Intro: How can we invite people to dig into their memories and offer us their stories? In this blog post, Amanda Blewitt, a doctoral student in International Education, reflects on how sharing experiences with participants can evoke the past while connecting us in the present. This reflection was inspired by Laura Mitchison’s conversation with OHMA on April 9, 2020.

“This is guanabana,” one student said, rolling the fruit on his palm so the midday sunlight could illuminate the dark green rind beneath its spines. We had been ambling through the neatly cultivated field of fruit trees for a couple of hours — four Colombian university students and I, a grad student from the U.S. — periodically crouching in the shade, admiring various specimens and discussing their nature and uses. I noticed that this was the first time someone had given me this kind of farming lesson without splitting open a sample of the harvest for me to taste on the spot — which these students’ reverence for their crops would not allow. I remember each of us reaching up to touch the guanabana tree’s branches while we exchanged views on the deliciousness of its fruits.

That summer of 2014, I was staying at Utopía, a sustainable agriculture campus in Colombia’s low-lying central plains, where a few hundred young people from some of the country’s poorest, most conflict-affected villages live together for three years, learning both in the classroom and in the field about ecological agriculture, before returning home to implement a senior-year project to benefit their communities. I was attempting to craft a research project about Utopía’s ability to incite positive social change in a wounded nation — and, in exchange for teaching daily English classes, I was able to stay in the guest dorm.           

Over the course of a month, I accompanied students in their daily activities. We ate three meals a day together, donned rubber boots to trudge out into the fields together, cheered on the triumphant Colombian World Cup team together, and walked to classrooms on the curving paths spanning their verdant campus. I came to know many of the students’ personalities — who was timid in the classroom but playful during recreational hours, who, like magnets, pulled others to their cafeteria tables, and who quietly nurtured those struggling to keep up with their course loads.

Sometimes, after my presence had become familiar, students and I would sit around during leisure time, addressing alternately my many questions about their studies, their campus, and their dreams, and their many questions about my family, my tastes, and my impressions of their country. We laughed often, luxuriating in one another’s company while myriad insects buzzed in the warmth around us.

Near the end of my stay, perhaps sensing that we would soon be unable to be so close, a small number of students began telling me stories of the horrific violence they had witnessed in their villages. They had seen fathers being shot and killed on their own front lawns, best friends’ lifeless bodies being strategically re-clad and repositioned to conceal which armed group had murdered them, sisters being tortured at gunpoint, and some of the students had, themselves, been sexually and physically assaulted. While I cannot share their stories in detail, I can say that the harrowing images these youth depicted have continued to burn in my memory throughout the six years since

On the evening of April 9, members of this semester’s OHMA workshop series and OHMA alumni spoke with the brilliant Laura Mitchison, a British oral historian who amplifies the voices of people who might not otherwise get “airtime.” In response to a question about building relationships with participants, Laura highlighted the importance of doing things together. She remarked that sharing experiences with people “enables you to sort of, I don’t know, get under someone’s skin a little bit more. And, I don’t know, it just feels like — like you can evoke something together.” While collecting stories for the audiovisual piece The Texture of Air, Laura and her narrators fell into step while traversing hospital halls together, observed old pieces of equipment together, and in one case a medical professional even demonstrated a procedure by laying Laura’s husband on a table and cradling his head in her arm. As Laura explained, the more that she and the participants jointly experienced things in this way, the clearer it became that their stories called for visual accompaniments. With images including cartoon monkeys as a man describes tinnitus (Chapter Two) and model ears while a prosthetics maker explains his art (Chapter Twelve), the mesmerizing final product invites us into the sensory worlds the speakers describe.

In this moment in mid-2020, with spring blossoms yielding to summer and most people in New York and across the globe holed up to slow the spread of the pandemic that is transforming our lives, I recollect my starry evenings listening to Utopía’s students recount tales of instability, fear, and the ever-looming threat of death — things that the spread of COVID-19 has many of us experiencing now, albeit in distinctly different form. Reflecting on Laura’s remarks, I have begun to see — it was precisely the lunches, laughter, strolls, and horse rides I had shared with the students at Utopía that had given me access to the memories lodged beneath their skin. Accidentally, I had created conditions conducive to gathering the oral histories of Colombian young people, years before I realized this was something I was interested in doing.

In this historical moment, many of us are more challenged than we ever have been in finding ways to share experiences with others, but there are still possibilities for creating the conditions to evoke something alongside our participants. I think that, like the subterranean networks through which trees tell each other what they carry and what they lack, the commonalities of our human experience — particularly in times of crisis — root us to one another and evoke so much. As we reach for connection during an isolating time, we may accidentally find new ways of inviting stories to be told.

Inspired by what she learned from the youth at Utopía, Amanda is currently exploring healing ways of hearing and acknowledging people’s memories of violence, especially in “peacetime” settings. For those who are interested in oral histories from Colombia, she especially recommends Voice of Witness’s Throwing Stones at the Moon: Narratives from Colombians Displaced by Violence.