Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People

Abstract

Loosely structured life history interviewing is increasingly the oral history method of choice when interviewing survivors of mass violence. Ideally, it gives the interviewee space to explore and express her or his memories and the connections between them, while emphasizing the context of the experience of violence within a larger life lived. There is, however, an inherent tension in setting out to interview someone about her or his life, as he or she understands it, while being, at the same time, specifically interested in her or his experience of violence. The latter interest immediately categorizes, directs, and betrays a particular understanding of the former: namely, that a person’s life can be interpreted through the lens of one particular set of experiences within it. This article examines two oral history projects that I conducted with survivors of atrocity—one with survivors of World War II and the Bosnian war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the other with Holocaust survivors in Montreal—to explore the limits of framing lives within the context of violence, and to ask how they might be overcome methodologically, ethically, and philosophically. In these projects, some interviewees struggled with not being survivors “enough” to merit being interviewed, and others felt that they were so much more than survivors that such a framing frustrated them. How can we understand someone’s experience and memory of violence without defining her or him, and the interview space, by it? Is a life history project that is interested in memories of atrocity necessarily restrictive and directive, no matter how broadly it tries to present itself? As we oral historians are increasingly concerned with how we understand, interpret, and represent the people to whom we listen, it is crucial to consider this question of framing.