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Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne
Patai
The Hour of the Poor, the Hour of Women: Salvadoran Women Speak by Renny Golden
I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town by Karin Barber
Review by: Susan Geiger
Source: Signs, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 499-503
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174810
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BOOK REVIEWS
Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral
History.
Edited
by
Sherna
Berger
Gluck and
Daphne
Patai. New York and London:
Routledge,
1991.
The Hour of the
Poor,
the Hour of Women: Salvadoran Women
Speak. By
Renny
Golden. New York: Crossroad
Publishing,
1991.
I Could
Speak
Until Tomorrow:
Oriki,
Women and the Past in a Yoruba
Town.
By
Karin Barber.
Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press,
1991.
Susan
Geiger University
of Minnesota
TH
rO W D O W E K N O W that a feminist
practice
has come
of
age?
These books
provide
different answers to this
ques-
tion as
applied
to the collection and
presentation
of women's
oral narratives. From the
essays
in Women's Words we learn
that feminist oral
history practice
is now
sufficiently
well established to
permit
the discussion of
techniques
for its
proper
conduct
(e.g.,
the
chap-
ter
by Kathryn
Anderson and Dana C.
Jack
and the one
by
Kristina
Minister)
and to
engage
in both self-criticism and criticism of others'
practice (e.g., chapters by
Sondra
Hale, Judith Stacey,
and Claudia
Salazar, respectively). Perhaps
most
tellingly,
the
coming
of
age
of a femi-
nist oral
history practice emerges
in the evocation of the unidentified
"Western feminist researcher"
guilty
of "incorrect"
practices
in the
chap-
ter
by Daphne
Patai.
In their
general
introduction to Women's
Words,
editors Sherna
Berger
Gluck and
Daphne
Patai criticize earlier work in the
fifteen-year-
old field of feminist oral
history
for
privileging
the
unifying power
of
gender
over the divisiveness of race and class and for
believing
that "the
mere
study
of women fulfilled a commitment to do research 'about'
women"
(2). Moreover,
"we"
(presumably,
white feminist oral historians
are the unmarked "we"
throughout
the
book)
thought
too little about the
lack of "true"
(i.e., equal) partnership
between narrator and interviewer
and
ignored
the
dangers
of
appropriation "hiding
under the
comforting
rationale of
empowerment" (2). Finally,
we
insisted, incorrectly,
that our
work constituted
political advocacy
and that we fulfilled our
obligations
to those we interviewed
by interpreting
and
publishing
their lives
(3).
Permission to
reprint
a book review
printed
in this section
may
be obtained
only
from the author.
Winter 1994 SIGNS 499
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Geiger
BOOK REVIEWS
Unfortunately,
the
only
citation the editors
provide
to the
misguided
early
feminist oral
history
work
they
have in mind is to two issues of
Frontiers
(1977
and
1983).
Happily,
and with few
exceptions,
the authors of the
many
informa-
tive
essays
in Women's Words are less inclined to
oppositional general-
izing
than are the collection's editors.
Instead, they rely
on their own data
and
experience
while
maintaining
the self-critical stance
necessary
for
work and research that is indeed
fraught
with difficulties and
pitfalls.
In
the book's first
section, "Language
and
Communication,"
speech
com-
munication
specialist
Anderson and educational
psychologist Jack
intro-
duce the nuances of the interview
process
and
provide
a model of
joint
authorship.
Communication
expert
Minister
argues
for the existence of a
"general
female sociocommunication subculture"
(28),
which she illus-
trates
by
reference to a
hypothetical videotaped
women's discussion
group. Although
Minister sometimes identifies women's same-sex com-
munication
system
as
specifically
North
American-already
a
problem-
atic
category-she
does not
consistently
do so. In
contrast, linguist
Gwendolyn
Etter-Lewis identifies at least three distinct narrative
styles
among
the black women she interviews and notes that black
narrators,
whether male or
female, typically
construct their
identity
in relation to
the black
community.
In the book's second
part, "Authority
and
Interpretation,"
folklorist
Katherine Borland and
linguist Marie-Fran;oise
Chanfrault-Duchet use
their own interview
experiences
to address
important
issues related to
these themes. Borland discovered that an
analysis
of her
grandmother's
life
history
interviews that was
respectful
of her
grandmother's
sense of
self
required
an
exchange
of
interpretations.1
For her
part,
Chanfrault-
Duchet
argues
for the
analysis
of narrative and textual structures and of
sociosymbolic
content to
interpret
the oral accounts of two women "who
had similar life courses but
produced very
different narratives"
(77).
In the final
essay
in this
section, speech
communication
specialist
Salazar uses Elisabeth
Burgos-Debray's self-positioning
introduction to
I...
Rigoberta
Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala to criticize
Burgos-Debray
for
"problematic
editorial interventions" in the text
(98)
and for
committing
"textual violence" in
turning
the Nobel Peace Prize
winner's
testimony
"into a Western
logocentric
mirror"
(99)
in
response
to a market demand for women's oral histories. Salazar also
argues
that
Western students and other readers of the book are
engaged
in the "facile
consumption
of Otherness"
(100).
1
For an
interesting comparative example,
see
Marjorie Mbiliyini,
"
'I'd Have Been a
Man': Politics and the Labor Process in
Producing
Personal
Narratives,"
in
Interpreting
Women's
Lives,
ed. Personal Narratives
Group (Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press,
1989),
204-27.
500 SIGNS Winter 1994
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BOOK REVIEWS
Geiger
Salazar's
essay
contains lessons for feminist oral historians.
First,
it
reminds us that
self-positioning
can be
dangerous. Perhaps
this
explains
why
Salazar assumes in her own
writing
an
unacknowledged
and
unpo-
sitioned stance of absolute
authority
over the text and its
interpretation.
Second, by "otherizing"
not
only Burgos-Debray
but all readers as
well,
Salazar
manages
to
reproduce
another
system
of
binary opposites.
In the book's third
part,
"Dilemmas and
Contradictions," Stacey,
Hale,
and Patai reflect on the
ways
in which their own
experiences
of
doing
oral
history
research fell short of their feminist
assumptions
and
expectations. Sociologist Stacey
situates the
agonizing
contradictions of
her
"ethnographic
role" in her Silicon
Valley
research in a
thoughtful
examination of feminist fieldwork and
ethnographic
research
generally.
Anthropologist
Hale offers an
equally
informative and self-critical
analy-
sis of her
stunningly
unsuccessful
attempts
to
impose
feminist
process
on
her interviews with Sudan's most
distinguished
woman
politician,
Fatma
Ahmed Ibrahim.
Finally, Patai,
a
professor
of
Portuguese
and women's
studies,
finds Western feminists' life
history
work with less
privileged
"non-Western" women to be
fundamentally contradictory, apolitical,
and
self-aggrandizing. Having published
her own
highly regarded
life
history
work with Brazilian
women,
it seems that
Patai,
who worried in an
earlier
essay
about the "last
piece
of
cake,"
is
having
it and
eating
it too.2
The book's last
section,
"Community
and
Advocacy,"
restores readers
to a modicum of
optimism
and
hope
about the
possibility
of
mutually
positive
and
respectful
oral
history
research. It does
so, however,
with the
term
feminist
bracketed if not left out
altogether.
The
essays by
Rina
Benmayor
and
by
Karen Olson and Linda
Shopes
describe collective
community projects
whose successes seem
largely
based on shared class
or ethnic identities between researcher and researched or on the research-
er's
ability
to maintain
long-term relationships
with the researched. His-
torians Lauri Mercier and
Mary Murphy
add a useful
autocritique
of
their
public history project,
which involved
forty
interviews with Mon-
tana women active in
voluntary
associations.
Finally,
coeditor and veteran oral historian Gluck describes her inter-
views with and on behalf of Palestinian
women, concluding
that the
"dual roles of scholar and advocate" cannot
always
be
seamlessly
com-
bined
(214)
and that
many
contradictions will never be resolved. Never-
theless,
she
says
we must
fight together
for our
right
to assert our social
responsibilities
as feminists and for the
legitimacy
of
advocacy
research
within the
academy.
Renny
Golden would
certainly agree,
and she offers one scholar-
activist's version of oral
history
as feminist
practice.
Winner of the 1991
2
Daphne Patai,
"Ethical Problems of Personal
Narratives, or,
Who Should Eat the Last
Piece of Cake?" International
Journal of
Oral
History 8,
no. 1
(February 1987):
5-27.
Winter 1994 SIGNS 501
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Geiger
BOOK REVIEWS
Crossroad/Continuum Women's Studies
Award,
Golden's The Hour
of
the
Poor,
the Hour
of
Women is both a
deeply moving
collection of and
a celebrative tribute to the lives of Salvadoran women in
struggle.
Ur-
gency, clarity
of
purpose, long-term commitment,
and the
support
of
key
Salvadoran women
guide
Golden
through
the
quagmire
of doubts that
frequently
immobilizes feminists when
they
discover the
difficulty-some
would
say impossibility-of
"sisterhood" across
gruesome inequalities.
Notable in Golden's stance is a
rejection
of the
peculiarly
self-absorbed
view that
prohibits
some Western feminist academics from
acknowledg-
ing
that their
"subjects"
have
anything
worth
having
when
they
do not
have access to what we
have-namely, university jobs, publication
de-
mands,
and Western
privilege
in all its
entrapping guises.
Golden
rejects
this view not because she is blind to structural and material
inequalities
between her and the Salvadoran women who
occupy
her book but be-
cause she values what these women
possess
and share
among
them-
selves-comunidad, the
language
of mistica
(achieved through profound
struggle
and historical
understanding), "revolutionary hope,"
and an
identification with the fire of the
smoldering
ocote
(pine),
where "no
flame is
separate
and
you
cannot
distinguish
one from the other"
(43).
Golden threads
throughout
the book her
practical
and theoretical
grasp
of Central American and Salvadoran
politics
and of the U.S.
gov-
ernment's
complicity
in the maintenence of Salvador's elite. This con-
firms her awareness that Salvadoran women's collective commitment to
humanity-born
of
war, poverty, death,
and sorrow-is in a
large
sense
the
product
of the
oppression
that also
compels
the
telling
of their stories.
Golden
organizes
the book and the three life histories related in each
of five main
chapters
to reflect the
organic relationships among
the
groups
she
brings
to the center of historical
process.
Thus,
we are intro-
duced in turn to
Matilde, Ana,
and
Reina,
who
"represent," through
their
lives and
stories,
Salvador's base Christian
communities,
and to
Lupe,
Venancia,
and
Hortensia,
women who
personify peasant
resiliance,
"dan-
gerous memory,"
and insistent attachment to the land. Selected voices of
Salvador's women's
organizations
are
similarly
contextualized.
Finally,
Golden introduces three
martyrs,
whose "deaths are a
weight pulling
toward
fidelity,
a
memory
heavier than
competing weights
of
personal
safety
or
advantage" (134),
and three militants-active members of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front whose stories were never-
theless "formed in families
steeped
in a communal tradition of
fidelity
to
pueblo" (171).
To relate these lives,
Golden relies on several narrative forms
including
life histories she collected
herself, people's
accounts of their own
martyrs,
interviews conducted
by others,
and
biographical
information
gleaned
from various sources. To these, she adds her own
poetic renderings
of
502 SIGNS Winter 1994
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BOOK REVIEWS
Geiger
events she did not
experience
but "knows" in the
way
that we know what
we see in the faces of
people
with whom we have shared similar
dangers,
hopes,
and horrors. Of
martyr
Silvia Maribel Arriola's
death,
for ex-
ample,
Golden writes: "Silvia and
ninety-one
others ran for three
days,
their
legs pumping
with the
fury
of animals
outrunning
the
hunters,
hunters with
precise, high-powered
rifles. Traced
by radar, pursued by
helicopters
and
planes,
the band of FMLN
militants,
the
wounded, doctors,
and nurses like Silvia were surrounded and
virtually
incinerated"
(155).
Finally,
Karin Barber's I Could
Speak
Until Tomorrow offers an ex-
cellent
example
of
literary anthropology
and an
answer, by way
of con-
trast,
to the
question
of how we
recognize
feminist research. Barber's
study
is a detailed and meticulous
exploration
of a distinctive form
of Yoruba
(Nigerian)
oral
praise poetry,
Oriki,
and of the
particular
contributions of its women
practitioners. Using
an
interpretive
frame-
work based on notions of context and the Marxist
philosophy
of lan-
guage developed by Volosinov/Bakhtin,
Barber
challenges contemporary
critical theorists whose domain of literature has failed to include oral
literature.
Barber neither claims nor demonstrates a
uniquely
feminist
practice
in
her research.
Unambivalently grateful
for the kindnesses of the
people
of
Okuku where she conducted her research for three
years,
she is
deeply
appreciative
of the
"generosity, hospitality
and tolerance" of her host
family
and
genuinely
honored to have been made an
"honorary daugh-
ter" of the then
reigning
Olokuku
(leader) (iix).
In these
attitudes,
Barber
shares with Golden a
deep respect,
devoid of
condescension,
for the
people
she writes about. At the same time-and here it is
important
to
recognize
the
differing
material circumstances that Golden and Barber
encountered-neither
worry
about
inequalities
of access to resources nor
fear of
being compromised by
her
particular
associations arises in the
nearly
three hundred
pages
of text Barber devotes to close
readings/
interpretations
of Oriki.
While Barber's work illustrates the
unique
value of "traditional" oral
narrative forms and their
explication,
and the Gluck and Patai collection
offers both
challenges
to and
examples
of feminist oral
history
method-
ology,
Golden's book reaffirms a feminist
approach
to women's oral
history
narratives in the 1990s. This affirmation
acknowledges
that there
are unanswerable ethical
questions
and dilemmas of
interpretation, many
of which can be traced to the harsh realities of a socioeconomic world
order that
privileges
and therefore
implicates
Western academic women
whether we like it or not. At the same
time, Golden,
like
Gluck,
insists on
the
importance
of
continuing
the
struggle
to
engage,
learn
from,
and
understand women who are
emphatically
not our "other" even
though
they
are not us.
Winter 1994 SIGNS 503
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