cm 2015 “Awaiting” explores concepts of diaspora, identity and hybridity, mostly by means of wearable items associated with traditions and cultures. The project investigates how identity is made visible by what we wear: garments, jewelry or body art. It examines the metamorphosis of the costume’s details and its direct relation to the embodiment of a claimed identity. It also seeks to map the role of Diasporas, ancient and modern trade routes in that process of metamorphosis, and examine how clothing is a visual signifier of an acquired or assumed identity. Awaiting investigates/engages the metamorphosis of the clothing/costume and its direct relation to or direct embodiment of a claimed identity. It speaks of clothing/costume as a visual signifier of an acquired or assumed identity. In the performance (whose remnants you see in these images) I am standing by the beach (wearing a traditional Masaai looking garment tailored into western formal dressing; an amalgamation of two identities intertwined by the painful histories of slavery, colonialism and post colonialism), like a lighthouse or beacon looking out to sea awaiting the arrival of the strange cargo of Humans or traditions and cultures or waiting to become cargo myself. The project denotes waiting of the new, the familiar, and the hybrid forged by exile and the local and the known but also the unfamiliar and speaks of the hybrid nature of what is often mistaken as pure state of the local.

Contents

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Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Spoken, Written and Material Narratives Bjørghild Kjelsvik, Pia Lane, and Annika Bøstein Myhr “I Have no Family”—Identity Constructions in an Asylum Interview Bjørghild Kjelsvik

3 Who Gets to Tell Whose Story? Asylum Seeker Narratives in Maria Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk, Mikhail Shishkin’s Venerin volos, and the Research Chapter Annika Bøstein Myhr 4

“Model Minorities” in a “Sociolinguistic Paradise”: How Latin-American Migrants Talk About Job Interviews in Norway Verónica Pájaro

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5 Wielding Space and Time in Migrant Narratives: Personal and Professional Identities in Discourse Elizabeth Lanza and Anne Golden 6 Visual Metaphors of Migration in Museums Saphinaz-Amal Naguib 7

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“An Inky Life Line of Survival”: Identity and Rewriting in Scandinavian Migration Narratives Ingeborg Kongslien

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“It Feels like Now This Is in Our Own Language”: Religion, Authenticity and Belonging Pia Lane

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Post-script: Narratives in the Construction of the Experiences of Migrants and Transnational People Anna De Fina

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Anna De Fina is Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics in the Italian department at Georgetown University which she also chairs. She has published extensively on identity, narrative, migration and superdiversity. Among her publications are the volumes Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2011) co-authored with A. Georgakopoulou, the edited collections Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), with A. Georgakopoulou, Discourse and Identity (2006, Cambridge University Press), with D. Schiffrin and M. Bamberg, and Handbook of Discourse Studies, with A. Georgakopoulou (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Anne Golden is Professor emeritus of Norwegian as a Second Language at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Norway. Her research is related to various issues on literacy in a second language and to the use of narratives as a tool in migrant research. She has published widely on a range of topics related to vocabulary (in particular to metaphors), i.e. in transfer studies using learner corpora, as well as on studies of migrants’ conceptualization of different cultural constructs. She edited Crossing Borders, Writing Texts,

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Being Evaluated. Cultural and Disciplinary Norms in Academic Writing (with L. A. Kulbrandstad and L. Jun Zhang) Multilingual Matters (2021) and was guest editor (with Katrin Ahlgren and Ulrika Magnusson) on a special issue on Metaphor in education: A multilingual and Scandinavian perspective (Metaphor and the Social World 2021). Bjørghild Kjelsvik is Associate Professor of Norwegian Language at the Department of Teacher Education, NLA University College, Oslo. Her Ph.D. in linguistics from 2008 is a study of teaching and learning interaction in and out of school in an African village context. Her research interests include discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, lexicography and narrative analysis. As postdoc at the University of Oslo she did research on identity negotiations in oral migrant narratives. She has published on discourse analysis, and on asylum interviews as oral narratives (“Winning a battle, but losing the war”: Contested identities, narratives and interaction in asylum interviews. Text & Talk [2013]). Other publications concern Norwegian compounds in the field of lexicography, and recent work includes a paper co-authored with U.S. Goth on diversity, prejudices and inclusion in a pedagogical setting. Ingeborg Kongslien is Professor emeritus of Scandinavian Literature and Norwegian as a second language at the University of Oslo. In the field of Scandinavian literature, her research has had a special emphasis on literature and migration experiences, both in the historical and the contemporary context. She has published widely on migrant narratives and translingual literature, e.g. “The Scandinavian ‘migrant novel’—a new national narrative and a cosmopolitical tale”, in Le roman migrant au Québec et en Scandinavie/The migrant novel in Quebec and Scandinavia. S. Lindberg ed. (Peter Lang Publishing, 2013). Pia Lane is Professor of Multilingualism at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Norway, and her research interests include narrative analysis, language policy, language shift and language revitalization. She edited Standardizing Minority Languages, Routledge (with Costa and De Korne, Routledge, 2017), is co-editor-in-chief of Linguistic Minorities in Europe and has recently published “From ‘Civilising Missions’ to Indigenous

Notes on Contributors

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Language Reclamation: Language Policy, Language Shift and Maintenance in Australia and Norway” (with Gillian Wigglesworth) in Multilingualism Across the Lifespan, U. Røyneland & R. Blackwood, Robert, eds. (Routledge, 2022.) Elizabeth Lanza is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, and Director of the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Norway. Her research addresses various issues in bilingualism/multilingualism; she has published widely on migrant narratives, language socialization of bilingual children, family language practices and policies, language ideology, linguistic landscape, language policy and research methodology. She edited Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes with R. Blackwood and H. Woldemariam, (Bloomsbury, 2016). Annika Bøstein Myhr is Professor of Norwegian Literature at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Myhr holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and has published extensively on Russian and Scandinavian literature. She is the editor of Twist (Novus, 2021), and co-editor of Sårbarhet og litteratur [‘Vulnerability and literature’] (Universitetsforlaget, 2021), with Dancus and Linhart. Other recent publications are: “Challenging Nordic Exceptionalism: Norway in Literature by and about Irregular Migrants”, Law & Literature (2021), and “Autobiographical narratives in an era of migration: To what extent is the idea of individual and national identity still viable today?”, in Northern Europe: Migration and the Questions of Identity, M. Humpál & H. Bˇrezinová, eds. (Charles University—Karolinum Press, 2022). Saphinaz-Amal Naguib is Professor emerita of Cultural History at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Oslo University. Her research interests comprise heritage and museum studies, international migration, Islamic iconography. Naguib’s research projects investigate the polysemy and polyphony of tangible and intangible heritage and the role of museums of cultural history in plural societies. Her latest publications include: “Ruins of Ruins: The Aura of Archaeological Remains”, in B. Olsen, M. Burström,

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C. DeSilvey and T. Pétursdottir, eds. After Discourse. Things, Affects, Ethics. (Routledge, 2021) and “Flâneries in a Northern Urban Landscape. Affective Atmospheres, Diffuse Museum and the Creation of Heritage in the 21st Century”. In Museums & Place. K. Smeds and A. Davis, eds. (International Committee for Museology—ICOFOM, 2019). Verónica Pájaro is Associate Professor of Nordic Linguistics at the Department of Nordic and Media studies, University of Agder, Norway. She holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, and investigates issues of discourse, power and multilingualism, and how these are played out in social interaction and in institutional contexts. She is the co-editor of the volume Andrespråkslæring hos voksne [Second language learning and adults] with M. Monsen (Cappelen Damm, 2021).

List of Figures

Chapter 6 Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4 Photo 5 Photo 6

Rusty iron key of the front portal of a house in Palestine, branch of olive tree, stones and sand . Immigrant Museum, Farum, Denmark. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib Trunks: Visual metaphor of migration. Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Ottestad. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib Hardship and hope—Crossing the US–Mexico border. Art installation by Valery James. Museum of World Cultures, Gothenburg. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib Stigmatisert [Stigmatised]. Sculpture by Louise Nippier, Oslo Museum. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib The Pakistani apartment. Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib Different buildings at the Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Ottestad. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

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Chapter 8 Fig. 1

Photo 1 Photo 2

Map—Bugøynes/Pykejä. Kartgrunnlag: Kartverket—Norwegian Mapping Authority (Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (© Kartverket https://www.kartverket.no/en) Laestadian prayer house in Bugøynes/Pykejä (Photo: Lightsource Productions) Laestadian woman with hymnal in Finnish. Bugøynes-Pykejä (Photo: Pia Lane)

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1 Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Spoken, Written and Material Narratives Bjørghild Kjelsvik, Pia Lane, and Annika Bøstein Myhr

In a world of increasing migration and diversity, attaining a deeper understanding of identity and belonging is essential. This volume examines how identity and belonging are expressed, constructed and negotiated in multilingual and culturally diverse settings, through assuming an interdisciplinary approach to the study of narrative. Two key questions B. Kjelsvik Department of Teacher Education, NLA University College, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] P. Lane (B) Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] A. B. Myhr Department of Languages and Literature Studies, University of South-Eastern Norway, Kongsberg, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_1

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linked to aspects of identity in migrant narratives are: How is identity constructed in narratives of migration? and Who gets to belong in the nation? These questions are central in all of the volume’s nine chapters, in which the authors draw on three overlapping and intersecting approaches, namely (1) the negotiation of identity in spoken migrant narrative discourse; (2) narratives of integration and identity formation in migration literature; and 3) discourses of cultural diversity and narratives of identity in institutional settings, mediated through material objects. The analysed narratives represent windows to the situation in the Nordic region, and in particular the Scandinavian countries Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The volume thus both develops a broad interdisciplinary approach to migration narratives and produces insights into a relatively understudied region in Europe. Transcending discipline-specific approaches and differences in foci, the chapters in this volume investigate how identity is constructed and mediated in face-to-face interactions (in real time and fictional writing), how writers use narratives to express migrants’ reorientation and identity negotiation in a (potential) new homeland, as well as how material objects, on their own or in combination with oral narratives, convey layered meaning to identity and belonging. In so doing, the contributions engage with recent developments in the humanities and social sciences by dealing with the interplay between language, culture and identity in migrant narratives from the Nordic region in ways that draw on theories and methods from different disciplines. For instance, the volume’s focus on the negotiation of identity and discourses of cultural and linguistic diversity in spoken, written and material mediation of identity resonates with recent sociolinguistic investigations into how language is connected to, and intersects with, embodiment, materiality and time (Blommaert and De Fina 2016; Busch 2012; Lane 2019). Furthermore, perspectives from cultural theory bring new and important insights on the role of material objects in identity construction in culturally and linguistically diverse societies, underscoring that the narratives museums construct have social effects and consequences (Sandell and Nightingale 2012) and showing how museums may be active agents of social cohesion and mediators of transcultural knowledge (Naguib 2015). In literary studies, there has in

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the past few decades been an increased focus on the role of multilingualism and cultural diversity for creativity, identity construction and national belonging (Kellman 2000; Kongslien 2009; Liu 1995; Myhr 2015; Wanner 2011) or as a restraint for one’s identity and opportunities (Myhr 2016, 2021a; Vorderobermeier and Wolf 2008). In the volume’s contributions, insights and theoretical approaches from all of the above-mentioned fields are put into play. In this chapter, we will present the historical and theoretical foundation that unite the volume chapters. We start by briefly describing the historical backdrop that has motivated the volume and the research project from which it has emanated, with its particular focus on narratives of migration in the Nordic countries. We then discuss the notion of “identity” and the interconnectedness of individual and group identities, as well as the importance of culture to both aspects of identity. A common ground for the chapters is found in a constructivist understanding of identity as created in interaction, as well as in postcolonial theory’s explication of the uneven distribution of discursive power in the relationship between the West and “the rest”. While the historical background, constructivist perspectives on identity and postcolonial theory represent a common basis for all of the volume’s chapters, the differences in research materials—oral, written and material narratives—call for a clear, but inclusive definition of what a narrative is as well as for a discussion of the role of mediation and genres in shaping narratives of identity, and how we can study narratives of different media and through different discipline-specific, but combinable methods. Finally, we have also included a more philosophical discussion of the narratability of identity, as we deem it necessary. This volume is the result of a long-term collaboration based on the project Language, Culture and Identity in Migrant Narratives, directed by Professor Elizabeth Lanza and funded by the Research Council of Norway (2008–2013). This interdisciplinary project focused on aspects of identity in the narratives of migrants and discourses of cultural diversity, primarily with a contemporary focus but also drawing on historical perspectives. The project explored the negotiation of identity in spoken migrant narrative discourse (face-to-face and in fiction), narratives of

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integration and identity formation in multicultural literature, and material aspects of narratives of identity (museums of cultural history and use of everyday objects). By integrating theoretical perspectives from Sociolinguistics, Literary Studies and Cultural History in the study of oral, written and material narratives, the volume opens up for new understandings of identity construction in narratives of migration.

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Why the Nordic Region?

Migration is a global phenomenon, and even if mass migration is not specific to our times, the general tendency to overlook everything until it hits the Western world may account for the feeling of many people in Europe that migration is an altogether new development. In the nineteenth century, however, millions of people emigrated from Europe to the USA. Throughout the twentieth century, wars and civil unrest around the world led to large flows of people trying to find security elsewhere beyond borders. Natural disasters, droughts and famines have affected the situation further, as have developments of physical and technological infrastructure across the globe. Since the 1970s several migration flows have additionally been caused by the need for labour in some countries and the lack of jobs in others. Indeed, labour migration truly illustrates how globalisation processes steadily lead to stronger interconnectedness of previously geographically distant cultures, and interdependence of national economies. The interconnectedness of the modern world also means that the material riches and high living standard of a privileged minority of the world’s population have become more visible to poor people all over the world. For many migrants, opportunities in more affluent economies seem to beckon, and people leave their homes in order to escape from poverty and an uncertain future (Efionayi-Mäder et al. 2005), often only to face difficulties and harsh realities along the way. The focus area of this volume is on the Scandinavian countries, with a particular emphasis on Norway. From a European perspective the Nordic region may be seen as peripheral, yet the Nordic countries are

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wealthy, have well-developed social welfare systems and are characterized by a high degree of trust in authorities combined with personal freedom. The Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad (2006) described the challenges Norwegian anthropologists faced when trying to attract international attention to the region with empirical materials from Norway; Norway was seen as “special, but not special enough”, and Scandinavia as neither a “metropolis” nor an “interesting field” but something in between. Yet, in the last decade or so, the Nordic countries have attracted considerable interest, and the region has been described as striving towards economic competitiveness and innovation while also maintaining a social welfare system (for a discussion on the Nordic welfare model, see Esping-Andersen (1990) and gender equality, see Larsen et al. (2021)). In particular, the Nordic model has gained both political and scientific attention because of its combination of social welfare and certain economic models. For instance, the Nordic states featured as models in the presidential election campaigns in both the US 2016 and France 2017, and in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. The region tops global indexes of happiness, competitiveness and equality, and the Nordic focus on gender policy, social welfare systems and high-quality education has attracted international attention (Angell and Mordhorst 2015). When it comes to matters of migration and questions of identity and belonging in the nation, however, the region faces the same challenges as the rest of the Western world: Right-wing populists have secured a larger part of the electorate and the Nordic countries have been criticised for their treatment of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. During the Cold War, the “‘peace-loving and rational’ Nordics”, in Christopher Browning’s words, “differentiated themselves from the rest of ‘warlike’ or ‘conflict-prone’ Europe” by becoming “active norm entrepreneurs” (Browning 2007: 28). Regardless of their internal history of suppressing historical minorities like the Sámi and Kven populations, the Nordic countries during the Cold War branded themselves as models for “how to settle conflicts and build a peaceful security community” (Browning 2007: 28). However, since the end of the Cold War, they have developed in different directions. For one, the role of the Nordic countries as international peace-makers and bridge-builders has been

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challenged by Denmark’s and Norway’s participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Browning 2007, 38; DeLong 2009). Second, Nordic political unity has been undermined by the fact that some countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland) have joined the EU while others (Norway and Iceland) have not. Nevertheless, the Nordic countries have continued to aspire to a role in overcoming the global North–South divide, and to be “‘exceptional’ in their solidarism with the world’s poor” (Browning 2007: 40). That such solidarism was especially important in Sweden was evident during the migrant crisis of 2015, when the country received more than 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other country in Europe (Moore 2016). This situation brought an end, however, to the traditional Swedish openness and more restrictive asylum regulations were temporarily put in place and finalised in a law which entered into force on July 20th 2021.1 Norway received only around 31 000 asylum seekers in 2015,2 and attempted to close its Storskog border crossing with Russia in order to stop asylum seekers from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan entering through “Europe’s back door”. Even so, migration to all of the Nordic countries has increased drastically the past thirty years, with migrants coming from every continent in the world. Finland has a lower percentage of people with a migrant background, only 8% (including those born in Finland of foreign-born parents3 ). According to Statistics Norway, in March 2021 18.5%4 of the Norwegian population had either moved to Norway or had been born in Norway of foreign-born parents. The corresponding number in Denmark is 13.9%,5 while in Sweden the number of people born abroad alone is 19.7%.6 Yet, Swedish 1 https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/About-the-Migration-Agency/Changes-to-the-Swe dish-Aliens-Act-in-2021.html. Accessed 13 September 2021. 2 https://www.udi.no/en/statistics-and-analysis/annual-reports/tall-og-fakta-2015/faktaskriv2015/hvor-mange-sokte-om-beskyttelse/. Accessed 13 September 2021. 3 https://www.stat.fi/tup/maahanmuutto/maahanmuuttajat-vaestossa_en.html. Accessed 13 September 2021. 4 https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/innvandrere/statistikk/innvandrere-og-norskfodte-med-inn vandrerforeldre. Accessed 13 September 2021. 5 https://www.statistikbanken.dk/10024. Accessed 13 Sep 2021. 6 |https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/manniskorna-i-sverige/utrikes-fodda/. Acessed 13 September 2021.

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literary scholar Magnus Nilsson (2008) warns against thinking that the Nordic countries have become culturally heterogenous because of recent immigration, as they have historically experienced several influxes of migrants and are characterised by an abundance of dialects and a number of languages. Indeed, Norway has been often described as a sociolinguistic paradise, given its acceptance of the use of Norwegian dialects in all contexts; however, the new linguistic diversity that has evolved through immigration questions whose paradise it is (Røyneland and Lanza 2020). The Nordic region is also home to the Indigenous nation of the Sámi and several minoritised groups, like the Kven and Romani peoples (Pietikäinen et al. 2010).

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Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Identity

The issue of identity, or rather identities in plural, has in recent years figured prominently in various disciplines in poststructuralist approaches to the discussion of the self and the other. Said’s (1978) seminal book Orientalism focused on the ubiquitous imperialistic Western tendency to construct “the other” as different from the idealised West, concerns that also have been brought to the fore in Southern Theory (Connell 2007). The fields represented in our volume have been shaped by poststructuralist theories emphasizing pluralism and hybridity, human agents as co-constructors of language, identity and culture, and a shift of focus from the study of “the others” to investigating transnational flows and intercultural relationships. This is clearly reflected in contemporary views of identity; identities are not perceived as fixed and stable, but rather as multiple, fluid and dynamic, and seen as both shaping and being shaped by cultural expressions and discourses of power (Lanza 2012). The social constructionist approach to identity discards bounded categories as defining a collective’s members, seeing identities not as fixed and stable essences, but rather as multiple and dynamic constructions. Furthermore, the attention has also shifted from seeing language as merely expressing identity to seeing identity and language as mutually constitutive (Pavlenko 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004; De

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Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020). In other words, identity is not only something we have, but rather something we create, mould and change through action (Lane 2012; Golden and Lanza 2013, 2019). For example, in discussions of ethnic minority groups, there has been a tendency to regard a “we-code” and a “they-code” as defining the minority and the majority culture respectively. Multilinguals defy such dividing codes, as they negotiate monolingual and bilingual identities in conversation and orchestrate a “multiplicity of selves”. Similar concerns are brought to the fore in museum studies, for instance by Mason, Galani et al. (2018: 125), who argue that bringing understandings of the self and the other into a new relationality is important when media and political discourses “tend to essentialise and reify the distance between those defined as insiders and outsiders; those who are seen to belong in specific places and those who are designated as always ‘the other’”. Such concerns are closely linked to belonging, one of the key topics in this volume; who gets to belong in the nation, and how can social actors find or negotiate a place of belonging? Identity and belonging may be negotiated in oral, written and material narratives, and such narrative negotiations may to varying degrees seek to subvert hegemonial discourses. One particularly strong hegemonial discourse is that of national identity and belonging, and this discourse permeates narratives on all levels of society, from the job interview to the religious ceremony; from the novel to the museum exhibition. Literary scholarship has taken an interest in investigating how multicultural authors “rewrite” or challenge the hegemony of national identities and discourses, and move towards a transnational identity. In this way they challenge the hegemonic position of the nation state in today’s world order (Kongslien 2014; Myhr 2015, 2021b). Several museums of cultural history are engaged in matters pertaining to cultural diversity and the representation of “others”, and thus reassess ideas of uniform national identities and of boundaries that function as defences of cultural integrity and authenticity (MacDonald 2003; Naguib 2013). While bringing some voices to the fore, museums leave other voices out, thus becoming important sites for both the production and uptake of narration of the past (Jimaima and Banda 2019).

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Issues of identity and belonging have also been addressed by sociolinguists and discourse analysts, not merely in the study of multilingualism, but also in gender studies and studies of discourse in institutional settings (Thornborrow and Coates 2005). Narratives in institutional settings, like the job and asylum interview, may truly bring insight into the structural forces of national discourse as a gate-keeping mechanism with immense influence on peoples’ opportunities for belonging, as well as for their professional and juridical identity. As this volume shows, since the stories of migrants’ encounters with new societies are communicated through different genres and media, the study of such stories benefits from taking an inclusive and open approach to a variety of materials, genres and modalities, which also is meaningful across scholarly fields. For instance, since material culture provides insight into both individual and group identity, physical artefacts are not only significant in the contexts of museums of cultural history (cf. Golden and Lanza 2015; Lane 2009a). Physical objects, as well as descriptions of these, may also be meaningful to the sociolinguist and the literary scholar, as they are telling of both our identities and the contexts in which we live.

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Ethical Perspectives to the Study of Narratives

The way we tell our stories, and also stories about others, is contextdependent, and we should therefore always take into account the way narratives shape and are shaped by the different contexts in which they are embedded. Narrative discourse is different in institutional settings compared to private settings, though the distinction to what counts as institutional talk is not always clear-cut. Research interviews themselves may be seen as a form of institutional context (Thornborrow and Coates 2005), and, as De Fina (2009: 237) reminds us, interviews are also interactional events. Job or asylum interviews are regulated by norms, laws, discourses of power and genre conventions to such an extent that the interviewee will not necessarily be able to manoeuvre the situation, and will depend on the proficiency and decency of the interviewer (Kjelsvik 2014, 2015). Asylum cases and hiring processes are regulated by laws

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and regulations, but the human factor in the process cannot be underestimated—a fact which highlights the relevance of ethics in the study of the narration of identity. As accentuated by Lévinas (1999), Waldenfels (2006), Bakhtin (1984) and others, it is ethically imperative that we relate to the other as “oneself;” as a subject. As Ricoeur (1992) and Kristeva (1991) point out, it is equally imperative to relate to oneself as another—that is, to realise the processual and pluralistic aspects of identity. Because identity is coconstructed in interaction neither individuals nor groups are identical across time and space. Fiction and museum exhibitions can create identification with “the other” who within the discourse of the national in a European context is described as someone whose presence is threatening to undermine the very foundation of the national, that is, the ethnic and cultural homogeneity. The accentuation of a common past and language may be more profound in the German Herderian model of the Kulturnation than in its counterpart, the French idea, which sees the nation members as those who are “willing to join the state or the polity and abide by its laws” (Brochmann and Kjeldstadli 2008: 18). However, the French model’s demand for assimilation and adaptation has rendered “immigrants in some degree invisible in the depiction of the nation’s identity” (Spencer and Wollman 2002: 106). The homogenising forces in the Nordic countries may present challenges that fiction and interviews with real migrants may shed light on. As pointed out by Joseph (2004: 4–5), “the identities of real and fictional individuals are actually not all that easy to distinguish”. Also, since “the reciprocal tension between individual and group identities gives the overall concept of identity much of its power” (Joseph 2004: 4–5), it is necessary to take into account the importance of culture to individuals’ identities and sense of, or opportunities for, belonging.

4

Culture, Identity and Citizenship

In the words of Todorov (2010, 419), “culture refers to common representations, thus shared by at least two human beings – mostly, however, by a far larger number of people”. Todorov goes on to explain that it “is

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not the content of these representations that determines their ‘cultural’ nature, but rather their spreading. Here, the collective is opposed to the individual. Culture, therefore, implies communication, of which it is one of the outcomes” (Todorov 2010: 419). This definition can serve as an explanation as to why language and objects are such crucial sources of insights into cultures and cultural variation between or within groups. The way culture has been understood by anthropologists and others has varied across time and research traditions. Barth (1969) pointed out that culture is not a bounded entity, and what defines groups is not only our cultural practices, but the social boundaries that social actors see as defining their group. Within cultural anthropology the term culture is used to refer to “knowledge about those aspects of humanity which are not natural, but which are related to that which are acquired” (Hylland Eriksen 2010: 3). Contemporary discussions on and definitions of culture tend to highlight the interactional, acquired, relativistic and contextualized aspects of culture, as in the definition by Hylland Eriksen above, and also by Hall: “Culture is located then not in accumulated bodies of static knowledge, but in the daily interactions occurring between individuals in particular sociocultural contexts at particular moments of time” (Hall 2008: 50). Hence, currently culture is understood, similar to the way language is perceived by many linguists, as a combination of stable and co-constructed, fluid and contextualized patterns of behaviour; both as something humans have and something we do (Lane 2012). This fluidity is also evident in Nair’s (2010: 3) discussion of culture. Her point of departure is cultural studies and literature, but her perspectives are equally relevant to sociolinguistic approaches to the study of culture and migration: In ways that are visible and invisible, abstract and pragmatic, conceptual and affective, imagined and lived, the idea of culture eludes unitary definitions. It is best apprehended in terms of the mobile, the fleeting, that which is in transit. This inherently migratory propensity of culture renders it unfinished, in process, always in the act of becoming.

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The interconnectedness of culture and identity is central for understanding matters concerning integration and tolerance in today’s multilingual and culturally complex world. A common cultural identity is often perceived as essential for providing social cohesion in society, an aspect particularly prominent in Europe during the nineteenth century, when nation states, such as Norway, arose founded on this idea of the nation. Yet respect for diversity is at the core of European ideals, though this is challenged in present political discourse. In Europe, language and identity are intertwined with cultural and national citizenship, and citizenship can be seen as having both legal and cultural aspects (see for instance Hermes 2006; Kjelsvik 2014; Lane 2009b; Ting 2008). Legal aspects of citizenship are associated with rights based on legislation, whereas cultural aspects are based on the sharing of common values or a form of cultural agreement among groups. Citizenship is thus a key aspect of the emergence and upkeep of European nation states, and issues of citizenship and belonging have been brought to the fore in current public discourse in many European countries. Globalization, increased migration and recognition of Indigenous and historical minority groups have, however, changed the notion of borders and citizenship, and in recent years citizenship studies have examined the themes of refugees and migration, see Amelung et al. (2020) for a discussion. The narratives and life stories of minorities, both Indigenous and of migrant origin, also contribute to shaping representations of nation states and giving new connotations to the notion of citizenship. The interconnectedness of language and identity on the one hand, and citizenship on the other, is a recurrent theme in the contributions of this volume, and one that accentuates the role of borders. Both cultural and political citizenship are intrinsically linked to borders, be they material or mental. The functions and roles of physical borders have been continuously changing through history, shaped by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues (Wastl-Walters 2011). Consequentially, borders are complex spatial and social phenomena and should be understood as dynamic processes and complex interwoven practices (Wille et al. 2021). Borders are political, material and controlled, they mark space and divide territories, and as such, for many migrants and asylum seekers, they become obstacles that control entry and access.

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Another political, but also cultural, aspect of borders is that they define and sometimes delimit the cultural nation, demarcating belonging and creating otherness, which in turn may be challenged by writers of migrant background who may negotiate what it entails to be for instance Norwegian. Norway is a relatively new nation state, having gained independence in 1905. When the idea of Norway as a nation emerged during the national romantic period in the nineteenth century, the conceptualization of the nation emphasized language, belonging and ancestry, sometimes referred to as the German nation state model. This is evident in the way Norway’s historically minoritised groups were treated as foreign and subjected to stringent assimilation policies. Cultural boundaries may be even harder to overcome than political ones because the former are invisible and not clearly defined. One may become a Norwegian citizen and yet not be seen as fully part of the nation because of one’s skin colour, language or religion. Norway was by no means the only European country striving for a monolingual nation state. Rather, most European nation states are (explicitly or implicitly) built on the idea of homogeneity. The promotion of a common language has ever since the nineteenth century been used as a means for assimilation of minorities, and as Todorov reminds us, nationalism may not lead to a just society: In the worst case, this policy leads to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, apartheid, to the submission of others, or to their expulsion; in less serious cases, it leads to the refusal for its own minorities of the rights they demanded when they were the minority within another majority. (Todorov 2010: 425)

Norway’s treatment of historical minorities like the Sámis and the Kven illustrates this point. In Europe today, the rising popularity of right-wing parties, Scottish movements for independence, and the Brexit process are a just a few examples of an ongoing search for national culture and values and attempts at identifying what is genuine and authentic. In Norway as well, there is a prevalent quest for a national Norwegian identity (Hylland Eriksen 1993), and for such an endeavour categorization and border-making mechanisms become essential, and therefore all the

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more important to scrutinise critically. One way of studying such mechanisms is through their discursive traces in oral, written and material narratives.

5

Narratives, Story Worlds and Identities

There are many different types of narratives, from the smallest “snippets of talk” to the longer life story (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015), as well as literary and material narratives. We here use the term “narrative” to refer to all kinds of accounts of past events (oral, written and material), including chronicles and life stories. Within the social sciences and humanities narrative analysis has been found to provide insights into the dynamics between the individual and the social and thus has become important for qualitative approaches (Pavlenko 2007). A common aspect of the approaches in this volume is a focus on narratives in context and how these are shaped by, and in turn may alter, larger discourses. Even though there are various understandings of narratives in various disciplines, cross-fertilization has indeed occurred. An example of such cross-fertilisation is the way Bakhtin’s (1981) work on polyphony, intertextuality and chronotopes, has extended beyond literary theory. In our volume, we see narratives as a means for constructing both individual and collective identities, and our understanding of this mode of expression is intrinsically tied to a view of identity as hybrid and (co)-constructed. As noted by the editors of the 30-year-anniversary of Narrative Inquiry, in the 1990s, “narrative became a zeitgeist in many disciplines, not just traditional ones such as language studies that had always found narrative central to their work” (McCabe and Van De Mieroop 2021: 1). Narrative analysis is not only used in different disciplines, it is in itself interdisciplinary, as pointed out by Biar, Orton and Bastos (2021: 126), who also underline that narratives, echoing Foucault (1972: 49), have the reciprocal effect of “systematically form[ing] the objects about which they speak”, and therefore represent “a type of cornerstone of social life”. The temporal aspect of narratives has been a key concern in sociolinguistic narrative research, ever since Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) work

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on oral narratives. They stated that a narrative structure is established by the existence of a temporal juncture between two independent clauses, and as such this early work saw narratives as recounting and reevaluating events in the past. Though time is a key orientational element of narratives, narratives do not always present events in a chronological order, but may have cyclical time configurations and fuzzy, vague or undetermined time contours (De Fina 2003). Labov also drew attention to this aspect of narratives when mentioning that narratives can contain hypothetical elements and be oriented towards the future: Narratives “frequently contain irrealis clauses – negatives, conditionals, futures, – which refer to events that did not happen or might have happened or had not yet happened” (Labov 2011: 547). As pointed out by Georgakopoulou (2007: 15), narrative time is not necessarily linear or constant, and “can be systematically contested, negotiated and/or re-set between participants”. This fluidity and lack of temporal continuity are salient in narratives about disruptive experiences, such as in the personal illness narrative presented by Riessmann (2015: 1066), who suggests that we may construct ordered narratives of an inherently disordered experience precisely because of our need for meaning when we experience profound disruptures in our lives and realise that “temporality is ambiguous: Beginnings, middles and ends bleed into each other just as past, present and future do”. Given that one of the key functions of narration is to impose coherence on one’s experience (Bruner 2004 [1987]), narratives are useful for analysing how individuals position themselves when telling stories about their journeys and settlement in a new country. Migration literature often explores how identity is formed and changes over time, and shows how language and discourse may limit or enhance our opportunity to define our own identities. Some authors of migrant background may be seen as “rewriting” national identities, moving these towards transnational identities, including immigrants and their stories. As pointed out by Bakhtin (1981: 84), there is an “intrinsic connectedness between temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”. This idea can be brought to bear on narratives more broadly, for instance through Bakhtin’s term “chronotope”. Silverstein (2005: 6) defines chronotopes as “denoting the temporally

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(hence, chrono-) and spatially (hence, -tope) particular envelope in the narrated universe of social space-time in which and through which, in emplotment, narrative characters move”. Configurations of time and space are part of identity negotiations in narrative discourse in ways that go beyond the mere invoking of context. The migrant telling a story of the home country speaks from another point in time and space, and the voyage that brought them to their present position constitutes yet another space–time frame. Such chronotopes can be immensely important in migrants’ processes of securing a place in a new social space–time. The chronotopes of home-back-then, the voyage to the new land, and the present space–time all become part of the identity of the teller. If narratives are means for recalling, reporting, reliving and reconstructing social actions and experiences in the story world established through the narrative, then telling a story allows us to create a story world in which we can represent ourselves (Schiffrin 1996), and present the event in such a way that the speaker’s stance to the events is revealed (Golden and Lanza 2015). The act of telling a story and the experiences and actions recapitulated through the storytelling are embedded in, and contribute to shaping larger discourses. As Schiffrin points out, “narratives are a form of discourse through which we reconstruct and represent past experience both for ourselves and for others” (Schiffrin 2006: 18). Narratives have both a referential function (telling what happened) and an evaluative function (conveying the significance of what happened). For that reason, in the analysis of narratives, we have to ask what the relation is between “what happened” and “what is told about what happened”? Narratives are not only privileged sites for the study of identity, positioning, emotions and individual experiences (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015; Schiffrin 2006), they may also be a way to fight back and craft one’s own voice (De Fina 2018). When we tell stories, we place ourselves in a cultural and social world, as pointed out by Schiffrin (1996: 169): telling a story allows us to create a “story world” in which we can represent ourselves against a backdrop of cultural expectations about a typical course of action; our identities as social beings emerge as we construct

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our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations.

Such self-representation is particularly evident in institutional interview settings, and in fictional or autobiographical accounts about such settings. Storytelling can establish a story world more subtly through generic narratives and narratives of habitual events, or materially through the design of exhibits in museums or use of material objects in our everyday lives. When considering the narratability of identity in situations where migrants’ narrative identity constructions are actively contested, such as in interviews for asylum and for jobs, the interdisciplinary insights of linguistics, social psychology and literary narratology are truly needed. The stakes are high in such institutional encounters. While speaking from the position of a migrant may exacerbate the situation for job applicants, asylum interviews are even more directly connected to migration issues, with the prevalent bureaucratic concern of dividing the continuous stream of asylum seekers into good and bad cases. For both types of encounters, the narrative construction of an acceptable identity is essential. The often deeply disturbing experiences of migrants generally, and asylum seekers specifically, are the subject matter also of fictional literature and biographies, bringing the troubles of migrants’ contested identities to a broader audience. Because records from conversations and interviews in institutional settings usually are classified, literature and research both play an important role in bringing attention to such conversations. Looking at narratives, of verbal interactions, texts and material objects, through the lens of social constructionism means recognizing a fictional side to storytelling. Stories may recount real events, but they are never more than representations of the real events; they will always to a certain degree be refracted through the narrator in the process of being told (Baynham and De Fina 2005: 3). The central role of narratives in institutional encounters as both argument for, and evidence of, the veracity of the narrator’s (for instance the asylum seeker’s or the job applicant’s) experiences needs to be further problematized in the light of the very impossibility of narrative to be a reality rendering device.

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The idea that a narrative can only present a stylisation of reality was presented already by Aristotle (Davis 1999: 3). Later, Bakhtin referred to narrative and its language as an image of the real world, rather than reality in itself (Bakhtin 1986: 359; 1990: 292). Such images of the world, be they oral narratives, literary works or museum exhibitions, may become contact zones that open for avenues of inquiries going beyond the binary oppositions and classifications such as “us” and the “other”. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of a “third space” serves as a metaphor for capturing the dynamics of such identity negotiations. The constitution of a liminal “third space” defies the fixed identities of traditional social order, and in this space, socalled hybrid identities can be performed and negotiated. This occurs in face-to-face interaction, in multicultural authors’ “rewriting” of national identities, and in cultural museums’ conceptions of a contact zone (Clifford 1997)—e.g. an intermediate zone of coexistence in which people, who originally were geographically and historically separated, meet.

6

Overview of the Book

The authors of this volume investigate ways in which narratives of migrant life present new understandings of cultural diversity and examine how identity is expressed, constructed and negotiated in multilingual and culturally diverse settings. Such settings include gate-keeping situations in which establishing and claiming the “correct” legal and/or cultural identity is essential for migrants, as shown by Pájaro, Myhr and Kjelsvik in their chapters on job interviews and asylum application processes. Due to migration, the workforce in most European countries is multilingual, and the chapters by Lanza and Golden and Pájaro address the construction of professional identities. Naguib and Lane address material aspects of contemporary and historical migration, respectively. Written and oral migration narratives focus on how the crossing of political, cultural and linguistic borders inherent in the migration process is an impetus to creative imagination. Kongslien and Myhr investigate how this is expressed in transcultural and translingual literature.

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The volume consists of seven analysis chapters, this theoretical framework chapter and a concluding chapter by Anna De Fina, discussing the main findings. In Chapter 2, Bjørghild Kjelsvik analyses identity work in asylum interviews by investigating the case of a young man from the Ivory Coast who unsuccessfully tries to establish a credible identity in his asylum interview in Norway. The chapter’s theoretical basis is drawn from narrative analysis as established by researchers working within a social constructionist framework. The chapter explores the intertextual gaps between the interviewer’s conception of a pertinent asylum identity, and the actual narration of the asylum seeker. It highlights the identity work done by the asylum applicant and the narrative devices he uses, while also looking at how institutional genres for asylum narratives shape the interviewer’s questioning. The data come from interviews recorded in 2010 by the Norwegian immigration authorities for the author’s research on identity negotiation in oral stories of migrants. In Chapter 3, Annika Bøstein Myhr enquires into what an autobiography by and a novel about asylum seekers and undocumented migrants might tell us about the correlation between language, culture and identity, as well as what impact such literature, of different genres, may have on reality. The chapter is informed by and contributes to an international debate of who gets to tell whose story, and Myhr argues that this depends on the context and the motives of the storyteller. While Amelie has first-hand experience of life as an irregular immigrant, Shishkin and Myhr speak on behalf of the “other”. And yet, Amelie’s rhetorical text could be said to have helped few but herself, whereas Shishkin’s novel raises awareness of how the human mind and identity politics work, and of the detrimental consequences these systems may have. Even so, the writings of Amelie, Shishkin and Myhr contribute to their creation of juridical and professional identities, and should be read critically. Verónica Pájaro in Chapter 4 investigates categorizations, language ideologies and identity through the analysis of job interview narratives of young professional Latinos in Norway and analyses the discursive regimes that support labour-market inequality through the lens of the narrated experiences of “successful immigrants”. In the telling of their job interview experiences in focus group interviews, the narrators negotiate professional identities and expose how they often were resisted, but

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also confirmed in their job interview experiences. Pájaro shows that tolerance of linguistic variation is not available to all, but is reserved for what is considered being within the range of Norwegian language variation, rather than variation resulting from contact and migration. This ideology is naturalized as valid selection criteria in recruitment processes by being equated to competence and professionalism, and thus function as hidden exclusion mechanisms. In Chapter 5, Elizabeth Lanza and Anne Golden highlight the role of space and time in narratives in interaction, and illustrate how they are intricately intertwined in constructions of personal and professional identities in discourse. Theoretically, the authors draw on the conception of identity as agency and identity construction through categorization strategies, revealing ideologies, values and norms. Their data come from a database of focus group interviews with medical doctors with a migrant background. The focal narrator is an African doctor in Norway who travelled back to her country of origin before returning to Scandinavia. The narrator constructs intersecting personal and professional identities in her accounts of personal experiences from her migration history to and from Scandinavia. Lanza and Golden’s analysis underscores the importance of examining the emergence of identities in narrative discourse and has implications for the study of migrant discourse. In Chapter 6, Saphinaz Naguib explores the interplay between representations of migration and narratives of identity and the ways these are negotiated in Scandinavian museums of cultural history. The materiality of migration and the relationship between things and people are investigated, and she delves into the ways an array of heterogeneous objects act as visual metaphors in exhibitions about migration. Like metaphors in general, visual metaphors are polysemous, expressing ideas and bringing about associations and analogies through images and material culture. They have a transformative function and the capacity of producing new meanings. Visual metaphors rest on visual perceptions triggered by objects that are physically there and exhibited in museums as well as on visual mental imagery and the visual memory of things that are not tangibly present. In Chapter 7, Ingeborg Kongslien discusses how the creative imagination inherent in crossing political, cultural and linguistic borders reflects

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the migration experience and contributes to a rewriting of the nation in four Scandinavian works of migration literature. The analysis of the four works is informed by postcolonial theories such as Said’s view of the exiled writer’s plurality of visions and double perspectives, of Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and “the third space”, Kellman’s “translingual imagination” and Pavlenko’s view of narratives written in a second language as representing ideal discursive spaces for the negotiation of identity. In the analysis, the aspects of place and space are in focus and are shown to be pivotal in the formation of a connection between the old and the new homeland and cultures. As Nordic versions of an international literary trend, these works of migration literature contribute to the rewriting of national narratives, and to the presentation of “ourselves” as the “other” and vice versa. The issue of who gets to belong in the nation is not entirely new in the Nordic context, evident in Chapter 8, by Pia Lane who takes up an historical strand of the problematic of belonging to the nation. Northern Norway has been multilingual for centuries, and the Kven and Sámi peoples have been present in the area for many generations. They went through a period of oppression, resulting in a language shift and devaluation of local culture. In her analysis of oral narratives and material objects, Lane discusses the interconnectedness of language, culture and religion. The Kven adhered to Læstadianism, a religious lay movement that regularly used Finnish, or Kven, language in preaching, hymns and prayers, in contrast to the hegemonic Norwegian language practices of the State church of Norway. Lane’s analysis sheds light on how individuals position themselves vis-à-vis the languages used in their community and shows that the Kven language in informal religious settings is associated with authenticity and belonging. This interdisciplinary volume integrates methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives from different disciplines in the study of identity among migrants. Migration, whether voluntary or forced, is tied to life stories and to narratives of journeys, departures, arrivals and processes of settling down while also maintaining one’s way of life. Such narratives are often structured according to collective and individual memories. Memories rely on written or oral texts, visual and performative arts, crafts and skills, and also material objects which are considered

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as records and witnesses of historical, cultural, political and religious realities. The stories material objects tell convey many-layered meanings of belonging and disclose various strategies of integration and exclusion. Narratives have many different functions and roles in our lives. They may be seen as an “expressive embodiment of our experience, as a mode of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ultimately ourselves” (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001: 1). Telling stories may be a way of creating cohesion in our lives, negotiating identities and enabling us to image different futures. Since narratives contribute to structuring our experience, our knowledge and our thoughts, they represent an ideal research material for the scholar who wishes to get insights into how identity is expressed, constructed and negotiated and to explore the roles of language and culture in this process. Acknowledgements This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

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Myhr, Annika Bøstein. 2021a in press. Autobiographical narratives in an era of migration: To what extent is the idea of individual and national identity still viable today? In Northern Europe: Migration and the questions of identity, ed. Martin Humpál and Helena Bˇrezinová. Prague: Charles University— Karolinum Press. Myhr, Annika Bøstein. 2021b. Challenging Nordic exceptionalism: Norway in literature by and about irregular immigrants. Law and Literature. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1930693. Naguib, Saphinaz Amal. 2013. Museums, diasporas and the sustainability of intangible cultural heritage. Sustainability 5 (5): 2178–2190. https://doi. org/10.3390/su5052178. Naguib, Saphinaz Amal. 2015. Collecting moments of life. Museums and the intangible heritage of migration. Museum International 65 (1–4): 77– 86. https://doi.org/10.1111/muse.12035 Nair, Parvati. 2010. Editorial. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 1 (1): 3–4. Nilsson, Magnus. 2008. Litteratur, etnicitet och förestellningen om det mångkulturella samhället [Literature, ethnicity and the concept of the pluricultural society]. Samlaren, 270–304. http://dspace.mah.se/bitstream/ handle/2043/8052/Nilsson-3.pdf;jsessionid=77435D3FB679DAE5185BE C769BDBE1A0?sequence=1. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2001. “In the world of the tradition, I was unimagined”: Negotiation of identities in cross-cultural autobiographies. International Journal of Bilingualism 5 (3): 317–344. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2007. Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 28 (2): 163–188. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ amm008. Pavlenko, Aneta, and Adrian Blackledge, eds. 2004. Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pietikäinen, Sari, Leena Huss, Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen, Ulla Aikio-Puoskari, and Pia Lane. 2010. Regulating multilingualism in the North Calotte: The case of Kven. Meänkieli and Sámi Languages. Acta Borealia 27 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2010.486923. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 2015. Ruptures and sutures: Time, audience and identity in an illness narrative. Sociology of Health & Illness 37 (7): 1055– 1071. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12281. Røyneland, Unn and Elizabeth Lanza. 2020. Dialect diversity and migration: Disturbances and dilemmas, perspectives from Norway. In Handbook of the

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2 “I Have no Family”—Identity Constructions in an Asylum Interview Bjørghild Kjelsvik

1

Introduction

How do genres and intertextuality on both sides of an asylum interview shape the negotiation of identity of one asylum applicant from a West African country? In answering this question, my main interest lies in the intertextual gaps which appear between the narrative accounts of the young man Saïdou trying to build a bona fide asylum identity, and the genres and orienting framework of the case officer interviewing him. I will discuss how Saïdou uses his repertoire of discourses to build his case, while the interviewer uses her tools of questioning to check whether his narrative qualify for asylum according to international law. The case is from an asylum process in Norway in 2010, but similar phenomena in this kind of institutional encounters are widespread in the world (Sorgoni 2019). B. Kjelsvik (B) Department of Teacher Education, NLA University College, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_2

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1.1

B. Kjelsvik

Research Questions

Saïdou bases his claim for asylum in Norway on the unruly situation of the Ivory Coast during most of the first decade after 2000. The widespread trouble of this West African country is well known. Saïdou, however, did not get asylum: his story was found to lack the crucial aspect of individual persecution. The following research questions will guide the analysis: 1. What identity is Saïdou trying to build? 2. How does he go about producing this identity? 3. What genres and orienting frameworks are shaping the interviewer’s questioning? The interview is an example of how careful identity work by the asylum applicant may not be taken up at all by the interviewer. Saïdou’s strategies of using generic narratives and local discourses of innocence and orphanage are important aspects of his failure to communicate, together with the genre expectations of the interviewer. The situation is aggravated by the interpreter’s faulty interpreting technique, somewhat editing the words of Saïdou so that his accounts become less detailed, this is more thoroughly discussed in Kjelsvik (2015). A short presentation of the data is provided in Sect. 1.2, while Sect. 2 outlines Norwegian asylum procedures and the structure of asylum interviews. Section 3 then presents the asylum seeker’s identity work in narration. The genre expectations of the interviewer will be treated in Sect. 4. Section 5 will discuss how the lens of social constructionism can bring in other perspectives on the narratives of institutional encounters such as asylum interviews.

1.2

Data

The data presented here are from an audio-recorded asylum interview from September 2010 by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (Utlendingsdirektoratet or UDI) in Norway, with a young man, Saïdou (pseudonym), from the Ivory Coast. The total length of the interview is 2 hours 20 minutes.

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The interview is one of a small corpus of audio asylum interview recordings made available for my research by the UDI. I was not present at the interviews. The UDI was responsible for choosing possible applicant candidates and carrying out the recordings. The interview presented here is an ordinary asylum interview, conducted as usual by an interviewer with an interpreter. No interview was used in my project without the informed consent of all the persons involved. The interviewers had an information letter and consent forms presented before the interview and were thus aware of the use for research. The asylum seekers and the interpreters were informed at the start of the interview that it was going to be recorded, but the use of the interview in a research project was only presented afterwards, when they were given information letters and consent forms. The interviews were fully transcribed by me, with marking of pause lengths and notes on audible behaviour. The interpreter’s turns were numbered continuously along with the interviewer and asylum seekers’ turns. In the excerpts below, the French and Norwegian texts are translated into English by me (transcription conventions are found in the appendix). As it happened, none of the applicants recorded were accepted by the UDI for asylum. All asked for a second treatment at the Immigration Appeal Board (UNE) and were rejected again. The letters of decision from UNE are part of my project data. Saïdou’s interview, and another interview from the same corpus, are discussed in Kjelsvik (2015) and Kjelsvik (2014). Both papers bring the perspective of intertextuality and narrative genres to bear on the negotiation of identity in the interviews, while also discussing discusses participation roles (Goffman 1981) and dominance structures (Eades 2005) in these institutional encounters.

2

Asylum Procedures in Norway

On arrival in Norway, asylum applicants register with the police and do a short interview. A large proportion is found to have groundless applications or belong to another country under the Dublin convention, and

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these are sent out within 48 h (Kjelsvik 2014). The others are sent to an asylum reception centre to wait for the main interview with the UDI.

2.1

Counselling Session and Interview

Before the interview, the applicants will have a counselling session with the Norwegian Association for Asylum Seekers (Norsk asylsøkerorganisasjon or NOAS ). NOAS informs the applicants about the asylum procedure, playing the role of an intermediary body between the bureaucratic institution and the immigration authorities (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996; Kjelsvik 2014). The main interview takes place two-three weeks after arrival and produces a report written in Norwegian, signed by all parties after a reading through in the interview language (orally back-translated). The case is then decided by the case officer after further verification of facts as far as possible, such as fingerprints and other biometric data, information on geographical and social affiliations and information on the country in question; this may take some time.

2.2

The Interview Structure

The UDI follows a quite structured template for their asylum interviews, known as a phased interview (see Kjelsvik 2014) for further details on the interview structure). The interview phases are: 1. The laying down of premises 2. Personal details 3. Main part A: – A freely told narrative of reasons for seeking protection in Norway; report writing 4. Main part B: – Questioning on the narrative as the interviewer sees necessary; report writing

2 “I Have no Family”—Identity …

5. 6. 7. 8.

33

Reading through a printout (back-translated from Norwegian) Remaining standard questions Signing of new printout by all parties General information on the process.

In phase 1, mention is made of the duty on the part of the applicant to provide truthful information for the case, while the interviewer and the interpreter have a duty of confidentiality. The goal of the interview is specified as clarifying the applicant’s reasons for seeking asylum. The second phase of personal details such as information on name, nationality, language and ethnicity is part of the verification efforts of the immigration authorities. Most of this has already been provided by the applicant during the arrival interview but is reviewed here. The final phases contain a reading through of the report, with the interpreter backtranslating the Norwegian text, in order to verify the correctness of the report. The main sections of the interview are the actual narration of the motivations of the asylum seeker, together with the follow-up-questioning. Based on an understanding of the importance of hearing the applicant’s own voice in making his or her case, the applicant is first explicitly given the opportunity to tell his or her story freely and without interruptions. This main narrative of the applicant is thus structured by the applicant, according to what he or she believes will best reveal the need for protection. The case officer will write this down from the interpreter’s translation. The follow-up questioning, on the other hand, is structured by the interviewer’s use of the interview guidelines, and answers to the need for identity verification and stories of persecution personally directed towards the applicant. The credibility of the story may be judged mainly on “internal” criteria: coherence, specificity, the amount of detailed descriptions of events and the lack of self-contradictions. In other words, to be able to produce a credible narrative, the applicant must have a grasp of the requirements of an individual-based and coherent narrative of conflict events leading to flight as understood by the UDI. The UDI is on their side required to check for the plight of the asylum seeker as an individual, as both international and Norwegian asylum law stipulate

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personal persecution as the only valid justification for refugee status and asylum (Goodwin-Gill 1985). Flight from more general trouble in a country is not enough to get asylum in Norway. Stories that downplay personal persecution or that answer to other criteria for credibility and coherence, risk not being accepted. In the case treated here, the identity construction in the applicant’s narration is quite instructive in understanding why he did not get asylum in Norway. In the following two subsections, I shall first present how Saïdou positions himself in his main narrative, and then how the interviewer takes up this positioning in the questioning phase.

3

Saïdou’s Identity Work

Important facts relating to Saïdou’s identity are present already in the “personal details” section of the interview, immediately preceding the narration of motivations. When asked about his nationality, he produces a statement of double national attachment: he is born in the Ivory Coast, but of Malian immigrant parents. Thus, he is possibly not truly a citizen of the Ivory Coast, and he is implicated in the political struggles of the ivoirité question of the Ivory Coast. This theme is brought up again in the main narrative of motivations.

3.1

Positioning in the Main Narrative

Saïdou starts his narrative proper with a basic fact: he does not have any close family. He lists the years of death of his father, his mother and a younger sister. His sister died “in the war, well, the rebellion”. In this way, Saïdou relates his situation to the armed conflict between the government forces of President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel groups resisting the policies of ivoirité seeking to establish a ‘true’ Ivorian identity for certain groups while keeping others out (Skogseth 2006; Geschiere 2009). The recital of deaths flows directly into a statement of his problematic position at home:

2 “I Have no Family”—Identity …

35

Excerpt 1: “I don’t have any relatives” 1)

Saïdou:

Bon, je ne savais pas où aller, parce que je suis né à Côte d’Ivoire, je ne reconnaîs pas le Mali, mais si je vont au Mali, je n’ai qu’aucun parent \0.9\

English translation: 1)

Saïdou:

Well, I didn’t know where to go, because I’m born in the Ivory Coast, I don’t know1 Mali, but if I go to Mali, I don’t have but any parents/relatives. \0.9\

Such statements of bewilderment and trouble due to a dangerous double national attachment and the lack of relatives are repeated several times during the interview, forming a kind of refrain. Saïdou presents his double national attachment as a challenge. His connection to Mali is not a positive trait in the general Ivory Coast atmosphere of resentment to foreigners (Geschiere 2009), while having no real value for Saïdou since he does not know anything of his possible family connections in Mali. Being born of Malian parents in Ivory Coast effectively leaves him with nowhere to go when things get difficult in his village. Saïdou’s use of the notion of lacking a family is quite striking. Through it, Saïdou reproduces a widespread discourse: the extended African family always provides for its members. We may take as an example of its frequency the introduction to a scholarly article on the care for AIDS patients: “It is commonly assumed that the extended family in Africa provides a safety net for individuals in times of need” (Seeley et al. 1993). The extended family may be a safety net with holes, as pointed out by Seeley et al.’s article, but this is no hinder for Saïdou using the presumably precarious situation of lacking a family, in his identity construction. In this way, he positions himself as a person needing help from those willing to act as parents to him. He adopts this “orphan” positioning several times in the interview. It comes up in a direct appeal for asylum in Norway, and in his constructed dialogue with the smuggler finally taking 1

The French word “reconnaîs” is translated here as “know” based on the usage Saïdou makes of it elsewhere in the interview. Other translations would be “recognise”, and also “acknowledge”.

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him to Europe. Elsewhere in the interview, it surfaces as a comment on various decisions and problems: he did not join the rebels, he was wanted by the police, it was impossible to go to Mali, all because he has no relatives, no parents. However, Saïdou is not entirely devoid of the support of a social network: he has a job with a man, a patron. Saïdou’s describes the relationship as “je me débrouillais avec lui un peu un peu, pour avoir un peu de salaire”, “I managed with him a little-little, to get a bit of salary”. Saïdou’s boss constitutes his main support after the deaths of his family members and stands in a position of authority to Saïdou. Having thus positioned himself as a dependent youngster needy of the help normally provided by the extended family, Saïdou continues to portray himself as a dependent person with diminished agency. He uses two narrative strategies in order to do this, generic narratives (Baynham 2005, 2006) and constructed dialogue (De Fina 2003; Tannen 2007).

3.2

Generic Narratives

Generic narratives are narratives that let go of the uniqueness condition of the canonical narrative as defined by Labov and Waletzky (1997 [1967]). Instead of telling of events that happened once with a unique set of characters, these stories tell of typical, repeated events, using the general present and generalized actors (Hackert 2006). In Excerpt 2, also from the main narrative of Saïdou, he uses such a generalized story of events in his village. He introduces it through a constructed dialogue with his boss (patron), who first tells him that the police are after him, possibly suspecting him to be a rebel. The continuation is given in Excerpt 2 below. Excerpt 2: “Often the police came” 1)

Saïdou

2)

IP

=Quand il m’a dit ça, \0.3\ bon, il m’a dit, vraiment, \0.3\ la situation est dure, parce que- \0.5\ souvent la rébellion vient dans les villages, \0.5\ Um-hm (continued)

2 “I Have no Family”—Identity …

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(continued) 3)

Saïdou

4) 5)

IP Saïdou

6) 7) 8) 9)

IP Saïdou IP Saïdou

pour venir, chercher les gens. \0.7\ Bon, souvent aussi la police vient dans les villages aussi pour attaquer les civils, puis parce qu’ils sont des rebelles. \0.2\ Uh-hm [choppy-] =Alors qu’il y a leur civils qui sentent ?rapid d’aller? xxx xx ?tout court? d’aller rébellion [-choppy] [Bon], [Uh-hm] pour éscroquer les gens Uh-hm [choppy-] Bon, moi, j’étais beau de faire ça, parce que moi je ne p-, je n’ai aucun parent. [-choppy] \1.6\

English translation: 1)

Saïdou

2) 3)

IP Saïdou

4) 5)

IP Saïdou

6) 7) 8) 9)

IP Saïdou IP Saïdou

=When he said that to me, \0.3\ well, he said to me, really, \0.3\ the situation is difficult, because- \0.5\ often the rebellion comes into the villages, \0.5\ Um-hm to come, take people. \0.7\ Well, often as well the police comes into the villages also to attack the civilians, then because they are rebels. \0.2\ Uh-hm =Even though there are those civilians who feel?quickly to go? xxx xx ?in short? to go rebellion [-choppy] [Well], [Uh-hm] to swindle people Uh-hm [choppy-] Well, me, I could not do that, because me I’ve no p-, I’ve not any relatives. [-choppy] \1.6\

The story of Excerpt 2 is an example of what Blommaert (2001) calls home narratives, contextualizing narratives used to “provide settings, scenes, referential domains and indexicalities that need to be adopted by the hearer” (Blommaert 2001). This function is clearly recognizable here: Saïdou’s account of the police repression and rebel raids on the area he lives in are vital to understand his decision to get away. Such home narratives may contain different time frames, the present, the past and a timeless frame of a general state. When the home narrative slides into a timeless frame with generalized actors, it also becomes a generic

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narrative. Here in Excerpt 2, the shift from a personal to a generic narrative starts in turn 1 with “often”. The use of the present tense indexes the general state of affairs, in turns 1, 3, 5 and 7. The actors are “the rebellion”, “the police”, “the civilians”, “the rebels”, not specific persons or groups. Finally, Saïdou returns to past tense in turn 9, citing his own reaction to the state described, and using the lack of family as his motivation to keep away from the rebellion. Baynham (2005, 2006) has drawn attention to the hegemonic character often pertaining to generic narratives—they are the stories told by those who have (or take on) a right to speak as a representative of a whole group. However, Saïdou is hardly speaking here from a hegemonic position himself; he is not staging himself as a respected representative of his village. Instead he takes cover, so to speak, within the well-known stories of the troubles in the Ivory Coast. In fact, police harassment, rebel attacks and general lawlessness have been common occurrences in the Ivory Coast for years, well known also to the international world (HRW 2010; LandInfo 2010). Saïdou presents the difficult situation in which he finds himself, an orphaned young man with no family support whatsoever, and points to the generalness of difficulties for everybody. It is important to understand how Saïdou uses the generic narrative here. The possibility of displaying voices of self and others and making available information on social relationships in the story world is an essential part of the identity construction in any narrative. In this way narratives allow the narrator to portray his character as having a certain place or role within the story world (De Fina 2006). In Saïdou’s story of the police and the rebels, he uses the voice of his boss, an older man standing in a position of authority to Saïdou, to construct a hegemonic narrative of the danger at home. The boss makes an evaluation of the situation as “really difficult, because-”, turn 1. The following sentence may still be conceived as a report of the boss’ words, warning him of further trouble, and underscoring Saïdou’s claim of danger at home. However, the story then slides into a general reporting voice which takes over the narration of the general troubles with police, rebels and young men taking advantage of the turmoil, in a generic narrative. Saïdou finally ends the recital in his own voice, by appealing to his orphaned state. At this point he is thoroughly back to establishing his position as

2 “I Have no Family”—Identity …

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a needy orphan, but he has made the claim that his boss evaluated the general situation as dangerous. Both later in the main narrative and in answering the questions of the interviewer afterwards, this strategy is repeated. He points out how he himself was not the only victim. Police habitually and randomly rounded up youth who never were heard of again, he is afraid of becoming one of these. The rebels repeatedly attacked his entire village. There were frequent rebel attacks on many villages in the same area, he is afraid of getting shot or taken by them. When directly asked about why the police should look for him specifically, he claims that he has no idea. His own role in the events is only the danger of becoming a random victim. He is not admitting to any particular reason for individual persecution but attempts to come across as innocent of any wrongdoing. A striking example of this self-representation lies in his comments on a police wanted notice for himself which he presented at the arrival interview. When quizzed about it, he simply says that it was the smuggler who gave it to him. He himself had not ever had any real issues with the police, the accusation of him being a rebel was false, and everybody in the village knew that. So, instead of using the wanted notice as a resource for building a more relevant asylum applicant identity (see Sect. 4), Saïdou goes for the innocent orphan identity position. The trouble stories are presented as stories of repeated and typical events which he and everybody else know of. They are thus anchored in a reality shared by many people: it is not just his own feeble voice that is represented here, rather he cites common knowledge and what the boss said. Saïdou uses this hegemonic representation of reality in his generic home narratives to build his “innocent, weak and needy” identity, consistent with the orphan state he has claimed for himself.

3.3

Lack of Agency

Both the orphan identity and the generalized trouble stories underscore Saïdou’s lack of agency within the story world he constructs (De Fina 2003). This is visible in the way he constructs the dialogues of his stories. When his boss warns him about police hunts and rebel attacks, it is the

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boss that initiates the interaction, and then continues to talk about the difficult situation, while any verbal response of Saïdou’s is not reported. Instead, he finally acts on the boss’ higher authority and leaves the village. Another constructed dialogue shows the same pattern. The man who helps him to escape, the smuggler Louis, is portrayed as quizzing Saïdou on his purported lack of relatives, Excerpt 3 below, also from the main narrative. Excerpt 3: “You must save me” 1)

Saïdou

2) 3)

IP Saïdou

4)

IP

Donc quelque temps. Bon. Il m’a dit comme- bon. \0.5\ Il a ?ouvrit sur là? Je ne comprends mes parents, moi, j’ai dit, Non. \0.5\ [rapidly-] Ben, il m’a contrôlé la virgule, vraiment, je ne comprends mes parents. Mes parents que je les connaisse, étaient seulement j’avais une sœur, bon, [-rapidly] \0.7\ Elle est décédée dans la guerre. \0.6\ [rapidly-] Bon, j’ai dit là il n’a qu’à me sauver, sinon je suis refugie, vraiment. [-rapidly] \0.4\ La police va pas me laisser, et la rébellion aussi, vraiment, ils vont pas me laisser. \0.4\ [Um-m.] [Parce que souvent] \0.4\ quand la police y vient prendre des jeunes civils, qu’ils sont des rebelles, bon, ils sont retournent plus, bon, ils les tuent. \0.7\ Aussi, les rebelles xx attaqu- x (interrupts to ask him to slow down)

English translation: 1)

Saïdou

2) 3)

IP Saïdou

4)

IP

Then some time. Well. He said to me, since- Well. \0.5\ He ?opened on that? I don’t hear of my relatives, me, I said, No. \0.5\ [rapidly-] Well, he controlled my least detail, really, I don’t hear of my relatives. My relatives as I know them, were only that I had a sister, well, [-rapidly] \0.7\ She passed away in the war. \0.6\ [rapidly-] Well, I said then he had to save me, if not I’m a refugee, really. [-rapidly] \0.4\ The police will not leave me alone, and the rebellion also, really, they won’t leave me alone. \0.4\ [Um-m.] [Because often] \0.4\ when the police comes there to take young civilians, because they are rebels, well, they are return no more, well, they kill them. \0.7\ Also, the rebels xx attackx-x (interrupts to ask him to slow down)

In this dialogue as well, the smuggler is portrayed as taking the initiative in the conversation. Saïdou furthermore brings in Louis’s

2 “I Have no Family”—Identity …

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evaluation of his statement of having no knowledge of his Malian relatives. The story is accepted as true by Louis after he has “contrôlé la virgule” “controlled the comma” of Saïdou’s account. In the story world, the acceptance of his orphan identity gives Saïdou the opening for asking Louis’s help, pleading for compassion: without his help, Saïdou will truly be a refugee, a person with no safe place to go. Saïdou underscores his need for help by again inserting the theme of general police and rebel harassment in his conversation with Louis. In this episode as well, Saïdou positions himself as lacking agency. Saïdou’s portrayal of his own character in the story world as reactive rather than active in dialogues is also repeated at several points in the narrative. It ties in with his positioning as a needy orphan, becoming part of his identity construction. He does act decisively on some occasions: he hides from the police for a month, he flees the village before the rebel attack, and he takes the chance to get away offered by the smuggler. But all these occasions are set in motion by others; he only follows advice and directions given by others more powerful than him. He himself is hardly responsible. Saïdou’s narrative strategies and unwillingness to cite any reasons for persecution directed to him personally, lead to several repetitions of the same general story of dangerous rebels and police, without clear connections to his own experiences. This is not in line with the expectations of the interviewer, or the requirements for getting asylum in Norway.

4

Genre Expectations and Specifications

Immigration authorities are often under political and institutional pressure to admit as few applicants as possible, making for an attitude of suspicion to all and any asylum seekers, as pointed out by Bohmer and Shuman (2008, 2018) and Daniel and Knudsen (1995). In this climate of suspicion, the attempts to construct bona fide identities in asylum interviews are often thwarted as they meet up with institutionalized genres of the immigration authorities, as has been shown in several

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studies (Blommaert 2001; Jacquemet 2005, 2009, 2011; Maryns 2005, 2006; Maryns and Blommaert 2001; Bohmer and Shuman 2008).2 The asylum institute is based on the idea of individuals needing protection for specific reasons (Goodwin-Gill 1985), hence the requirement for verification of personal identity and an acceptable story of why asylum is needed. In the bureaucratic understanding of identity, personal identity is equated with the ability to present valid identity documents, with a name-and-number categorizing the person as belonging in a certain society; in other words, proof of his or her nationality. A valid asylum seeker identity is likewise strongly associated with the ability to present motivations for asylum requests that fall within the categories recognized by the laws of regulating asylum in that particular host country. Both of these concerns of the bureaucratic understanding of identity come together in the asylum interview, where the asylum applicant must make good who he or she claims to be, and what he or she claims to have happened to them. The power asymmetry is obvious. The UDI interview guidelines have an explicit strategy of using open questions, based on the presumption that this is the best way to obtain relevant information actually providing evidence of the applicant’s need for protection. The template for interviews and the more specific written guidelines for filling it in stipulates such formal details as e.g. writing interviewer questions in italics and applicant responses in regular type. In the introduction to the guidelines we find the following paragraph3 (my translation): Excerpt 4: from the interview guidelines: The interview shall be conducted in line with principles of objective and reliable information gathering. The interviewer shall through the method of phased interviewing arrange for the free telling of the asylum seeker

2

This problem has also been treated in fictional literature by authors such a M. Shishkin, cf. Bøstein Myhr, this volume. 3 Norwegian text:”Intervjuet skal gjennomføres i tråd med prinsipper for objektiv og pålitelig informasjonsinnsamling. Intervjueren skal gjennom faseinndelt intervjumetode, tilrettelegge for at asylsøkeren får fortelle fritt innenfor fokuserte tema valgt av intervjueren. Informasjonen som framkommer skal følges opp med åpne, ikke ledende spørsmål.”.

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within the focused themes chosen by the interviewer. The resulting information shall be followed up with open and not leading questions. (UDI n.d.)

Valuable details and information, which might have otherwise been withheld, are thought to surface through such open questions, while “closed” questions are said not to expand knowledge. The use of open story-initiators such as tell , explain and describe is advised (UDI n.d.). Follow-up questions on the form of “Tell me more about …” are also parts of the repertoire. The open questions are exemplified with a list of wh-words: who, what, where, when, how. This list shows the strong concern with fact finding that is also part of the interview goals. The interviewer is admonished to record as accurately as possible the grounds for asylum with concrete names of persons and places and times for the relevant events. The activities and/or affiliations of the applicant shall be mapped, together with the reactions he or she has met, and from whom.

4.1

“But What Happened to You?”

Saïdou presents in his main narrative a fairly dramatic story of why and how he had to flee from the Ivory Coast. Besides the more generic home narratives discussed above, he also tells of a rebel attack on his village that precipitated his flight. Bringing with him only a bag of clothes, he runs into a group of rebels. They rummage through his belongings, question him and hit him, before he gets away. He then meets the smuggler, asks for his help and is brought to Europe. The interviewer follows up the main narrative first by trying to establish a timeline of the events leading to Saïdou being now in Norway. The timeline questioning is only partly successful: Saïdou first says he cannot really say when this happened, everybody was so concerned with the rebels attacking that he had not really noticed even the month. He also cites his lack of schooling as a reason for not knowing the months. After further questioning, he does arrive at about a month’s time from when he first was warned about the police hunting for him, till the meeting with the rebels and the smuggler, and then another week or so went by before he came to Norway. This is in line with the date of the wanted

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notice he brought with him (see Sect. 3.3), but here as well Saïdou does not use this resource for adding to his credibility. The interviewer then goes for investigating the most promising part of Saïdou’s narrative in terms of personal persecution: the encounter with the rebels, a frightening situation directly concerned with Saïdou. She poses a “tell me more question”, a preferred question format in the UDI practice. In the next telling of the meeting with the rebels, Saïdou tells much the same things, but in a more emotional way, with a shaky, hurried voice. The clauses are less coherent and consequently more difficult to understand. In the first version, he mentioned that the rebels had taken the money he had carried, in the second telling the same theme is presented slightly differently, he says that they rummaged through his belongings, but “they didn’t see anything in it”. The talk of being hit and injured is repeated with an addition of the instrument used; something with nails in it, but this is rather unclear. Excerpt 6 below gives an interesting detail from this version, with some new information. Excerpt 5: “Towards twenty-four hours” 1)

Saïdou

2) 3)

IP Saïdou

Bon. Moi, moi, j’étais blessé. \0.5\ Bon, vers le vingt-quatre heures pour aller dans les trois qua- une heure de matin, Bon, cela, je puisse me sauver, j’ai ramassé mes bagages. \0.4\ [choppy-] Par ce temps ils sont blessés déjà et xx-xx ils disaient que, non, qu’ils- bon, ils s’en vont mais au retour encore il faut plus laisser quelqu’un. [-choppy] \0.5\ Uh-[hm.] [Il faut] tuer tout le monde. \0.9\

English translation: 1)

Saïdou

2) 3)

IP Saïdou

Well. Me, me, I was injured. \0.5\ Well, towards twenty-four hours going to three qua- one o’clock in the morning, Well, that, I could save myself, I gathered up my things. \0.4\ (choppy-) By this time they were injured already and xx-xx they said that, no, that they- well, they go off now, but when coming back again it would be necessary not to leave anybody. (-choppy) \0.5\ Uh-[hm.] [It is] necessary to kill everybody. \0.9\

Saïdou here comes up with a fairly precise time for his escape from the rebels; it was “towards twenty-four hours going to three qua- one o’clock

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in the morning”. As Tannen (2007) notes (see also Baynham 2003; De Fina 2003), striving to be precise about a detail like the exact time of day gives an impression of truth, of verisimilitude, to the story. A note of packing “three pants and some of the other clothes” plays a similar role in the first version of the rebel meeting story: the number of pants is quite irrelevant as such, but it gives an impression of a remembered event rather than a made-up story. The exactness in the citing of the time of day in Excerpt 5 stands in a conspicuous contrast to Saïdou’s pleading of ignorance when quizzed about the date when this meeting took place, in the timeline questioning mentioned above. Then, in the last part of turn 2 and in turn 3, Saïdou returns to the theme of general danger from the rebels and his positioning as innocently and randomly involved in a rebel attack, when he quotes the rebels as threatening to come back and “kill everybody”, turn 3. This is not adding positively to Saïdou’s possibilities of getting asylum, as it again fails to portray him as a victim personally targeted by the rebels. The interviewer tries another three times to elicit a ‘better’ personal story on the rebel encounter, as preferred by the asylum regulations. Saïdou repeatedly answers along the lines of telling of the general danger from police and rebels forces, building a picture both of an area with much rebel activity and police repression and how he himself is only an orphan with nowhere to go. He starts these generic narratives with a link to his personal story, saying such things “Well, there, when I worked with my boss, well, the reb-” or “Wellh! When I saw, well, the village is attacked, yes, xx xx shooting, it was shooting everywhere”. Then he slides into the more general story, giving accounts of how “the rebellion” was fairly close to his village, or how civilians often will be handed weapons to defend themselves in the case of rebel attacks. These generalizing accounts are given codas containing variations on the theme of Saïdou’s quandary as orphaned and with nowhere to go in the Ivory Coast or Mali. One account ends with his own refusal to take part in an armed defence, as he has never used a shotgun. This leads to a reflection on how he himself could never join the rebellion, even if there is “some money in it”, because of the danger of accidentally killing a relative or friend, like his sister, that is “why he wanted to get away”. In these codas, Saïdou thus relates the general stories to his present

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situation of being an asylum applicant, but the connections are not very clearly spelled out. In the case of citing his sister’s death in 2008 as a reason for fleeing, the coda comes across as a serious discrepancy with his former information on when he left the village and leads to a section of questioning in order to clarify this misunderstanding.

4.2

Genre Specifications

The interviewer’s insistence on the theme of the encounter with the rebels is indicative of the interviewer’s positioning. She works from the point of view of the international and Norwegian asylum law, based on the individualizing approach dating back to the 1951 Refugee convention (UNHCR 2010). This position is implicit in an interesting genre specification after two thwarted attempts at getting a more detailed story from Saïdou on his encounter with the rebels. Excerpt 6: “YOUR story” 1)

IntF2

2)

IP

3) 4)

Saïdou IP

5) 6)

Saïdou IP

7) 8) 9) 10) 11)

Saïdou IP Saïdou IP IntF2

Ja. Jeg hører det du sier. \0.3\ E:hm- \0.6\ men det jeg ikke tror du skjønner er at at jeg vil gjerne høre hva DU har opplevd \1.2\ E:h, vi veit masse om den generelle situasjonen \0.9\ i for eksempel Elfenbenskysten, \0.9\ eh, men det vi er interessert i er din historie, hva du har opplevd. \0.9\ Alors, j’entends ce que vous dites, mais eeh, c-ce qu’il faut comprendre, c’est que ce qui m’interesse, moi, c’est vOTRe histoire, ce que vous avez vecu Ok[é] [Par]ce que nous, on est bien au courant de la situation générale en Côte d’Ivoire, Ok[é] [on] connaît bien. Donc, ce qui nous interesse, nous, c’est votre histoire, ce que vous avez vecu. [Vous person]nellement [Oké.] Um-m. \0.5\ Comme quoi? Ja, hva tenker du på da? \1.0\ La oss begynne med når du møtte på rebellene. \0.5\ Fortell meg, så:: nøyaktig og detaljert som mulig, hva som skjedde, før du klarte å rømme. \0.4\ (continued)

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(continued) 12)

IP

Alors, on peut commencer avec cette rencontre que vous avez eu donc avec les rebels. Et essayer de nous raconter de facon aussi precise et détaillée que possible, ce qui c’est passé à partir du moment où vous les avez rencontré jusqu’au moment vous avez réussi à fuir

English translation: 1)

IntF2

2)

IP

3) 4)

Saïdou IP

5) 6)

Saïdou

7) 8) 9) 10) 11)

Saïdou IP Saïdou IP IntF2

12)

IP

Yes. I hear what you say. \0.3\ E:hm- \0.6\ but what I think that you don’t understand is that I would like to hear what YOU have gone through. \1.2\ E:h, we know a lot about the general situation \0.9\ in for instance the Ivory Coast, \0.9\ eh, but what we are interested in is your history, what you have gone through. \0.9 So, I hear what you say, but eeh, w-what is necessary to understand, it is that that which interests me, myself, that is YOUR story, what you have gone through Ok[é] [Be]cause we, we are quite in the know of the general situation in Ivory Coast, Ok[é] [we] know it well. Consequently, what interest us, we, that is your story, that which you have gone through. [You perso]nally [Oké.] Um-m. \0.5\ Like what? Yes, what are you thinking of then? \1.0\ Let us start with when you met up with the rebels. \0.5\ Tell me, a::s accurately and detailed as possible, what happened, before you managed to escape. \0.4\ So then, we may start with this meeting that you had with the rebels, then. And try to tell us in the most precise and detailed way possible, what took place from the moment that you met them till the moment when you succeeded in escaping

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In these remarks the interviewer strongly appeals to Saïdou to tell his personal story, saying that she does not really need all his home narratives of general rebel troubles and police repression. She wants HIS story, not what happened to everybody. He, however, may think that he very much has given her his personal story, consistently depicting himself as an orphan in need of help, who only by the goodwill of others, such as his boss and Louis the smuggler, has managed to save his life. What can be more personal than displaying himself as such a dejected and weak person? Turn 9 is a telltale question from Saïdou: he does not quite understand what the interviewer is after, so he asks “Comme quoi? ” “Like what?” She presents him again with an open question on the rebel encounter, in turn 11. In view of the interview guidelines cited above this is somewhat surprising. There are numerous questions which could have been asked at this point, such as details about the rebel group, their name, name of leader, approximate number, names of the villages where they normally stayed, these locations in relation to the areas of Ivory Coast mostly controlled by rebel Northerners and the areas controlled by the President Gbagbo’s forces, and so on. She could also have asked about the larger circumstances of this particular attack, on his own village, on other villages. Does he know of any casualties of outcomes? How precisely was he himself hurt? Where was he heading when leaving the village? What did he leave at home if he only brought a few clothes? There is literally a host of questions that could have been asked to add detail, but they are not brought up. Instead the interviewer goes for the general open question in turn 11, and consequently does not get much new information in Saïdou’s response. He veers again into generic accounts of the situation with thrown-in remarks on his difficulties due to lacking a family. In the last try to elicit a more detailed personal story, Saïdou does retell the encounter story in a more colourful way, though not perhaps as required by the asylum genre. This time he says that the boss had been attacked in his house and seriously wounded and was hovering between life and death when talking to Saïdou. His march order to Saïdou thus acquires substantially more narrative power. Furthermore, Saïdou is more precise about how he came across the rebels. They had put up roadblocks on all the roads leading out of the village, so he was caught in one of

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them. Then the rebels tie him up, ransack him and his things, but do not find anything. They hit him with a piece of wood, and they threaten to come back and kill everybody in the village. The main structure is thus much the same, and there is no further hint of Saïdou being a special target for the rebels.

5

Discussion

As noted in Sect. 4 above, asylum seekers often struggle to present acceptable reasons for asylum in their encounters with immigration authorities. The narration of the applicant plays an important role as the main basis for reaching a decision of rejection or acceptance. The elaborate procedures established in Europe and the Americas in order to carry out a verification of asylum seekers’ identities are based on a bureaucratic understanding of identity which never has taken on board the view of identity elaborated by the social constructionism research tradition, that identity is constantly negotiated and constructed in narrative. Credibility does not emanate only from the story as such, it is very much tied up with the genre notions of what credible asylum stories should be like. Such genre expectations are crucially linked to intertextuality (Briggs and Bauman 1992; Kjelsvik 2014). On the one hand, there are a number of intertextual links between the law texts, the guidelines for interviewing, and the actual phrases and questions with which the interviewers conduct the interview. On the other hand, interviewers will develop genre notions out of the applicants’ stories, recognizing common features and structures from one interview to the next, and comparing them to more “ideal” stories. The case officers of the immigration authorities are likely to develop their own genres of “good” and “bad” asylum stories, based on institutional training, institutional practices and the intertextual links between the asylum interviews they have done (Blommaert 2001).

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Obviously, these institutional genres are not necessarily well known to asylum applicants. Instead, the applicants bring with them their own genres of how to tell a story in particular settings, and their own knowledge of what to say in order to build a credible identity for getting help in a difficult situation. In such situations of differing orientational frameworks (Hanks 1987) for the interaction at hand, misunderstandings are to be expected. In addition, the necessity of using interpreters adds another layer of complexity. The story worlds that Saïdou creates in his interview are meant to provide reasons for Saïdou to be afraid and explain why he chose to flee to Europe. The generic stories cited in 3.2 above function as home narratives that provide necessary orientation for Saïdou’s more personal stories of trouble. However, his wish to come across as an innocent young person forced to flee by the generally difficult circumstances clashes with the expected content of an asylum interview. The genre of asylum motivation stories favours personal, concrete stories of what happened to the particular asylum seeker, not the general, generic narratives treated above. The painstakingly constructed personal identity of Saïdou is thus quite useless when faced with the expectations of certain kinds of conflict stories implicit in the asylum regulations. Instead, wide intertextual gaps (Briggs and Bauman 1992) appear between the narratives he produces and the orientational framework of the interviewer. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the UDI for giving me access to interview recordings, participation in an interviewers course, and decision letters for my research.

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Appendix Transcription conventions Speaker labels: Saïdou Interviewee; IntF2 Interviewer; IP Interpreter Other symbols CAPS \0.4\ . , ! [we] = xx xx [rapidly-] [-rapidly]

Emphatic stress Pause measured in seconds Sentence final intonation Sentence continuing intonation Self-interruption Animated tone of voice Overlapping speech Latching Unclear segment Start of divergent speech pattern End of divergent speech pattern

References Baynham, Mike. 2003. Narratives in space and time: Beyond “backdrop” accounts of narrative orientation. Narrative Inquiry 13 (2): 347–366. Baynham, Mike. 2005. Network and agency in the migration stories of Moroccan women. In Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement, ed. Mike Baynham and Anna De Fina, 11–35. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Baynham, Mike. 2006. Performing self, family and community in Moroccan narratives of migration and settlement. In Discourse and identity, ed. Anna De Fina, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg, 376–397. New York: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2001. Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium. Discourse & Society 12 (4): 413–449. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0957926501012004002. Bohmer, Carol, and Amy Shuman. 2008. Rejecting refugees: Political asylum in the 21st century. London: Routledge.

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Bohmer, Carol, and Amy Shuman. 2018. Political asylum deceptions. The culture of suspicion. Palgrave Macmillan. Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman. 1992. Genre, intertextuality and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2): 131–172. Daniel, Errol Valentine, and John Chr. Knudsen. 1995. Mistrusting refugees. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. De Fina, Anna. 2003. Identity in narrative: A study of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. De Fina, Anna. 2006. Group identity, narrative and self-representations. In Discourse and identity, ed. Anna De Fina, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael G. W. Bamberg, 351–375. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eades, Diana. 2005. Beyond difference and domination? Intercultural communication in legal contexts. In Intercultural discourse and communication. The essential readings, ed. Scott F. Kiesling and Christina Bratt Paulston, 304–316. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The perils of belonging. Autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa & Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Footing. In Forms of talk, 124–159. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin-Gill, Guy S. 1985. Non-refoulement and the new asylum seekers. Virginia Journal of International Law 26: 897–920. Hackert, Stephanie. 2006. Oral narrative and tense in urban Bahamian Creole English. In Structure and variation in language contact, ed. Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman, 225–242. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hanks, William F. 1987. Discourse genres in a theory of practice. American Ethnologist 14 (4): 668–692. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1987.14.4.02a 00050. HRW. 2010. World report 2010 - Côte d’Ivoire. New York: Human Rights Watch. Jacquemet, Marco. 2005. The registration interview. Restricting refugees’ narrative performances. In Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement, ed. Mike Baynham and Anna De Fina, 197–220. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Jacquemet, Marco. 2009. Transcribing refugees: The entextualization of asylum seekers’ hearings in a transidiomatic environment. Text & Talk 29 (5): 525– 546.

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Jacquemet, Marco. 2011. Crosstalk 2.0: Asylum and communicative breakdowns. Text & Talk 31 (4): 475–497. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.201 1.023. Kjelsvik, Bjørghild. 2014. “Winning a battle, but losing the war”: Contested identities, narratives and interaction i asylum interviews. Text & Talk 34 (1): 89–115. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2013-0039. Kjelsvik, Bjørghild. 2015. «Eg har ingen familie» - Identitet, deltakarroller og tolking i asylsøkjarintervju. Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning 55 (1): 58– 86. https://www.idunn.no/tfs/2015/01/eg_har_ingen_familie_-_identitetdel takarroller_og_tolki. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1997 [1967]. Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1–4): 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.02nar. LandInfo. 2010. Elfenbenskysten: Sikkerhetssituasjonen pr. mai 2010 [Ivory coast: The security situation as pr. May 2010]. Respons, May 21. Oslo: Utlendingsforvaltningens fagenhet for landinformasjon [Oslo: The Norwegian Country of Origin Information Centre]. Maryns, Katrijn. 2005. Displacement in asylum seekers’ narratives. In Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement, ed. Mike Baynham and Anna De Fina, 174–196. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Maryns, Katrijn. 2006. The asylum speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Maryns, Katrijn, and Jan Blommaert. 2001. Stylistic and thematic shifting as a narrative resource: Assessing asylum seekers’ repertoires. Multilingua 20 (1): 61–84. https://doi.org/10.1515/MULTI.2001.003. Sarangi, Srikant, and Stefaan Slembrouck. 1996. Language, bureaucracy and social control . London: Pearson Education. Seeley, Janet, E. Kajura, C. Bachengana, M. Okongo, U. Wagner, and D. Mulder. 1993. The extended family and support for people with AIDS in a rural population in south west Uganda: A safety net with holes? AIDS Care 5 (1): 117–122. Skogseth, Geir. 2006. Report: Côte d’Ivoire: Ethnicity, ivoirité and conflict. Oslo: Landinfo. Sorgoni, Barbara. 2019. What do we talk about when we talk about credibility? Refugee appeals in Italy. In Asylum determination in Europe: Ethnographic perspectives, ed. Nick Gill and Anthony Good, 221–240. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking voices. Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

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UDI. n.d. Retningslinjer for utfylling av asylintevjumal [Guidelines for filling in the asylum interview template]. Oslo: Course material for new asylum interviewers, August 2010: Utlendingsdirektoratet [The Norwegian Directorate for Immigration]. UNHCR. 2010. Convention and Protocol relating to the status of refugees, with introductory note by the High Commissioner, ed. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Geneva: UNHCR Communications and Public Information Service.

3 Who Gets to Tell Whose Story? Asylum Seeker Narratives in Maria Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk, Mikhail Shishkin’s Venerin volos, and the Research Chapter Annika Bøstein Myhr

As I started out writing this chapter, I wanted to explore what literature by and about asylum seekers and undocumented migrants might tell us about the correlation between language, culture, and identity, as well as what impact such literature, of different genres, may have on reality. The autobiography Ulovlig norsk [Illegally Norwegian] by the undocumented migrant Maria Amelie (2010a), and the novel Venerin volos (2005, Maidenhair 2012) by the Russian-Swiss author Mikhail Shishkin stood out as two works that could offer interesting answers to these questions.1 But in 1 Quotes in English are from Marian Schwartz’ translation Maidenhair (2012). All English translations from Amelie’s book are mine. I will for the sake of readability, refer to the books’ titles in English. Page references to Amelie’s and Shishkin’s books are given in parenthesis after quotations.

A. B. Myhr (B) Department of Languages and Literature Studies, University of South-Eastern Norway, Kongsberg, Norway e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_3

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the process of writing the chapter, an even more pressing question took center stage, namely: Who gets to tell whose story? In answering this question, I have happened upon some methodological quandaries, which I will discuss at different points in the chapter. I also have to discuss my rights to and motivation for writing this chapter.

1

Methodological Quandaries

In literary studies since New Criticism, looking for the intentions of an author in a literary text, and for correlations between the text and the life of the historical author , is taboo. One main purpose of this taboo is to safeguard the status of literary studies as a scholarly discipline, with methods based on objective criteria. We need to explain the meanings or effects of a text based on an analysis of the form, content and genre of the text itself, not on speculations about what the author may or may not have thought, felt or experienced in real life. Although this demand is in many ways fair, it makes it more difficult to formulate the conclusions Shishkin’s novel begs for, as I will show later. It also complicates the comparison of Amelie’s and Shishkin’s works. In an autobiography, the narrator and protagonist should be perceived as identical with the text’s historical author, as is evident from the definition of the autobiography as “the biography of a person narrated by that person” (Merriam Webster, n.d.). There is no guarantee that the content of an autobiography is true, but in the critical analysis of it, it is crucial that we look for the intentions of the author—especially if the author wants to gain something—like legal residency in a country, which was the case for Maria Amelie. Also, in the case of Amelie’s Illegally Norwegian, the definition of the autobiography genre poses a delicate problem: Since the name Maria Amelie is a pseudonym, Illegally Norwegian may, some would say should, be perceived as fiction. Amelie in this book could be perceived as presenting herself as the person she wants to be. A critical reader could for instance ask why she never mentions her birth name Madina Salamova (in Russian) or Madine Salamty (in Ossetian). And in order to answer this question, one would have to speculate on the intentions of Amelie, the historical

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author. She may have wanted to protect her parents, who were living as undocumented immigrants in Norway at the time, or maybe she did not want to jeopardise readers’ sympathy by revealing her non-Western, nonChristian birth name. In short, an analysis of Amelie’s autobiography cannot be comprehensive without taking into account the intention of the author, her concerns for other people in her life, the reception of the book by readers, and the fact that the book is written under pseudonym.

2

Identity and Narratives

But we should also remember that every autobiography, while claiming to be “non-fictional (factual) in that it proposes to tell the story of a ‘real’ person,” is “inevitably constructive, or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual ‘self-fashioning’” (Schwalm 2014). And if every autobiography “ultimately resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives (autofiction, autobiographical novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred” (Schwalm 2014), it does not seem right to read Amelie’s autobiography with more suspicion than other such works. If anything, is it not positive that an undocumented migrant tells her own story (Myhr 2015b)? Also, who am I, or anyone else, to say that Amelie is not Maria Amelie, the person she came to be as she lived in Norway, and whose becoming she describes in Illegally Norwegian? Amelie is not the first person to change her name—women have regularly taken their husband’s surname, without being accused of being imposters. Also, constructivist ideas describe our identities as created in context and developing over time, through processes of interaction, positioning, negotiation and narration (see Chapter 1). In Amelies’ description: “Gjennom vennene mine, først tilfeldig bekjente, så mennesker jeg ble glad i, er jeg ikke lenger en historieløs og identitetsløs person på avveier i denne verden. Det er som om jeg er blitt en vanlig norsk jente i deres selskap” (130). [“Through my friends, random acquaintances to begin with, then people I came to love, I am no longer a lost person without history and identity. It is as if I have become a regular Norwegian girl in their company.”] Theory backs this description.

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In an excerpt from her diary, written around the time she entered Norway, Amelie describes the role of written narration in her efforts to understand who she is (becoming): Men jeg vet at jeg må fortsette å skrive detaljert om denne reisen vår i dagboken. Det er merkelig å beskrive alt så konkret. […] Jeg vet at en dag skal jeg bla gjennom og lese om og om igjen om denne reisen. Jeg vet at en dag skal jeg komme tilbake til disse notatene og finne en mening med alt. For det må jo finnes en grunn til alt. Det må det. Ellers … (31). [But I know that I have to continue writing in detail about this journey of ours in the diary. It is strange to describe everything in such detail. […] I know that one day I will leaf through it and read about this journey over and over again. I know that one day I will return to these notes and find a meaning in it all. For there has to be a reason behind it all. There has to be. Otherwise …]

Narratives help us maintain a sense of continuity between the past, present and future (Eakin 2008), which is crucial to our sense of having a stable identity. Amelie’s intuitive understanding of identity as created through narration resonates with Toril Moi’s description of the writing process of a novelist: The picture of intentions conjured up by the New Critics and shared by Belsey, is a theoretical fiction. If I intend to write a novel, it doesn’t follow that the text resides in my brain as a kind of homunculus, a fully formed work in miniature. Writers know that intentions don’t work in this way. Writing is thinking. Texts grow and change as the writer works on her sentences. (Moi 2017: 201)

Even though the text as a whole is unlikely to have rested in Amelie’s brain as a “fully formed work in miniature” (Moi 2017: 201), what could cause suspicion, is that based on her eight years of living in Norway, Amelie did have an idea of what it means to be Norwegian, and could brand herself accordingly. The question her readers have to ask themselves is not merely if Amelie’s autobiography is, or borders on, fiction, but if she is telling the truth. If Amelie wanted to avoid scepticism about her truthfulness, she could have described her Norwegian identity in

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a novel. But since there is a strong precedent, in literary scholarship and in law, against the identification of the narrator and/or protagonist in a novel with its historical author, a novel would not have the same potential as the autobiography to change Amelie’s juridical status in real life. Amelie’s story is a prime example of that telling one’s story is not all it takes to be or become someone—one also has to be accepted as that someone by others (Todorov 2010). As Kenneth Gergen (2005: 39) has phrased it: whether a given narrative can be maintained depends importantly on the individual’s ability to negotiate successfully with others concerning the meaning of events in relationship with each other. […] narrative constructions typically require a supporting cast.

Others have to believe one’s story. In Amelie’s description, lawyers, officers of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) and interpreters took it for granted that the family’s case was lost, since they came from Russia, had lied about their identities, and came to Norway through Finland, another Schengen country, and a member of the Dublin Regulation (49, 79).2 In publishing her autobiography, Amelie took control over her story in a way that she would not be able to do in an asylum interview. And that Illegally Norwegian should be read as a substitute for the asylum interview, is evident from the fact that on 9 September 2010, the day before her book was published, Amelie sent an appeal to the Immigration Appeals Board (UNE), and pleaded that they review their previous decision to expel her, given that she had come to Norway as a minor, and had not had her case examined independently from that of her parents. Amelie did not apply to the UNE under the name Maria Amelie, since if she did, this would mean an automatic refutation of her case. The appeal and the conscious use of different names for different purposes or audiences profiles her book as a strategical alternative to the asylum 2

The Dublin Regulation is an agreement between the EU countries, Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Each asylum seeker shall only have his or her application considered in one of the countries participating in the cooperation (UDI, n.d.).

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interview she risked not being invited to. If UNE decided not to treat her case, enough people might have read the book for it to have an impact on her case—or enough people would at least know she existed. Amelie described the despair that made her take this huge risk in an interview with Aftenposten in 2011: When we were given the date of expulsion, I wanted to take my own life. The fear you experience when you realise that you actually don’t exist makes you more an animal than a human being. What if I had disappeared, thrown myself from a bridge: who would be looking for me? (Refsnes 2011, see also Amelie 2010b)

As proof of Amelie’s existence, Illegally Norwegian also asks people to open their eyes to the paradoxical fact that in our lives in Norway, we may meet actual, physical people, who juridically do not exist. The book did open people’s eyes to this, but the fact that it did so using certain literary or rhetorical devices, might also raise some suspicion. In her examination of the narrative demands placed on asylum seekers to the US, historian and literary scholar Madeline Holland (2018: 86) found that literary norms may impact asylum seekers’ cases, since “Western literary standards shape our understanding of what a ‘true story’ should sound like.” As Holland illuminates, “this conflation of literary story-telling and truthful story-telling in the context of asylum proceedings can result in the failure to recognize ‘true’ stories told by asylum seekers” (Holland 2018: 86). A well told story is not neccesarily true—just as true stories are not always well told. These two paradoxes are a major challenge in asylum seeker cases. A credible asylum story, according to professor of asylum law Stacy Caplow (2008: 249), should be consistent, detailed and plausible. Had Amelie rendered trauma through an incoherent narrative in her autobiography, this might have damaged the consistency and plausibility of her story, and this, in turn, could have worked to estrange her supporters, and thus make it less likely for her to obtain legal rights of residency in Norway. Instead, Amelie created credibility by telling “everything in […] detail” (31), through first-person narration, and by structuring her story chronologically, through the book’s three parts of which “Part one”

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(13–132) is based on diary entries from 8 February 2002 to 12 August 2004, “Part two” (133–189) on blog entries from Amelie’s five years of university studies in Trondheim from 2004 to 2009, and “Part three” (191–214) describes Amelie’s life after she moved to Oslo to write Illegally Norwegian in 2009. The book as a whole describes the coming about of Maria Amelie, and assures the reader that Amelie is a person, and not just as a name. Without residence permit, to feel , or to be perceived by her friends and others as Norwegian, in 2009 no longer sufficed for Amelie, who wanted to live an adult life with a job, a tax card, access to health care, insurance, and opportunities for travel and political rights. On the back cover of the book, Amelie’s dilemma is described as her having a choice between continuing to live a lie, or to tell the truth: Etter åtte år i Norge følte Maria at hun måtte velge. Skulle hun stå fram og dermed sette seg selv og familien i fare for å bli tvangsreturnert? Eller skulle hun kjøpe et falskt pass og leve resten av livet sitt på en løgn, med en annens identitet? Maria valgte å stå fram med sin egen historie. Kan hun håpe på en lykkelig slutt? (Amelie 2010a, back cover) [After eight years in Norway, Maria felt she had to make a choice. Should she come forward, thus exposing herself and her family to the risk of being returned by force? Or should she buy a false passport and live the rest of her life based on a lie, with someone else’s identity? Maria chose to come forward with her own story. Can she hope for a happy ending?]

Telling an unflattering truth in spite of the risk of losing everything creates ethos, and the ethos Amelie achieved through her autobiography played a crucial part in the development of Amelie’s case in the aftermath of the publication of Illegally Norwegian—as I will show after a discussion of why I feel that it is valuable, but potentially problematic, to include Maidenhair into this chapter.

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Who Gets to Tell Whose Story?

Whereas Amelie’s Illegally Norwegian tells the story of one individual’s life, Mikhail Shishkin’s novel Maidenhair consists of a collection of many life stories. Structurally, the novel is a collage consisting of ten asylum interviews, letters from the narrator-protagonist to his son, excerpts from the diaries of the Russian opera singer Izabella Iurieva (1899–2000), and the Greek Mercenary and philosopher Xenophon’s autobiography Anabasis from ca. 370 BC. These stories are not connected according to a structuring plot, but are instead framed within the mind of the novel’s nameless protagonist and first-person narrator—an interpreter of asylum interviews in the Swiss Immigration Office. That Shishkin used to have this very job for several years, until he left it to become a full-time writer, would according to New Criticics be irrelevant to my interpretation of the novel, but is, as I will show, a piece of information that may expand the meaning and increase the value of the novel. The first six of the asylum interviews in the novel are fragments, serving to introduce the asylum interview as a genre. The first five interviews present realistic narratives, but the content and style of the sixth interview makes it seem improbable. Interview seven is even more incredible—and also the most interesting one to analyse, as I will do here. In doing so, I have some conflicting feelings. For one, it is as if the complexity, perspective and artistic virtuosity of Shishkin’s novel make Amelie’s autobiography look somewhat plain and … self-centred. But even if Shishkin’s novel is more sophisticated literature, Amelie has the ethos of having experienced life as an undocumented migrant, which Shishkin does not—and neither do I. As James Dawes (2007: 8), a specialist in literature and human rights, puts it, “in giving voice to suffering we can sometimes moderate it, even aestheticize it,” thereby doing injustice to those who suffer. The intricacy of Shishkin’s novel does represent an aestheticizing of the suffering of others. And in writing a research chapter on Shishkin’s book I myself could be perceived as a paracite on another paracite on the suffering “other.” In literary studies, Gayatri Spivak already in 1988 asserted that: “[t]he position that only the subaltern can know the subaltern, only women can know women and so on, cannot be held as a theoretical

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presupposition […], for it predicates the possibility of knowledge on identity” (Spivak 1988: 253–254). But not everyone would agree with this—as can be seen from debates about novels like Sofi Oksanen’s Purge (2010)3 and Jeanine Cummins American Dirt (2020).4 The debate on who gets to tell whose story has also had a rich life in literature about the use of narratives in humanitarian and human rights work (see e.g. Dawes 2007), since the funding of such work depends to a great extent on the narration of the suffering of the ‘other’. Fiction’s protective distance between text and reality may somewhat assuage the problem. For instance, the name of the narrator and protagonist in Maidenhair is not Mikhail Shishkin and the asylum seekers in the novel are not identifiable individuals, but caricatures illustrating typical problems with the asylum interview as a genre, and with representing or constructing identity through narration and in interaction. Thus, Shishkin uses the stories of asylum seekers to their benefit. Still, ascribing good intentions to Shishkin does not mean that his novel cannot potentially cause harm—or that we should disregard the benefits Shishkin draws from appropriating others’ suffering. Even if his novel is not a block buster, unlike the much-criticised novels of Oksanen and Cummins, it does play a role as a building block in Shishkin’s career as an author (Myhr 2021a)—just as this chapter, and other texts I have published about Amelie’s and Shishkin’s works, could be steppingstones in my career and should also be read with a critical distance (Myhr 2015a, b, 2016, 2021a, b). Regarding the question of who gets to tell whose story, some sound self-scepticism is in order. In an earlier draft of this chapter, I explained my choice of books thus: Amelie’s and Shishkin’s books are doubly important for placing both the stories of people “suddenly lost, without a tellable history” and the topic

3 With the novel Purge (2010 [originally Puhdistus, 2008]), the Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen won several international prizes but was criticised by Estonians for falsifying and selling Estonia’s Soviet history to the West as a “skilfully written horror story” (E.L. 2010). See Myhr (2015a: 269–276) for a synopsis of this debate. 4 See Humphries (2020) for an overview of the debate on cultural appropriation in Cummins’ novel American Dirt (2020).

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of emigration from post-Soviet countries on “the map of literature and culture” (Kaplan 1996: 121). A higher number of literary works has been written, and much more research has been conducted on migration from the Third world to the First, than on migration from the Second world to the First (Etkind 2011: 26). And not many works of so-called migration literature (Frank 2008: 3; see Kongslien’s chapter in this book) focus on asylum seekers and undocumented migrants.

It is true that Robert Young (2003) and Simon Gikandi (2010) already several years ago asked what it would mean to consider the refugee, rather than the exile or émigré, as the quintessential outsider, or “other,” of our times (see Gilmour & Chambers 2018). But the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (UNHCR 2010), and to get refugee status means you are eligible for asylum. By putting into the spotlight the even more marginalised group of irregular or undocumented migrants, defined as persons “who, owing to irregular entry, breach of a condition of entry or the expiry of their legal basis for entering and residing, [lack] legal status in a transit or host country” (EU, n.d.), I wanted to do the right thing for the suffering “other”. But at the same time, who is to say that my main goal is not to build ethos and sympaty for my own work by focusing on literature by and about the ultimate outsider—those who juridically do not even exist? Several philosophers and specialists in law have described undocumented migrants as being not only victims of the global order of nationstates, but a group that does not even benefit from the human rights. As Giorgio Agamben puts it in an essay where the word refugee is used to signify “a person without a country”: “[P]recisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee,” paradoxically “constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept” (Agamben 1996: 116): In the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state.

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This is implicit, if one thinks about it, in the ambiguity of the very title of the Declaration of 1789, Déclaration des droits de l’homme e du citoyen […]. (Agamben 1996: 116)

Since Shishkin has not personally felt the dread of being an asylum seeker, and does not speak for himself, we should consider if he might be said to exploit the asylum seekers whose interviews he has heard. But we also ought to consider if his novel presents valuable insights regarding the structures and mindset that work against asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. Could writing about the suffering “other” be something more than egotistical appropriation of the “other”s story?

3.1

Interview Seven: The Detective Novel

Interview seven (31–91) [30–94] in Maidenhair describes an increasingly spectacular story of an asylum seeker, who amongst other fantastic things, is saved by Captain Nemo in his Nautilus and put to shore at Romanshorn (46) [46]. These motives from novels by Jules Verne also occur in the interpreter’s letters to his son. Because of the novel’s lack of a central plot, it is initially hard to see what connects such coinciding motives, if indeed such a connection exists. Earlier in the book, asylum interviews were described as merely a formality, since rejection is the only acceptable outcome: Do Petpa ctolonaqalnice byla Cabina. Ona, naobopot, vcem vepila. I ne zadavala voppocov iz vceznawe kniicy. I nikogda ne ctavila xtamp “Prioritätsfall”. Bot ee i yvolili. A Petp ctavit poqti kadomy. B doce na pepvo ctpaniqke. to oznaqaet yckopennoe paccmotpenie dela vvidy oqevidnogo otkaza. (17) [Before Peter, Sabina was our chief. She, on the contrary, believed everyone. And didn’t ask questions from the omniscient book. And never used her stamp ‘Prioritätsfall.’ So she was fired. But Peter lets nearly everyone have it. On the first page of their file. This means an expedited review of the case in view of its obvious rejection. (16)]

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Hopefully, real asylum seekers are given a fair chance—although Amelie in Illegally Norwegian claimed her family’s chances were poor because everyone took for granted that they would be expelled. One could also hope that asylum seekers are not as unreliable as they are presented in Maidenhair. The exaggerated depiction of them as untrustworthy nonetheless highlights the fact that immigration offices are faced with an almost impossible task of determining whether the asylum seekers tell the truth or not. As Bjørghild Kjelsvik (2019) puts it: “There is no obvious solution to the uncertainty inherent in asylum cases (Liodden 2019), but an awareness of the possibly skewed ‘professional vision’ (Maryns 2006) may help.” Maidenhair depicts some dubious methods that may be used in the absence of such an awareness, and the motivation behind these methods: paz nelz vycnit ppavdy, to nyno vycnit xot by neppavdy. Po inctpykcii, neppavdopodobie v pokazanix daet ocnovanie poctavit vot tot camy xtamp. Tak qto polyqxe ppidymyvate cebe legendy i ne zabyvate, qto camoe glavnoe – melkie detali, podpobnocti. (22) [Since you can’t clarify the truth, you at least need to clarify the lie. According to our instructions, improbability in statements is grounds for affixing this very stamp. So you’ll have to come up with a better legend for yourself and not forget what is most important: the minor details, the trivia. (20–21)]

According to Doron Menashe and Mutal E. Shamash (2005), the use of free narration in court should be limited, since it tends to promote, rather than prevent, what they call the Narrative Fallacy: The Narrative Fallacy is an erroneous heuristic,5 through which fact finders attempt to use commonplace narratives in order to make sense of insufficient information, but mistakenly choose the wrong narrative (i.e., a story that does not in fact reflect reality) and so end up distorting the information they do have access to, and misunderstanding it. (Menashe and Shamash 2005, 15) 5

A heuristic is a mental shortcut to intuitive judgments of complex information.

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As Frode Helmich Pedersen (2019: 113), an expert in the field of law and literature, explains, the degree of cultural accessability determines whether a so-called stock story (Brooks and Gewirtz 1996: 8–9), or generalised or stereotypical narratives on central aspects of our lifeworld, comes to serve as a shortcut to judgements of facts in narratives. In most cases, asylum seekers are interviewed before they know the language and culture of the receiving country, and therefore, the Narrative Fallacy is likely to work against them, as it often works against marginalised groups: [T]he apparently innocent role that narrative plays in resolution of questions of fact actually serves to disguise a powerful force for the preservation of the social status quo, which inevitably works against marginalized groups whose access to the prevailing social narratives is limited. (Menashe and Shamash 2005: 15)

One remedy against the pitfalls of the Narrative Fallacy would seem to be to avoid free narration by interrupting the interviewee with questions that may clarify whether the fact finder has understood facts correctly (Pedersen 2019: 114). But as Shishkin shows (through caricature)— because interviewers are in a position of power and can make asylum seekers feel forced to accept the interviewer’s version of their stories, questions about details may lead to the confirmation of falsehoods. Boppoc: […] vy vyckoqili na platfopmy i cpoxvatilic, qto zabyli diplomat, a take vce dokymenty, ydoctovepwie vaxy liqnoct, no bylo ye pozdno, poezd yxel. Bce tak? / Otvet: Da. Kaetc, tak. He zna. Moet,  qto-to i napytal. By izvinite men,  volnyc. (46) [Question: You jumped out on the platform and suddenly realized you’d left your briefcase, as well as the documents attesting to your identity, but it was too late. The train was gone. That’s the straight goods? / Answer: Yes. I think so. I don’t know. Maybe I got something mixed up. You have to forgive me, I’m upset. (46)]

It is hard to determine whether the asylum seeker in this quote is confused because he has lied and cannot remember what he has said,

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or if the story he hears is not the one he has told—which would indicate that the interviewer is unreliable. The reaction of the asylum seeker seems to indicate that the latter is the case. Initially, he threatens to leave, but then decides to stay, after he has been able to categorise the interviewer’s role in their relationship as that of an “investigator” of kinds (48) [49]. The interviewer, on his side, is also struggling to understand the asylum seeker and explains the reason for his confusion as follows: Bot to tana: vce ye bylo, a vac ewe ne bylo, i vot vy zdec. I potom cnova vac nikogda ne bydet (49) [“Now here’s a mystery: everything has already been, but you haven’t yet, and here you are. And afterward, once again, you’ll never be” (50)]. The interviewer here defines the asylum seeker’s identity as locally situated—as described by Deborah Schiffrin (1996: 198), who has said that “who we are is, at least partially, a product of where we are and who we are with, both in interactional and story worlds.” To Shishkin’s interviewer, the interviewee’s identity is not “partially,” but exclusively locally situated. Thus, Shishkin not only satirises the asylum interview genre—he also satirises the theory with which we try to understand how identity is created. The result is absurd, but also reflects the insight that the interview is a meeting between two people who meet only once. As soon as the asylum seeker and the interviewer have defined their roles in the interview, the story world and genre they co-construct also become more specific—and the Narrative Fallacy is blooming. According to the interviewer, the asylum seeker is one of the little Indians in the counting rhyme (by Ceptimus Winner)—or Cinderella, or a knight, “metaphorically speaking” [50, 51]. The asylum seeker protests to all these categorisations and wants to know how the interviewer can know what has happened to him. A tyt ppocto zakony anpa (52) [“But this is simply the laws of the genre” (52)], the interviewer explains. This makes the asylum seeker puzzled: Qto  cppaxivaete, ecli vce znaete? (57) [“Why ask if you know everything?” (59)]. Through the absurdities of interview seven, Shishkin creates awareness of the three main sources of misconceptions in interviews, known from studies in law and literature (Pedersen 2019: 109–114), as I will show in the following. The first source of misjudgement is the persuasive powers of the well constructed narrative. When a narrative engages us, we may become

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immersed or transported into the narrated world to such an extent that any scepticism we may have vanishes, and we accept every detail (Gerrig 1993: 161–176). A precondition for such an effect is the narrative’s socalled verisimilitude—i.e. its capability to create an illusion of reality (Pedersen 2019: 109–110; 2016: 69–70, see also Barthes 1986; Stoehr 1969). Verisimilitude may be created through the description of details and adequate emotional reactions, as is done in Amelie’s Illegally Norwegian. But in Maidenhair the connection between details and verisimilitude is depicted as fickle: Tak qto polyqxe ppidymyvate cebe legendy i ne zabyvate, qto camoe glavnoe—melkie detali, podpobnocti (22) [So you’ll have to come up with a better legend for yourself and not forget what is most important: the minor details, the trivia (20–21)] (my emphasis). A well told story with false details may be believed/believable, while a badly told story with true details need not be believed/believable—as explained by Holland (2018). Second, perception of non-intended content may be a source of misjudgement of narratives. Consciously or not, we fill in blanks in narratives, and this leads us to make “tacit judgements […] with respect to which elements seem normal or abnormal” (Gerrig 2011: 38). Such judgements reflect our personal preferences and values and may be based on what psychologist Richard J. Gerrig (2011: 38) calls “general background knowledge”—that is on our own personal experiences, including stories we have read or heard from others and through media. When the interviewer in Maidenhair categorises the asylum seeker as one of the ten little Indians, Cinderella or a knight, the underlying stock stories are those of the hero or the innocent victim. These are the most frequently occurring stock stories in mass medias’ depiction of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants and here clearly affect the interviewer’s judgement. The third common source of misconceptions in interviews is the Narrative Fallacy. Shishkin’s interviewer commits the Narrative Fallacy to such an extent that the asylum seeker no longer needs to talk: He nado, ne govopite, ecli vam to tpydno. ppocto pepepixy v ppotokol iz cqitalki (78) [“Don’t tell me if it’s too hard. I’ll just write it into the report from the rhyme” (81)], says the interviewer comfortingly—but disconcertingly. It may seem far-fetched that

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Shishkin demonstrates how the Narrative Fallacy works by employing canonical works of literature like Cinderella or the counting rhyme “Ten little Indians.” But as lawyer Alan Dershowitz (1996: 112) puts it: “All too often fact finders employ the canons of literature and interpretation in the search for truth, generally without any conscious awareness that they are doing so.” By exposing this tendency, Shishkin also makes it easy for the reader to understand how exaggerations make both the interviewer and the asylum seeker seem unreliable.

4

Can a Novel Tell Something True?

Because Shishkin has heard many asylum interviews in his job as a translator for the Swiss Immigration Office, he knows the genre well—but is prohibited from publishing transcripts from such interviews. How, then, may he be able to create awareness of unhealthy dynamics in such interviews? Here, the benefits of fiction’s distance to reality are useful. For even if Shishkin’s (re)presentation of asylum interviews are not accurate descriptions of real interviews, they may communicate something true. On the contrary, even though we cannot say that the novel’s narrator is identical to the historical author Shishkin, Shishkin’s life experiences may make it more likely that his novel tells something valid about how stock stories influence asylum seekers’ destinies. We may also check the validity of Shishkin’s novel by consulting research on asylum seeker narratives, which can tell us for instance the following: Either understated or overstated, refugees’ stories run the risk of losing a measure of their truth, of their integrity, and thus of their credibility. This is partly due to the fact that these stories are not shared casually with friends, but are told to strangers in institutional settings invested with the infinitesimal techniques, tactics and devices through which authority, legitimacy, and dominance operate. (Jacquemet 2005: 201)

In interview seven, Shishkin travesties these techniques in the portrayal of the interviewer, whose tone and leading questions are

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mocking, and in his depiction of the asylum seeker, who obediently— or strategically?—adjusts his story to the plot of the rhyme: Dalxe vce bylo po cqitalke (72) [“After that it all followed the rhyme” (74)]. Maidenhair may thus also be said to illustrate why Jan Blommaert (2001: 438) warns against the “standardisation of individual cases” in the treatment of asylum applications. Individuals’ stories don’t “follow rhymes.”

5

The Amelie Case After Her Arrest

Undocumented migrants rarely tell their own stories in public, and many people wanted to read Amelie’s book. Between 10 September and Christmas 2010, 5,000 readers bought Illegally Norwegian. This is a lot, compared to the average print run of 3,000 copies for contemporary works of non-fiction prose in Norway. Still, the sales numbers increased significantly after Amelie was arrested and sent to the Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum on 12 January 2011 (NRK 2011), reaching a total of 18,000 copies by April 2011 (Lilleås 2011). Amelie had been awarded the Norwegian of the Year prize by the news magazine Ny Tid (New time), as a statement of acceptance of her Norwegianness,6 but it was not until her arrest that large numbers of people engaged in her case. Judging from the sales numbers, Amelie’s book alone might not have generated the public pressure that the arrest brought about. And yet, the arrest would maybe not have created the attention it did without the book—and the extremely clumsy timing of the police. Coincidentally, 2011 was the “Nansen year,” with Norway celebrating the 150th anniversary of polar explorer, diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Fridtjof Nansen’s birth. Less than a century earlier, the socalled Nansen passports saved around 450,000 people whom Lenin had made stateless in 1921. Amelie had just given a talk about conditions for undocumented immigrants in Norway, when five (some say ten)

6

The Norwegian of the Year Prize was introduced in 2007, the year after the Norwegian Language Council argued that only ‘ethnic Norwegians’ could be counted as Norwegians. For a discussion of the debate on this topic, see Lane (2009).

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policemen arrested her in front of the Nansen school at Lillehammer. In Illegally Norwegian Amelie had constructed a division between the compassionate and helpful Norwegian people and the heartless Norwegian state. Now, reality proved her right. “The apprehending of Maria Amelie in front of the Nansen school will go down in history books as a symbol of a country that has lost touch with its own basic values,” announced Amelie’s friend, the high-profiled social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2011), reminding the reader that Nansen had made a “significant humanitarian contribution” in the Caucasus, the very area from which Amelie’s family had fled. The thousands of people who took to the streets to protest Amelie’s expulsion were also demonstrating that they had not lost touch with basic Norwegian values. The media had a field day, and during the period between Amelie’s arrest and her deportation to Russia on 24 January 2011, the pressure on the UDI, UNE and politicians was tremendous. In spite of continuing sympathy, protests and speculation that Amelie could be in serious danger in Russia, she was sent there on 24 January 2011. She was granted a Russian domestic passport on 4 February, an international passport on 10 March, and a Schengen visa so that she could go to Poland on 15 March. Then, on 31 March 2011, the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security (2011a, b) issued a press release about a new law, saying that people who have been in Norway as asylum seekers may return as migrant workers if they meet the immigration requirements for skilled workers, and have not violated Norwegian criminal law. Amelie could return to Norway and be granted legal rights for residency in the country. To understand the coming about of this new law, it does not suffice to conduct a close reading of Illegally Norwegian—but it is important to understand that the book did play a part in the process leading up to the creation of the law, popularly dubbed “Lex Amelie.” Criminologist Thomas Ugelvik’s analysis of the Amelie-debate in Norwegian media between 12 and 24 January 2011 shows that different stock stories were at play in different phases: “When Amelie was arrested, she was a prosecuted author or a poor young refugee girl. A week and a half later, she was deported as an illegal immigrant who should not be given any kind of special treatment” (Ugelvik 2013: 78). If Amelie

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had not published Illegally Norwegian, the image of her as “a prosecuted author or a poor young refugee girl” would not have been established by the time of the arrest. I also doubt that so many people would have identified with Amelie and supported her, had she not positioned herself as being a Norwegian girl, with a protestant working moral and a clear will and ability to integrate into Norwegian culture. As Ugelvik’s (2013) analysis of the media debate on Amelie’s case shows, “Amelie’s ‘Norwegianness’ (that is, her social membership) worked as a kind of protection that enabled her to return, or, more precisely, made it difficult for the authorities to deny her access” (Aas 2013: 247). The “social membership” Ugelvik here refers to is both Amelie’s linguistic and cultural integration, and her large network of friends and acquaintances that she knew from her extensive work at different festivals in Norway. Members of this network supported her in the media and contributed to putting pressure on politicians. Although Amelie’s book and case demonstrate that socially constructed identities may be transformed into juridical identities, some people, with a more essentialist view on identity, would insist that Amelie will never be Norwegian, since she was born in Russia. Shishkin’s novel, read as a whole, problematises the very concept of identity in a way that may be described through a combination of terminology and theory from Ernest Goffman and Mikhail Bakhtin.

6

The Interpreter

In interview seven, the asylum seeker is presented as less and less of an author, in Goffman’s sense, as “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded” (Goffman 1981: 144). After an initial negotiation of what stock story to choose, the asylum seeker only has to animate the sentiments of that story. The question is who the principal behind these sentiments is— that is “whose position is established by the words that are spoken, whose beliefs have been told, [and] who is committed to what the words say” (Goffman 1981: 144)? Is the interviewer the principal of the narrative we read, or is it—curiously—the interpreter?

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Goffman’s definition of an animator as a “talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic activity, or, if you will, an individual active in the role of utterance production” (Goffman 1981: 144), describes the ideal interpreter. Although the interpreter is perhaps such a talking machine in daytime, it gradually becomes clear that what we read are his thoughts at night when he has problems sleeping, since remnants of the day’s interviews run through his mind: Bydto pazgovapivaex cam c cobo. Cam cebe zadaex voppocy. Cam cebe otveqaex (26) [“It’s like talking to yourself. You ask yourself the questions. And answer them” (25)]. The text we read is the written representation of the stream of consciousness going through the interpreter’s mind. Thus, it is he, who should ideally be invisible in the communication between the interviewer and the asylum seeker, who is both author and principal of everything that is said, including the asylum seeker’s and interviewer’s utterances. This explains why motives from the interpreter’s biography on Iurieva, letters to his son and thoughts about his ex-wife and Xenophon’s Anabasis turn up in the conversations of the interviewer and asylum seeker. And because the absurdities in the interview take place in the interpreter’s mind, the asylum seeker and interviewer are acquitted of suspicions of unreliability. In the context of the novel, the interpreter is portrayed as confused and in crisis: He explains, in sent and unsent letters and cards to his son, how he broke up with the boy’s mother Isolde because he feared he was only a bad replacement for Isolde’s former husband Tristan, who died in a car accident. In the chivalric romance Tristan and Isolde, there is no room for a “second guy,” and the interpreter obviously undestands his life in the light of this classic work of literature, thus making life choices based on the Narrative Fallacy. Mikhail Bakhtin (1990: 153) says about heroes of chivalric romances like Tristan and Isolde that they belong to “an already existing common storehouse of images,” and are “not heroes of individual novels.” Bakhtin’s argument reduces the role of the implied author in Maidenhair to that of an animator , in Goffman’s sense, in the writing of yet another version of Tristan and Isolde. But why choose to write a version of an old story, rather than making up a new one? This question can be answered with a new question: To what degree can we tell new and original stories, and to what extent are we merely

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reflections of our surroundings? As is said in Maidenhair: Qelovek ect xameleon: ivywi c mycylmanami – mycylmanin, c volkami—volk (466) [“Man is a chameleon: if he lives with Muslims, he’s a Muslim; with wolves, a wolf ” (492)]. Our minds animate our experiences and narratives with cultural power (stock stories) cause us to interpret the world in specific ways. In Goffman’s terms, the interpreter may be the author of the voices in the interviews, but he hears them in his head because he has heard them during the day. His mind is an animator of his experiences, just as the text we read is a portrait of the world he lives in—or rather of the mind of the historical author Shishkin, whose experiences the interpreter-narrator’s thoughts are built upon. Thus, if it is “plausible to say that the culture is speaking through the actor, using the actor to reproduce itself ” (Gergen & Gergen 1988: 40), it is also fair to say that Maidenhair is a portrait of a culture and a time—or rather cultures, and times in the plural. For in Maidenhair, different historical times are not kept apart: Here, vce vcegda ppoicxodit odnovpemenno (470) [“everything is always happening simultaneously” (497)]. And thus, Shishkin’s novel criticises the very basis of the concept of cultural and national identity, since these are entirely dependent on, not only the excluding and exclusive cultural memories that support a group’s cultural or national identity, but also on the “obligatory forgetting” of elements that do not support this identity (Anderson 1991, Assmann 2011). If everything is remembered, the concept of cultural and national identity would not make sense. Shishkin’s novel is not merely a critique of the practical administration of immigration legislation—as the first six asylum interviews in the novel could indicate. It repudiates the very concept of identity, since it is because of the phenomenon of identity that strifes between groups produce asylum seekers, and because of borders between nations that some people can be refused a life according to the value of human life that Westerners enjoy.

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Fiction vs. Autobiography

The meaning of fictional texts is often considered to be more loosely connected to extraliterary reality than what is the case for non-fiction. Fiction may nonetheless express sentiments that are meaningful and true on a more sublimated level—even when the author of a work of fiction speaks for the suffering “other.” In their shared wish for truth and meaning, law and literature studies have developed what Marjorie Garber (2001) labels as “discipline envy,” with the following two positions: Law seemed, to the literary scholar longing for the political real, a sphere in which language really made things happen. Literature seemed, to the legal scholar longing for the critical-humanist real, a sphere in which language could stand outside the oppressive state apparatus, speaking truth to the law’s obfuscations and subterfuges. (Peters 2005: 448)

In Amelie’s book of non-fiction, we have an example of a work of literature that actually “made things happen,” in the sense that a new law was introduced to enable Amelie to legalise her stay in Norway. However, since Amelie’s book is a first-person narrative with a specific practical aim, we have to read it with attention to its rhetorical qualities and strategies. We should also consider that Amelie may be ethically correct in giving voice to her own suffering, but not have great value for or positive impact on the lives of other suffering people. Very few others have benefitted from the new law. Shihskin’s novel is not a rhetorical text, but instead aims at creating an awareness in readers of how the human mind and identity politics work, and of the detrimental consequences these systems may have. The novel presents insights into the mechanisms that are at work in the asylum interview per se, but also shows that the very same mechanisms come into play in personal relationships with family members, and in our cultivation of culture and identities. Shishkin is not longing for language to make “things happen” (Peters 2005: 448). He sees that language is already making things happen, all the time. Language largely determines

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how we perceive the world, other people and ourselves. The crucial question Shishkin raises is whether what is happening is morally right, true and fair—on a global scale and in our personal lives. To sum up: Who gets to tell whose story depends on the context and the motives of the storyteller. And regardless of who tells the story and in what context, it is paramount that we read all texts critically, including the research chapter, since this is also part of someone’s identity construction—in this case mine (until someone else appropriates it for their own identity construction). Acknowledgements Thanks to the University of South-Eastern Norway for research time spent on finalising this chapter.

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4 “Model Minorities” in a “Sociolinguistic Paradise”: How Latin-American Migrants Talk About Job Interviews in Norway Verónica Pájaro

1

Introduction

In countries of the Global North, migrants’ lower participation in the labor market is often explained as rooted in their low qualifications and poor command of the dominant language (Codó and Garrido 2014; Flubacher et al. 2016; Tronstad 2010). However, when migrants do have higher education, professional experience and language competences, the higher rates for un- and underemployment are seen as a consequence of the lack of relevance of migrants’ foreign degrees to the local labor markets and the status of non-Western university degrees (Allan 2013; Garrido and Codó 2017). To complicate the situation even further, job interviews impose an extra communicative burden on migrant candidates to translate and reframe their foreign education and work experience to V. Pájaro (B) University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_4

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make them visible to interviewers and institutions (Roberts and Campbell 2006). Hence, the gate-keeping mechanisms standing in the way for migrants’ access to employment are multiple and intersect, creating hierarchical systems where knowledge and communicative repertoires are unequally recognized and valued. The blame-game of policy solutions to social problems places the burden of qualification on migrants, but what can we learn if we look at this issue from the perspective of highly educated “model migrants”? The present paper looks closer into the discursive regimes that support labor market inequality through the lens of the narrated experiences of “successful immigrants”: two highly educated Latin Americans living in Oslo. In contrast to the USA and other European countries, LatinAmerican migration to Scandinavia is rather low, and as a group, Latin Americans score the highest on employment and higher education among “non-Western migrants” (SSB 2021). In this way, the situation and status of Latin Americans in Norway are radically different from other contexts, notably the USA. As a central topic under the umbrella of migrant narratives, job interview narratives highlight the importance of the labor market as a one of the crucial arenas of migrant experience and bring forward the voices of the workers that are often an object rather than a subject of discourse.

2

Norway: Migration, Multilingualism and the Labor Market

During the past twenty-five years, Norway received its historically highest immigration rates and has accelerated its process of transformation into an increasingly diverse and unequal society along with the rest of Western Europe. There has been a sustained increase in immigration rates, particularly of labor migration, that has led to the internationalization of the Norwegian labor market and a notable increase of born abroad candidates applying for work in Norway (Friberg 2016). This change corresponds with the expansion of the Norwegian economy and a higher demand for highly educated professionals, as well as skilled and seasonal workers.

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Despite the need for qualified personnel, migrants in Norway as a group are significantly un- and underemployed compared to their Norwegian neighbors (SSB 2021). This inequality is often presented as a key challenge to the Norwegian welfare state, and including migrants into the labor market has become the explicit main goal of adult introductory programs for refugees and adult Norwegian as second-language education (Stortingsmelding nr 16 2015–2016). It is undeniable that getting a job is one of the milestones in a migrant’s life, as it not only represents concrete advantages in the form of economic independence and membership into the welfare system, but also access to a new professional identity and network in the host community. This is why employment is often discussed as the most important indicator of successful immigration. Government organs, municipalities and teaching institutions invest in developing programs and methods that put emphasis on learning communicative skills relevant to the workplace and prioritize early labor market experience, presenting thus language skills as the determinant factor for gaining employment (Randen et al. 2018). The Norwegian labor market is highly formalized. Informal employment is almost non-existing and there are strict rules and regulations in place that govern all aspects of employment, from how to conduct a recruitment process to negotiating salary and minimum-wages. Access to the labor market is thus formalized and ritualized in the form of the recruitment process, where the job interview is the culminating event and a high-stakes institutional event. It is thus not surprising that out of all the experiences and stories shared in a focus-group interview between four Spanish Speaking Latin Americans, several job interview narratives emerged.

3

The Linguistic and Communicative Demands of the Job Interview

From an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, the dynamics of gatekeeping in job interviews in immigration countries have been analyzed through the study of the implicit communicative demands of the

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interview, such as the preference for candidates to structure their answers in a narrative form or produce long, elaborated answers to interviewers’ questions (see, e.g., Roberts and Campbell 2005; Sarangi 1994). These demands are culturally specific and migrants’ unfamiliarity with them can affect the outcome of the job interview negatively. Celia Roberts (2012, 2013) developed the notion of linguistic penalty to identify the series of communicative, cultural and institutional disadvantages foreign candidates face at job interviews to make their qualifications relevant to the interview. In addition, the shared ideological representations of the language spoken by migrants sustain the linguistic penalty, as these inform stereotypes and assumptions about second-language speakers (Irvine and Gal 2000). In a study of the language attitudes toward broadcasted language use, Kulbrandstad (2009) reported negative attitudes toward Norwegian with foreign accent, which was evaluated as “not good Norwegian” and “not acceptable language for news broadcasting.” Interestingly, respondents also reported that they were overall positive to Norwegian secondlanguage speakers and had no trouble in understanding the accented speech samples they were presented with. There is no contradiction between the positive attitude to new accented speech and the negative attitude for such speech to be broadcasted, as speakers can recognize a variant and still consider it low prestige and not suitable for professional performance. These findings are in line with the reported attitudes of Norwegian business leaders’ toward hiring foreign and minority background personnel and “mother-language ideal” they measured potential employees against (Dischler 2011). Hence, native-like, unaccented speech appears to be the norm for second-language speakers in formal, professional contexts in Norway.

4

Categorization and Narrative Sense-Making

Narrative has been described as both a sense-making device central to human experience, a form of knowledge in its own right, and a linguistic structure and communicative resource. Given the universal character of

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narrative in human communication, storytelling has taken a central role in the study of multilingualism and migrants’ experiences as an analytical perspective capable of grasping and communicating the experiences and voices of minoritized speakers. However, when we choose to tell a story about a personal experience, we are not only constructing our own subject reality against the backdrop of larger historical processes, but also constructing a narrative as something relevant to how we want to present ourselves in front of our audience of interviewers or peers (Pavlenko 2007). Hence, positioning is central to narrative (Bamberg 1997), in terms of both the stances speakers take vis à vis events and characters represented in the stories told, the interactional work with interlocutors, and self-positioning vis-à-vis circulating discourses and ideologies. In this paper, I look at participants’ positionings in narratives of job interviews as expressed in narrative structure and through membership categorization devices (Schegloff 2007). I employ the notions of categorization and category bound activities (Sacks 1992) to analyze how participants present characters and actions in their narratives through the use of inference-rich social categories. In line with an interactional perspective on narrative (De Fina 2003), I approach categorization work in narrative as relevant to both story and telling worlds.

5

Data and Methodology

The narratives analyzed in this paper are stories about job interviews told in the context of a focus-group interview I conducted in 2010. There were three participants in the project, two women and one man, who had been living in Norway for approximately five years at the moment of the interview. The conversation was held in Spanish, with no questions designed to elicit job-interview narratives in the semi-structured format of the interview. The narratives analyzed in this paper emerged spontaneously from the interaction. All participants in the project had migrated from Latin America to Norway voluntarily, had university level education from their home countries and were fluent in English at the moment of migration. As

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a Latin-American migrant with a background similar to the participants, I see myself as both an insider and outsider researching my own community. This position carries both advantages and disadvantages, as it implies negotiating roles as both a researcher and a member while conducting the interview and analyzing the data, but provides access to situations and knowledge not necessarily available to outsiders. My position is not necessarily more problematic than any other researcher interacting with her participants and using conversation as data (Talmy 2011). I address this issue analytically and approach the narratives as interactionally achieved products, emergent in situated conversation (De Fina 2009). The data presented in this paper are excerpts from two rather long job interview narratives told in the interview, and are part of a thematic set of narratives about job interviews.

6

Analysis

6.1

Introducing: El Charro

When I provocatively asked participants “how do you think Norwegians see you?”, Victor, a Chilean man in his thirties, shared the following job interview story as part of a discussion about stereotypes of Latinxs: Excerpt 1 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

V

me acuerdo en una entrevista de trabajo, en la que ya era: era la última entrevista y habíamos dos persquedábamos solo yo y otr- y un noruego, (.) para conseguir el trabajo y (0.8) y en esa ocasión me tocó hablar con (.) con el dueño: (1.35) con el socio económico osea el capitalista de la empresa, el que era el dueño de la empresa, (1.5) y: y él estaba super preocupado de que yo entrara. @@ me di cuenta meentiendes, osea era una empresa en la que no había ningún extranjero yo habría sido el primero (.) y él estaba muy preocupado.(.)

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English translation 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

V

I remember in a job interview, that wa:s was the last interview and we were two peopthere was only me and anoth- and a Norwegian left, (.) for getting the job and (0.8) and on that occasion I had to talk to the owner (1.35) to the financial partner I mean the investor of the company the one who was the owner of the company, (1.5) a:nd and he was really worried that I might get the job. @@ I realized youknow, I mean it was a company where there weren´t any foreigners I would have been the first one (.) and he was really worried. (.)

The narrative opens with a long orientation that sets the stage: Víctor was one of the two candidates called in for a last job interview to decide who would be hired. If hired, Víctor would have been the first foreigner in that company, and the head of the company, who was conducting the final interview, was worried about this possibility. The orientation of this narrative is heavily categorized and the characters are identified as either noruego “Norwegian” or extranjero “foreigner” when introduced. The character of the owner is not explicitly categorized as Norwegian, but implicitly, from the actions of worrying about Víctor being a foreigner and the background of not being any foreigners employed at the company at the time of the interview. The use of categories in the orientation is relevant to both contextual levels of narrative and interaction (De Fina 2000). At the contextual level of the narrative, the story world, the labels extranjero and noruego function as an interpretative guide that assigns meaning to the development of the narrative action, as part of Category Bound Activities that are typical or representative of a group (Sacks 1992). This is because using categories in narrative builds explanatory connections between characters and actions: “this is what noruegos always do.” At the interactional level of the interview, the narrative serves an argumentative function, as it is imbued in a discussion about stereotypes of Latinxs in Norway. Hence, categorizing characters makes the narrative relevant to the telling world, as an example or case that presents evidence for an argumentative position (Carranza 1999): “this happened to me and proves that I have a point.” Categorization is thus key to understanding Victor’s positioning

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about the events narrated and the people represented in them (De Fina 2006), as we are about to see. Excerpt 2 58 59 60

V

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

estaba sobre todo como que e: (2.5) a él le preocupaba, osea él estaba realmente miedoso de mi: de mi condición de extranjero de que “de que yo podría tener otras costu:mbres, de que yo podía ser viole:nto, de que yo podía- (.) cómo era mi temperamento, qué qué ea-” o sea el tipo estaba tratando en ese momento de la entrevista de trabajo, tratando de entender qué es lo que era (.) un extranjde entender qué es lo que es un extranjero. osea “este tipo se crió en la selva, mató gente, @ comió monos, qué hizo este tipo ah, qué es lo que hace,” me entiendes,

English translation 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

V

he was specially like e: (2.5) he was worried, I mean he was really scared of my: of me being a foreigner that “that I might have other cu:stoms, that I could be vi:olent, that I could- (.)how was my temper, what what wea” I mean the guy was trying at that moment of the job interview, trying to understand what it was (.) a foreignto understand what it is a foreigner. Imean “did this guy grow up in the jungle, kill people, @ eat monkeys, what did this guy do ah, what does he do,” you know,

The core of the narrative is the questioning part of the interview, and it is represented through a series of voicing devices that animate the voice of

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the interviewer. In lines 61–64, we can see the use of prosodic cues such as the elongation of the vowels of the final words of the clauses in combination with a rising intonation in the final syllables, accompanied by a change in volume (Günthner 1999). The combination of these resources creates the impression of a voice distinct from that of the narrator, even though there is no explicit signaling of reported speech, such as the use of verba dicendi or changes in the use of tempus. Hence, the reference to the interviewer’s voice is implicit, indexed by the prosodic cues of volume, duration and intonation of words, but nevertheless manages to convey the animation of the voice of the interviewer. The second passage that animates the interviewer’s voice (lines 68– 72) is rather different, as it introduces his voice directly and in the form of an inner monologue: a hypothetical mental conversation where the character of the interviewer externalizes his thoughts. This passage can more explicitly be analyzed as some form of reported speech, particularly the switch in the use of verbal forms that refer to Víctor in third instead of first person. This contrast in verb conjugation, along with the use of the same prosodic cues as in the previous passage, makes the illusion of an animated dialogue more explicit. Victor uses different linguistic and paralinguistic resources to weave a different voice into his own narration, bringing the character of the interviewer to life and introducing different points of view on the events. Constructed dialogue can be analyzed as a discourse strategy that allows speakers to frame information in a manner that is both effective and creates involvement at an interactional level (Tannen 2007: 112). In this sense, introducing other voices and creating theatrical dialogues instead of relaying action sequences is a creative, transformative move that functions as an internal form of evaluation (Labov 1972) aimed at the interlocutors and the communicative situation. In Victor’s narrative, the passages in the voice of the interviewer introduce stereotypical, hyperbolic qualities and actions associated with the category extranjero, and hence Víctor himself. The voice of the interviewer introduces Víctor’s perspective on the actions and characters without disrupting the dramatic continuity, and simultaneously creating more involvement in the audience.

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The second passage of constructed dialogue introduces an ironic depiction of Victor as a stereotypical savage—growing up in the jungle, killing people, eating monkeys—that is both hyperbolic and resonates with a discussion of Latinxs being perceived as exotic in Norway that immediately preceded the narrative. The category exotic implies a Eurocentric, orientalist gaze on other cultures as primitive and savage, as well as to the idea of exotic travel destinations where exotic cultures live (Said 1978), in short: the fear and fascination vis à vis an exotic other. It is this stereotypical categorization that Víctor challenges through the ironic narrative performance. The categorization work in the orientation in combination with the use of constructed dialogue animate an ironic performance of the interviewer, and ultimately Norwegian men, as little cosmopolitan and not used to dealing with people from different cultural backgrounds. Victor’s narrative performance presents thus a counternarrative to circulating stereotypes of foreign men and simultaneously ridicules Norwegian men. From a narrative analytical perspective, Victor’s narrative scores low on the canonical criteria for identifying a personal experience narrative (Ochs and Capps 2001), as there are few clear reported events that are temporally ordered (Labov and Waletzky 1997 [1967]). There is no temporal contrast between the orientation of the narrative and the initiation of the narrative action, as both parts are coded in Spanish past imperfect. The presentation of the interviewer being worried about Víctor getting the job, for example, develops into different elaborations on the reasons for that worrying, all actions coded in Spanish past imperfect. This choice in temporal use conveys the meaning that the events are repetitive or durative in character and communicate a particular feeling about the situation and events and how the narrator experienced them. Carranza analyzed this type of narratives coded in Spanish past imperfect as low narrativity narratives and argued that they function as argumentative devices at an interactional level (Carranza 1998). The holistic picture of the past that is created through the use of imperfect is harder to argue against than single events in the past and is thus a more effective argumentative form of narrative structure. In the case of this narrative, Victor constructs a holistic view of the interview situation as a series of ethnically oriented, exotifying questions

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that were not reducible to a specific type of question or a single action of asking. This form of representing narrative action, in combination with the categorization of the characters in the orientation analyzed in Excerpt 1, presents the narrative as an exemplar story in which the actions by the different characters in the narrated universe are constructed as representative of typical behavior of noruegos and extranjeros, and how conflict usually plays out. As I showed above, there is little narrative progression in this long narrative, though a single complicating event stands out, both for the use of reported speech and the choice in verbal tense: Excerpt 3 87 88

V

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

S

entonces yo yo me empezab- yo me empecé a b- a chorear, porque: la entrevista de trabajo nunca se trató del tema profesional yo trataba de llevar la la la entrevista de trabajo a (.) cuál habían sido mis experiencias de trabajo, y él siempre cambiaba el tema de de la entrevista (.) hacia mi: (.) hacia mi: condición de extranjero osea “ya. que el idio:ma que de dónde vie:nes que si vas a viajar a chi:le que si tu familia viene pa acá:” osea (.) era- no tenía nada que ver con el trabajo mismo entonces era todo el rato era eso entonces ya al final me dijo “bueno pero ustedes lo (.) los latinos tienen: tienen (1.1) ese temperamento como de: °cómo fue que dijo°, entonces ahí dijo algo así como de: (.) como de charro o una cosa así como” se imaginó un: [un cowboy] me entiendes @@ [un macho]

English translation 87 88 89

V

then I I was start- I started to g- to get angry, beca:use the job interview was never about professional questions I would try to lead the the the interview towards (.) my previous work experiences, (continued)

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(continued) 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

S

and he would always change the topic of the interview back (.) to my: (.) to my status as a foreigner Imean “there. the la:nguage that where you co:me from that if you’ll be traveling to chi:le that if your family comes he:re” I mean (.) it wa- it had nothing to do with the job itself then it was like that all the time then at the end he told me “well but you (.) latinos have: (1.1) that temper of li:ke °what did he say°, then there he said something like a (.) charro (mexican cowboy) temper or something like” he imagined a: [a cowboy] you know @@ [un macho]

As the questioning continues in the same exotifying direction, Víctor reports a salient action in simple past: He began to get angry (line 87). The action otherwise continues through durative tenses and constructed dialogue, representing repetitive efforts to redirect the interview talk toward his work experience instead of his background (lines 89–94). In an open evaluative pause, Víctor highlights the contrast between what could be expected questions in a job interview situation, and the questions he actually was presented with (lines 88–90 and 95): It was never about the job, but his status as a foreigner. Víctor clearly orients toward the institutional genre of the job interview and the topics and questions that are expected or even acceptable to the communicative situation, and evaluates his narrated experience as deviant. The emphasis on the inappropriateness of the interviewer’s questioning in combination with the repetitive representation of actions provides also with moral justification for Víctor’s getting angry that is not attributable to the stereotype of the violent Latino. The climax of the story is reached when the interviewer introduces a question, in single past, that specifically categorizes Víctor as a LatinAmerican man alongside gendered and racial prejudices: el charro, the Latino man with a volatile temper (lines 98–100). This stereotype resonates with fictionalized representations of Latin-American men as drug dealers and violent criminals that are pervasive to international

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media and discourse (Jaramillo 2014). These representations reflect what Piñón (2011: 396) calls “institutional-organizational hierarquies” that have normalized and privileged white, middle-class male subjectivities. Víctor’s narrative is, thus, not simply the story of conflict at a job interview, but a personal account of racism and discrimination in a recruitment process that is framed as representative of Victor’s experience as a Latin-American man in Norway. In the context of the interview, Victor constructs this narrative as a telling case of discrimination in the Norwegian labor market. The introduction of El charro generates a lot of engagement among the participants, that begin co-telling the narrative and introducing hypothetic alternative scenarios for Víctor’s actions, such as reacting like a stereotypical macho and punching the interviewer in the face, among others. Víctor stands thus as a skillful narrator that conveys his evaluation of the events by bringing to life the voice of a racist employer and introducing the colorful and hyperbolic image of el charro; a Mexican cowboy, a machoman. The character of the employer is thus completely discredited as a ridiculous man that projects absurd, racial stereotypes onto Víctor. There is no clear resolution or coda for this narrative, but rather the telling dissipates as the participants engage in conversation about the implications of the stereotypes and actions presented. The point of the narrative was, thus, not to recount a singular experience, but rather to present evidence of the exotifying perceptions of Latinxs, particularly men, and ultimately denounce discriminatory practices. Access to employment is not only mediated through acquiring linguistic capital and knowledge of the forms communication that make competences visible and relevant to the job interview, but also through the negotiation and co-construction of a trustworthy professional identity that synthesizes the professional with the personal (Campbell and Roberts 2007). Being a hirable professional is not only an issue of having the relevant qualifications, experience and linguistic/communicative competence, but also about performing a “relatable and acceptable self ” (Allan 2013: 66), someone that “fits in” the culture of the institution recruiting. In the context of the homogeneous company with no foreigners depicted and denounced in Victor’s narrative, that persona was White and Norwegian.

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6.2

“It Was Very Bad that You Spoke English”

Susana, a young Peruvian woman with a Master’s degree on preschool pedagogics, shared a job interview story as an answer to my question about the participants’ best and worst experiences in Norway. Susana’s narrative, told as a case of one of her worst experiences, opens the story with an orientation that sets the scene: She was called in for a job interview for a teaching post at a kindergarten after she had been studying Norwegian for a few months. Present at the interview were the head teacher of the kindergarten, as well as two or three of the teachers, who are categorized by their roles in the institution and gender (all female, morphologically marked in Spanish). Susana evaluates the scene she introduces by recounting how she experienced the interview, reporting that she felt “put on the spot” in front of many people, thus stating an antagonistic relationship between the interviewers and herself in the institutional context of the job interview. The narrative action begins with the questioning part of the interview, in line 81 below, led by the head teacher: Excerpt 4 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

S

empezó ahí a preguntarme a hacerme muchas preguntas, y me empezó a preguntar (.) “del sistema educativo peruano cómo era, y en relación al noruego,” osea yo tenía cinco meses estudiando noruego (.) me habia aprendido las supuestas preguntas, (V: mh @) y me sale preguntando sobre “el sistema educativo peruano, y que lo traduzca, y no sé qué.” (0.7)

English translation 81 82 83 84 85

S

there she started asking me asking a lot of questions, and started asking about (.) “the Peruvian educational systen how it was, and in relation to the Norwegian,” (continued)

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(continued) 86 87 88 89 90

Imean I had been studying Norwegian for five months (.) I had learned all the typical questions, (V: mh@) and there she starts asking about “the Peruvian educational system, and that I should translate it, and that.” (.)

The narrative actions take the form of a constructed dialogue passage in the voice of the representative of the preschool that acted as the interviewer, asking about the “Peruvian educational system” (lines 83–85). The voice of the interviewer is not directly quoted, but marked by a contrasting voice quality and rising intonation, as we saw in the analysis of Víctor’s narrative. Also, the choice of using the phrase “the Peruvian educational system” instead of another, more informal or colloquial form is clearly dialogical (Bakhtin 1986), which in combination with the choice of voice quality emphasize the effect of recontextualizing someone else’s voice in a new context. In terms of content, the head teacher requested a contextualization of Susana’s qualifications by making her background relevant to the interview. The request was not to simply translate degrees and institutions, but rather to explain a different educational system and to provide the interviewers with a context to interpret her qualifications. This is perhaps not surprising considering the reported difficulties Norwegian employers have in assessing applicants’ foreign education and work experience (see Sect. 2). Interestingly, however, Susana evaluates this request as atypical and marked, and structures her narrative so that the request for a translation and recontextualization is the central complicating action of the story. She had studied “all the typical questions” expected to emerge in a job interview and, to Susana, this request was unexpected or salient (lines 87–90). From a membership categorization perspective, the identification of Susana’s education with the national category “Peruvian” implicitly opposes her qualification and background to the activity of interviewing for a position in Norway. The categorization of Susana’s education, as well as herself, as Peruvian is introduced as relevant to both narrated and narrating universes, that is, the category Peruvian is important for understanding the development of the narrative action and

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Susana’s positioning in the interview as a professional teacher trained in Peru and living in Norway. In her analysis of recruitment interviews for job internships for migrants in Denmark, Tranekjær (2009) showed that ethnic, language and religious background of foreign applicants were often thematized in the interviews. This orientation toward the candidates’ background had a bearing on the development of the interaction, as it affected the distribution of status and interactional rights among the participants. In her analysis of an internship interview with a Colombian woman applying for an internship in a kindergarten, Tranekjær showed that the category Colombian was introduced in opposition to the Danish kindergarten system to introduce negative connotations about Colombian kindergartens as pedagogically outdated. This categorization work is what Tranekjær analyzes as gate-keeping in action: Foreign qualifications and work experiences are categorized as different, and in this manner constructed as irrelevant or invisible to the interview situation—form of deskilling. In her narrative, Susana does not specify if this qualification of her competences as Peruvian was framed negatively, however later in the interview she shared that her education often had been a matter of discussion in professional contexts in Oslo. Susana has a four-year teaching degree plus a master degree from Peru. This, she argued, was often seen upon with suspicion by Norwegian employers: Excerpt 5 01 02 03 04 05 06 07

no entienden qué es una licenciatura y después el posgrado y uno va a la universidad tanto tiempo y de ahí "¿pero por qué tanto?" y en verdad uno termina teniendo el doble de puntaje que un noruego y y te cuesta que te reconozcan osea […] yo he contado los puntos osea un punto osea son tres años en høghskole para ser profesora y son 180 puntos y yo tengo 300 y me siguen jodiendo @@

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English translation 01 02 03 04 05 06 07

they don’t understand that it is a licenciatura, and then the graduate degree and you go to university for so long and then “why so long?” and one ends up having twice as many points as a Norwegian and and it is difficult to get recognition […] I’ve counted my [ECTS] points I mean a point, I mean it takes three years university college to become a [kindergarten] teacher, and that is 180 points and I have 300 and they are still screwing with me @@

Thus, in spite of having validated her education with Norwegian authorities and being recognized as having qualifications equivalent to a Norwegian MA-degree, Susana still experienced difficulties in getting recognition for her education. She reported that it was strange and potentially suspicious that her education is comparable to a Norwegian post-graduate degree. Her qualifications were expected to be lower and her education fundamentally different from Norwegian teacher education. Susana’s narrative presents a version of the linguistic penalty for foreign candidates in Western job interviews (see Sect. 3) and the added burden of framing and translating competences and experiences in order to make them “fit” the interview. Moreover, we live in a communication centered culture (Cameron 2000), and talking about past experiences in job interviews is central to performing professional selves and providing examples and evidence for the qualifications and skills candidates claim to have. In order to do this in a manner relevant to the discursive order of the Western job interview, migrants need knowledge of the communicative and institutional constraints on how to present oneself, as well as the linguistic capital to present foreign work experience and competence in a manner that makes them relevant and visible to the job interview (Roberts 2013). In Susana’s narrative, the burden of making her competence and work experience understandable and relevant was placed on her. Returning to Susana’s narrative, the action continues as she introduces her answer to the interviewer’s question:

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Excerpt 6 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

S

y este: (.) y lo de dije que: (.) ah ella misma me dijo creo, “puedes hablar inglés si es que tu quieres.” y yo le dije “okei” entonces lo expliqué en inglés, y de ahí agarró y me dijo: “la verdad que tu nivel de noruego esta mu:y- (.) bajo, y muy mal que hablaste inglés.” y yo “pero es que tú me dijiste que hable inglés”-

English translation 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

S

and e: (.) and I said tha:t (.) oh she herself told me I think, “you can speak in english if you want.” and I said “okei” then I explained it in english, and there she said to me “well your norwegian level is rea:lly- (.) low, and it was really bad that you spoke in english.” and I “but you told me to speak in english”-

As she is about to introduce her answer and the following discussion in the interview through an animated dialogue between her own character and the head teacher, Susana introduces a short orientational remark: The director of the kindergarten offered her the possibility of answering in English (lines 93–94). Susana then reports producing an explanation of the Peruvian educational system in English (line 95), communicating the meaning and relevance of her education for the job. She had stated earlier in the narrative, both in the orientation and in an evaluation in the beginning of the narrative action (see Excerpt 4), that she had been studying Norwegian for a short time, emphasizing the contrast between the request from the interviewer and her knowledge of Norwegian. She did not have the necessary communicative competence nor linguistic capital to explain her education in a manner relevant to the interview, but a solution to this challenge is presented through the use of English. The head teacher, however, evaluates Susana’s performance in the interview very negatively, both stating that her proficiency in Norwegian was

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low and that it was a bad choice to speak in English (lines 97 and 98). Thus, the character of the interviewer fulfills her role of the antagonist, highlighted by the unfairness of her evaluation and animated in her own voice, an effective discursive strategy as I showed earlier. Providing answers in English, then, was not appropriate in the Norwegian job interview context. Language proficiency in Norwegian is undoubtedly a key factor in gaining access to the labor market, particularly for a teaching position. However, what this linguistic competence constitutes and represents, is a complex matter. When the linguistic knowledge or communicative fluency of migrants is thematized in relevance to gaining access to the labor market, there are often important discrepancies between how different actors and institutions interpret what constitutes “sufficient knowledge of Norwegian.” Is it language competence to do the job it is being hired for, is it to talk about education, background and degrees in a matter relevant to the context of a job interview, or is it to score high in a standardized test? Probably all and none of the above, depending on the fluctuations in the demand for qualified personnel (Rogstad 2000). It is interesting to contextualize Susana’s surprise at the negative evaluation of coding her answer in English against the different values assigned to speaking English in a professional context in Norway and Latin America. It is not common to acquire a high level of English proficiency through the public-school system in Latin-American countries, and families often invest in private bilingual programs or extra-curricular tutoring in order to make children “competitive” for the labor market through the knowledge of English (De Mejía 2002). Hence proficiency in English is often treated a class marker as well as a sign of professional competence. In Norway, on the other hand, all children begin learning English from the first grade in the predominantly public-school system, and most children achieve a high, academic level proficiency in English upon completing high school. Fluency in English is often treated a basic requirement, not a competitive advantage in Norwegian recruitment processes (Pájaro 2018). The indexical value of fluency in English in professional contexts is thus not the same in Norway as in Latin America. This shows how the same linguistic and communicative resources can have different values across countries, indexing different positions in the

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hierarchical symbolic structures that belong to different orders of indexicality (Blommaert 2005). For Susana in this job interview narrative, speaking English was not a desirable skill of a competitive professional, but rather a liability, evidence of her lack of adequate communicative resources in Norwegian. However, Susana does not let the head teacher’s evaluation of her answer stand alone and introduces her own voice, in a hypothetical extension of the constructed dialogue, with a contrasting high tone, stating that it was the director who had given her permission to answer in English and emphasizes the unfairness of the events (line 99). This reaction is assigned to the narrated universe, as Susana’s reaction to the interviewer’s evaluation, but it is an evaluation issued from the moment of the focus-group interaction. Susana takes a moral stance and explicitly evaluates the interviewer’s behavior, but this evaluation is embedded in the narrative in the form of a hypothetical dialogue. In this manner, the use of constructed dialogue provides Susana with the opportunity to introduce her own voice and confront the interviewer by addressing her directly (with the choice of verb form in the second person), an option that was not available to her in the interview situation. Narrative and the act of retelling our past experiences can thus function as powerful meaning making devices, providing speakers with the opportunity to revisit previous experiences and give themselves voice and agency in situations when they did not have one (De Fina 2003). Like in the case of Víctor’s narrative, Susana gives herself voice by overtly evaluating the actions of the antagonist character and standing up for herself in a hypothetical alternative outcome. Susana closes this narrative by presenting herself as feeling humiliated and badly treated, and crying, walking her way home in the middle of a snowstorm. This theatrical ending, hyperbolic and comic in the context of the interview, stresses Susana’s experience of the job interview by underpinning her evaluation of it: She felt treated unfairly and not valued as a professional teacher. There are no ethnic or national category labels used in this narrative—other than Peruvian—but this does not imply that there is no categorization work going on. The characters of the interviewer and

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Susana are introduced in the roles of the interviewer and job applicant in the setting of the job interview, and the factor that distinguishes them beyond their roles and the country where they were educated is proficiency in Norwegian. The character of the interviewer is implicitly categorized as a Norwegian through the use of a category bound activity for the category Norwegian: namely speaking Norwegian (Pájaro 2011). The character of Susana has low proficiency in the language and therefore is clearly not a Norwegian in the universe of the narrative. The categorization of characters is done on the axis of language proficiency, where the interviewer is a member of the category Norwegian since that character not only speaks and asks questions in Norwegian, but she is also in the position of evaluating the Norwegian performance of non-members of the category, that is, Susana. Ultimately, what is problematic in the story world, as Susana constructs it, is the equation of Norwegian proficiency with professional qualification, so that her background and qualifications become invisible when she fails to translate them to Norwegian. In a second story Susana shared immediately after this narrative, she introduced the case of a successful interview at another kindergarten. After the very negative experience of her first job interview, Susana prepared herself thoroughly for her next one: She translated the Peruvian educative system to Norwegian and made a PowerPoint presentation to show her interviewers. This explicit translation work paid off, but not in the intended manner: The interviewers were impressed by her IT knowledge and decided to hire her, in spite of her weak knowledge of Norwegian. As I show elsewhere (Pájaro and Steien 2021), Susana’s experience and perspective highlight the very core of the problematic connection between language and employment in policy documents and public discourse. Susana’s proficiency in Norwegian did not increase substantially between the first and second job interview experiences she shared. What distinguished her performance and the outcome in the second interview was that she made her qualifications visible through specific linguistic and communicative resources: translation and IT skills. Hence, it was not her knowledge of Norwegian as a second language that granted her access to employment, but rather her experience with the demands of the job interview and the linguistic penalty imposed on her.

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This experience was invaluable for learning how to strategically present herself in a manner that was both visible and relevant to the recruitment process. Susana’s experience thus problematizes the claim that there is a linear connection between developing communicative competence in Norwegian L2 and gaining employment.

7

Discussion and Concluding Remarks

Victor and Susana’s narratives both highlight a crucial mismatch between their expectations in terms of questions and topics relevant to the hiring process and their experiences in job interviews. Both Victor and Susana evaluate the questioning as not appropriate for the context of a job interview. Victor problematized an exaggerated and exotifying focus on his cultural and ethnic background as well as his gender, whereas Susana problematized the communicative demands of the job interview and the communicative burden placed on foreign, second-language speaking candidates. What the participants confront in the narratives can be understood in terms of othering, a making relevant to the situation of the interview sensitive, personal topics regarding their origin and experience that are not central to their professional experience and qualifications. They clearly expected to be judged on their CV and experiences and were instead questioned about their national origins. In Victor’s narrative, the interviewer introduced Victor’s temper and character as relevant to the recruitment process. In a contemporary, post-Fordist, labor market, personal traits such as resiliency, autonomy and collaboration are recast as soft skills essential to the workplace (Urciuoli 2008), which in turn are only conveyable through specific communicative techniques (Allan 2016). The personal and the professional become intimately intertwined, and performing a hirable future employee requires embodying these traits in order to “fit in” the culture of the institution. In the case of Victor, it implied somehow overcoming the interviewer’s racialized stereotypes of Latin-American men. Susana´s narrative problematizes the idealized representation of Norway as a “sociolinguistic paradise” and highlights that the tolerance and celebration of linguistic variation and multilingualism are not available to all. It

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is reserved for what is considered being within the range of acceptable Norwegian language variation, rather than contact-induced variation in the contemporary landscape of accelerated immigration. This ideology is naturalized as valid selection criteria in recruitment processes by being equated to competence and professionalism, and thus function as hidden exclusion mechanisms through the linguistic penalty. Ultimately, they reproduce inequality, because if professional identities are essentially framed as and communicated through specific linguistic and communicative competences, Norwegian applicants will always be the best qualified independently of their professional accomplishments and credentials. Is it possible to be professional without having first-language like proficiency in Norwegian? The experiences of the participants in this project, as well as Kraft’s (2020) ethnographic study of language brokering in Norwegian construction sites, suggest it is. Employers should be reflexive and aware of the linguistic and communicative demands of the job when establishing requirements for hiring process. It is possible to be professional and qualified and not (yet) proficient in Norwegian, but still be an asset, like Susana managed to prove to her employer at a later interview. At the moment of finishing writing this chapter, Norway and the world are experiencing a reckoning with their colonial heritage, systemic racism and White innocence (Wekker 2016) in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Marielle Franco and many more. In these times, the voices of migrants like Susana and Víctor constitute an important testimony on how difference and access are constructed and reproduced in a European, mostly-White country like Norway, in spite of the disbelief of a large part of the population. Storytelling offers a space to formulate counternarratives to that disbelief and make these important experiences visible and real.

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Transcription Key

(1.10) (.) , hyphlo:ng underlined “quotation” (commentary) @

silence in seconds and tenths of seconds for pauses longer than half a second pause shorter than half a second falling intonation rising intonation (question, pause) unfinished contours or unfinished words elongated pronunciation emphasis constructed dialogue notes on gestures, noises, etc., and disambiguation and sentence completion in the English translation laughter

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5 Wielding Space and Time in Migrant Narratives: Personal and Professional Identities in Discourse Elizabeth Lanza

1

and Anne Golden

Introduction

Sociolinguistic approaches to studying narratives, in particular migrant narratives, have contributed to understandings of how individuals use language to negotiate identity, agency and power in their presentation and positioning of the self in social experiences (e.g., De Fina 2003; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015; Golden and Lanza 2012, 2013, 2019; Lanza 2012). Such approaches have increasingly transcended the study of monologic stories to stories embedded in conversation, from big stories to small stories—from a focus on narrative as text to narrative as E. Lanza · A. Golden (B) Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] E. Lanza e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_5

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social practice (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020). Migrant narratives offer particular insight into identity construction across both temporal and spatial dimensions as they inevitably involve the storyteller’s trajectories in time and space (Baynham 2015). Through migrant narratives, storytellers construct many identities in their portrayal of agency and positioning in their story worlds and in storytelling in interaction. The literature abounds with accounts of the construction of personal identities, however, with less work on professional identities, and especially how the personal and professional intersect (cf. Baynham 2011; Slay and Smith 2011; Lee 2020). We may ask: how do personal identity constructions meet professional identity constructions in migrant narratives in interaction? And how do the dimensions of time and space impact this identity work? The dimensions of time and space have been hallmarks of inquiry in narrative analysis, and traditionally, these dimensions have served as background orientation for narrative action in the Labovian framework of narrative analysis (Labov 1972). However, as De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2015: 9) note, there has been “a recent trend in narrative studies that advocates the reevaluation of the significance of the dimension of space vis-à-vis the dimension of time, both in the story world and in the storytelling world”. A migrant’s narrative is indeed “a travel story, a spatial practice. Nowhere is this more obvious than in migration stories, where displacement and mobility in time/ space constitute the narrative action” (Baynham 2015: 123). There has indeed been an increasing focus on space in applied linguistic research in general; however, Kramsch (2018: 108) offers “a word of caution against the current engagement with space and the concomitant neglect of time and history”. Both spatialization and temporalization are important in narrative analysis. Moreover, they can actually be indexical features of different types of narratives about a particular issue, as demonstrated in quantitative text analysis of narratives (Sullivan et al. 2020). With a focus on interaction, we may investigate how both spatial and temporal dimensions drive the narrative forward in the presentation of self that emerges in discourse, as so clearly illustrated in De Fina’s (2003) groundbreaking study of the narratives of undocumented bordercrossing migrants from Mexico to the U.S. Space and time are thus far

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from being mere points of orientation, rather they are the essence of the narrative. Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 587) point out, “… identity is a discursive construct that emerges in interaction”. Hence we can examine the emergence of the significance of both temporal and spatial dimensions in migrants’ identity construction in interaction as speakers employ various linguistic devices. And while migrants’ narratives have focused on personal identity constructions, the intersection between personal and professional identity constructions deserves more attention, as the construction of transformed personal identities from a migrant experience may impact the construction of professional identities. In times with increased migrations and displacements, we need to look at the lived experiences of multiple language users (Kramsch 2009)—how the personal and professional selves intersect in both storytelling worlds and story worlds. In this article, we analyze a focus group conversation involving an African doctor and the authors. Our focus participant came to Scandinavia as a refugee from a war-torn country when she was quite young. Attention is drawn to this participant who recounts the spatial trajectories of her lived experiences from the past to the present, with intermittent reflections on the past in light of the present. The theoretical framework for our analysis highlights identity as “performed rather than as prior to language, as dynamic rather than fixed, as culturally and historically located, as constructed in interaction with other people and institutional structures, as continuously remade, and as contradictory and situational” (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 138). In the following, we first discuss theoretical issues that are particularly relevant for our analyses. Subsequently, we present our methodology before embarking on the actual analysis of the narrative in conversation. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings and how they may contribute to further understandings of narrative talk in interaction.

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Constructing Personal and Professional Identities in Narratives Across Space and Time: Some Theoretical Perspectives

The notion of space as developed by Lefebvre (1991) and Massey (2005) has been advanced in applied linguistic research, highlighting space as dynamic and continually negotiated between various social actors with different discursive power, material constraints, and spatial practices (Canagarajah 2013; Lanza 2020, 2021). In contemporary multilingual spaces, even the notion of linguistic repertoire is interpreted as a spatial practice. Pennycook (2018: 453–454) notes in his description of sellers in an open market in Asia that “… linguistic resources intersect with the spatial organization of other repertoires… that bring a range of other semiotic practices into play”. This is a particularly relevant insight in light of the construction of professional identities in narratives in interaction, which also bring in temporal dimensions of language learning and use, and acculturation. Moving away from the conception of space and time as merely orientation features in the narrative, Baynham (2015: 123) proposes “a move in narrative analysis from backdrop to constitutive accounts of space/time orientation in narrative”. He suggests that researchers investigate how space and time can be construed as semiotic resources in the narrative, constituting narrative action, and how these dimensions contribute to identity constructions in narrative. Space involves indexical processes anchoring discourse locally and beyond, and across time. Migrant narratives are indeed discourses embedded in social, cultural, and political processes and our analyses of these narratives in interaction should take them into account. Baynham and De Fina (2005: 4) clearly pointed out the need “… to capture how meanings emerging in specific instances of interaction are related to ideologies, institutional discursive and social practices, and material life processes”—in other words, how the micro-level interaction relates to macro-level processes. In order to accomplish this, some scholars have attempted to retheorize sociolinguistic space by investigating scales: “space and scale offer a connection between macro-conditions and micro-processes” (Blommaert et al. 2005:

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197). The subtle layering of hierarchical scales in interactional discourse index local, regional, national, transnational, and global relations that permeate the story world and the interaction at hand (Baynham 2015). Considering space and time as semiotic resources enriches the analysis of identity construction in narratives with a focus on agency, positioning, and categorization, and how identities emerge in interaction. Agency refers generally to “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” by Ahearn (2001: 112), who advocates a dialogic approach to the study of agency. Within an immigrant context, agency, and power are closely interconnected, and indeed as Al Zidjaly (2009, 179) points out, “agency is a major basis for claiming power…”, highly relevant for discourses involving migrants. One way of analyzing agency is through the investigation of constructed dialog or reported speech, indicating how narrators through different speech acts construct either diminished agency or a high degree of agency (Lanza 2012). An important aspect of identity construction is that “in order for an identity to be established, it has to be recognized by others” (Blommaert 2005: 205). Moreover, the analyst is confronted with what De Fina (2015: 361) refers to as “the dilemma of local versus transportable identities,” which brings into play the debate between conversation analysts and researchers in interactional sociolinguistics and discursive psychology. The notion of categorization in discourse in relation to identity construction illustrates very clearly this discussion, with conversation analysts insisting on the importance of participants’ orienting to the categories in conversation in order to ratify their legitimacy. And this can be accomplished in the manner pointed out by De Fina (2003: 139): “self-identities are … often built on the basis of opposition or contrast with others”. Narrators establish and negotiate with interlocutors the various characters in the story, revealing the most salient categories that are used for the description of one’s self and others. There are various actions and reactions that are associated with these categories, revealing also ideologies, values, and norms. An interesting question is how identity categories are constructed in narrative discourse using temporal and spatial resources. Moreover, how do narrators position themselves toward those who have not shared the same temporal and spatial migration paths?

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An interactional analysis of narratives allows the analyst to trace the emergence of various identities in both the conversation and in the embedded story worlds. And as Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 587) point out, “… identity does not emerge at a single analytic level – whether vowel quality, turn shape, code choice, or ideological structure – but operates at multiple levels simultaneously…. It is in interaction that all these resources gain social meaning”. They offer five principles as a sociocultural framework for analyzing identity construction in interactional discourse: (1) emergence, (2) positionality, (3) indexicality, (4) relationality, and (5) partialness. Emergence refers to processes whereby a complex pattern is formed out of the interplay between simple structures and behaviors. Personal and professional identities are constructed in interaction and are hence a product of interaction. Speakers orient or position themselves to local identity categories instead of the analyst’s sociological categories and such positioning or stance-taking can result in the construction of various identity categories (cf. Jaffe 2009; Deppermann 2015). Indexicality involves the formation of semiotic links between linguistic form and social meaning (cf. also Gumperz’ 1982 “contextualization cues”). Identity emerges in interaction through several related indexical processes such as the positioning of oneself in relation to others, the use of linguistic structures ideologically associated with certain social groups or persons, and even through the use of a category or name. Positioning in narratives often occurs with the use of constructed dialog and indexical devices as in contrast created with personal pronouns. And finally, in line with postmodern theorizing, identity is “fractured and discontinuous”, as emphasized in the partialness principle (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 605). Identity is fluid as it is relational and co-constructed in interaction. Analytically, the five proposed principles for analyzing identity in discourse are set up as five different principles; however, they most definitely overlap.

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Methodology

The data in this study come from a database of focus group interviews with medical doctors with a migrant background, with a focus

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on one medical doctor’s narratives. Work on this database including the focus participant’s narratives in other conversations can be found in Golden and Lanza (2012, 2013, 2019). Although the encounters are called “interviews”, interviews are indeed interactional events (De Fina 2009). The entire interview conversation may be seen as an overarching narrative (Riessman 1993) or autobiography since the participants tell and co-construct their lives as migrants to Norway. In the focus group, the researchers used a semi-structured approach and focused on three different periods in the women’s lives. The first period was intended to be around the time of migration to Norway, and questions about expectations concerning their future lives and their challenges entering the county were asked. The following period to focus on was to be some years later, when the first challenges were overcome. The final period was the here and now, the present situation, and the participants were asked to reflect back on their lives. The topics initiated were mainly about their encounters with a new language and culture, and the questions were related to their memories, reactions, and evaluations of the process. The speakers in the focus group conversations spoke with many voices as they positioned themselves with various identities. Multilayered positioning work might constrain interviewees to speaking from positions of language learner or immigrant or doctor (Miller 2010). Notably, we construe the research interview, as Baynham (2011: 63) states, “as a dynamically co-constructed speech genre rather than as a neutral locus for gathering data”. The conversation selected for this analysis is with a doctor referred to as Sarah, who had a particularly interesting personal migration trajectory and work experience across her home country and Scandinavia. The two authors were present and two medical doctors with a migrant background were invited. As one of the participants arrived late, the narrative in question was recounted in interaction between the two researchers and Sarah, the focus speaker in this article. Sarah arrived in Sweden as a refugee from a war-torn country when she was quite young, and eventually settled in Norway. During the course of twenty years in Sweden, she acquired her medical training as a doctor and specialization. She subsequently went back to her original homeland as medical personnel in order to assist those afflicted by the war and practiced there for

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some years before returning to Scandinavia. Sarah identifies herself as a refugee: “Once a refugee, always a refugee” (Golden and Lanza 2012, 2013). Among the different identities she negotiates in interaction— immigrant from the old days with highly educated parents, Scandinavian and linguistically competent, a highly educated doctor, well-integrated woman, individual with no material needs—her identity as a refugee is a recurrent motif. We may say that the interaction took place in “Scandinavian” with Sarah basically speaking Swedish with some accommodation to Norwegian, and the other participants using Norwegian. Scandinavians are polylectal and the Scandinavian languages, essentially a dialect continuum, are mutually intelligible rendering “receptive multilingualism” although there are both disturbances and challenges in such a “sociolinguistic paradise” (Røyneland and Lanza 2020). At the time of the recording, Sarah had previously met Anne through a professional meeting and had already been involved in another focus group discussion, whereas this encounter was the first time that Elizabeth and Sarah met. As they genuinely did not know each other from before, Anne at first proposes that Sarah tell about herself. To start the conversation, however, Elizabeth initially offers a short account of her own migration trajectory to Norway, thus creating “a dialogic relationship in research” (Elliot and Bonsall 2018: 334). Subsequently, Sarah recounts her migration trajectory to Sweden where she received her medical training and met her husband, also a medical professional, who, moreover, came from her country of origin. Together they went back to their homeland with their young children before returning to Scandinavia, but this time to Norway. In her initial presentation of self in the conversation, Sarah constructs a transformed identity, both personal and professional, that emerges through her narrative, while poignantly illustrating the role that both time and space have played in this transformation.

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The Emergence of Self Across Time and Space: Personal and Professional Identities

The following narrative occurred at the beginning of the recorded interaction in which Sarah constructs various identities through temporal and spatial dimensions, positioning herself to both the past and the present, to her original homeland and her adopted homeland, Sweden and currently Norway. The researcher Anne starts by referring to Sarah’s narrative in an earlier encounter, a focus group discussion with another African doctor. In that encounter, Sarah had shared her migration trajectory across Europe and Africa (see Golden and Lanza 2013). Anne uses the Norwegian adverb jo (line 1), indicating already shared information about her return, but asks for the rationale behind their decision to leave her homeland again. 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

A: For dere hadde jo bestemt at dere skulle være der S: Ja A: Var det sånn litt etter litt at dere tenkte neeei, eller hvordan, var det noen spesielle (.) Var det det med barna og militærtjenesten som du sa? S: Ja, det var det og senn var man en – Vi hadde forandret oss også. Det er inte bara at (.) det så. Vi, vi var ikke de samme personer som har flyttet derifrån E: Nei = A: = Nei S: Vi hadde [også] = E: [På] hvilken måte? S: = Vi hadde også forendrat på hvordan vi tenkte, til eksempel det her med kultur og språk og sånt her

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

A: Because you had decided that you would be there S: Yes A: Was it kind of little by little you thought nooo, or how, was there any special (.) Was it about the children and military service as you said? S:Yes, it was like that and then one was – We had changed, us too. It wasn’t just that (.) like that. We, we were not the same persons who have moved from there E: No = A: = No S: We had [also] = E: [In] what way? S: = We had also changed in how we thought, for example this with culture and language and the like (continued)

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(continued) 17 18 19

Så tenkte jag at - jag var mer engasjerat jag som kommer från - från Sverige tilbaka til Hjemlandet, var jag mer interesserat av de kulturella

17 18 19

Then I thought that - I was more involved, me coming from - from Sweden back to Homeland, I was more interested in cultural aspects

Sarah early on orients to identity construction across spaces and introduces the notion of another self . She claims that she and her husband had changed during their stay in Scandinavia (l. 7), in fact, that they had become different persons (l. 8). In this way, Sarah indexes a relocation that is not only geographical from one place to another, nor just temporally physical in becoming older, but it is as much a mental move of becoming somebody else, a change of identity and a change in “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world” (Norton 2013: 45). Sarah specifies the change further by saying that she and her husband no longer thought the same, for example, in relation to language and culture (l. 14–16). Indeed, as Kramsch (2009) claims, “Language learning – as acquisition of a new semiotic system – shapes and forms who you are”. However, the cultural experience of residence and further education in Sweden, including her medical training and professionalization, clearly anchored Sarah in what we may call a Swedish, or Scandinavian, cultural mindset—one that is concerned about the welfare of all and is pragmatically solution-oriented. In l. 17–19, Sarah referred to the geographical trajectory from Sweden to her original homeland and how this spatial trajectory heightened her sensitivity to culture. In the continuation, Sarah illustrates how this personal cultural interest actually affected her professional medical practice. She recounts the desires of the local patients who wished to simultaneously consult with their “medisinmann” (‘medicine man’) (l. 23), who have traditionally and pejoratively been called “witch doctors”, who perform rituals of healing or exorcizing, a traditional practice well documented in Africa (Stevens 2006). Through reported speech, she begins to position herself in relation to her medical colleagues in the field, who were negative to such a practice (l. 26–27). She, on the other hand, wished to investigate this practice with open eyes (l. 29), thus constructing an independent,

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creative, and agentive identity in contrast to her colleagues in the field. In l. 22, Sarah uses the Norwegian adverb jo (translated as ‘as you know’), which indexes here her knowledge about the existence of places where medicine men practice their rituals, and that she assumes that we are also familiar with this practice. 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

S: till eksempel vi hadde pasienter som ville gå på < helligvaktvaktena > Så det er jo noen sånne platser der dom har medisinmann og vissa ritualer og så [der] = E: [mmm] S: = Så (.) dom fleste av mine kollegaer var negative til det Dom bara kategorisk sejer ”nej, vi tror ikke på det det funker ikke” Men for meg var det jag ville se hva er det her for nån ting = A: ja E: mmm

20

S: For example we had patients

21

that wanted to go to the < holy watch- watches > So there were (as you know) some places Where they have medicine men and some rituals and so [there] = E: [mmm] S: = So (.) most of my colleagues were negative to this They just categorically said ”no, we don’t believe it it doesn’t work” But for me it was I wanted to see what is this thing = A: yes E: mmm

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

In narratives, the speaker may have multiple voices (Bakhtin 1981). Reported speech, or constructed dialog, is a well-studied topic and is an important locus to study agency in immigrant discourse (De Fina 2003). Furthermore, reported speech is a strategic resource for positioning, and for constructing a migrant identity of empowerment in narratives about social experiences in a new country (Lanza 2012). In narratives of action, it is a resource for the speaker to position herself in discourse, both the immediate conversation as well as the discourse in society, and thus her reaction transcends a hierarchy of scales from the local to the transnational. Sarah positions herself in regards to her fellow medical colleagues in the field, and indirectly, evaluates them. Her use of the conjunction “men” (‘but’) in l. 28 accentuates the contrast in their evaluations. Goffman (1981) dissected the speaker role in his production format for discourse: (1) Author (the person who actually produced the utterance);

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(2) Animator (the person who reproduces the utterance); and (3) Principal (the person whose beliefs are being expressed). In the story world, the narrator can be all of these roles; however, some of the roles can be ascribed to others. In l. 26–27, Sarah is the animator of the words of her colleagues, who are the utterances’ author. Moreover, as we will see below, the principal of the utterances can be ascribed to those who stand for the traditional (implicitly non-progressive) education of the medical doctors. Continuing her story, Sarah recounts how she negotiated a compromise with her patients who wanted to consult with the local medicine man (l. 32–40). As long as they took their prescribed medication, it was acceptable for them to listen to the medicine man. As she reasoned, it was a “kind of therapy” (l. 42). In the following, Sarah presents an account for why she acted as she did. Most definitions of accounts involve “a breach of expectations”, but not always (De Fina 2009, 239). De Fina (p. 240) points out that ‘narrative accounts (including justifications, excuses and explanations) can … be defined as recapitulations of past events constructed as responses to an explicit or implied “why” or “how” evaluative question by an interlocutor’, and they are presented when the speaker anticipates or presupposes an evaluation by an interlocutor. In l. 13 above, after Sarah stated that she and her husband had changed before returning to Homeland, Elizabeth asked her in what way, to which Sarah replied that her migration trajectory heightened her sensitivity to culture. In the ensuing conversation, this sensitivity to culture is exemplified. Through repetition, as we see below, Sarah clearly anticipates the need to justify her decision to allow her patients to consult with the medicine man, a practice one would not associate with modern medicine, hence an example of where her personal and professional identities met at the crossroads. In other words, we witness how the personal identity she constructs in both the storytelling world and the story world, focusing on a heightened interest in culture, intersects with the professional identity she constructs in the story world in which her personal interest in culture affects her medical treatment of her patients in a crisis. While Sarah has a relational, generalizable identity with her colleagues as medical doctors, we see how the identity she has “brought along” is negotiated in her narrative as she appeals to the scale of culture.

5 Wielding Space and Time in Migrant Narratives…

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

S: = og då kom jag i dialog med pasienter, så at dom kunne faktisk gå på det Men dom skulle ta medisinene E: ja S: Det var det liksom kompromisset å [seja] = E: [ja] S: = ”ta dine medisiner, men det er greit at du er der og hører på hva [medisinmannen]” E: [ja ja] S: For det var nån slags terapi

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

og vi (.) hadde ikke tid Vi var tre leger på alla som kom dit (.) Det fanst bara ett sjukhus Du har ikke tid til å bedrive terapi E: Nei S: Førtifem minuter med resepsjon og allting

43 44

49 50 51

som det er [her] = E: [nei] S: = du skal ta det der og da =

49 50 51

52 53 54 55

A: [ja] E: [ja] S: = og løse problemer Så når dom var hos disse medisinmenn eller = E: mmm S: = prester eller et eller annet, så dom tok terapidelen og vi tok medisindelen liksom

52 53 54 55

A: ja S: Så oppfattade jag det i alla fall

59 60

45 46 47 48

56 57 58 59 60

45 46 47 48

56 57 58

123

S: = and then I got into a dialogue with patients, so that they in fact could go there But they were supposed to take their medicines E: yes S: That was like the compromise to [say] = E: [yes] S: = ”take your medicines, but it is fine for you to be there and listen to what [the medicine man]” E: [yes yes] S: For that was a kind of therapy and we (.) didn’t have time We were three doctors for all those who came there (.) There was only one hospital You don’t have time to do therapy E: No S: Forty-five minutes with receiving them and everything as there is [here] = E: [no] S: = you have to take it there and then = A: [yes] E: [yes] S: = and solve problems So when they were with the medicine men or = E: mmm S: = priests or whatever, then they took the therapy part and we kind of took the medicine part A: yes S: That is how I understood it in any case (continued)

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(continued) 61 62

64

A: ja S: Så at dom kunne ta sina medisiner Men jag sejer og at komma tilbaka når dom skal ta mer medisiner

64

65 66 67

eller for en oppfølging A: ja E: mmm

65 66 67

63

61 62 63

A: yes S: So that they could take their medicines But I said they should come back when they were to take more medicines or have a follow-up A: yes E: mmm

In this extract, Sarah presents four separate but parallel accounts of her compromise with her patients in l. 33–34, l. 38–42, l. 55–58, and l. 62–65. In l. 38–40, she employs direct speech, quoting herself as she advises her patients that as long as they take their medication, they could consult with their medicine man. Sarah provides an explanation for her compromise in l. 42–54, stating that they were only three doctors and there was only one hospital to treat all of the patients. Notably, in l. 46–54, Sarah effectively wields time reference in her switching from the use of the past tense to the use of the present in her description of the emergency situation, in essence aligning the story world to the storytelling event, and Sarah’s interlocutors do indeed react to her appeal for understanding her dilemma, through their minimal responses and backchanneling (cf. Lanza 2012). The third account of Sarah’s compromise with her patients functions as a refrain to the explanation (l. 55–58): the problem of how to deal with the patients with so little resources meant a compromise. Modern psychiatry comprises therapy and medication. In the described crisis situation, doctors could provide the medicines and the medicine man could fulfill the need for therapy. Identities emerge in discourse through several related indexical processes, and among them through the use of pronouns (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Interestingly, while Sarah positioned herself skeptically to her colleagues in their negative response to the medicine man, referring to them as “they” (l. 26 above), she resorts to a common reference for herself and her doctor colleagues five times in explaining the crisis situation they faced, by indexing all of the doctors as “we” or generically “you” (lines 43, 44, 46, 51, and 58). Nonetheless, as she is finishing up the account,

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she returns to her own position in l. 60: “That is how I understood it in any case.” This marks a turning point in her identity construction vis-à-vis her medical colleagues, as we note below. From a common identity as a doctor, she repositions herself in opposition to her colleagues, once again through reported speech (l. 71–72) in which they adamantly state that allowing the patients to consult with medicine men was “bara gammeldags” (‘just old-fashioned’) and would not work, a positioning of that practice as historical and inappropriate, that is, contrary to what Sarah contends. 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86

S: Så - så det tenker jag at jag var mest, mest opptatt av, så det var mer jag som var opptatt av det De andra kollegar sa ”det her er jo bara gammeldags,

68

så det her fungerer ikke” E: Men de var også fra [Homeland] S: [ja] = E: Eller var de [svenske som kom]? S: = [de var også från] E: Nei, [det var Homeland ja]

72 73

S: [Fra Hjemlandet] som har studerat kanskje i Andrelandet i [Africa] = E: [ja ja] S: = og som har studerat i Ryssland, i [forskjellige plats, hva] = E: [Riktig. Nettopp, ja] S: = Så vi kommer med våra bagasj, hva vi har lært oss i andra [länder] = E: [mmm] S: = og så skal vi (.) innføre der og jobba sammen =

69 70 71

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86

S: So – so that’s what I think that I was most, most concerned about, so I was the one most concerned about that The other colleagues said ”this is just old-fashioned, so this here doesn’t work” E: But they were also from [Homeland] S: [yes] = E: Or were they [Swedes that came]? S: = [they were also from] E: No, [that was Homeland yes] S: [From Homeland] who studied maybe in Otherland in [Africa] = E: [yes yes] S: = and who studied in Russia, in [different places, yes] = E: [Right. Exactly, yes] S: = So we come with our baggage, what we have learned in other [countries] = E: [mmm] S: = and then we are to (.) introduce there and work together = (continued)

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(continued) 87 88 89

E: mmm S: = då blir ikke så lett E: Nei, det skjønner jeg [godt]

87 88 89

90

S:

90

[mmm]

E: mmm S: = it is not so easy E: No, I understand that [well] S: [mmm]

The use of reported speech brings the words alive across time to the present interaction in the storytelling world, allowing Sarah’s interlocutors to judge for themselves. When asked by Elizabeth in l. 73 whether the other doctors were from the same country, Sarah initiates an account on the importance of culture and highlights “So we come with our baggage” (l. 83), a trope she had initiated in the beginning of the conversation (l. 17–19) in regards to her personal transformation through migration: 17 18 19

S: Så tenkte jag at - jag var mer engasjerat jag som kommer från - från Sverige tilbaka til Hjemlandet, var jag mer interesserat av de kulturella

17 18 19

S: Then I thought that - I was more involved, me coming from - from Sweden back to Homeland, I was more interested in cultural aspects

Sarah pursues the importance of culture in relation to her professional life as well. She points out how her other colleagues, although originally from the same homeland as Sarah, had studied in other places in Africa or in Russia, as opposed to her personal cultural transformation from her migration trajectory to Sweden where she had studied. In another focus group conversation involving Sarah (Golden and Lanza 2013), she refers to culture as “en ryggsekk” (‘a backpack’), something she carries along with her and can reach into and take out what she needs in a situation. Interestingly, Sarah chooses the metaphor of a backpack in her portrayal of culture, a cultural artifact with strong associations with her new homeland in Scandinavia. It is a flexible object as it may be packed and unpacked, consisting of objects from different spaces. In this conversation, Sarah refers to culture as “våra bagasj” (‘our baggage’) (l. 83), also an object. As argued in Golden and Lanza (2013), drawing on metaphor theory in regards to conceptualizations of culture, culture as

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an object metaphor is in fact more dynamic for the speaker: you can manipulate it, you can adjust it, you can act on it. This is in opposition to culture as a location metaphor, which is more static and less flexible. For Sarah, by using the object metaphor for culture she was able to negotiate an empowered migrant identity, flexible for attending to the requirements of the situation at hand in the earlier conversation and in this one. Implicit in Sarah’s account of the other medical personnel is that they have different “baggage,” which they have packed in one place and unpacked somewhere else. Sarah’s baggage is Swedish and perceived as flexible and in contrast with the others’ baggage. Implicitly, her cultural identity imbues a more modern professional identity in a crisis situation, an approach actually corroborated by research on multicultural counseling and psychotherapy (Moodley and West 2005). In a study of Swedish youth ethnic identity narratives, Gyberg et al. (2018: 18) point out that “Not only do the Nordic countries differ significantly from other countries in the world, but Sweden stands out as having the most pronounced beliefs in emancipative values and as the second most secular-rational country in the world”. While their study involved the lived experiences among youth in Sweden, highlighting negative notions of otherness and segregation, in Sarah’s case we witness how she agentively wields her otherness positively among her ethnic medical peers who have done their medical training elsewhere. Moreover, a secular-rational stance in a crisis situation contributes to flexibly bringing into modern psychiatry what may be considered its antithesis— resorting to the inclusion of a traditional treatment in therapy with a medicine man. Personal identity is indeed often constructed on the basis of contrast with others through categorization strategies, as noted above. This occurs through descriptions as well as through the various actions and reactions characters engage in that index different values and norms. In the story world that Sarah constructed in the conversation, her compatriot colleagues associate specific values with the professional identity of being a medical doctor. While they insist on maintaining normative practice with traumatized patients, Sarah on the other hand, portrays herself as pragmatic and flexible in a crisis situation. She drew on the possibilities

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of the current situation that would allow her patients to receive therapeutic healing that the overworked doctors could not satisfy—personal attributes one would associate with a modern doctor.

5

Discussion and Conclusion

The analysis illustrates the complexities of identities and context created by Sarah’s wielding of time and space in her migrant narrative in which we witness the emergence of an empowered identity in stark contrast to her generalizable identity as a medical doctor. Through the use of various linguistic resources at the micro-level of interaction, Sarah indexes macro-level ideologies and cultural values, thus pointing to the interplay of the subtle layering of hierarchical scales in interactional discourse (Baynham 2015). In narrative studies, there has been a renewed and growing interest in Bakhtin’s (1981) literary notion of “chronotopes” (literally, ‘timespace’), which was originally developed in reference to different genres of the novel. The chronotope has also been used to link time and space for the study of identity in discourse—“chronotopic identities” (Blommaert and De Fina 2017, Kroon and Swanneberg 2019). Drawing on Blommaert (2015), De Fina (2019: 200–201) points out how a clear analytical advantage may be attained through this approach, which also captures historical dimensions of context and ideologies: “the chronotope rather than isolating ad hoc elements or aspects of context, attempts to capture the wholeness of the social occasion by relating places, times and identities with scripts and normative behaviors and values”. Nevertheless, there are difficulties and challenges in applying the notion of chronotope to concrete communicative events, as De Fina stresses. Some chronotopic identities are well-established. For example, the minor asylum seekers in De Fina et al.’s (2020) study construct an agentive identity by appropriating the chronotope of Ulysses in The Odyssey. De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2020: 101) clearly point out that “… work on chronotopes in narratives has investigated both the ways in which identities are inscribed and negotiated into time/space frames and the kinds of contrasts that the latter may index”.

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Bakhtin developed the construct of the chronotope to demonstrate how authors draw on time and space motifs to create various literary characters. In another approach to Bakhtin’s chronotope, Creese and Blackledge (2020: 422) argue that “Sociolinguistics to date has shown little interest in the way characters are authored in identity texts to articulate values and beliefs”. In this regard, they highlight the epic tale, in which “characters are tightly controlled by the author, with the single voice of the author dominating. Characters exist exclusively to transmit the author’s ideology”. (p. 421). Sarah’s narrative may be likened to an epic tale, and it is quite clear that the other main characters, her fellow medical colleagues, exist in her tale to promote her agentive self in a time and space characterized by uncertainty and poor resources. Sarah wields time and space in the character she creates in her narrative. By demonstrating her cultural understanding of her patients in light of the current situation, she paradoxically constructs an identity of a modern doctor in a crisis situation, and becomes the hero of her tale. Narratives of migration across space and time also reveal quests for belonging as the narrator constructs new identities (cf. Chung and Demary 2020). In Sarah’s narrative of operating as a medical professional in a war-torn country, we witness the critical role of space in identity construction. We witness how Sarah’s identity as a modern doctor emerges in the discourse—how time and space interplay in her construction of identity in the story world, continents away yet anchored in the storytelling world. Sarah orients to her Swedish/modern identity yet still retains an openness to cultural traditions from her original homeland, indicating her sense of belonging. In the end, she remains independent and flexible with “baggage” from across time and space. Sarah started the story of her travel back to her country of origin by emphasizing that she had come from Sweden with her spirit of engagement. And although she did not specifically mention Sweden at the end of her story, there is an implicature that it is indeed a Swedish identity she negotiates, equating Sweden with modernity: initially, she states that she came from Sweden and went back to her war-torn homeland. This travel across space from Sweden transformed her in that she had become especially conscious of language and culture, both privately and professionally. Sarah contrasts herself with the other doctors she encountered

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in the field who had been educated in other countries, including Russia. And finally, she returns to the issue of culture referring to “our baggage, what we have learned in other countries.” This final point echoes the utterance with which she had opened her narrative—“Vi, vi var ikke de samme personer som har flyttet derifrån” (“We, we were not the same persons who have moved from there.”). Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 587) stated, “…identity does not emerge at a single analytic level …. but operates at multiple levels simultaneously”, and this is evidenced in the interactional discourse. Sarah positions herself in her narrative in relation to the other doctors, who have not shared the same temporal and spatial migration paths, as she had. This positioning was done through various indexicality strategies, including pronoun use. Positioning in narratives often co-occurs with other categorization strategies, including constructed dialog, as was the case in this interaction. Dialog and action in narrative have been analyzed in terms of identity as agency, particularly salient in migrant narratives (De Fina 2003; Lanza 2012). Sarah’s narrative occurred in an interactional context and hence we also need to conceptualize agency as interactively and collaboratively emergent. In the conversation, we can also see how minimal responses and other positive back-channeling by Sarah’s interlocutors encourage her identity construction as an empowered migrant. The analysis of Sarah’s narrative highlights the need to ensure that the various dimensions of narratives are taken into account in a narrative analysis (Ochs and Capps 2001), particularly in regard to co-construction. More work is needed on the use of speakers’ linguistic resources in the performative nature of narratives. Migrants’ biographical narratives are privileged sites to provide insights into how language and culture interact and figure in identity construction and negotiation in interaction. This article has highlighted the role of space and time and how they are intricately intertwined in constructions of personal and professional identities in discourse. Space was not just an orientation feature in Sarah’s narrative; rather it was a crucial dimension to Sarah’s practice of medicine. Sarah offers careful reflection on her travel back in time to a homeland where she in some ways no longer felt she belonged, yet still understood. While Sarah had embraced Sweden and Swedish culture, her story resonates with all, not

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only refugees but also those who travel back to a place that once was home, only to discover how they have transformed. More work is needed on migrant narratives and how the construction of personal identities interacts with professional identities across space and time.

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Transcription Conventions self-interruption. animated tone of voice. short pause. measured pause in seconds. piano–lowered voice. overlapping speech. latching. unclear segment

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

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6 Visual Metaphors of Migration in Museums Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

1

Introduction

Museums of cultural history have for the last four decades or so aspired at positioning themselves as inclusive institutions. They stand as authorities of recognition, arenas for debates and for treating topical social and political issues. One of these issues is migration. Several countries have established museums of migration or address the theme in special exhibitions and in this way integrate the narratives of migrants in the broader shared history of the nation (Naguib 2010, 2013a, 2015a: 237–244, 2015b: 82–84). The term migration derives from the Latin migrare meaning “to move from one place to another”. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines migration as: S.-A. Naguib (B) Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_6

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The movement of a person or a group of persons, either across an international border, or within a State. It is a population movement, encompassing any kind of movement of people, whatever its length, composition and causes; it includes migration of refugees, displaced persons, economic migrants, and persons moving for other purposes, including family reunification.1

Under the United Nations entry for migrant we read that: The UN Migration Agency (IOM) defines a migrant as any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of (1) the person’s legal status; (2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary; (3) what the causes for the movement are; or (4) what the length of the stay is.2

Migrations whether voluntary or forced encompass manifold narratives of journeys with their departures, arrivals, processes of settling down, of building up new networks and sometimes of return. Migration, in particular transnational migration, has a lasting impact on the relations between territory and identity whether it is national, ethnic, cultural, religious or political. Usually, it is a mix of all these elements. The present chapter is about narratives of migration and how they have been visualized in five Scandinavian museums of cultural history during the first twenty years of this millennium. The study is based on field research during the period 2009–2013. I examine the ways an array of heterogeneous objects serve as visual metaphors in exhibitions about migration, in particular international migration. I begin by discussing the notion of visual metaphors and a selection of objects that are frequently used in exhibitions. Following the movements of a journey, I then go on to reflect upon visual metaphors of departures and arrivals. I continue with those expressing processes of settling down. I consider representations of transculturality and everyday cosmopolitanism in exhibitions and end the voyage with visual metaphors of what I regard as “return 1 2

https://www.who.int/migrants/about/definitions/en/ (retrieved 12.04.2020). https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/migration/index.html (retrieved 12.04.2020).

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by proxy”. To conclude, I shortly map out some of the new directions museums treating questions related to migration and population movements are taking. My examples are taken from Världskulturmuseet (Museum of World Culture) in Gothenburg, Sweden; the Immigrantmuseet (the Immigrant Museum) at Farum, a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark; Oslo Museum—Interkulturelt museum (Oslo Museum-Intercultural Museum, hereafter IKM), Norsk Folkemuseum (the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) in Oslo, and the Norsk Utvandrermuseum (Norwegian Emigrant Museum, NEM) in the town of Ottestad near Hamar in Norway.3

2

Aesthetic Frames and Visual Metaphors

Museums of cultural history rely largely on aesthetics both as a method of framing and as a mode of representation to treat difficult topics. The borderlines between art and non-art are blurred and the installations often consist of assemblages of things used in daily life. These objects serve as visual metaphors and evoke something beyond themselves. Like metaphors in general, visual metaphors are polysemous. They have, as Paul Ricoeur (1975) pointed out, a transformative function and the capacity of producing new meanings. Visual metaphors relate to visual perceptions where one sees concrete things that are physically present, as well as to visual mental imagery by which one draws upon visual memory to recall and perceive objects that are not physically there (Kosslyn and Shin 1991: 524). In their exhibitions about migration, museums resort to visual metaphors by using specific objects to refer to complex processes and feelings related to exile in general. Visual metaphors may have a profound impact on the beholder’s experiences, emotions and imagination. However, after repeated usage of the same objects and motifs these metaphors may turn into clichés and serve as framing tools. In the 3 http://www.varldskulturmuseet.se; http://www.immigrantmuseet.dk; https://norskfolkemuseu m.no/; http://www.oslomuseum.no; http://www.emigrantmuseum.no.

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case of migration, the recurrent use of various kinds of luggage, identity papers and travel documents tends to convey melancholic images of exile, displacement and homesickness rather than prompting visions of positive experiences, new opportunities and a sense of freedom. I shall come back to this point later in this chapter. Relying on visual metaphors in exhibitions entails to mediate between various forms of cultural expressions and find points where they may coincide. It denotes a transfer from one form of communication to another. In the process, things acquire multiple meanings and symbolic values they may not have had before being collected and displayed in museums. The objects used in exhibitions about migration become part of their owners “autobiographical narratives” (Bruner 2004: 694) and serve as anchor points that mark certain specific moments in the lives of these persons. The narratives they convey tend to be about the reasons that led to migration, serendipity, official procedures, hope, adaptation and settling down. They bring to mind phases of hardship and despair, failures and perhaps success. Longing is most often an underlying emotion during all these phases (Photo 1). One of the first display cases at the Immigrant Museum at Farum in Denmark gives us a powerful example of the latter. A big rusty iron key is lying in the foreground of the vitrine. It is the key of the front door of a house in Palestine. Behind it, there is the fragment of an olive tree branch, a few stones and a handful of sand. In my mind, this assemblage of things brings forth the poignant image of an abandoned home in Palestine, a strong feeling of nostalgia and the dream of a potential return. It also discloses a certain resistance of losing one’s “real” identity, and the manifold strategies one resorts to for keeping up some protective borders and maintaining an awareness to difference. Museums of cultural history in Norway have for the last twenty years or so been engaged with the inclusion of minorities both national and of foreign origin in their museological programmes (Bettum et al. 2018). Hence, the growing importance of participatory programmes and the representation of migrants from the vantage point of the Norwegian notion of likhet or likeness, in its double sense of similarity and social and juridical equality. This approach perceives the “other” as a reflection of oneself rather than as a complete stranger (Møller and Einarsen 2008: 143–144; Naguib 2013a). Further, it opens up for probing private

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Photo 1 Rusty iron key of the front portal of a house in Palestine, branch of olive tree, stones and sand. Immigrant Museum, Farum, Denmark. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

and public policies of adaptation and integration. In 2002, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History in collaboration with the IKM, the University of Oslo and members of the Pakistani, Turkish and Bosnian communities, initiated a documentation project entitled, Norsk i går, i dag, i morgen? (Norwegian yesterday, today, tomorrow?).4 The project’s main objectives were to document the history of immigration to Norway and to set up an archive that would contain various types of material and immaterial sources. The project concentrated on the ways individuals adjusted to Norwegian society and the solutions they developed to get by the challenges they met. In order to have a broader and more in depth knowledge of the immigrants’ backgrounds, researchers and photographers travelled with their informants to their countries and places of 4

https://norskfolkemuseum.no/norsk-i-gar-i-dag-i-morgen (retrieved 15.4.2020).

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origin. The resulting documentation includes a photographic archive based on donations of private pictures, collections of life stories and interviews. In addition, a number of temporary exhibitions were organized (Naguib 2013a), as for instance in 2002, Norge, mulighetenes land? Innvandring til Norge 1536–2002 (Norway the land of opportunities? Immigration to Norway 1536–2002). In 2003, IKM set up the exhibition Jeg er absolutt ikke rasist (I am absolutely not racist) and «Jeg er her» Innvandringshistorie fra 1945 til i dag (“I am here”. The history of immigration from 1945 to today).5 The permanent exhibition The Pakistani apartment at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History is another outcome of the project. I shall come back to it later in the present chapter.

3

Trunks, Suitcases, Bags and Identity Papers

Various types of objects give concrete forms to the visual metaphors of travel in general and migration in particular. Trunks, suitcases and bags are recurrent objects in exhibitions about migration. So much so that they have become the quintessential visual metaphors of migration in all its forms (Photo 2). Each piece of luggage tells its overlapping stories through the tags, destination labels and owners’ names and addresses affixed to it. Travel documents, passports, identity cards, birth or marriage certificates and diplomas of all sorts are other keystone objects to exhibitions about migration. These documents prove the very existence of a person and are thus invested with a unique significance. The articles of Bjørghild Kjelsvik and Annika Bøstein Myhr in this volume underscore the fundamental role these documents play in corroborating the veracity of migrants’ claims, especially asylum seekers and refugees, when meeting the authorities of the host country.

5 Jeg er absolutt ikke rasist lasted from February–June 2003; «Jeg er her» lasted from January–June 2005.

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Photo 2 Trunks: Visual metaphor of migration. Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Ottestad. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

Other objects used as visual metaphors in exhibitions about migration are usually modest things from daily life that have a strong emotional value and are easy to take along when on the move and in the process of starting a new life. They consist mainly of personal belongings, mementoes and souvenirs of all sorts such as clothes, photographs, pieces of jewellery, amulets, toys, books, letters, musical instruments, food recipes, kitchen utensils and working tools. By extension trunks, suitcases and bags serve thereby as metaphors for possessions of a more intangible character that one takes along when travelling such as skills, various kinds of knowledge and traditions. The exhibition Destination X at the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg examined various reasons for travelling and forms of travelling from leisure travelling and the pursuit of adventures, to business travelling, to pilgrimages and the quest for spiritual experiences, to travelling out of necessity because of economic, social

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and political circumstances.6 All had in common a wish or need for change and renewal. In line with the main views and policies of the museum, Destination X addressed a global phenomenon and not one exclusively Swedish. The exhibition relied on an aesthetic mode of representation that combined art installations by contemporary artists and non-art, photographs and short video films recounting individual life stories that would strongly affect the visitor. One of these installations, Hardship and hope-Crossing the US–Mexico border, by the artist Valery James dealt with the fate of the many illegal female Mexican immigrants into the USA.7 The installation was shaped as a church altar covered with heterogeneous things such as baby clothes, toys, bras, creams, plastic bottles of water and a mobile telephone that had been lost in the desert during the crossing. These clearly engendered objects referred mostly to motherhood and childcare. The wall behind the altar table was covered with embroidered blankets and napkins for babies. Prophylactic pictures of saints, Jesus and the Virgin Mary were pinned on the edge of the altar table and plastic water bottles wrapped in cloth made up the frame of the installation. Various rucksacks for children were placed in front of the altar like offerings (Photo 3). As mentioned earlier, one of the characteristics of the aesthetic mode of representation in museums is the combination of art and non-art to treat difficult topics. Hardship and Hope-Crossing the US–Mexico border is a salient example of this trend. It illustrates well the affective potential and the resonance of common objects used in everyday life. How putting them together enhances their power of evocation, of reaching the beholder’s feelings and, concurrently, of bringing forth mental images of the political, social, cultural and religious contexts to which they refer.

6 http://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/varldskulturmuseet/ongoing-exhibitions/previous-exh ibitions/destination-x/ (Retrieved on the 8/3/2020). The exhibition lasted from April 2010 to December 2012. 7 The installation “Hardship and hope—Crossing the US–Mexico border ” was subsequently acquired by the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg.

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Photo 3 Hardship and hope—Crossing the US–Mexico border. Art installation by Valery James. Museum of World Cultures, Gothenburg. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

4

Settling Down, Transculturalition and Everyday Cosmopolitanism

Having arrived at destination and been through the formal procedures of getting their identity documents and other personal papers accepted, migrants go through processes of settling down and (re)creating a sense of home and belonging. Fernando Ortiz (1995 [1947]: 97–102) coined the term transculturation to express various stages of settling down and crossing cultural borders. In his view, transculturation involves the loss or uprooting of elements of one culture, the incorporation of new ones from another culture and the convergence of these fragments of old and new and their transformation into a more or less coherent new body. The stages of transculturation do not happen one after the other in an orderly fashion. Rather, because there are many decisions and choices to be made along the road; they are often concomitant and criss-cross

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each other. As I understand the concept, transculturation entails a search for a kind of stability on a road strewed with many interruptions and challenges. It denotes phases of adjustments, of finding one’s way while at the same time maintaining a sense of difference and some borderlines. The latter was well illustrated by the exhibition Våre hellige rom (Our Sacred Spaces) at the IKM. It introduced six religious communities in the counties of Oslo and Akershus. These communities represented Buddhism, Christianity/Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikkhism (Bettum 2007; Bettum and Özcan 2018: 182–193; Varutti 2011: 19–21; Naguib 2013b: 109).8 The exhibition buttressed the museum as a committed actor engaged with issues pertaining to social cohesion. It was conceived as a collaborative project and members of the selected religious communities participated actively to its elaboration. The main objectives were to present and acknowledge the religious diversity in the region, show how the different communities have adapted to local conditions while keeping the integrity of their faiths, and to encourage dialogue between people of different religions. Playfulness, interactivity and performance were major characteristics of the exhibition and the visitors—mostly schoolchildren at the primary and secondary levels—took part in the choreography. They were invited to take off their shoes at the entrance, wash their hands, cover their heads, light a candle, burn incense, write down their thoughts about the nature and meaning of love on a blackboard, etc. The building where the IKM is situated was a former prison, and the layout of the exhibition space consisted of a series of small cells linked by corridors. Each cell reproduced the interior of one of the different religious buildings in the Oslo area. Hence, there was a synagogue, a mosque, a Catholic church, a gurdwara for the Sikhs, a Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple. The corridors served as a kind of no-man’s land, that is, the in-between spaces that separate and at the same time connect the different religious communities. The various things assembled to reproduce specific religious spaces in the city and its suburbs served as visual metaphors to such loaded concepts as religion, faith, belief, values, truth, respect and love. 8

The exhibition opened in 2007 and was prolonged several times until the end of December 2013.

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Migration has a significant influence on notions and feelings of identity as well as on other manifold cultural and existential matters. Pia Lane (2009: 212) reminds us that identity is not a given good, but always being shaped and re-shaped through action and, I would add, circumstances in life. Gender roles, in particular within “traditional”, enclosed communities are among the most perceptible identity, cultural and existential issues affected by the displacements and relocations of people from one cultural context to another (Naguib 2015b: 81). Even when these communities try to uphold long-established gender roles in the diaspora, women (and men) find ways of accommodating these norms to their new contexts. Many Muslim women in Scandinavian countries, especially second and third generation migrants, feel empowered by the local social and political conditions and claim broader civil rights than those they would have had in their countries of origin (Akman 2014). Most of them strive to maintain a certain balance between their old customs, the precepts of their religion, and the social and political settings of the new country. For instance, several Muslim activist women wearing the hijab or Islamic veil in Norway choose to stand apart from the majority society and assert their own understanding of feminism. At the same time, they involve themselves in matters of common concern beyond the boundaries of the Muslim communities. In the spring of 2009, the Oslo Museum arranged an exhibition entitled Hijab – med rett til å velge (Hijab – the right to choose; Naguib 2011: 120–123, 2013a: 2183).9 At the time, there was a heated debate going on in Norway about the hijab, and whether Muslim women entering the police forces should be allowed to wear it as part of their uniform. By organizing this exhibition, the museum asserted its engagement with ongoing controversial discussions and underscored its active role in promoting tolerance and social cohesion in a plural society. The curator, designers and artists focused on the Norwegian context and on young Norwegian Muslim women. Most of them had a foreign background. The exhibition presented eleven models of sophisticated hijabs designed by the founders of the Fashion House of Badr, the sisters Nafeesah and Suzan Badrakhan. Two pieces by the artist Louise Nippierd were part of the exhibition. The 9

The exhibition lasted from February 15th–April 15th, 2009.

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most striking entitled Stigmatisert (Stigmatised) showed a figure clad in a black metallic like burqah (Photo 4). To me, the sculpture represented a Western idea of Muslim women as oppressed and invisible behind and beneath their veils. The explanatory texts of the exhibition were kept to a minimum. On one panel, verse 30 in the surah of Light (surah 24) of the Qur’an instructing women to cover themselves in public was juxtaposed with St Paul’s first letter to

Photo 4 Stigmatisert [Stigmatised]. Sculpture by Louise Nippier, Oslo Museum. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

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the Corinthians in which he admonishes women to cover their heads. The other panel reminded the visitor that until recently Norwegian— and by extension European and Western—women used to go about with their heads covered. The hijab served as a visual metaphor of religious identity that brought to mind, without specifically naming them, ongoing international socio-political debates on the use and significance of the hijab. Disputes among Muslim communities, Muslim feminist movements against the hijab considering it as a tool of oppression, and those seeing the hijab as a mean to accommodate protest by allowing women to participate in public life were implicitly present themes in the exhibition. The video film directed by one of the initiators of the exhibition, the artist, Anita Hillebrand, told the story of the Fashion House of Badr. It showed a catwalk with models parading the most recent samples of what is today known as the “Islamic fashion” with tightfitting clothes that reveal the curves of their bodies, attractive head-covers and veils and heavily made-up young women. In my understanding, the exhibition pointed towards different types of boundaries and emphasized one aspect of a complex debate on Islam and the integration of Muslim communities in Norwegian society. Moreover, it visualized the will of veiled activist Muslim women to highlight their differences while at the same time being integrated. It underscored the ability of these women to improvise and innovate. Thus, the exhibition not only drew the attention on their denial to conform to some of the ways of life of the majority of the population. It also highlighted their determination to defy both the conservative and the “modern” elements of their own original cultures. Hence, using the metaphor of the veil the exhibition depicted an endeavour to move beyond transculturality towards the practice of what Steven Vertovec, Robin Cohen (2008 [2002]: 5) and Asef Bayat (2008) define as “everyday cosmopolitanism”. Everyday cosmopolitanism is not restricted to urban elites, frequent travellers and academics. It is a state of mind, a way of managing and of participating in a plurality of cultures to some degree on one’s own terms. The practice of everyday cosmopolitanism entails selectivity and a degree of autonomy towards one’s original culture (Naguib 2013a: 2183). Everyday cosmopolitanism gives rise to various forms of cultural hyphenations, and stimulates the articulation of individual prismatic

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identities. It suggests, in my opinion, a certain feeling of permanence and of self-confidence. As an analytic approach, everyday cosmopolitanism offers alternative perspectives to explore the ways people from various backgrounds share a common space, interact on daily basis and practice glocalization by mixing the local with the global. Chan Kwok-Bun (2008 [2002]: 206) suggests that it involves considering “the unspectacular, practical, usual, everyday life fusion and hybridization that happens when groups share a neighbourhood, a history and memory based on simply living together and solving the practical problems of living that require a certain transcendence of group identities”. In recent years, several European and north-American museums have treated questions pertaining to migration from the vantage point of everyday cosmopolitanism. They show how hybridization seen as a transformative, innovative process of continuous interaction between people from different cultures is practiced in daily life in what Michel de Certeau (1990: 173) described as the lieux pratiqués, or practiced spaces. That is, spaces of creative accommodation that are defined by the experiences and complex identities of those who use them. The Pakistani apartment at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History that I describe further down is an example of this trend. In 1998, the Oslo Cooperative Housing Cooperation (OBOS) donated a three-storey brick apartment building known by its former address Wesselsgate 15, to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. The edifice dates from 1865 and is typical of many residential buildings in Oslo of this period. The inhabitants were usually from the middle and lower middle classes, mostly shopkeepers, craftsmen, white collars and employees in the public and private sectors. The reconstruction of the building on the grounds of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History began in 2000 and was finalized in 2009. As it stands on its new site the building contains eight apartments in addition to a liquor store on street level. The size of the flats varies between 50 m2 to 125 m2 . Each flat narrates its own story of daily life, living conditions and interior styles in Oslo from the late nineteenth century up to the present. The interiors are not merely reconstructed homes furnished according to the fashion and taste of different periods, but rather what I would describe as tangible biographical narratives of individuals in the city.

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The so-called Pakistani apartment was set up in collaboration with a family that came originally from Pakistan. The layout is common to many three-room flats from the 1970s and 1980s in Oslo. The first room that meets the visitor is the kitchen and already here the blend of cultures is clearly expressed. It has the usual working bench, fridge, oven, pots and pans, table, chairs and curtains as most Norwegian kitchens in that kind of flats at the time. The food and spices on display evoke, however, a different cultural background. The same is true with the configurations of the other rooms. The furniture is ordinary to the average Norwegian homes and may be purchased anywhere. However, the details of the interior decoration, the choice of materials and colours, the pictures on the walls—many are calligraphied verses from the Qur’an—the artificial flowers, the teddy bears, the silverware, the dainty tea-glasses and other ornaments in the living room emphasize the impression of everyday cosmopolitanism and of people who have settled down and created a home to their taste (Photo 5).

5

To Return Would Be Like Emigrating a Second Time10

Museums treating migration depict those who emigrated as pioneers whose experience and understanding of their “core nationality” and ties to the country they have left are emphasized by their exile (Naguib 2015b: 81). They are men and women who have learned new ways of being, and struggled to improve their living conditions while keeping strong bonds with people “back home”. The collection of buildings and artefacts at the Norwegian Emigrant Museum (Norsk utvandrermuseum, hereafter NEM) in Ottestad near the town of Hamar in Norway tells another kind of overlapping stories about migration.11 It addresses the metaphor of return or rather, of what I call “return by proxy”. The objects in the collection are not merely inert material possessions of 10 «Retourner serait comme émigrer une deuxième fois», quote from the exhibition Multiplicité, Théatre des mots, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, Octobre 2007. 11 http://www.emigrantmuseum.no/ (retrieved 13.04.2020).

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Photo 5 The Pakistani apartment. Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

specific persons. They actually may be considered as substitutes of their owners for whom returning in person to the original home country would represent a second uprooting. The greater part of the collection at the NEM consists of a variety of things that belonged to Norwegian immigrants to the USA between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth. In its conception, the exhibition conveys feelings related to identity, belonging, hope and determination mixed with various degrees of nostalgia. Here, everyday cosmopolitanism is toned down while the sense of dual belonging to Norway and the USA is emphasized. The NEM is structured into two main sections. One is the open-air museum consisting of eight different buildings that belonged to Norwegian settlers in the Upper Midwest region. The other section is the indoor museum where smaller things used in daily life such as pieces of luggage, kitchen utensils and various kinds of tools, furniture, individual stories, letters,

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photographs and other personal documents are kept and exhibited. In the following, I limit my observations to three of the buildings in the outdoor section of the museum (Photo 6). In 1954, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History received Norman’s house, which was the first pioneer’s house sent back “home” from North America. The second house to make the trip across the Atlantic ten years later was the Gundersen log cabin. In 1972, both houses were transferred to the outdoor museum of the town of Hamar, and in 1988, they were moved to their present location at Ottestad. The outdoor collection consists of three houses, a granary, a corncrib and a barn. Two of these buildings are still in storage. In addition, there is a church and a school. The three buildings I very briefly describe here stand as concrete metaphors of emigration and various stages of settling down in a new country. Their materiality and narratives give us insights to different moments in migrant lives and ways people introduced and

Photo 6 Different buildings at the Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Ottestad. Photo: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

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adapted the knowledge they carried with them to local conditions. The first house was built as a home but served also other purposes to the benefit of the community such as a school and post office. The second building was a simple storeroom and the third stood as a central religious and social meeting place. One of the first buildings to meet the visitor in the open-air section of the museum is the Norman house (Normanhuset ). It originates from Norman in North Dakota which was one of the first Norwegian settlements in the region.12 The settlement was founded in 1871 along the Sheyenne River southwest of Fargo. The Norman house was constructed in the style of a simple Norwegian log cabin painted in white. It belonged to the first priest of the locality, Johannes Hellestvedt. For several years, it had a multipurpose function and served as the settlement’s vicarage, school, town hall and post office. In 1883, the house was dismantled and sold to the Perhus family in Richland County. The new owners used it as their home until 1928. In 1929, the house was dismantled once more and moved to “The Sons of Norway Rustad Park” near the new Church at Norman. It was then turned into a museum. The museum eventually closed down and the building was abandoned until the early 1950s, when it was decided to “send it back” to Norway where it became part of the collection of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. A major drive that pushed Norwegians to emigrate to America was the dream of owning land and establishing a farm. During the harvest season, settlers stored their grains in a special built granary known in Norwegian-American dialect as grøneri. The grøneri in the open-air section of the museum at Ottestad was built in the 1870s by a man called Sjur Bjorgo on his farm in Wisconsin. It is an example of the kind of storerooms in which settlers kept wheat and other types of grains. The Norwegian-American word grøneri is an example of transculturation. It conveys the image of people settling down and adapting to their new lives and at the same time relying on their own enskilled knowledge that is, a kind of knowledge based on cultural traditions and gained by practice and experience. 12

https://utvandrermuseet.no/en/open-air-museum (last retrieved 13.04.2020).

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The third building is a public edifice, the Oak Ridge Lutheran Church, which was built in 1896 by a certain Ole Haraldsen.13 The church was situated on a hill on the outskirts of Houston in Southeast Minnesota. Churches played an important role in the social and religious life of the Norwegian diaspora and in keeping up the bond with the “homeland”. The Oak Ridge church was in use until 1967 when it was dismantled and shipped to Norway. In August 2002, the then acting Bishop of Hamar consecrated the reconstructed Oak Ridge Church as a Church to the memory of Norwegian emigrants. Today, the church serves again as a meeting place and is used for concerts, conferences and weddings. The general picture of Norwegian emigrants conveyed by the collection of buildings and other smaller objects at the NEM at Ottestad is that of strong-minded pioneers. The objects on display underscore the “Norwegianess” of their owners rather than their acquired transcultural identities. Like in other museums of migration, emigrants are depicted as worthy representatives of their country of origin. Keeping the memory of emigration alive in Norway is, in my opinion, an act of recognition of the predicaments and achievements of those who had left and a way of integrating them in the wider national history of their country of origin (Naguib 2015b: 81). However, one has to keep in mind that museums of migration usually portray people who have managed; those who have stayed on the margins of society are generally ignored and left out of the exhibitions (Naguib 2015a: 244).

6

Mapping Out New Directions

A shared standpoint to the Scandinavian museums considered in this chapter is their endeavour to address broad issues pertaining to migration and identity in general and concurrently direct the attention to other more poignant issues that touch upon dignity and human rights. There is all along the underlying idea of open, inclusive societies accepting and promoting diversity. Exhibitions about migration in Scandinavia 13

https://utvandrermuseet.no/en/open-air-museum (last retrieved 13.04.2020).

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have until recently tended to express the sense of an enduring faithfulness to roots and tangible and intangible cultural heritage while coping with and adjusting to different ways of life. Another common feature of the different exhibitions about migration in the Scandinavian museums presented here is the open-endedness of the narratives. These are narratives of departures, arrivals and settling down, of longing, of multiple hyphenated identities and ways of putting everyday cosmopolitanism into practice that are mediated through the materiality of selected objects. Asef Bayat (2008) argues that everyday cosmopolitanism refers to: the ways in which the ordinary members of different ethno-religious and cultural groupings mix, mingle, intensely interact, and share in values and practices – the cultures of food, fashion, language, and symbols – in history and memory. It signifies how such association and sharing affect the meaning of “us” and “them” and its dynamics, which in turn blurs and problematizes the meaning of group boundaries.

The objects on display act as visual metaphors of complex lives and personal itineraries. They convey their owners’ memories, hopes and quests. They evoke manifold borders being crossed and the many steps, conflicting emotions and attitudes that arise when people leave their countries of origin, arrive somewhere else, settle down and built new homes. Several Scandinavian museums are now opting for a more selfreflective turn in exhibitions treating migration and population movements. Sustainability, climate change, environmental issues and involvement in the politics, economy and culture of the new country are now main underlying themes. One approach is, for example, to acknowledge the debt the host country has towards immigrants. Migrants do not leave and arrive empty handed. They carry with them various kinds of knowledge and experiences that make the core of their intangible cultural heritage, introduce them and put them into practice it elsewhere. The Immigrant Museum at Farum delves into the lasting impact of immigrants’ intangible heritage(s), in the form of skills, different bodies of knowledge and living traditions, has left on Danish culture and society

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from the eighteenth century to today. The objects on display act as visual metaphors of traditions related to agricultural knowledge, such as the cultivation of potatoes, to technologies related to the making of iron stoves, to the production of the famous Danish blue porcelain or to various foodways and cuisine. The current exhibition, Crossroads at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg is another example of the new trends. Here, the focus is on various forms and places of cultural contacts, the challenges of disruptions and space.14 The exhibition explores the stories of in-between spaces, spaces of encounters, of reconciliation, of atonement and of clashes. Sustainability, climate change, worldviews, routes, confluences and democracy are the main themes of the exhibition. The wooden blue fishing boat and the stairs made of wobbly wooden slats tied together with clothing rags stand as visual metaphors of migration in general but more specifically of escape and human trafficking. Another example of the recent directions museums have been exploring concerns attitudes towards otherness in general whether it applies to foreigners or to people who in a way or another seem different. The current exhibition at the IKM, Typisk dem (“It’s Just like them”), shows new, more introspective, approaches in treating diversity as well as some of the after-effects of migration in museums. The exhibition with the art installation Anatomy of Prejudice by the contemporary conceptual artist, Thierry Geoffroy aka Colonel, is about stereotypes, prejudice, racism and xenophobia. It asks whether prejudices are dangerous and how may we change them (Vaagan and Bothner, 2020).15 The exhibition is designed for secondary and tertiary school levels. The young visitors participate actively and are encouraged to express their prejudices by using their smartphones to write and send them. The messages are then anonymized and exhibited. They state for instance that “All Muslims are terrorists”, that “All East Europeans are alcoholics, painters and carpenters”, or that “One shouldn’t look down on people because of weight and obesity”, and that “All white West End mothers drink at least one glass of wine with 14

http://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/varldskulturmuseet/ongoing-exhibitions/crossroads/ (retrieved 14.04.2020). 15 The exhibition will last five years 2017–2022.

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dinner ”.16 These notes stand as visual metaphors of preconceived ideas about and attitudes towards some specific “other”. In this manner, IKM encourages the visitors to reflect about the kind of effects their own and other people’s prejudices may have on social and intercultural relations. By exploring the variety of fields linked to migration through the lenses of sustainability, climate change, enskilled knowledge, behaviour and preconceptions, museums open up for looking ahead beyond differences and clefts in societies and instead bring about similarities, various contact zones and alternative understandings of population movements. Newer exhibitions about migration seek to highlight the manifold ways of practicing everyday cosmopolitanism and show how people from different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds do manage to socialize and share common grounds daily without being hindered by politics of segregation and exclusion.

References Akman, Haci, ed. 2014. Negotiating identity in Scandinavia: Women, migration and the diaspora. New York: Berghahn Books. Bayat, Asef. 2008. Everyday cosmopolitanism. ISIM Review 22: 1. Bettum, Anders. 2007. Våre hellige rom: Seks religioner på vandring [Our sacred rooms: Six religions on the road]. Oslo: Oslo Museum and Kontur media. Bettum, Anders, Kaisa Maliniemi, and Thomas Michael Walle, eds. 2018. Et inkluderende museum. Kulturelt mangfold i praksis [An inclusive museum. Cultural diversity in practice]. Oslo: Museumsforlaget. Bettum, Anders, and Ôzcan, Gazi. 2018. Dialog som metode – Inkluderingsstrategier ved Interkulturelt Museum 2006–2016. In Et inkluderende museum. Kulturelt mangfold i praksis [An inclusive museum. Cultural diversity in practice], ed. Anders Bettum, Kaisa Maliniemi, and Thomas Michael Walle, 181–224. Oslo: Museumsforlaget. Bruner, Jerome. 2004. Life as narrative. Social Research 71 (3): 691–710.

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«Alle muslimer er terrorister»; «Alle øst-europeere er alkoholikere, malere og snekkere»; “Man burde ikke se ned på folk pga av vekt og tykkelse”; «Alle hvite vestkant mødre drikker minst ett glass vin til middag.»

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Certeau, Michel de. 1990. L’invention du quotidien, vol. I Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. Kosslyn, Stephen Michael, and Lisa M. Shin. 1991. Visual mental images in the brain. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135 (4): 524–532. Kwok-Bun, Chan. 2008 [2002]. Both sides, now: Culture contact, hybridization, and cosmopolitanism. In Conceiving cosmopolitanism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 191–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, Pia. 2009. Mediating national language management: The discourse of citizenship categorization in Norwegian media. Language Policy 8 (3): 209– 225. Møller, Bente Gum, and Hans Philip Einarsen. 2008. As in a mirror. In Scandinavian Museums and cultural diversity, ed. Katherine Goodnow and Haci Akman, 140–145. New York: Berghahn Books. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2010. Reconciling history and memory at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. In Museums, new media and refugees: Forms and issues of participation, ed. Hanne-Lovise Skartveit and Katherine Goodnow, 47–58. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2011. Engaging with gender and diversity in museums of cultural history. In ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, vol. 67, 111–128. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2013a. Museums, diasporas and the sustainability of intangible cultural heritage. Sustainability 5(5): 2178–2190. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su5052178. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2013b. La politique de la diversité dans un musée sans collection, l’Interkulturelt Museum d’Oslo. In Métamorphoses des musées de société. Collection Musées-Mondes, ed. Denis Chevallier, 105–110. Paris: Éditions Documentation Française. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2015a. The articulation of cultural memory and heritage in plural societies. In The formative past and the formation of the future, ed. Terje Stordalen, and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, 221–246. Oslo: Novus Press. Naguib, Saphinaz-Amal. 2015b. Collecting moments of life. Museums and the intangible heritage of migration. Museum International 65: 77–86. https:// doi.org/10.1111/muse.12035. Ortiz, Fernando 1995 [1947]. Cuban counterpoint. Tobacco and sugar. Durham: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1975. La métaphore vive. Paris: Le Seuil. Vaagan, Robert Wallance and Annelise Rosemary Bothner. 2020. Confronting stereotypes, racism and xenophobia in Oslo Museum-Intercultural Museum (IKM). Intercultural Communication Studies 29(1): 1–21.

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Varutti, Marzia. 2011. Gradients of alterity: Museums and the negotiation of cultural difference in contemporary Norway. In ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, vol. 67, 13–36. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen. 2008 [2002]. Introduction: Conceiving cosmopolitanism. In Conceiving cosmopolitanism, ed. Steven Vertovec, and Robin Cohen, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 “An Inky Life Line of Survival”: Identity and Rewriting in Scandinavian Migration Narratives Ingeborg Kongslien

Migration literature has a strong presence in contemporary literature, and it has been a growing tradition throughout the past century. With world wars, termination of colonialism, the end of the divided Europe and political upheavals in many parts of the world, migration and exile experiences of crossing national, cultural and linguistic borders have become topics and themes in literature globally. One might even say, as does literary scholar Søren Frank (2008: 1), that “the main protagonist in the twentieth century is the migrant”. Much literature about migrants is written by writers of migrant and exilic backgrounds, who have turned to narratives to express their experiences of cultural encounters, reorientation and identity negotiation implicit in changing homelands and language. The description from the end of Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s book School Days [Chemin d’école 1994], “the little black I. Kongslien (B) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_7

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boy bent over his notebook was tracing, without fully realizing it, an inky life line of survival” (Chamoiseau 1997: 144), seems to capture the idea that through a narrative, one can formulate and understand one’s life. The phrase, “an inky lifeline of survival”, can be applied in a wider context, namely to the many writers in today’s world who are transnational, transcultural and translingual and create stories of lives between nations, cultures and languages. With this as a point of departure, in this chapter I will discuss how authors of contemporary Scandinavian literature express migration experiences pertaining to crossing borders, cultural encounters and identity construction. Such literary works are Scandinavia’s contribution to the rich international tradition in this field.

1

Perspectives

Perspectives from two pioneers in postcolonial literary studies inform my analysis. Edward W. Said’s concept of the “contrapuntal” indicates that exiles have “a plurality of vision”, and thus “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” for which he borrows this term from music that indicates two voices intertwined in the discourse (Said 2000: 186). Migration literature will contain this ‘contrapuntal’ awareness since authors and characters often have a double perspective and continuously are referring to both the homeland and the adopted land. Homi K. Bhabha talks about “cultural hybridity” that entails differences without hierarchy in “the interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (Bhabha 2004: 5). Narratives of migration may be read as representations of experiences of dislocations and relocations, and such narratives will necessarily move within the interstitial passage between cultures, rather than present the more fixed positions of the cultures of the migrant’s old or new homeland. These fictional narratives are ‘life stories’ of migrant experiences. Azade Seyhan observes that “writing between histories, geographies, and cultural practices” inevitably underscores that societal aspects become part of the literary discourse (Seyhan 2001: 9).

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Migration Literature

Literature of migration is quite prominent within contemporary literature internationally, but the term ‘migration literature’ is both complicated and contested. This literature is rooted in migration experiences, and ‘reimagines’ the processes and emotions of the movement and cultural encounters implied. Literature about migration often depicts how a life with material and political hardships and suppression evokes a wish for freedom and a better life, which in turn leads to a break-up, a journey and a search for a place to build a new life. Through their stories and literary characters, works of migration literature portray a continuous process of language change, cultural encounters, establishing of new homes and integration into new societies. The development in the last few decades of an abundance of terms for this type of literature demonstrates possibly the richness and complexity of its representation of the phenomenon of migration. Professor of English, Roy Sommer discusses these terms and settles for the concept of “fiction of migration”, as is the title of his book on the topic (Sommer 2001). The most commonly used and comprehensive term is ‘migration literature’, while the term ‘multicultural literature’ points to its rendering of cultural encounters and thus being poly-voiced and diverse. The terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural literature’ in turn denote movements across borders. Other terms are ‘exile literature’, which features predominantly a double perspective, and finally ‘translingual literature’, which pertains to both linguistic and referential aspects. Much migration literature is translingual, and the concept of ‘translingual imagination’, a term coined by Steven Kellman, aka the title of his book (Kellman 2000), is according to him at the core of migration literature’s representations of integration experiences and identity negotiations. Translingual literature has existed throughout the history of literature, and in modern times was particularly prominent among the modernists of the early twentieth century, since an element of Verfremdung, a perspective from the outside, they thought, added aesthetic value. In migration narratives, the perspective from the margin is fundamental. Migrants who become writers in their new countries most often adopt the new language as their literary language, although there are illustrious

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exceptions as literary history can testify, for example Elias Canetti and W.G. Sebald. Making this linguistic choice is most often a necessity in order to find one’s place in the new national literature, but it is equally a sign of dedication to the new country and culture. Translingual writers reposition, reinvent and ultimately in their migration narratives rewrite their lives, and this process of rewriting implies identity negotiations and constructions. Writing in a second language “becomes the locus of selftranslation” and represents “ideal discursive spaces for repositioning” and for “negotiation of identity”, according to sociolinguist Aneta Pavlenko (2001: 324, 339). The writers use their second language, the language of their new countries, as their literary language, in order to write about cultural encounters as well as integration and identity formation. In Kellman’s words, much translingual literature is actually “literature of immigration” (Kellman 2000: 16). Just like Pavlenko, Kellman points to identity as a central issue in translingual literature, and in fact states that identity negotiations and identity construction make these writers “the prodigies of world literature” (Kellman 2003, ix). The concept of world literature was first formulated by Goethe. Originally, it pertained to translating and transmitting literatures across borders. This would make good literature accessible outside of the national boundaries and read worldwide. Bhabha seems to be of the same opinion as Kellman when he says that if earlier, transmission of national traditions was the major theme of world literature, today it is rather the “transnational histories of migrants [that] may be the terrains of world literature” (Bhabha 2004: 17). The contemporary narratives depict migrants crossing national, cultural and linguistic borders, representing negotiation and construction of their new national or transcultural identities. Many of these works belong to ‘world literature’, a majority of them features themes of migratory experiences, and quite a few are written by translingual writers, for example Andrei Makinë, Milan Kundera, V.S. Naipaul and Yoko Tawada. Within American literary history, there are continuous literary traditions of migration literature thematizing identity and belonging, from those writing in their own immigrant languages, to ethnic writers who strive to present themselves as fully American writers, and to contemporary writers who expose their

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bicultural and bilingual status by using code switching, for example Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez (Shell & Sollors 2000; Pavlenko 2001).

3

The Scandinavian Material and Its Historical Context

The Scandinavian contribution to the rich international tradition of literature relating to the crossing of national, cultural and linguistic borders developed from the second half of the twentieth century and onwards (Kongslien 2007, 2013). For my analysis, I have selected literary texts by four translingual Scandinavian authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, respectively. Prolific Swedish author Theodor Kallifatides, who is of Greek background, has a large production over a career of forty years with many texts pertaining to migration. Two novels, Utlänningar (1970) [Foreigners] and Det sista ljuset (1995) [The last light] feature migrant lives at two periods of Swedish immigration and of two different migrant generations. Michael Kon˚upek, a Norwegian author with a Czech background, in the novel I sin tid (1993) [In its (own) time] tells the story of a young Czech who leaves his country for a life as an exile in Norway. Swedish author Fateme Behros, with an Iranian background, in her novel Fångarnas kör (2001) [The prisoners’ choir], presents the story of a young woman who flees Iran and establishes a new life in Sweden. To fill out the Scandinavian canvas, Danish author Rubén Palma with a Chilean background in his short story collection Fra lufthavn til lufthavn (2001) [From airport to airport], features several tales of Chilean and other Latin American characters in Denmark.1 Together, these writers and texts expose the global context. They show how social or political disruptions in one part of the world affect movements of people in another part through migration processes and movements of people. All four writers have backgrounds of political conflicts and upheavals in their home countries that brought them to the Nordic shores in the first place, conflicts that featured prominently in international news at the time and now in these writers’ texts. The texts are novels and short 1

Translated into English as The Trail We Leave (2004).

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stories, that is to say fiction, not autobiographical accounts and will not be read as such. But given that the writers are migrants and refugees, and that their individual histories include migration experiences of national, cultural and linguistic encounters, their literary works may be read as textualizations and representations of such life-worlds. Therefore, short sketches of their respective backgrounds will help to better expose the texts ‘migratory energy’ (Said), how fictional representations of their migration experiences work: for Kallifatides, who migrated to Sweden in 1964, the Second World War and the Greek civil war, but even the junta years of the 1960s and 1970s, are frames of reference. For Kon˚upek, the turbulent years in what was then Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s were the direct background for his exile and move to Norway in 1977. Behros’ background as a migrant to Sweden in 1983 was the Iranian political upheavals in the last decades of the nineteen hundreds. The overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 made Palma a refugee and a migrant to Denmark in 1974. Their respective backgrounds reflected in their literary texts bring in political issues as important elements in the literary characters’ life stories. These four writers all migrated into the Scandinavian countries as grownups, and the literary language for each of them is a second language. The literature of migration and exile is today important globally, and these Nordic works are Scandinavia’s contribution to this tradition and thus belong in an international context. The novels and short stories convey how migrants establish themselves in their new societies. The texts are stories of integration and negotiation of identities, narratives that at the same time express “cosmopolitical claims” (Mani 2007: 7). These contemporary narratives show the migrants in their new societies representing negotiation and construction of their new ‘national identities’, or as it seems in the texts we will be reading, transcultural identities. In essays and introductions, many translingual and migrant writers have commented on how the migrant experience, and especially the change of language it involved, influenced and inspired their writing (de Courtivron 2003). Polish-American writer Eva Hoffman’s book from 1989 with its iconic title Lost in Translation is a point of reference

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for many writers of migration and translingual literature. Her narrative of immigration and integration into the American society, and in particular adapting to a new language that mediates the cultural and linguistic negotiations that went into this process, seems to resonate with many writers within this tradition. The same goes for her statement that the migration experience is “a powerful narrative shaper” and “a great impetus to thoughts and creativity” (Hoffman 1997: 45, 50). This seems to agree with the Scandinavian writers, which the analyses of the literary text will show. An interesting feature that expresses strong attachment to or identifications with the migrants’ new homelands are intertextual references to their canonical literature in the literary texts of all the four writers.

4

Kallifatides—Migration and Generation

When Kallifatides, in his essays and articles, comments on his language learning, he insists that he learned Swedish by reading and translating August Strindberg, the most canonical writer of Swedish literature, not by attending courses in Swedish as a second language. Additionally, a quote from Strindberg regarding ‘loving your country’ even serves as an epigram in his first novel. It seems that this writer from the outset wanted to adapt to the culture of his new country. Kallifatides has been a prolific translingual Swedish writer for more than forty years with his Greek background prominently featured in his writing. Two novels, published a generation apart and dealing with two different generations’ integration experiences are Utlänningar [Foreigners] and Det sista ljuset [The last light]. The two narratives of Swedish life with characters of migration backgrounds offer two different perspectives—those of the very young man coming to the new country to establish a new existence and of the middle-aged man looking back on a generation of life with continuous efforts of integration in Sweden, respectively. Both stories are contrapuntal. They refer consistently to the old homeland—language, culture, politics, cities, physical environment—while depicting life in the new country that constitutes the translingual Swedish discourse. There is as well another dimension present in Kallifatides’ literary production,

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namely classical Greek literature and mythology. In both his fiction and non-fiction, he often refers to this tradition—for example the oracle of Delfi and its claim ‘know thyself ’—which adds a new dimension by connecting his works to the beginning of Western literature and culture and to world literature. Characters named Odysseus, or variants of this name occur frequently; one is an old immigrant to Sweden now returning home to Athens, but no one recognizes him at the airport. His destiny parallels Homer’s Odysseus, the migrant of world literature, as he returns from Troy, thus lending depth to the contemporary theme relating to exile and identity. Kallifatides’ first novel, Utlänningar [Foreigners], portrays a young Greek’s encounter with Sweden in the early period of immigration. The novel is distinctly marked by the double perspective, thematically and structurally. Its discourse moves continuously between the contemporary Swedish life and the Greek background, together forming the plot. The narrator depicts his own and his fellow immigrants’ first couple of years in Sweden, detailing their struggles at finding their place and space in the new country, providing images of urban life in deprived living quarters and low paying jobs, that is Swedish society from the margin. A three-step pattern emerges: the protagonist first seeks shelter among his own countrymen, then expands to include immigrants from other countries, and finally even starts “flirting recklessly with the winter landscape” as a first step to integration (Kallifatides 1970: 163).2 Two emotional processes emerge, detaching oneself from the home country and attaching oneself to the new one. Such processes include concrete hardship and existential anguish, with the migrant positioned in the ‘in-between’ of two countries, cultures and languages. This is the basic migrant situation and a challenge to identity and belonging. Det sista ljuset [The last light], a novel published a quarter of a century later, the theme of migration and exile extends into featuring integration, identity formation and belonging in a larger and more complex context. The protagonist is a middle-aged man, another Odysseas [sic] who has left Greece for Sweden to avoid political oppression and to find a job to make a living, both typical migration motifs. After a quarter of a century, 2

flirta hänsynslöst med vinterlandskapet.

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he looks back and reflects on his life in Sweden, with his Greek experiences as a backdrop. Between holding a job within a mostly Swedish context and raising a family according to Greek ways and values, he enjoys a social life with fellow Greeks and other migrants, and the years go by in his new homeland Sweden. Odysseas’ story portrays how he tries to balance his rather fragmented life. In the beginning, he succeeds quite well by concentrating on being a good father and raising a ‘Greek’ son in the Swedish society, which is somewhat confusing to him, especially as the boy grows up. The motif of generational tension is quite frequent in migration literature, not least in contemporary American fiction of migration experiences that features this motif as “often embedded in bilingual and bicultural tensions” (Muller 1999: 25). When Odysseas, on New Year’s Eve looks out over the suburb of Rinkeby from his balcony, awaiting his son to appear, he reflects on how society has changed. This is presented in a way that contextualizes the protagonist’s Greek-Swedish position by linking it to recent Swedish immigration history and thus to the political world history of the twentieth and twenty-first century, when poverty and political upheavals resulted in increased migration. Not only the Greeks but also a broad spectrum of immigrant groups in Sweden experienced such upheavals and migrations. These reflections actually present a very brief history of the suburb and thus of Swedish immigration history and its background up towards the millennium: The Rinkeby square […] Until a couple of years ago, Greeks and Yugoslavs – that is what they were still called – Finns, South Americans. […] Now there were other people and other gods. The subway […] was not called the Orient Express any more, but the Safari train […] now one can introduce the name ‘The Trans-Siberian railroad’ because of all the newly arrived Russians (Kallifatides 1995: 5–6).3

3 Rinkebytorget […] Ännu för ett par år sedan bodde här greker, jugoslaver – de hette ännu så – finländare, sydamerikaner. […] Det var andra människor nu och andra gudar. Tunnelbanan […] kallades inte längre Orientexpressen utan Safaritåget […] nu kan man införa namnet ‘Den transsibiriska järnvägen’ med tanke på alla nyanlända ryssar.

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The framing of the novel with contemporary immigration history as well as world history points to a movement towards transnational and poly-voiced identity. The numerous literary characters linked to the different groups of migrants and refugees who over the years became Swedish inhabitants display a society with transcultural and multicultural identity. In their midst is Odysseas, who contemplates his twenty-five years as an immigrant with moderate success in the new country, while his son perishes in the same context. When the son realizes that he is gay, he feels crushed between the demands of the Greek background with its masculinity ideals on the one hand and the freedom of a modern Scandinavian lifestyle on the other. The son commits suicide. This threatens the father’s existence, and when both his wife and his best friend leave for Greece after the liberation in the country, he feels like nothing is left for him. He used to identify with being a good worker, a family man and good father, and a Greek. A special aspect of the Greek immigrants’ lives that for many years influenced their identity and transcultural status is their active work in exile against the fascist government in their homeland. Odysseas comes face to face with this part of the past on his urban wanderings after the disaster has happened. He walks into a photo gallery and spots a photo of his younger self in a protest march against the Greek government where the legendary Swedish Prime Minister Palme took part and by chance is featured in the same picture. For Odysseas, seeing himself with Palme make him realize that he too has been part of Swedish history and this inspires him to reclaim his Swedish identity and life when everything else has been destroyed. Odysseas’ recovery after his son’s death rests on two pillars: one is his Swedish friend and fellow worker, a social democrat by upbringing and conviction. The two men walk around in their home city of Stockholm and rediscover it, in particular all the traces of the new multicultural aspects of the Swedish society that has developed over the years because of its large immigration. The other one is realizing that he has a group of friends and acquaintances that help and sustain him. It consists of Greeks of different credentials, Hungarians, a black girl from Luanda, all of them exiles from political hotspots of trouble in contemporary history, now part of the multicultural Swedish society.

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The ending of the novel expresses some interesting choices regarding identity and belonging. The protagonist does not join his ex-wife and closest friend to go back to Greece, but ventures out of his local space and retraces his Stockholm of twenty-five years together with his Swedish friend, and reestablishes his relationship with the city. He even travels out into the Swedish countryside to reconnect with his very early days as a migrant and seems to embrace fully his identity as a ‘migrant’ Swede with a Greek background. Odysseas’ narrative represents ‘an inky life line of survival’ of a migrant life to use Chamoiseau’s term. It includes as well a generational aspect and has a historical context of contemporary migration history. In his essays, Kallifatides discusses questions regarding culture, language, identity and belonging. In the collection of essays or biographical sketches Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster [A new country outside my window] he proclaims that the important differences between languages that define a culture are only two: “Ontology and logic. What does the world look like in these languages? That is the ontological question. How is the world organized in these two languages? That is the logical question” (Kallifatides 2001: 145).4 From these two perspectives, he approaches his new country and language, and uses literary narratives to understand the Swedish world and the references, the ontology and the logic of the language. Thereby, he can negotiate his identity in the new country in a language other than the one that he had believed held “the seamless connection between words and things” (de Courtivron (2003: 1). As a translingual writer, Kallifatides now concludes that there is a positive position to be ‘in-between’ and having changed language and homeland. From such a position he has negotiated a new, bicultural or transcultural identity that even saves him from becoming a “främling”, an alien: I have not become Swedish, even though I am no longer the Greek I thought I was. I am not even a total stranger. […] There are times when I feel more naked than when I was born. […] But there are times when

4 Ontologin och logiken. Hur ser världen ut i dessa språk? Det är den ontologiska frågan. Hur är världen organiserad i dessa två språk? Det är den logiska frågan.

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I feel a profound peace for having learned to love something other than what was (originally) given to me (Kallifatides 2001: 154–155).5

The novel of Odysseas’ depicts how to find the space between two countries, languages, cultural traditions and thus negotiate and construct a new identity as a Swede, a transcultural Swede. The two discourses of the homeland and the adopted land are in continuous negotiation, part of the migrant’s double perspective and thus a contrapuntal discourse. In this way, the migration or translingual writer rewrites what it means to be Swedish or possibly new ways of being Swedish that includes to be transcultural.

5

Konupek—Freedom ˚ and Identity

Michael Kon˚upek’s novel I sin tid [In its (own) time] has the turbulent 1970s in what was then Czechoslovakia as its background. The protagonist Tomas Klapste tells the story of his flight or migration to Norway in 1977 and of his life there up to 1989, a pivotal year in the history of the divided Europe. A quest for identity was behind this decision “to migrate”, he wanted “to become myself ”, which was not possible in the Czech society at the time (Kon˚upek 1993: 20).6 He considered Norway to be the ideal place for such an endeavour, a country where freedom prevailed and “freedom according to legend has become so self-evident that you only meet empty stares when you mention the word” (Kon˚upek 1993: 20).7 This ironic or rather contradictory statement is typical of Kon˚upek’s style. The narrative has a continuous shift between Prague and Oslo, and the double perspective is the basic pattern stylistically and thematically. Culture, history, politics and the urban centres with their physical surroundings strongly colour the literary discourse that includes 5 Jag har inte blivit svensk, även om jag inte längre är den grek jag trodde att jag var. Jag är inte ens en främling till hundra procent. […] Det finns stunder då jag känner mig naknare än när jag föddes. […] Men det finns också stunder då jag känner en djup frid över att jag lärde mig älska något annat än det som var mig givet. 6 å bli meg selv. 7 friheten ifølge sagnet er blitt så selvfølgelig at du bare møter tomme blikk når du nevner ordet.

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scenes from the narrator’s childhood in the 1950s, the turbulent 1960s and oppressive 1970s. The main part of the narrative deals with life in Norway from 1977 to the watershed year of 1989, featuring identity negotiations and attempts at integration into the new society. The novel has an episodic structure with mostly a first person narrator. The childhood chapters and the concluding ones where he reflects on his integration process and state of belonging are third person narratives. When the protagonist seems to need distance to what he experiences, he includes a few other third person narrators like “the little boy”, “the martyr” and “the showman”. Features such as non-chronological structure and multiple voices are found in many migration literature texts and serve the representation of complexity and hybridity. The protagonist struggles to develop a new identity, between building a family and adapting to strange Norwegian ways of peace and contentment on the one hand and memories of his old existence of political oppression on the other. The continuous comparison of Czech and Norwegian ways throughout the text shows the protagonist negotiating his identity ‘in-between’ the two positions, a Czech position that is criticized as oppressive and at times absurd and a Norwegian one that is depicted as naïve and culturally deficient. The reason is that Norway never experienced the period of the baroque, claims the narrator. The contrapuntal discourse with the Norwegian and the Czech ‘voices’ ends with Tomas arriving at an understanding of belonging: Imagine living in Norway! And then he suddenly realizes that he, too, lives in Norway. Whenever he manages to tear himself away from the past and his dreams, something that does not happen very often, he lives in Norway. The very thought of it makes him happy (Kon˚upek 1993: 238).8

His identity is neither Czech nor Norwegian, but transcultural and ‘in-between’. His sense of belonging though seems to gradually having moved closer to his Norwegian life. 8

Tenk å leve i Norge! Og så blir han plutselig klar over at også han lever i Norge. Hver gang han klarer å rive seg løs fra fortiden og drømmene, noe som ikke skjer særlig ofte, lever han i Norge. Han blir glad ved tanken.

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Some aspects of Kon˚upek’s literary discourse seem to suggest frames of interpreting his character’s development. First, there is an intertextual reference to Norwegian literature. When the protagonist and first person narrator towards the end of the narrative tries to collect his thoughts and experiences, he says: “Everything […] experienced, suddenly demands to be put into words. Especially all the crazy bastards from the time he walked around starving for love in Kristiania” (Kon˚upek 1993: 231).9 With this intertextual cultural reference to probably the most canonical opening line of any Norwegian novel, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger: “It was the time when I walked around starving in Kristiania”,10 Kon˚upek relates his narrative to the Norwegian literary canon. What the two protagonists have in common is that they are outsiders when roaming the urban space. This is a minor element in itself but strong in its powerful literary reference and thus helps to support the construction of the narrator’s Norwegian identity. Second, a meta-reference occurs when the protagonist states that he will create a narrative of his life in order to make himself more adaptable, actually a reference to the text at hands: “A tale of exile […] Rootlessness […] & freedom, which of course is just another word for nothing left to lose” (Kon˚upek 1993: 231–232).11 The intertextual references to both classical Norwegian literature and to modern Western popular music are elements in his identity formation. The meta-perspective—for the narrator to suggest a narrative about exile—reflects back to Chamoiseau’s idea of “the inky life line of survival”, to use a narrative to express your life. This meta-perspective is made even more explicit by referring to the actual book: “Imagine that the book you are holding in your hand in five years’ time […] for example is the one I have written […] Or just a tale of freedom” (Kon˚upek 1993: 227).12 The book is a narrative of exile as well as of the search for freedom, and the protagonist, whose identity 9 Alt […] opplevd, forlanger plutselig å få tildelt sine ord. Særlig alle de crazy bastards fra den tiden da han gikk omkring og kjærlighetssultet i Kristiania. 10 Det var i den tid jeg gik omkring og sultet i Kristiania (Hamsun 1890:1). 11 En fortelling om eksilet […] Rotløshet […] & frihet, som jo er just another word for nothing left to lose. 12 Tenk deg at boken du kommer til å holde i hånden om fem år […] for eksempel er den jeg har skrevet […] Eller rett og slett en fortelling om frihet […].

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throughout is very much rooted in his ‘in-between’ position, inevitably chooses his Norwegian life and says he is “happy” to have done that.

6

Fateme Behros—A Woman Finds Her Voice

A noticeable feature in Swedish migration literature is the frequent references to the late Olof Palme (Wendelius 2002: 73–74) as already seen in Kallifatides. These references can be read as political statements that express strong approval of the new homeland. The former Prime Minister Palme who was shot to death in 1986 is featured as a symbol of the generous Swedish society, and a protector of those who seek shelter in a new homeland, like migrants and refugees do. His social democratic politics had marked the Swedish welfare state, and his international engagement in many political hotspots of the time had him perceived in many parts of the world as a guarantee for freedom and human rights. The narrator in Behros’ debut novel is deeply affected: “Someone had shot Palme. […] I had lost my protector and was now both fatherless and helpless. […] He had left me, us and Sweden, we were burdened with the same grief ” (Behros 1997: 338).13 With this reference, the literary character places herself firmly in the middle of the Swedish society, and the attachment seems to be important in her identity formation. Behros’ novel The Prisoners’ Choir [Fångarnas kör] has the same contrapuntal structure as the works by Kon˚upek and Kallifatides. The female protagonist and first person narrator Shabtab tells the story of her new life in Sweden, including integration and identity negotiations. The literary discourse is coloured by consistent references to the homeland—language, culture, family life, politics—even the paternal grandmother’s voice is included through the narrator’s frequent quotations expressing Iranian values, such as: “God loves women who obey their men” (Behros 2001: 16).14 The Iranian elements are also present 13

Någon hade skjutit Olof Palme. […] Jag hade förlorat min beskyddare och var nu både faderlös och hjälplös. […] Han hade lämnat mig, oss och Sverige, vi bar på samma sorg. 14 Gud älskar kvinnor som lyder sina män.

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through some examples of codeswitching, a feature that is quite common in translingual literature (Lennon 2010). A few words and phrases from Farsi are included in the otherwise standard Swedish text, mainly related to cultural and religious aspects. A cultural attachment in the form of an intertextual reference to Swedish literature, similar to such references in Kallifatides and Kon˚upek, is explicitly marked. In Behros’ The Prisoners’ Choir, the reference is to Vilhelm Moberg and his emigrant epic about the Swedish emigration to America in the nineteenth century. The female protagonist and first person narrator in the contemporary novel is an immigrant to Sweden in the 1980s who feels a kinship with Kristina, the emigrant from Sweden depicted by Moberg who becomes a farm wife in pioneering Minnesota in the 1850s and 1860s: “I was deeply moved by this woman’s [Kristina] experiences in a foreign country. We shared loss and longing” (Behros 2001: 341).15 The narrator identifies with a character from one of the Swedish literary canon’s most acclaimed and popular literary work from the twentieth century that deals with an important aspect of Swedish history in the nineteenth century. The text thus emphasizes that migration is a phenomenon of both the past and the present, and shows that literature can draw parallels between experiences and feelings across timespans. The protagonist and first person narrator presents her life through continuous reflections concerning everything that meets her in the new country. There are two leitmotifs running through the literary discourse that present the protagonist, ‘school’ and ‘love’, and together they constitute the plot. The motif of ‘school’ starts with introductory language courses, continuing in the steps of the Swedish educational system all the way up to teacher training. Throughout this process, Shabtab is writing school compositions that next become small stories and end with the narrator proclaiming that she is going to write a novel. This process is presented by references like “my studies”, “I devoted a lot of time to learning Swedish”, “I wrote small stories”, and finally, “I’ll write a book.”

15

Jag var djupt tagen av denna kvinnas [Kristina] upplevelser i ett främmande land. Vi delade saknad och längtan.

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[…] It will be called ‘The Prisoners’ Choir’” (Behros 2001: 338).16 The narrator depicts how to acquire the language of the new land, using it as her literary language, and thus claiming her right to it (Pavlenko 2001: 238). The meta-reference to the title of the protagonist’s planned book, a reference similar to and even more direct than in Kon˚upek’s novel, points to the power of identity construction in narratives. The first person narrator Shabtab is constructing a story in order to understand her new life as a migrant in Sweden, which illustrates Chamoiseau’s idea of “an inky life line of survival”. The other leitmotif in the novel besides ‘school’ that ends with this decision to write a book is ‘love’. The search for ‘love’ starts with an arranged marriage to a slightly older conservative Iranian man who demands that she is submissive, and so she is discouraged from entering into the Swedish society. After divorcing and then entering into a new relationship with a Swedish man, happiness is in sight. She is now considered a fallen woman though in the eyes of both her family back home and by the Iranian society in Sweden. In her new relationship, she is allowed to be an equal, which means that she also has to take on all the responsibilities of being a free and independent woman. However, without having the prerequisite for being that, the relationship fails again. Finally, there is a possibility for happiness, partly based on equal status with a younger Iranian man, but mainly since her experiences have made her more independent in her thinking. Throughout the development of the story, there are consistent comparisons between the two countries featured in discussions with her fellow Iranian and with her Swedish female friends. Everything comes together in a continuous identity negotiation and formation. Throughout the process, Shabtab evaluates and compares the lives of women in her old and new homelands. She has to reevaluate her old beliefs and former values and develop new ones within the Swedish society. This process gives Shabtab firmer ground and even makes her able to write the book about women that have been suppressed and unfree, aka the title of her book. Although the title “The Prisoners’ Choir” echoes the title of Verdi’s opera Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, 16

Jag ska skriva en bok. […] Den ska heta ‘Fångarnas kör’.

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‘slaves’ in Behros’ book seem rather to be referring to all the unfree women whose stories the narrator wants to tell. Her integration into the new society made her freer and stronger, and she is thus able to reestablish her relationship with the family back home. The meta-perspective in the protagonist’s reference to her feeling of reading a book when looking at her own life, “[a]t times, when I sat alone and contemplated my own life, it seemed to me that I was reading a book” (Behros 2001: 316),17 underlines the element of construction or creative act in her own identity formation and integration process.

7

Palma—Language and Double Perspectives

The Danish writer Rubén Palma, in an interview on the eve of the publication of his short stories in America, described his relationship to language change: [L]earning to write in Danish was a second way of discovering my host country and the mentality of the people. […] The most obvious advantage [of writing in the new/second language] is freedom. […] I have built little by little a second house on top of the existing one; a construction that needs attention and maintenance [...] and that is why I am there most of the time, writing in Danish. (Palma and Taylor 2005)

Palma touches upon several relevant issues for a migration and translingual writer in these short statements. First, learning to write in a new language means to be able to understand the country and its culture. Second, it offers you freedom, and for the exile Palma from Chile, Spanish was associated with violence and oppression. For a writer with such a background, to abandon your language could mean freedom and not loss. Third, for Palma to construct and maintain a new literary

17

Ibland när jag satt ensam och skärskådade mitt eget liv verkande det som om jag läste en bok.

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language seems to be a challenge and thus a creative impetus, to echo Hoffman. The title of Palma’s collection of short stories, Fra lufthavn til lufthavn [From airport to airport], indicates that it deals with lives on the move as in a migration process, of not belonging. The title story is anchored in the narrator’s present Danish life but set in the old homeland during a visit after two decades of absence. The story is literally about a journey from airport to airport, aka the title of the book, when the protagonist travels back to Denmark after his visit. Such a perspective from a returned migrant is found in migration and exile literature, and this special use of the ‘double perspective’ in Palma’s text strengthens the focus on identity. Waiting in the airport in Santiago to board his plane, the protagonist hears the name of an old school friend called out, and the crucial question is whether this friend was a freedom fighter or a terrorist. This makes recollections from the past all the way back to his childhood come forward and ‘interrupt’ his contemporary ‘tale’. The context is the political coup in Chile in 1973 that made the narrator a refugee and a migrant. Looking back, he tries to come to grips with the past, and he worries that everything he once was, is lost in his new life. This trip through his former life educes identity negotiations and quests for belonging. After the long trip back home and searching for an understanding of his past, he lands in the Copenhagen airport, and when looking out of the window, he states: “Beautiful sight!” (Palma 2001: 176).18 Denmark seems like home. The first story in the collection, “Santiago, sommervarmen og det hinsides” [Santiago, the Summer Heat and the Hereafter], is also set in the narrator’s old country during a visit many years after the flight. The story is framed by two statements that indicate, even in the choice of words, a change in perceptions and references: “Santiago’s cruel summer sun followed me all the way to the most enchanted place of my childhood” is the opening, and: “Had it always been this hot in Santiago?” is the ending (Palma 2001: 7, 15).19 A “cruel summer sun” does not sound 18

Smukt syn! Santiagos grusomme sommersol fulgte mig hele vejen til min barndoms fortryllende sted. […] Havde det altid været så varmt i Santiago?

19

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Scandinavian and to forget that it was hot in Santiago does not sound Chilean. This frame places the narrator in the ‘in-between’ position. The story features the returned migrant, walking in his childhood park where he had played all the time and knew every part. He finds an ‘animita’, a small altar for someone who met a sudden and violent death, a memorial that could perform miracles, much used in many Catholic countries. He cannot remember ever having seen it, although they tell him that it was always there, so he realizes that his perspective has changed. Seeing the ‘animita’ now, he first thinks that Chileans talk a lot about the soul and God, but soon realizes such thinking reflects that he has become Danish and adopted a new perspective after years of absence from his old own city. Even Palma uses, like Kon˚upek and Behros, an intertextual reference to the canonic literature of his new country to anchor his story, to H. C. Andersen, a Danish writer that definitely belongs to world literature. In a school play, a very young immigrant girl plays the role of maid to the princess that “kissed the swine herd”.20 The name of the author is not included, but any Danish child, probably even many Scandinavian children, will know that the words are from “Svinedrengen” [The Swine Herd], one of Andersen’s famous tales and definitely Danish canon. Similar to Behros and Kon˚upek, a meta-reference appears in Palma’s text in the form of the pet name “Palmita” from his school days.

8

Concluding Remarks

The literary texts by the four Scandinavian writers Kallifatides, Kon˚upek, Behros and Palma belong to the international tradition of migration literature. They are translingual writers like a majority in this tradition (Kellman 2000), and their works include intertextual references to the literature of their new homelands. Code switching often found in migration and translingual literature is used both by Behros and Palma. Two of the writers, Behros and Kon˚upek, include explicit meta-references where the texts point to the respective literary constructions. Palma does 20

[k]ysset svinedrengen…

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this as well, but more indirectly. Behros, Kon˚upek and Palma are also the ones most explicitly situating their protagonists in political contexts relating to recent world history, and Kallifatides’ later book brings in a broad context of post-war migration history. The global context is clearly featured in this contemporary Scandinavian literature. The narratives have urban settings, three of them posed between the capitals of the respective countries with Kallifatides’ characters between Stockholm and Athens, Kon˚upek’s between Oslo and Prague, and Palma’s between Copenhagen and Santiago. Behros has chosen two smaller cities, Uppsala and Tabriz, both with rich cultural and historical marks. This relates to the fact that the influx of migrants and exiles is largest into urban centres and thus makes cities multicultural and diverse. The writers have chosen urban arenas, which is the ‘cityscape’ (Appadurai 2008: 33) to depict their protagonists’ identity negotiations. Exploring the city is important for each of the protagonists in their attempts at integration and their quests for belonging. The novels and short stories from around the millennium explore the theme of migration with cultural encounters and identity negotiations. To write the stories of their experiences in the languages of the new homelands, the authors take ownership of the linguistic and cultural references of their new nations and make themselves legitimate parts. Fictional narratives, novels and short stories, present migrant characters that build new lives, explore new linguistic and cultural aspects, and negotiate and construct new identities. They provide us with new stories of what it means to be Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, respectively, thus they ‘rewrite’ (Muller 1999) what it means to be Scandinavian, or depict new ways to be Scandinavian. With the contrapuntal structure, the migration and translingual writers bring in elements from their own backgrounds—language, culture, history—to create transnational, translingual and transcultural discourses that depict ‘life lines’ or stories of our societies in the age of migration. The literary narratives in the Scandinavian languages discussed in this chapter are hybrid and transcultural, narratives of our contemporary societies. They are now also being included into the histories of literature in the respective countries. The Scandinavian migration literature compares to the international tradition of migration literature.

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References Behros, Fateme. 1997. Som ödet vill [As Fate Demands]. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Behros, Fateme. 2001. Fångarnas kör [The Prisoners’choir]. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Bhabha, Homi K. [1994] 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Chamoiseau, Patrick [1994] 1997. Chemin d’école, in English 1997 School Days. Lincoln, Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press. de Courtivron, Isabelle. 2003. Lives in Translation. Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frank, Søren. 2008. Migration and Literature. Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancolia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge. Gröndahl, Satu. 2009. Multicultural or Multilingual Literature. In Literature for Europe?, eds. Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt, Studies in Comparative Literature 61, 173–195. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Hoffman, Eva. 1989. Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin Books. Hoffman, Eva. 1997. The New Nomads. In Letters of Transit. Reflections on exile, identity, language and oss, ed. André Aciman, 35–63. New York: New York Public Library. Kallifatides, Theodor. 1970. Utlänningar [Foreigners]. Stockholm: Bonnier. Kallifatides, Theodor. 1995. Det sista ljuset [The last light]. Stockholm: Bonnier. Kallifatides, Theodor. 2001. Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster [A new land outside my window]. Stockholm: Bonnier. Kellman, Steven G. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kellman, Steven G., ed. 2003. Switching Languages. Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kongslien, Ingeborg. 2007. New Voices, New Themes, New Perspectives. Contemporary Scandinavian Multicultural Literature. Scandinavian Studies 79(2): 197–226. Kongslien, Ingeborg. 2013. The Scandinavian ‘Migrant Novel’ – A New National Narrative and a Cosmopolitical Tale. In Le roman migrant au

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Québec et en Scandinavie. Performativité, conflicts signifiants et créolisation / The Migrant Novel in Quebec and Scandinavia. Performativity, Meaningful Conflicts and Creolization, ed. Svaante Lindberg, 125–140. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang. Kon˚upek, Michael. 1993. I sin tid [In its (own) time]. Oslo: Aschehoug. Lennon, Brian 2010. In Babel’s Shadow. Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mani, B. Venkat. 2007. Cosmopolitical Claims. Turkish-German Literature from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Muller, Gilbert H. 1999. New Strangers in Paradise. The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Palma, Rubén, 2001. Fra lufthavn til lufthavn – og andre indvandrerfortællinger [From Airport to Airport – And Other Immigrant Narratives]. Højbjerg: Hovedland. Palma, Rubén. 2004. The Trail We Leave. Willimantic: Curbstone Press. Palma, Rubén and Alexander Taylor. 2005. “Exile-Immigration-LanguagesLiterature.” JP Exile Literature Interview with Alexander Taylor. Willimantic: Curbstone Press. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2001. ‘In the World of Tradition, I was Unimagined’. Negotiation of Identities in Cross-Cultural Autobiographies. International Journal of Bilingualism 5 (3): 317–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/136700690100500 30401 Said, Edward W. [1984] 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Shell, Marc, and Werner Sollors, eds. 2000. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York and London: New York University Press. Sommer, Roy. 2001. Fiction of Migration. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des Zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Grossbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Wendelius, Lars. 2002. Den dubbla identiteten. Immigrant- och minoritetslitteratur på svenska 1970–2000 [The Double Identity. Immigrant- and Minority Literature in Swedish 1970–2000]. Uppsala: Centrum för multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet.

8 “It Feels like Now This Is in Our Own Language”: Religion, Authenticity and Belonging Pia Lane

I can still hear the swell of the voices of the Laestadian preachers accompanied by rustling bags of camphor sweets, brought along to keep the children quiet through the long gatherings; or the parents in the kitchen, talking through the long hours of the evening. Their voices rose and fell, and the intonation of their Finnish language followed the same rhythm as the waves of the sea outside. This was the way we grew up, surrounded by Finnish while awake and in our dreams; yes, even the air we breathed seemed to be saturated by Finnish. A living language, a language used by the adults for everything, apart from one important thing: nobody spoke Finnish to the children. They all spoke Norwegian to us, even the older people who didn’t speak Norwegian that well. One didn’t speak Finnish to the children, for what use was there for this language? Our Finnish wasn’t ‘proper Finnish’ because it was different from the Finnish P. Lane (B) Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1_8

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language in Finland, and because we used Norwegian words. Our Finnish was a language not worth keeping, this is what the adults were brought up to believe through their encounter with the Norwegian school and Norwegianness. (Lane 2005, my translation)

This is an excerpt of a short text Min Besterfars Bibel (My Grandfather’s Bible) which I wrote reflecting on my childhood in what then was a predominantly Kven-speaking1 village, Bugøynes-Pykejä in Northern Norway. I reflected on the ambiguous attitude to Kven—it was seen as not good enough, but also the language of home, of humour and of prayers. In this chapter, I will address the role of the religious domain, in this case Laestadianism, a Lutheran-based revival movement, as an arena for language maintenance. Recently, the interrelationship between language and religion has been addressed by several researchers, frequently highlighting the role religious institutions and religious texts have played in the maintenance of minority languages. In Pykejä, the Laestadian gatherings were conducted in Kven (or Finnish, as the language was called then), and the aim of this chapter is to shed light on this arena as an important site for the maintenance of the Kven language and explore the interconnections between language and identity. I draw on interview data and participant observation as a community member and researcher, supplemented by an analysis of material objects. The chapter is structured in the following manner: I first give an overview of the emergence of Norway as a nation state and the discourse of Kven as a “danger” and “foreign”. Then short overview of research on language shift is presented, before I briefly introduce the Sociology of Language and Religion and discuss the role of Laestadianism, a Christian lay movement, in providing an arena for the maintenance of the Kven language. I then move on to analyse three short narratives of habitual or repeated events in order to explore how two Laestadian women contrast the role of Kven/Finnish and Norwegian, before I conclude by addressing the role of Laestadianism from an insider perspective and underscoring the need for further investigations of the relationship between language and religion, particularly in the context of language maintenance and shift. 1 In this chapter, I use Kven and Finnish interchangeably. From 2005, the language has been recognised as Kven.

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Historical Background

Northern parts of what today are the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish nation states have traditionally been multilingual, with several Sámi languages, Finnic languages and Scandinavian languages in contact. The area was characterised by cultural and linguistic contact, trade and seasonal migration between the inland and the coastal areas. Finnicspeaking peoples from what today is Northern Finland and Northern Sweden established permanent settlements along the coast from the seventeenth century, though the main migration occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their descendants in Norway are referred to as Kven. In the Eastern part, where Pykejä is situated, the main settlements occurred from about 1840 until after the turn of the century. The Dano-Norwegian authorities initially regarded the Kven as a positive contribution because they had skills and knowledge as the Kven were skilled foresters and farmers. When the idea of Norway as a nation state emerged during the nineteenth century, the attitude towards the northern minorities changed. They were seen as “foreign nations”, and particularly the Kven were regarded with suspicion. The borders between Norway and Finland-Russia had been drawn in 1826, and the Kven’s loyalty to the Norwegian nation became an issue of concern because Norwegian authorities feared that Finland would use the Kven as a “bridge” to claim land in the North. This was referred to as the “Finnish danger” (Eriksen and Niemi 1981). As in many other European contexts, the idea of “one nation – one language” was a key element in the Norwegian nation-building process, and in the period from 1840 to 1960, the official political goal was to “Norwegianise” the minorities in the north (Eriksen and Niemi 1981). Thus, during the nineteenth century, the image of the Kven as a national group was transformed into seeing them as foreign, and the Kven went through a period of substantial linguistic and cultural oppression. From about 1850, the Norwegian authorities implemented an official national policy aimed at Norwegianising the Sámi and Kven peoples, and assimilatory legislations and measures were introduced. An amendment to the Land Sales Act of 1902 (abolished in 1964) stated that only people who could speak Norwegian could buy land, and Norwegian farmers from the south were given

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land in the Northern areas to ensure a Norwegian presence. Initially, Sámi and Kven languages were allowed in the educational system, but only as a supportive language when “absolutely necessary”. In teaching of Christianity, some use of Kven and Sámis was allowed, because the mother tongue was seen as important for understanding and relating to the “Word of God” (Myrvoll 2011). The state church and the educational system were key tools for Norwegianising the Kven and Sámi peoples, though the church to some extent allowed the use of Kven. The state employed assimilative strategies to limit the use of minority languages in domains such as the educational system and the church, established boarding schools for Kven and Sámi children, and the state church and missionary organisations strived to bring Christianity to the North. Churches were often built in traditional Norwegian architectural styles, and church services were conducted in Norwegian. From the middle of the nineteenth century these processes intensified (Pietikäinen et al. 2010) (Fig. 1). This assimilation strategy remained the official Norwegian policy until 1959 when the Norwegian parliament allowed for Sámi (at least in principle) to be used as a language of instruction. After World War II, other oppressive laws were abolished, and from the 1970s, there was a revival of Sámi language and culture, followed by a Kven revitalisation movement starting in the 1980s. Norway recognised the Sámi as an indigenous group and has ratified the ILO convention, whereas the Kven people were granted some legal and linguistic rights according to two treaties under the auspices of the Council of Europe, namely the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Kven language was initially referred to as Kven-Finnish, but in 2005, Kven was given status as a language in its own right, and not primarily as a dialect of Finnish (Lane 2011).

2

Who Belongs in the Nation?

The view of the Kven as immigrants prevailed after the oppressive policies were abandoned. At a seminar on research on Kven history, language

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Fig. 1 Map—Bugøynes/Pykejä. Kartgrunnlag: Kartverket—Norwegian Mapping Authority (Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (© Kartverket https://www. kartverket.no/en)

and culture at the University of Tromsø in 1994, a political advisor to the Norwegian Government declared that he did “not care whether the Kven had come during the nineteenth century or the sixteenth century. The Kven were immigrants because this was what the Norwegian Government had decided” (Megard 1999: 832 ). This statement followed a presentation in which the advisor had argued that the Kven were immigrants and that their status and rights therefore were comparable to those of recent immigrant groups. Even after Norway ratified the Framework Convention and the Charter, the Kven were still described as immigrants, though they are recognised as a national minority with a historical continuous presence of more than 300 years having settled 2

My translation.

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before the borders were established. The discourse of Kven as “foreign” tells us something about what it may take to be considered as being Norwegian and shows how difficult it is to be included as “Norwegian” in public discourse, see Lane (2010) for a discussion. Issues of belonging and who has the right to belong or accept belonging are discussed in other chapters in this volume, and the role of an historical minority can shed light on the situation of migrants in the Nordic region today.

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Language Shift

Indigenous peoples and minority groups around the world share a history of marginalisation, oppression, silencing and even displacement, and stringent assimilation policies in combination with processes of modernisation and economic development have led to language shift as adults stop using their mother tongue with the next generation. Language shift has been an important analytical object for sociolinguistic and multilingualism research. Among the early works is Haugen’s (1953) influential study on how Norwegian-Americans changed from speaking Norwegian to speaking English in the course of three generations. He pointed out that social pressures in these circumstances worked in one direction only because of the difference in ascribed prestige and status between the speakers of these two languages. In other words, language shift is shown to not be caused by factors internal to language, but rather by the conditions of the socio-economic context. Thus, the analysis of language shift is an analysis of social conditions as much as it is an analysis of language. Fishman, another major researcher in the field of multilingualism, highlights the importance of language use in his definition of language shift: The basic datum of the study of language maintenance and language shift is that two linguistically distinguishable populations are in contact and that there are demonstrable consequences of this contact with respect to habitual language use. (Fishman 1964: 33)

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Fishman points out that one of the key factors for language survival is precisely whether parents choose to speak their mother tongue or the majority population’s language to their children—a choice that in turn has an impact on the transfer of a minority language from generation to generation, referred to as intergenerational language transmission (Fishman 1991). This is one of the major theses in the research of language shift and revitalisation, but is further discussed and nuanced by for instance King (2009: 14–15). She points out that we still know relatively little about intergenerational transmission as a process and further that intergenerational transmission is not everything as not all revitalisation efforts will necessarily aim to or result in restoring intergenerational transmission. The disruption of intergenerational transmission can be seen as a consequence of a choice or a series of interlinked choices speakers make, but in reality they do not always have a choice. Norway’s policies towards the Kven contributed to language shift to Norwegian (Lane 2010). In Pykejä, the choice of not passing on the Kven language to children did not happen in a vacuum and the speakers’ actions have to be understood with reference to the socio-political context, cf. Dorian’s notion of “ideology of contempt.” In a situation of language shift the two languages usually do not co-exist on an equal footing; one of the languages tends to be socially and/or politically dominant, and thus the power relations between the speakers of the national language and the minority language are not balanced. The majority language is associated with progress, modernity and mobility, the minority language with the past better left behind. Due to social pressure and implicit expectations, parents tended to choose that which they deemed best for their children, and in the Kven context, this was Norwegian, a language that was not the parents’ mother tongue, see Lane (2010) for analysis. Many minority language speakers express that they did not wish to place the same burden on their children as the one they had to carry, and therefore they chose not to speak their first language to their children. When meeting national official institutions such as the educational system, many minority language speakers experienced a position of double shame: their mother tongue was worthless, and they could only try to replace it with a foreign language they did not master. For many, the feeling of shame became internalised to such

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an extent that people did not even question the hegemonic discourses of the inferiority of languages other than the national official language (Lane 2010). Language shift is a process which pervades different scales of social organisation and historical processes, but it is at the same time a phenomenon that manifests in the everyday lives of individuals. Language shift can be examined at a macro-sociological level, as in research on how language policies are designed and implemented. Language shift can also be investigated at the level of an individual’s life-world, paying attention to their personal experiences of the language situation in question; hence, the analysis of narratives provides a useful tool for examining language shift in ways that illuminate its individual, social and also lifespan dimensions. Narratives incorporate the time aspect and privilege the experiences of individual social actors; therefore, narratives are a well-suited tool for the analysis of complex processes such as language shift. Narrative approaches have been employed to study language shift in other communities, see for instance Kulick (1992) (shift to Tok Pijin on Papua New Guinea), Makihara (2005) (Rapa Nui on Easter Island, Chile), McCarty et al. (2006) (Navajo youth counter-narratives on language shift), Golden and Lanza (2015) (Norwegian in the US), and Forsman (2015) (Swedish in Ukraine). Before moving on to the analysis of narrative data, I will briefly address the relationship between language and religion, with a particular emphasis on Laestadianism, a Christian lay movement in the northern parts of Finno-Scandinavia.

4

Language and Religion

The interrelationship between language and religion has been addressed by several scholars, including Haugen (1953) in his study of the Norwegian language in the Americas, Dorian’s investigations of Gaelic in Scotland and Ferguson’s (1982) work on religious factors in language spread. Spolsky (2004) brought forth religion, religious organisations and religious practices as an understudied area in the field of language policy, particularly “the close interactions between religion (whether beliefs or

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practices) and language policy” (p. 48). He points out that religions such as Judaism and Islam preserve earlier versions of a language for ceremonial use and sacred texts, while other religions have promoted translating holy texts, that religion and colonialism are closely connected, and that language choice can be closely linked to religion in multilingual societies. The interconnectedness of language, religion and religious practices have received more attention during the past decades, particularly because Joshua Fishman and Tope Omoniyi called for Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) as a separate field (Omoniyi and Fishman 2006), aiming for their 2006 volume to be “the first definitive text” and a first overview of the new field. Based on the contributions to the volume, four key aspects are identified: effects of religion on language, the mutuality of language and religion, effects of language on religion, and language, religion and literacy. Omoniyi (2010) edited another volume in 2010, aiming to address change, accommodation and conflict and how these concepts “characterize and define the relationships between two states of being, contexts or persons/groups”. Though, according to Omoniyi, SLR takes a macro-analytical perspective, he argues that in order to understand change, analyses of social practice, “choices made in language behaviour” and micro-level linguistic elements (p. 4) should be considered. While acknowledging the classification suggested by Omoniyi and Fishman (2006), Darquennes and Wanderbusse (2015) suggest a framework of four interrelated and partially overlapping categories: the anthropology of language and religion, meanings and other uses of religious language, the role of religion in language standardisation and language spread, and the relationship between language and religion as markers of identity. Based on my rudimentary overview of SLR, it does indeed seem like the field still is in its infancy as classifications and frameworks are grounded in categorisations of contributions to edited volumes, which might lead to important aspects still not being taken into account. One such aspect is the role of religion in language maintenance and shift which in sociolinguistic studies often is mentioned as one of the factors affecting shift and maintenance. This topic is systematically investigated in a recent volume which addresses the role religion plays in the maintenance, revival and/or shift, of languages and aims to explore the complex and dynamic relationship between religion and the

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maintenance, revival and shift (Pandharipande et al. 2020). In literature on language shift and maintenance, the role religious institutions and religious text have played in the maintenance of minority languages are mentioned. Religious domains and practices can provide arenas where there both is a need for and an opportunity to use the minority language. This type of implicit or on the ground language policy brings the interrelationship between language, religion and identity to the fore: when use of language is influenced by social factors, language may be employed by social actors to negotiate and display various aspects of social, including religious and linguistic, identity. Religion has also been used as a tool of oppression and colonialisation (see for instance Lane and Makihara 2017; Myrvoll 2011; Olsen 2008), thus greatly contributing to language shift. This was also the case in Northern Norway, where several missionary organisations strived to convert the Sámis to Christianity, and churches were built not only to bring Christianity to the region, but also to serve as cultural border fortresses against Finnish and Russian influence and potential claims on the region. In this sense, the church straddled to horses: preaching Christianity in peoples’ mother tongue was seen as essential for conversion, while at the same time the church, missionary organisations and priests were tools in the Norwegianisation process. My contribution is not primarily to the field of SLR, but an analysis of how individuals perceive language and religion in their lives as the lay religious domain in Northern Norway was an arena where multilingualism not only was tolerated but actively practiced.

4.1

Laestadianism as Reversal of Values

An important factor which has contributed to language maintenance is the Christian lay movement known as Laestadianism, a revival movement which originated during the mid-nineteenth century, originating in Karesuando, a small village on the border between Finland and Sweden. The movement is named after the Lutheran priest (and botanist) Lars Levi Laestadius who served as a priest in the Swedish Lutheran Church in the Finnish-speaking part of Sweden, where the revival movement

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started in 1845 and spread quickly, reaching Norway in 1848 (Olsen 2008). Laestadius was of Sámi background and spoke Sámi and Finnish, but preached primarily in Finnish. A vast majority of the population were members of the Lutheran State Church, official church services of the state church were conducted in Norwegian, and the church was one of the key institution in the promotion of the Norwegian nation state. Laestadianism’s main objective was a moral and spiritual revival, but it also came to the hegemony of the state church by establishing an arena where regional values, languages and beliefs were important and valorised. Finnish was the lingua franca for the movement, and Sunday afternoon gatherings were conducted in Finnish. Laestadians still attend regular Lutheran church services, and in numerous places, they make up the majority of the regular churchgoers, though they usually conduct their own religious gathering Sunday afternoons. Kristiansen (1998) describes the role of Laestadianism as a reversal of values: Norwegian values were important for the assimilation of the Kven, but Laestadianism emphasises the values of the minority group, including Kven and Sámi languages, frugality, local traditions and lay ministries; therefore, Laestadian teaching, according to Kristiansen, may be seen as an ideological resistance. A similar idea is brought to the fore by Olsen (2014) when he describes Laestadianaism as a movement with countercultural traits. Even though Laestadianism does not hold the same important position that it used to have in Pykejä, Finnish is still used when Finnish preachers come to the village and at greater reunions for the entire movement when people from Finland and Sweden participate. Thus, the Laestadian movement was an important factor for the maintenance of the Kven language, both in Pykejä and in other communities in the area. Laestadianism served as contrast to the official Lutheran state church that was used as a tool in the Norwegianisation process, though some local Lutheran priests underlined the important role of the mother tongue when preaching the Word of God (Larsen 2012). The Laestadian movement and the local prayer house are also central to belonging and identity to many in Pykejä, particularly the older generation. Today, most of the Laestadian gatherings are conducted in the

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Photo 1 Laestadian prayer house in Bugøynes/Pykejä (Photo: Lightsource Productions)

church building, but the prayer house is still maintained and looked after, and Hedvig, whose narrative is analysed later, described this building as a place of reverence tämä on ollu rakkas huone kylässä, penkit täynnä—“this was a loved house in the village, full pews” (Photo 1). Until the late 1970s, Kven was the language used in the Laestadian gatherings in Pykejä; Laestadius’s Prayer Book was read in Finnish, hymns and spiritual songs were sung in Finnish and the local men who had the authority to preach would do so in Finnish. These gatherings took place every Sunday afternoon, whereas there was a Lutheran church service conducted at the school’s “multi-purpose-room” every second Sunday. In the interviews with people from Pykejä, people do not explicitly address the choice of language of their gatherings, apart from explaining that they started using Norwegian because of a Norwegian-speaking Laestadian school teacher who joined their gatherings and brought a copy of Laestadius’ Postil in Norwegian. Rather, their comments centre on appropriate places for Laestadian worship and whether objects from their prayer house should be moved to the Lutheran church when it was built in the late 1980s. The school was not seen as an authentic place for worship as Saturday dance parties took place next door in the same building. When the church was built, through local fund-raising efforts, the Laestadian community, though using the church for their gatherings, did not want to move any objects such as an alter painting or pulpit from the prayer house, as these were seen to belong to a Laestadian setting. Thus, in Scollon and Scollon’s terms, these objects can be understood as meditational

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means, denoting Laestadian values and identities, and their authentic place would therefore be in a Laestadian location. The inherent tension between the Laestadian movement and the Lutheran state church thus resides in more than choice of language. Locally, this is frequently described by the non-Laestadians as a sign of arrogance; the church not being “good enough” for the Laestadians. However, bearing in mind the role of the state church during the Norwegianisation process, a likely explanation might be that the Laestadian prayer house denotes what Kristiansen (1998) describes as a reversal of values.

4.2

Laestadianism and Materiality

This reversal of values was also physically manifested, not only in the prayer house, but also in style of clothing, particularly for women. Men would wear suits, and women wore headscarves to cover their long hair, did not wear make-up or jewellery and wore dresses or skirts. This tradition changed in the 1970s when younger Laestadian women in Pykejä would adhere to this style of dressing on Sundays only. Dressing appropriately for Laestadian gatherings can be understood as a form of performativity (Olsen 2014) because what we chose to wear is an act of identity and in religious settings, such as a church service or Laestadian gathering, may also contribute setting the gathering apart as something more and different than our everyday lives (Photo 2). Style of dressing and material objects can be seen mediational means or cultural tools or objects that serve as visual metaphors because they evoke something beyond themselves (see Naguib, this volume, for a discussion of visual metaphors). Mediational means are semiotic tools ranging from language to material objects (Scollon and Scollon 2004) that social actors may use. Thus, objects become meditational means when social actors use them in social interaction, to display aspects of identity (Lane 2009) or for meaning-making in social life. Objects can therefore be seen as a result of action, both through physical process that created them and when social actors make use of material objects to do identity work (Norris and Makboon 2015). Norris (2004) draws

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Photo 2 Laestadian woman with hymnal in Finnish. Bugøynes-Pykejä (Photo: Pia Lane)

our attention to how objects can be seen as frozen actions because they are the material results of social actions. Thus, Laestadian material traditions, such as style of dressing, can be seen as material outcomes of social actions. Today, though the Laestadian gatherings in general are conducted in Norwegian, there is one notable exception: the hymnal is in Finnish. Hymns and religious songs have always had a strong position in the Laestadian movement, and play a central role both in Sunday gatherings and also in many private homes. The style of singing is distinctive: slow and contemplative and often without any accompanying instruments.

5

Language Shift—Narratives of Social Practice

In Pykejä, people shifted from Kven to Norwegian out of a feeling of necessity, partially as a result of the oppressive polices towards Kven, but also because Norwegian was cast as the language of modernity and prosperity. In this sense, there was an ambiguous attitude to both languages in the community. On the one hand they both had negative connotations as

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Kven was stigmatised and Norwegian was a language not mastered by the majority of the population; on the other, both had positive connotations because Norwegian was seen as the language that opened up for possibilities and progress, and Kven was hjertespråket “the language of the heart”. This latter function of the Kven language is particularly important in the religious domain, and Laestadianism clearly was a factor contributing to the maintenance of local languages. Kven was the lingua franca of the Laestadian movement; thus, the Laestadian prayer houses offered an arena not only for the use of Kven, but also a setting where Kven was valued and given status. In the religious domain, Kven was the language of authenticity, belonging and valuation of self. The narratives analysed in this chapter shed light on how individuals value their languages used in their community and how they position themselves vis-à-vis these languages. This is reflected not only in the factual content of the interviews, but also through pragmatic features, such as pauses, intonation and voice quality. In the analysis of three short narratives we will see how both the factual content and discourse features contribute to the social meaning of narratives. The data come from the Ruija-corpus,3 a collection of 119 transcribed interviews conducted in the Kven-speaking area in Northern Norway between 1964 and 2014. I will analyse excerpts from interviews with two women, Anny and Hedvig, who were born in the first part of the twentieth century, learnt Norwegian when they started school and spoke Norwegian only to their younger children. Anny was interviewed by a Finnish field assistant who knew her and spoke Kven, whereas Hedvig was interviewed by me. I have also interviewed both these women on other occasions, and this data and my knowledge of Pykejä and the Laestadian movement (I grew up in a Laestadian family) inform my analysis. Narratives told in interviews have become a central tool of data collection and analysis in a variety of disciplines within the social sciences (De Fina and Perrino 2011), but these interviews were not conducted with the goal of eliciting narratives. They were part of a larger project documenting Kven language and analysing issues such as language shift and attitudes to the standardisation of Kven. Narratives typically are stories 3

http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/about/organization/text-laboratory/projects/ruija/ruija.html.

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of past events and experiences, though time figurations in narratives can vary (De Fina 2003; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020). The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to an analysis of narratives showing how Anny and Hedvig see languages in the religious domain. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the relationship between language and religion and the role of religious domains are areas in need of further investigation, and in the following, I will address this relationship by analysing three short habitual or generic narratives. The boundary between habitual and generic stories is difficult to demarcate as both recount typical events that are repeated regularly or over a period prolonged time. Generic stories often present an absence of specific characters and represent generalised actors through the use of pronouns such as “you” or “one” rather than “I”), see Georgakopoulou (2008) for a discussion. Anny’s and Hedvig’s use of personal pronouns shift between second person (you) and first person (I, we) pronouns, they both use passive constructions where the agent is underspecified and switch between present and past tense. Therefore, in this analysis I do not distinguish between habitual and generic narratives, but rather wish to underscore the role of these narratives as describing locally situated social practices. The main part of the analysis is devoted to Excerpt 1, whereas I draw on Excerpts 2 and 3 to identify and discuss similar story-telling patterns. In the sequence prior to Excerpt 1, the interviewer posed the question mitä kieltä teillä kotona puhuttiin? —“which language(s) were spoken in your home?”. Anny talks about how her entire family spoke Finnish only in the home and what a challenge this was when they started school (note that in this chapter, Kven and Finnish are used interchangeably). She underscores that the transition to the Norwegian schools system was easier for the children who lived in the neighbourhood of the Norwegian shop owner and played with his children because they learned Norwegian before they started school. Anny, like all those born in the early 1900s, did not learn any Norwegian prior to going to school and learned Norwegian through the educational system. What follows this statement is characterised by several shifts in orientation towards the languages she talks about. Excerpt 1: Anny—to me this is my mother tongue

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1 2 3 4 5

mutta kotona praa- oli se se suo:mi↓ (.) se oli suomi ja se on soma ko se suomi

6

vieläki (.) nyt vaikka tuota (.) niin niin se tuntuu että se on (.) se on se on eri (.) että vaikka me olemma harjantunheet tähän norjan kiehlee

7

ja mutta ko sie saat kuulla

8

suomen (.) ni ko sie käyt seuroissa (.) suomalainen saarnamies joka puhhuu (.)

9

10

ni se se antaa eri vaikutuksen ja eri

11

13

tunnelman (.) nii se tuntuu että nyt se on meän omala kielelä joo nii (..) ni mie (..) [softly] se om s- minusta se on

14

äidinkieli nii.h (..) mm jo [softly]

12

201

but at home spok- was this Finnish ↓ it was Finnish and it’s strange that this Finnish still even though this (.) so so it feels like it is (.) it is different (.) but even though we are used to this Norwegian language and but when you get to hear Finnish (.) like when you go to gatherings (.) and when there is a Finnish preacher who talks (.) then this gives a different sentiment and different feeling (.) like it feels like now this is our own language yes then (..) then I (..) [softly] it is my i- to me this is mother tongue yes.h (..) mm yes [softly]

After mentioning challenges her family faced when starting school and underscoring the fortunate position of those who had learned Norwegian, Anny contrasts this with the fact that there still was Finnish spoken in the homes (line 1 in the excerpt above). The first instance of suomi is pronounced with a prolonged diphthong, marked falling intonation and a slight change in voice quality, combing to give the utterance an air of dejection or resignation. Then Anny has a meta-comment on her statement, contrasting the role of Finnish with Norwegian (lines 2–10), showing an interesting positioning vis-à-vis these two languages. Norwegian is situated as a pragmatic feature, something one is “used to” (line 6). This can be understood as reflecting the discourse of Norwegian as a necessary language and the natural unmarked choice. Anny belongs to the generation who did not speak Norwegian when they started school. The experience of starting school “without a language” has silenced many

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indigenous children, who later as adults passed the heritage of silence on to their children by using only the national language with them. Many also recall a feeling of falling short and did not want to place the same burden on their children. This type collective shame or dis-remembering can be brought about by what Connerton (2008) describes as forgetting as humiliated silence. For many, such a feeling of shortcoming and even shame can become internalised to such an extent that people do not even question the hegemonic discourses of the inferiority of languages other than the national official language (Lane 2010). As a result of this process was that Norwegian came to be seen as natural, something one had to get used to. After Line 3 there is an interesting change in positioning, as Anny switches from past to present tense (Line 4) and then starts a metalinguistic reflection by the use of the conjunction mutta “but” which initiates a sequence contrasting the role of Finnish to the role of Norwegian. This is further underscored by the use of emotion-laden words, or words that do not refer to emotions directly but instead express or elicit emotions from the interlocutors or acquire emotional connotations in discourse (Pavlenko 2008: 148). Anny recounts how it feels when a Finnish preacher gives sermons at Laestadian gatherings, stating that this gives a different sentiment and feeling, also generalising the experience by the use of the pronoun sie “you”. Interestingly, she places those who listen as receivers “you get to hear”, so this is something that is brought to you. In line 11 there is another change in positioning as Anny refers to Finnish as our own language and mother tongue, voicing this through the pronoun mie “I”. She closes her narrative by concluding that to me this is my mother tongue (Lines 13–14). Her quality of voice changes, she speaks softly and her statement is followed by two self-confirmations: nii and joo. Excerpt 2: Anny—Finnish words are more weighty 1

mutta kyllä suomenki usiastikki

2 3 4

ko mie istun kotona ni kyllä se on suomen (.) suomen ne virsikirjat usiasti (.) mie laulan

but certainly Finnish is most often when I sit at home certainly it is Finnish (.) Finnish these hymnals often (.) I sing (continued)

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(continued) 5

siittä nii (.) mm (.) jo: (..) ei se

6

(..) se se (.) se se niinko eri (.) miten

7

mie sanon met sanomma klangin (.)

8 9 10 11

mutta kuitenki että se (.) se tuntuu että se on niinko e- eri: ko sie laulat suomeksi (.) mm. se on enämpi painava (.) nii (.) s- siinä on paine

12

painavammat sanat suomen kielessä

13

että ko norjan kielessä

from then so (.) mm (.) ye:s (.) it isn’t (.) it it (.) it it like different (.) how to I say we say klang [“timbre”] (.) but still that it (.) it feels like it is like diff- different when you sing in Finnish (.) mm. it is more weighty (.) nii (.) there is more weightmore weighty words in the Finnish language than in the Norwegian language

As is the case for the first excerpt, Excerpt 2 also recounts a repetitive event with no peak in action, a feature Riessman (1993) mentions as one of the typical traits of habitual narratives. This occurred later in same interview, and Anny talks about singing at Norwegian church services and says that when it suits (referring to choosing hymns that exists in both Finnish and Norwegian), they often sing in Finnish. In a marked contrast to the past, today there are Finnish hymnals also in the Norwegian church building and some of the priests, when this interview was conducted in 2007, would select a hymn that could be sung in either language. In 2020, this is the norm and the numbers referring to the specific hymn is given for both hymnals. Anny then goes on to say that when she is at home she certainly sings in Finnish (Lines 1–4). She makes an attempt at explaining this to the interviewer, who also has a Laestadian background, and Anny’s explanations of the role of Laestadianism can also be seen as an alignment with the interviewer’s background. From Line 5, Anny starts explaining why Finnish feels different, and a number of linguistic features characterise her affective stance; there are a number of pauses, she uses the emotional verb tuntu “feels like”, and then there is a code-switch to Norwegian when she says that singing in Finnish has a different klang —“timbre” (Line 7). In line with Pavlenko’s (2008) analysis, the word klang can be seen as emotion-laden because klang is associated with pleasant musical sounds and can also be seen

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as a metaphor for sentiments evoked by the use of Finnish. Metaphors are prevalent in narratives, and may be used as a tool in the study of identity (Golden and Lanza 2013) because as pointed out by Cameron (2008: 197) metaphors can tell us something about peoples’ attitudes and values: People use metaphor to think with, to explain themselves to others, to organize their talk, and their choice of metaphor often reveals – not only their conceptualizations – but also, and perhaps more importantly for human communication, their attitudes and values.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) show how metaphors structure our perception of ourselves, the world we live in and how we relate to other people. Thus, metaphors and emotions are closely linked, and in all three excerpts presented in this chapter, emotion-laden words function as metaphors. In the second excerpt, Anny uses emotion-laden words such as klang and painava (Lines 11–13) when she states that there more weighty words in the Finnish language than in the Norwegian language. Thus, when words carry more weight, they can be seen as making a stronger impact or evoke more emotions. Metaphors for emotions are also found in the third excerpt, from an interview with Hedvig, carried out by me in 2008. Prior to this excerpt, Hedvig talks about how easy and good it feels to read the Word of God in Finnish, and she then describes the Word of God as yksinkielinen, which literally means monolingual, but in this context “the same language”. Excerpt 3: Hedvig—finnish songs are warmer 1

4

monta kerta pääsieisenä kun oon seura tuolla suomen puollella nii (.) sinne pittä kaikella muotoa päässe (.) (.) ja se (.) suomen (.).h (.) ko

5 6 7

se on enempi (.) lämmempi (…) niin ko sie eh sie: saat niinkö (…) ätinkieli on ä:itinkieli siitä ei pääsy

2 3

many times during Easter when there are gatherings there on the Finnish side then (.) one to get there by any means (.) (.) and this (.) Finnish (.).h (.) when it is more (.) warmer (…) when you eh you: get like (.) mother tongue is mo:ther tongue from t (continued)

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(continued) 8

mihenkän (.) vaikka norja tuota (.)

9

mutta suomea mieko laulan kotona (.) kyllä se on suomen lauluja (.) norjan lauluja kuiten kans mutta suomen laulut (.) antavat eri tunte- eri tunnelma.h

10 11 12

can’t get away (.) even though Norwegian that (.) but Finnish when I sing at home (.) then it is Finnish songs (.) Norwegian songs however as well but Finnish songs (.) give a different feel- different feeling.h

This excerpts starts with Hedvig talking about Laestadian Easter gatherings in Northern Finland—on the Finnish side (of the border) and that one has to get there by any means. As is the case for the stories recounted by Anny, this is also an example of a narrative about recurring events and both Anny and Hedvig use the present tense. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) show that many basic metaphors arise from correlations between co-occurring embodied experiences and mappings between conceptual domains, such that warm is associated with affection. This seems to be the case for Hedvig’s use of “warmer”, which therefore may be seen as a metaphor describing a pleasant emotion. Like Anny, she also uses metaphors and emotion-laden words to contrast Finnish with Norwegian: gives a different feeling, is more weighty, have a different timbre, is warmer. Another interesting aspect is that they both explicitly allocate a different position in their lives to Finnish than Norwegian, as Finnish is described as mother tongue.

6

Conclusion

Laestadian gatherings for many were experienced as a form of sanctuary, which provided a place for cultural continuity in a society that had been exposed to the Norwegianisation process (Paine 1988; Myrvoll 2011) and became a domain where one could maintain one’s cultural and linguistic heritage. Though I have drawn on these aspects in my analysis and presented Laestadianism as a form of counter power or opposition,

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it is important to keep in mind that from an insider perspective, Laestadianism might not be understood as a social counter power because Laestadianism places faith and the relationship between God and the individual at its core. However, perhaps precisely because of this focus on a personal relationship, minoritised languages came to be at the heart of Laestadianism. It became important to hear the Word of God and singing hymns in their mother tongue for those who entered into this close relationship with God. The closeness to God was seen as something that could be fully achieved only through one’s mother tongue. The multilingual space that Laestadianism provided supported the use of Kven. It provided a domain where languages other than Norwegian not only were allowed, but were allocated a key position, as we have seen in the narratives by Anny and Hedvig. This key position is underscored by their use of emotion-laden words and emotional metaphors. Further, the narratives analysed in this chapter shed light on how individuals value their languages that are used in their community and how they position themselves vis-à-vis these languages. During the past decade, the role of the Norwegian Lutheran Church has undergone a profound change: from being a tool for oppression, the church now is an important arena for revitalisation; sporadically church services are conducted in Kven, the hymnal now has hymns in Kven and Sámi and the liturgy used in Northern Norway has incorporated elements in Sámi. A topic for future research would be to look at the role of religious arenas in other language and culture vitalisation processes. The relationship between language and religion is an under-researched area, perhaps because sociolinguists and sociologist tend to shy away from investigating issues related to religion. However, there is a need for further investigations of the relationship between language and religion, and in particular the multifaceted relationship between religion and language maintenance, revival and shift.

7

Transcription Conventions

(.) pause ? rising intonation

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. .h

207

falling intonation in-breath

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265. I would like to thank Lightsource Productions for permission to use screenshots from the documentary movie The Secret Language.

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9 Post-script: Narratives in the Construction of the Experiences of Migrants and Transnational People Anna De Fina

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Introduction

The study of narrative is and has been at least from the beginnings of the ‘narrative turn’ (Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988) in the late 1980s and early 1990s one of the most important areas for investigating migration and migrants. Personal narratives constitute tools for constructing worlds in which people present themselves as characters and take up roles that demonstrate agency or lack of it, position others as antagonists or supporting characters also assigning them greater or lesser agency, depending on their views about who they are. Through personal stories narrators represent social relations between them and others and among collective agents, they depict power struggles and ways in which events that are central to their lives or the life of communities to which they A. De Fina (B) Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA e-mail: [email protected]

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belong unfold. These ways of presenting their identities and their realities are organized within narratives plots that capture the interest and attention of audiences that may be made up of individuals who are present in the storytelling event or absent, act as addressed or unaddressed hearers, as friends, acquaintances or strangers. Because of this ability to construct worlds populated by characters, to depict events and relations from the specific point of view of the teller and to capture the attention of audiences, narratives are regarded as a privileged window into the world views of individuals and groups and therefore are also seen as precious for the study of migrants and their quest for belonging (for an overview see De Fina and Tseng 2017). These narratives also tap into the cultures of different groups to which migrants may claim to belong, as narrators place themselves within their own communities and convey through them their beliefs, customs and ways of life, often setting them in opposition to the values of others they come in contact with during their travels or in the countries where they settle. Thus, narratives also have great significance for the investigation of intercultural issues with which migrants, as mobile people, continuously deal (De Fina 2016; Wilczewski 2019). While personal stories offer a glimpse into the perceptions, world views and struggles of individuals, public and institutional narratives such as the stories that the mass media publish on migrants, provide insights into mainstream ideologies about migration and policy choices (Leurs et al. 2020; De Cillia et al. 1999). Conversely, many narratives published on social media or told during political events demonstrate the strategies of resistance that migrants and their supporters put in place in order to push back against stereotypes and prejudices (De Fina 2021; Forkerts et al. 2020). Finally, stories told in institutional domains that are related to migration such as asylum-seeking interviews or judicial proceedings are a privileged locus for the investigation of how public policies that address the influx of migrants from different countries are operationalized in concrete circumstances (Jacquemet 2011; Maryns 2006). In all these ways the analysis of stories and of storytelling events can be seen as a research tool that is central to understanding migration as a social phenomenon and migrants as persons.

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A terminological clarification is in order here: I use the term ‘migrants’ throughout this chapter, but I am conscious of the fact that this word does not capture the diversity of the people that are qualified by it. Indeed, migrants may refer to people with very different situations: from economic to forced migrants, from refugees to asylum seekers, from descendants of immigrants to recently arrived individuals. Thus, my terminological choice is due to lack of a better general term.

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Narratives and Migration in This Volume

As can be gathered from the preceding notes, the contributors to this volume add their insights to a well-established tradition of narrative analysis within the vast and interdisciplinary field of migration studies. Indeed, like other scholars in this wide domain, the authors of the chapters collected here use narratives to shed light on the presentation and negotiation of identities and senses of belonging by different kinds of migrants who left their countries in search of better economic and or social conditions and on the representation of migration by institutions and public discourses. Authors in this volume share a common approach to identity on the one hand and to narratives on the other. In terms of identities, all contributors subscribe to a social constructionist view (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina 2015) which is by now amply accepted among discourse analysts and social scientists more in general. In line with this orientation, all contributors see identity as socially constructed within specific semiotic practices, as plural and often, especially in the case of the people investigated here, hybrid, emergent and negotiated. Thus, in none of these chapters there is an assumption that the identities presented by migrants in their narratives are the expression of their pure or innermost self, of a stable and persistent identity. On the contrary, all authors analyse how such representations are deployed in specific storytelling practices, within specific circumstances and in negotiation with interlocutors. Consequently, they also embrace an approach to storytelling as practice (see De Fina 2020; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012), in the sense that the contexts in which stories emerge are not only not

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ignored, but often also constitute points of reference to carry out the analysis. This means that for example, in chapters based on interactive storytelling, interlocutors’ positions are analysed and the circumstances in which the stories are told are made explicit. Other elements of context that are taken into account in all chapters are the semiotic practices in which stories are embedded, the ideologies and shared values that emerge at different scales, the historical circumstances that led to certain semiotic configurations and frames. These are other ways in which the work of the contributors to this volume aligns with the general shift in narrative analysis from the study of narratives as texts to the study of narratives as practices. In this postscript I want to offer a comment on the contributions here collected to narrative analysis and more in general to the sociolinguistic study of migration. My chapter is organized as follows: In the first section I highlight the elements of novelty of this volume and some of the ways in which these chapters add to and advance current theorizations and methodologies in the field. In the following section I comment in a more detailed fashion on the different contributions in the light of some thematic threads that run through different chapters: that is, the relationships between narrative and truth, the expression and regulation of belonging, the role of space time configuration in narratives that stem from experiences of mobility and the function of objects in narrative.

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What’s New

In the preceding section I have underscored the many ways in which the work presented here ties in with existing research on narratives and migration and narratives and identities. However, there are aspects of this work that present elements of novelty and anticipate or follow very recent trends in narrative analysis. The first element of novelty is of course, the ‘Nordic’ slant. This book brings together the analysis of different stories, all of which have in common the fact of having been told in or of relating in some way or other to the so-called ‘Nordic’ European countries: Norway, Sweden,

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Denmark, Finland. Chapters deal with Nordic literary writers and traditions, interviews with migrants to these countries, artistic projects carried out there. As noted by the editors in their introduction, the Nordic countries represent a particularly interesting vantage point to observe ideologies and practices that surround migration phenomena. Indeed, according to Dahl et al. (2021: 216) ‘the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) have many similarities, for example, they share welfare states, with active labour market policies, and a universal approach to the delivery and financing of benefits and services’. The latter creates an expectation of openness and liberalism in the reception of migrants. And yet debates about migration rage in these countries as well since the number of international migrants has increased by 60% since 1990 (Pyrhönen et al. 2017) even though not in equal proportion for each of them. Recent research demonstrates that different attitudes are expressed in these countries towards migrants. In a study of press articles devoted to this theme in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Hovden and Mjelde (2019) show for example that the Swedish press conveys the most negative reactions, the Danish press the most positive and the Norwegian press sits in between these two poles. Thus, although the Nordic countries are often seen as a block, they are in fact distinct in the way they deal with migration. The studies collected in this volume offer a unique glimpse into the personal, collective and institutional processes that surround migration in countries that have the most advanced welfare state systems and that do not have a long history of migration from the Global South and this way they provide a new angle on processes and identities that have not been studied before. Another element of novelty in this volume is its interdisciplinary inspiration. Recent years have seen in both narrative studies and discourse analysis more in general a trend towards breaking up barriers between approaches within the field. Scholars in different areas of discourse have started to combine qualitative with quantitative methodologies, for example using corpus linguistics and discourse analysis together, or different methodologies such as conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020). Narrative analysts have done the same, for example by using classical narrative analysis methods together with the investigation of linguistic landscapes

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(Lou 2010) or with multimodal discourse analysis (Bateman and Wildfeuer 2014; Giaxoglou 2020). This volume goes beyond the breaking of boundaries within the field, by showing the promise of bringing insights from different areas of knowledge to the investigation of the ways in which narratives are used to convey and construct identities. Indeed, the contributors to this volume use theoretical and methodological approaches that come from a variety of fields including museum studies, literary inquiry, cultural and postcolonial studies and sociolinguistics in order to bring to light the many ways in which people and institutions narrate migration and delimit identities. The result is a broad kaleidoscope on the phenomenon, a rich panoramic view that could not have emerged from within the confines of a single discipline. A third valuable contribution of this volume is that it touches upon some of the topics that are most central not only to narrative analysis, but also to current sociolinguistic approaches to migration issues. Among them are the related issues of the challenges and chances offered by mobility, the role of borders in delimiting rights to belonging and the changing definitions of citizenship. Indeed, sociolinguistics in the last twenty years has been defined by its focus on mobility. Both the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) and the superdiversity movement (Arnault et al. 2016; Blommaert and Rampton 2011)—most likely the most influential trends in the field—put mobility at the centre of their agenda. By recognizing the importance of this phenomenon, scholars in this area rejected received notions about the stability of relationships between social categories, languages and communities seen as defined in territorial terms, and devoted growing attention to virtual and disembodied communication, to the constitution of different kinds of transnational communities, to the shifting and complex definition and negotiation of hybrid sociolinguistic identities, and to the many ways in which communicative practices are shaped by the possibilities and affordances offered by the technological revolution. Migrants are not seen any longer simply as people who move from one place to the other, but rather as transnational individuals with a variety of attachments, connected through both physical and virtual networks and therefore involved in complex practices and belongings. However, this tendency towards mobility has also raised concerns about the possibility

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of glorifying this construct without seeing its more negative effects. The anthropologist Salazar raised this point declaring that there is a risk of understanding mobility merely as movement that, in his words: generates positive change, often conceived of as an improvement for oneself and one’s kin (e. g., in the case of migrants) or for nonrelated others (e.g., in the case of ngo workers). (2018: 154)

Recent research in sociolinguistics has started to redress this trend by pointing to the interrelations of mobilities and immobilities and to the power laden processes and struggles that surround migration (see De Fina and Mazzaferro 2021). Such a view implies that mobilities and immobilities are linked together not only in the sense that the possibility of movement for some involves stasis and stagnation for others, but also in the sense that mobile people experience long periods in which they are physically or socially stuck and that the apparent openness of geographical and virtual movement hides in reality a variety of monitoring processes, regulations and the continuous setting of obstacles to free displacement and social advancement. Such bordering processes have also turned into the object of much sociolinguistic and migration research as it has become more and more clear that the increased influx of migrants from the Global South to the Global North has provoked the constant setting of new restrictions to the acquisition of citizenship and the definition of who belongs in the nation. As noted by Sabaté-Dalmau (2021) ‘newer ICT-mediated “mobility regimes” (Deumert 2019: 236) have emerged that regulate cross-border mobility by limiting and directing people’s freedom of movement’, and this goes together with increasing securitization of frontiers and the construction of physical walls. This dialectics between mobility and immobility with its consequences on people’s lives and perceptions is, in my opinion, clearly highlighted in some of the contributions to the volume that recognize this dynamics within different phenomena related to migration, such as the ambiguities in migrants’ sense of selves, the difficulties of breaking barriers for migrants in their quest for social and economic ascent, the increasing intolerance in the language policies

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implemented by governments. Contributors bring to light these shortcomings of mobility together with an underscoring of the possibilities and chances that open up at the same time. A final point that I want to make in stressing the novelty of this collection of papers is in the variety of environments from which authors derive their data and of the methodologies that they employ. Contributors offer analyses of data embedded in different kinds of social practices: from the institutional domain of the asylum seeking or the job seeking interview, to the public sphere of museum exhibitions and the creation of monuments, from liturgical assemblies to the telling of stories within research interviews, to the fictional worlds created in novels. Being able to survey storytelling among migrants or about migrants in all these environments gives us not only a sense of the richness and importance of narrative as social practice, but also provides a variety of perspectives from which to learn about issues that are important for migrants and therefore can provide insights for further research and for concrete steps in policymaking. Authors also demonstrate that the analysis of narratives can benefit from the tools offered by different disciplines, from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic constructs such as positioning and chronotopes (adopted from Bakhtin 1981), to concepts like visual metaphors coming from psychology and cognitive sciences, to notions of space and place from social geography and ideas about translingual writing and belonging stemming from literary and cultural studies. This varied toolkit also underscores the possibilities that research on narrative offers to our understanding of migration and migrants. In the next section of this postscript I will tease out some of the themes that run through the different chapters and that are relevant to the investigation of the nexus between storytelling, identities and migration. In particular, I will focus on telling rights and the relationships between narrative and truth, the expression and regulation of belonging, the role of space time configurations in narratives that stem from experiences of mobility, the role of objects and materialities in narratives.

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Narratives and Belonging in Spaces and Places

The question of who has the right to tell a story is one of the most interesting, but also, probably one of the most neglected in studies of narrative. Amy Shuman (1986) was one of the first scholars to point to its importance in her ethnography of storytelling practices among adolescent girls at an inner city school in the US. She related the right to tell a story to sets of rules continuously posed but also constantly contested by the girls constituting one of the school’s communities. The telling of stories was highly constrained by social rules that determined who could tell about whom and in what circumstances. The concept of telling rights is central to an understanding of narratives as shaped by and shaping social practices and throws light on issues of social justice and equal opportunities. The question is implicitly or explicitly at the centre of the chapters by Kjelsvik, Myhr and Naguib. Both Kjelsvik’s and Myhr’s chapters deal with stories told by asylum seekers, where the narrator is a migrant caught in the bureaucratic net of asylum procedures. In the latter case the narrator is a woman who having seen her request for asylum rejected decides to write her own account of her life. Studies of storytelling in the case of asylum-seeking interviews (Maryns 2006; Jacquemet 2005) agree on the fact that migrants are granted no effective right to tell, but basically only the right to respond. Indeed, they have to mould their stories to fit the requirements of immigration authorities who decide not only what counts as an acceptable story in terms of content, but also what kinds of story genres are to be produced by the interviewees. In her chapter Kjelsvik demonstrates how the use of the generic narrative, which allows Saïdou to claim that violence by armed police is endemic to the area where he lived, runs counter to the requirement of particularity and uniqueness of the story posed by the authorities, which would be best satisfied by a Labovian canonical narrative of personal experience. On the other hand, Kjelsvik also shows that Saïdou makes a second mistake in the kind of identity that he chooses to position himself as a character in the story world: that of the orphaned individual who has lost the protection of his family. Such identity, which is central to his character, has no relevance for the authorities, and in fact

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is very likely one of the factors leading to the rejection of his request for asylum. Myhr’s chapter deals with the other side of the coin in terms of the right to tell for asylum seekers, as she presents the case of Maria Amelie’s autobiographical account story Illegally Norwegian, through which the writer decides to grab her telling rights at the risk of losing everything. In Myhr’s words In publishing her autobiography, Amelie took control over her story in a way that she would not be able to do in an asylum interview. The appeal and the conscious use of different names for different purposes or audiences, profiles her book as a strategical alternative to the asylum interview she risked not being invited to. (p. 59)

And indeed, through the writing of this story Amelie managed to stay in Norway. In this situation then, taking possession of one’s telling rights means also taking control over one’s destiny in a way that is precluded to migrants who stay within the limits imposed by the system. Naguib’s chapter illustrates yet another facet of the question of telling right by examining the case of different exhibitions organized in five Scandinavian museums of cultural history during the first two decades of this millennium. Naguib discusses how these exhibitions respond to policy guidelines requiring that migration be presented under specific ideological angles which evolve in time, for example the ‘participatory’ angle or the view of migration as ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’. This chapter illustrates how by acquiring telling rights museums are granted the ability to shape the stories of migrations and migrant groups according to ideological agendas operating at higher scales. While this illustrates a growing awareness by influential agents of the impact of migration, it also implies that the way these identities and processes are presented is curated in a top-down fashion and does not stem from the protagonists’ voices. Another important theme that emerges in the chapters that I have reviewed up to now is the question of the relationship between storytelling and truth, between story worlds and the world outside them. This

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is a fundamental and vexing question that forever preoccupies and preoccupied narrative analysists. Indeed, social constructionist approaches to narrative have put great emphasis on the fact that stories are the product of narrators’ emplotment of their experiences rather than mirrors of external realities. But this emphasis presents the risk of denying the existence of any objective reality outside the story that gets told. Susan Davis presents this problem in opposing the attitude of folklorists who pay exclusive attention to how stories are told to that of historians, who focus primarily on historical data. According to this author: Anyone who holds that it is possible and important to be able to say something about ‘what happened’ has to spend time thinking about the relationship between the nature of storytelling and our knowledge of ‘what happened.’ And we do have to take seriously the problem of the relationship between the passing of time between events and their narration (1998: 1)

The problem of what happened is, as discussed in Kjelsvik’s chapter, central to asylum-seeking narratives as what is at stake is the credibility of the narrator and their perceived ability to ‘tell it as it was’, but it is also central to the way experience is presented in literary writing. In her chapter, Myhr compares Amelie’s autobiographical account, based on her own experience, to the novel Venerin volos by the Russian-Swiss author Mikhail Shishkin, in which interviews with asylum seekers are to a certain extent fictionalized. The author discusses how even a novelistic version of ‘what happened’ can contribute to give a sense of the kinds of conditions in which asylum seekers narratives are told and of the institutional obstacles that they encounter in their attempts to acquire the right to stay in a country. Finally, in Naguib’s chapter, the reality of the curation of the stories that museums tell about migration also poses the problem of the extent to which the former are accurate depictions of what happened. The analyses presented in these three chapters contribute to problematizing the relationships between story worlds and worlds of experience, showing that while the existence of actual events cannot be denied, their telling is always filtered through personal and institutional needs and always shaped by the contexts in which it happens.

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Another theme that emerges in different contributions is the expression and regulation of belonging, which is at the core of identity construction. Issues related to the construction of identities are particularly central to the chapters by Pájaro, Golden and Lanza, Kongslien, and Lane. The contributors look at different aspects of identity and belonging. Pájaro and Lane investigate the struggles that stem from the imposition of identities, while Golden and Lanza and Kongslien focus on ways in which narrators convey and negotiate identities in their own terms. In Pájaro’s chapter the analysis of categories of belonging used in narratives about job interviews illuminates the processes of exclusion and covert discrimination at play during such events. Indeed, narrators voice the labels used by their employers during their interviews, labels through which they are categorized as ‘strangers’ and described in stereotypical ways, and contest them in order to articulate their resistance to prejudice and their right to a fair assessment of their abilities. Pájaro notes how these narratives about interviews are central to understanding the professional experiences of migrants since getting a job is one of the most important goals for migrants to settle in Norway. The analysis demonstrates the emotional involvement that surrounds job interviews and, more in general, power laden relationships between locals and migrants. Pájaro illustrates how employers still categorize migrants through systems of labels that have nothing to do with their professional experiences. The chapter throws light on the one hand on the deviant nature of the claims that make a direct connection between acquiring the language of the country of migration and making progress in the job market and on the other hand on the still very unequal and unjust conditions in which migrants find themselves during gate keeping interviews. In her chapter, Lane devotes her attention to the struggles over belonging that are revealed in narratives about religious practices by speakers of the minority language, Kven. Lane discusses how members of this community have been denied their right to belong to the nation through the marginalization of their language. Such exclusion has resulted not only in language loss but also in the forced detachment of speakers from their ethnic identity. And yet, Lane is able to show, through a close analysis of linguistic items and emotional keys in

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their narratives, how women still express a strong sense of belonging to their customs and ethnic identity in talking about their participation in liturgical events. The chapters by Golden & Lanza and Kongslien deal with a different kind of identity process, the struggles of narrators to define themselves as transnational individuals and members of different communities. In line with much recent sociolinguistic work on migration (see, for example, Horner and Dailey-O’Cain 2019), the authors of these contributions embrace a view of belonging as multiple and contradictory and pay attention to hybridity, a concept that as noted by Iyall Smith (2008: 5) ‘encompasses partial identities, multiple roles and pluralistic selves’. Hybridity is central to Kongslien’s analysis of ways in which literary authors who migrated to Scandinavian countries from various migrant backgrounds transform their experiences as border crossers into fictional narratives. Borrowing Edward Said’s notion of the contrapuntal, Kongslien shows the many ways in which these writers convey their ‘awareness of simultaneous dimensions’ in their identities and the constant presence of different points of reference in their writings. Kongslien describes the storytelling process through which migrant writers go when producing their works as central to the reinvention, repositioning and negotiation of their identities. In that sense, literary narratives reveal their similarities with everyday stories in that the latter are also a privileged locus for identity work. However, Kongslien’s analysis underscores that there are peculiarities stemming from narrating real or fictional lives for people who have gone through different cultures, times and spaces and need to find an equilibrium between past and present, place of origin and new home countries. The works of Kallifatides, Kon˚upek and Behros, all illustrate the presence of these conflicts through the positioning of characters and their actions and the evoking of cultural constructs and metaphors. But Kongslien, like Lane, also shows the important role that language use, language choice and styles play in this positioning, with the new home language and the literary styles of local writers often playing the role of affording migrant writers the possibility of constructing and negotiating new hybrid identities. The theme of identity negotiation by migrants is central to Golden & Lanza’s chapter on the narratives told by a professional woman who

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migrated to Sweden and then to Norway in focus group interviews. Their contribution focuses on the analysis of the metaphors used by this woman to depict her experiences but it also introduces a theme which emerges as a relevant thread connecting it to other chapters as well: the role of space and time in the storytelling and in identity processes. In this respect, Golden and Lanza connect to a trend that started in narrative studies in the early 2000s and has been gaining momentum in recent years due to the growing attention that sociolinguists are paying to issues of mobility. Scholars that took this approach underlined the constitutive role of space together with time as an organizing principle in narrative (see Baynham and De Fina, 2005; De Fina 2003). In recent times, such realization has led to increasing interest in the construction of identities within chronotopes as frames defined by the convergence of spatio-temporal coordinates that connect to specific identities (see Bakhtin 1986; Blommaert and De Fina 2017; Perrino 2005). In line with this tradition Golden and Lanza show that the woman they interviewed relates her identities to specific geographical spaces and its transformations to movements in space as well. She explicitly refers to the role that crossing spaces and the passing of time has played in the way she has been understanding her identity as a professional and as an individual more in general. Golden and Lanza demonstrate the importance of space/time connections in the metaphors that the narrator uses and in the kinds of chronotopes that she evokes in order to place her identities. The significance of space in the construction and negotiation of identities is also an important theme in Lane’s chapter, as she deals with connections between religion and identity among Kven speakers in Norway. In her analysis, the narratives that women tell about their use of Kven are firmly rooted in specific spaces defined by the performance of traditions: the home and the church emerge as landmarks in those narratives and discourses. Space is also at the centre of Naguibs’ chapter on visual metaphors of migration in Scandinavian museums. Naguib illustrates how the narratives that museums tell about migration are organized around the notion of the journey, which then implies an identity as travellers for migrants. And spaces also figure prominently in the analysis of the fictional works by Kallifatides, Kon˚upek and Behros that we saw in Kongslien’s chapter, as these writers use the movement of their

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characters in different spaces as a metaphor of their relationship with the cultures that generated them. Spaces contain objects and this takes me to the last thread that runs through different chapters in this volume. The recognition of the mediating role of objects in the production of discourse is at the heart of nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), an approach to discourse that stresses its embedding in social practices and complements some of the ideas about space as also socially constituted (de Certeau 1984) as discussed above. Although these ideas about communication as mediated have become more and more influential in sociolinguistics, they have not drawn much attention in narrative studies. Both Lane and Naguib fill this gap by showing how objects are central to storytelling as well. Lane points to the presence and use of objects considered sacred in Laestadian liturgy. Such objects, which, as noted by the author, function as ‘frozen actions’ are evoked in the narratives. In this regard for example, the ‘hymnal’ in Anny’s narrative has the power of conveying all her emotion in singing in her own language. Objects are constitutive of the narratives told by museums about migration as shown by Naguib in her chapter. Indeed, Naguib illustrates the ways in which ‘a range of heterogeneous objects may be understood as visual metaphors in exhibitions about migration’ (p. X). Objects like suitcases, identity papers and travel documents evoke nostalgic images of leaving one’s country, while personal objects help build individual migrants autobiographies. These chapters illustrate how objects can be used in storytelling worlds as means to emplot events and index identities and in storyworlds as metaphors for feelings and ideas. To sum up some of the arguments developed in this postscript: the contributions collected in this volume present a rich kaleidoscope through which the experiences of migrants can be understood. Through the lens of the Nordic case, they look at different ways in which identities are constructed, ascribed and contested in storytelling in a variety of institutional, public and personal environments. They point to important tools that narrators use in their meaning making practices: from time/space connections, to metaphors, to material objects, and to the constituting role of contexts at different scales, from national policies about languages or regulations about migration flows to more local

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processes of inclusion and exclusion. They show how these contexts shape and at the same time are shaped by the stories that people and institutions tell. By underscoring the complex attachments and the multifaceted identities that migrants embrace at different times and in different spaces and the ways in which these are subject to, but can also alter, power relations these chapters problematize binary views about migrants as either integrated or marginalized, pushing us to think about them as people that go through life with backpacks full of stuff that come from their encounters with different worlds. Finally, by offering these analyses from the perspective of migrants and migration processes to Nordic countries they point to important connections between the analysis of stories and the study of the dynamics between the Global North and South.

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Index

A

Account 4, 14, 17, 20, 29, 30, 37, 41, 45, 48, 57, 95, 112, 114, 118, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130, 166, 214, 219–221 Agency 20, 36, 39, 41, 102, 111, 112, 115, 121, 130, 211 Analysis 19, 21, 30, 56, 57, 88, 115, 199, 212, 214, 215, 222, 224, 226 conversation analysis 113, 115–117, 130, 215 narrative analysis 14, 16, 19, 112, 114, 116, 130, 192, 200, 213, 214, 216, 218 Animator 74, 75, 122 Appropriation 65 Arrival 21, 31–33, 39, 138, 156

Author 15, 56, 57, 63, 72, 74, 113, 117, 121, 129, 162, 180, 181, 213, 218, 223, 225 historical author 56, 57, 59, 70, 75 implied author 74 Autobiography 19, 55–62, 76, 117, 220

B

Becoming 5, 11, 57, 58 Belonging 1–3, 5, 8–10, 12, 13, 21, 22, 42, 44, 129, 143, 145, 152, 164, 168, 171, 173, 179, 181, 190, 195, 199, 212–214, 216, 218, 219, 222, 223 Bicultural 165, 171 branding 58

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Lane et al. (eds.), Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89109-1

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232

Index

C

Career 63, 165 Categorization 13, 19, 20, 86, 89, 92, 93, 98, 102, 103, 115, 127, 130 Category bound activity 87, 89, 103 Chronotopes/chronotopic identities 14–16, 128, 129, 218, 224 Co-construction 95, 130 Code switching 165, 180 Communicative practice 216 Constructed dialogue 35, 36, 40, 91, 92, 94, 97, 102, 106 Context 7, 9–11, 14, 16, 19, 57, 60, 74, 77, 84, 86, 87, 95–98, 101, 102, 104, 115, 128, 130, 144, 147, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 179, 181, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 204, 213, 214, 221, 225 Contrapuntal discourse 172, 173 Cosmopolitanism everyday cosmopolitanism 138, 145, 149–152, 156, 158, 220 Credibility 33, 34, 44, 49, 60, 70, 221 Cultural encounters 161–164, 181 Cultural values 128 Culture 3, 4, 7, 10–12, 19, 21, 22, 55, 67, 73, 75, 76, 92, 95, 99, 104, 117, 119, 120, 122, 126, 129, 130, 145, 149–151, 156, 162, 164, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 178, 181, 188, 189, 206, 212, 223, 225

Discourse 15, 91, 95, 112, 115, 116, 121, 124, 128–130, 162, 168, 172, 199, 202, 224 Dislocation 162

E

Emergence 12, 20, 113, 116, 119, 128, 186 émigré 64 Emotion/emotional 16, 44, 69, 139, 140, 143, 156, 163, 168, 202–205, 222, 225 Emplotment 16, 221 Exhibition 8, 10, 18, 20, 137–140, 142–144, 146–149, 152, 155–158, 218, 220, 225 Exile 64, 139, 140, 151, 161, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 174, 178, 179, 181

F

Fiction 3, 10, 56, 58, 63, 70, 76, 166, 168 Frozen action 198, 225

G

Gatekeeping/gate-keeping 9, 18, 84, 85, 98, 222 Genre 3, 9, 19, 29–31, 46, 49, 50, 55, 56, 62, 63, 68, 70, 94, 117, 128, 219 institutional genre 19, 41, 50

D

H

Departure 11, 21, 138, 156, 162

Heritage 105, 156, 202, 205

Index

Human rights 62–64, 155, 175 Hybridity 7, 21, 173, 223

I

Identity bureaucratic identity 42, 49 cultural identity 12, 18, 127 emergent identity 213 hybrid identity 213 identity construction 113, 115, 129, 222 identity negotiation 2, 16, 18, 19, 161, 163, 164, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 223 identity presentation 213 juridical identity 9 locally situated identity 200 personal identity 42, 50, 112, 113, 122, 127 professional identity 85, 95, 112, 113, 122, 127 social constructionist view of identity 7 stable identity 58 Ideology 20, 105, 129 Immersion/transportation 69 Immobility 217 In-between 146, 157, 168, 171, 173, 175, 180 Indexicality/indexical processes/indexicality strategies 37, 102, 114, 116, 124, 130 Integration 2, 4, 12, 22, 73, 141, 149, 163, 164, 166–168, 173, 175, 178, 181 Intention 56–58, 63 Interaction 2, 3, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 40, 50, 57, 63, 87, 89, 98,

233

102, 112–119, 126, 128, 130, 150, 192, 197 Interactional sociolinguistics 85, 115 Intercultural 7, 158, 212 Interdisciplinary 1–3, 7, 14, 17, 21, 213, 215 Intertextual 14, 19, 29, 31, 49, 50, 167, 174, 176, 180 J

Job interview 8, 18, 19, 83–90, 93–97, 99, 101–104, 222 K

Kven 5, 7, 13, 21, 186–189, 191, 195, 196, 198–200, 206, 222, 224 L

Laestadianism 186, 192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 203, 205, 206 Language and work 190, 192 English language 190 intergenerational language transmission 191 language maintenance 190, 193, 194, 206 language shift 190–192, 198, 199 second language 178 sociology of language and religion 186, 193 Spanish Language 178 Latinx 88, 89, 92, 95 Life-world/lifeworld 67, 166, 192 Linguistic landscape 215 Linguistic penalty 86, 99, 103, 105

234

Index

M

Marginalization 222 Materiality 2, 20, 153, 156, 197 Mediational means 197 Membership categorization 87, 97 Metaphor 18, 20, 126, 127, 139, 143, 149, 151, 153, 204–206, 223–225 visual metaphor 20, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 149, 156–158, 197 Migrant 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15–21, 72, 83–87, 98, 99, 101, 105, 111, 112, 116, 117, 121, 127, 128, 130, 131, 138, 140, 142, 145, 147, 153, 156, 161–163, 165–167, 169–171, 175, 177, 179–181, 190, 211–213, 215, 217–220, 222, 223, 225, 226 economic migrant 138 forced migrant 213 undocumented migrant 55, 57, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71 Migration 1, 4–6, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 64, 84, 87, 112, 113, 117–119, 122, 126, 129, 130, 137–140, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 155–158, 162, 165, 166, 172, 178, 179, 181, 187, 211–218, 220–225 Migration literature 2, 15, 21, 64, 161–164, 169, 173, 175, 180, 181 Minority, minorities 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 86, 140, 186–188, 190, 191, 194, 195, 222 cultural minority, minorities 8 linguistic minority, minorities 187 national minority, minorities 189

Mobility 112, 191, 214, 216–218, 224 Multimodal, multimodality 216 Museum 2, 4, 8, 9, 17, 20, 137–140, 144, 146, 147, 153–155, 157, 158, 221, 224, 225

N

Narration 8, 10, 15, 19, 30, 33, 34, 38, 49, 57, 63, 91, 221 free narration 66, 67 Narrative 225 autobiographical narrative 140 generic narrative 17, 30, 36, 38, 45, 50, 200, 219 habitual narrative 186, 200, 203 hegemonic narrative 38 home narrative 37, 39, 43, 48, 50 institutional narrative 212 narrative analysis 213–216 narrative fallacy 66–69, 74 narrative turn 211 public narrative 212 self-experienced narrative 96, 174, 191 the well constructed narrative 68 Narrator 17, 19, 20, 38, 56, 59, 62, 63, 70, 91, 92, 95, 115, 122, 129, 168, 173–176, 178–180, 211, 212, 219, 221–225 Nordic 2–6, 21, 127, 165, 166, 190, 214, 215, 226

O

Outsider 8, 64, 88, 174

Index

P

Partialness 116 Place 8, 16, 21, 32, 38, 41, 43, 74, 84, 85, 120, 121, 126–128, 131, 137, 138, 141, 157, 163, 164, 168, 196, 219, 223 Poly-voiced 163, 170 Positioning/positionality 16, 34, 35, 41, 45, 46, 57, 87, 89, 111, 112, 115–117, 119, 121, 125, 130, 137, 201, 202, 218, 223 Power 7, 9, 10, 12, 67, 111, 115, 144, 191, 205, 211, 217, 225, 226 Prejudice 157, 158, 212, 222 Principal 73, 74, 122

R

Refugee 5, 12, 34, 40, 41, 64, 70, 85, 113, 117, 131, 138, 142, 166, 170, 175, 179, 213 Relationality 8, 116 Religion 13, 21, 64, 146, 147, 186, 192–194, 200, 206, 224 Religious practices 192, 193, 222 Relocation 120, 147, 162 Reported speech 91, 93, 115, 120, 121, 125, 126 Return 38, 45, 58, 64, 72, 73, 119, 125, 130, 138, 151 Revitalisation 188, 191, 206

S

Scale 77, 114, 115, 121, 122, 128, 192, 214, 220, 225 Settling down 21, 138, 140, 145, 153, 154, 156

235

Silence 106, 202 Social action 16, 198 Space 10, 12, 16, 20, 105, 112, 114, 118, 128–130, 146, 157, 172, 218, 224–226 Stereotype 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 104, 157, 212 Stock story 67, 73 Storytelling practices 213, 219 Storytelling world 112, 113, 122, 126, 129, 225 Story world 14, 16, 17, 38, 39, 41, 50, 68, 89, 103, 112, 113, 115, 116, 122, 124, 127, 129, 219–221 Suitcase 142, 143, 225

T

Telling rights 218–220 Time and space dimensions/temporalization and spatialization 112 Transculturation 145, 146, 154 Translingual 162, 164–166, 172, 180, 181, 218 translingual literature 18, 163, 164, 176 Transnational 7, 8, 15, 115, 121, 138, 162–164, 170, 181, 216, 223 Trunks 142, 143 Truth 45, 58, 61, 66, 70, 76, 146, 214, 218, 220

V

Verisimilitude 45, 69

236

Index

W

World literature 164, 168, 180