Writing trauma: Emotion, ethnography, and the politics of suffering among Somali returnees in Ethiopia

By comparing Somali narratives of emotion and suffering with literature about emotion in relation to trauma and "the refugee experience," this paper contributes to the understanding of emotion, suffering, and trauma in different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, and interrogates the roles and methods of ethnographies of trauma in situations of high political, social, and economic stakes. In the mid-1990s, emotional distress among Ethiopian Somali returnees was about social rupture and injustice and not simply about private suffering. Emotion is critical to creating, recognizing, reinforcing, and mobilizing the moral webs on which both individual and collective survival depend. In the aftermath of dispossession and war, and amidst ongoing hunger and destitution, certain expressions of emotion carry a particularly important valence: anger, passion, and rhetorics of demoralization revolving around a collective narrative of dispossession and demands for restitution. "Experience near" descriptions of Somali emotion expressions cannot be conflated with "psychological" analyses or "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Somali refugee narratives index and challenge the embodiment in lived experience of local, national, and global institutions' (in)action and inequality. To the extent that academic debates over emotion and trauma help to shape, reinforce, or challenge the assumptions and practices of institutions affecting millions of lives, we researchers must address in our analyses the practical and political implications of how we interpret and write about emotion, trauma, and politics.