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  • Theorizing Oral History as AutobiographyA Look at the Narrative of a Woman Revolutionary in Egypt
  • Margot Badran (bio)

I want to reflect on oral history in the context of recent efforts at rethinking and extending theorizations of autobiography. I argue that oral history can be read as autobiography. Oral history is typically created through the collaboration of an “oral history taker” and an “oral history giver,” an interviewer and interviewee or narrator. The interviewer, eliciting biographic data, asks questions on a particular subject or cluster of themes while the interviewee shapes a narrative in response. Oral histories may focus on restricted areas of interest or may be more wide-ranging. They may unfold over many sessions or be confined to a single encounter. Oral histories can be gleaned in a highly structured format through a set of prepared questions scrupulously administered or via a more open-ended approach employing questions not only to acquire sought after information, but to provoke the unexpected and to jog memory. While the oral history taker has an agenda, the consenting oral history giver is an interested collaborator.

Autobiography can be defined most simply as a person’s account of his or her life. New theorization expands notions of autobiography from being “The Autobiography,” typically a book-length work explicitly announced as such, to “autobiography” as embedded in a person’s letters, essays, poetry, and fiction. I further extend this to include oral history. While the aforementioned forms of autobiography are the products of a single author, oral history involving an interviewer and a narrator is a dual production. The written texts are carefully crafted and polished, albeit letters are typically more free-flowing, whereas oral histories as spoken texts are more raw and spontaneous. Theorizations of autobiography have also included the testimonial, relating to witnessing and experiencing, which may be generated through oral history method, involving an author and a prodding interlocutor, and thus the testimonial may be also seen as a form of oral history. Yet the testimonial may as well be generated as a written document with little or no input from others. To this list I would like to add that the documentary, or filmed segments, may also serve as autobiography-cum-oral history. In the documentary, the director or an interlocutor interacts with the filmed subject who recalls aspects of her past the documentarist seeks out. In uniting visual and verbal narratives, the documentary provides an atmosphere that intensifies the narrative of the reflecting self.1 [End Page 161]

It is as a historian that I theorize oral history as autobiography. A historian of women for over four decades, with an early focus on Egypt and subsequently on the wider Islamic world, I have used oral histories as a primary tool for unearthing and understanding women’s past and more particularly, women’s feminisms. As I sought out knowledge on feminist experiences in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century through oral histories, my interlocutors shared their memories of the collective experience and at the same time they transmitted intriguing pieces of embedded “autobiography.” Recently, when I peered into my old notebooks of transcribed interviews, long after I had used them as historical sources and building blocks for my writings on the nascent Egyptian feminist movement, I saw these oral history narratives as precious autobiographic nuggets in their own right. These, and the large numbers of oral histories I have assembled over the succeeding years, constitute an oral archive of women’s autobiography.

I am now collecting oral histories of women as participants in the revolution unleashed in Egypt in January 2011. I am interested in their narratives both as slices of autobiography and as part of the story of the revolution in the making. My oral history practice from the start has involved engaging interlocutors in a dynamic exchange. I come with a set of questions but I proceed in a fluid manner making room for the conversation to take spontaneous turns. In this way the narrator may drive the conversation in unexpected directions opening up important terrain. The earlier women’s oral histories relating to the rise of feminism in Egypt were narrated by older...

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