When I transcribed my interview with Dutch choir conductor Edith Casteleyn, I was struck with the multilingualism in her narrative. Her frequent use of English made sense: since the 1980s, Casteleyn had accompanied a Black gospel choir during their weekly services at the United States Airforce in Soesterberg (Maultsby 2013). Casteleyn immersed herself in their music: first as a pianist, later as their official conductor. Over the years, she became a household name in the Black gospel scene. Today, she is the only white woman to be included in a permanent exhibition of the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville .
To me, a memory scholar researching cultural appropriation debates about African-American music, her biography provoked endless questions. How had she, a white woman, navigated the performance of African-American music across cultures and ethnicities? Casteleyn’s living room was a testimony to her transcultural career: piles of sheet music, a piano, posters of past concerts she’d conducted across countries (often using the term “Black” in their titles), a picture of her and her all-Black choir—Casteleyn sticking out, yet also blending in. For me, the picture seemed to exemplify Casteleyn’s position in the gospel scene. As did her elaboration on the difference between white and Black gospel: there we sat, in Soest, one white woman showing another white woman how Black gospel ought to be sung.
But her deep connection to this typical African-American genre, and the intriguing tension between that very genre and her own identity, didn’t just come out in her impromptu living room performance of Black gospel songs, or through the memorabilia that covered her walls. Sat at my desk, jotting down her English-interspersed-Dutch while listening to my phone recording of the interview, I realized: this tension is also a profound part of her language. While the interview was held in Dutch, memories were recounted partially in English: “Ik had een lady and she said,” “het was during Black history month”, and “de Amerikanen vroegen me, in 1982, far away.” Where a Dutch person might have opted for a “toch?” or a “hè?”, Casteleyn closed her sentences with a “right?”.
While translating my Dutch transcript to English, I was confronted with the question: What do I do with this multilingualism? But this question—which likely could have been addressed by incorporating some sort of footnote detailing my linguistic considerations—soon made way for another one: How and in what languages are memories that are primarily born out of intercultural and non-native encounters narrated? And from that question, another followed: Why had I conducted this interview—about Casteleyn’s work in the international gospel scene—in Dutch in the first place?
The questions brought back something I’d read in Ritchie (2014): “[I]nterviewers need to be sensitive to the diversity of social and cultural experiences, and to the implications of race, gender, class, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexual orientation. They should encourage interviewees to respond in their own style and language.” So what language should I have encouraged? What was Casteleyn’s “own” style or language, when her place in the gospel scene was an ambiguous one? Was Dutch the proper “style” or “language” for transmitting Casteleyn’s experience, considering that her incidental usage of American-English also reflected the situatedness of these memories in a mostly international context? How had I, as interviewer, per Portelli (2009), affected the transmission of Casteleyn’s memories, by assuming Dutch would be the best language through which to remember them? And what had been the basis of that assumption, besides the fact that we were both Dutch?
Rather than leading to concrete answers (and, frankly, I don’t think there are any), these questions forced me to reflect on the assumed self-evidence of language/translation in the transfer of memory within my scholarly field at large. Too often, as literary memory scholar Eneken Laanes (2021) has argued, memory scholars think of the linguistic mediation of memory as “a smooth process where nothing is lost and all is gained.” While I had been aware that, in cultural memory studies, the role of language in remembrance is too often sidelined, oral history, as a method, gave me a first-hand experience with these issues. Oral history explicitly implicated me in the (re)mediation of memories—or, following Portelli (2009), made me part of the source. Laanes’ words kept popping up in the back of my mind when (re)mediating Casteleyn; English, so it seemed, was not just a medium, but a profound part of the memory.
Bibliography
Laanes, Eneken. 2021. “Born Translated Memories: Transcultural Memorial Forms, Domestication and Foreignisation.” Memory Studies 14 (1): 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020976459.
Maultsby, Portia K. 2013. “Featured Collection: Black Gospel Music in the Netherlands.” Liner Notes 18: 4–5.
Portelli, Alessandro. 2009. “What Makes Oral History Different?” In Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans., edited by L.D. Giudice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ritchie, Donald A. 2014. Doing Oral History. Oxford University Press.