Addendum: Or How My Job Could Be Better

In my last post, I attempted to articulate a sort of mission statement, to describe why I am here and what I hope to accomplish. Two or three days ago, as I wound down a nearly two hour interview with a vodou priest, he asked me why I was doing this, and when I told him, he asked me if there were others working with me. No, I said, it's just me. You are not enough, he said. I know, I replied. And he is absolutely right, for so many reasons. First of all, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by my goal of 200 interviews, but ultimately, two hundred stories are nothing if you are trying, in a way, to take a snap-shot of a collective trauma. Five hundred, a thousand, maybe those could be a significant sample. To do that I would have to be able to enlist other researchers to go out in the field along side me. Of course, what are the future researchers of my imagined audience going to do with a thousand interviews? Two hundred interviews, making probably a hundred and fifty hours of audio, is already an overwhelming body of work to sort through. Somehow in the coming months I will find the means to transcribe all of this, and eventually get it translated into English so that the interviews can be accessible to the most people possible.

Also, I'm not Haitian so my sense of nuances in the Creole language is poor, and there are myriad culture references that are inevitably lost on me. In my dream world, I find the funding to buy more audio recorders (or...video!) and develop this project future with a team of three or five Haitian researchers, who would actually be the ones conducting the interviews. I learn a great deal from the contributions of my Haitian translator and co., whose personal investment in my project helps me learn themes Haitians themselves think important to document. The questions they think to ask are the ones that probably matter most. These teams would go out into the field while I dedicate my energies to transcribing, developing the database, re-listening to the interviews and summarizing them to make them more easily searchable to others. Maybe I would build a website so that people could access them from anywhere, not from the privileged location of a New York or Haitian archive.

I wonder sometimes if its a delusion to think that anyone else will ever listen to these or care about them? I don't think so, but it all depends on how I can make them accessible to others.