Learning How To Tell, Learning How To Ask: Reciprocity and Storytelling As A Community Process

Applied Linguistics 2020: 1–19
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doi:10.1093/applin/amz070
Learning How to Tell, Learning How to

Ask: Reciprocity and Storytelling as a
Community Process
1,* 2
ANNA
DE FINA, GIUSEPPE PATERNOSTRO, and
2
MARCELLO AMORUSO
1
Georgetown University and 2Università degli Studi di Palermo
*
E-mail: definaa@georgetown.edu
In this article, we discuss the discursive processes that surround storytelling of

traumatic experiences in the case of minor asylum seekers involved in the recent
migration flow to Italian ports. We argue that in order to understand not only
how traumatic experiences are told but also how they are overcome, it is neces-
sary to focus on the reciprocal relationships and impact of the members of the
communities in which migrants are received. Such approach shifts the focus
from the content of stories toward the protagonists of their tellings and from asy-
lum seekers as ‘subjects’ to asylum seekers as members of communities to which
they and others contribute. The article is based on narrative data collected
through an ongoing project with teachers, researchers, and minor asylum
seekers involved in a school of Italian Language for Foreigners in Palermo.
INTRODUCTION
In this article, we discuss the role of storytelling in relation to the sharing
of traumatic experiences by unaccompanied minor asylum seekers to Italy.
We argue that the telling of traumatic experiences cannot be regarded as a
one-way process and that in order to understand not only how trauma is com-
municated but also how it may be overcome the stress needs to be put on the
reciprocal relations and impact on people involved in the storytelling and in
the community under analysis. We also discuss how such a perspective
requires an approach to storytelling as a semiotic and discursive practice. We
focus on a community, which can be defined as a transient community
(Mortensen and Hazel 2017), formed by asylum seekers who are unaccom-
panied minors, their teachers and school collaborators in order to exemplify
how reciprocity impacts the way traumatic experiences are talked about.
The structure of the article is the following: in the first section, we review
the literature on narrative and trauma. We then introduce our conception of
storytelling as practice. In the following sections, we provide some background
on unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Italy, present our project, data,
and analysis, and close with some concluding remarks.
C The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
V
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2 RECIPROCITY AND STORYTELLING AS A COMMUNITY PROCESS

NARRATIVES AND TRAUMA
Trauma has been defined through the metaphor of a devastating psychological
wound (Caruth 1995: 3). The relation between narrative and trauma has been
a topic of interest for social scientists for decades. The literature on this topic is
vast and covers disciplines as diverse as psychology and psychiatry (Tuval-
Mashiach et al. 2004; Kaminer 2006), sociology (Eyerman 2013; Matei 2013),
social work, health studies (Goodman 2004), counseling (Etherington 2003;
Bride 2007), and literary theory (Caruth 1995; Robinett 2007). In linguistics
and particularly in the area of narrative analysis, work on trauma has focused
on three main areas: the social construction of trauma as a frame for evaluat-
ing stories and tellers, the characteristics that distinguish trauma from other
kinds of stories, and the healing power of narrative in relation to trauma.
With regards to the first strand of research, scholars have shown that soci-
eties frame trauma in specific ways and those frames generate expectations
about what traumatic experiences involve and therefore also about how a nar-
rative of traumatic events should be shaped. There are many socially estab-
lished presuppositions of what trauma consists of in particular cases such as
being a victim of rape, experiencing the fears, physical abuse and death of
others during migration journeys, being subjected to torture by political oppo-
nents, and so forth.
Research has demonstrated the power of such framings and the way they
often reinforce stereotypes and impede a deep understanding of how traumat-
ic experiences are actually lived and recounted in different areas such as rape
trials (Ehrlich 2001; Trinch 2013), political contexts (Anders 2010), asylum-
seeking procedures (Shuman and Bohmer 2004), and Truth Commissions
deliberations (Blommaert et al. 2006; Anders 2010).
Trinch (2013) has shown, for example, that framing a woman who has
undergone rape as a victim requires that she produce a certain kind of emo-
tionally laden narrative, leading to the strengthening of gender stereotypes. In
another context, Blommaert et al. (2006) describe the conditions of production
of narrative testimonies presented during the hearings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in 1996. They note that these
hearings established the legitimacy and the right to be heard for thousands of
victims who had never before been allowed to tell their stories, but at the
same time they also created certain conditions of tellability. For example,
there was the idea that victims’ narratives needed to conform to an ‘overarch-
ing topic’ (Blommaert et al. 2006: 85) of suffering that was openly thematized
by the hearing commissioners, emphasized in the accounts of witnesses, and
directly invoked in the questions addressed to them.
Another strand of work has analyzed the characteristics of trauma narra-
tives. Here, a general focus has been on the fact that the latter are fragmented
(Matei 2003; Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004; Hydén and Brockmeier 2008;
Medved and Brockmeier 2008; Stern Perez et al. 2008; Hyvärinen et al. 2010;
Ladegaard 2015), often incoherent accounts rather than stories with a
A. DE FINA, G. PATERNOSTRO, AND M. AMORUSO 3

beginning, a middle, and an end, and that they reflect the impossibility of
making sense of dramatic human experiences. Studies show that people who
have gone through trauma often have difficulties talking about it, show no ap-
parent emotion, or produce ‘broken’ stories. Anders (2010: 162) talks at
length of a ‘crisis of representation’, that is the realization of the limitations
that language encounters in representing unthinkable experiences and thus
the failure of everyday language in that regard.
A third topic that has dominated discussions in the field has been the ques-
tion of whether storytelling helps narrators overcome trauma. Many argue
that trauma is inaccessible to human language (Caruth 1995). However, a
great deal of literature in social work and counseling (Etherington 2003) and
psychology (for a review, see Kaminer 2006) argues that telling the story of
what happened allows people to heal by distancing themselves or reliving the
experience that caused the trauma and revolves around the use of storytelling
as one of the most effective strategies to lead victims and patients to healing.
This theory has been applied, for example, in research on post-traumatic stress
disorder (O’Kearney and Perrott 2006). However, similar applications can be
found in communication and discourse studies as well (Goodman 2004;
Berkowitz 2010).
These studies and arguments are very much in line with the idea, widely
held by proponents of the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences (Bruner
1986), that storytelling is a central mechanism for apprehending the world
and experience by emplotting it into temporally and causally related events.
They thus also suggest the existence of a strong connection between narrative
and experience in that narrative reproduces and imitates experience, a pos-
ition held by William Labov (1972) as well.
As this brief review shows, it is hard to talk about narrative and trauma in
general ways both in terms of narrative structure and in terms of narrative
process. Stories that relate traumatic experiences may certainly be broken and
incoherent, but they may also be complete and detailed. Telling one’s story
may help people overcome trauma and in other cases it may be ineffective or
simply may not happen at all. In this article, we shift the focus from storytell-
ing as healing to storytelling as revealing of both the circumstances that make
traumatic stories difficult to tell and of the processes that may facilitate com-
munication between those who have suffered trauma and those who have
not. Central to our analysis is a focus on reciprocity, intended as a process of
‘mutual dependence, action, or influence’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2017),
that is as a process through which people who get into contact with each other
change in their manner of thinking, communicating, and or acting in ways
that implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the influence of the other. Indeed,
we see reciprocity as an important element not only in understanding how
traumatic experiences are communicated and received but also in explaining
how they can be overcome. This move seems to us particularly important in
the study of communicative practices involving migrants, including those in
which traumatic stories emerge. Indeed, reciprocity has been at the core of

many important linguistic theories such as Grice’s (1975) Cooperative
Principle in Pragmatics, Accommodation Theory in Sociolinguistics (Giles and
Coupland 1991), and the systematics of turn taking in Conversation Analysis
(Sacks et al. 1974). However, its role has been scarcely considered in the socio-
linguistic literature on migrants. Migration is often seen as a one-way street in
which migrants ‘integrate’ (or not) into receiving societies and migrant com-
munities are influenced by (but do not influence) the social contexts in which
they find themselves. What happens in reality is the opposite. Migration and
displacements are phenomena that involve not only those who are displaced
but also those who come in contact with them and not only people in the
countries of arrival and/or passage but also people in the countries of origin.
These complexities are rarely analyzed in research on these phenomena. A
proper consideration of reciprocity shows instead how the way experiences
are communicated is deeply influenced by how they are received and how
this process of contact between migrants and members of local communities
generates new dynamics that are capable of shifting and modifying relations
and semiotic practices on both sides. Such a perspective requires a focused at-
tention on storytelling as an unfolding practice rather than on stories as texts.
And it is to approaches to narrative that take this perspective that we turn in
the section below.
STORYTELLING AS SEMIOTIC AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICE

Narrative is often seen, particularly by narrative-turn analysts (Freeman 2006;
McAdams 1997), as a transparent act of self-disclosure that is supposed to give
voice to and throw light on the experience of individuals and groups. This per-
spective emphasizes the relationship between teller and text but excludes con-
sideration of the circumstances of the telling and the role of participants. In
this article, we take an entirely different focus on narrative. In line with recent
interactionist approaches (De Fina and Perrino 2011; De Fina and
Georgakopoulou 2012; Baynham and De Fina 2016), we regard storytelling as
an interactional process that, as it unfolds, points to its own context of produc-
tion that includes the participants, their relationships, and the local environ-
ment in which they are negotiating meanings, but also shapes and is being
shaped by social processes at different scales. It is precisely by virtue of these
characteristics of narrative as an interactional event that the analysis of story-
telling can be seen as providing researchers with a deeper understanding of
complex social phenomena. In this light, narratives are not just texts told by a
narrator, but are produced within acts of telling that involve tellers and audi-
ences. This point was made decades ago by conversational analysts who have
shown the many ways in which the telling of a story is connected to the local
context: for example, stories unfold and progress in different fashion according
to both recipient design and audience reactions (Goodwin 1986; Goodwin
et al. 1997), while participants may derail stories entirely or change their
course. And of course, as Jefferson (1978) and Sacks (1974) have illustrated in

many ways, narratives are sequentially implicative. On the other hand as
demonstrated by Ochs and Capps (2001), narratives are emergent and often
unfinished utterances rather than polished texts. This work by conversation
analysts has highlighted the importance of interactional dynamics. In their
proposal on narratives as practices (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012, in
press) have extended the scope of the relationship of narratives with contexts,
emphasizing that storytelling must be understood also in light of social proc-
esses at different scales that go beyond the local interaction. In the case of asy-
lum seekers that we will examine, such contexts include the local level of the
relationships between teachers and students, the regional scale of increased
visibility of migrants in Sicily, and the national scale of discourses about mi-
gration. We will see how narrative events within the school are related to dif-
ferent factors at these different scales.
Before we proceed to discuss our project, we present some background on
unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Sicily.
BACKGROUND
As is by now common knowledge, Sicily and particularly the port of
Lampedusa have become an important site of passage for economic migrants
and asylum seekers who come from many parts of Africa and Asia. Migrants
arrive in boats arranged by smugglers and, if they are lucky and do not perish
at sea, land in Italian ports (Lampedusa being one of them) or are accompa-
nied there by boats managed by the Italian Navy. Many among these migrants
and refugees are ‘unaccompanied minors’, defined by the United Nation
Committee on the Rights of the Child as those ‘who have been separated from
both parents and other relatives and are not being cared for by an adult who,
by law or custom, is responsible for doing so’ (United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees 1997). Recent counts of these youngsters in Italy
(Colombo 2019) report that in December 2018 there were 10.787 unaccom-
panied minors. In 2016, they were 17,000 and in 2017 they were 18,000.
Most frequent countries of origin were Gambia, Nigeria, Guinea, Mali,
Senegal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. At least 60 per cent of arrivals take place
in Sicilian ports. In total, 91 per cent of these youths are males.
Unaccompanied minor asylum seekers are treated according to the stand-
ards of international law. They are hosted in guesthouses with peers and edu-
cators and provided with health care, education, and recreational activities.
Most of these guest houses are placed in Sicily, since more than 34 per cent of
the minors stay on this island.
THE PROJECT: DATA AND METHODS

Data for this article come from a project that is being conducted with minors
who study at a language school in Palermo. The school introduced an ‘integra-
tion program’ that involved first of all not separating migrants from other

students and then supporting several events and activities to facilitate the
minors’ immersion in the social context of Palermo. Given this multiplicity of
initiatives, the school has become the site of a transient community formed by
students, teachers and practitioners who come into contact with each other in
a sustained way through the various activities that take place there. We regard
this community as transient based on Mortensen and Hazel (2017) definition
that describes such communities as ‘social configurations where people from
diverse sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds come together (physically or
otherwise) for a limited period of time around a shared activity’ (p. 256)
In general terms, the project focuses on following the linguistic practices
and the social insertions of the young asylum seekers in the local networks.
Researchers concentrate on two areas. The first area refers to language acquisi-
tion for those who are not literate in the L1 and the second area centers on
narrative. Research on narrative goes hand in hand with the development of
‘narrative’ projects. These projects have included theatre labs, the creation of
a short movie, a photo exhibition, and the production of a show titled ‘Echi
dalla lunga distanza’ presented in the most important theater of the city and
of an exhibition of artwork by the students. Most recently the school also
hosted a narrative lab organized as part of an initiative of insertion of young
migrants in the workforce.
The research was conducted by the three authors: one member of the de-
partment of Human Sciences, the language school program coordinator (all
males), and one researcher from a US university (female) in collaboration
with two local teachers. The research project follows an ethnographic ap-
proach in that researchers do participant observation and conduct interviews,
are in constant contact with students and teachers, take field notes, and collect
artifacts produced by the community. The material analyzed in this article
comes from interviews conducted by teachers collaborating with the research-
ers and by the coordinator of the language program. Indeed, besides initiatives
to foster narrative in terms of artistic production, the teachers in the school
carried out biographical interviews and elicited biographical language maps
from the students in order to get to know their background better and to get a
sense of their previous life experiences. The latter were part of an approach to
teaching that included creating among students a sense of their own worth as
individuals who carried with them a variety of linguistic experiences and his-
tories independently of their literacy skills. This work contributed to establish-
ing a relationship of trust among the teachers and the students ahead of the
interviews. Minors agreed to the interviews and informed consent was
obtained.
The analysis that we present here concentrates on the narratives that were
told in the interviews. Twenty four video or audio interviews were collected
among the students. Almost all are in Italian, except for two, the first one in
Arabic, the second in English. Almost all the interviewed are males, except for
three girls from Nigeria. In addition, three teachers and the director of the the-
atre lab were also interviewed. The interviews with the minors, which, as we

mentioned, were conducted by two female teachers and by the program co-
ordinator, included:
1 Interviews centered on linguistic biographies. These interviews were con-
ducted by teachers with the objective of finding out more about students’
background. Interviewers asked students questions about their socioeco-
nomic and family background, their literacy experience, their use of differ-
ent languages, and their progress in learning Italian. In these interviews,
the students were also asked about the trip to Italy.
2 Interviews centered on the experience of participating in the theatre pro-
duction called ‘Echi dalla lunga distanza’, and in the workshop that took
place in the school in preparation for that production. The theater piece
tells fragments of stories recounted by minors about their trip or previous
life. The actors who read the stories read other minors’ stories, not their
own. The narratives were read in different languages and presented in
translation in Italian on a screen, together with photographs of the protag-
onists. Questions in the interviews focused on how students had felt work-
ing on the piece and presenting it in a theatre, if and how that experience
had changed them, how their relation with their languages had changed
them too.
ANALYSIS
Our first analysis of the interviews with the students revealed a number of
important phenomena at the interactional level that led us to study inter-
views with teachers as well and then to carry out a new interview with the
program coordinator. Indeed, we noticed that the interviews were full of
negotiations about meaning that followed misunderstandings, that inter-
viewees often gave short laconic answers, that interactions were marked by
sudden topic shifts and sometimes explicit refusals to tell on the part of the
minors. We will present some of these examples before we discuss their
implications and significance.
Let us start with the evident linguistic difficulties that many minors had
when expressing complex experiences in Italian and the frequent communica-
tion and cultural misunderstandings that transcripts reveal were also emerging
in the interactions. We provide a translation into English but the latter can
hardly account for many of the morphological and syntactic peculiarities of
the Italian spoken by some of these minors. All names used are pseudonyms.
Fragment (1) comes from an audio-recorded interview conducted by the
program coordinator (R) with Ali, an 18-year-old Egyptian who had been in
Italy for 1 year and 8 months.
(1)
1. R: no I didn’t understand I didn’t understand (0.2) can you
2. repea::: t: (0.1) I mean you: your parents knew
3. A: yes but don’t want that I come to Italy

4. R: oh they didn’t want?
5. A: yes
6. R: no.
7. A: I tell I want like other guys go with my friends that one (0.1)
8. they also always almost for one month always had problem with
9. them because want go to Italy (0.3) ah:: wa::: s at sea eight mon.
10. eh:: sorry eight days (0.2) eh::: eight day
11. R: the trip?
12. A: yes [at sea
13. R: [from where?
14. A: from Alexandria:: eh here in Italy::: eh: no what is it called
15 (0.2) no eh: I don’t know no in no I think but Lampadusa no
16. there is a pla[::: ce .
17. R: [Lampedusa?
18. A: . Ba. Bari Bari
We see that R is trying to get some basic information about the role of Ali’s
parents and his trip trajectory. Ali cannot respond in extended form to R’s
questions and there is a lot of back and forth between the two. We also en-
counter a phenomenon that is common in the narrative fragments contained
in the talk: spatial disorientation (see lines 14–16). Most of these youngsters
could name the countries that they had crossed but did not remember or
know the ports that they had been to. Some of them could not even tell the
countries because they had been taken on multiple trips by car, walking and
by sea before getting to their final destinations and indeed Ali cannot name
the port of arrival.
At other times, language difficulties were compounded by the difficulties of
being asked to talk about painful, at times traumatic, experiences at home and
particularly about the trip to Italy. In the following fragment taken from a
video interview, the Program Coordinator is talking to Yaya, a 16-year-old
from Gambia who has been in Italy for five months. At the point where the
fragment starts he is asking about Yaya’s parents
(2)
1. R: no I mean your parents ((in English in the transcript))
2. Y: oh my parents. my mother is old. My father died
3. R: your mother is old.
4. Y: yes old.
5. R: and your father?
6. Y: my father died.
7. R: he died eh (0.3) I understand ((sighs)) ehh you what kind of
8. trip did you do to arrive in Italy
9. Y: first Senegal and then
10. R: so Gambia, Senegal
11. Y: Mali, Burkina, Libya, Italy
12. R: and how long did this trip last
13. Y: one month and three weeks
14. R: one month and three weeks

15. and from Libya- and in Libya how long did you stay?
16. Y: maybe three weeks. three weeks?
17. R: three weeks in Libya
18. how did you get from Libya to Italy?
19. Y: in Italy yes
20. R: how? with the boat?
21. Y: with the boat yes
22. R: how many people?
23. Y: uhm ninety-five
24. R: on the boat.
25. Y: yes
26. R: and can I ask you (.) were you afraid in this trip?
27. Y: ((smiles)) uh yes ((smiles)) afraid a bit yes
28. R: ok. uh this trip were you alone or with a friend . . .
This interview further illustrates some of the difficulties related to language
proficiency that participants experience. We see that R (line 1) resorts to
English in order to ask Yaya about his parents. He is also seen and heard
speaking slowly and repeating Yaya’s answers to make sure he has under-
stood. Yaya responds in Italian mostly, with short utterances and very simple
language; thus throughout the interview, we have the impression that R is
trying to get more information than he receives. This difficulty in communica-
tion results in dramatic moments at times, for example, when (line 2) Yaya
tells R that his father died and R does not understand at the beginning and
asks him to repeat that piece of information. We see that when R understands
he finds it hard to continue asking questions. In line 7, he pauses twice, then
sighs audibly, and then changes the topic.
When it comes to the trip, the same pattern continues. Here, however, it is
also clear that the style of questioning adopted by R is creating discomfort in
Yaya. R asks a series of very pointed and detailed questions, often taking up
Yaya’s answer and prodding him to continue even though it is obvious that he
is not eager to talk (lines 12–16 or 18–22). He also asks many details about
Libya. One particularly telling moment is when R tries to inquire about the
feelings of Yaya during his trip from Libya. He asks him whether he was afraid
(line 26) and Yaya smiles and smiles again during his response ‘Uh yes, afraid
a little’ which not only represents an understatement but also does not pro-
vide any elaboration on an experience that is known is in most cases traumatic
since Libyan prisons are notorious for the inhuman conditions in which pris-
oners are kept and the violation of human rights that are constantly perpe-
trated there. It is hard for the viewer to interpret the smile as it must have
been for the interviewer as the smile could mean ‘What do you think?’ or ‘I
don’t want to talk about it’ or many other things, but it certainly indicates
Yaya’s discomfort with the questions. At this point, we see that R resorts to a
change of topic (line 28).
In the previous example, we have been dealing with minors whose Italian is
limited, but studying the whole corpus of interviews it is clear that

competence is not the only and very likely not the main issue both because
there are minors who can communicate quite well in Italian and because most
of them seem to be more expansive on less painful or personal topics. For ex-
ample, when asked about future plans, even youngsters who have a lower
competence in Italian take longer turns and explain things with the linguistic
resources that they have. At the same time, the topic of the trip from the
country of origin to Italy tends to elicit narratives that appear to be consistent-
ly under-developed. While interviewees seem ready to provide information
about the itinerary, they need constant prodding to narrate the particulars of
their experiences. See, for example, the following interview with Kofi, an-
other Gambian youngster (17 years old). R is asking Kofi about how long he
stayed in Senegal after leaving Gambia and where he went afterwards:
(3)
1. K: a bit yes. (.) I don’t remember but not long, not. . .
2. R: mh! then?
3. K: then Mali. then Burkina Faso (.) then: mh Nige, Nigeria and
4. Libya.
5. R: and in Libya how long did you stay?
6. K: a year.
7. R: (.) a year: wow! (.) and what did you do for that year in
8. Libya?
9. K: mh works a little then (.) police: takes me to prison (.) I don’t
10. know how you say that
11. R: prison (0.1) to prison?
12. K: in prison yes.
13. R: for how long?
14. K: ah for mh (.) five months.
15. R: five months in prison?
16. K: yes.
17. R: oh! and why? because you we:: re
18. K: it’s like that. (.) if you have (. . .) even if you do nothing, like
19. that. in Libya it’s like that.
20. R: oh! and were you afraid?
21. K: afraid? yes.
22. R: and did you know other people?
23. K: [no: I haven’t seen
24. R: [other
25. K: no I did see: I saw other Gambians as well (.) with black people,
26. but (.) I don’t know, anyone.
27. R: you did not speak there with: five months what did you-
28. what did you do for five months in prison?
29. K: nothing! ((slightly impatient tone)) just like that.
30. R: (.) and how can I well do you feel like talking about prison,
31. about Libya?
32. K: (.) and but.
33. R: if you don’t want to, don’t.
34. K: no, it’s hard to say things.

35. R: why?
36. K: many things (0.1) but prison is difficult.
37. R: but is it difficult because the lang-
38. [talking about these things in Italian or
39. K: [language and also many thing no.¼
40. ¼ to speak in Italian (. . .)
41. R: because it’s difficult that you don’t want to think about?
42. ah ok. (.) eh:: and what - in the prison mh: (0.1) ((sighs)) did
43. they treat you badly or:
44. K: yes badly.
45. R: mh. and you had people- other people did you talk there in
46. the prison with
47. other boys or other: (.) there when- in Libya (.) did you talk
48. with other: people
49. [other boys?
50. K: [yes yes yes. Some boys who speaks my language.
51. R: mh. but older than you?
52. K: yes, older.
53. R: and your age?
54. K: no ehm my age there is not.
55. R: no? you were the youngest?
56. K: the youngest, yes.
57. R: ah. (0.1) wow. e:: fine that was ok. then you left Libya
58. and you came to Italy.
59. K: in Italy yes.
The exchange between R and Kofi is typical of this data. R is trying to elicit
details about the trip from Gambia to Italy. When he realizes that Kofi has
spent 12 months in Libya, he asks him what he did there lines 7–8. As men-
tioned above, the topic of Libya is in all the interviews a point of extreme dis-
comfort. In this case, when prodded to explain why he was in Libya for one
year, Kofi offers the information that he was in prison. R appears surprised by
this. In later interviews, he will show interviewees that he has come to know
that minors are often incarcerated in Libya, but in this instance he seems eager
to find out more and he continues to ask questions to which Kofi does not
seem willing to respond. For example, he does not want to explain why he
was incarcerated (lines 17–19). He hints at the fact that no particular reason is
needed for that in Libya (in line 19, he repeats ‘it’s like that. “In Libya it’s like
that”’). Then R tries to elicit his reaction to being in prison and again Kofi
responds with minimal tokens. The interaction continues in a similar fashion
with R attempting to establish what Kofi did during those months and
whether he made any friends, with Kofi providing laconic replies. There is
also a slight impatience in his tone in his repetition of ‘nothing’ in line 29.
That Kofi is not eager to talk is evident to R as well since in line 30 when he
asks him ‘well, do you feel like talking about prison, about Libya’ Kofi
responds that it is difficult. R tries to understand whether Kofi is referring to
linguistic difficulties (lines 37–38) and interprets Kofi’s reply (line 39) as

confirming that, but in fact Kofi gives an ambiguous reply since he says ‘lan-
guage and also many things’ and then ‘to speak Italian’. But when R further
enquires about Libya it becomes clear that Kofi does not want to provide more
than minimal information; thus R at a certain point abandons the topic of
Kofi’s experiences in Libya and introduces the new topic of to the trip from
Libya to Italy (lines 57–58).
Later on in the interview when R asks him about early experiences with the
language, Kofi utters an open refusal to tell:
(4)
1. R.: mh. (.) and how was your: impact with the Italian language?
2. K. it’s hard for me Italian language.
3. R.: and finding your way in the city, without knowing: anything
4. about the language. without understanding (.) the the latin
5. alphabet, right? abcd with-
6. I mean you went around the city but you could not read anything,
7. right? all of that.
8. K.: (.) yes
9. R.: eh! do you want to tell me a bit about this experience?
10. K.: that’s it (. . .)
11. R.: why that’s it?
12. K.: (. . .) tired (. . .)
13. R.: but we just started!
14. K.: (. . .)
In this extract, we see that R has a great deal of difficulty getting Kofi to ex-
pand on his responses. In lines 3–7 he provides some clues to the kind of an-
swer he is expecting. But we also see some hesitations in his turn. Kofi this
time declares that he wants to stop the interview altogether, to which R reacts
with surprise as he notes that the event has just started. But then he gives up
and closes. It should be noted that Kofi a few days after the interview escaped
the host community.
In sum, these interviews demonstrate the kinds of obstacles that communi-
cation about painful experiences raised for both teachers and students.
Teachers needed to gather personal information about their students and
therefore asked them many questions that inevitably touched upon painful
events. At the same time, they lacked factual knowledge about the migration
routes and the types of experiences that migrants are exposed to during their
trips and also cultural knowledge about possible mismatches in communica-
tive styles. Such difficulties were compounded by the students’ own exposure
to questioning by immigration authorities and their fear of letting out infor-
mation that could jeopardize their asylum procedure. Thus, difficulties on
both sides made it hard for interactants to communicate, particularly on the
topic of traumatic experiences.
Given the picture that was starting to emerge from our analysis, we turned
to the experience of working with these unaccompanied minors as reported
by teachers. The interviews with teachers revealed some of the details of this

reciprocal process of understanding and accommodation. Teachers talked
about their initial ignorance about the circumstances from which the young-
sters came and about their personal stories. They detailed their own reticence
to ask them questions.
Martina, who was tutoring one of the students, explained how it took him
months to establish some trust with her and also how she felt embarrassed
asking him everyday questions on his life knowing that he had gone through
such painful experiences. She reported that things started to change when he
introduced her to his friends and started spending some time with her after
class. In a follow-up interview that we arranged after a first analysis of the
data, the program coordinator reported similar feelings.
He commented on how inadequate he felt the activities that he and another
teacher had devised for these students were. In particular, he referred to tech-
niques to get students to narrate and therefore to practice their Italian:
(5)
1. PC: I must tell the truth it seemed clumsy because the attempt
2. (. . .) so it was clumsy the fact that we created planned activities
3. that would have worked for a class of foreigners who want
4. to learn Italian and have that as their main objective and
5. then the clash that happened with these kids that probably felt
6. like telling their stories beyond learning Italian I mean
7. whenever you ask someone who has a story that .
6. I: that beyond the technique that you were trying to teach.
7. PC: Yes exactly I mean I realized this thing how clumsy we are
8. we teachers when we create some techniques when they would
9. not need these techniques to narrate themselves because they
10. have stories that are really shocking I mean, I am thinking
11. about a scene (.) it was an activity in which we focused on the
12. five senses what do you remember about your country related this
13. thing to the five senses, I don’t know something that you that you
14. think of about your country that has to do with hearing
15. something that has to do with sight, I don’t know now thinking
16. about it even at that moment it seemed like a clumsy attempt
17. because the moment you ask I don’t know
18. what did you see during the trip and they tell you what did you
19. hear? well gunshots in Libya for example some told us gunshots,
20. or what smell comes to your mind the smell of blood, I remember
21. this thing immediately I thought and also my colleague
22. ((name)) thought the same how stupid we have been creating
23. these techniques of the five senses all this bullshit when at the end
24. there is someone who is telling you a story that is so shocking.
This fragment is telling of the paradox of using narrative as a technique
to recount past experience when the experience of the other is so far
away from the experience that one is familiar with and when it involves
traumatic events. But it also explains the sense of embarrassment that
teachers felt about asking questions and how they started a self-

reflection on how their teaching needed to change in order to adapt to
their students’ realities.
To understand such issues, we also need to consider the bigger picture of
storytelling for asylum seekers in general. As shown by much of the literature
on the topic (Barsky 1994; Jacquemet 2005; Maryns 2005) asylum seekers
need to construct stories that fit within the parameters of established legisla-
tion for seeking asylum and are trained by different parties to do so. Without
going into the details of this very complex process, we can safely say that ado-
lescents have to learn how to navigate between the different and often oppos-
ing forces that surround the telling of their stories, forces represented by
institutional needs (the need to tell an adequate story to immigration author-
ities, the need to share some of their past with the people who are close to
them such as their teachers), and personal needs (wanting to tell and not
wanting to tell). Teachers also slowly learning these realities in the process of
constructing real ties with their students. Among other elements of the context,
and an element at a different scale than the local, that weighs on their relation-
ships and on the telling that goes on is also the fear of what has been described
by the program director as ‘the immigration circus’, that is, the exploitation by
the media of sensationalist stories to stir public opinion and the furious debate
around the arrival of migrants by sea that shakes the whole country and indeed
Europe. That is why silence and gaps are as important in the analysis of this data
as things that are told. And this is a reality that became more and more clear to
those who participated in the educational project of the school.
All these elements point to interviews as representing much more than
boxes containing data, to narrative as a central process around which relation-
ships are negotiated and which on the one hand can only be fully grasped in
its development and in its embedding within different kinds of communicative
practices and events, and on the other provides important insights into the
mutual influences and their effects on communicative practices and reciprocal
relations. Indeed, when we go back to the different narratives collected and
the different participants in the life of the school we see an evolution in time.
First, we witness an evolution in the direction of reciprocal understanding.
While the coordinator appears completely unfamiliar with many of the condi-
tions under which trips to Italy are carried out by adolescents, by the time of
the later interviews we realized that he had learned a lot more as reflected in
his questions. Teachers also started a reflection on their own ways of teaching
based on their conversations and experiences with the minors. On the other
hand, some of the adolescents who were participating in the theatre activities
with other teenagers and with Italian facilitators, also went through a process
of reflection about what narrating one’s story means, particularly when they
started learning that so many of their peers had gone through similar experi-
ences. They talked in interviews about how, for example, telling their and
their peers’ story had become a way of making people who listen to them
understand more about them and also a way of dealing with that experience.
Consider the following interview carried out by the program coordinator with

Mohammed, a 16-year-old Egyptian, who had been in Italy for 1 year and
4 months, after he had participated in the theatre lab, Echi dala lunga distanza.
Like the other minors, Mohammed read the story of another minor during the
piece. So the coordinator asked him about the experience:
(6)
1. R: so can you tell me some details?
2. M: there were two of us recounting the story my cousin and I
3. my cousin told about the trip,
4. I tell his story
5. R: and what do you remember?
6. M: he comes from Asyut my city which is the south
7. and then he is eighteen and he has been in Palermo four months
8. and also in Partinico one year
9. he did the same thing every day, he had breakfast lunch at one
10. dinner at eight.
11. R: what impressed you about this story?
12. M: first I did not feel I was doing something let’s say a story a
13. theatre piece doesn’t do- but then I realized that the story is
14. important and we need to tell it
15. you need to know
16. I liked that I have been with the teachers
17. R: why do we need to know?
18. M no you need to know I mean there are people who don’t
19. know how we came so they ask they want to know
20. and we did that because we want a Europe without wall all
21. open
In this fragment M documents both the process of identifying with another
person and that of building more of a collective identity. When R asks him
what impressed him about the story he told (line 11), he points to its value as a
testimony for local people who listen to it. Indeed he also talks about his person-
al process of change from regarding the telling of stories as not “doing some-
thing” (lines 12–14) to coming to regard it as necessary for people to understand
how and why minors migrate. It is noticeable here that he uses the “we” line 14
to include himself among the minors and the “you” to include the interviewer,
his teacher, among those who “don’t know how we came so they ask they want
to know” (line 15): a “you” and a “us” that index difference but also the need to
come together.
CONCLUSION
Our data point to storytelling as a meaning-making practice, which is reveal-
ing of real processes of mutual adjustment within communities. Here the ana-
lysis shows the importance of reciprocity, that is, of mutual influence between
students and teachers and how the experience of coming together changes
both sides, making it eventually possible for students to talk about trauma in
their own terms. Indeed, we have shown that participants in this transient

community go through a complex process of understanding and getting to
know each other before sharing stories that refer to traumatic experiences in
moments of self-disclosure. Adolescents come to the experience of talking
about themselves with expectations and constraints that derive from processes
in different contexts: the unspeakable nature of many of their concrete experi-
ences in traveling to Italy, the hard to communicate baggage of their life and
culture at home, the previous narrative events in which they have been cap-
tive participants such as police interviews, and legal asylum procedures. They
are also the object of constant attention from the media, who boxes them into
specific categories; their perception of this may also play a role in the way they
respond to questions. Teachers come from radically different backgrounds and
also pedagogical practices with entirely different students. They know very lit-
tle about these minors and they learn by trial and error how to relate to these
newcomers. Storytelling reveals the struggles of these processes but also the
changing nature of these relations and how they evolve in time toward
real encounters and real changes. In the light of the above, the analysis of
storytelling becomes a tool for reflecting not only on the difficulties of sharing
traumatic experiences but also on the evolving identities of participants in
super-diverse communities of practice, on the nature of their encounters, on
the importance of reciprocity as a basis for communication and understanding,
and on the challenges ahead rather than a tool for ‘giving voice’ or represent-
ing the other.
In more general terms and with reference to literature on narratives and
trauma, our article shows both that a view of storytelling as a way of overcom-
ing trauma is simplistic and that it does not make much sense to talk about
‘trauma narratives’ as a genre disconnected from the interactional and social
processes in which they are embedded.
Transcription Conventions
PP indicates some or all of the participants speaking.
Xx upper case letter of a new line indicates new intonation unit.
xx lower case letter of a new line indicates continued intonation
unit.
(1.0) indicates a pause of one second.
? indicates rising intonation at the end of a unit, not necessarily a
question.
! strong emphasis, with falling intonation.
. indicates falling intonation.
. indicate a noticeable pause.
... indicate a significant pause.
¼ indicates latching (second voice begins without a perceptible
pause).
[ indicate overlap (two voices heard at the same time).
(??) indicates inaudible utterance.
(h) indicates laughter during word.

(sound) gives details about speech or non-speech sounds.
Word indicates emphatic stress.
>fast< indicates the speaker is accelerating.
<slow> indicates the speaker is decelerating.
.hh, hh indicate the in-breath and out-breath, respectively.
: following a vowel indicates elongated vowel sound.
- indicates an abrupt stop in speech, a truncated word, or syllable.
(( )) indicates comments by the transcriber.
NOTE
1 We present all our examples in the
English translation but transcripts in
Italian are provided on this journal’s
website.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Anna De Fina is Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics in the Italian Department
and affiliated faculty with the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. She
holds a Master in Linguistics from Cambridge University and a PhD in Linguistics from
Georgetown. Her interests and publications focus on discourse and migration, identity,
narrative, and super diversity. She has published many articles on these topics and 10
volumes of authored and edited books. Address for correspondence: Anna De Fina, Italian
Department, ICC 307 H, Georgetown University, 37 & O Streets NW, Washington, DC,
USA. <definaa@georgetown.edu>
Giuseppe Paternostro is a researcher in Italian Linguistics in the Department of Languages

and Linguistic Sciences at the University of Palermo. His research is devoted to the rela-
tion between language and identity. In particular, he deals with the construction and
expression of identity in narratives and the management of semantic vagueness in pol-
itical discourse.
Marcello Amoruso is a PhD in applied linguistics at the University of Palermo. His re-
search activity is focused on illiterate and low-schooled learners of Italian L2. He also
has a post-MA in ‘Didactics of Italian as a non-native language’. Since 2008, he teaches
Italian L2 at ItaStra and, starting from 2013, he is responsible for the ItaStra projects for
the linguistic inclusion of migrants. He is one of the supervisors of the working group
‘Adults with low schooling’ set at ItaStra in 2016.

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