Stories of Chechen Deportation: Transformations of Narrative Language

This article analyses the language of narratives about the deportation of the Chechen people that existed in Chechen society before and after the First and Second Chechen Wars. The main focus of the study is on how the events of the two wars, having inflicted a new trauma on Chechen society, forced a certain part of this society to reinterpret the previous trauma of deportation in accordance with the new collective experience. This rethinking found expression primarily in the change in the language used to describe the deportation of Chechens in 1944. The sources used for this research include collections of memoirs of deportees published before the First Chechen War, as well as focus groups and thirty in-depth interviews collected by the authors over the past four years. The second part of the paper is devoted to analyzing the mutual influence of the language of the researchers and the language of the researched. The author proposes, following the ideas of postcolonial scholarly discourse, to give special importance to the language of description used by those we work with and to consider it as an element of analysis absolutely necessary for understanding the cultural reality in which and by which the people who entrust researchers with their stories live. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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