Talking through trauma.

While every week of this course thus far has provided me with the opportunity to think about the practice of oral history alongside my own experience as a journalist, this week’s reading of Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory put it in most stark relief. The chapter on trauma in particular brought up a lot of questions for me about past interviews I’ve done and underscored how the purpose of and overall product crafted by a journalist is fundamentally different than that of an oral historian, even if much of the work appears to be the same. I appreciated Abrams’ discussion on theories around trauma and how the notion of the “talking cure” has come to pervade our conceptions of how survivors should tell their stories and the overall utility of them sharing those stories at all. At my previous job, one of the stories that I was most proud of but also most challenged by involved a series of interviews with women filing lawsuits against the prisons they were incarcerated in because they endured years of sexual abuse by corrections officers.

I remember feeling the weight of what they shared with me in a far heavier way than I had ever experienced before, and also a really high burden of responsibility because our conversation in its entirety was never going to be accessible to the general public. Instead, I knew that I had to slice, cut, and contextualize their story within a larger article that aimed to serve a purpose that went beyond just platforming these individual women and giving them the space to process this difficult chapter of their past. Similarly, the way these women shared their stories was shaped by their knowledge that the story would be broadcast but also filtered through me— and my editors– beforehand. As Abrams writes, “narrators needed the space to find explanations of what had happened that were meaningful to them and not imposed by interviews’ theories of trauma.” (188) In the context of journalism those theories feel very much at the surface as they shape the whole infrastructure around the interview as it is taking place and they inform our sense of how the information shared will be perceived by the public afterwards.  

Further, because the interviews for that story were taking place during the time of an active lawsuit, there was an inherent element of rehearsal because these women had been sharing these stories to their legal teams and possibly other members of the press before speaking with me. For that reason, I really enjoyed Abram’s discussion on Performance and don’t necessarily think of it as a pejorative or something to avoid. I just think it’s a natural feature of how we tell stories about our lives, particularly those that we have grown accustomed to resharing over time. I would imagine that an oral history— because of the time spent between narrator and interviewer and the knowledge that the purpose for the conversation is solely the collection and preservation of one’s story— allows space for less of that performance, even though it surely will still be there.