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A Dialogical Relationship. An Approach to Oral History(2)
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4. Relationships: memory
From the point of view of traditional, more methodologically conservative historians, the most important objection to oral sources concerned their reliability: one cannot rely on oral narratives because memory and subjectivity tend to “distort” the facts.
In the first place, this is not always the case – also, how can we be sure that equally serious distortions are not to be found also in more established documentary sources? Thus, as with all other sources, the task of the historian lies in cross-checking the information, checking each narrative against other narratives and other kinds of sources.
In the second place, and most importantly, the most critically advanced and methodologically aware work in oral history has turned the question upon its head: what makes oral sources important and fascinating is precisely the fact that they do not passively record the facts, but elaborate upon them and create meaning through the labor of memory and the filter of language. Which is why I, personally, tend to avoid the use of terms such as “testimony” and “witness”, and prefer to speak of “narratives” and “narrators”, “stories” and “story-tellers” or, in fact, “history tellers”.(7)
When we work with oral sources, then, we must chart a complex path covering three distinct but interconnected levels: a fact of the past, the historical event; a fact of the present, the narrative we hear; and a long-lasting, fluid relationship, the interplay between these two facts. Thus, the work of the oral historian includes:
- historiography in its traditional meaning (reconstructing past events);
- anthropology, cultural analysis, textual criticism (interpreting the interview);
- and the space in between (how do those events produce this memory and this narrative).
Oral history, then, is history of events, history of memory, and history and interpretation of events through memory. Memory, in fact, is not a mere depository of information, but rather an ongoing process of elaboration and reconstruction of meaning. At this time, when the very meaning of Italian democracy undergoes a drastic right-wing revision based on debunking the foundational narrative of anti-Fascist Resistance, the history of memory is at least as important and as necessary as the history of the events. Indeed, events are recognized as such, and become sites of meaning, primarily through the work of personal and public memory, which select certain events out of the shapeless array of everyday happenings, and endow them with meaning. Interrogating the wrong memory, especially when it is so widely shared, is a way of interrogating the meaning of the remembered event. In order to do this interpretive work on false narratives, we must be able to prove that they are indeed false. Thus, the oral historian’s work includes a careful check of the facts to the best of our abilities, so that we may distinguish between factually reliable narratives, which are the majority, and the significant cases of creative error and myth. Only after we have done this work, by cross-checking false memories with the reconstruction of the events, we are able to gauge their impact – as in the case of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre and its background - in social imagination and in the contemporary political arena. At this point, even error, invention, misunderstanding, even lies, especially when they are socially widespread, become precious symptoms of such important historical processes as memory and desire.
5. Narrative responsibility
Just like memory, the narrative itself is not a fixed text and depository of information, but rather a process and a performance. As Walter J. Ong writes, orality does not generate texts (8), but performances: in orality, we are not dealing with finished discourse but with discourse in the making (indeed, dialogic discourse in the making). Thus, when we talk of oral history we ought to think in terms of verbs rather than nouns – remembering rather than memory; telling rather than tale. In this way, we can think of oral sources as something happening in the present, rather than just as a testimony of the past.
Most importantly, when we look at the act of speech, rather than at its outcome, we realize that remembering and telling are indeed influenced by the historical context and by the social frameworks of memory (9), but they are also filtered by individual responsibility. The place where memory is elaborated is the individual’s mind, and the way we access it is the individual narrative. Therefore, narrators take a responsibility upon themselves, each time they tell their history. We must always remember this: just as the narrator has a responsibility to tell, the historian has a responsibility to open up a narrative space by listening actively to what the narrator has to tell.
6. Relationships: orality and writing
The form of the oral history document is one of performance and dialogue; the form of the historian’s work is that of a written, monologic essay. When we present the results of an oral history project, then, we must take care to leave at least a trace of the oral, narrative, dialogic origin of the materials we work with. This is why, beyond a matter of documentary accuracy, oral historians quote their sources and use montage to a much wider extent than other historians, anthropologists, sociologists.
By quoting our narrators at length, we also achieve another result: that of retaining at least some of the complex polysemy of oral story-telling. On the one hand, by preserving, as much as it is possible in writing, the vernacular, colloquial language in which the stories are often told, we insist that the meaning of an event cannot be separated from the language in which it is remembered and narrated. On the other hand, the narrative form always contains more layers of meaning, more directions of interpretation than a logical, rational analysis. Although we do not refrain from advancing hypotheses and suggesting interpretations, we are aware of the fact that the material we present can always be read in a number of different ways. Indeed, it has often been the case that other readers, or the narrators themselves, saw in my own books undercurrents of meaning and webs of connections which I had not intentionally put there, and of which I had not been aware myself.
Orality, then, is not just the vehicle of information but also a component of its meaning. The dialogic and narrative form of oral sources culminate in the density and complexity of language itself. The very tones and accents of the oral discourse convey the history and identity of the speakers, and transmit meanings well beyond the speakers conscious intention.
7. Conclusions
Now, the important thing about the dialogic nature of oral history work is that it does not end with the interview, or even with the publication, but must find ways of being useful to the individuals and the communities involved. This is the process that goes under the generic labels of “restitution” and “dissemination”.
Restitution, of course, begins with the interview itself – in the first place, at least returning a copy of the tape to the interviewee, or to the family. In the past, this was not always easy. On the one hand, duplicating was not an easy process before the availability of electronic tools. Most importantly, often our interviewees, especially in rural environments, did not own a tape or cassette recorder and were unable to listen to the tapes. They, however, accepted them gladly, both as a token of our good will, and as something to pass on to the younger generations. More recently, especially since we have been able to put the catalogue of our archive on the web, we have received requests from family member, especially grandchildren, of our interviewees of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and were glad to be able to return copies of the recordings to them. In this way, we help create stores for family memories.
Things become more complicated when it comes to restitution to the community, because it involves locating an institution, an organization, that can be identified as active in and representative of, the community. While we have done our best to locate copies of the tapes in local libraries and archives, this was not always the best solution, as the collections remained largely unused.
We had better luck with schools, not so much in terms of depositing the material, as of teaching classes on our research on the community’s history and culture. This work often resulted in an increased awareness of cultural identity and of projects that the young people could carry out themselves. An even more effective form of restitution was in terms of music, theatre, media. I remember a wonderful evening in which we went back to Arrone, a town where I had collected many songs of anti-fascism and union struggle, and presented a program based on those very songs. The very fact that a group of professional musicians from Rome had found those songs important enough to learn and sing them was a revelation to the community that had been taking them for granted. More recently, the Circolo Bosio has produced a series of multimedia documents (DVD, CD-Rom) that have been distributed to schools and libraries in local communities (Terni, Tivoli, Valmontone, Monterotondo) and have become important teaching tools. An interesting case was the CD-Rom we produced in 2003, to commemorate the 50 years since the mass layoffs at the Terni steel works: as it came out exactly at the time of another wave of mass layoffs, we gave out dozens of copies to the workers on the picket lines at the factory, and it became an instant organizing tool.
Another thing we should keep in mind is that by “community” we may not necessarily mean a geographic community, but also a community of feeling and action. This is the case of the alternative globalization” movement that staged the mass protests at Genoa in 2001 (culminating with the death of a young demonstrator). We have carried out an oral history project on those events, and produced a number of home-made audio CDs that were both distributed among the movement, and sold to finance the cost of legal defence in a number of court cases that followed the protest. In this case, we may also notice that, since the project was carried out mainly by young researchers who were themselves part of the movement, it is the “community” itself that produces the research and its results.
Another case is my research on the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine. The episode had been cloaked in a cloud of false narratives and legends that were offensive both to the Resistance, and to the victims themselves. The most important aspect of “restitution” was the kind of historical rectification and recognition that the book granted to the “communities” of the partisans and to the survivors. Because the book was (relatively) successful, they felt that they had been vindicated, and that their voices had been articulated so that they could no longer be ignored. The book was published in 1999; since then, I have been involved in at least 150 events with partisans and survivors, in schools, meetings, festivals, telling the story along with them. The book has also been used as a teaching tool in many schools.
This experience suggests that “restitution” is a somewhat inadequate label. The historian/activist contribution to those “communities” is, in fact, not just the collection of the stories and songs. Nor is it just to return the knowledge to the community (which, by definition, already possess it, since that’s where it comes from in the first place). Rather, the historian/activist’s contribution to the community is an elaboration and articulation of the community’s knowledge, and the spreading of this knowledge beyond the community’s boundaries.
Thus, the most important contribution I feel I have made to the communities has been, often, the fact that my work made their knowledge available to artists that told their story all over the country. Ascanio Celestini has presented a one-man performance on the Fosse Ardeatine in hundreds of venues all over Italy; singer Giovanna Marini (Italy’s finest musician) wrote, performed and recorded a ballad based on the narratives in my book. In other words, the non-academic uses of the book not only returned the pride and identity to the partisans and survivors, but restored an awareness of these events and their meaning to a broad national community.
This, of course, is only one – though possibly the most significant – example of a non-academic use of oral history. After all, the cultural/activist tradition with which I identify myself – that of the Istituto de Martino, the Circolo Gianni Bosio, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano - has been active entirely outside the academy (my own academic position has nothing to do with oral history and folk music). Our purpose has been, from the beginning, to document the musical and historical knowledge of the urban and rural working classes in order to develop forms of communication – concerts, recordings, teach-ins, theatre, radio programs as well as books and articles – that would reinforce working people’s sense of identity and cohesion and articulate their ideals and grievances.
The synthesis of this approach is that we need to combine the best of activist involvement with people and communities, with the best of the “academic” methodology, so that the dialogic result of our work we produce jointly will not be a mere mirroring of what the community already knows, but a further articulation of this knowledge, and its inclusion in a broader cultural dialogue. After all, what makes Terni steel workers proud and aware of their heritage is less the fact that I returned the tapes of their interviews. Instead, because my book based on their stories is a textbook in a number of universities in the United States and elsewhere, their experience and their words are now part of an international historical record from which they had been excluded before.
Finally, a dialogue reflects on both sides. An interview is primarily a learning situation for the interviewer, especially if the motivation is (broadly) political. It is hard for me to pinpoint ways in which doing oral history and collecting folk songs has changed me: I have been doing this for thirty-five years, and I guess I can say that most of who and what I am is a result of this work. Perhaps, the most important thing I have learned is the art of listening and respecting the agendas and priorities of other people. I hope I have been able to apply this lesson, to some extent at least, not only in oral history work but also in my own life.
7 See Alessandro Portelli, “Oral History as Genre” and “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. 3-39.
8 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 10-15.
9 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).
Alessandro Portelli
Source: swaraj
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