Migration, constraints, and suffering

A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doings. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering.

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doings. Recent linguistic research often highlights transcendence of boundaries through migration and celebrates the fluidity and hybridity of multilingualism. By contrast, Santello argues that this discourse neglects migrants’ experiences of constraints and suffering. He sees limitations not just as structural inequalities resulting from macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate, but focusses on the lived experience of constraint at the individual level.

The study is based on fieldwork with Lamin (pseudonym), a young man from Gambia in Italy. Instead of asking the conventional question how language learning unfolds, the researcher was interested to understand why Lamin had not learnt to speak Italian to any significant degree.

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Call for papers

Marco is currently guest-editing a special issues of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to “Constrained Multilingualism.” The Call for Papers is available here (abstracts accepted until Nov 21, 2024)

Reference

Santello, M. (2024). Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000423

Related content

Piller, I. (2016). Portrait of a linguistic shirker. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/portrait-of-a-linguistic-shirker/
Piller, I. (2016). The real problem with linguistic shirkers. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/the-real-problem-with-linguistic-shirkers/

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 18/10/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and I’m distinguished professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Marco Santello.

Marco is a researcher in multilingualism at the University of Turin in Italy. Marco has a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia and has held academic positions at the University of Warwick in the UK, at Monash University in Melbourne, and at the University of Leeds where he taught intercultural competence. Marco’s research interests revolve around the intersections between language and migration.

Welcome to the show, Marco.

Santello: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Piller: Marco, so your current research is with African migrants to Italy, and maybe you could start us off by telling us about your research project and the approach you’re taking.

Santello: Yes, that’s right. So, my research at the moment is with migrants from Africa to Italy, and in particular with the group of these migrants, those that come from Gambia, which is a small country in the west of Africa. So, it’s a country which is basically enclosed within Senegal.

It’s only three million people live there, more or less. And that’s a group of migrants that is quite common, actually, in Italy, that I was able to come across. And I thought of being interested in.

The way the project unfolded is due to, first of all, my reading of certain authors in particular, Michel Destot. And so, first of all, I did some kind of academic intellectual work, if you will, on his understanding of everyday life, action in everyday life, and how important are constraints for his understanding of creativity and action within the space of action, indeed. So, this kind of idea that very many people operate within a specific space of action, and don’t have quite the possibility of going beyond it in so many ways.

And on the other hand, migrants have always been at the centre of my attention. I’ve been a migrant myself, travelled, as you were saying before, and lived in different countries. And it’s also been challenging for me at times.

So that’s always been some kind of an interest. At the same time, I was, I always worked in, with multilingualism. And so, from an academic perspective, that’s what prompted me to do a PhD and then to work with migrants afterwards.

And but also in my personal life, I’m just simply dedicating some of my free time to volunteering for new migrants and that I’ve been doing.

Piller: Maybe you can tell us a bit about that intersection between your volunteering and what your volunteering involves and how this relates to your research project.

Santello: Yeah, that’s right. Listen, it’s, you know, I’m a researcher, but I’m also a person. So, the, it just makes me happy really to be surrounded by foreigners.

And it, I volunteer for a couple of NGOs. One of these provide shelter and support to migrants near Padua. And this is something that just I wanted to do and I started doing.

And I didn’t have much of an idea other than I can support them with their linguistic needs. And they were really, the NGOs, they were really telling me, you know, we would need this, would you be happy to do this? Would you be happy to do that?

For example, meeting one to one with people or supporting some small classes. And it’s something I simply did. That was it really.

But then when I thought about this, and this kind of idea that we don’t know for sure constraints that people experience as they migrate, immediately I thought about the possibility of, you know, getting in touch with the NGO and see if they had anything to do, if they thought that was a good idea. Because in my research, I always try to start from the needs that might be coming from the field. So, if of course, on one side, as I was saying, I’m doing some kind of, you know, reading as a researcher, at the same time, you know, what matters to me is really that somehow, I’m connected to people and they were really enthusiastic about it.

And at the very beginning, I remember, I wanted to focus on people who had just arrived. Because that was my idea, and that’s also the kind of people that I was meeting in these kinds of volunteering activities. But then they told me, why don’t you instead talk to these Gambians?

Because they’ve been in Italy for a much longer time, and then probably have much more to say. And honestly, they don’t speak much Italian, some of them. And we don’t know exactly what happens there.

And I also thought to myself, actually, it is very interesting as a question, like why after years, you are not able to easily have a conversation. Some of them, of course, do have conversations in Italian, some of them really don’t, they struggle. So it was an interesting question.

And that kind of linked back again to this kind of idea that we focus a lot on the resourcefulness of migrants, but sometimes there is just something that happens and it doesn’t seem to be working as well as perhaps we would hope for or think about. So that was the whole reason.

Piller: So, what did you actually find in terms of why is it that they take such a long time to learn Italian? I mean, it is a really interesting question. And particularly with Africans, I mean, we know that there is a lot of language learning going on on the continent and people are often very, very multilingual and sort of learn languages easily.

And then we suddenly find that once they come to the global north, to Europe, same in Australia. We’ve just seen that in this new research that we’ve published, Life in a New Language, that actually then all of a sudden learning English becomes really difficult in all these everyday language learning skills that they brought along no longer seem to work. So, what did you find?

Santello: Yeah, I mean, listen, with this particular study that I published called Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy, what I found was that there’s a level where there’s an impossibility to practice spoken Italian because of lack of an environment which is conducive to it. So people working in jobs that don’t require much interaction, and also not having a circle of people with whom they can speak Italian. And that was one of the constraints.

Another constraint that people brought up is the lack of classroom instruction available to them. So, in the specific case of these migrants that I met, the NGO provides some support from volunteers. But it’s a kind of a support which is quite limited in terms of hours, for obvious reasons.

Whereas there might be other schools in other places. But what Lamin, the specific migrant, my main informant for the study reported, it was that he tried to call the local school, but nobody replied. So, he assumed there was no space for that to happen.

And that doesn’t mean of course, that he doesn’t speak any Italian or he can’t communicate at all. But that he feels the need or the willingness to advance in certain aspects. And Lam also showed me a notebook filled with exercises.

And you could see the effort that was there in terms of the learning. But from the spoken perspective, there was a kind of limitation that he was experiencing. So we really see, we touch concretely through his experiences, the range of constraints that he experiences, particularly in terms of the environment.

Piller: Can you tell us a bit more about Lamin? Just introduce him as a person?

Santello: Absolutely. So, Lamin is a migrant, of course it’s a pseudonym, a migrant who moved to Italy six years ago. So, we’re talking about a migrant who has been in the country for a long time.

He comes from Gambia, as you were saying, and he speaks English fluently. Now, I usually have these exchanges in English, and it was important for him, particularly that he could speak English with me, because of course he’s extremely proficient, so he’s able really to make himself understood. He also speaks Mandinka.

That’s his main language, as he describes it. But then he also speaks Wolof, and bits and pieces of other languages. indeed, that was one aspect that came up through my research, which was the progressive surfacing of linguistic repertoires and interactions.

So, what both me and him made apparent at the very beginning, in terms of the languages we speak, was not what actually unfolded during the exchanges. So, by talking about constraints, we were able to bring up bits and pieces of our repertoires. For example, for him, in Italy, it is very important to speak Wolof, because Wolof allows him to communicate also with Senegalese.

The Senegalese are very numerous in Italy, in a long-standing community, many more than the Gambians. Many people in Gambia speak Wolof as well. But at the very beginning, he did not make that apparent to me that he spoke Wolof.

Now you would think such an important language for his life would have been apparent to him straight away. But this is not surprising at all that bits and pieces of our experiences and our speaker would also become apparent in conversation. The same goes to me.

When I explained to him that I’ve lived in Norway, then immediately brought up the fact that he spoke a little bit of Swedish. So, he said a few sentences to me, which was very important because I wasn’t expecting myself, as I was saying, I’m a person, I’m a researcher. So, it immediately brought some kind of emotional reaction on me, very positive.

Hearing this language, I wasn’t expecting to hear it in the shelter in Padua. So yeah, so he’s a multilingual, that’s for sure. And he has lived in the south and in the centre of Italy, going through different camps and also living in the streets.

So as a homeless person and was now living in Padua in the shelter, working in a local factory and trying really to settle in Italy in many ways. So, and when I when I introduce myself to the group, he was immediately very, very keen on telling me about his experiences and so on and so forth.

So, another thing that I want to be an opportunity for him to practice Italian or not, not really?

In this specific case, I don’t think so. In this specific case, I think that for him, it was really important to make his experiences known. And one aspect also that came out of my study was the fact that he was also trying to convey to me that his experience is not like an isolated experience.

That is something that is shared among several migrants. For example, when he was talking about the fact that he arrived in Italy, but some people didn’t because he crossed the Mediterranean. And it’s a very dangerous road as a road and route, really.

As he was putting it, he was really kind of representing it as a collective experience because it is. It’s not just him. There are many, many people taking that boat and trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The same goes for being homeless. So, he was really talking about this in the plural. And conveying the idea that people suffer.

And that’s one of the aspects that I wanted really to include in my article because I sensed that something that he wanted me to communicate. And even though this suffering is not strictly related to language, I thought it was a very good idea to insert it in many ways as part of the data. Because it was, I felt that it was important for him.

And it was important for me to be faithful to what I was given. And so, whilst, of course, every time we do research, particularly this type of research where the researcher is highly involved because again, it’s a kind of ethnographic and it’s a participation of US researchers, he at the same time, for me, was important to do justice as much as possible to what he was giving me. So even though it was something that wasn’t related strictly to language, I wanted for it to be inserted in the research so that again, I did something that I thought was faithful to what he was telling me.

Piller: Yeah, I think we’re both sort of interested in how language actually shapes your life, and the lived experience of language learning and language as a part of life. So, I thought that was really, really important and just so interesting to also for him to have that desire. I mean, again, that we see that a lot in our research as well, that sometimes participants really have this expectation that if they speak to a researcher, we’ll be able to, I don’t know, bring their experiences to the proper authorities, to the attention of people who can actually make a difference in their lives, and I sometimes find that really hard to deal with actually, because I think there is a bit of an expectation that by talking to someone who is in a fairly privileged position as a researcher or who they perceive to be as influential, even if we aren’t really socially influential.

That has a positive aspect or a positive consequence for themselves, but really for the larger structures under which they labor. As you say, he often wanted to make explicit to you that this was not only his experience but that suffering is sort of an endemic condition, I guess. So how did you deal with that expectation?

Santello: Yeah, listen, I don’t tell him, I’m going to solve your problems, etc. I’m just telling him, we don’t know these things, we just don’t know. My job as a researcher is to try and understand them with your help.

What I’m doing is simply trying to understand what’s going on, but I don’t have any power to change policy or anything like this. On the other hand, of course, it is a way for him to take these experiences in another place so that other people are aware of, for example, the constraints he experienced, or the suffering, or the deprivation, and so on and so forth.

And of course, also the sheer fact that we could have this conversation in English, as I was saying to you, at the moment in Italy, my position is within English. And for him, this was very important. And so, I was really, and it was something really united us because just the possibility for him to articulate himself the way he wanted to was key.

And that again tells us something about the importance of the resourcefulness of migrants and of multilinguals more generally, in being able to use different linguistic resources to make meaning. However, as I was also trying to explain in my article, very often we focus on the resourcefulness only from below saying that there’s a kind of a freedom of fluidity, etc. And that somehow by being multilingual, almost automatically, if you will, we will be able to advance or at least to be oppositional to some kind of a given system.

Whereas I didn’t necessarily find that in my research. In the sense that it’s not that by being multilingual, you’re automatically trying to disrupt the system or by going against monolingual norms, etc. Sometimes none of that really happens.

Another thing I also was interested in is in how the constraints are part of the multilingualism that people experience. For example, something really surprising in a positive way that I found was that he was even welcoming some constraints.

For example, in his house, and most of them are from West Africa, and he can speak with them either in English, or in Wolof, or in Mandinka, and so on. But there’s one person who doesn’t speak any of these languages. And so, for him, the only way to speak with this guy is in Italian.

And initially, at the Wolof, that must be difficult, you’re not. But, and I asked him, is that okay for you to speak? And he said, yes, yes, because it’s the only way I can improve my Italian by speaking it.

So, the constraint then was not experienced as a dramatic predicament in that specific circumstance. He was even welcomed as an opportunity to be in a, to be able to speak another language which he finds useful. And in a situation where he’s, that he’s lacking in his daily life, which is the possibility to speak in Italian, because of what we were saying before, the isolation, the non-Italian speaking environment in general, and some many tasks that don’t require any circles of people that speak other languages that he speaks, which are very important, of course.

And he says that very often with the Senegalese, with the Gambians and so forth, and other people from the foreign parts of West Africa, that also speak languages related to Mandinka. But so, there’s a kind of a, it’s a complicated picture, where the constraints are not simply impediments that are lived as something to be overcoming on costs. There is also that aspect, of course, of something that is experienced as a problem, and that is actually something that’s blocking.

But at the same time, there are many more things that we can see happening in, for the understanding of the multilingualism.

Piller: Yeah, I mean, just let’s continue with this idea a bit more that constraints can also be opportunities, because I guess from the national European perspective, from the perspective of the Italian state, or from the majority population, there is this idea that if you don’t speak Italian, you’re hugely constrained, and that’s a real lack, and without discounting that it’s important to speak Italian and whatnot, I think you’re also drawing attention to the fact that there are other multilingual repertoires or other languages in Lamin’s repertoire that are really important and that open doors for him in some kinds of ways and enable his life in Italy. So maybe you can speak to that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. So, as we know, in many countries around the world, there’s this kind of sense that a successful migrant is a migrant who’s able to speak very fluently the national language, for example, the national languages.

This is something that we kind of take for granted. And we know how this is very problematic because it kind of assumes that everybody is a more is more a lingual, it assumes a native speaker standard, and so on and so forth. But actually, even if you think about Italy, people born and raised in Italy, we have plenty of people in Italy who don’t speak Italian fluently, maybe they understand, but then to speak it fluently.

For example, people who speak regional languages, dialects, etc., who are not really able to have an entire conversation, monolingual conversation in Italian. And nobody would even dream of telling them that they are not good citizens.

Or else, we often put this label on migrants who might not be entirely proficient the way we think they should be in Italian, for example. So, there’s a huge problem there. And indeed, when you look at people’s lives, you look at the reality of them living with multiple languages and using many of them to create social networks, to work, to shop, for example.

Now, Lamin, for example, talks about this, the importance of using Mandinka and Wolof, or particularly Wolof, in shops, when he was living in Naples, and when he was going around the Central Station, and there were African shops, he says, and there I would be speaking my language, he says. And that’s where I realized that he was talking about Wolof, not Mandinka. So, you can tell that in that specific circumstance, there is no need for him to necessarily to speak Italian.

Of course, Italian is important, because it allows you to do things. And also because, you know, the overall society has a specific idea of Italian, what confidence in Italian is, but that’s not the only side of the story. So, by shedding light on this multilingualism, we try to understand better how things work, simply and without having this kind of preconceived idea that either you speak Italian like a native, or you’re not very, very good as a migrant, right?

So that’s not what comes out of this. However, he really hopes to improve his Italian and to be able to attend classes. That’s something that he conveyed to me.

Remember that Lamin has been in Italy for six years. And to this day, he has problems, you know, having a full conversation in Italian. So, there’s, and his willingness is there.

And he’s hopeful that that can change, particularly when it comes to spoken language, because it’s important for him. But again, that doesn’t mean…

Piller: Are there any Italian speakers in his social networks? Or is Italian really just the language he needs to interact with institution?

Santello: Yeah, so he didn’t say to me that he has any Italian-speaking friends. And so, I don’t think he has a kind of, you know, interaction from that kind of perspective with Italian speakers. So that’s one side, you know, of the coin.

On the other hand, of course, you need Italian in Italy in many ways, also to interact not just with institutions, but sometimes but also with people around. And then in the future, you know, with potential employers and whatever. So, there’s a, he knows that’s useful, that’s for sure.

One thing that, for example, he mentions to me, which is also very interesting, is this kind of idea that he cannot rely fully on English in Italy. Whilst he was making this comparison to Scandinavian countries, for example, where the knowledge of English is much more widespread. And so, people like him who are proficient in English, can easily rely on English if they don’t speak, for example, Swedish or whatever.

And whereas in Italy, he says, that’s not exactly my experience. So, it also tells us something about people speaking in the country. Of course, people in Italy, lots of people speak Italian, but that doesn’t mean, what I’m trying to say is that English and knowledge of English, which sometimes is regarded as only the kind of way to advance your career, etc.

It actually can be a way to create an easier environment for newcomers. In the beginning, those who speak English, so that at least when they’re very proficient in Italian, it’s not there yet to be able to communicate what they want to communicate. You can resort to English.

That’s not exactly his experience. So, he was making this kind of comparison, which also tells me about his knowledge of different countries, different languages, different, this kind of idea that these people come with a boat and they are unaware where they are. That’s not what I’ve found at all.

Piller: Yeah. Let’s maybe just have a bit more of a look at the conceptual side of things a bit more, because one thing that I really enjoyed about your article was actually that going back a bit, typically in applied linguistics, we see individuals as really creative, and you see a lot of multilingual playfulness, and individual multilinguals enjoy their multilingualism, and on the other hand, when we talk about constraints, when we talk about inequality, we locate that on the macro level, or in terms of language policies, in terms of the state, in terms of institutions. I think you are trying to break down that dichotomy a bit, that the constraints are macro, and the playfulness and the joy is individual.

Maybe you can explain that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. It’s exactly the way you explained it to us.

Basically, often what we see is that there are some societal structures that impede multilingualism, and that really is something that comes from above, and it constrains people, and from below instead, there will be a freedom and fluidity, a playfulness. Some authors talked about unbridled use. But actually, what we see happening among these individuals is something a bit more subtle than this.

It’s not simply social structures that push down, and that are, and these kinds of multilinguals would fight against it somehow. Nor is something at the bottom level unbridled use, where simply linguistic resources are used without any problem, and that they just show creativity and so forth. It doesn’t work like that in this kind of experiences.

What you see is something much more subtle. For example, one aspect which comes out of my research, is this kind of constraints that have to do with their personal life. It’s not only societal structures, for example, you know, something that you experience yourself, you know, for example, in another piece of research, you know, the family member passes away, and that actually sets in motion a change in your investment in language or investment in certain things that you need to do for your migration.

So, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not entangled with some other societal processes, it’s also a personal component. There’s also, you know, the lived experience of people in interaction, the social networks, the people helping each other or not helping each other, and so on and so forth. And so surely, we don’t see at a base level, the simple and unbridled use where people, you know, enjoy their multilingual resources, and this is somehow, you know, they will be unrestrained if they could.

It’s not exactly like that. And there are many more aspects that we need to consider. For example, indeed, what we were saying before, this kind of idea that certain constraints actually can function as a way to exercise certain linguistic skills that the person wants to exercise.

And so, it’s not the unbridled use in that case that becomes relevant, that becomes powerful, that becomes meaningful, but it is indeed a constraint which is inhabited. This is what Destot used to say. People inhabit what is given.

And what they inhabit, what is given, doesn’t mean that they adapt to it. It means that they engage with it in a creative way. So there’s a lot of…

Destot never talks about being passive. Quite the opposite. He says there’s a way to be active, to be proactive, to be able to be creative, which isn’t against the system.

It is within a system where people kind of manage to find a way to be creative, to be able to communicate within a given system. Which was sometimes there is no solution to that at the very stage. There is no way that you can all of a sudden speak Italian, all of a sudden doesn’t work like that, right?

And so that’s what I was interested in. There’s a level of creativity, of resourcefulness, which happens within a space of action. And that specific moment that migrant is not trying to go against anything really, she’s just trying to get things done and communicate within that specific space of action.

And we can see a lot of multilingualism there, a lot of creativity, a lot of things being done. So again, this kind of idea of a dichotomy between strong macro structures that oppress us and something at the bottom which is just free and fluid, I think it’s much more complicated than that. That’s what I found.

Piller: Yeah, so true. Look, Marco, before we go, what’s next for your research? Where will you take this project?

Santello: Yeah, so I’m really trying to expand on the things that I’ve been working on. And one thing that, for example, I would like to expand on is a kind of idea of how are constraints related to this kind of educational deprivation, and how is this educational deprivation actually being counterbalanced by other activities? So, for example, things that don’t happen in the classroom, where people, for example, you were saying about the multilingualism of Africans, you know, how is that ability to learn languages in the street, for example?

So many interacting with people inside the classroom. How can this become resourceful for them in the migratory settings? So, in the host country, in this specific case, how is that worked out?

So how is the constraint inhabited by interacting with people when classes are not provided, for example, because it’s not a situation, it’s not conditioned or you yourself are experiencing certain problems, et cetera. So that’s something I’m working on at the moment. Very excited about it.

Piller: Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, we’ve also found that even where classes are provided, they sometimes can be so unsuitable.

And so, you know, besides the needs of the learners, that actually the classes can become another barrier to language learning. So, look, good luck with that. Thank you so much for the conversation, Marco.

Santello: Thank you very much. Grazie.

Piller: Grazie mille and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.