ON THE CONTRADICTIONS AND TENSIONS OF MEMORY

Our choice of oral history was deliberate. Oral histories are an opportunity to explore the subject in history; the peculiar and contradictory nature of individual human experience as it occurs during moments of shared collective action. Oral histories are inherently contradictory, unresolved, open, and expansive. Each person brings their own psyche and their own pattern of remembering and forgetting. We cam to this project particularly interested in the contradictions of memory.

…We are sharing a rich and open story; one we are all making together. As interviewers, we practiced our own agency of selection and control in choosing narrators, in the questions we asked, in this introduction, and in this book’s final presentation. Our narrators exercised their own agency in telling their stories, refusing our questions, pursuing their own tangents and thoughts. As in the assembly, the forum, and the commune, we are joined in a shared project of collective emancipation, in tension and in solidarity.

Introduction, Everything for Everyone, M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi