This week, we read Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, by Abigail Perkiss. Drawn from more than sixty oral history interviews conducted as part of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project, Perkiss’s book tells the complex story of how residents of New Jersey’s Bayshore area survived Hurricane Sandy. With the hurricane itself present only within the first two chapters, Perkiss focuses more on the storm’s aftermath. Some of the interviews give the impression that surviving Hurricane Sandy was easier than dealing with insurance companies in the months and years to follow. Perkiss shows how “neighborhood pride, the impulse to keep busy, and the slow pace of bureaucracy” prompted communities to rally and support each other without waiting for the government to catch up.

In her analysis of why the storm impacted the Bayshore area so horrendously, Perkiss turns to both political and environmental history. “The environmental history of the state [of New Jersey] is at once a story of industrial growth and shoreline development and one of vast green space and fierce coastal protection,” argues Perkiss. The absence of environmental alongside the economic considerations of shoreline development has resulted in what Neil Maher has coined “ecological schizophrenia.” Wetlands are natural “sponges,” possessing the ability to absorb and store stormwater. When wetlands are destroyed and replaced with beach houses, boardwalks, and other development, the coastline loses its ability to absorb water, resulting in the kind of flooding experienced during Hurricane Sandy. Even the plans to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy demonstrated “ecological schizophrenia” by failing to meaningfully address the need to protect wetlands and opting instead to simply continue building and rebuilding new structures on flood plains.

Politically, Perkiss indicts the disaster response after Hurricane Sandy as suffering “from a federal emergency-management system that privileged homeland security over natural hazards.” FEMA, ever since it was gobbled up by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, gradually became more equipped to respond to terrorist attacks instead of natural disasters, resulting in the Bush Administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of Perkiss’s narrators felt FEMA under the Obama Administration had learned from its mistakes in New Orleans, but these sentiments soured when the recovery stalled.

I’m not sure how effectively undergraduate students (or graduate students, to be frank) can be prepared for interviewing traumatized people who describe traumatic events, unless the student has already experienced and passed through something similar. Exposing undergraduate students to trauma with minimal training just for the sake of applying theory, gaining practical experience, or furthering education seems unethical. What strikes me as a mitigating factor in this case is the personal connection Perkiss’s student interviewers shared with the storm. The Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project was based out of Kean University, located not far away from the Bayshore area. The students who participated in the project experienced the storm firsthand. Kean University students experienced significant disruption from the storm. For at least two of the student interviewers, Hurricane Sandy “had brought terror to their homes and families.” I think the interviewers’ personal connection to the storm went a long way towards helping the students conduct interviews sensitively while remaining sensitive to the narrators’ traumas.

Question: Should oral historians offer professional support to survivor-narrators who are being interviewed about traumatic events? Was any offered to the Hurricane Sandy narrators?

Question: How did the interviewers deal with transference? The transference of intensity/wounding from a trauma survivor to a listener?

Question: “If the subject benefits from the process” of oral history, writes Lynn Abrams, “this is a happy but unintended outcome.” How did the subjects benefit from this project?

In previous weeks, we have explored the foundations of oral history from several practical angles, including the history of oral history and the nature of shared authority. Then, in order to bring these definitions to life and see oral history put into practice, we examined concrete examples of labor oral history interviews. Reading Swing Shift allowed us to experience the analysis-driven final intended product of an interview-gathering process. With foundations laid and our feet now firmly planted, this week we look up to the sky, so to speak, by focusing on Theory. In Oral History Theory, our assigned reading for this week, Lynn Abrams surveys the range of different theoretical frameworks with which oral history may be more thoughtfully and effectively conducted. This class is officially named “The Theory and Practice of Oral History,” and one might assume at first glance that these two facets exist in isolation, but Abrams argues that “practice and analysis cannot be separated” when conducting oral history, and that “the process of interviewing cannot be disaggregated from the outcome.”

Theoretical Promiscuity, to borrow from Abrams’s terminology, describes a key theme throughout her book. According to Abrams, oral history is “a discipline with undisciplined tendencies, continually drawing upon other disciplinary approaches, and in flux as it defines accept able practices and modes of theorising. It is at the same time profoundly interdisciplinary, a promiscuous practice that, jackdaw-like, picks up the shiny, attractive theories which have originated elsewhere and applies them to its own field of study.”[1] In other words, the mutability of oral history-making pushes scholars to analyze oral sources in multilayered ways using theoretical frameworks derived from linguistic (orality), literary (narrative), psychiatric (memory), neurological (trauma), and other non-historical disciplines of study.

I hadn’t realized how much oral history, as both process and product, is subject to continuous change. Narrators first translate their stories and experiences into suitable responses to the interviewer’s questions, and this process is greatly shaped by the quality of an interviewer’s questions. The interviewer constructs their own understanding of what is shared, ideally striking a balance between engaging with broader research questions while giving narrators enough space to tell their stories. The resulting conversation is then winnowed through a transcription process laden with its own pitfalls (is it ethical to render dialects into more standardized forms speech for the sake of easier comprehension by a wider audience?), after which the narrator has the opportunity to redact any of their own words. Finally, the oral historian breaks apart this already much-transformed product, sprinkling fragments of many interviews into a scholarly book or article, holding them up against available archival and written sources, and binding everything together with analysis.

And it doesn’t stop there. Step outside of the process of oral history-making, and we can see how oral history itself, the theories and methods used to create it, also evolves over time. The study of trauma within oral history, for example, its effects on narrators and interviewers alike, is a newly emerging field within oral history which will help inform how best to approach projects involving survivors of war, genocide, natural disasters, or other traumatizing experiences. In the first edition of Oral History Theory (2010), Abrams plants the seeds for the second edition by examining (in the chapters about Memory and Narrative) how trauma can leave holes in a narrator’s memory and prevent narrators from arranging memory into cohesive narratives. The second edition (2018), however, features a new chapter devoted entirely to trauma, the ethics of working with traumatized narrators, and a painstakingly navigated distinction between viewing oral history as therapeutic for traumatized narrators (ill-advised) versus acknowledging that oral history is not inherently therapeutic (despite whatever Freud might say), but catharsis can sometimes happen as an unintended byproduct. The evolution of Abrams’s own book reflects the evolution of crisis oral history into a sub-field of oral history in its own right.

---

[1] Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2018), 32.