Oral History Practice As Activist Practice
As I stood in the crowd for the rally in November, I felt an uneasy tension between my desire to both shape students’ stories into a narrative and to listen. Part of my early training in oral history practice was about deep listening, a method of hearing in which you are present with what is shared, in the moment it is shared, without controlling, judging, or assuming. It requires a profound openness and activeness on the part of the interviewer, an acute shift from an ordinary approach in which listening is a passive activity. Deep listening requires that you understand the sounds of words and phrases, hearing their rises and falls without reaction. By abandoning the instinct to project your opinions and describe your experiences, you are better able to understand the opinions and experiences of others. In this, deep listening offers the potential to transform not just the conversations we chose to record but everyday conversations, including, perhaps, a persistent political campus discourse. But deep listening remains wildly elusive to me. [1]
I am trying to amend this defect. For now, though, it signals not just a weakness in my abilities as an oral historian, but also as a free speech activist. The right to speak freely is echoed by the right to listen. I doubt my authority to call for the former when I am unable to practice the latter. At meetings, where I imagine the abundance that awaits a future archiving of the materials of a student organization, and at rallies, where I create historical narratives by impulse, I am not listening. I am not the witness I want to be. Alessandro Portelli explains in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories that listening beyond words means that one must be aware of the cultural forms and processes by which “individuals express their sense of themselves in history.”[2] I feel that I am just waking up to the awarenesses of the experiences and opinions of the student activists around me. For theses reasons, I still must mediate: I am an historian-activist.
In an interview last April with a student activist and friend, I found myself lost in the story she was telling, asking myself what she meant because I was focusing on myself, thinking onto how I would phrase the next question. When I returned the recording of our interview and heard the story in which I had found myself lost, a story easy to follow and easy to follow-up on, I was irked even further. But I am getting better. In an interview last month with a faculty member, I fought the impulse to understand a story she was telling about a visit to an archive before she was done telling. I am not sure it was deep listening, but it was active listening. With self-reflexivity supporting future interviews with student-activists, I want to engage in deep listening as a practice of oral history, but also as a method of free speech activism. If, as an historian, I want to speak and tell a story, I first need to listen.
[1]Norkunas, Martha, “Teaching to Listen: Listening Exercises and Self-Reflexive Journals,” Oral History Review 38, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 63–108.
[2]Portelli, Alessandro, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), xi.