The topic of this reading group was trauma and oral history. The two pieces read were: “Oral History and Trauma: Experiences of sexualised violence under National Socialist persecution” by Helga Amesberger (Austrain) and “Oral history – ‘More dangerous than therapy’ ?: Interviewers’ reflections on recording traumatic or taboo issues” by Wendy Rickhard (who did Creature Comforts).

Event .v. People

A big issue in interviewing people about traumatising events is that you have this tension between the interviewee’s whole life and that key event. Both parties involved come together because of this event but the life of the interviewee is bigger than the single event. Their opinion of the event might have changed over the years and might still change even after the interviews, making the interviews also a single event in that person’s life.

There is also the issue between the traumatising event and the trauma that the person lives with because of the event. On top of that the trauma that these people live with might change and be manipulated by other things in their life and wider society. In the examples in the texts the traumatic events are layered between the taboo of sexual harassment. Which brings me on to the second point.

TABOO!

Taboo topics can become a bit of an obstacle for oral historians, as was discussed during the reading group. When talking about uncomfortable topics you could walking into the situation where you could reenforce the taboo further. By interviewing a person about a taboo subject you are also highlighting it, which is often considered positive however it has the possibility of backfiring. In addition when the interviews are done and the contents is released into the world no longer have control over how people react to the taboo subject.

The Transcribing Problem

This was a fascinating thing that came up in the discussion. It seemed that nearly everyone had experience of having the heaviness of the conversations hit them when they were transcribing the interviews. In fact Graham even said that he gives his transcribers a heads up that they do not have to finish it if they are not comfortable with it. Clearly the re-listening of the interviews opens up this space of realisation of the heaviness of the topic. I just found this to be a very interesting problem everyone was experiencing.

Access

Now this is the part most relevant to my work: what do we do with the tapes? The tapes can offer a whole bunch of problems. Lets say the tapes are available in an archive which can be accessed by anyone and some random person listens to them, what could happen? Well the recording could be taken completely out of context (like an old tweet) and manipulated into something else. The people were experts in their topic and knew exactly what they were talking about but if anyone can access it the recording they might not actually understand what is being said. Having the recordings open to complete interpretation could have extremely damaging consequences.

This only becomes a bigger problem when you make access to these tapes easier like what I want to do. This mostly happens through the use of technology which currently does not have a good reputation in protecting the users.

To end this access issue the group pondered on whether the tapes should be archived at all, only leaving behind the research done by the expert. This protects those who took part in the interview but also leaves a slight emptiness. (but that might mean because then my whole PhD would be pointless.) Maybe the question is not how should we archive but what we should archive.

And finally…

My favourite quote had to be from Rickhard’s text:

“You need to have money to be ethical”

That truly sums up everything. Because if there is anything that I have worked out about oral history is that it is in a constant battle between capturing an ongoing saga and permanent nature of capturing itself.