Je te parle dans ta langue, et c’est dans mon langage que je t’entends.

I speak to you in your language, and it is in my language that I hear you, and understand.

— Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde

How does remembering language you? What languages you beyond words?

What if we are also our dreams for our children? What if we are also our mothers' worry? What if we are the only archive of the house in which we grew up? What if we are the memories we belong to and the ones that belong to us? What if we are the evidence of generations’ dreaming?

To be remembered is to be born a relation. What if we start from this relational ground?

Thinking from inside Black and Caribbean memory practices and the relational ontologies of the Global South, I suggest that an attunement to how remembering languages us can occasion otherwise forms for our oral history practice—both for and beyond the goal of documentation.

In this engagement, we will travel across a series of encounters drawn from years of listening work that apprenticed this register of attention, noticing our own situated reading as it happens. We will slow listening encounters down and attend to how we make meaning: how the narrator gathers themself as a world, and how we gather them. How they language themselves and how we, as listeners, can nurture a literacy for this. How can a person experience themselves as possible or impossible in an encounter with us—worlded or unworlded?

I approach listening as decolonial practice in intimate space. It has taken form as one-to-one interviews, facilitated group dialogue, ritual, artworks, and otherwise architectures of communal remembering — spaces where diasporic counter-imagining can take place. Oral history as relational memory work.

Across these spaces, I have met Black, brown, and Global South practitioners, oral historians, artists, writers, and keepers of everyday archives reaching for a practice of listening that could host their mothers, their families, their communities, their kin, yet feeling a tension with the conventional method. Experiencing yourself as impossible in encounter is a form of precarity; you are made differently vulnerable. For many, this is felt knowing. In these many conversations, I hear a shared hunger for something otherwise—a different kind of hospitality.

This session is a call and response, an invitation to engage with your own ways of knowing and with one another’s in the chat. An ephemeral and real-time relational archive. It is an invitation to think and speak, if you wish, from your geographies of memory and embodied knowledge, and imagine what this might occasion for your listening and oral history practice.

This event is part of a year-long series: Keeping Memory: Oral History Practices that Host Kin and Community. A keep is a place to hold what is both precious and intimate. In the oral history practices featured in this series, kin memories are held in trust, in wisdom, in ritual, in heritage, and in each other. These projects think beyond the one-to-one interview encounter, gathering the embodied experience of kin, families, and communities. Each asks what needs to be remembered, and who needs to remember.

This series is curated by Nyssa Chow and hosted in partnership with two institutes of community memory: this fall at Weeksville Heritage Center in Central Brooklyn, a historic site preserving one of the largest free Black communities in pre–Civil War America; and this spring at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural home on the Lower East Side.

About Nyssa Chow

Nyssa Chow is a memory worker, oral historian, artist, and writer from Trinidad whose practice thinks from inside the memory practices of the Caribbean and the Global South. Her work attends to the poetry of ordinary lives: the ways of being and knowing held by those who live at the margins of agency. Through installation, social practice, and documentary art, she builds otherwise architectures for remembering: histories at the scale of intimate disclosure, place-based, communal, embodied, relational.

She served as Interim Director and Core Faculty of the Oral History Masters Program (OHMA) at Columbia University, was the 2019–2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Humanities Council for four years. With documentary filmmaker Stephanie Owens, she co-founded the DocX Fellowship at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, a funded residency for documentary practitioners that has supported artists across the Global South and diaspora. She was Co-Director of the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project at Columbia University . Her civic artwork Trace: A Memorial has been recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives, the New York State Senate, and the New York City Council, and The Story of Her Skin was awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.

www.tellinghistories.com