Remembering Gathers a World: Listening as an Occasion of Possibility - Incite at Columbia University

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

“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.)”

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.