In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 224.
When I say that I am an oral historian, people often guess that my work is to collect stories and preserve the past. But oral history is memory work, and we are memory workers. We listen for the ways that individual and collective memory shape who we are in the present and our imagination for the future. Reflecting on the ways our memories inform how we interpret our shared world can be a generative starting point for our writing.
Individual memory speaks to how we make meaning. Think about love. What memories inform the way you think about love today? What memories of your own experiences or inherited memories shape your understanding? Memories are the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world and ascribe meanings. Collective memory is how we make meaning as a society or community. Think about America. What memories shape our collective understanding? What are we asked to remember in the form of monuments, high school curriculums, and parades? What are we asked to forget?
Oral historians listen for how our memories shape our identity and imagination of ourselves, others, and the world. Far from being isolated, bounded individuals, we are all nested stories, like Russian dolls. We are the story of the self, inside the story of a family, inside the story of our nation, inside the story of the global history of the world.
There is a generative writing exercise that I share in my classes and workshops as a way to locate ourselves in the nested geographies of memory and belonging. It’s an invitation to think relationally: Of what stories am I a part? In what ways do I belong to memory? This is my geography—what would yours look like?
In what way do I belong to the memory of the global history of the world?
I belong to the memory of revolutions.
(I’m inside the history of colonialism.)
In what way do I belong to the memory of nation?
I belong to the memory of Independence, green, young, yearning, and fragile.
In what way do I belong to the memory of community?
I belong to the memory of carnival and dancing in the street, and to the way people whose languages have been stolen remember their stories with the body, dancing ancestry like phantom limbs.
I am from the memory of we are because we are—and the soux soux.
(In Trinidad, country women would pool their meager monies together so all the children could have schoolbooks and white shoe polish. This is called soux soux.)
In what way do I belong to the memory of family?
I belong to the memory of my mother and my aunt chittering their contraband speak in the kitchen. I am from the sound of women whisper weeping as they confided in my grandmother, piercing the skin of their silence to spill their ordinary lies.
In what way do I belong to the memory of more than human worlds?
I belong to the memory of the sea. I am from the sea. I am the sea. I am from the memory of awe.
In what way do I belong to the memory of my own life?
I belong to the memory of being small in the world but enormous to my single mother.
Now it’s your turn: I invite you to try this in your writing practice. Of what stories are you a part?
Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, multidisciplinary artist, and writer. She is the interim director of the Oral History master’s program at Columbia University (OHMA) and cocreator/lead artist facilitator for the DocX Residency at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Her immersive oral history project, “The Story of Her Skin,” won the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.
image credit: Renaldo Matamoro
