Trauma Interviews: Dori Laub

It was a little bit weird to learn about trauma video testimony by watching a video interview about trauma video testimony that recounted testimonies of trauma secondhand. It was not just an interview but an interview about interviewing—though I guess this is a well-represented portion of MMC's work, which, among many other people of course, addresses journalists, psychoanalysts and therapists.

I found myself trying to listen for answers to questions I had, and thus getting frustrated when, not surprisingly, answers weren’t immediately apparent. It became really clear to me while watching this interview how oral history interviews differ from conversations. Of course, when I have conversations, I can’t relisten to them, as I did with Laub’s interview, yet I can still know the opinions and positions of the person I spoke with. But the sorts of clarifications and reiterations that are part of conversations are not always part of oral history interviews—at least not at the same pace. Laub could clarify what he had said 20 minutes earlier without any outside prompting, and complicate the rather confined space I had allowed him in my mind for his responses. Even when direct answers are given, I realized, all sorts of complicated and contradictory statements are likely part of that concise answer too.

It also became clear to me how damaging it can be to be overly concerned with questions and answers in an interview setting because they narrow the focus of my listening. As a result, I could miss very subtle statements, allusions, or body language. Laub says of the testimonies he collects, though also, it seems, to Mary Marshall, “if you back off there’s more that comes.” This seems like very good advice.

The most striking part of the interview for me, however, was when Laub talked about photographs and their role in helping a person start to tell about their trauma. He describes the oldest photographs that people have inside themselves. Something about that statement was completely arresting to me, I guess because it allows for something small but external and solid to become internal, intangible, and completely foundational to memory. There also seems to be an element of possession involved in this concept too; when I think of the photographs I would use to tell my own story, they are so essential to my understanding of my life that without them, I would be lost. I’m thinking of one particular picture from a Saturday morning when I was 5. I’m in a room in my parents’ house with my cat, Gypsy (who my sister named after Stevie Nicks). I’ve seated her on a lawn chair covered in afghans and I’m standing in front of a rocking chair in my nightgown with a long stick that I’m using as a pointer while I teach Gypsy the lessons I learned in school. Then there are also the photographs of people who I never met, like the picture of my great, great aunt Sylvania sitting in the woods next to her whiskey still with her hunting dog beside her, and her long-johned legs sticking out of her skirt.

There’s so much life around all of these things that are objects, and so much of it is imagined—or maybe, more precisely, the connection made around the objects are so imagined, and so much a product of personal narration. Though they are no less true, and certainly no less important.

Collective Memory: 9/11

The first interview I listened to was with CM and AS, recorded in October 2001 and then December 2002. This was the first interview from the collection that I was able to listen to rather than read. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could or would read the transcripts, since I knew that the audio recordings were available. I was really privileging the ability of the audio to communicate both the interpersonal dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee, and also the intimacy of the narrator’s story, better than the transcript. Although I understand the unique insight that can come only from reading and seeing the arrangement of words on a page—after all, my academic background is in the study of literature—at this point I think that it’s essential to listen to the interview whenever it’s the subject of research, in addition to reading the transcript (at least, whenever the audio is available). I almost feel like the researcher should specify whether they listened to, or read the transcript of, any interview they cite; that’s another part of the context of the interview as far as I’m concerned (the context of its creation as well as the context of its use).

The major theme of the interview sessions with CM was the impact of September 11 on her work. She was a social worker at the Freedom Community center in the Bronx where she works with people who need assistance finding work, school or apartments. She had grown up seeing her mother depend on her father for almost everything; she had never learned English, did not know how to get around the city, etc. Carmen used her example to mold herself into the opposite: someone who was independent and could navigate all the city systems, and furthermore, could help other people become independent in this way too. The fact that many of the agencies with which she regularly corresponded were housed in downtown Manhattan, and were therefore physically displaced or otherwise totally disrupted as a result of the destruction downtown, presented a major problem for the work that she did. She could no longer refer people to the agencies they needed in order to find homes, or to get public assistance or job training, and she therefore felt impotent, and blocked from helping the people in her community.

This manifested itself in anger with the city as a bureaucratic entity. She said she felt like “NYC had gone to sleep” before the attacks occurred—meaning, the country should have known that something like this would happen and it should have been prepared. After the attacks, she was upset that it was taking so long for the city agencies to get back up and running. In her opinion, agencies were using September 11 as an excuse. In other words, agencies chose to be lazy about reorganization and reopening because they could; they understood that the September 11 attacks could be used to excuse anything and they took advantage of that opportunity.

Perhaps this is the way that CM articulated her frustration over her loss of control in her life. Because her whole life had been built around taking control and helping others take control, her inability to fulfill these goals generated anger, which she directed not at the perpetrators of the attack (she referred vaguely to “the enemy”) but at her own city and its organizations. In this sense, the traumatic event for her seems not so much to be the events of September 11, but rather the daily aftermath in which she’s unable to live her life as she chooses and to find personal fulfillment in the way that she formerly had.

The second interview (which I was only able to read because the transcript couldn’t be found) was with ZE interviewed by GA. ZE also located the real problems of September 11 as manifesting outside herself; she explained that she hadn’t felt much of the impact herself until one of her close friends, who is Indian, was accosted on the street while she was wearing a traditional sari because she was mistaken for a Muslim woman. ZE is an independent museum curator who specializes in Indian art, and her friends include a number of Indian aristocrats; the friend that she spoke of in her story was an American citizen who was a consultant for CK. This episode was shocking to ZE because she suddenly felt that she realized how many people she would have to protect or advocate for. Her friends, who were successful cultural and professional figures, were equally as vulnerable as people who she saw on the streets and the subways whose histories were unknown to her. She didn’t feel bodily threatened herself—that was not a comprehendible effect of September 11. Rather, it was a direct attack on an individual, her friend, who caused her to understand September 11 as the impetus for discriminatory hate crimes by Americans on other Americans.

She compared the experience to when she was a student at Berkeley in 1968 and the police began to physically attack the student protesters and to administer tear gas. I thought this comparison was interesting since it describes a domestic attack of the Berkeley police on the Berkeley students. To her, however, the events are similar because in both cases she fought for the rights of her friends (to stay out of the Vietnam War) and for the rights of the innocent Vietnamese who were being killed by American soldiers. She does not seem to understand September 11 as an event that made her a victim because of her history--as one who fights for cultural understanding.

I can understand her desire to avoid the feeling of being victimized. Part of how I understood September 11 was to see it as an attack on the American government, and specifically the policies of George Bush and his administration. Because I didn’t agree with those policies, I could avoid feeling attacked—even though I lived in New York City at the time and witnessed the effects of the attacks firsthand. That was, simply, my logic at the time. Furthermore, such a violent event, to me, seemed to be lacking in compassion, and I too felt that it was an appropriate time to have compassion in the places where others directed their feelings of revenge and anger. I hadn’t thought of it so much as a coping strategy, but reading the interview with ZE made me want to ask her how she was able to maintain that she wasn’t a direct victim. In other words, this logic that she and I might have shared started to seem faulty to me.

On the other hand, I think this response is somewhat rooted in the dominant narrative that began to be proffered by the media in that it was a response against it. For me, it’s natural to want to offer an alternative to the official statement about how the group responds or what the group thinks. My thought is very much rooted in individualism, rather than the communal, and this is perhaps because I grew up in a community where my and my family’s beliefs (and the food we ate, our names, the cars we drove, et al) were drastically different from our neighbors’. It’s partly an inherent understanding for me that I’m not represented in communal stories. I think this is why when I hear about any kind of group—even one that I may be a part of, such as “New Yorkers”—I automatically dismiss its potential to include, or apply to, me in any way. Part of the September 11 Narrative and Memory project was to get a diversity of stories of individuals that could potentially create a collection of individual memories which, collectively, could serve as a statement against (or alongside) the official collective memory as preserved by the media or the government. It was a useful assignment for me to see how individual memory and collective memory can feed off each other, or be formed in response to one another. And most importantly, it was a reminder to me that my own feelings of existing outside the dominant group are likely to each person’s perception, to a certain extent, and not just mine.

Archival Interviews: Session Two

After thinking last night about the use of archives in oral history, in conjunction with the subject of the interview I chose with a founding member of the National Parks Service, I started to wonder if the National Parks themselves were some kind of archive. So today when I set out read more of the transcript with Albright, I had it in mind to compare the way he talked about the Parks with the way some of the authors I consulted this week wrote about archives.

I had been thinking that certainly the organizational structure of the Parks and their relationship to the Forest Service, the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Mines, and so on and so forth along the scale, were in some ways analogous to Brown and David-Brown’s description of hierarchies that are constructed through use of the Library of Congress Classification System—perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the LoC is also federally managed. And Albright did spend a bit of time going over the organization of the governmental offices during his tenure (both his interviewer and I had trouble keeping all the offices straight).

I felt like I struck some sort of mother lode when Albright started talking about Theodore Roosevelt. First, he answered a question I wished I could have asked about how the conservation movement came about. He said,

TR is rated as the founder of the conservation movement. Well, that’s not exactly so, because what he did…was to bring together all the men who at that time were interested in conservation and natural resources, including industrialists, and who put programs and policies looking to the future. What he really was was a catalyst….TR glamorized conservation, emphasized it at every turn. He got out into the woods. He was a hunter and a horseman and a rancher, he understood cattle, sheep ranching. He traveled extensively through the National Parks and the National Forests. No president before or since has been so active personally in covering the territory involved in conservation, nor in understanding and even participating in the use of its resources. He knew natural resources and their use.

Specifically, I wanted to know how close were the concepts of preservation, use, and recreation. And much to my surprise, Albright united them in a way that—even though I wasn’t able to ask my specific question—leaves me with a lot to work with. Earlier in my reading of his transcript, I had gotten the sense that a lot of the intermingling of these issues, which I perceive to be very different from one another, happened because of the way the resources were organized under the Federal government, and not so much because of the way the resources were thought of by the people who were in charging of protecting them. At the very least, reading this part of the interview provided me with some evidence in that direction.

Another thing I found amusing was that as soon as Theodore Roosevelt died, as Albright explained, there was a big rush to name a Park after him. Originally, they wanted Sequoia National Park (then a National Forest, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture)--meaning, they wanted the land and thought they could nab it from the Forest Service using Roosevelt's name. But that didn't work out, so they settled on a part of the Badlands in North Dakota where Roosevelt had his Elkhorn Ranch, which is today Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Archival Interviews: Session One

I chose to consult the transcript of an interview with Horace M. Albright, who was one of the first administrators of the National Park Service. As I’m interested in the history of the development of the National Parks, in addition to the development of the conservation and preservation movement within the United States, this transcript could prove to be invaluable to me for the information it provides.

The transcript begins without an introduction to the narrator, interviewer, or context of the interview. For this reason, it is difficult for me to situate myself as a reader; I know what sorts of things I’d like Mr. Albright to talk about, but have no confidence that he or his interviewer shares my precise interest. This presents a certain conflict: I sense that I am approaching the transcript already knowing what I hope to find. On one hand, this seems to indicate that I’ve done an appropriate amount of research and I am looking to Mr. Albright in order to assess the language that he uses to express his relationship with landscape in general, as well as with areas designated National Parks. However, with such a specific interest in mind, I worry that I could miss the opportunity to get a more comprehensive view of Mr. Albright—an opportunity that an oral history uniquely provides. I feel as though I am approaching the transcript as a historian who aims to discover new data rather than as an oral historian who aims to discover the relationship that allowed Mr. Albright to talk about the development of the National Parks Service as he did.

Using James Fogerty’s distinction in “Oral History and Archives: Documenting Context,” the interview with Mr. Albright is not a life history, but nor is it precisely a project history. I decide to treat it more like a project history, in which I use other historical narratives I have read during research to compare and contrast Mr. Albright’s statements. In conclusion, I recognize that I am excited to read through this new collection of information because I recognize its value as data—and that I am feeling perhaps a little underequipped at this first session to critically analyze its value as an oral history.