The Unseen Memories

Hamid Qazvini
Translated by: Zahra Hosseinian

2020-12-15

The number and variety of cultural and artistic productions are usually considered as indicators for assessing the cultural condition, which is also the basis for judging by many individuals and institutions.

Many officials  has obsessed with this view and it has led them to think only about the number of works in the allocation of budget and other support, regardless of the richness of the content and the degree of influence and attraction of the audience.

In such a situation, some publishers, who also have deep cultural and value concerns, have joined the line of producing rushed large number of works, and sacrificed the quality for quantity. Such works not only do not contribute to the growth of culture and the realization of its lofty goals, but sometimes also cause harm.

The high volume of published works in the field of memoirs and oral history is an example, many of which are incapable of attracting even the smallest audience and have no added value to the knowledge of society.

It has been repeatedly stated that the purpose of writing memoirs and oral history is not merely to publish the mental resources of a narrator, rather the goal is to add a new and of course valid page to the pages of the history book to help recording or discovering the truth.

In recent years, we have witnessed institutions, publishers and media which have recorded and published the memoirs of different people in various formats every day, but they did not specify how they supposed to meet the need of audience and history. Like any other research, the effect of oral history should have specific goals so that the audience can make a clear assessment of its achievement.

In this type of historiography, if the less seen groups of the society define a new role and position for themselves by entering the compiling history, care and delicacy must be exercised in presenting this role so that their works are not considered futile and do not cause a waste of resources.