Method. The autobiography as a biography

In book eight of the epic, Odysseus’s journey becomes meaningful for Odysseus himself as he sits incognito among the Phaecians and listens to a blind poet’s hymn about the Trojan War. In the tale of this rhapsode, the discontinuous events Odysseus experienced when he lived through the events of the Trojan War are woven together so that they cohere as a continuous story (Cavarero, 2000, p. 18). Odysseus was able to make sense of the events in Troy when he heard them narrated by another; he then knew who he was (Cavarero, 2000, p. 18

& 35). He was initiated into his own story retrospectively, in a different time and place from when the events themselves actually occurred. This is similar to what Hydén (2008) writes: the ‘I’ of then is connected with the ‘I’ of the present, and so the teller of the story is able to shed a new light over her or his ‘self’ as the protagonist of a

2 This study did not follow an evidence based research design. However, it was a pilotstudy mapping the conditions for migrants with PTSD. Hopkins Symptom Checklist 25 and a short version of Harvard Trauma Questionnaire were used.

story that has been exposed to institutional forces. In sociology this has been discussed in terms of how listening to the accounts of people’s lives makes it possible to understand social contexts. The “I”

of present fit both “the others” conceptions about ones self and how one fit in institutional practices (Cicourel, 1995, p. 27). More precisely, the social is to be understood via the accounting of the narrator for his or her autobiography. When concentrating on and examining these spoken life stories, it is possible to produce a sociological analysis of the actualities of each narrator’s life. That is, how those narrated actualities are embedded in a social context and amidst the hardships of everyday life.

Life stories of this kind reveal the social and, then, expose relations between the narrator and institutional arrangements (DeVault &

McCoy, 2006). But because each story comes from a person who is deemed to be ill, they become ‘illness stories’, even though the illness part is peripheral to the plot (Frank, 1995; Kleinman, 1988). For the people concerned, there are other factors that are more relevant than the symptoms. Therefore, they are able to provide a better understanding of what it is like to live through the actualities of everyday life while having both the diagnosis PTSD and also experiences from a previous migration process. Therefore, although these stories are narratives about PTSD, they present characteristics that are central for the interviewees. All people with PTSD have the same clinical diagnosis, but the particular living conditions of each person differs in ways that have consequences for his or her everyday life. Accordingly, these consequences may not be covered by the constructs of medicine because they focus on a different object. But the individual does not exist in a vacuum; instead, he or she is very much the product of the social aspects of everyday life, as it is found in attitudes, intentions, and experiences (Brante, 2001, p. 181). So, to make sense of the psychiatric concept of PTSD from the standpoint of the individual, the life stories are treated as a part of the ‘social’. An autobiography does not exist in a vacuum and it may tell more about intersecting social organizations and institutions than about an individual. When connecting the “I” of then together with the “I” of the present episodes are initiated in retrospect in a life story. When the story ends the protagonist has fused with the identity of the narrator. I tell a story about someone who in the course of events turn out to be me (Brockmeier, 2001, p. 251) These retrospective initiations are explanations and depend, then, significantly upon the identity of the protagonist of the story and the identity postulates

another as a necessary (Cavarero, 2000, p. 20). Therefore, the story is hard to tell as an autobiography - unfolding instead as a biography from the other.

5.1 Translation Dilemmas: Three Methodological Obstacles

I collected the material at a language school for refugees during the fall of 2007. The interviews were conducted together with an interpreter in a meeting room located at this language school, and all the interviewees have the diagnosis PTSD. The approach was to start from the standpoint of the interviewee and from this location obtain information about institutions such as psychiatry, the Swedish Migration Board (SMB), language, employment, or whatever the refugees thought it was relevant to talk about. The interviews for this article were done with the aid of an authorized interpreter who spoke the native language of the interviewee, with Swedish as a secondary language. For ethical reasons, I give the interviewees the name Mahmod, Ina, and Nadia. The interviews were all tape recorded and later transcribed into written text. Focus for the interviews was upon the period of time after each interviewee’s arrival in Sweden, and how each individual made sense of this posttrauma period. The interview began with a presentation of the purpose of the interview. I explained that the interviewee could stop anytime he or she wanted, that the interviews were anonymous, and that the interviewee was free to withdraw his or her story and retrieve the recording. My first question was always: “Please, can you tell me about your time in Sweden?”

Before the interview ended, my final questions were “Do you want to bring something forward that you think that you have missed? Is there something you wish to clarify or something you want to withdraw?” The shortest interview lasted for one-hour, the longest, two-and-a-half. After the interview I remained for a while, talking with the students and teachers at the school where the interviews were conducted. No one wished to quit or withdraw from the interviews.

There were three persons involved in the interview: the interviewee, the interpreter, and me; thus, there was not only storytelling involved but also acts of translation, i.e. spoken translation. This introduces three epistemological obstacles, including analytical issues of bias, power relations, and distance. These obstacles refer to the central issue of who possesses and produces knowledge and of what the knowledge is about. First, the translation introduces a distortion in the final

material. Meaning that the translation cannot be fully ‘correct’ from the interviewee’s point of view, even if it could be, however, it is in this sense more correct from the interpreter’s point of view. The analysis will also suffer in the sense that there are problems with reliability; nevertheless, the findings may be valid and reveal an accurate phenomenon. Usually this means that the interviewer treats him or her self analytically as external to the narrative, and not as a part of the knowledge production. But if the narrative is recollected as external to the interviewer’s experience and analyzed as a text, then the findings are located within the text that the interviewer asks for (Hydén, 2008, p. 50; Temple & Young, 2004, p. 163; Whittemore, Chase, & Mandle, 2001, p. 530). So, the empirical material depends very much upon the interviewer and the cultural context he or she also is a part of. Following this reasoning, the material is collected together with the interviewee and cannot be treated as external. This first obstacle is reinforced by the interpreter’s translation of the narrative to a language that the interviewee does not have control over.

The interpreter is introducing bias in the material but it is treated as if the interviewee was fluent in the language spoken. Accordingly, the original protagonist of the story does not structure the narrative.

The second obstacle appears here, meaning that the protagonist of the story does not become the master of his or her story. Every social agent aspires to have the power to established a worldview by naming but, ultimately, the identity of the interviewee is in the material constructed by the ‘other’ who is the interpreter who can speak the relevant language for the interviewee (Spivak, 1992, p. 177; Temple &

Young, 2004, p. 164). The interpreter gives voice to the interviewee as if she or he could not speak for his- or herself; there is a hierarchy in the situation. In this hierarchy the interviewee becomes situated at the bottom; it is the interviewee that is questioned, the material depends on the questions asked, but the story is translated into another language and into another rhetoric distanced from the interviewee’s life world and own language. The third obstacle is that the material comes in a strict sense from the interpreter, rather than from the protagonist of the story. This means that the interpreter takes on two roles, both the interviewer’s and the interviewee’s. The interviewee is clearly in the ‘researched’ position, that has his or her story captured by the interpreter who subsequently releases it to me in a way that the interpreter believes that I will understand.

These obstacles are important to bear in mind; what is significant for this study, and for biographical research, are the relationships

between life and the story told and not exactly how the narrative is verbalized (Stanley & Temple, 2008, p. 278). The narrative comes from an individual, but the analysis cannot only be about the individual, it must be about the social and extended to the social relations and institutional order in which we participate (Smith, 2005, p. 43). There are two emergent aspects about this. First, I am not excluded from the construction of the knowledge, together with the interpreter and the interviewee; there is an emergent material that consists of stories about a social phenomenon and how we together construct it. So, It is I as interviewer who calls for these stories, the interviewee narrates them, and the interpreter makes them concrete for me in a language I understand, but which is not understood by the interviewee. The construction of an interpreted material is complex, situational, and hybridizing, but ideally it reveals concepts that avoid categorization, which implies exclusivity and immutability.

Second, translated narratives are always biased, are always distanced from the protagonist and always differentiate, but this hybridizing process of language mixing opens up new worldviews and new understandings that unfold alternative analyses unavailable when the interview is done in a single language. So, before going any further I want to declare that these stories are to be considered as a part of the social world and unfold an episode of the narrator’s life.