Steps to Conduct an Imposed War Oral History Project

Introduction:
It is difficult to talk in details about steps in writing memoirs and conducting oral history projects on the imposed war in a short article like this. What I say then, will focus on general tips concerning the issue.

An essential note:
But before delving into the issue of doing oral history, it will be useful to mention a neglected fact. Writing memoirs and doing oral history is a specialized field that similar to other disciplines, requires education and training. So any individual with any knowledge and level of literacy is not capable of doing oral history.  A successful project of the oral history needs skills that are acquired over a long period of time.

Steps in conducting oral history are as follow:

Step 1: identifying the subject
In doing oral history, before everything, we need to find our subject who will tell us about his/her story and share his/her memoirs with us. An oral historian, who is interested in collecting memoirs of the combatants of the eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, should be a talented investigative person who can identify good sources of war era memories.
Since the imposed war against Iran drew people from all walks of life to the fronts, a war era oral historian can find everywhere across the country former combatants with short or long presence at the front and various war memoirs.
More, mothers and wives of those martyred in the war, along with prisoners of war, wounded war veterans and even ordinary people behind the front can recall interesting memories and can serve as good subjects.

Step 2: Convincing the subject to share his/her memoirs
Many years have passed since the war ended and the former combatants are now living everyday lives. So they are not comfortable in evoking their memories and publishing them in the form of a book. It is the responsibility of the oral historian then to convince them to share their memories and if necessary, visit them on several occasions to encourage them to tell their stories.
Of course there are some former combatants who are quite willing to speak.

Step 3: Pre-interviewing
After convincing the interviewee, the oral historian (interviewer) needs to prepare him/her for the main interview. The pre-interview sessions include explanations about the goal of the interview and the methods and approaches adopted by the interviewer. Some interviewees are afraid of recorders and they stop speaking as soon as a recorder is on while they are comfortable before recording. 
The oral historian should allay fears of the subject and reassure him/her about his/her job.

Step4: Interviewing
Interviewing constitutes the heart of the oral history. The oral historian should try to extract detailed information from his interviewee if he/she wants to conduct a successful project. This makes it necessary for the interviewer to avoid asking broad general questions and instead ask short questions that require answers in detail. For example, the interviewee may say: “Two days after the start of the war my friends and I went to the front. We went directly to Khorramshahr and engaged with the Iraqis at the Pol-e-Now neighborhood.” This piece of testimony is too general and needs details to be fully understood. So the interviewer may ask the following questions to delve into details:

- Where were you on the first day of war?
- How did you know the war had begun?
- What was your reaction?
- What was your motive for going to the front?
- Where did you go first?
- Did you have company? What were their names?
- How did you get there?
- What did you have on?
- Had you received any military training by that time?
- How many of you were there?
- Do you have photos of that day?
- Where did you go together?
- What did you see?
- How did you feel after seeing those scenes?
- Where did you go in Khorramshahr?
- How was the city like? Tell me about your observations.
- Which parts of the city were occupied by the Iraqi forces?
- How did you engage with them?
- What kind of arms you were carrying?
- How many Iraqis did you gun down or injure?
- Were any of your friends martyred or wounded?
- and…

By providing detailed answers to these questions, the interviewee depicts a complete image of the war he/she participated in.
To carry out his/her interview, the oral historian should exercise great patience and never hesitate to ask about even more details. If the interviewee has a photo album, it will be of great help for the interviewer to copy the pictures and write their details including dates, places and names of those shown on the back of each picture.

Step5: transcribing the recordings
After conducting the interview and recording the testimony, one needs to transcribe what the interviewee has said word by word. It is better to compare the transcription with the oral testimony before organizing and processing it. 

Step 6: Organizing and Processing
After transcribing the testimony, it should be organized and processed. If we regard interview as the heart of an oral history project, organizing and processing constitutes its brain. It is at this stage that the oral historian can produce an attractive and read worthy book, by relying on an in-depth and comprehensive interview. Of course, organizing and processing an interview require techniques and special skills that need to be dealt with in a single section.

Step 7: inserting footnotes and endnotes
While organizing and interview, we often come across words that need elaborations. These include names of places, people, and words from local dialects, events and even political and social movements. The organizer should explain about such words or concepts using footnotes or endnotes. For example, if the interviewee has referred to a village named “Chah-kootah” we need to give the reader some information about its whereabouts.

Step 8: reviewing and editing
After processing and organizing, the text should be given a thorough review. Then it is ready for editing. All the words and sentences should be taken care of properly in order to avoid possible mistakes in pronunciation, style and punctuation.

Step 9: typing and layout
The final step is typing, sample reading and page design. Then the book is ready to go to the publisher. Of course you need also to place pictures in your book.
It is worth mentioning that all the above said steps could be completed by a single person, or two or three people. But it will be much better for the interviewer himself or herself to do the job of processing and editing as well, if he/she could manage both.

Important note:
To conduct war era oral history projects, the oral historian and those involved in organizing and processing the testimonies, should have enough information about the eight years imposed war against Iran. These include the history of conflicts between Iran and Iraq, the state of two neighbors and different stages of the long war. As such, it is recommended that before embarking on such a project, the oral historian should read some documentary books on the history of the imposed war and the holy war published by the Islamic Republic Army or the Revolutionary Guards Corps. Reading some oral history books after all will be of great help. Sure enough, an oral historian with an ample knowledge of the history of the imposed war against Iran and the Islamic Revolution in the country could do a more perfect job in conducting the interview and processing and organizing it.

Seyyed Qassem Yahusseini
Bushehr Port, March 8th, 2012

Translated by: Reza Bahar