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A Dialogical Relationship. An Approach to Oral History(1)
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1. Oral sources and oral history
The phrase oral history is a common abbreviation for what we might describe, more articulately, as the use of oral sources in history or the social sciences.(1) In its most elementary form, the oral narratives and testimony which constitute oral history are but an additional tool in the historian’s panoply of sources, and are therefore subject to the same critical scrutiny as all other sources, in order to ascertain their reliability and their usefulness. From this point of view, we distinguish the oral source from the oral tradition: the latter is made up of verbal constructs that are formalized, transmitted, shared, whereas the historian’s oral sources are individual, informal, dialogic narratives created in the encounter between the historian and the narrator. Of course, these narratives may incorporate traditional materials, and oral historians may also avail themselves of oral traditions. However, it is best to keep the two concepts distinct: not all that is oral is traditional.
However, when we speak of oral history we also mean something more specific. Rather than an additional, often secondary tool in the historian’s panoply, oral sources are used as the axis of another type of historical work, in which questions of memory, narrative, subjectivity, dialogue shape the historian’s very agenda. When this is the case, the critical use of oral sources requires specific approaches and procedures, adequate to their specific nature and form.
As opposed to the majority of historical documents, in fact, oral sources are not found, but co-created by the historian. They would not exist in this form without the presence, and stimulation, the active role of the historian in the field interview. Oral sources are generated in a dialogic exchange – an interview -- literally a looking at each other, an exchange of gazes. In this exchange questions and answers do not necessarily go in one direction only. The historian’s agenda must meet the agenda of the narrator; what the historian wishes to know may not necessarily coincide with what the narrator wishes to tell. As a consequence, the whole agenda of the research may be radically revised.
For instance, when I started a project on the history of the labor movement from 1949 to 1953 in Terni, an industrial town in Central Italy, many narrators insisted in connecting the events I was interested in to the long-term history of their families and their town. Though this was not what I was originally looking for, I revised my project, and gained a great deal by it. Eventually, I ended up writing a history of the town from 1831 to 1985.(2)
Oral history, then, is primarily a listening art. Even when the dialogue stays within the original agenda, historians may not always be aware that certain questions need to be asked. Often, indeed, the most important information lies outside what both the historian and the narrator think of as historically relevant. For instance: I recently carried out a project on the memory of Nazi massacre perpetrated in Rome in 1944, known as the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine. 335 men were executed in retaliation for a partisan action that killed a number of German soldiers in the center of Rome. Beyond the reconstruction of the events, I wanted to understand how the survivors, especially women, had lived with the loss and the memory, how they had made lives for themselves with this pain their souls afterwards. It was only by accident, however, and when I thought that the interview was over, that I stumbled into one of the most painful memories.
I had been interviewing Ms. Ada Pignotti, who was 23 when her husband and three other relatives were killed by the Nazis at the Fosse Ardeatine. She had told me about those days, and then about her life ever since. We both thought the interview was over, that all that needed to be said had been said and I had no more questions. However, we chatted on – and I left the tape running – as she told me about her protracted, humiliating struggle with bureaucracy in order to receive the small pension to which she was entitled as a victim. Then, almost incidentally, she said: “And wherever you’d go, they knew that I had lost my husband, I and the others, the other women – and they all tried, wanted, tried to give you a line, a talk all of their own, because – who knows: you had to be at their disposal. You were a woman, you had no husband anymore, so you could very well …”(3) Pain, loss, poverty – these were themes to be expected. What I did not expect was this insult, almost unspeakable (as the narrator’s reticence shows), an insult for which she didn’t even have a word – sexual harassment – at the time.
Fortunately, I had left the tape running. Though I thought the interview was over, I knew that the art of listening includes respect; and you don’t show respect by turning the tape recorder off, as if to announce to your interviewee that from now on you are no longer interested in what she may have to say. Thus, the unexpected theme of harassment came into my research, and later on I was able to find confirmation in other interviews. No one had talked about it before; even the widows had hardly discussed it among themselves. It was too private to mention in public and, most importantly, until recently neither historians nor the women themselves were aware that this, too, was history. The assumption was that the historical event was the massacre; the survivors were supposed to be interesting only as witnesses to it, but their own lives were irrelevant. And, of course, women’s history and the history of sexuality were not considered of historical significance when these elderly ladies studied history in school.
Oral history, however, is not only about the event. It is about the place and meaning of the event within the lives of the tellers; which is why, in order to understand the meaning of two days in 1944, I had to go back and forward two or three generations, from 1870 to 1999.
2. Relationship: dialogue
All of this means that oral history is a listening art, and an art based on a set of relationships:
- the relationship between interviewees and interviewers (dialogue);
- the relationship between the time in which the dialogue takes place, and the historical time discussed in the interview (memory);
- the relationship between the public and the private sphere, between autobiography and history – between, we might say, History and story;
- the relationship between the orality of the source and the writing of the historian.
Let us begin with the first of these relationships – dialogue. A young scholar who was interviewing women who had breast cancer surgery once told me this story. She was talking to an elderly, recently widowed lady, who had spoken at length about many things but had carefully avoided the theme of the interview. The lady’s desire to protect her intimacy crossed the researcher’s desire to know about her experience, so she wouldn’t talk about it. Yet, her own need for human contact, so all-important for a person who has been left alone, made her want to continue to conversation, so she talked of other things. Only incidentally (and this time with the tape recorder off) the young researcher mentioned that she, too, had had surgery for breast cancer. Right there, the relationship changed: “so you’re one of us", the lady said. Authority, always implicit in an interview situation, also shifted: rather than feeling that she was under the researcher’s scrutinizing gaze, the lady felt that her age placed her now in a position of authority – “but you’re only a child!”, she said. It was then that the definition of interview as mutual exchange of gazes was radically revised and literalized, as the two women bared their breasts and compared their scars.(4)
“You are one of us / you are only a child” – the interview is based on a common ground that makes dialogue possible, but also on a difference that makes it meaningful. It would be a mistake to assume that only similarity allows interviewees to express themselves, that only similarity establishes the “trust” on which dialogue is founded. By definition, in fact, an exchange of knowledge has a meaning only if this knowledge is not previously shared – if, that is, between the subjects involved there exists a meaningful difference and one of them is in a learning situation.
For instance, in a project I coordinated in 1990, a group of my students and I were collecting interviews on the historical memory of the students in my department, in order to explore the cultural and political roots of a nation-wide student movement. We soon realized that the fact that both the interviewers and the interviewees were students, and involved in the movement, ultimately paralyzed the dialogue: “Why are you asking me about this? You’re supposed to know it already!” Also, the fact that their own peers took upon themselves a role of authority as interviewers seemed to some students an undue assertion of authority. On the other hand, when the interviewers were done by me, the hierarchical difference between me as a professor and them as students was less a problem for the interviewees than an opportunity to explain certain things to someone, a professor, who didn’t know them (“You professors don’t know a thing about what’s on the students’ minds!”). Thus, my difference, and the fact that I was in a position of learning from them reversed our usual authority roles and made the conversation meaningful.(5)
Perhaps the most important lesson I received in field work was when a black, working-class, American woman told me – a white, middle-class, European male – “I don’t trust you” – and then went on for two hours, telling stories that implicitly explained why she didn’t.(6) Common ground makes communication possible, but difference makes it meaningful. Common ground does not have to mean a shared identity but must rather depend on a shared will to listen to and accept each other critically. In this case, the possibility of dialogue was established initially both by the fact that I had been introduced by trusted friends from the Highlander Center. It was confirmed by the first question asked in the conversation – not by me, but by the lady’s husband, a preacher, union organizer, and former coal miner. As I have already pointed out, questions are not a one-way thing. He opened the conversation by asking me a question: “Are you in the United Mine Workers?” When I explained that I was not in the UMWA, but was a member of the teachers’ union back home, then the interview could begin. Finally, what enabled the interview to go on was the fact that I asked no probing, indiscreet questions. I mostly listened to what they had to say. They could see that I was not studying them, but learning from them.
Another example; The same people from Highlander who had introduced me to this black couple who later suggested I also interview Annie Napier, a disabled miner’s wife in Harlan, Kentucky. I called her, and she told me to come over. Then – as she revealed several years later – she called her sister and asked her, “What shall we do?” They finally reached the following conclusion: “If he ain’t too stuck up, we’ll talk to him.” It was only years later that I thought of asking her, “How did you know I wasn’t too stuck up?” And she said: “You came into the house and didn’t look for a clean place to set your butt on.” Which also suggests another thing: there is no one-way relationship between the observer and the observed. The observed also observes us, and judges us from behaviors of which we are not even aware (like the farmer in Tuscany who deduced my political leanings from the fact that, as he explained to a friend, “He didn’t ask me about priests.” Sometimes, it’s the questions we don’t ask that open up the dialogue).
In other words: it is the historian’s openness to listening and to dialogue, and the respect for the narrators, that establishes a mutual acceptance based on difference and thus opens up the narrative space for the interviewee to go into. On the other hand, it is the interviewee’s willingness to talk and open up to some degree that enables the historians to do their work. And the historians’ openness about themselves and the purpose of their work is a crucial factor in creating this space.
3. Relationships: the public and the private
Let us go on to another form of relationship, that between the public and the private sphere. One reason why the story of sexual harassment to the widows of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre had never been told before was that it was thought of as a personal matter, of no historical interest. Indeed, we would have looked in vain for its traces in public archives or court records.
Oral sources, then, help us question the boundary between what is of concern to history and what it not. On the one hand, both parties are caught in a grid of pre-established categories of relevance. Historians often do not know that there are unforeseen areas of experience that they ought to explore; narrators may not always be aware of the historical relevance of their personal experience. They may wish to guard them as too intimate to be revealed, or may be reluctant to discuss things that are important to them lest they be dismissed by the historian as irrelevant. This is why “I have nothing to say” or “What do you want me to say?” are such common beginnings in interviews. Even persons who have much to say, and may be anxious to say it, may be worried that their precious narrative may not be recognized, may not be “History” as they have been taught to define it.
In fact, the shifting and elusive boundary between History and stories is one of the relationships that make oral history meaningful. Ultimately, oral history is about the historical significance of personal experience on the one hand, and the personal impact of historical matters on the other. The hard core of oral history lies exactly at this point, where history breaks into private lives (for instance: when war breaks into domestic space in the shape of a bomb dropped from an airplane) or when private lives are drawn into history (for instance: the experience of the trenches in World War 1, the experience of Italian troops in Russian campaign in World War II…).
Yet, after listening to so many war narratives by men, I wondered: is there a comparable women’s narrative about personal encounters with the public sphere? When I was working on the project on Terni, I did my own transcribing, which was hard and grueling work. Thus, I used to skip certain sections of the interviews which I thought I would not use in the book. After a while, I realized that the narratives I skipped fell mainly into two categories: men’s war stories, and women’s hospital tales, most specifically tales about assisting relatives in hospitals. War stories seemed too common, and not “local” enough; hospital tales seemed private, not “political” and not local. But the fact that these were the stories I was ignoring drew my attention to their analogies. I realized that the confrontation with death and suffering that took place in war for men also took place in hospitals for women; also, both the war stories and the hospital narratives were about the experience in which respectively men and women leave home to enter the public sphere and confront the State, authority, bureaucracy, technology, science. Just as men told stories about confronting the brass and proving that they knew more than the officers, likewise women relished narratives in which they put those big doctors in their place and corrected their errors. In other words, women’s hospital narratives were the equivalent of men’s war tales: stories about the encounter of private persons with the public sphere (it all comes together, of course, in the stories of war nurses, as in Vietnam).
The difference, of course, lies in the fact that, while the historical significance of the war experience is generally recognized, the women’s hospital narrative has been generally neglected by historian and confined to a merely private and familiar sphere. By insisting on telling these stories, the women narrators forced me to stop and listen and to recognize how important they were.
In other words, oral history allows us to access the historicity of private lives – but, most importantly, it forces to redefine our pre-conceived notion of the geography of public and private space and their relationship.
1 Gianni Bosio, “Fonti orali e storiografia,” in L’intellettuale rovesciato (Milan: Edizioni Bella Ciao, 1975), pp. 263-68.
2 Alessandro Portelli, Biografia di una città. Storia e racconto: Terni 1831-1985 (Torino: Einaudi, 1985). For more introductory readings on oral history, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford University Press, 1988); The Oral History Reader, ed. by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Rutledge, 1998); Oral History. An InterdisciplinaryAnthology, second edition, Altamira Press (Walnut Creek - London), 1996, ed. by David Dunaway e Willa K. Baum; thejournal Historia, Antropología y Fuente Oral, published in Barcelona, Spain.
3 In Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out, New York: Palgrave 2003, p. 219).
4 The research was never published; for reasons of privacy, I cannot supply the names of the persons involved.
5 Micaela Arcidiacono et al., L’aeroplano e le stelle. Storia orale di una realtà studentesca (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1994).
6 A. Portelli, “There’s Always Goin’ Be a Line: History-Telling as a Multivocal Art”, in The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: Wisconsin University >Press, 1997), pp. 24-39.
to be continued...
Alessandro Portelli
Source: swaraj.org
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