Then, Now, and Between

This semester has taken my ego into its hands, squeezed it, popped it, oozed particles of it out into my life. My classes this semester – in particular Latin@ Oral Histories, The Racial Politics of Teaching, and Language in Society – have combined with resurfacing personal challenges and events in my immediate communities that are pushing me to be more aware and critical of my positionalities, privileges, responsibilities, and place in the world. This is an incredibly worthwhile but also occasionally painful process. In expanding my understanding of histories, and in listening to some of the unvoiced threads of cultural narratives, I have also started to shift and revise my own stories within these larger systems – an editing process that will last me much longer and require of me many more than the thousand words of this paper.

 

Coming from a mostly White, upper/middle class, highly educated community I was embarrassingly oblivious to the inequities of the institution of History and the U.S. educational system. The vague awareness I did have was tainted by the paternalistic do-good attitude imposed by my previous educational community in this regard for the sake of touting ‘diversity’ and ‘social responsibility’ without a critical examination and deconstruction of what those actions and that attitude really meant. Evyn made a point that really resonated with me toward the beginning of this semester – that yes, what we are doing as budding oral historians can be seen as ‘helping underprivileged communities’ to voice their stories, but that kind of framing makes a mistake in minimizing the tremendous honor, enrichment, and privilege that we are benefiting from by hearing and interacting with these stories and their tellers. I guess I am learning to see people as already whole, already resilient, already surviving, and to examine the stories that are created to make sense of our lives with respect to that.

 

The privilege of choosing to expand my own knowledge of histories is one that I previously took for granted, to some extent. I’ve been incredibly lucky in the education that I’ve received and have not done anything particularly extraordinary to deserve it. Three of my classes this semester have exposed me to the realities and consequences of the ways in which public education in the United States has historically and continues to systematically fail to serve people of marginalized communities. This drastically changes my relationship to my own education and perspective on topics such as war – my own opinions are not coming from a place of neutral logic and objective thought; in fact, perhaps there is no such place. Confronting my own non-neutrality in every aspect of my life and relationship to others – as a student, ally, partner, employee, co-worker, interviewer, facilitator, friend, community member, historian/consumer of History, storyteller and performer (in all senses of the word; I am of the belief that everything is a kind of performance as Ramírez notes in his piece A Living Archive of Desire) – has complicated my experiences of voice. I am noticing the way that voice is inextricable from its context – that its interpretation is tangled in strands of history, communities, and cultural narratives.

 

I’m learning to be more critical of statements and stories that are presented to me as knowledge and truth, and my own presumptions about what these categories mean. One theme that has come up a lot in this class is the voice of academia, the voice of authority. Who is this voice for, who does it include and exclude? Other current influences such as the Occupy and Workers for Justice movements have contributed to my understanding of privilege, voice, and authority this semester as well. Part of the (unfinished process of) crushing and dispersing of ego for me has been trying to destabilize that voice in the ways that I hear, speak, read, and write… this is happening with mixed success and is a of course a continual process. All of this is an expanding process, one that involves letting more emotion, connections, and relationships into my schooling, and letting more academic critique into my emotions (especially discomfort) and perceptions of the myself, my surroundings, and the world.

 

I am deeply grateful for having had the experience of interviewing someone so different from myself – differences spanning age, race, gender, class, political beliefs, family, religion, and probably a lot more that I’m not even aware of, contributed to a more intense appreciation for nonjudgemental listening that I hope to employ in other areas of my life. Growing up under the conditions I did in Santa Cruz and spending four years of my life at Pitzer – I suppose it has been easy, almost default for me to identify as someone who is liberal and against war, and to be inwardly skeptical of views that strayed too far from my own. This class has helped me to understand what a horrible, if unconscious, mistake that can be, and pushes me to consider more carefully where people are coming from and ask more questions before coming to conclusions about any situation or person. Coming to premature conclusions – or maybe coming to any conclusion that is too definitive and unmoving – places limitations on otherwise endless opportunities to empathize and learn. As a person interested in linguistics, I am fascinated by the nuances of conversation and listening – and Latin@ Oral Histories and the experience of interviewing someone with such different life experiences from my own pushed me beyond my comfort zone and challenged what it meant for me to be ‘good’ at those skills, in such a way that only makes me want to continue that exploration, that adventure. In the wise words of Audre Lorde, “it is not our differences that divide us; it is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

 

Much of my schooling has taught me to place emphasis on answers and evidence, artifact and argument and proofs. And yet, I find myself coming away from this semester with more questions than answers and the feeling of having learned more than I can adequately express.

 

How is the History that I have been exposed to incomplete? Who has written it, with what motives? Who is included, who is excluded, who is glorified, villanized, victimized? How do I write and rewrite my own history in relation to my expanding and changing context? Can I tell stories without appropriating them? How can I cultivate and communicate deep humility and respect for difference, while using my own stories and opinions and voices in a provocative and expressive way? What are my responsibilities as a student? An ethical storyteller? A human who strives to be thoughtful and sincere? How do I use my own expanding voice and simultaneously make room for the voices of others? What is active listening? How can I train myself to listen and ask questions in a way that challenges myself and my world? How do I create space for people to be in liberated conversation? What is engaged, critical learning? In what ways are the oppressions, conflicts, and movements explored in this class changing and continuing into today? How does media, education, and community shape my relationship with current events? With war? With race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, power, and language? How do my own “[a]utomatic gestures, spontaneous words, which seem to lack any origins and to be the fruit of improvisation and reflex, in fact posses deep roots in the long reverberation of systems of thought” (Jacques Legoff)? What stories and histories am I perceiving and performing, consciously and unconsciously?

 

What forces influence my answers to and explorations of all of these?

 

I suppose this continued asking is my offering of humility, a manifesto of ignorance and uncertainty and an honest confession that I have so much more to learn. There are many realities that I will never understand but that I deeply want to educate myself toward and empathize with.

 

Body and Voice in Gods Go Begging

In Gods Go Begging, Alfredo Véa metaphorically entangles voice and body in such a way that constructs the essence of humanity as an entwinement of languages, meanings, symbols, histories, ancestries, and cultural and linguistic memories. He emphasizes the physicality of the human body alongside the units of human sound, particularly voice, words, and language. In doing so, these threads become almost vein-like as they are woven inextricably into survival and humanity. Major and minor characters experience language at as times natural and raw, and at other times wildly discordant and inadequate, at once deeply personal, deeply divisive, and deeply unifying – in some ways, much like war.* Véa’s linguistic positioning of his characters makes a larger comment about oppression, suggesting the use of forced ignorance, silence, and cultural amnesia as a means of figuratively stripping individuals and communities of their humanity, parallel to the horrifying and literal taking of a person’s life. Véa illustrates words as a double-edged sword (pun intended) – a means either of survival or death, unity or division. Language, unlike the delicate and mysterious inner-workings of our bodies, unlike our inevitable mortality, is a facet of humanity that individuals have a negotiable degree of agency toward. Véa illuminates the possibility that reclaiming voice, words, and histories is some way of resisting oppression, of regaining humanity, and of “choos[ing] life” (316).

*This literary thread frays in certain areas – leaving readers to question whether humans are as hard-wired for war as they are for language?

In emphasizing the bodily production of language, as well as using words, language, and stories metaphorically as part of the body, Véa presents these two facets as equally essential  to the human experience.  On the very first page, words are given the color and significance of blood, “they spoke their last words in crimson-colored breaths. Theirs was a withering language [...]” (1). A child’s organs are graphically described as having “liquid secrets” that “boil[ed] out” (75). Sexual interaction is described as the “conjugation of […] inner dialogue” (246). The physical production of language is sometimes written about as hauntingly as the words themselves – “The soft sound of air passing  through Persephone’s larynx, over her palatine tonsil, and past her lips had staggered Jesse, jolted him like a bolt of ball lightening down his spine” (189). Not only does this sentence emphasize the bodily production of language on the part of the speaker, but also its physical affect on others – Jessie feels it in his spine.

The frequent moments of dissonance between language and body make me think of the appropriation of body for war. The clinical way that the medical examiner prefers to see cadavers as stripped of their stories, of their humanity, reflects the way that soldiers are seen in the military – stripped of humanity, “a body count.” Sounds are portrayed as able to haunt a space, separate from their human bodies: “frightened to death in a room like this one; bold timbres and shy tenors alike were suffocated, haunted into silence by a legion of echoes. A hall of mirrors for the spoken word” (2). Véa uses this technique on multiple occasions, again describing words as beings that can lose their humans in such a way that turns them ghost-like: “It was as though the words had always been there, hovering in that small apartment, waiting patiently for the two humans that would, at last, come to speak them. Each word was tinged with frenzy and relief, glad that their human conduits had finally arrived” (210). The separation of words and histories from their “human conduits” spills into the related themes of festering secrets, hidden stories, and silence.

At least three of the primary characters struggle with forgotten/oppressed/suppressed memories and histories – this is a running thread in the stories of Jesse, the Chaplain, and Biscuit Boy. In a pivotal moment of war, “Jesse couldn’t know it as he spoke, but his voice was no longer the same. Around each forced word that left his lips was a deathly host of sullen harmonics, echoes of savagery, second and third-order resonances of screams and sighs, sights of explicit mortality and images of incredible courage that had settled in to infect and to bless each day for the rest of his life” (105). Here Véa reinforces the parallel of physicality and “voice” – in both a literal and figurative way. I particularly love the way that he constructs memories as corporeal – stories that live in our bodies, whether or not we are aware of them or choose to voice them explicitly. The double-edged sword returns – the  “sights of explicit mortality and images of incredible courage,” which simultaneously “infect and bless”.

These hidden histories highlight the limitations, discordance, and inadequacies of language, and resurface in powerful moments of the novel. In a beautiful passage about the ancestry of the Chaplain, Véa writes from the Chaplain’s point of view,

Supposing I say to you that my own story begins on the hallowed hinge of a chrysalis, an exquisite cocoon that dangles between truth and fable. But before I begin my mad weaving, there are certain things that I suppose I must confess to you. I cannot be an omniscient narrator, so don’t expect me to have the answers to everything, and don’t expect me to see every facet as though I had a hundred insect eyes (199).

This thread continues continues as the Chaplain talks with a character that we later find out is Mai, “It is a word in Ladino―one half of the language of spiders. The other half is a smattering of yiddish. You said that I can also speak french, vietnamese, and Thai? Perhaps I need all of these tongues to speak a single honest thing” (213). The narrator responds that the Chaplain’s discordance of language is historical, and both a response and resistance to oppression:  “Hiding had been passed down in the blood, as had the ability to spin homonyms in three languages” (214).

Jesse too comes up against the limitations of language and the hardness of secrecy “he pounded his skull – pummeled his calavera with his fists, banging his knuckles against the hidden meanings of words” (212). Later,

without thinking, Jesse mumbled a line from a poem. Perhaps the sound of his own voice―his own mortal, living voice―could chase away the lingering vestiges of the night before. He repeated the line as he left the hotel room and fell into the driver’s seat of his car, attempting to speak each word carefully and precisely. He found that enunciation was extremely difficult because of his dry mouth and his buzzing, pounding brain (216).

Although these hidden meanings and secrets can “infect” and fester, they can also be voiced as a means of resilience and survival. The way this is presented begins as a defense, a continuation of war and assault, and transitions into a reclamation of humanity. Toward the beginning of the book, Jesse tells Biscuit Boy, “You have to learn about words. Your fate will be decided by words […] The courtroom is a war of words, and you have almost none at your disposal” (70). Jesse then “wondered how on earth an angry mute like himself had chosen a profession based on words” (70). Calvin’s “becoming a real person” (257) happens alongside his expanding vocabulary, knowledge of history, and articulation. After his testimony, the narrator notes, “the boy had survived. He had explained himself clearly and answered every question in a manner that the jury could understand” (268). This illustration of words as metaphorical survival is made literal – the voice translates to the body later in the story when Calvin survives a bullet wound, against all odds. Calvin’s transformation is paralleled by that of the Chaplain – who “unearth[s] his written inheritance” (303), as well as Jesse’s own transformation at the end of the novel, as seen through the eyes of Carolina, who wonders, “How did Jesse feel about words? Were metaphor and symbol just another form of ammunition?” (290). She urges him to bridge the dissonance of his body, memory, and voice and to choose an embodied, present existence, one that faces his history with agency-

“You didn’t die on that hill Jesse,” said Carolina softly. “Your life went on. I can feel you. I can touch you. You’re here with me. The heart just need some lyrics,” she said, recalling Jesse’s own words. ‘It needs to articulate. You can’t keep hiding among the living; you can’t keep forcing your soul to mumble in code. No one can ever answer you. Not me, not anyone. I know I can’t really comprehend what you’ve been through, but I know enough to understand that you have a choice to make and you have to make it now, tonight. Supposing you choose life, Jesse? Suppose you choose life just this once?” (316)

Véa powerfully intwines choosing to live with choosing to “articulate.” Nearing the end of the novel, he asks “Who on earth could write the cause of life?” (314). This question strikes me as very meta – at this moment he simultaneously engages in and breaks with the fictional world of his characters and refers to his own position as author. He indexes the cathartic, productive, and resilient action of claiming voice – writing, remembering, and spinning stories not only to “break the spell of sadness,” (296) but to regain one’s humanity after inconceivable oppression and exploitation. Not only to survive, but to live.

Reading Reflection #5

It was great to see an example of how the use of oral histories alongside  secondary sources can contextualize, accentuate, and complicate our understandings of past events. Moyes seemed to draw almost entirely from quotes and personal narratives in the prologue, “This Is Where You Ride,” which drew me in as a reader and personalized/contextualized the historical account of the Tuskegee Army Air Field /Airmen (and the burgeoning civil rights movement) that followed. Beginning the book with such powerful personal moments as reluctance or desire to join the war, coming to critical consciousness of race and racism, and resistance to oppression sets the stage for the history that follows by making clear the enormous impact the TAAF had on actual individual lives, and threaded these themes through micro and macro perspectives. National and global systems, political/racial/economic structures, media accounts of current events and even traditional tellings of history – with their seemingly endless barrage of numbers and names and dates and battles and laws, can feel chaotic, and lose humanity for some people (okay, sometimes myself included). But by focusing on people – people with names and childhoods, aspirations and passions, disappointments and revelations and all these factors that influence them – something about the historical is made more personal, more relevant. There is a deeper connection to the history and a heavier weight of its importance. I think that if a person is compassionately and skillfully profiled, no matter how culturally or geographically removed from the reader, they will almost always be relatable on some level simply by sharing in the human experience. There is something about hearing individual stories that, for me at least, makes dealing with larger systems feel important and necessary, less tangled and overwhelming. It creates new and more nuanced meaning for historical and current events. Looking at one life in some amount of detail makes me care for that life, and caring makes me want to understand how it fits into its conditions, context, and history. My understanding is that historians use oral history to answer, for the reader of a historical account, questions such as – Why does this matter, and to whom? How did this event contribute to the meaning and content of someone’s life? How is it relevant today? How is it relevant to me?

I think one of the major themes that came out of my first interview was the power of being acknowledged. This was reiterated in a variety of contexts throughout the two and half hours we spoke, which is something I think needs to come across in however I choose to present his story. I also think that it relates to wider systems of power, privilege, resistance, governance, and expression.

*As a kind of side note, I found this interesting: another component of chapter 1 of Freedom Flyers – which may or may not count strictly as “Oral History” but is certainly oral evidence in a historical context, is the quote from a propaganda film, which drew attention to the airmen as “the masculine ideal of the day,” and was followed directly by a quote from Gen. Henry H Arnold, Chief of the ACC, who said that “Negro pilots cannot be used in our present Air Force since this would result in having Negro officers serving over white enlisted men. This would create an impossible social problem.” The use of propaganda narrative highlights the privileged and romanticized status, the cultural “masculine ideal” and then provides direct evidence that black people were blatantly and systematically excluded this position. The way that African American men were denied the performance of this culturally celebrated masculinity, combined with the way that they were presented in “the use of negro manpower in war” (on page 20, the excerpts of which were horrifying), was understandably wildly demoralizing. I thought this was a particularly interesting moment because it hits the intersection of gender and race in a very direct way.

Interview Reflection #1

6:30 am is pretty early for a college student to be awake. I drove around haphazardly looking for a disposable camera, getting breakfast (the dining halls weren’t open yet), and reviewing my list of questions. I looked up ‘Jessie James’ on Wikipedia. I watched the clock. Finally, 9:00 rolled around and I called V* to remind him that I would be at their home in an hour for the interview.

His enthusiasm made me want never to be afraid to call strangers. ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got everything all set up over here – got my uniform, some photos- I’ve been up since 6:30. You could come sooner if you want, I mean you could come now, only if you’re ready and you want to.’

I rolled up and he was waiting outside, shouted my name, greeted me with a hug. His wife S* ushered me in and they both adjusted and perfected seating, lighting, air conditioning, and other external conditions. S is organized and serious; it was immediately clear that V’s stories now belong to her as well, that she shares in some of the burden of memory. ‘He says he’s fine but he’s not,’ she announced in a combination of firm and gentle and he quietly acknowledged it, without dispute. Throughout the interview she sat quietly in an armchair in the corner and watched her husband remember. Occasionally he looked to her to confirm a name or date, and twice she quietly prompted him to tell a story that she likes.

All I had to ask was the first question, ‘when and where were you born’ to get a good ten minutes of stories that already began to venture into war time, so I gently tried to reel back and slow it down, hoping to delve a little deeper into the feelings and motivations he had experienced during each period of his life. V frequently repeated something along the lines of, ‘this may upset me now, now that I’m retired and that I have time to think about and remember it, but I honestly don’t remember how I felt about it at that time. I think I was numb to it.’ It was often difficult for him to recall specific motivations. For example when he introduced the topic of enlisting in the military, he simply said that he ‘suddenly found himself riding his bike’ to the recruitment center. I gently prodded at this: Did he have other family members in the military? What did he know about Vietnam before enlisting? (These were separate questions; I tried not to bombarde him). Turns out he knew very little of the war beforehand, and unlike many of the Veterano stories we’ve been exposed to so far, he didn’t seem to have a super politicized view of it afterward. He claims not to regret the war, wouldn’t choose to forget it, and even feels guilty that he never served a second tour while some of his buddies did. There was a running thread throughout the interview of the unmet need to be acknowledged and thanked. V emphasized repeatedly that even today, when he meets another Vietnam veteran the first thing he says to them is ‘welcome home.’

The entire interview experience was profoundly moving for me. I sat on the couch in their front room with a collection of photos and memories, in awe of human resilience, survival, and stories. Watching and listening to someone as they authentically reflect and remember is an honor. Being welcomed into the lives of strangers such an intimate way is… crazy! Sorry for the colloquial language but, there’s just really no adequate word. Certain moments of tenderness and emotion really stood out to me . There were traumatic war experiences which eventually surfaced without my elicitation – his first exposure to dead bodies, losing a buddy. Seemingly unrelated was this moment of extreme tenderness and vulnerability when V spoke about his three year old granddaughter T*, who currently lives with his ex-daughter in law in Utah. The separation has been extremely hard on him; he and S used to babysit T almost every day and now only get to see her once a month. ‘It’s been 28 days now since we saw her.’ Now, he says, he would rather be back in Vietnam than endure that separation. This made me consider the thresholds and contextualizations of pain.

The interview was pretty long – almost three hours. For quite a while, there was a circular motion of wrapping up with present-day reflections and then delving back into stories and memories of war. Concerned with the consequences of ending prematurely, I was conscious to allow the interview to end at a place that the narrator felt was appropriate; I gave him space to take the lead with wrapping things up and when the stories began to feel more highly resolved I eventually asked him if he felt there was anything important that we did not cover, or if he would like to explain any more of the pictures. He concluded with a very heartfelt appreciation for the project.

The three of us continued talking for a while afterward, S talked briefly about her experiences with war stories – she had maintained mail correspondence with three soldiers during the war and was fascinated by the differences and similarities in their experiences. I would really like to interview S someday – it is clear that these stories are also profoundly a part of her and that she has a lot of opinions and observations.

It’s been a little over 24 hours since the interview and I find myself continually reflecting on and returning to it. Shortly after getting back to campus I drove out to LA with some friends for the Occupation and was able to share with them and reflect aloud during the drive, which I think was really necessary and helpful to me. Although I’m still in that process, I already feel a shifted awareness toward listening and a greater understanding of the responsibility, implications, and mutual rewards of creating a safe space for someone to share their stories. I am extremely grateful for and deeply humbled by this experience.

Reading Response #4

“Hence a spirit of adventure, a delight in watching human beings as human beings quite apart from what you can get out of their minds, an enjoyment of the play of your own personality with that of another, are gifts of rare value in the art of interviewing” (115)

-Beatrice Webb

I really loved these chapters; while I initially thought that interviewing is mostly intuition (and perhaps it is), it was a comforting exposure to some very detailed and specific advice, guidelines, and reflections. Of course we will all strive to ‘be empathetic listeners,’ which is the ground-rule of interviewing, but it’s easy to forget that empathetic listening means really different things from culture to culture, even from person to person.

The discussion about silence, for example, was a great reminder. Only in the past few years have I learned not to be terrified of silence in casual conversation. In the past I would plow through moments of what I perceived to be ‘awkward’ silence, assuming that I was making all parties more comfortable and doing the ‘work’ that needed to be done. How naïve! And yet, especially now, when someone asks me a question and then moves on too quickly afterword I get so agitated, I’ll often go back to their original question and keep answering it in new ways way beyond the timeframe that is socially appropriate. So I think I will be bringing to the conversation a new awareness of and appreciation for silence and I’m interested to navigate that in the interview.

This brings me to the point of self-awareness, which was prevalent in these chapters – awareness of silence, back-channeling, body language, facial expression, etc. I was grateful for the reminder that “being aware of our own fears, aversions, and assumptions, and checking to see where we might have failed to hear and understand fully is a beneficial strategy” (112). I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of improv theatre, noticing the way that my own fears and preferences influence what I see and how I respond to other people’s offers. Because of whatever I’m bringing to the space that day – my recent studies, my mood, etc. – I reinterpret or re-contextualize a player’s action, sometimes in a way that they did not intend. This is a tendency to be mindful of, in all situations.

I really enjoyed the following quote from a narrator who was interviewed -

 “It was always easier to just say what people expect to hear, and that way I didn’t have to deal with it myself. But you asked me all the details, who said what, and what happened when. People don’t really care enough to want to hear all that, but you seemed to want to hear it and that kind of forced me to say it like it really was” (103).

To me it expresses the beautiful unfolding effect of a good conversation, a good listener. I think that people write these mini-scripts according to appropriate cultural narratives, and breaking away from that script can be an act of vulnerability but also of liberation, and most always creates a genuine, deep connection between the people involved. Sometimes people have that script so well rehearsed and so tightly folded that doing so requires a very delicate way of asking, listening, engaging.

Reading Response #3

I am fascinated with the norms and nuances of storytelling, and I’ve begun to make some observations about the values and ideologies behind the telling of war stories among the chicano vietnam veteran community. The way these stories are (and are not) shared is influenced and complicated by social identities such as gender, race, and class.
One of the sections which I’d like to focus on explicitly dealt with storytelling – the combined narratives of Frank and Socorro. What I found particularly beautiful about their narrative and interactions was that they use the act of telling and listening to stories as a way of reclaiming and revising a horrifying past. Socorro says, “Until this day, he can tell me stories more than three or four times. I always tell him the one I like is about Jimmy,” Frank then goes on to tell about Jimmy. Together, Frank and Socorro reshape the remembered experience in this way. Socorro seems to have a heightened awareness of the way that stories can be empowering, cathartic, vital – not just to the veteranos themselves, but to everyone affected by war.

Socorro: When I used to hear his mom talk, every time she would see his picture, she’d say, ‘cuando mijo estaba allá en la guerra.’ She would always bring up this story about how she would make peanut butter cookies, and then she would cry, and his brothers and sisters they didn’t understand how their mom felt. I could see it because le decían ‘mom if you’re going to make peanut butter cookies and cry and remember, don’t be baking them.’ And I would tell her, ‘No, acuérdese y llore y hable.’
[emphasis added]

What interests me here is not only the value that Socorro places in the catharsis of remembering, crying, and talking, but also the repetition of stories. Which stories are told repeatedly, and why? Is this repetition a fluke – does memory get stuck in certain moments the way that a CD skips and stutters? (I think not). What happens to stories as they are repeated – how does memory shift or soften or blur or brighten or exaggerate? The process reminds me of sea-glass – repeatedly agitated and reworked and tumbled until its edges become smooth, until it finally becomes an artifact ‘worthy’ of sharing. That’s another thing – the worth of stories and storytelling is so contentiously debatable here. Some veterans themselves critiqued others for being ‘stuck’ telling the same old stories of the ‘glory days’ again and again. Many veterans emphasized the burdens of sharing and also of silence.
Maintstream U.S. culture places a fair amount of value in stories that are clearly resolved – by explicitly stating the meaning gained from the experience, the teller softens the burden on the listener to create that meaning out of confusing and difficult experiences. I don’t know whether this was due to the way the interviews were arranged or the way the narratives were edited post-interview, but most stories demonstrated a fairly strong sense of resolve at the end, as in Frank’s final lines:

I think I’m a better person for it now, a stronger person, and I appreciate things that I should appreciate and see what is really important in life and what isn’t.

Additionally, I am interested in the underbelly of storytelling – what is kept secret, what is stigmatized, what is silenced? Whose voices are valued and shared? “I used to feel like I couldn’t talk to people about Vietnam because I felt guilty and I didn’t want people to really know I was a Vietnam veteran” (Francisco, page 164). Francisco’s reluctance to talk about the war was echoed by several veterans, some of whom related it to machismo stoicism, others to guilt and shame surrounding the war. I think it’s crucial to acknowledge that the body of stories we’ve just been exposed to, while incredible, is incomplete.  Who was invited to speak, who accepted the invitation?

And who didn’t?

 

Screams of fragile young men
never heard
we exist in the silence
hollowed within
numbed by it.

 

Reading Response #2

It’s hard to pick two aspects of these incredible stories on which to focus. Immediately though, I was struck by the common theme of

1. Education and susceptibility to rhetoric. I’m really interested in rhetoric and its implications, the way we humans persuade each other with stories, manipulate and reinforce desired or undesired identities through language and narrative. It’s dangerous. The racial inequality of our education system cannot be ignored and is inextricable from enormous personal and political consequences, as seen in a number of these narratives, especially in Chapter One. One of the narrators interviewed said that in high school he was taught to be a good mechanic, not a good college student. Many others echoed the sentiment that lack of other options and a desire to ‘prove their worth’ to their society and families pushed them to be easily persuaded by military rhetoric. Many felt deceived.

2. A common related theme in the stories was a sense of repentance through education and activism.  Many of the vets described themselves as formerly “brainwashed,” so perhaps it was an act of empowerment for people to return to the rhetoric that had wronged them and dissect it, see through it, reject it, inform others about it. Daniel, whose story begins on page 150, deals with this notion explicitly and asserts that some vets may use activism as a distraction from the more introspective traumas and effects of war:

I think what happens is that war just generally politicizes individuals, either that, or it thoroughly defeats them. I think politics is kind of a crutch insofar as it allows you to deal with some issues that is maybe traumatizing to you, maybe unacceptable to you. But it lets you do so on a macro level, where you can intellectualize it. So that, for me, politics was a way of not dealing with Vietnam. It was a way of atoning for that at some level and I got involved in it.

Reading Response #1

I first have to mention how thrilled I was over these readings – I’ve had a longstanding obsession with the power of QUESTIONS (especially personal ones) and it’s wonderful to have that academically affirmed!

One essential understanding (there were a few really salient ones so it was hard to choose!) that I found particularly gorgeous in Ramírez’s A Living Archive of Desire was Teresita’s ownership, control, and performance of her stories and body (the two are inextricable) as not only an act of individual identification and affirmation, but also “a means to make space collectively. Teresita’s everyday informal performances created a cultural geography of the multilingual intersections of sexuality, race, and desire” (122). As a story listener and lover, I am fascinated by the ways in which personal narratives can be a forum for dealing with complex issues of identity on both individual and community levels. I was reminded of how the action of interviewing and recording someone can, with the proper care and attitude, be an act of empowerment and a vehicle for social change by acknowledging and exploring difference; placing value in the voices and stories of people who have been silenced.

Another understanding that I’ve been grappling with recently is that of neutrality, and recognizing that everything about me – the way I look and speak, my gender, my social-class, the level of education I’m coming from- contributes to my interactions with others. An Oral History of Our Time reminds us that “all oral presentations involve a degree of performance, and that audience, (even an audience of one, as in, the interviewer), can affect that performance” (38). This links in with a fascination in the process of accommodation – this nuanced way in which speakers interpret and react, bend toward and away from each other in conversation.

In that vein, both chapters in Recording Oral History, although they acknowledged the pitfalls of interviewing and oral history, really spoke to the value of dialogue and spontaneity intrinsic in its form. As someone who finds so much joy/meaning in the details of language and speech, I was struck by the quote from Jaques Legoff

“Automatic gestures, spontaneous words, which seem to lack any origins and to be the fruit of improvisation and reflex, in fact posess deep roots in the long reverberation of systems of thought.”

 

Reflection #1

“What has interested me passionately all my life is the way [people] make their world intelligible to themselves. It is, if you like, the adventure of the intelligible, the problem of meaning.”

Roland Barthes

I fell into Linguistics through a fascination with language – the precision and detail of language, the ways in which it defines and liberates, divides and connects us as individuals, groups, worlds. That orientation has pushed me into various related modes of thought – sociolinguistics and anthropology in particular, which are helping me to realize the profound importance of cultivating a stronger linguistic awareness of ourselves and others, that doing so is not only an act of compassion but also a process of alleviating and preventing the miscommunication and segregation that are at the root of so many human problems.  Also, I am fundamentally curious about the ways that humans make sense of and assign meaning to the world and their lives, and I think that the telling/study of stories is an amazing way of exploring that. What Profe Sandoval said in class about exploring the space between then and now and examining how people reconcile with and reconstruct memories as a tool for survival really resonated with me.

I recently watched a documentary about the student protests to protect the Ethnic Studies department of UC Berkeley,  in which a Latino interviewee articulated wanting his ancestry to be included in The History, wanting to be writing The History. I fear this may be a naive comment, but I was really moved by the reminder that for the most part, academia/education in the U.S. treats history as a singular entity, and that The History I’ve been exposed to for much of my life is a singular and biased one. Who is writing that history? I realized how opposed to that narrowness I am and also, how lucky I am to be at a place where I am given unbelievable opportunities to expand the histories and cultural narratives that make up my understanding of the world, the past, and my life/identities as it fits into these systems and communities.  I’m ashamed that I’ve gone for so long without substantiating and expanding much of that singular History that I was taught in school, (this is my first Latino/a studies class), but I am so thrilled to be in that process now.

Finally, I was super inspired by Profe Sandoval’s language around conversations – how intimate conversations are about creating space for a person to be as open and free as possible.  I aspire to be someone who can help create and inhabit that kind of space of liberation.