Paper short abstract:

While general discourses may portray refugees as a homogeneous mass of miserable people, this paper tries to draw, in contrast, the multiplicity of their experiences surviving trauma in exile. Based on a non-trauma centered ethnographic study, it tracks the life-desire along with the suffering.

Paper long abstract:

Almost by definition (UN, 1951) to be a refugee is to be someone who has suffered from persecution and arguably experienced trauma. Refugee populations are thus often researched through a damage-centered lens, and “portrayed as broken” (Tuck, 2009).

Through an ethnographic study conducted in a trauma-therapy center for refugees in Stockholm, and thus a damage-defined space, this paper looks at experiences of surviving trauma and going through therapy, through multifaceted lenses. In fact, while the people I met, were, certainly, victims of violence, oppression, and inequalities_not only in their home-countries but also in their host society_ and their stories were a lot about that, they were also about resistance, desire, hopes, and dreams. One of the characteristics of these stories was their future-centeredness, which is far from being a story of mere trauma, fatal damage and misery, but was rather echoing with Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and moving beyond the survival (1994).

This paper focuses on the complexities and multiplicities of these experiences_ the experiences of trauma and exile_, resisting over-simplifications and the binaries of pathology and recovery, of suffering and wellness, of the fortunate and the vulnerable. It tries to acknowledge the nuances, and how conflicting experiences and feelings co-exist, interact and are lived. It tracks the life-desire, while trying not to minimize the accounts of suffering, in a pursuit of what anthropology aims to (or should): bringing voices in their complexity rather than being an alternative (and thus modified) voice.