After navigating Sarita Daftary-Steel’s East New York Oral History (ENYOH) Project, a current MFA dramaturgy student, Kate Foster, reflects on her journey to uncover and understand her family’s history in Detroit, MI. She remarks on the benefits of agency in learning history and discovers connections between the ENYOH Project and the elements of a documentary play.

Like many other white families during the 50s/60s, my grandparents left the city of Detroit to live in the surrounding suburbs, where I was raised. When I moved to midtown Detroit to attend college in 2010, I began reading books about racial inequality in the region, such as Detroit Divided. Today, I continue to read books on the subject, most recently The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The problem is that, in the flood of court rulings and historical events, I often find myself disconnected from the real communities and people this history is about. Then, I came across the East New York Oral History Project.

As a student of dramaturgy, I’ve garnered a vast appreciation for plays that weave historical documentation into a narrative without anchoring it in overtly didactic commentary. These plays, like the work of the renowned artist Anna Deavere Smith, often carry a historical event into the present by highlighting and embodying various perspectives on the event. I found that the ENYOH Project presents history in a way more akin to this kind of documentary play than to a textbook. Viewing it online, I encountered very similar history to what I was reading in the books: redlining and blockbusting, highway building and disinvestment. However, with the Project, I was doing more listening and observing than reading, which proved equal parts relieving and appealing.

During her talk with our class, Daftary-Steel aptly stated that “it’s not history, it’s reality.” The ENYOH Project modeled to me a way of centering the history of segregation in our present day as it relates to people’s memories, stories, and personal struggles in East New York. Due to the multi-sensory nature and interactivity of the website, I discovered a place for myself within the history as an active listener. I reorganized my initial experience here to reflect the plot, characters, settings and thoughts I followed.

As I enter the website, a large map.
Immediately oriented, East New York.
Immediately immersed in the lives of the “characters.”

 The streets map –
The Brooklyn “redline” map –
the racial composition map–
the locations of the stories I’m about to hear.

 As my mouse scans over the maps, voices come alive.
Each voice: a person, a story
about East New York –
about the relationship between land and people and
systemic oppression.

I see years:
30s, 40s, 50s - 60s, 70s, 80s
I see photos:
Black and white
I see topics:
Organizing-resistance-wreckage-racial-relations-opportunity-life-chances
I see:
Displacement.

The moment I entered, I was on a journey to
Listen.

Real peoples’ voices were recorded. I heard historical events, but more importantly I felt the emotion of the people who directly experienced those events. A shift in tone, a question unanswered, a pause, a burst of energy. It allowed me not only to hear about what happened, but to feel along with those who witnessed. Further, I had the opportunity to pause and reflect - the agency to navigate through time as I observed the map in the echo of stories just told to me.

“that was a part of growing up”
“capitalism, some kind of natural process, like a hurricane”
“you could see the racism”
“you’re going to lose everything”
“coming in, taking out the radiators, degrading”
“housing didn’t ask them”
“kids were resilient, it was the adults”
“this is your fate”
”it bothered me that I got scared”
“she said it was OK”

Played one after another, the voices began speaking with each other. I became privy to an interstitial conversation. Listening between the pauses, I noticed the larger systems of oppression (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy) emerge and then loom without feeling my attention directly drawn to them. The focus, rather, was on the individual lives of those affected.

The longer I stayed there, the more stories I heard, revealing a more complex script of East New York. How I chose to piece the many stories together was ultimately how I was deciphering and interpreting history. This way of interactive learning felt personal. Why was this experience different than my previous history lessons?

Then, I remembered The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest For Wholeness by Maureen Murdock: “For the last five thousand years culture has been largely defined by men who have had a production-oriented, power-over, dominating approach to life. Respect for life and for the limits and cycles of nature and her children has not been a priority” (Murdock 84). Murdock describes her need as a woman to develop “heroic qualities that society has defined as male…those skills of discrimination, logical thinking, and follow-through” that help her in the “outer world” (137). There is another way of navigating challenges, however, which she describes as the heroine’s journey, which includes “sharing dreams of a future that incorporates values of the heart, language that is inclusive, and images that celebrate life” (147).

Unlike the hero who ventures out to win a battle and return home with newfound knowledge, the heroine sees injustice within the community and overcomes a personal, inner struggle to re-envision with others a more just future. While a Hero’s Journey is an external battle that exalts the returned hero and domination of knowledge, the Heroine’s Journey is an internal interrogation that results in everyone creating, sharing, and holding the knowledge. 

The ENYOH Project strives for wholeness and internal investigation as a community, inviting each listener to invest in the process of interpretation, in order to subvert the dominating way in which history has traditionally been taught. Oftentimes, especially in classrooms and monographs, history is made to feel distant: that was then, and this is now. But in actuality, the then and the now are intertwined, and no individual stands outside of that history. The agency of the investigation reminds the listener that their individual life journey today is part of a collective and a larger historical narrative.

There is no hero of history, but we are each on a journey to reckon with and heal from the past. Prompted by the ENYOH Project and efforts in other major cities, I discovered that Detroit also has several oral history databases. I've been listening to one in particular, organized by the Detroit Historical Society: Detroit 67. My grandparents aren’t alive to share their memories, but I can imagine hearing similar stories from them. As I continue to listen, I feel equipped with these stories in my everyday life and decision-making. I bring with me the echoes of what came before me to navigate life not only with historical knowledge, but also empathy. This is what a good play does; it reminds us what it means to be human and allows us to see our life and our past through new perspectives.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life And Work. Joseph Campbell, 2018.

Farley, Reynolds, Sheldon Danziger, Harry J. Holzer. Detroit Divided. The Russell Sage Foundation, 2000.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest For Wholeness, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. Boulder, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2020.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

Kate Foster is an MFA Dramaturgy Candidate in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She received her bachelor’s degrees in theatre and German, and her master’s degree in German language, literature and culture from Wayne State University. Following her studies, she taught English in Germany as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant with a Diversity Specialization. She is interested in working on documentary and international new plays. For those interested in plays written about Detroit, check out Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit trilogy.