Narrative Rhythmanalysis: the art and politics of listening to women’s narratives of forced displacement

In this paper I draw on my experiences of listening to migrant and refugee women’s stories of displacement and explore questions around discourses and practices of listening across borders and languages. In doing so, I particularly focus on the materiality of listening, the force of corporeal voices, the rhythms of oral narratives and their effects on understanding and making connections within the web of human relations. Following tracks and traces of a rich body of literature around sounds, voices and texts in narrative analytics and feminist theory, I have turned my attention to aurality and I have suggested narrative rhythmanalysis as a mode of understanding and as a method. What I argue is that turning our attention to listening practices as a neglected process in theoretical analysis illuminates the perspective of the storyteller, mobilizes affective forces in the milieu of relational narratives and enacts the materiality of knowledge through the intensity and uniqueness of the corporeal voice. What I finally suggest is that perhaps we should move beyond the imperatives of clarity and transparency in an attempt to be in the world with others. Here the sound of narratives could become a trope that can take us down the path of decolonizing our ways of knowing and understanding.