Our Approach to Oral History
Understanding oral history as collaborative art
Oral history refers to the process of seeking, recording, preserving, and interpreting the memories, experiences, and feelings of diverse people, particularly those whose histories are not traditionally documented in conventional archives. But beyond just uncovering and reconstructing facts about the past, oral histories are complex narratives. Each recorded interview is a collaboration between the narrator, who shares their memories and tells their story, and the interviewer, who inspires the narrator to begin remembering. And so, no two interviews with the same narrator will ever be the same, especially when conducted by different interviewers.
Interviews also do not follow a fixed, coherent structure—with a clear beginning, middle, and end—as our memories of the past always exist in fragments. They move forward and backward, sometimes conflicting, other times consistent. Nor do interviews have a natural end point. They can be repeated indefinitely, as it is impossible to exhaust the memory of a single person. New memories will always emerge, while memories already shared will change in how they are told or the meanings they are given.
Oral history always has the unfinished nature of a work in progress.
Some of the interviews in this collection are one hour long, others are seven hours long. Each is as significant as the other, and none is essentially "complete." Likewise, Mawtini itself is, and always will be, inherently an unfinished work in progress.
This is a fitting method for documenting the experiences of Arab Americans. Many Mawtini narrators hold multiple intersecting identities, being both Arab and American and feeling both at home and out of place in both parts of the world.
Nobody tells you once you leave home, you're a foreigner everywhere…even in the place you came from.
To the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, this sense of perpetual displacement has the potential to produce a unique and powerful perspective: one that refuses to view identity as a fixed inheritance but as an ongoing, always incomplete process. In his autobiography Out of Place, Said wrote:
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one's life, … require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are 'off' and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme.
We suggest listening to oral history this way: without searching for reconciliation or harmony or completeness and enjoying the flows and currents within each narrative.
Listen without searching for reconciliation or harmony—enjoy the flows and currents within each narrative.