Researching an unmentionable (Ammbɔdin) among the Akans in Ghana: Suicide taboos, discursive representations and subject positionings

Abstract

Death and dying are highly emotive, and in some contexts hard to research. However, when a particular mode of death, like suicide, does not fit into a people’s notion of ‘acceptable’ deaths, disclosures on and researching it from the perspectives of persons who are bereaved by such deaths often get complicated with contested discourses and languages. These complications, however, could also present sites for a discursive construction of situated meanings and many ways people’s world can be represented. Using critical discourse analysis, this article takes a discursive journey into the linguistic tensions and negotiations that characterized the interviews with persons who had been bereaved by suicide in Ghana. Findings reveal five discourses of censure, denial and contestation, fear and insights, trapped pain and release, and insults and distancing. Underlying these discourses are various subject positionings that discursively construct the suicides, the suicide bereaved, their interviews and the researcher differently.