Becoming Your Own Historian
Several years ago, Cole Arthur Riley began interviewing her family members as a way of preserving memories and history.
As a Black woman married to a white man, she had become intimately aware of the differences between the presence of his family heirlooms and written histories and the relative scarcity of her own.
She started to think: "what artifacts are left from my family?"
This question led her to begin to "excavate," as she says, and preserve as many memories as she could. She started interviewing family members, which unearthed a potent mixture of her own grief and hesitancies and longings and self-knowledge.
In an interview with Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant, she shares, "I also think just the practice of preserving memory has shown me something about myself:
What histories am I keen to keep?
And what histories would I rather remain hidden?
[What histories] am I less inclined to draw into?"
She says, "I learned something about myself just in the practice of becoming my own historian."
📝 Questions:
What histories or life stories are you keen to keep?
Which ones would you prefer remain hidden or feel less inclined to draw into?
🧰 Resources:
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