Let’s Identify Oral History Editing Standards

As Iranian Oral History Website reports; Ahad Goudarziani, one of the judges in Documented Literature Section in Martyr Avini Book Prize Festival, about the judgment of books in memoirs writing and oral history section said: “Documented Literature section experts reviewed several works in different fields of Memoirs, Report, Biography, Will, Interview and anthologies. Most of these works are rooted in interview and then are changed to memoirs and finally a historical document. So the most important matter in Oral History is “interview”.
He added: “After interview, the interviewer should find the accuracy of the information given by the interviewee and then he can consider it as a historic text. The book “Paasyaad-e Pesar-e Khak (In memory of the soil’s son)” by Muhammad Qubadi, and “Dezli Staff” by Hassan Rezaii Kheyraabaadi, are the two elected books for Documented Literature which both are oral histories. Both writers have different documented evaluation of the matter. “Paasyaad-e Pesar-e Khak (In memory of the soil’s son)” is a research project narrating the life of a unique figure with special characteristics considering the resistance during the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defense.
About the resistance characteristics of the book “Dezli Staff”, Goudarziani said: “The writer has considered Oral History rules and he has looked at the story from different angles. In these books memoirs of a number of Jahad-e Sazandegi forces from Kurdistan are presented and the writer is facing with different people with different personalities. Kurdistan was a very important zone during the imposed war because of the presence of Mujahedin-e Khaq guerrillas and among the narrated memoirs we can see resistance elements.
He added: “Single narrator, structure weakness in narrating and writing, not referring to several sources and superiority of literature over documentaries, and being far from resistance elements were among the problems we had in judging the works in Documented Literature section. In Documented Literature we need narrations with the capability of analysis. Oral History comes out of orality and when orality enters a theme brings historical view to that theme. So we should be careful about documenting the information.”
Goudarziani noted that it seems oral history is at the beginning of its way in Iran and added: “We have not gathered all the raw material and it still running. So we should evaluate the production of an Oral History work by a critical and competing viewpoint.”
At the end he mentioned: “We see educational workshops are presented for oral history theoretical and practical fields, and at the same time oral history works are published. We should identify the standards for editing and oral history work in order to help the writer. As a matter of fact the writer and researcher should be interacting with each other and use theoretical and practical discussions for producing a useful work. Going toward this aim may help us pass this first steps toward more standard oral history works.

Reporter: Fatemeh Noorvand