“Something Remarkable Happens When You Listen”

That’s the title of a short article I wrote for an issue of Democracy in Action, a publication of the now-defunct NGO called the Institute for Democracy (Idasa) in South Africa.

That was in April of 1995, at the end of my two months in Cape Town where I’d been teaching the art of radio documentary and also co-producing two half- hour programs with local producers Sue Valentine, Siviwe Minyi and Jackie Davies. Though I’ll never forget my time there—it changed my life—I’d forgotten all about writing the piece. But this morning I had the pleasure an hour’s Zoom with Siviwe, whom I haven’t spoken with in years, and he reminded me about it. Here he is, talking about radio’s capacity to spark the senses.

After our conversation I dug through the bowels of my computer and, just when I was about to give up, finally unearthed the article. Here it is, for posterity:

---

An elderly woman sits on the edge of her bed, reminiscing about her childhood in her native West Virginia. I’m interviewing her for a radio documentary about the historical tug-of-war between the individual and big business in her rural community where most residents are poor and marginalized.

She punctuates her observations with apologies—“I’m afraid I have nothing interesting to say. I’m sure none of this is of any use to you.”—but she continues with the interview. Suddenly she pauses, a spark in her eye as a question triggers a distant memory.

“You know, when I was a child my grandparents lived down there on the river. And when they put the new highway through, the state blasted that place up, and my grandparents had to move. It broke all our hearts.”

She gets up, crosses the room and digs out a stack of papers yellowed with age. From the bottom of the pile she pulls a wrinkled page. “I wrote a poem about that, over forty years ago. Would you like to hear it?” She reads her poem, ending with:

My grandparents both are dead now. They died with a broken heart.
The old homeplace they loved so well, I am sure they never forgot.
I go there every summer, just to fish and swim.
There’s no one there to greet me, no home to enter in.
I often sit and wonder just why it had to be.
The old homeplace we loved so well was more than a heaven to me.

Her tale reveals far more about the experience of displacement than any purely factual document could. Part of its strength comes from her straightforward language; part, impossible to capture in print, from the sound of her voice: the power of her delivery, and the freshness of her surprise as she remembers the forgotten poem.

The work of gathering oral histories for radio is rewarding, and it is these moments, when memory releases an unexpected treasure, that provide the supreme satisfaction for the interviewer. Every person has a story. The challenge is to unearth it, and is the fuel that maintains enthusiasm during scores of hours of interviewing.

The value of documenting the lives of “ordinary” people has long been recognized. Personal stories capture an alternative view of history and reveal a great deal about a culture as well as about an individual. As a radio producer, I draw from interviews with people who are rarely if ever heard beyond their own communities, people who could be our neighbors, or our enemies, or ourselves. Their experiences, thoughts, rituals, and ideas form the heart and soul of my programs.

Though my work is based on oral histories, it is not oral history in the formal sense, different both in how it’s gathered and how it’s presented. While historians may interview one person many times and explore a comprehensive range of subjects, the focus of a radio producer tends to be in-depth but pinpointed.

For a feature about the American tradition of Valentine’s Day I interviewed dozens of people specifically about their memories of the trials and tribulations of romance. The final product is not a single complete interview but a weaving together of many excerpts; each interlocks thematically with the one before, enhancing or extending it. The program is a web of stories that are highly personal yet often universal.

Radio is a strongly sensory, surprisingly visual medium. Similar to writing in its capacity to evoke images, emotion, and sense of place, it’s uniquely suited to first-person storytelling. Part of radio’s strength is in its intimacy; voices coming through the audio speaker seem as though they are talking directly to us. Since radio supplies no pictures, the language suggests images which we as listeners define and sharpen in our imagination.

As a vehicle for bringing oral histories to a broad and diverse audience, radio has particular strengths. We hear the voices of the people who actually lived the stories: their inflection, accent, age, mood. When a man describes the day that his mother came to retrieve him from an orphanage, we hear not just the details but his tone, which tells more than words alone can. And of course language isn’t the only storytelling element available to a producer of radio programs. We use sound to illustrate a point, enhance a mood, or set a context: a cluster of children chants a risqué jump rope rhyme; a young man pages through his diary and reads selections that vividly portray his life in the army; a woman from the American south skips stones across a river that was, until recently, the only integrated spot in town. Ambient and situational sound carry listeners right into a story.

Because radio finds its way into isolated areas as well as cities, and to low-income and well-to-do households alike, oral history programs are an extraordinarily powerful tool for building understanding across culture and geography, and for helping to heal the wounds of a fractured history. Glimpses of individual lives shed light on larger truths. The poem of the old woman in West Virginia captures not only her own experience, but that of countless others who have been similarly dispossessed.

With the Idasa radio unit staff, I recently had the opportunity to co-produce two oral history programs in South Africa. Throughout the process I was struck by the willingness of many people to tell their frank stories of life under apartheid, by the eagerness of others to listen, and by the potential for that exchange to be a step toward reconciliation.

After hearing our program about forced removals, a listener said, “Of course we know about the removals, and have read about them. But there’s something remarkable that happens when you listen to the stories, in their own voices, of the people whose lives were changed. It affects you on a very deep level.”

A former resident of District Six remarked, “We have a voice. We want to be heard . . . They don’t have to give us anything. We just want someone to listen to us.”

---

By the way, the old woman in West Virginia is someone I’ve written about here many times: Virginia Crockett, the original Mama Ginna from whom I borrowed the name my grandchildren now call me. I still miss her.