3. Severe Conflicts: Frustration-Deprivation
3.5. Open Interviews: Story Analysis
88 lock and key until such a time as they are deemed to be instrumental in reconstructing that historically tumultuous period.231
The document analysis of this study revolved around primary sources such as newspaper clippings, investigative reports, internet postings, political communiqués, published speech scripts, and other personal narrative writings of ex-combatants and the civilian population in Matabeleland.232 Secondary sources involved historical books, research dissertations and statistical research reports on the Matabeleland conflict from the specific time period of interest.233 Recollections data was extracted from the
numerous published biographies on the persons of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, the ZANU, ZAPU and Zimbabwe as a nation.234 The document analysis processes ran congruently and carried a cross-sectional function throughout the research time-fame.
89 and producing life.”236 Story narrative is not just a means to find out about the world; a descriptive conduit for information. It is a producer of data, and a creator of interpretation and meaning.237 Narrative is about people making sense out of their experience. Narrative stories are told to make a point not just to share information. The ‘constructivist’
approach seeks to discover how a sense of social order is created through talk and interaction. In the words of research methodology author, Jane Elliot: “Stories are…life as well as about life”238.
The open interview process brings certain unique advantages over other
instrumentalities of research. The open interview is more personal in nature, it allows for a more free-flow conversational style, it provides the freedom to explore issues in more depth, and it can at times reveal data that participants would otherwise not be willing to disclose in a in a more public group environment. The disadvantages of this interview instrument are that because of its intensive personal focus participants can sometimes feel intimidated or uncomfortable, which could lead to an unnatural, formalised or stilted expression of data. Also, interviewing can often err on the side of subjectivity bias, an issue that is of paramount concern in the qualitative research arena.
For this research effort, an open interview format has been selected precisely because of how it lends itself to the narrative analysis aims and objectives of this project.
In order to build on, and compliment the literature review and the document analysis, 35 open individual interviews were conducted with representatives from each of the earlier identified sectors of society; political, ex-combatant, media, legal, education, church, women, rural agriculturalist populations. The goal in this interview process was to gather individual story narratives about the experience of violence in Matabeleland during the time in question. Out of these personal stories various themes used to describe and give shape to the dominant and subjugated narratives of Matabeleland were examined. These story highlights and discourse landscapes were then transcribed, compiled and compared with the findings from the literature review and document analyses processes. The interviewees were also encouraged to reflect on any possible connections between their
236 Cupitt, 1991: 49.
237 Elliot, 2005: 17-18.
238 Elliot, 2005: 18-20.
90 experiences of violence during the Matabeleland conflict and the crisis being faced in Zimbabwe at present.
Steiner Kvale239 espouses to a thorough interview ‘life-cycle’ that entails seven distinct phases.
• Thematising (setting an aim / goal for the interview),
• Designing (giving ample time to developing the appropriate questions),
• Interviewing (timing, venue, atmosphere, recording and managing subjectivity)
• Transcribing (detailed conversational format /‘units of discourse’ uncovered),
• Analysing (form, substance and performance),
• Verifying (authenticity, reliability and validity), and
• Reporting (writing up and / or publishing the findings).
These phases provided a general ‘map’ followed in setting-up, conducting and analysing the findings of the interviews, and served as the back-drop context in which to place and
‘track’ the particular interview sessions as they progressed.
3.5.2. Story as structured narrative flow
The interview component of this research concentrated on gathering raw data of uninterrupted (as much as possible) story scripts and converging themes describing the experience of the Matabeleland violence from various societal sectors. The challenge was then to find the terms, strictures and boundaries of analyses that lent themselves to the effective and integral interpretation of story meaning. It is the belief of this author- researcher that in using the mode of narrative analysis one is compelled to take seriously the constructed as well as the free-flowing elements of the story discourse. Thus, in the process of analysing the interview data in this section, all efforts were made to highlight the recognizable patterns evident in the process of building a story. While at the same time, the research tools attempted to expose and explore the themes of symbolism, irony and deep meaning that emerged along the pathway of discovery.
In general terms, there are six kinds of knowledge topics that can be pursued in the interview process: facts, beliefs about facts, feelings and motives, standards of action,
239 Kvale, S. 1996. Interviews – An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. London: SAGE Publications.
91 present and past behaviour, and conscious reasons.240 However, in order to manage the flow of data that came from the interview sessions, it was critical to choose a specific frame of reference that was utilized for the deconstruction of the narrative discourses that were gathered. The dominant structural narrative analysis frameworks are found in the works of Labov (1972), Gee (1986), and Burke (1945). Kohler Reissman summarises these three models of narrative analysis as follows:
1. Labov’s model “includes six common elements: an abstract (summary of the substance of the narrative), orientation (time, place, situation, participants),
complicating action (sequence of events), evaluation (significance and meaning of the action, attitude of the narrator), resolution (what finally happened), and coda (returns the perspective to the present)”241.
2. Gee’s model “analyzes changes in pitch, pauses, and other features that punctuate speech that allow interpreters to hear groups of lines together. Using poetic units, stanzas, and strophes to examine the talk… [Gee] shows how organized, coherent, and senseful…speech is.”242
3. Burke’s “classic method of analyzing language – dramatism…is contained in a pentad of terms: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. Any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions: What was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he [or she]
did it (agency), and why (purpose).”243
This study utilised the Burke framework of narrative analysis as the ‘guiding questions’
for unpacking the interviews. Thus, while the interview data contained large portions of free-flow scripts of the personal experience of violence in the Matabeleland conflict, the mode of analysis was guided by Burke’s markers described above. The following questions assisted in teasing out Burke’s paradigm:
• Act: This has to do with the plot-formation – What are the issues involving order, duration, frequency, causation and / or conflict embedded in the events and actions of the story?
240 Silverman, D. 2001. Interpreting Qualitative Data – Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction.
London: SAGE Publications, 88.
241 Kohler Riessman, 1993: 18-19.
242 Kohler Riessman, 1993: 19.
243 ibid.
92
• Scene: This has to do with settings – What are the spatial, temporal and social dynamics surrounding the story?
• Agent: This has to do with the characters – How are the actors described? What is revealed about their points of view and traits? Do they draw out empathy, hatred or apathy?
• Agency: This has to do with symbolism and irony – What are the universal, historical, contextual or cultural threads that are used, articulated, manipulated and woven through the story in order to convey meaning?
• Purpose: This has to do with narrative patterns – What deeper meaning may be able to be unearthed in the structural composition of the narrative itself?244 Each interview narrative was broken down into manageable bits of script that were then categorised under the Burke rubric of analysis. In this way the research analysis findings were ‘thickened’ and yielded the narrative discourse cross-pollination necessary to shed new light on the questions surrounding the formation and interplay between the dominant and subjugated narratives surrounding the violence system in the Matabeleland case.