When I am in pain words do not come or leave my mind quite right. I can miss something said to me, lose it in a clouded mind; read beneath lights steadily increasing the tension behind my eyes.
Ruth R. Martin says that oral history is "a way of taking down reminiscences by means of a tape recorder; not random reminiscences but planned interviews on a subject of historical interest about which the narrator can speak with authority"(4). My reading this week and my own meditations on pain lead me to ask, what if the narrator has authority, but they do not have, or have not been allowed, words?
In How to Talk About Pain, author Joanna Bourke begins with the thought of Virginia Woolf. "[Woolf] lamented the 'poverty of the language of pain.' Every schoolgirl who falls in love 'has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Bourke's opening may leave a reader exploring their own language stores, regarding their own cultural metaphors, and evaluating the truth of her point in what they find. She continues on to provide a careful history of pain from the late 1700s - pain as a force of the spiritual and a guide to virtuous behavior- through the late 1800s and early 1900s - when pain lost its mysticism and positive quality to the invention of functioning anesthetics becoming instead an "enemy"- until today.
Today, Bourke explains, pain narratives are no longer central pieces to a doctor's diagnosis. "Knowledge taken from microbiology, chemistry, physiology and neurology enabled physicians to bypass patient narratives in their search for an 'objective diagnosis.'... Chemical and neurological tests replaced stories; statistics replaced language." This replacement, she seems to be arguing, along with Woolf, has done damage not just in the loss of patient narrative in medicine, but in the continued challenge a patient may have finding the words to complete their narrative in the first place.
To take Bourke's argument one step further, and to connect to #DecolonizeHistory, I want to consider the idea that the experience of pain as disability may not just have been linguistically quieted through increased medical technology, but may have been also marginalized as a narrative unwelcome to a desired norm. In addition to norms built around race, gender, sexuality, class, etc, I want to consider norms of health and ability-status as they relate to the stories that have been allowed into our dominant historical narratives.
And so I return to my initial question. To focus on oral history, must we also, or perhaps first, consider the potential loss of language to describe the pain experience? How do we tell the stories of our history? Of our presents? Bourke says that perhaps "it is not that the people in pain cannot communicate, but that witnesses to their pain refuse to hear." How do we then, also, work to commit ourselves fully to listening?
Oral histories, therefore, involve more than just an authoritative speaker and a tape recorder. They involve a history of words and artful acts of listening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/how-to-talk-about-pain.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
Kate- I am very interested in seeing where your project takes you. My mind has flowed into a number of different areas on this subject. My first thought was that maybe the reason why it is harder to describe pain is that pain is often associated with weakness and shame. I do not think two people feel pain the same (this is my humble opinion). My mind is definitely on my two friends that gave birth to baby girls in the past week. I think about the pain of giving birth to my two children and then each of their stories and just like pain - every pregnancy and every delivery story is different. I think it is too abstract for people often to be able to describe their pain in a way that people can understand. I think it can become frustrating and discouraging. I find that to be the reason your project is so insightful and interesting. How do we break that barrier to help one another to understand, accept and communicate our pain?
ReplyDeleteKate, this is beautifully written and you make some important observations--notably, that we need be fully present and engaged with our interview subjects so we capture not only the language they use to tell us their stories, but the other ways in which they communicate with us when words are not enough.
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