CRAFTING A STORY: REPRESENTATION OF DATA
4. REVIEW OF STORIES WRITTEN FROM EXPERIENCE DATA
4.5. Stories written with the researcher as narrator to illuminate the life and a particular theoretical position
sequence or chronology."(1993: 178). An excerpt from one of the stories in My Soul Is My Own.
My father became Mayor of the town. One of the beginnings of the town was Mar, Marcus Garvey's ah, interest in taking people back to Africa ... was the fact that he felt there, was no way that black people were going to get a good deal in these United States. And he, along with ah, what was his name, the man for whom the town was named, along with another man who ah, was the son of one of the people that was with John Browns raid. And ah, they were trying to get water and they discovered that the water was very metallic and they kept sounding farther and farther down and they spent so much time there, that they decided, well maybe we better start a town here. (pg.
5)
In reading the stories I was not distracted by the speech patterns but sometimes I found that the narrative digressed and I had lost the thread of the story. I also found contradictions between Etter-Lewis's theoretical position about the construction of narratives and what she did in the constructing the narratives. Etter-Lewis indicates that an important part in constructing an oral narrative is the relationship between the researcher and the interviewee; yet this relationship is not acknowledged in the story.
Nor does she indicate whether the participants of the project had a chance to review the final constructed story.
4.5. Stories written with the researcher as narrator to illuminate the life and a
as soldiers and ex-servicemen and to reflect upon the ways they had come to terms with their wartime past" (1995: 11 ).
Thomson indicates that this popular memory approach suggests a particular structure for writing up of the interviews. The write up should highlight the interactions between experiences, memories, identities and the legend and show how these interactions have changed over time. In the story Thomson focuses on three main periods of the ANZAC experience and narratives: during wartime, during the post-war period and in the 1980's and 1990's.
In writing the memory biographies, for the most part Thomson used the chronological approach "noting where the stories I used as evidence for past meanings were redolent with retrospectivity. I broke the chronological flow at certain key points to explore the layers of meaning in the memory of a particularly significant experience"
(pg. 239). An excerpt from one of the stories illustrates the writing of the memory biography.
Bill's various accounts of his enlistment in 1915 show that while he tried to compose an affinning memory of the event, his remembering was influenced by other, public accounts. In our first interview, Bill's initial explanation for joining up was that it was a very personal, spur of the moment decision:
Oh, Jdon't know. Jthink it came suddenly. Jused to pick up the papers and see fellows that Jknew and mates that had been knocked over{. ..} One of my very good mates, he was a bit older than J was, but he was a lovely fellow and J read in the paper one morning where he's got knocked, so I thought, 'Well, I'll go and have a go at it. '
In response to a follow-up question he denied that he felt under any pressure to enlist, yet at the time and subsequently there were a number of public influences that affected his decision and how he remembered it. (pg. 82)
An integral part of these stories relates to analytical comments regarding remembering and the composure of the memory. This approach increases our understanding of composure of memory but can "reduce understanding of an
individual's life as a whole"(Thomson 1995: 239).
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot uses narrative work to capture goodness in institutions and individuals. Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983) was aware that social scientists tended "to focus on what is wrong rather than search for what is right, to describe pathology rather than health." In developing the stories (which Lawrence-Lightfoot calls portraits) of schools or African-Americans of privilege, Lawrence-Lightfoot looks for goodness.
These stories then illuminate more general phenomena. InJ've Known Rivers(1995) the theoretical orientation guiding the development of the story is the exploration of the dynamic intersection of class, race, culture and gender. InThe Good High School (1983) the stories "seeks to capture the culture of these schools, their essential features, their generic culture, the values that define their curricular goals and institutional structures and their individual styles and rituals." (pg. 8). The audience of these stories is both people inside and outside the academy. Therefore the challenge in writing these stories is that they should be both readable and trustworthy.
Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997) indicates that the essential features of developing portraits are: context (includes physical setting, references to the history and culture of the setting); voice (the voice of the researcher is everywhere); relationship (relationship between the researcher and the respondent is at the centre of portraiture) and emergent themes (the portraitist works to develop a process and a structure for categorising the data, for tracing patterns and for capturing and constructing themes). The portraitist then develops the story. In the development of the story the portraitist invokes artistic principles.
In writing the stories of either the individual or the institution Lawrence-Lightfoot looks at the data and searches for coherence, for bringing order to phenomena that people may experience as chaotic or unrelated. Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983) explains the analytical process. The process involves reading the data several times and offering tentative hypotheses and interpretations. When there were contradictions, the researcher would search for the roots of dissonance. When there were repetitions and elaboration of similar ideas the researcher would underscore them and find traces of the central themes in other contexts. Slowly the story would begin to emerge, filled in over time with detailed evidence, subtle description and multiple perspectives. At some point there is a shift from searching for evidence and distilling themes to one of composition and aesthetic form, from finding the plot to telling the story. During the transition from empiricism to aesthetics, the researcher needs to take care not to distort the material. An excerpt from the crafted story inI've· Known Rivers.
Itis hard to know how to give shape to this fmal session, how to give words to the sadness we both feel. I am haunted by Toni's bereft feeling that her mother has left her so little. I remember that one of the most precious legacies left by her mother has been the memory of her wonderful voice.
Toni has said repeatedly, "Mymother's power was in her voice. .. She meant this in two ways, I think. First, she has always known her mother as outspoken, forceful in her honesty. Her mother
always possessed the voice of power, clarity and confrontation. "My mother always said what she thought. She was not like me. She was not worried about other people's feelings." (pg. 285)
The power of the stories crafted by Lawrence-Lightfoot is in both the content and the artistic presentation.
In Facing the Nation: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa, Tim Keegan (1988) explores the "rural experiences of black South Africans living on the highveld during the course of the century." Field workers in the Oral Documentation Project at the University of Witwatersrand collected these life stories. These stories were then transcribed and translated. The purpose for collecting and documenting these histories is to understand the past more fully. In reconstructing the past and writing these stories, Keegan supplements oral testimony with other, more formal, written sources of evidence. This evidence provides the "larger context of public events, of political and constitutional, economic an institutional developments, in relation to which ordinary people lead their lives" (pg. 161). In the process of writing the story, the historians' skills are used to bring together the diverse pieces of evidence. In these portraits the author tried to give meaning and context to the life stories told by the respondents using evidence and conclusions drawn from other research. Anexcerpt from The Life Story of Ndae Makume developed using oral testimony, which has been supplemented by other evidence, is:
Thus in 1913 the Makumes reaped their crop, gathered their livestock, their goods and chattels, loaded their ox wagons and left Rabie's employ. As was the case throughout the arable districts in the winter of 1913, many of the tenants in the neighbourhood were also turned off the land rather than submit to the demands and exactions of landlords. 'They started scattering in all directions,' recalls Ndae. As the Makumes trekked to their new farm, Kleinfontein, they came across many others on the road, moving from one tenancy to another; but unlike the Makumes, most of them were unlikely to find better terms that those they had left behind. (pg.11&12)
In the stories developed by Keegan, it is the researcher's voice that is the most prominent.