Prof. Hans J LADEGAARD, Department of English and Communication

The language of trauma: Evidence from domestic migrant workers’ storytelling. School of English, the University of Hong Kong (hybrid mode), 22 September 2022.

Abstract
Trauma storytelling represents a break not just with a particular form of representation but with the very possibility of representation at all. Extreme suffering is an experience that goes beyond ‘ordinary’ words, and since no vocabulary is available to account for extraordinary subhuman experiences, storytelling which reports on human-inflicted trauma is characterized by voids in the narrative flow. Drawing on a large corpus of more than 400 domestic migrant worker narratives recorded at shelters in Hong Kong and among returnees in Indonesia and the Philippines, this talk analyzes narratives of suffering and humiliation. The women talk about their painful encounters with verbal and physical assault, sexual assault, starvation, and the fear and anxiety they experienced while working for an abusive employer. The talk outlines some of the characteristics of these stories of suffering, including a broken disruptive style, incoherent stories that break with ordinary logic, and lack of appropriate vocabulary to account for extreme suffering. Finally, I discuss how we as researchers (should) deal with other people’s stories of suffering.