“Print encourages a [false] sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized and reached a state of completion,” Walter J. Ong, “Orality and Literacy”
Orality is a buzzword frequently used by oral historians to mean verbally communicated in the belief that written documents are not the be-all and end-all for researchers and that oral testimony can fill in necessary gaps, especially in studying marginalized groups and investigating sensitive subjects such as child abuse, sexual identity, and the like.
I’ve been participating by zoom in the 54th annual Oral History Association conference originally scheduled to take place in Baltimore. The theme, “The Quest for Democracy: One Hundred Years of Struggle,” is a reference to passage a century ago of the Susan B. Anthony women’s suffrage amendment. Other than workshops, the session I was speaking at, “Profiles and Journeys of Identity, Recovery, and Be(longing),” was at the very first time slot, 12:30 (Central Standard Time) on Tuesday. Unable to connect to “Addendify” on the laptop at home, I hurried to IUN and logged on successfully, although I had to wait until the session was “launched” before knowing for certain that things were a go. One of the participants had dropped out, so the three of us had a leisurely 20 for our presentations, in my case, “The Journeys of Maria Perez Arredondo.”
Izumi Niki
Because I had read up on Japanese Canadian Kimura Kishizo, the subject of Izumi Niki’s paper, I was familiar with Kishizo’s unenvious task of selling the possessions of Issei fishermen interned during World War II. Interviewed by editors of his wartime journal, Kishizo used phrases such as “could not be helped”and “there was no other way” to indicate his lack of control over governmental policy. He expressed sorrow that the younger generation could not understand how he could have done what he carried out or why his generation was so passive in the face of blatant discrimination. He claimed that the authorities he dealt with were unfailingly respectful and was unwilling to criticize the policy as blatantly racist. It reminded both session chair Annette Henry and me of WPA slave narratives of the 1930s where the aged interviewees refrained from emphasizing the barbarity of involuntary servitude, especially when the interviewer was white.
A University of British Columbia professor, Henry (above) discussed the social lives of two Black Canadian women caught between two cultures and experiencing feeling of “in between-ness” or “un (be)longing.” “Andrea,” who emigrated from the U.S. at age five, experienced racism in school and didn’t see a Black teacher until she became one. While a research librarian in Vancouver, Andrea told Annette, “I haven’t dated a Black man since I got here.” Dr. Henry made the point that even though Vancouver has many more biracial marriages than elsewhere in Canada, this is mainly due to the large Asian population and does not necessarily indicate to a colorblind society.
My talk was similar to one I delivered last year at the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State except I had time to elaborate on the background to Ramon and Trish Arredondo’s 2010 publication “Maria’s Journey.” Forty years ago, as oral historian for the grant-funded project “Pass the Culture, Please,” sponsored by Tri-City Mental Health Center in East Chicago, I first interviewed Maria with son Ramon acting as translator. Then I conducted a group interview at an Arredondo family Saturday lunch presided over by Maria. Ray and Trish took it from there and produced an oral history biography of the family matriarch that I edited and wrote chapter introductions for that ultimately found a wide audience thanks to Indiana Historical Society Press, now working on a Spanish translation.
Steven HighAlthough not able to socialize in person with old OHA friends and recent acquaintances, I made plans to attend their sessions. Steven High of Concordia University, host of the 2018 OHA conference in Montreal, both chaired and delivered a paper, “The Unexpected Interview: Florence Richard, Sexual Violence, and the Disruption of Local History. At age 20 High was hired by Thunder bay Historical Museum Society to do interviews. Without any training and left to find subjects on his own, he arranged to interview Florence Richard, whom he knew through his family to have been a Communist activist in the Seaman’s International Union. Instintively, he took a life history approach, and two minutes into the conversation Florence revealed that she was molested by older men as a child and the horrors of those encountered affected her the rest of her life. In fact, examining the transcript later, High discovered that these traumatic experiences took up 12 of the 15 minutes about Florence’s childhood. He went on to say that he might have stayed on the subject as long as he did because he himself had been molested and if conducting the interview today might be more reticent. Actually, I would have thought the opposite would have been the case and said so.
Afterwards I emailed Steven High:
Very powerful and enlightening talk. Your explanation of your personal reason for being interested in the effects of Florence’s traumatic childhood experience reminded me of when IU Northwest’s LGBTQ club held a program after a gay N.J. college student killed himself because his roommate outed him in a shameful way. The Chancellor, the son of a NYC cop, read the campus policy on bullying and then said he was there for a more personal reason, that his brother committed suicide at age 27.
Nowadays the issue of child molestation endured by previous generations seems infinitely more important than radical politics of the 1960s-1970s but, as you mentioned, probably not something an untrained 20-year-old should dive into. One thing I loved about Anne Balay’s “Steel Closets,” about gay and lesbian steelworkers, was not only the light it shed on an unexamined subject (until the book came out the steelworkers union even denied there were gay steelworkers or that harassment was a problem) but the specificity. I learned, for example, that “straight” steelworkers would have gay colleagues give them blow jobs ( a “lube job,” in the parlance) and not consider that being gay.
Steven High emailed back: “Thanks so much for your comments. I also very much enjoyed the "Steel Closets" book, also for its grounding in everyday lives.”
Wednesday after attending IUN Chancellor Iwana’s Meet and Greet at the library courtyard and eating a turkey wrap meal with chips and cookie, I joined an OHA session on oral history archives because one of the speakers was Jon Cameron discussing the IU Bicentennial Oral History Project that I took part in, interviewing numerous former students, faculty, and staff. I was disappointed that all three talks dealt with technical matters of accessibility of interest to archivists rather than content or the value of such projects. I had hoped to mention something about the participation of regional campuses in the project but, unlike yesterday’s sessions, the chair elected only to take questions from “chat” that dealt with access forum such as Avalon and Aviary that were of no interest to me. Even so, I learned that digitized oral histories are much more accessible than ever before and much more widely used without the need to visit archives in person.
No comments:
Post a Comment