The Archive Remembers: to a Future Narrative Engineer

What an old list of names taught me about memory, disappearance, and why we must preserve knowledge before it is too late

Today, I went looking for people.

Instead, I found a reason to continue this work.

It started with something very practical.

We are preparing for an event in Verona on the 16th and 17th of October, and we want to bring people together around the work we are doing with Saving the Burning Library.

So I thought about the people we have worked with over the years.

I went back to some of our old projects.

I started looking through names.

People we interviewed.

People who opened their doors to us.

Students.

Teachers.

Refugees.

Business owners.

Artists.

Community leaders.

Social workers.

Researchers.

People who allowed us, sometimes many years ago, to sit in front of them with a camera or a recorder and ask:

Tell me about your experience.

My intention was simple.

Find them.

Reconnect.

Tell them what has happened to the work they once participated in.

Invite them to Verona.

But something happened as I went through those names.

I started searching for people I had not spoken with for years.

Some telephone numbers were no longer useful.

Some people appeared to have moved.

Some had changed positions.

Some could still be found online.

Others were much more difficult to trace.

The students we interviewed all those years ago are no longer those students.

People we met as refugees and asylum seekers have continued with their lives. Some may have relocated. Some may have established themselves somewhere else. For many, I simply do not know.

And that distinction matters.

As a Narrative Engineer, we must never turn what we do not know into something we claim to know.

If I cannot find someone, it does not mean that person has disappeared.

It means only that I can no longer easily reach them through the network that once connected us.

But even that tells us something.

A community is not a photograph.

A community moves.

People arrive.

People leave.

Children become adults.

Businesses open and close.

Neighbourhoods change.

Telephone numbers disappear.

Friendships weaken.

Institutions change leadership.

Families migrate.

People return home.

People cross borders again.

And eventually, inevitably, people die.

That was when this exercise stopped being about filling a hall for me.

I was looking at the reason we are building Saving the Burning Library.

I could still hear them

Across the wider body of work I have done over the years, I have conducted more than 1,500 interviews.

And among those people, I already know of at least five people I interviewed who have since died.

Five.

There may be others I do not know about.

But these five I know.

I cannot telephone them.

I cannot send them a message.

I cannot return with another question.

I cannot say:

“Something you said to me ten years ago has become important. Can you explain what you meant?”

That opportunity is gone.

And yet something extraordinary remains.

I can still hear their voices.

I can return to those recordings.

I can hear the pauses.

The laughter.

The emphasis they placed on particular words.

The stories they chose to tell.

The experiences they remembered.

The things they understood about the world from the position in which they lived.

The person is no longer available to me.

But something that person knew has survived.

And today, one sentence came into my mind:

The archive remembers.

The network may lose someone.

The telephone directory may forget them.

The institution may replace them.

The neighbourhood may change.

The social-media account may become silent.

Even our own memories of a person may become less precise with time.

But the archive can remember.

Not perfectly.

An interview can never contain an entire human being.

A photograph cannot contain an entire life.

A documentary cannot contain everything a community knows.

Preservation is always incomplete.

But incomplete preservation is profoundly different from complete disappearance.

What exactly are we losing?

When we speak about a Burning Library, it is easy to imagine an elderly person carrying ancient traditions.

That is certainly part of it.

But I increasingly believe the Burning Library is much larger than that.

The Burning Library can be the woman who has operated a neighbourhood business for thirty years and has learned things about survival that she has never written down.

It can be the migrant who remembers arriving in Verona at a particular moment in the city’s history.

It can be the grandmother who knows why the family does something in a particular way, while everyone else simply follows the tradition.

It can be the craftsperson whose knowledge lives in their hands.

It can be the teacher who has watched generations of children pass through a changing neighbourhood.

It can be the photograph in a drawer that everybody has seen but only one elderly person can still explain.

It can be a language.

• A recipe.
• A song.
• A business practice.
• A migration route.
• A neighbourhood memory.
• A method of healing.
• A way of solving conflict.

A story about a building everybody walks past but nobody remembers.

A mistake from which somebody learned something that could save the next generation twenty years of suffering.

Libraries are burning around us all the time.

Most of them do not produce smoke.

That is why we don’t notice.

A conversation across the Atlantic

Something else happened today.

I was speaking with one of our team members in the Caribbean.

I told her about some of the work we are doing and about my experience interviewing a person in Verona who is around 90 years old.

There is something different about sitting opposite somebody carrying nine decades of life.

You become conscious of time.

Not time as a number on a clock.

Human time.

A person sitting in front of you has seen people arrive and disappear.

They have watched places change.

They remember things that younger people know only as history—or perhaps do not know at all.

And while we were talking, my colleague immediately thought of someone.

A person in Canada who has been instrumental in her own life.

That person is over 90.

And she said she is going to interview them.

Think about that for a moment.

I did not give her a list of people to interview.

I did not tell her:

“Go and find an elderly person.”

I shared an experience.

The experience caused her to look into her own world.

And she recognised a library.

That, to me, is important.

Because perhaps this is how this work must spread.

Not through me travelling around the world trying to interview everybody.

That would be impossible.

Instead, someone in Verona recognises a library.

Someone in Canada recognises a library.

Someone in Lagos recognises a library.

Someone in London recognises a library.

Someone in a village recognises the person everybody goes to when they need to remember.

And they understand:

We should not wait.

A message to the future Narrative Engineer

And this brings me to you.

The future Narrative Engineer.

Perhaps you are listening to this years after I recorded it.

Perhaps Narrative Engineering has become something much more developed by then.

Perhaps you have training, technology and tools that I don’t have today.

But before you learn how to operate the camera, before you learn interviewing techniques, before you learn ONBA, before you learn how to structure evidence or work with the Sovereign Oracle, I want you to answer something much more personal:

Why are you doing this?

Don’t give me the institutional answer.

Don’t tell me the mission statement.

Look inward.

Who is the Burning Library in your own family?

Who is the person whose death would cause everybody to say:

“I wish we had asked her about that”?

Who knows your family’s story?

Who understands your neighbourhood?

Who remembers what existed before you arrived?

Who knows why your community became what it is?

Who has survived something and learned lessons that have never been documented?

Who possesses knowledge that exists nowhere except in memory, experience, practice or relationship?

• Find that person.
• Maybe it is your mother.
• Your father.
• Your grandfather.
• A neighbour.
• A former teacher.
• A business owner.
• A religious leader.
• An immigrant.
• An artist.
• A farmer.
• A mechanic.
• A midwife.

A community organiser.

Or perhaps the library you need to save is not one individual at all.

Perhaps it is an entire generation.

But find your reason.

Because there will be difficult days in this work.

People will refuse interviews.

Someone will promise to meet you and not appear.

You will follow a lead that produces nothing.

Equipment will fail.

Funding will be difficult.

You may spend hours discovering something that becomes only two minutes of a documentary.

And sometimes nobody will understand why you care so much.

Money matters.

Narrative Engineers should be able to earn a livelihood.

Preservation requires equipment, infrastructure, technology, training, travel and professional labour.

We cannot build sustainable knowledge infrastructure by pretending these things cost nothing.

But money cannot be the only reason.

Because there will be moments when the economic reward comes much later than the responsibility.

Payment can sustain the work. Conviction gives the work meaning.

Find your reason

I think I found another part of mine today.

I began the day trying to find people for an event.

I opened an old list.

I searched for names.

And the absence of some of those people taught me something.

The data began speaking back to me.

It reminded me that documenting people is not simply content creation.

An interview may look ordinary on the day you record it.

You put somebody in front of a camera.

You ask questions.

You save the file.

You move on.

Ten years later, that same recording can mean something completely different.

Because time changes the value of evidence.

One day, the voice you casually recorded may become a voice nobody can record again.

And that is why I believe we must learn to recognise the value of knowledge before loss teaches us its value.

We should not have to wait for somebody to die before deciding their knowledge mattered.

We should not have to wait for a neighbourhood to disappear before documenting how people lived there.

We should not have to wait for a business to close before asking how it survived.

We should not have to wait for a language to have its last speaker before deciding it deserves preservation.

We should not have to wait until all we can say is:

“I wish we had asked.”

Saving the Burning Library is an attempt to ask while we still can.

To listen while someone can still speak.

To preserve while the evidence still exists.

And then to return that knowledge to communities so that preservation does not become extraction, but continuation.

The archive remembers

So this is my message to the future Narrative Engineer.

Look around you.

Not tomorrow.

Today.

Look at your family.

Look at your street.

Look at your neighbourhood.

Look at the people you work with.

Look at the people whose knowledge everybody depends upon but nobody has documented.

And ask yourself:

If this person were no longer available tomorrow, what would become impossible to recover?

Your answer may lead you to your first interview.

It may lead you to an old photograph.

It may lead you to a business.

It may lead you to an elder.

It may lead you back into your own family.

But wherever it leads you, follow the knowledge.

Because people move.

People change.

And eventually, people leave us.

Knowledge that is not preserved can leave with them.

But sometimes, if we arrive in time…

the archive remembers.