Simorgh: A Sufi-Hermeneutic Horizon to Essential Existential Understanding of L2 Metaphors

Abstract

This contemplative, artistic writing is a snapshot of international students’ understandings of metaphors situated in their transition journeys. It is informed by my life-long Self-exploration journey and existential understandings essential to human beings, directing me to a critical perspective of metaphor understanding and human understanding as represented in dominant cognitive literature on L2 metaphor understanding and human relations inside and outside my academic context. The inadequacy of systematic cognitive approaches to capture the myriad, emergent ways that metaphors are experienced by individuals moved me to explore Gadamer’s hermeneutic-existential approach to address the issue and help with learners’ understanding challenges. I integrate hermeneutics with Persian Islamic tradition to recontextualize metaphor/language understanding within human understanding, revive understanding in its original whole human sense, and attend to both diversity and unity aspects of understanding.

This research is conducted through a deep and detailed analysis of international students’ Self-understandings before and after transition to Canada. Using in-depth, individual interviews and think aloud techniques, it examines the understanding journeys of thirteen students from twelve different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, studying various disciplines at University of Ottawa. Within the Sufi view of Simorgh, participants’ understandings of linguistic metaphors in the poem The Road Not Taken are examined within their collective Self-exploration and essential journeys with Others. Participants’ diverse interpretations of metaphors, reflecting their pre-transition (EFL) and post-transition (ESL) experiences and understandings, were entwined with their common humane understandings. The multiplicity and varied depth of interpretations reveal the individuality, historicity and complexity of participants’ understandings.

Tracing kinship between Islamic philosophy and hermeneutics, integrated and applied to L2 metaphor understanding, I highlight intercultural, inter-traditional, and interdisciplinary approaches for multicultural research and education.

This dialogic work is deemed as my obligation and a step for inter-traditional thinking and awareness to create inclusive and peaceful linguistic and academic contexts.