“They say that history repeats itself,
but history is only his story. You haven’t heard my story yet. My story is different from his story. My story is not
a part of history. Because, history repeats itself. My story is endless. It
never repeats itself.” – Sun Ra, 1981
One
of my favorite quotes on history is non-academic in its origin, and is rather
attributed to the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra. While Ra claimed to be from
Saturn, he lived his later years in the North Philly neighborhood of
Germantown. If you drive past his old house, you will see ancient Egyptian
symbols and cosmic images of space painted along the house’s exterior. Although
Sun Ra has long since passed, I believe members of his old band still live in
the house. I listened to a lot of Ra’s music over the summer and even drove by
his old compound once or twice, so it makes sense that this quote popped into
my head during the first day of our Archives and Manuscripts class.
I think Sun Ra’s message is in many ways
applicable to the work of the archivist. As discussed in our first meeting, the
archivist must be able to recognize the significance of a document beyond its
original purpose. So, while something like a flyer from the 1930s advertising a
tour of New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood might have originally existed to
let tourists know of a potential city outing, an archivist would recognize the
document’s greater significance. Reading between the lines of the flyer’s
descriptions of such a tour, an archivist might locate the item’s usefulness in
terms of understanding 1930s perceptions of race and urban neighborhoods. In
this sense, an archivist specifically preserves items that enable changing
interpretations of the past to occur.
Yet, there remain two sides to this
issue. Archivists cannot preserve everything and must dispose of certain items.
As we discussed in class, there is a lot that is thrown away. When I first
heard this reality described, I cringed a little bit. It seems to me that an
item’s historical worth is not immediately apparent. For what is useless to one
person’s project might hold the answers to another’s inquiry. In their
determining of which documents might possess historical value and remain worth
preserving, it seems that archivists really play a key role in shaping the
constructions of historical narratives. However, this act is not a malicious
one, but designed to ensure multiple interpretations over an extended period of
time. Some items simply have more historical value than others.
Due to their constant exposure to
historical documents and vast historical knowledge, archivists ensure that
historical interpretations do not repeat themselves by aiming to preserve items
that answer a variety of historical questions. I believe Sun Ra’s estimation of
history to be correct. His story and all other stories remain endless in the ways
that others perceive them, and such perceptions undoubtedly change over time.
It is thanks to the work of the archivist that these changing historical
perceptions continue.
Here is a video of Sun Ra's quote (the quote begins at 0:36):
