Editor’s Corner
May 6, 2008
Narratives not-from-here
By
Constance Hale and Andrew Meldrum
After several reporters sent us intriguing stories from abroad, we realized that trying to pick one stellar piece of narrative foreign reporting was as impossible as picking one piece of fruit from a Paris street market. We weren’t just trying to compare apples and oranges—we were trying to compare bananas, mangoes, and pomegranates, too.
So, extending the metaphor, we decided to offer up a basket of fruits this month, rather than one shiny specimen.
The stories we selected fulfill the seemingly contradictory goals of foreign correspondence: first, describing a faraway place with enough vivid detail so as to deliver the exotic—showing readers how it feels to be in a distant and quite particular place; second, describing a faraway place with enough depth and insight to bring it close to the reader—to reveal the universality of the human experience.
“Viewing Life from the Roof” was sent to us recently by Jeffrey Fleishman. Based in Cairo and filing frequently for the Los Angeles Times, Fleishman allows his stories to unfold more as vignettes than as grand narratives—he chooses a tight focus and fills his frame with exquisitely captured characters and scenes. “Cairo is a city of rooftops,” he tells us in this month’s selection, which ran at 1,900 words. Half of Egypt’s population of 73 million is terribly poor, Fleishman adds, and in the ancient capital the poor often raise families “on rooftops and in parks, graveyards, median strips and shanties hammered along the Nile.” In his eloquent writing style, Fleishman allows us into the lives of these millions through the person of Alia Qotb—69, haunted by memories and regrets, and always alert to the “world [that] is going on below her.”
David Samuels works within a larger frame. When he stumbled across a Reuters article about a series of incidents where young people had gassed themselves to death in cars outside Tokyo, he says, he began to see that “the subject of anonymous group suicide might be an interesting way to think about suicide bombing in the Arab countries and the wider Muslim world.” “Let’s Die Together,” which ran in The Atlantic, doesn’t lack stark intimacy (“the black shadow in my heart remains,” one person admits online; “when we get older, nobody stops us”), but it links the Japanese phenomenon with guerrilla movements such as the Palestinian national movement and the Tamil Tigers. Samuels wrote in an email to us that after 9/11, he began to find himself “pulled towards finding a language and stories that would help explain America to the world and the world to America.” His inventive narrative succeeds in bringing “suicide-positive cultures” to us.
Samuels had three months in Japan to research his story—and just under 5,000 words in which to tell it. Many of us, of course, never get the luxury of such time and space. So we also wanted to call attention to a foreign story reported and written within the span of eight hours. The Guardian’s Xan Rice is based in Nairobi, and when the aftermath of elections in Kenya turned violent, he was dispatched to cover the ethnic strife. Rice filed a news account about the torching of a church in western Kenya, in which dozens of people from President Mwai Kibaki’s ethnic group perished. But Rice also filed a sidebar, in which he visits the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, with smoke still rising from embers, among which are strewn a child’s shoe, a woman’s sandal, a bible, and corncobs that were to be cooked for lunch. He talks to Kikuyu victims (“They were from around here and even knew some of our names. We kneeled down and surrendered. It was quiet, as we were all praying. We knew this was the end.”). He tracks down Kalenjin villagers who were part of the rampage (“They were not worshipping in the church. They were hiding. That makes it a cave not a church.”) He even cites a text message from a horrified Kalenjin bystander fearing reprisals (“No transport. Road blocked with stons. Elctrisity disconnected. No car fuel. House still baning and robary. We r so scared.”)
Powerful stuff.