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November 14, 2003
The Atlantic Unbound interviews
The current edition of The Atlantic Unbound has a couple of worthwhile interviews.
P J O'Rourke talks about his experience reporting from Kuwait and Iraq earlier this year:
Historian Robert Gildea discusses Marianne in Chains, his book about Vichy France:In this piece, you talk about being in the souk in Kuwait and walking through another small market in Iraq and being called into the empty stores. And in "Letter From Egypt" (September 2002 Atlantic), you describe shopping in another souk, this time in Cairo. Why are these markets so important to the research you do in these countries?
The souk is the great place to do "man on the street" interviews, because the whole way of Middle Eastern shopping is that there's a fair amount of haggling, but there's also a lot of socializing that goes into shopping. It's a great opportunity to eavesdrop on peoples' conversations and to ask people things, in a way that shopping in Europe or America is not. You end up sitting down, you have some coffee, and you talk to the people about various things. It's a little bit like up here in New Hampshire, especially the smaller towns and the smaller stores. Every errand up here, whether you're stopping by the insurance agent or something else, it's always a social call, and you're considered quite rude if you come immediately to the point about why you're there. You've got to ask after their kids, and they've got to ask about yours, and you've got to talk about the weather a little bit before you order any meat at the meat counter. And in the Middle East it's that way times one hundred.
Also, almost invariably when I've been in the Middle East, I've been there at some time when all the tourists and many of the business travelers have been chased out, so it's lonely in the souks. I had a guy drag me into a store in Aqaba in Jordan one time, saying to me - and he meant it, too - "I don't want you to buy anything, I'm just lonely." It was funny, and I sat around in there for about an hour.
It's a pity that the print version of The Atlantic isn't easily available in the UK, because they carry articles like these every month. I'd subscribe in a flat minute.This book draws a lot of its material from oral history, individual interviews with people who lived through the occupation. When you're conducting this kind of research, how do you decide when a person's comments reflect something of larger social significance and when they are just individual anecdotes?
Very often, people pattern what they say on standard accounts. People are quite keen to show that they did a bit of resistance. That can be very minimal, such as the man who told me that when the Germans arrived in his town in 1940, they were throwing cigarettes to the crowd and when one landed next to him, he said he spat on it and stomped on it—and that was an act of resistance. In fact, that might have been the only thing he did that could be categorized as resistance, but he was keen to show that he did something.
Then people tend to tell their own stories. I started with a clipboard of questions, but that was hopeless. I'd ask, "What did you think of the mayor of your town in 1942?" They probably couldn't remember who he was. But if I'd just say, "Tell me your story of what it was like under the occupation," they'd start in on some event that really traumatized or affected them. Then I'd take it from there. I suppose the easiest thing to do was to try and figure out if they were making up a story because they wanted to come across as good French persons. When they sort of got things wrong, I figured there was maybe more to it than the nice story they were trying to tell me.
Posted by John at November 14, 2003 11:05 PM
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