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Nicole: What drew
you to the subject of oral history?
Michael:
I somewhat stumbled
into it, in videos that I made on various subjects,
including HIV/AIDs early in the 1980s, and also
radio documentaries. I was in the position of
trying to understand the complex realities of
people’s lives in situations much removed from
my own, all over the world, and the natural way to
do so, it seemed to me, was to ask people a lot of
questions, to the extent that they were willing to
share that kind of information with me. The
approach just organically lent itself to this kind
of careful listening, and then trying to draw on
what I heard, to create documentaries that were as
faithful to the experiences I’d heard that I
could make them. That, I discovered a few years
ago, is generally called – especially in North
America and Europe – oral history. Once I
understood that there was a formal designation for
it, I began to think about it and was asked to give
talks, and I began to think, ‘well, what is it
that I actually do?’ And then, by extension,
the other people who do this kind of work: what do
they do, and why, and how, and what obstacles do
they face? Hence the book.
N: Given that
you came to it pretty much organically, how would
you define oral history?
M:
I would define it
as the gathering of people’s life stories, or
aspects of their life stories, and the preservation
of these stories in some form for the future. Also
– now, some people wouldn’t include this
as part of a definition, but I tend to
–conveying that material to others so that it
has a kind of extended life; so that it has other
listeners besides just the person who sat with the
tape recorder and the narrator; so that it can
create an impact beyond the initial conversation.
It’s a kind that I would call engaged oral
history: to reinsert the people who have gone
missing, that have been deliberately written out of
the official version, as with First Nations people
in Canada; to deliberately create a space in the
larger history for those voices to be heard, so we
get a more authentic and fuller picture of our
shared story.
N: You call
your book An Unauthorized Biography of the
World; is this because you have a specific
meaning you want your audience to draw from the
book, the particular tales? And what sort of
meaning would that be?
M:
It varies from
chapter to chapter, story to story. The overall
meaning, or value, is that it is worth paying
attention – close attention – to the
voices of the people of very diverse experience in
the world. Within the larger, overarching meaning,
I hope that readers are able to – in the way
that I was able to, and honoured to –
encounter the struggles that people are engaged in
in different countries and different contexts, to
value the richness of what people bring to their
lives and the potential power that we have to shape
our world, up against undeniably powerful forces.
There are people living under very difficult, and
often dangerous, circumstances still trying to
preserve the land, to continue to work for justice,
for equality, for peace. These are things that are
essential to life. I hope people will, as they
encounter each of these stories, get a glimpse of
the richness and diversity of human
experience.
N: The stories
you cover span very broad territory, such as New
York City, Manitoba, Turkey and Peru. What drew you
to these particular subjects?
M:
I wanted to look as
broadly as I could not only at types of experience,
but at the ways and circumstances under which oral
history is done. And through that, at how people
use this thing called oral history to elicit the
stories and what impact the stories can have in
developing these various issues. To some extent, it
also depended on encounters I had with people;
people I heard about either through the oral
history list-serve or people I met directly and
their willingness to talk to me.
N: These topics
are different from your usual focus on gay and
lesbian communities. Did that affect the way you
approached these stories at all?
M:
This is an
interesting question that’s often discussed in
oral history circles: insider/outsider interviews.
Since my previous books have all dealt with aspects
of gay, lesbian and transgendered experience, I
could be called, to some degree, an insider.
Whereas with many of the issues that this book
looks at, its frame is much larger than my prior
books and I could be called an outsider, for
example with the Quechua-speaking women of the
Andes. One of the interesting things about oral
history is discovering what common ground there is
between people: you actually discover humanity,
which is vague and abstract. But you do have
similar needs, in terms of our survival on this
earth. We do have similar desires, presumably,
which have to do with having a life that is worth
living and loving and being loved, and having
adequate nutrition and access to water: common
ground.
I probably didn’t do
much differently, though, because at the heart of
this kind of work is a really respectful kind of
listening. I pursue certain things; in this case
it’s defined partly by the fact that I’m
talking to people who do this kind of work, so
I’m talking to colleagues about things we all
understand: how complex it is to build trust, the
responsibility that’s inherent in having
somebody entrust you with their story. In general,
the continuous thread through all of my work is how
carefully you listen and how carefully you respect
what you hear and deal with it in whatever form
it’s going to take; in this case, a
book.
N: While
interviewing these colleagues, did you find
anything problematic, since they do the same kind
of work as you?
M:
The short answer is
no. [we laugh]. Actually, what a number of
people identified was that it was a rare experience
for them to actually talk about what they do. This
kind of work, which involves paying close attention
to other people, doesn’t leave much room to
pay attention to your own process. For example,
talking to people who had done interviews with
survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center,
I learned about something called secondary trauma,
which is the cumulative effect of closely and
empathetically listening to the experiences of
people who had been through intense
traumas.
For the person who is
telling their own experience, there can be a kind
of release in finally speaking this thing that you
have bottled up. So the person who is listening to
it, especially if they are doing a series of these,
can become quite burdened with these stories and
their content of horror.
Part of the value for the
people in talking to me, was that they rarely have
a chance to reflect on their own work, to release
the experience, because they just do it. Usually
it’s under pressure, sometimes it’s under
dangerous conditions, but they just do it. So in my
questions, coming from a similar position, I think
it provided an outlet for people to explore some of
their own dilemmas and tensions and conflicts in
doing this work.
N: With regards
to trauma, how do you remain objective in the face
of emotion and horror? How much of yourself do you
invest in your work? And is objectivity even
necessary?
M:
Yeah, I don’t
think I’m particularly objective; nor do I
think this book is. I think one of the values of
it, and of oral history, is that it’s not
objective, using that word the way the people in
the media do. I think the mass media operate under
the illusion that it is objective somehow, but
isn’t necessarily. The value in oral history
is not the one story, but in the fact that you
accumulate many impressions of similar events,
whether it be genocide in Peru or struggling
against a transnational goldmine in Turkey. What
you get is like a mosaic, a cumulative picture of
reality. You get a much richer, more layered, more
complex picture of the reality that we are living
in from this kind of technique than from the single
voice of the national radio or the New York
Times or any of the mass media.
So in doing it, I’m
not particularly objective. I feel quite
impassioned and I’m very moved, often, by
people’s stories. I’m quite professional
when I do interviews, in the sense that I keep very
clear sight of my job – to create a context in
which a person can tell their story with a certain
amount of safety and comfort – but sometimes
when I’m listening to the tapes later on, then
I’m freed to have an emotional reaction to
them, which can often be quite profound. Because as
you’re listing to someone’s life story,
it’s very human to feel empathy. That’s
the challenging part for me, and conveying their
story as authentically as I can.
N: Throughout
the book, you adhere to the notion that the
unspoken voices within history are in need of being
drawn forth. What role within our current society
do you think oral history must take?
M:
I think its role is
becoming increasingly important as the media
that’s loud in our lives becomes increasingly
monolithic. It becomes increasingly compelling that
we hear other voices because those other voices
have extremely important truths to tell and
it’s at our peril that we ignore them. For
example, in the book’s section on First
Nations, we are not just conveying grievances about
their land being taken away. We’re also
listening to ways of understanding the world, and
being in it, that are fundamental to all of our
survival. There are voices of the villages, the
peasants, in Anatolia who are defending their land.
Similarly, they’re not just defending their
little patch of land, they’re also defending
the sacredness of earth and water, the integrity of
those things, against poisoning by arsenic and
cyanide from the mine. That has implications for
all of us. Those voices which are either silenced
by the military, or ignored by the mass media in
favour of celebrities and politicians, those voices
need to be heard. That, I think, is one of the
crucial roles of oral history.
N: Why this
book now? Is there something about this particular
time period that begged the book to be written,
maybe on a more personal note?
M:
For myself, the
timing of it began a few years ago, of taking some
time to reflect on what I was doing. People were
asking me questions about it and I wasn’t very
able to answer them because I hadn’t thought
much about the implications of what I was doing or
the techniques or the ethical dilemmas. So for me,
it became important to pay attention to those
things. I wanted to understand, in context, what I
do; in a much larger context of other people doing
this work, and under more difficult conditions,
with deeper ethical dilemmas.
N: Is there a
common goal behind the practice of oral history in
general?
M:
The book would
suggest that there are a lot of common dilemmas and
approaches, but each person works in their own
particular context. People come up with their own
approaches, if they haven’t defined their work
as oral history, because they simply, as I did,
said ‘Well, ok so it’s very important
that these stories be heard’. They approach
these things with something in common: the need to
elicit and preserve people’s stories that
might otherwise be lost.
N: How would
you counter critics that say history is
‘facts’ but oral history is
‘subjective
interpretation’?
M:
There’s two
things to be said to that. The first is that
there’s truth that’s inherent – and
people understand that memory is faulty and
partial. What people who do this work for a long
time discover is that there can be a remarkable
consistency when you talk to a number of people
about an experience they all went through. There
might be a fudging of the details, but what you
find is that there are essential truths about
experience. As you accumulate these fragments of
stories, you begin to see trends and patterns so
they become cumulative truth.
On the documents side,
there’s evidence that documents are, as much
as people’s stories are, created by human
beings with vested interests. Therefore the only
way to look at documented history is to look at a
lot of documents and see how they compare. But even
then, since the documents often depend on each
other, you could still end up with this dominant
voice, which is, I would call, the official version
and it has remarkably little resemblance to the
real people on the ground.
In the chapter on
Israel/Palestine, Efrat Ben-Zeev talks about her
images of macro and micro versions of history. The
macro version is what I would call the official
version. The micro version is the same events as
experienced by the villagers, for instance. So what
you get is, in some ways, a similar story, but with
details of how people experienced the attacks, with
very different interpretations and motives. So, by
unearthing the experience of people who underwent
these events themselves, you can end up with a much
richer, and probably more honest, version of what
happened than the official version, which as been
very clean cut.
N: How should
oral history be brought to everybody’s
consciousness?
M:
Any way it can be.
I think it’s quite challenging to do, and this
is partly why I wrote the book, because I think
generally the pattern of media conglomeration is to
have a continuously shrinking space for other than
the dominant voices. So I think that any work that
finds any way to focus these stories in any medium
is useful, even crucial.
For example, Efrat reports
from Israel that it’s getting harder all the
time to get Palestinian stories heard in the
Israeli media. Rather than listening to this person
you define as your enemy and seeing if there’s
any common ground to be found, they’re shut
up. She and others argue, in other contexts
similarly, that the only way you’re ever going
to have any kind of peace, which people desperately
need in order to live, is by listening to the other
and trying to discern where common ground is. As
long as we are mired in defining ourselves by how
distant we are from the other and how much of a
threat the other is – look at U.S. Homeland
Security – the less room there is to make
peace and create a kind of world that really is the
only one that people can survive in: a cooperative
kind of world.
That’s what I think
this work has to do. It’s why I wrote the
book: I want to honour where people are doing this
and forcing the space, you know, scrambling any way
they can. Here’s the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in Peru; these women work very hard,
they’ve never spoken out before – even in
the villages – to create a space where the
particular experiences of women during the genocide
can be heard. And then once they’re heard,
that they don’t just disappear into an archive
somewhere; that the stories remain alive and a
vital part of the ongoing national
debate.
N: So, sort of
humanizing the victims?
M:
Yes, exactly. She
specifically refers to that. The Andean people went
from being non-existent, to being a problem, to
being terrorists to being victims, and now, maybe,
to becoming citizens – which is the ultimate
objective of course, because none of those other
categories offer much potential for life or growth.
They now have a voice.
Also, I often find when I
encounter people they say, ‘Oh, why would you
be interested in my story?’ People have this
notion that their stories are unimportant, but once
you start listening and asking the right kind of
questions, what you get is this rich life history
that they don’t value themselves, but begin to
realize matters. That’s often the case with
this work: people who have come to believe that
they don’t matter actually begin to think,
‘Well maybe what I have to say does matter and
maybe I can speak and have some kind of
impact’. That’s what impassions me about
me about all of the interviews.
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