Next step in oral history
Maryam Rajabi
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan
2019-03-19
According to the website of Iranian Oral History, the second session of the meeting " Live History: A Study of 40 Years of Oral History of the Islamic Revolution and the Holy Defense" was held in the Qasr-e Shirin Hall of the Islamic Revolution Museum and Holy Defense on Tuesday 5th of February 2019 attended by Hojjat al-Eslam Saeed Fakhrzadeh, Habibollah Esmaeeli and Morteza Mirdar. In the previous part of the report, you read the words of Hojjat al-Eslam Saeed Fakhrzadeh who was in charge of the Oral History Department of the Office of the Islamic Revolution Literature.
In continuation, Habibollah Esmaeeli, the history researcher and author said, “After the Islamic revolution, we witnessed the birth and flourishing and growth of oral history. The work’s volume is so large and carried out so well that can be considered as one of the achievements of the revolution and really a very hard work has been carried out. I would like to talk about why the issue of oral history was brought with a global view.
Something wrong has happened and since the issue is supposed to be continued, we should focus on it. The wrong thing is that it has been imagined that oral history means interview and this is the worst thing happened in our country. History is an oppressed arena with no owner and everyone who thinks that if he or she talks about an event, he or she has done a historic work. But this is not true. If we want to make a general categorization in the area of history, what do we basically recall from as a historical witness, historical document and text and historical discourse? Three different periods can be seen almost tolerantly. One is the period which basically the official historians and those who name themselves as historians started working in history; it starts from Herodotus and reaches to Tabari, Ibn al-Athir and others. These are the ones whose official duty is historiography. That is why important historical events which generally focus on the arena of politics, war and great developments are recalled in the resources produced by them, and if you look at the subjects of all of these books, they are about of the traveling of the kings, great men, dynasties, the life of the prophets and special persons of the history.
A new area in history was opened in the middle of the nineteenth century which does not respond to the entire things that have happened in history. Only the historians are not able to register and record the whole things that have happened in history. This must happen in other places. Thus, documents are involved here. Documents were paid attention to in a period and if you look at their arguments, you see that the documents have more historical texts. The document's writer has not been aware that he or she was producing a historical text. Therefore, his or her text is more pragmatic and closer to the truth of the story. That is why the archives were set up in the whole world in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. And in our country, the Organization of Documents and Archives was set up in 1340s solar hijri calendar and all institutions were obliged to deliver their documents to them. It was as if another area has been opened for those who want to understand history. The area refers to written documents in addition to historical texts. The process continues until 1950s when the third period of the witnesses of history was shaped. It was as if the historical knowledge discovers a new area through which the history is understood better and as if no attention was paid to in those two phases (historical texts and government documents). Where is this period? This period is inter-subjectivity which is in the words of ordinary and other people. From here onwards, we witness something in the name of oral history. I said this for the viewpoint that you see oral history neither against history nor during history.
Unfortunately, today all academic circles imagine that oral history means memories. When I was a student, we were told that memories were the least valuable sources of history and they were right. The reason for this was that the one who narrates a memory, he or she makes himself or herself the pivot of all developments and turns everyone around himself or herself. It means that if you see the memories of most of the people whether in higher or lower levels, when he or she narrates a memory, the first hero of the story is himself or herself and the rest are a series of second-handed heroes and a series of anti-heroes. They do not pay attention that oral history is not memories necessarily. The problem here is that those who work on oral history do not ponder over the subject. A memory turns into a history when it is trained by someone who is well-informed. For instance, the transformation of converting memories into oral history is felt in the works published by the Art Center at present. At first we did not know what rationalization meant. We had read history. But we denied such things. Later, we found out that techniques have been created to correct the text. We were told that oral history should be considered as a document and we said what a strange word it was. We gradually understood that we did not deal with the reality but with historical interpretation. Every one of us who accompanied the revolution, did a thing. This tangle was opened little by little and the awareness and knowledge increased and we realized what to do and today, I sit in front of you and say that for understanding history, we had already two areas of historic document and text and today we have a new area and this is a new horizon. Now, you can connect this to the points mentioned by Haj Agha (Saeed Fakhrzadeh) regarding the great men of the revolution, campaigners and those who were preset and played a major role in different parts of the history of the Islamic revolution; whether who left or those who stayed. Well, all of these had been registered and recorded nowhere and we found out that this part is the same one that the pen cannot do anything for it and this is the discourse which is working.
Without realizing that there are new principles, we moved insentiently on this path and learned little by little to reach from an interview to a historical text. Four to five years ago, if anyone wanted to interview, we would accept and sit in front of him or her to talk about his or her life from the beginning to the end, and we did not pay attention to asking him a single point, instead of letting that person say everything dispersedly; every man is aware of a field to the extent he or she has played a role in it and we ask questions just about the same field. If you ask me what happened in such and such a university in such and such a year, what should I answer? If I have been there on that day, I am aware of the event, but if you ask me about the history of the higher education, I start talking dispersedly and say everything. Here, we understand that if we wanted to interview about any field, we must ask question in accordance with that person's awareness. For instance, they went after Mr. Seyed Mohammad Sadr and asked him just about diplomacy, but if you look after the events of the previous one decade, you will see that they have said from the birth to the end and the interviewee has been asked about everything and eventually, a mess is ceratitid which nothing comes out of it. Even now, we understood that we should go one step further and talk only about one vent. It is not necessary at all that an individual is the subject of our interview. When an event is our subject, it means that first I have carried out a special research about that event and prepared my questions precisely. We can also select an institute as our subject.
The work of oral history is not the collection of data, but it is a research and should be dealt with very precisely and scientifically and this is the thing to which we have achieved during the course of time. When we turn discourse into a text, we have condemned it to survival and when it is condemned to survival, if one generation passes from it, they imagine that it is true. Now, we have to move one step forward and if we moved toward actors until now, we have to move toward the events and incidents. Now it's time to take the next step in oral history and this step completes previous measures. Today, the fact of the matter is that the image overcomes the word. The world of image dominates the world of word and if I want to look at this reality in terms of history, it should be said that I as a historian must migrate form the world of word to that of image. That is, if I want to produce an oral history work, it's like I am producing a documentary and disseminate it in the cyber world in pieces which is a scientific text and all principles of historiography have been observed in it. Narration, document, discourse and rationalization are clear in it and it's a complete work.
We carried out an incomplete experience somewhere; we said that if a person has had an interview about a subject in 1987 and again, the same person has been asked about that subject in 1997 and 1998 and his words have been different in all three times, we must mention him or her differences without any judgment. Nothing will come out form the heart of one hundred hours or ten thousand hours of interview. We have to move one step forward. Interview is not oral history. Interview is the technique of the work. Oral history is the turning of the individual’s memory to historic text. We have to notice that a new area has been added to this knowledgeable area and must obey all principles of this science and we cannot say we have invented a new area. If you look at the text of Herodotus or Beihaqi, you say that I have narrated the work form that person or that person told me this. Today, we are doing this and here our work makes a little harder. It would be better If we move toward small monographs but carry out a basic work”.
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