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Author Interview: Eldad Ben Aharon on the Use of Oral History in the Study of International Relations

In his recent OHR article,  “Doing Oral History with the Israeli Elite and the Question of Methodology in International Relations Research,” available in issue 47.1, Eldad Ben Aharon discusses the challenges and benefits of using oral history when researching the history of International Relations and diplomacy.

Why is oral history helpful for studying International Relations, especially when studying Israel?

Security agencies often conduct their operations in the shadows with the state’s sanction, being granted relatively unquestioned freedom to conduct their covert actions to protect a country’s security. This also directly limits the research options for International Relations (IR) historians because there is no access to those security agencies’ archival records, thus making oral history extremely valuable for scholars in the field.

The 12th director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. (Photo Credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90).

Regarding Israel, the country has been in a semi-permanent militaristic position, and it has always relied heavily on its intelligence agencies. Therefore, the dominance of rhetoric and actions around security and sovereignty in Israeli society, culture, politics, and, hence, its restrictive foreign policy is not at all surprising.  My fieldwork, parts of which can be read in my new article in the OHR, leads me to argue that there is definite value in accessing the memories of the Israeli diplomatic/intelligence elites, because they can shed new light on actors, events, themes, and processes that characterize Israel’s foreign policy since 1948.

Why have historians of IR not typically used oral history to fill in details when censoring prohibits access to information?

There are two constraints: one, there is a generational barrier. Many of the IR historians that worked in the 1980s and 1990s and had a dominant voice in the field, did not believe in the use of oral history, meaning they have rejected memory as a source of knowledge about the past because of the assumed unreliability of memory itself. Subsequently, these historians mentored their students, the next generation of historians, teaching them to avoid oral history methodology as a reliable source, and this cycle has gone on and on. Generally, the new generation of IR historians has been more receptive of oral history but, most historians in the field still choose to rely on archival research.

Secondly, traditional archival research has seemed more reliable among IR historians, although we already know that all historical sources should be studied very carefully. As former US secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger noted in his biography “What is written in diplomatic documents never bears much relation to reality.” Even if Kissinger was exaggerating about the reduced importance of official diplomatic records, he was still making an important point. IR historians need to be very critical when analyzing any primary sources, not just oral histories but also official diplomatic records.

The problem begins when archival research has been controlled by strong censorship regulations of intelligence agencies. As a result, some topics/histories remain understudied because there is no access to formal documentation in archival records.

What is ‘clandestine diplomacy’ and how does it relate to your research?

Israeli Defence Force Chief of Staff Benny Gantz (2015-2011) with US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey (2011-2015), at a military base in Tel Aviv January 20, 2012. (Photo credit: Gideon Markowicz/Flash90)

Traditional diplomacy is mostly transparent to the public and covered by media outlets daily. By contrast, ‘clandestine diplomacy’ is part of the role that intelligence officials and their agencies play in modern diplomatic settings. The power balance between these two types of diplomacy varies by country and changes based on a country’s institutional traditions, its geography, geopolitics, and its perception of the nature of threats to its national security.

With regards to my article, in the U.S. and Israel for example, we can notice covert competition for diplomatic influence between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Department of State and corresponding intelligence agencies. Another factor which drives this competition, is that much of the Israeli political leadership began their careers in the military before ascending the rungs of political and/or executive power. Therefore, it is essential to interview these elite, who were part of milestone decisions and shaped the country’s history.

What are the barriers one would encounter when conducting oral interviews in IR research? Why are these barriers present and how can they be overcome?

There are two main barriers. First, as with any oral history project, one needs to understand the culture of the society the narrator is coming from. Cultural awareness is a significant factor because it affects the whole process of the oral history project. For example, how do you interpret a narrator’s initial hesitation to be interviewed, especially if they are a high ranking official? If they don’t say “yes” immediately, does that mean they are not interested or just can’t commit to the interview in advance? Would it be appropriate to try again or is the first refusal final?

Based on my experience as an Israeli who interviewed mainly Israeli diplomats, their first hesitation usually means that you might need a bit more effort to make contact, such as a second email (even third). Sometimes, even a phone call can help make the meeting happen. Also, it’s embedded in Israeli culture not to make appointments in advance and to play it by ear. Therefore, saying “call me when you are here, and we’ll fix something” (when you are visiting from abroad for a research trip) doesn’t mean they are not interested.

Secondly, it’s better to manage expectations about everything that ranges from signing a consent form, recording them or how long you estimate the interview will take. Most importantly, let them know what you intend to do with the outputs of the interview and to ask for their consent in advance to use the transcript in your publications. My experience tells me that most of them understand that their voice is extremely important to the research process of a certain topic/period.

If an interviewee is overly cautious or takes steps to ensure self-censoring, how can an interviewer help them overcome this caution?

I will tell you something that happened to me during my field research. In 2016, I retrieved a file from the Israeli State Archive with unclassified documents which become available for researchers only a year earlier. The documents recorded a secret summit that took place in 1987 in Ankara among Israeli and Turkish diplomats, in which they exchanged intelligence about terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East.

Both countries wanted to build a mutual counter-terror network, but also had further mutual interests to cooperate. However, the minutes, although 8 pages long, were quite vague, written by one diplomat who was present in the summit. Some details were missing regarding an Armenian organization, which was the primary focus of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the core chapter of my doctoral thesis. I thought interviewing the Israeli participants at the summit and asking them tailored questions could cast more light about the important details of the summit.

Two of the diplomats had retired, and the one who wrote the minutes is still in active service; all of them are now in their 60s and 70s. I approached each of them by email asking their consent for an interview about the 1987 summit in Ankara. Initially, I explained that I retrieved the summit minutes in the Israeli State Archive and that their names were mentioned several times in the documents. Two of the diplomats who had retired, were quite suspicious of my request. So, they did not say anything immediately, but asked if I could share some details from the minutes. Once I gave them other names of individuals who were present in the summit, dates, and other relevant details they said, “sure let’s meet.” Both of them ended up being very kind and informative in their interviews.

Not everything went smoothly, however. The diplomat who documented the proceeding, who was recommended to me by his retired co-workers as a fair and thoughtful interviewee, declined my invitation, noting that he is still in active service.

Have there been any attempts on a large scale to challenge Israel’s censorship of diplomatic occurrences and communications?

23 May 1994: Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels load ammunition onto a truck. (Photo credit: Corinne Dufka/Reuters)

Yes, in the last few years there were two notable examples. In July 2018, several Israeli human rights activists, attorney Eitay Mack and historian Yair Auron, submitted a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court requesting to disclose four highly classified documents. Based on the Freedom of Information Law, 5758-1998, these documents record the talks between Israel, Turkey, and Azerbaijan and their objection to recognizing the 1915 Armenian genocide. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly objected to the request and submitted the documents to the court. The petition was rejected by the Supreme Court, based on article (9A1) of the Freedom of Information Law (1998), which argues that state sensitive information cannot be disclosed if there is more than a reasonable doubt that revealing the information to the public could severely damage Israeli foreign policy and its national security.

Previously, in November 2016, these groups of activists submitted another petition to the Israeli Supreme Court regarding Israel trading arms with two countries, which perpetrated the genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995). The activists suspected that the arms that Israel sold to the perpetrators’ regimes were used during the genocides. Not surprisingly, this petition was also denied by the Supreme Court, based on the same arguments.

In my article, Israel’s arms trade history is one of the three short case studies discussed with my narrators. It demonstrates the opportunities oral history methodology gives us to study this sensitive and topical theme, which was obviously extremely censored.

How does an interviewee’s position during the performed clandestine diplomatic mission affect their recollection of the event in an interview?

Well, that is a great question. Most of the Israeli elite I have interviewed—some of whom were very high-ranking officials, including the 9th director of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy—were proud to explain how close they were to the actual decision-making table. However, I also interviewed some lower-ranking officials and diplomats, who have overvalued their role in the process. That’s one of the dangers in oral history fieldwork which one needs to be totally aware of during the interview and was recently discussed in this journal. Actually, this might be a topic I will develop further for another research article.

The way to deal with this issue in my research project is to rely on the available documentation on specific decision making, which could cast initial light on who said what and who was really “in the room,” and by contrast, who was in the office behind a desk writing a telegram. When I came to analyze and interpret the transcripts of my interviews I had to be discerning when appraising what the narrators said. Thus, I always examined the interview transcript of one narrator vis-à-vis what other narrators said and carefully compared them with the available primary sources.

Are you planning to undertake further oral history projects in the future?

The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during the Cold War 1959. (Photo credit: Allan Hailstone)

Yes, I’ll be starting a post-doctorate project later this year (2020) at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) titled: “Nation Building and the Perpetrators of Genocide: Memory, State Security and the Cold War.” This project focuses on the early stages of the Cold War and the response of the three perpetrator states—Turkey, and the two Germanies (FRG and GDR)—to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). By specifically examining how the memory of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide was leveraged for state security, diplomacy, and governance, this project will contribute to understanding largely overlooked links between the memory of past crimes and perpetrator nation-building in the early stages of the Cold War. The project draws on two types of primary source: archival records and ‘elite oral interviews’. In this project, I will interview German and Turkish state officials and veteran diplomats about the ways in which the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide were used for nation-building. Although this is a well-researched field, I hope these interviews will cast new light about the competition between the two Germanies and their influence on the Cold War arms race and how the crimes of genocide were leveraged for nation-building and diplomacy. Furthermore, in the next few years, I hope to complete another series of interviews with Israeli elite and then publish a book about Israeli public and clandestine diplomacy.

Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon is a lecturer at LIAS Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD from Royal Holloway University of London in 2019. His doctoral thesis investigates why and how Israeli diplomats leveraged the contested memories of the Armenian genocide in key moments of the last decade of the Cold War. Dr. Ben Aharon specializes in the field of modern Middle East studies and the region’s diplomatic history during the Cold War. His research focuses on Israel’s foreign policy from 1948 to the present. His other main areas of interest are memory studies, Turkey’s foreign policy, the Middle East responses to Nazism and the Holocaust, comparative genocide studies, Arab Jews, and the theory and practice of oral history. He has published his research in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Cold War History, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, and the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 

Featured image by Flickr user Tyler Hewitt, used with permission of a Creative Commons C.C. BY-NC 2.0 license.

Other photos courtesy of Eldad Ben Aharon.

5 Questions About: Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. Today, James Green discusses Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary.

Sevil Çakır-Kılınçoğlu’s review of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary is available online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Exile within Exiles is the story of Herbert Daniel, a medical student turned revolutionary, who joined other students to fight against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In order to conform to heteronormative notions of revolutionary masculinity, Daniel felt he needed to repress his homosexual desires to be an effective guerrilla fighter, which he managed to do for five years. During this period, he was involved in bank robberies to obtain funds for the revolutionary movement; he joined eighteen others in a rural training camp to learn guerrilla tactics; and he participated in the kidnapping of the German and Swiss ambassadors to obtain the release of 110 political prisoners, who had been victims of torture and were lingering in Brazilian jails. He eventually fled the country in 1974 for European exile. While living in Paris and working in a gay sauna, he challenged the Brazilian Left to rethink its conservative positions on gender and homosexuality. Returning to Brazil in 1981, he unsuccessfully ran for the state assembly of Rio de Janeiro in 1986, presenting a radical program that among other issues defended equal rights for gays and lesbians, at the time a pioneering position. In 1989, he discovered he had AIDS, and within months he founded an important association for people living with HIV/AIDS. In the subsequent three years he reshaped the national discussion about the disease, proposing acts of solidarity with those infected as the most effective response to the virus. He passed away in 1993, leaving behind Claudio Mesquita, his partner of twenty years.

This biography of Herbert Daniel offers a unique window into Brazilian politics, society, and culture during the Brazilian military dictatorship and in the early years of democratization, as Daniel challenged the authoritarian nature of the regime, and then later questioned deeply-held conservative ideas against homosexuality that were pervasive within the Brazilian Left. While a unique figure, Daniel reflected a generation of radical youth willing to sacrifice everything to change Brazilian society, as well as those among that generation who over time were capable of rethinking core values for those engaged in social change.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

In order to recuperate the stories surrounding Daniel’s unusual life trajectory, I conducted over seventy oral histories with people who knew him in his youth, during his days as a medical student, and while he operated underground, lived in European exile, and became involved in electoral politics and AIDS activism when he returned to Brazil. Although he had written a memoir about parts of his life, there were many missing elements connected to the five years in which he lived clandestinely that I was partially able to reconstruct through interviews with people who had shared those tense moments with him, including former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was also a member of the first revolutionary organization to which he belonged. Still, there are many mysteries about his life that I was not able to solve.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Oral histories have been vital sources for all three of the monographs that I have written. They will also be essential for my next project, “Generation 77: Youth Culture and the Demise of the Brazilian Dictatorship,” which will rely heavily on the oral histories of seven activists involved in the movement to end authoritarian rule in Brazil. A core section of my first book, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-century Brazil (University of Chicago, 1999) relied on oral histories to reconstruct the social history of gay men in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when there were less written sources to rely on. Similarly, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Duke University Press, 2010) used over seventy oral histories to tell the stories of U.S. and Brazilian activists involved in myriad campaigns against torture, repression, and the regime that dominated Brazil for two decades.

As an historian interested in writing about Brazil’s past for US and Brazilian audiences that are not very familiar with the history of the military dictatorship, I have found that oral histories fill in details that cannot be found in written documents and also bring to life individual protagonists whose stories have not been told. Of course, there are many issues related to memory and positionality that one must acknowledge, but this is also always the case with written historical sources. In the specific case of writing about Herbert Daniel, oral histories allowed me to partially recreate moments in his life, especially when he lived underground, that could not be recorded at the time for obvious reasons.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Over the years, I have learned to weave the oral histories that I have conducted into the overall narrative of my works that enliven them and suggest some of the successful ways that I have interviewed people and listened to their stories and then woven them into a unique new reading of the history of a dramatic period in twentieth-century Brazil. Hopefully these voices that recall their pasts will engender interest in people totally unfamiliar with this subject.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Herbert Daniel was a person who lived his life to the fullest, enthusiastically taking on ever new challenges and confronting obstacles with confidence, so that he could be an agent in changing the course of events. He was notably simple and humble, and at the same time a larger-than-life figure whose story can help us rethink how ordinary people can have a much larger influence on society than they could ever imagine.

5 Questions About: Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Karida L. Brown discusses Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia.

Katie Nash’s review of Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia is available online and in issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Gone Home is a book about the emergence and transformation of African American subjectivity. By this I mean the interior and subjective understandings of Self, and in this case, of a people: birthed into freedom out of the battered womb of the Civil War, striving in a dogged pursuit to reach their ideals of freedom and citizenship—those of life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness; a claim to the land that generations ago had been forced on them in bondage; and a sense of belonging in the national life of the United States of America. Through this pursuit, collectively, Black Americans continually confront a somewhat peculiar version of the fundamental questions of the human condition: Who am I? What am I? and, as they look to their fellow Americans, Who are “we” as a people? These questions are the primary matter of concern for this book.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Gone Home is centered on the oral histories of 153 African Americans who share eastern Kentucky roots, between 1927 and 1980. They are the protagonists of the historical epochs that I examine throughout the book; namely life behind the veil of the color line in the Jim Crow South, the boom and bust of the coal mining industry in Central Appalachia, the African American Great Migration, and school desegregation. Instead of listening to interview data and translating what I think the actors in my book were trying to express, I just present the oral history data for the reader to contend with—in other words I just let them say it.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

I have a deep appreciation for using oral history as a methodology for several reasons (1) because it allows you to tap into the inner most parts of the self. As a lifelong student of the human condition, this dimension of the social world is of utmost importance to me as a scholar and a human being in relation with others, (2) as your body of interviews accumulate, you can start to see the structure of memory. Certain events, people, places, and ideas come to take on shared meanings over time, and sometimes that fundamentally changes people. Oral history allows you to trace that in an organic and inductive manner, and (3) because it gives agency and unadulterated voice to the people we study. Maya Angelou hit the nail on the head when she said “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Folks should be able to tell their stories and be heard in their own words.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Because it is a fun journey through one of the most transformational periods in American history. What I love about Gone Home is that it is written in a manner that invites the reader to buckle up, and take the journey with my research participants. It’s a subtle shift in the point of view that I invite the reader to assume—that of an active participant in the story, not a passive consumer of the lives of others.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

We are all matters of consequence to human history.

Bringing your research full circle

Oral history projects do not have static after lives, as this travel journal from Gwyn McClelland demonstrates. He reflects on his recent visit to Japan, where he returned to share the results of his research on the trauma resulting from the atomic bombing in Nagasaki. Meditating on his role as an outsider, he shares what he learned by bringing his research full circle.

By Gwyn McClelland

Place of fire.
Oh I’m waiting here…
Yes, I’m waiting here back home.
In the light of this place of fire.
(Archie Roach, 2019)

In November 2019 I travelled to Japan, as I had five times during my doctoral studies, but this time taking with me four copies of my new book, Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives. I was attracted as well by the visit of the Pope, only the second Pope to visit Japan. Perhaps it does take a touch of daring to carry out oral history in a language which is not your mother tongue, to believe in such an endeavor leading to new knowledge, and willingly inserting yourself as a listener into this research. Returning to the field, I have come full circle. When the subject is trauma, returning to Japan appears as an invitation to open up the pain once more. Surely, I should rather let it rest. But, as listening to the audio of my interviews reminds me, my participants are themselves not at rest, and so, a part of this new journey is returning the results of the research to the place from whence it came. The final step of this project is to take these stories home, where they belong. I returned to Japan, to talk of the darkness of modernity, a pain not easily understood, a suffering continuing close to 75 years later, still raw, complex, and dissonant.

Oral history, of course, places the interviewer in the picture, as I noticed on this “book-tour” of Japan, where I deliberately included interview audio in my presentations. Of course, I intended for the interviewees’ voices to be front and center, but my voice is present, contributing to the dialog. These audio elements needed no translating—they stood out clearly to the audiences, legitimating the new voices uncovered in this study. But hearing the interviews made me keenly aware of the translation process. Returning to Japan necessitated a reverse translation of my analysis. First, in the writing process for my thesis and book, I had painstakingly translated interviews into English as I interpreted them. Now, in backward gear, I translated my analysis into Japanese, discussing my translations and the difficulty of the process.

Two main concerns bubble to the surface as I returned to speak about my book at six universities throughout Japan. My own identity is, of course, a part of my return to the place of research. What influence have my own biases had on the interview process let alone on the results? One bias is my home country, Australia. I am still reflecting on the extent of my own country’s traumas due to our ‘settler-colony’ culture, not yet extirpated, and I bring this tension to Japan, a colonizing country itself in the early twentieth-century. Inasmuch as in Australia today I acknowledge my work on an unceded land, I am myself a descendent of colonizers, coming from a land of trauma, a land of unspoken war, where the indigenous exist in a state of disinheritance. Australia is itself a place of shadows, where the traumatized and the haunted live alongside each other, and a legacy of intergenerational trauma is often palpable. Returning to Japan, I found myself listening to a song by an Indigenous Australian aware of these issues: Archie Roach’s, “Place of Fire”. I reflected on this haunting song and the stories of ‘fire’ I carry back to Japan.

I asked myself how could I understand my own responsibilities as I returned this research to Japan? There is an essential risk in returning to the place of research, even in opening myself up to my own change, through my encounter with those who I have observed, and have moreso been engaged with. How do I communicate appropriately back to the community itself? But as the trip continued, I realized that this question was a starting point, much like my own research. By interacting with the local community, I realized how much more I have to learn! As at the onset of my research, I remain an outsider.

And yet, as a result of this very intimate work I have been involved in, I sensed during this trip that my own story—my outsider status—is in some way inverted. My personhood intersects with the story of Nagasaki. I make a trip to meet Ozaki Tomei, atomic bomb survivor, now 91, once more, and he confirms: “I think that by this work you will be changed.” Essentially, I am changed by my relationship with those with whom I have interacted. Oral history does not only observe change among the people interviewed, but the interviewer is also changed by the interaction.

Figure 1: Ozaki Tomei holds the section of the book where his story is told

Japanese audiences asked me many questions about the book, about translations, about this intricate history. Repeatedly I heard the question, “How did you come to be involved in this research?” I had various answers: I received a manga at the age of 12 about Hiroshima; I grew up in Asia; I came to Nagasaki first in 1999; and I saw the broken down Cathedral as I entered the museum.

I was asked:
“Are you playing the audio of the interviewees at various places around the world?” Well, yes.
“Is listening again a painful process?” Yes!
“Why do you call this dangerous memory?” (you have to read the book)

And finally, while in Nagasaki—overwhelmed by museums, people, talking—I travelled to a hot springs, an onsen, to take time out. This onsen happens to look out over the Urakami Valley and standing out in the middle I could see a baseball stadium where the Pope would hold a mass the next day. Here I cannot completely leave behind my research. Just beyond the stadium is the Urakami Cathedral rebuilt in 1959 after the trauma of the atomic bombing. As I sat in the outdoor baths looking down to this valley, I remembered once more the ravaged ‘Valley of Death,’ as photographed by U.S. troops. From the rotenburo, the stories of the interviewees flashed through my head as a looked around the hills: Ozaki in a northern tunnel factory, Matsuo on the mountain in the northeast, Nagase near Ground Zero in Shiroyama, Nakamura finding a dying boy in a cemetery and teacher Miyake’s horrible memory of visiting her elementary school. I took time to sit, breathe, and close my eyes.

The following day, the Pope was greeted by heavy rain;  I was a part of all the crowds and was caught up in it, and reflected on Twitter shortly after his speech against nuclear weaponry and nuclear power at the ‘Hypocenter’ as follows:

Later, I went to the Mass where I could look out from the stadium on the hills of the valley, listening to the voices of the Urakami choir, as the Pope moved through the crowds in what appeared like a large golf cart.

Figure 2: Inside the baseball stadium

Figure 3: Kataoka Chizuko at Junshin University

I had at least three more occasions for connection in Nagasaki: One at Junshin University where I donated a book to the Junshin University Library via Kataoka Chizuko, one of my interviewees. Secondly, I spoke at an ‘atomic bomb historians’ group’, where attendees included academics and a novelist, Seirai Yuichi, previous Director of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Finally I gave a book to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, where I interviewed the great majority of survivors.

Figure 4: Japanese Manga Special in the week of the Pope’s visit

Assuming that the most difficult part of my tour was over, I travelled north for three more speaking engagements at Kyushu, Nanzan, and ICU Universities. However, there was at least one more surprise to come. At Nanzan University, I spoke to a group of Religious Studies scholars at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. One of the young academics shared a name with two of my interviewees. This was no accident;  she too was at the Pope’s mass and hailed from Urakami itself! As it turns out, my speaking on this occasion to her as if I was talking about her life. This young scholar offered to introduce me to at least two new interviewees, relatives of those of whom I have spoken, illustrating once more the unfinished nature of the work which I had, in some way at least, brought home.

 

 

Gwyn McClelland holds a Master of Divinity from the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Japanese history from Monash University. He is the winner of the 2019 John Legge prize for best thesis in Asian Studies, awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Images and captions provided by Gwyn McClelland.

5 Questions About: Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Lillian Guerra discusses Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958.

Read David Olson’s review of Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958 online and in upcoming issue 47.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

First off, you should know that elevators in Cuba are extremely slow or simply don’t work, so this elevator pitch of my book might be slightly longer than expected. I was initially inspired to write this book back in 2006 when I was trying to figure out how to start Visions of Power, a book about the post-1959 Cuban revolutionary process. Silly me! I thought—like most historians of Cuba–that I knew what had actually happened in the 1950s and that it would really only comprise a chapter at most. I was planning on retelling the old story—the story that still gets told by some historians who have not necessarily delved into the newly opened archives of Eddy Chibás or Carlos Marquez-Sterling in Cuba’s National Archive, as I luckily have. That old story purports that civil society was mostly dead or on its last legs with Cubans feeling apathetic, demoralized, or simply complicit with the status quo under Batista. It also sells short their reactions to the democratic opening that the 1940s represent. A quick look at the existing literature revealed that most historians seemed to be looking backward from the triumph of Fidel Castro’s guerrillas in 1959 and seeing almost everything that came before as either a preface to that or a factor contributing to that. The urban underground of the Revolution against Batista and the role of the labor movement have become central to new, deeply researched works on the 1950s by such scholars as Michelle Chase and Stephen Cushion. However, I could not find a deep exploration of multiple political paths Cubans were taking in response to events beyond their control—such as Batista’s coup—or that were hidden from them—such as Raúl Castro’s secret rise in the Cuban Communist Youth and 1953 family-financed tour of Eastern Europe. One of the reasons for the narrowness of our focus is the impenetrability of the binary that has overwhelmed most studies of Cold War Cuba, before and after 1959.

For example, it turns out that the most prolific and meticulous analyst of the dictatorship era of Fulgencio Batista was none other than the dictator Fulgencio Batista himself! The man “wrote” or co-wrote five memoirs, some of which are packed with facts and figures that are not so much wrong per se as intentionally distorted. The other great narrative that seemed to consume all others is best represented in a phrase Fidel Castro used in 1959; that phrase later generated not only a book by the same title but a whole slew of official historical interpretations and ideological pedagogy used in the revolutionary school system and press: todo comenzó con Moncada [everything began with Moncada]. Of course, that was Fidel’s own assault on the Moncada military barracks of Santiago on the 26th of July 1953, an event that two years later, launched his own movement, the 26th of July Movement.  In short, there was some work to do. 

I would like to think that my book will open a floodgate of subsequent research, not only into the 1940s and 1950s but also the 1930s. It was in the Revolution of 1933 and the first US-backed coup of 1934 by Fulgencio Batista that the makings of successive years can be found. For now, I would say that Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs’ primary contribution is to reveal the extraordinary breadth of civic action and citizen political consciousness that arose in the 1940s and took flight, despite all possible obstacles arrayed against it, in the period after 1952 when Batista launched his second coup. Cuba did not have one leader in January 1959: it had an island full of leaders in the citizens themselves. 

What is the significance of the book? It is one of a tiny number of scholarly works that researches the events, people, ideas, vibrant civil society and political culture of the 1940s and 1950s from the perspective of the citizenship. I also very deliberately rely on a source-driven method of research and analysis, that is, I try to position myself in the moment of the events and see the players before they became important. Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs does not take outcomes as inevitable. It attempts to reveal the history that might have been as well as the history that was.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Oral history is essential because it was a starting point for a lot of the research I did. Since I could not rely on secondary sources or police archives to tell me about the specific actions and protests led by the student movement, for example, or the acts of sabotage carried out by the urban activists of the 26th of July underground, I learned about them first, mostly, by asking the people who participated or frequently, planned them. I then went from the oral accounts to the detective work of finding documentary sources that would elaborate, fill in blanks, or contradict. Then I would usually go back to my oral history informants and show them things I didn’t understand and boom! They would always have more to tell. The plot would thicken.

How did I get started?  Luckily, in 2008, film director Glenn Gebhardt asked me to interview a startling number of elderly, key players of Fidel’s movement and the early revolutionary government exiled in Puerto Rico, such as Carlos Franqui. I nearly fell over. The initial interviews on camera for Glenn and the Emmy-award-winning documentary The Forgotten Revolution made me realize the enormity of the task at hand. So, I spent from 2008 to 2012 writing Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 while conducting many of the interviews and gathering the personal and archival collections of my subjects to lay the groundwork for Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs.  When I finally received a couple of fellowships, I was able to return to doing more oral histories, more follow-up research, and of course, deepen my motherlode of documentation.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

It is fundamental because so much of what one would normally discover simply by reading in a library or archive in Cuba is taboo. That is why so many documentary sources are unavailable, inaccessible or on the verge of disappearing due to deterioration. Let me say something about that as I want to emphasize the way in which oral history works for me and for Cuban history. That is, I start often by asking living people about the past, what they remember and asking not only why it matters, but why they simply could not admit it mattered at all under the Revolution. History is a very inconvenient creature in an ideological ecosystem that forces everyone to look forward for evidence of its legitimacy rather than look around them, in the present, or behind them, in the past. History is also a very inconvenient thing in a political system that criminalizes dissent and polices and rewards conformity, uniformity or, on all policies of state, unanimity.

Very few archival collections of the post-1933 era are open and available to researchers of Cuba; indeed, the massive collections of newspapers that Cuba’s National Library holds are still inaccessible and it is hard to even piece together the day by day events that explain things like the consolidation of corruption and impunity under the Auténticos and the congressional system’s desperate efforts to stop it in the 1940s. For decades after 1959, the history of the Republic was considered irrelevant on the island when it was not simply taboo. I encountered all kinds of obstacles to my work when I was in Cuba researching my dissertation and that was about the early Republic. You can imagine the 1930s-1950s era pertinent to 1959. No wonder basic collections at the National Archive such as the Secretaría de la Presidencia for post-1933 presidents remain closed: there has never been any political will at the level of the government to order their processing. The National Archive, like the National Library, mostly warehouses republican history as a result. The fact that hundreds of newspapers, radio stations, and even television stations abounded in the 1940s and 1950s could not even be mentioned (and it’s still fairly shocking to average islanders) because the official position of Fidel Castro’s government was very caricatured. Caricatures of the past before 1959 is what Cubans learned in schools, in the media, on television, and in government-sponsored forms of popular culture like music, until the reforms of 1991. How could there possibly have been such an expansive press if Cuba’s illiteracy rate was astronomical? Cubans ask. Wait, how come Cuba has only one newspaper today if it had dozens before the Revolution?  Knowledge of history is explosive because it changes not only how you think about the present, but it forces you act to rectify it.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Because the experiences, the pain and the trauma that so many of the revolutionaries, activists, and family members told me about were so raw, there is a sense of urgency to the narrative that lends, I hope, to the relevance and readability. Their stories belong together and needed to be told. Once I started writing, I often felt as if the stories were telling themselves.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

I want them to be inspired by the courage and sense of moral outrage that drove thousands of Cubans to believe that their lives were not inevitable and their destinies were not determined by either Washington or a dictator. I want them to identify with Cuba and Cubans’ struggle to recover what they have reached for, almost grasped and lost so many times in the last century: freedom.

5 Questions About: The Schizophrenia Oral History Project (TSOHP)

We’ve asked creators of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our latest installment of this series, project founders Lynda Crane and Tracy McDonough discuss The Schizophrenia Oral History Project (TSOHP)  Read more about it in their 2014 OHR article, “Living with Schizophrenia: Coping, Resilience, and Purpose.”

Read Robin Weinberg’s review of The Schizophrenia Oral History Project in issue 46.2.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Started in 2011, The Schizophrenia Oral History Project (TSOHP) is an ongoing project collecting and archiving life history narratives (not illness narratives) of persons living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. With very few exceptions, the literature on schizophrenia focuses almost exclusively on deficits related to the condition, and the public view of those with schizophrenia is of people who are violently dangerous, incoherent, and incapable of insight. TSOHP provides a platform for such persons to speak directly to mental health professionals and the public, in order to counter existing prejudices.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

In addition to recording these life history narratives, we also provide public talks about the project to various audiences (community groups, law enforcement, clinicians, oral historians, undergraduate and graduate students, etc.) that include audio excerpts from our narrators’ stories. In addition to being oral historians, we are psychologists, and we have learned from the field of social psychology that the most effective way to reduce stigma is to humanize the target of the stigma. Listening to audio excerpts is an essential element of the talks and serves to humanize persons with schizophrenia. When we see the photograph of Shirley with her dog Fluffy, and hear the emotion in her voice as she discusses anxiety and fear of interacting with people in society, we no longer see her as an “other.” She is now a human being who, like us, experiences challenges, hopes, accomplishments, and love. She is now a person because we connect with her. And because we connect with her, it makes it very difficult for us to stigmatize her. Audience members have confirmed this, identifying the impact that they believe came exclusively from the use of oral history as the method to deliver the message (“I feel this is a very powerful way to hear the message. It is one thing to read about schizophrenia in a textbook, but it’s another to hear it from someone who has schizophrenia.” “Hearing the narrators’ stories straight from the source was very, very powerful. It has a greater impact than statistics, reports, secondary reporting.”).

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

We enjoy oral history because it allows people to represent themselves the way they want to be represented; they are not limited by the questions asked of them. Furthermore, it is only through oral history that listeners can truly experience what it is like to see through the eyes of another.  As clinical psychologists, we see the value in people understanding signs and symptoms related to mental illness. But as oral historians, we believe in the power of oral history to allow them to see the person behind the diagnosis. That is where true learning occurs, because that is where empathy is born.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

There are two aspects of the project that we believe fellow historians would find particularly interesting: 1) our methodology of creating “dialogue” between narrators and audiences and 2) the ongoing and frequent nature of providing public talks about the project for education and advocacy. The “dialogue” is created by a circular feedback loop that begins with the narrator’s story. Then, during our public talks about the project, we gather audience feedback, including messages for our narrators—hundreds so far. Following this, we re-contact our narrators and share with them a multi-page collection of these messages, while recording their reactions.  Many of these reactions, we then share with subsequent audiences. Thus, a kind of dialogue between narrators and audience members is formed, providing narrators with a real sense of how their words impact others. After reading some of the overwhelmingly positive reactions others have had to her story, Shirley stated, “I feel like I matter for the first time.”

In addition to creating this “dialogue” between narrators and audience members, another unique aspect of our work is the extent of public talks we provide—most without honoraria. Many oral history projects culminate in some form of publication and/or a public presentation of what was learned. To date, we have provided over 50 presentations to various audiences as well as measured impact of the talks. In doing so, we identified educational, emotional and motivational responses and found that over two-thirds of the audience members learned something new, one-half experienced an emotional reaction, and one-fifth indicated motivation to modify their behavior, showing that listeners report measurable change on several levels after hearing TSOHP narrators’ stories.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

This is an interesting question for us because at the end of all of our interviews, we ask our narrators, What do you most want people to know about you and your life? Their answers are then highlighted on the individual webpages as “His/her message,” Their messages (“I’m not dangerous. I’m just a human being, with a problem.” “How would you cope if you were in the same situation?” or “No matter what I go through in my life that I’m the same, nice, loving, caring [person], and I won’t change that for anything in this world.”) are simple, elegant, powerful, and get at core issues of what it is to be a human being. Their messages are what we want others to remember most.  

Happy New Year from your OHR Editors

By Janneken Smucker, Abigail Perkiss, and David Caruso, co-editors

After a winter break and the turning of a new calendar year, we are back at the Oral History Review blog, eager to share the latest research and news related to the oral history community. During the past year we’ve been preparing for a big transition, and as of January 1, it is finally here. We are proud to announce our new publishing partnership with Routledge, part of the Taylor and Francis group, based here in the editorial team’s hometown of Philadelphia. We look forward to working with Routledge to connect with our readers in new ways, through digital media and international outreach. Routledge shares our commitment to the publicly engaged humanities, a concept the Oral History Association has embraced before anyone ever used such a term.

For you, dear readers, there will be few significant changes, although we encourage you to bookmark our new home at Routledge so you can find the latest articles, reviews, and instructions for authors. As in the past, Oral History Association members have full access to the OHR archive through our members site. As you renew your memberships this year, you’ll see we have rolled out a new option that allows readers to opt in to receive the print version of the journal; all members will have access to the online version by default. We will continue to publish the print copy, but will only send to readers that continue to prefer this format.

We welcome article submissions on all aspects of oral history methodology, theory, and pedagogy. We have already been hearing your great concepts for our upcoming special issue on ethics in oral history. You have until June 1, 2020 to submit your articles on this topic. We also welcome reviews of books and non-print/media projects. 

As always, we encourage you to participate in our oral history community by writing for our blog. Have a think piece on our methods and discipline rattling around in your brain? Want to share with our readers the project you’ve been working on, or address ways current events relate to oral history in a timely way? Pitch us your ideas.

Finally, we have made a slight alteration to how we are conceiving our editorial team: we’ve removed the titles from our core editorial positions, and each now go by “co-editor,” thus reflecting the nimble and collaborative approach we’ve had toward editing the journal since we took the helm in 2018. 

We look forward to engaging with you all in 2020. 

Fondly, 

JS, AP, and DC, co-editors

Voices from the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project

Oral history provides the opportunity to explore intersubjectivity and positionality. Here, Daniel Clarkson Fisher shares his work with the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project centered in Toronto. The moving video excerpts from interviews below demonstrate shared authority in practice.

By Daniel Clarkson Fisher

During the 1970s, North America became home to thousands of new immigrants in the Chinese Jamaican community—the descendants of the (almost exclusively) Hakka Chinese brought to Jamaica in the nineteenth century as indentured laborers, those who freely joined them, and the racially-mixed families created on the island. Some were fleeing flare-ups in ethnic and political violence, while others felt uncertain about their future under then-Prime Minister Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Others still were simply taking advantage of new opportunities abroad. The largest group came to the Greater Toronto Area, and the community has had a marked effect on the city since arriving.

When I am asked how I as a White settler came to create the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project (CJOHP.org), I usually explain, with tongue in cheek, that I “married into it”: my partner Stephanie is Chinese Jamaican, and so I had an interest in the community simply by virtue of being married to her. But that interest also deepened as I got to know her family better, made Chinese Jamaican friends, and read. So much so that when it came time to apply to the M.F.A. program in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, it made perfect sense to propose exploring it further in a Major Research Project (M.R.P.).

In my application, I suggested something along the lines of what Michael Renov refers to as “domestic ethnography,” or Timothy Corrigan calls “a portrait essay film”: a purposely “autobiographical” work that would push against outdated ideas about “objective” research by accentuating my positionality as someone in the Chinese Jamaican community but not of it. By the time I matriculated, though, this approach had become discomfiting: while I wanted to be sure to underscore the inherently subjective nature of documentary work, centering my own experience in this way reduced the community to little more than a backdrop for conceptual navel-gazing. This felt unseemly and exploitative, not to mention oblivious to the realities that should inform a positive White racial identity.

At the same time, it was becoming clear that there might be an opportunity to support a documentary aspiration coming from within the Chinese Jamaican community. In 2015, Stephanie was invited to join a group assembled by the late photographer Ray Chen to discuss the possibility of undertaking a community oral history project. Given my interests, she brought me into their conversations and I enthusiastically volunteered to help. But between Ray’s untimely death and a lack of necessary resources, the effort fizzled out. Though I was eager for everyone to regroup and forge ahead somehow, this became less and less likely as time went on; Stephanie and others eventually encouraged me to just start doing something myself if I was so inclined. Thus my M.R.P. became turning the digital-first project that the group had been imagining into a reality.

As it turns out, oral history suits me very well as a mode of documentary practice, especially given its foundational understanding of intersubjectivity and ideal of shared authority. Indeed, I can completely relate to literary oral historian Svetlana Alexievich, who has spoken about “[choosing] a genre where human voices speak for themselves” after much struggling to find one “that would be most adequate to my vision of the world, to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life.” The discovery of my own personal affinity for oral history aside, though, I also found it to be an optimal method for documenting Chinese Jamaican history in particular.

For one thing, certain important experiences are perhaps most fully captured in memories and stories (These include, but are certainly not limited to, indenture, creolization, and diaspora). In my interview with Dr. Keith D. Lowe, multicultural studies scholar and co-chair of the Toronto Hakka Conference, for example, something remarkable happens when I ask about his family today. Rather than list immediate family members, Keith discusses the kinship he feels with all those who share his surname. This leads to a story that offers an arresting and affecting peek across time to a generation otherwise far out of reach today:

And even in cases where the specific time or place under discussion are comparatively well documented, the narrators provide indelible details and bring to light special significance with their reminiscences. For instance, Carol Williams-Wong, an author and past president of the Tsung Tsin (Hakka) Association of Ontario, vividly describes a fairly representative childhood spent working at her family’s store (Chinese Jamaicans dominated retail business in Jamaica for much of the twentieth century). She also reveals how watching the films of Hollywood star Nancy Kwan in the store’s makeshift movie theater stoked a lifelong interest in her Chinese roots:

Additionally, the interviews that comprise CJOHP.org are essential examples of what Alistair Thomson calls “moving stories”—or, oral histories “[centered] on the physical experience of movement between places.” Even for those narrators who have not personally experienced such a movement, their families’ migration(s) invariably loom very large in both their interviews and lives. One especially strong “moving story” is the interview with Tony Wong, television critic for the Toronto Star. As a pre-teen, Tony was sent to Toronto to live with extended family years ahead of his parents’ migration to Canada. He remembers this difficult transition with a lively sense of humor, and also underscores the dramatic effect it had in terms of his later professional life:

Obviously, there are necessarily complicated issues of and diverse opinions about identity/-ies within the (Canadian) Chinese Jamaican community as well; an ongoing oral history project, then, allows a diverse and ever-expanding collection of narrators to speak about matters of identity in their own way and in their own time. This also goes a long way toward averting such documentary pitfalls as generalization, reductionism, and/or marginalization. I am particularly pleased, for example, that the project includes the voices of queer Chinese Jamaicans, as their experiences and stories have not always been part of narratives about the community. One such narrator, Brian Chang, who recently ran for office as the New Democratic Party candidate for Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre, speaks with both striking candor and tremendous perspective about being “an out and proud gay man” in the community:

[WARNING: This clip includes discussion of a hate crime.]

I am very proud of what CJOHP.org has accomplished so far. At the same time, seeing as I am the only interviewer and de facto manager, it is, at the moment, more of a cross-cultural oral history project than a community oral history project. Hopefully, though, now that the website is live—with twelve interviews, portraits, an interactive timeline, and other features—it will be easier to drum up interest in the kind of robustly collaborative effort that Ray and the group originally envisioned. It has been my honor and privilege to help get the ball rolling, but the next step needs to be finding my own replacements from within the community. This will ensure that proper ownership of the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project returns to and stays where it ultimately belongs.

Daniel Clarkson Fisher is a Toronto-based writer and educator. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, where his major research project (M.R.P.) was the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project (CJOHP.org). During his studies, Danny also presented about CJOHP.org as a work-in-progress at the 6th Emerging Scholars Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice at Concordia University’s Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He is currently a contract lecturer in the M.F.A. Documentary Media program at Ryerson, and blogs about oral history as a mode within the documentary arts at his personal website (danielclarksonfisher.com).

Bits and pieces of this essay are adapted from the author’s M.R.P. support paper, which will soon be available to read online at the Ryerson University Library Digital Repository.

Images, audio, and video courtesy of Daniel Clarkson Fisher / The Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project.

OHR Call for Submissions for Upcoming Special Issue on Ethics

The Oral History Review invites submissions with a special focus on ethics in oral history, broadly conceived. Submit full articles by June 1, 2020.

Core to our work as oral historians are the relationships we establish with our narrators, asking them to trust us with their stories so we can learn and broaden our understanding of history. This engagement with our narrators and the dissemination of their stories, experiences, knowledge, and memories is highly complex, from the questions we choose to ask and how we phrase them, to potential power differentials between interviewee and interviewer, to the presentation and preservation of those stories for generations to come, just to name a few. As our methodologies have grown and changed, so have our ethical responsibilities to our narrators, our colleagues, our sponsors, and ourselves. As interviewers, researchers, and preservers of oral history, we cannot ignore the significant role of ethics to our practice.

The editors of the OHR are interested in essays and articles that address the ethical considerations and complications that practitioners have experienced and/or foresee for our future. What must we consider, for example, when we plan to interview at-risk populations or victims of crime and violence? What are the implications of oral history’s exemption from Institutional Review Boards’ review in the United States? How do we handle transnational and international oral history projects when our narrators have different views on ownership of their histories and their use in publications? How do we handle issues of harassment or the legacies of cultural and social hegemony? How does our broadening profession consider our methodologies when anyone with access to a smartphone can claim to conduct oral history? When does de-centering the interview become a key exploratory process of ethical responsibility in oral history research? And what might this decentering look like? This list of questions is in no way comprehensive and should not be taken as limiting; instead we intend to spark ideas that authors should be considering for their submission.

We ask that all completed article manuscripts be submitted to the Oral History Review no later than 1 June 2020 through Routledge’s ScholarOne system. Please include “(Special Focus on Ethics)” at the end of the title of your piece. Should you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Featured image by Flickr user amk713 licensed by Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Intersubjectivities of Interviewing and Pregnancy

All oral history interviews result from the interaction between interviewee and interviewer, and the intersubjectivities within that relationship. Oral historian Liz Strong experienced many variations of this dynamic over the nine months of her pregnancy, which she shares in this post.

By Liz Strong

On the day that I went into labor, I conducted two back-to-back oral history interviews in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t recommend doing oral history fieldwork at that pace. Even the simplest, most joyful and life-affirming oral history interviews require all my focus, and leave me exhausted to spend the rest of the day in a cloud. At eight-and-a-half months pregnant, two oral histories in one day was especially ill-advised. 

I did it because I needed the work, because I loved the projects, and because there was no other time to get the interviews done. I did it because this was my first pregnancy, and I hadn’t learned my limits. And I was able to accomplish it because I have a supportive partner who was ready and available to help. He rode with me both ways on the subway, holding my hand through waves of nausea that came with every bump and jolt. He met me with snacks and bubbly water between interviews, to help settle my stomach and keep my energy up. After the long day was done, I climbed the four flights of stairs to our apartment, I flopped down by the air conditioner to finally relax, and my water broke. He then packed our bags and calmly called an ambulance.

Five hours later, we had a healthy baby boy.

I’m writing about this experience because I know I’m not the only oral historian to work this hard while pregnant. In the nine months of my pregnancy I recorded twenty-two oral history interviews. Over the course of that time, pregnancy influenced every part of my practice as an oral historian: how I communicated with narrators, hosted interview sessions, structured interviews, absorbed and responded to what narrators told me, and even the equipment I used. 

I’d like to encourage more women to talk about these experiences. Doing so is more than just an opportunity to begin sharing resources and supporting each other. Pregnancy affords us a unique opportunity to examine our oral history practice because it is such an extreme, and ephemeral, physical and emotional transition. We have a chance to experience, first hand, how people interact with us differently and how those intersubjective exchanges of the interview can change and then change again after pregnancy. 

Beginning in my first trimester—and continuing well into my third—I had horrible morning sickness that lasted all day long. Riding the train to Queens for an interview, I clung to the pole of the crowded subway car with my eyes closed, breathing slowly through my nose. No one was giving up their seat. I could only look forward to the small privileges of being visibly pregnant. Slung in my backpack I had two lapel mics, a recorder, backup batteries, a portfolio of release forms, and two apples (currently the only food I could comfortably keep down). 

The oral history interview was in an old synagogue near Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and the walk from the subway helped soothe the nausea. By the time I reached my destination, I felt myself again and my narrator was none the wiser. The interview was like many others; I made an effort to host the interview in a way that would engage her and make her most comfortable. She interacted with me professionally, warmly and genuinely, but without much curiosity about who I am as a person. 

By the second trimester, the interview dynamic started to change. I was beginning to show. Narrators who I had met during my first trimester had a whole new response to me: “I didn’t realize you were pregnant! What are you having? When are you due?” We would launch into celebratory conversations about my future as I set up equipment and got settled. By the time the interview started a few minutes later we were chatting like old friends. 

The second trimester also had new challenges for me. I had to adapt to always feeling just a little bit exhausted and out of breath. I quit my weekend job, added thirty minutes to all my estimated travel times to interviews, and embraced my new place on the right side of New York subway escalators as everyone else raced passed. My morning sickness hadn’t subsided, but I had medication to help. Even so, I was still dealing with extra internal noises experienced by many pregnant women, that could be picked up with the extreme sensitivity of lapel microphones. I experimented with new microphone set-ups, eventually settling on a kit I continue to prefer post-pregnancy.

I found that my favorite microphone was a dynamic supercardioid one, built for close-micing and rejecting room noise, similar to those used in radio studios. This gave me lots of control over my levels, to lean away a little when I didn’t want to be heard so clearly, and to speak directly into the mic when I did. While that was great for me, I didn’t want narrators to have to be as mic-conscious. So, for them, I used a small diaphragm cardioid condenser microphone, which has a broad cone of sensitivity allowing them to lean forward and back or side to side as they got comfortable over the course of an interview. I often carried a second narrator microphone with me as well. In the event of a surprise group interview, I could set up both cardioid condenser microphones in an XY configuration in order to capture the whole group together without phase cancellation. 

In my third trimester, I was undeniably showing. No one was too shy to ask about my pregnancy. What most distinctively marked this period for me was how the dynamics of hospitality shifted. I was used to playing host during interviews, regardless of whether we were in my office or a narrator’s home. I made sure the narrator was comfortable, offered them water, checked in with them about taking breaks, and generally centered their needs during our visit. As a pregnant interviewer I had to quickly accept a complete reversal of this dynamic. Just about everyone I interviewed made sure I was sitting in the most comfortable chair available. Glasses of water were frequently offered, and one woman cooked me a whole meal. While all of this attention was very generous, I struggled with feeling like I had transformed into a distracting physical presence. 

I soon came to accept that I did appreciate an extra cushion on my chair, food always helped my energy and focus, and making it through two-hour conversations without bathroom breaks was probably asking too much of myself. It wasn’t easy for me to embrace my new physical needs as a normal part of my process as an interviewer. In spite of that, everyone I met was eager to help. All of my narrators were either close to someone who had been pregnant, or had been through it themselves. This gave us instant camaraderie.

After my son was born, I went back to work after my eight weeks of recently state-mandated maternity leave. I dove into fieldwork at my old pace, with an interview already scheduled for my first day back. My biggest hurdle at this point was the logistics of pumping breast milk. In an eight-hour work day, I usually had to pump three times for twenty minutes to stay comfortable. I was very lucky that my employer provided a lactation room. I had access to a clean private space, and stored my electric pump there. It was centrally located in Brooklyn, so in most cases I could easily plan my trips around the city with a layover or two as needed. If I had to go much farther afield, I would throw a hand pump and cooler bag in with my recording equipment, and hope to find a Starbucks bathroom along the way. 

Relationships with my narrators continued to have a subtle sweetness to them. The idea of a new baby in the world is magical, and people were absolutely radiant towards me. I was especially drawn in by the way that fellow parents treated me as if we were all in on the same story. As an interviewer, I began to see narrators’ motivations as parents in clearer focus. My line of inquiry often followed their passions and creativity in raising children. They recognized in me a new kind of genuine interest and were eager to share experiences. In an interview with Nailah Lymus in 2018, when my son was three months and hers was ten years, we had the following exchange:

STRONG: So, an important aspect of your career that we haven’t really touched on yet is, you have a son… He was born just a couple of years after you started your own line, right?  

LYMUS: Yes. This guy… I really feel like God just blessed me with him, because, I’ve been in the industry from when he was in my stomach. I remember sewing, and sometimes I’d have to take a break because he’d be like kicking the crap out of my stomach, like, “Mom, that’s enough, I don’t want the vibration anymore.” …But he just adjusts to my lifestyle so well.  I mean part of it is he grew up in it, like fashion shows and going to photo shoots…

An important premise of oral history research is that we have to acknowledge the emotional and embodied contexts in which we live our lives and remember our pasts. Lymus’s career and motherhood were inexorably linked, and so were mine. Knowing that about myself, and recognizing it in others, became part of my strength and style as an interviewer.  

For me, pregnancy was an opportunity to build awareness about my physicality in an interview. The challenges of being pregnant ultimately improved the way that I record, and the way that I communicate with narrators about what we each need. I think I’ve gained a powerful intentionality and presence in my work. I definitely pushed myself too far at times, but I was lucky to have people I could rely on for help. I’m grateful for all of these experiences, and for the way I’ve grown as an interviewer.

I hope that those of you reading this will take the time to share experiences of your own in the comments. What did you learn about yourself? What changed about oral history interviewing for you over the course of your experience? What advice would you share for other women in the midst of fieldwork and pregnancy? I believe that the more we talk about this, the more we all stand to gain.

Liz Strong is Project Coordinator for the Obama Presidency Oral History. She previously served as the Project Coordinator for “Muslims in Brooklyn” at the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) from 2017 to 2019. From 2015 to 2019, Liz was the Oral History Program Manager for the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP), where she lead several oral history initiatives on the history of the preservation movement in New York City. Previously, she worked with the Columbia Center for Oral History Research to write their Oral History Transcription Style Guide. She was also a member of the Oral History Association task force to author their 2018 Principles & Best Practices. As a freelance oral historian and personal historian, beginning in 2010, she worked with a variety of clients, including the Washington Department of Commerce in 2013, and the University of Arizona Steward Observatory in 2012. She received her MA in Oral History from Columbia Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in 2015, and her BA in Narrative Arts from Oberlin College in 2009.

Featured image courtesy of author

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