Fantasy oral history: Filling the gaps between oral history and silence with Rebecca Kiil
2023-24 Experiments in Oral History Methodology Series presents:

How can you tell the story of a family member whose voice you’ve never heard or whose name was rarely mentioned? How do we find answers to questions when the people who hold those answers are long gone or are inaccessible to us? As oral historians, how can we amplify the voices of individuals whose voices have been silenced – by governments, by censors, by our own families?

In her Brodsky award-winning master’s thesis, Rebecca Kiil explored the concepts of silence, embodied memory, intergenerational trauma, and oral history approaches to shared authority within the context of her family’s experiences during World War II. Oral history revealed the echoes of her family’s trauma in Rebecca’s own body and patterns in her life. But ultimately, after having grown up immersed in family stories, spending 10 years collecting oral histories with multiple generations of family members, and countless hours in conversation with her grandmother, then poring through family records (including diaries, photos, and letters), archival research in Estonia and Siberia, and field research along the routes her family took to escape, Rebecca found that there were still no answers to some of the questions that had haunted her grandmother and, by extension, her family.

This led her to explore beyond the boundaries of traditional oral history. Through a “fantasy oral history,” a genre of speculative oral history she created that focuses on the past, Rebecca explores how memory lives in the body, and charts a path to healing through creative and rigorous memory work. The workshop will include a dramatic reading of Rebecca’s fantasy oral history, as well as space to reflect on silences in your own past and how you might fill them.

About the Host:

For the past decade, Rebecca Kiil has been working to document the life histories of family and community members who fled their homeland of Estonia during World War II to escape the brutal Soviet and Nazi regimes. Before her grandmother passed away in 2020 at the age of 102, Rebecca spent seven years with her, filming, researching, and helping document her grandmother’s story – and the stories of her men who had been lost to the war – none of which her grandmother had been ready to talk about previously.

Rebecca Kiil is a writer, oral historian, and filmmaker. She earned her B.A. in English from Wake Forest University, attended the Salt Institute for graduate studies in documentary film photography, and earned her M.A. in oral history from Columbia University. Her master’s thesis won the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award in 2023. Her areas of interest are intergenerational trauma, women and war, memory transmission, forced migration and displacement, and refugee studies.

0:00 Introductions
3:40 Presentation
11:25 Multiple layers of silencing
18:37 Breaking silences
22:16 Un-silencing Harald
36:23 Fantasy oral history: Excerpt 1
48:26 Fantasy oral history: Nicknames
52:51 Interactive debrief
1:12:40 Q&A Discussion

2023-24 Experiments in Oral History Methodology series:
Oral history as a research tool has been at times almost synonymous with a certain kind of interviewing: one-on-one, biographical, long-form, recorded, and intended for the archive. In this year-long series of events, are exploring other approaches to doing oral history, from using guided meditation to access sensory memories to grounding memory work in our favorite family songs.

Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:30PM, and where possible each event will include a hands-on experience or interactive space to try out and reflect on these new approaches. Events will be virtual and in-person.

Event Date: February 15, 2024