Narratives as Borders: Using an Adapted Narrative Approach to Understand the Retelling of the Physical Narratives of Trauma by Karen Women With Refugee Status Resettled in the United States

Abstract

The refugee narrative spans time, geography, and generations, enfolding the complexity of constructing identities through displacement and migration. Through adapted narrative analysis, we examined the physical narratives of war trauma which a sample of Karen refugee women constructed, as they claimed their experiences of war trauma and torture in interview discussions. We employed an adapted narrative method relevant to the analysis of field texts to interpret the remembering and retelling of trauma narratives. This method helped to elicit positional identities and physical/sensory memories that were prominent in women's experiences and to contextualized concurrently collected quantitative data. Accounts revealed key constructs relevant to the narrative function and orientation of the narratives: remembering childhood, being a mother, embodiment of trauma.