Sediments of Memory: Wendy Tai, Daisuke Tajima, Emily Kueis

The experience of a thing, our recollection of the same, and its consequent narration are necessarily incongruent. In her 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience,” American historian Joan W. Scott examines the reading and interpretation of oral histories and suggests that they should be read as literary texts subject to interpretation rather than static bits of objective information. Scott’s argument rests on the premise that our experiences and how we feel about them change as we do. Her claim allows us to consider the formation of memory—vis a vis language—as a sedimentary process, such that the original experience is inevitably inaccessible, buried under layers of bedrock where each layer is formed in a diachronic way: as we evolve, so do our recollections.

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