Narratives of Internally Displaced Persons of Anglophone Cameroon Crisis: A Circumstantial Appraisal

Narratives of trauma are generally aimed at expressing the depth of pain
experienced by victims in an attempt to begin the journey towards healing and
the choice of expressions show how close or distant to the victim is the narrative
event. This article examines the use of circumstantial elements to prove both
authenticity and negotiate how close to the heart the traumatic event is to the
victims of trauma in the Anglophone Cameroon Crisis. The data were collected
from sixty victims using a convenient sampling technique. Ethnographic
approaches, which include semi-open interviews, diary reading, and focus-group discussions, were used. The qualitative research design was used
focusing on the circumstantial elements found in the narratives of the victims
sampled for this work. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics was used to
analyze the data focusing largely on the use of duration, which involves time
and space; manner and cause. This work concludes that by making use of
adverbial and prepositional phrases, the victims show a very close relationship
with their traumatic experiences as expressed in the exactitude with which they
associate these experiences with the time, space, cause, and manner of
occurrence. It further suggests that, while handling the socio-political causes of
the crisis, attention should be paid to the depth of the wounds inflicted by the
crisis in the hearts of the victims through the creation of trauma healing centers
and the provision of psychosocial support for all victims.

Key words: Trauma, IDPs, narratives, Anglophone, Crisis, SFL