Features

Suruç, Turkey

The War within the War

Best of In The Fray 2015. We had come to the Syrian border to help refugees from Kobani, a Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State. In this corner of the country's unending civil war, another kind of conflict was being waged—for a city, a people, and a young democratic movement.

Jo Magpie
June 2, 2015

Refugee camp in Suruç — A camp in Suruç for refugees fleeing Kobani, a nearby Kurdish city under assault from the Islamic State.

We stand on an empty highway in South Turkey, twenty kilometers from the Syrian border. The dusty road leads to the city of Suruç. My husband and I are hitchhiking into a war zone, or at least the fringes of one. My heart thumps in my chest.

A yellow truck appears like a mirage in the distance. I stick out my thumb and the driver stops abruptly, kicking up a cloud of grey dust.

“Suruç?” he asks.

“Evet—yes,” I agree.

“Yardım?—to help?”

“Evet.”

The driver hands me his business card. He is none other than Suruç’s mayor, driving aid and supplies into the city himself. This is the first of many clues: everyone here is involved in the war effort.

It’s December 26, Boxing Day. Activists and volunteers have descended on Suruç to support Kurdish forces across the border in their fight against the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS. In the parts of Syria and Iraq that it now controls, ISIS has persecuted and displaced minorities. The victims of its highly publicized atrocities—rapes, forced marriages, beheadings, crucifixions—have included the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group.

Through the truck window, a compound with rows of identical green-grey semicircle tents comes into view. “Çadır kent—tent city,” the Mayor tells me, pointing. We pass a second camp shortly afterward. A sign announces our arrival: “Suruç: Population 101,000.”

The population is now more than twice what it says on the sign. An estimated 150,000 people—mostly Kurds—have fled to Suruç from Kobani, another Kurdish city that is inside Syria. ISIS has taken over part of Kobani, trapping those civilians who remain between its militants and the closed Turkish border.

The Mayor asks where we want to go. I have scribbled instructions from a friend of a friend I met in Diyarbakir. It says we should report to Suruç’s city hall.

In the aftermath of World War I, the French and British divvied up a large swath of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, splitting up the Kurdish people across the region’s redrawn national boundaries. Since then, the Kurds have found themselves unwelcome throughout the Middle East, the targets of massacres, chemical attacks, and state-perpetrated “disappearances,” along with political repression and discrimination.

The ongoing rebellion against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, however, has loosened the hold that Damascus had on the country’s Kurdish minority. In 2012, the Kurdish inhabitants of northern Syria took advantage of Assad’s retreating forces, declaring their region autonomous and naming it Rojava—Kurdish for “western.” (Rojava is the western part of what many Kurds consider to be Kurdistan, a culturally defined region that also includes large parts of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and northern Iraq.)

The war has also brought the Kurds unprecedented news coverage. After the Islamic State began its siege of Kobani, the media called attention to not only the waves of Kurdish refugees but also the strength of Kurdish fighters—especially the women fighters—and the progressive stances that Kurdish political parties have taken on issues such as feminism and minority rights.

A few of the more astute commentators also mentioned the innovative system of governance—democratic self-management—being tested in Rojava. Equal rights are enshrined in the Rojava system. There are three official languages. Every canton is administered by three leaders—in theory, a Kurd, an Arab, and a Christian—with at least one of the three a woman. In practice, of course, most of these ideas have not filtered all the way down. Many Kurds still fight for a country of their own. But many others just want to coexist peacefully with other Syrians.

It strikes me how very normal Suruç looks, despite the war being only ten kilometers away. Shops, restaurants, and teahouses are open. People bustle about the streets. Men wearing red and white kaffiyeh on their heads loiter around the main square, chatting, smoking, and haggling with the merchants.

We saunter into the city hall shouldering our huge backpacks, tired and smelly after days spent hitchhiking around the frozen edges of Anatolia. The few men who stroll past us in the narrow corridors greet us formally despite our disheveled appearance.

I explain to one of them that we have come to help. Some of our friends have been here before, and they advised us to come to the city hall when we arrived, I say.

A man with a characteristically Turkish mustache points to some benches in the hallway. We sit. Soon tea arrives. Another man ushers us into a small office, where I repeat the same halting explanation to yet another man behind a desk. He nods politely, thanks us for coming, and directs us to the city’s cultural center, now a base of operations for the constant stream of activists and volunteers coming through the town. There, a girl who speaks good English points us to the distribution center down the road. She says they need help there now.

The distribution center is a converted wedding salon, filled with stacks of aid packages from around the globe. Groups of volunteers scoop the contents of big sacks into small clear bags, which are then flung onto growing mountains of red lentils, rice, sugar, and chickpeas.

Distribution center for refugees in Suruç — At Suruç’s distribution center, volunteers prepare packages of food for the Kobani refugees.

We are warmly greeted by people who speak to us in Turkish, English, and German. Someone hands me a melting plastic cup of tea. “Parti mi?” a girl asks in Turkish. She wants to know if I’m here with a “party,” meaning any of the Kurdish political parties. “No,” I tell her, “just with my husband. You?”

“Evet, parti,” she nods, smiling. She demonstrates how one of us should hold the bags open while the other shovels lentils from the big sack into the smaller one—“not too much, like this, see?”—and then ties it and tosses it onto the stack.

This food, I am told, will go to refugees from Kobane who are living in residential buildings around the city.

The activity here is both methodical and chaotic. Nothing seems to run on a timetable, and people work when they feel like it. Nobody is visibly keeping track of who’s doing what or when. But somehow, everything just gets done.

Every ten minutes, someone asks if I want tea. One man in particular seems very concerned that I drink enough of it. He brings a steaming thermos and small stack of plastic cups around regularly.

Around 7 p.m. a bell rings. We follow the people wandering outside to a van that has just arrived. Two men in the back scoop lentil stew from an enormous metal pot onto flimsy plastic plates.

That night we drive out to Mahser, the last village before the Syrian border—and the raging war beyond it.

A sign says “Çaykara.” The village’s local name is Mahser, but officially it is Çaykara—like all Kurdish settlements in Turkey, it had its name changed during the previous century as part of the government-enforced Turkification process.

We are now a mere kilometer from Syria. In the village, I spot a friend. She is perched on a block of concrete where someone has painted the word “Kobani” in the Kurdish colors of green, red, and yellow. My friend, like myself, is something of a nomad. She has a long-held interest in Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, and has been writing a blog about the region for some years under the pseudonym “Iris.”

Iris is watching the Kobani skyline, just visible in the distance. “We always meet in interesting places,” I tell her, just as a fiery mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon, accompanied by a mighty boom. My heart drops through the floor.

When they hear us speaking English, a crowd of men gather and begin firing questions. Iris speaks Turkish more or less fluently and has a working knowledge of Kurdish. I let her do the talking.

We’re invited to drink tea by some of the men. We follow them through the village and enter a small room where about fifteen men sit on the floor. They each stand to greet us, and motion for us to sit.

“Parti mi?” Iris asks.

All the men around us nod slowly. Iris points to a sign on the wall advertising the HDP—the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a Kurdish left-wing political party in Turkey. “HDP?”

The man closest to us looks at her. “Actually, we are all PKK,” he says.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a notorious Kurdish political organization. From 1984 to 1999, the party fought an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdistan within Turkish territory. Since the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, and his subsequent shift in political views, the organization has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots and recast itself as a nonhierarchical social movement working on behalf of autonomy and rights for all minorities. Despite its more moderate approach in recent years, the PKK remains on the Turkish, EU, and US terrorist lists.

Iris decides this is a fantastic time to quiz the men about Ocalan, who is still the party’s leader—and still inside a Turkish island prison somewhere in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years Ocalan has come out in favor of environmental protection, gender equality, and rights for LGBT and ethnic minorities. So what explains the discrepancy, Iris asks, between those progressive views and what she’s seeing on the ground—nonrecyclable plastic dishes, women doing most of the housework, entrenched patriarchal views?

The man nearest us nods slowly, politely considering this criticism. “You know,” he says, “these things take time.”

It’s 10 a.m. sharp. Men, women, and children gather by the line of red tape that separates the village from a field—the only thing between them and the Kalashnikov fire echoing in the distance.

A semicircle forms and quickly expands. This is the daily demonstration, a show of solidarity with the PKK and YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia) forces fighting right across the border. “Freedom to Kurdistan! Freedom to Kobani!” the crowd shouts in unison. “We are PKK, PKK is us! We are YPG, YPG is us!”

Demonstration in Mahser — In Mahser, a crowd gathers near Turkey’s border with Syria, rallying in support of Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State a short distance away.

The crowd goes on to recite a string of other well-rehearsed slogans that I can neither understand nor follow. After they’ve run out of chants, they extend their well-wishes to the fighters and, at the very end, to Apo—their affectionate nickname for Ocalan.

I hear gunfire ricochet through the streets beyond the field. What can it be like over there? I’ve heard that around 7,000 civilians chose to stay in the city when the Islamic State began its assault.

I meet a woman just before leaving Mahser. She’s from Kobani and doesn’t speak Turkish, but somehow we’re able to communicate through basic words and gestures. The woman tells me she has three sons fighting in Kobani. Her eyes remain fixed on the hazy outline of the city, as if she hopes to catch sight of them.

While I watched the war from across the field, Italian journalist Francesca Borri was trying to escape it.

Several days earlier, Francesca had been smuggled over the Syrian border into Kobani. She had left after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State. “The point is not getting in, as usual,” Francesca tells me when we meet up in Suruç. “The point is getting out.” She says she was refused reentry into Turkey by Turkish border guards, who told her, “No, no, you went to Kobani. You have Kurdish friends, stay with them!”

I ask her about the civilians inside the city she just left. So far, they’re doing alright, she says: the Kurdish fighters look after them, and they are staying in their own homes on one side of the city. Around half are children. “I mean, of course, it’s a war,” Francesca says. “Kobani isn’t Paris. But I would say that compared to other wars, it’s a good situation for civilians.”

Francesca describes three levels of fighting inside Kobani—Kalashnikov fire exchanged on the frontline, heavy artillery shells lobbed into the city by the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi forces who have entered Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State), and aerial bombardment by the US-led coalition. “The battle is mortar fire and rocket fire from one extreme to the other of the city, so you just stay in the middle—and if you’re lucky, nothing is dropped on your head.”

Francesca is a seasoned war correspondent, having spent much of the last two and a half years reporting on Syria. To her, the war raging in Kobani is “a war within a war”—a war for the future Kurdistan wedged into the sprawling and endless conflict in Syria.

In Mahser, the sound of gunfire was constant. Back in Suruç, I feel safe and far from the fighting. Inside the cultural center, people sit in small groups and converse in a mélange of languages: Kurmanji, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, English. Many are Kurds from other parts of Turkey. Some are members of the diaspora who grew up in European countries such as Germany or Switzerland.

Then there is Darlene. Originally from Ireland, Darlene O’Carroll is currently studying in Copenhagen. She has come to Suruç for her Christmas holiday.

Darlene tells me she decided to make the trip after watching news footage of the devastation in Kobani. “When I should have been working, I was looking at all the images. There were a few that just kind of pulled at my heartstrings.”

On Darlene’s first day in the city, a Kurdish man from Iran showed her around. “This was my first shock,” she says. “He’s Mormon. His family were executed by the Iranian government. His uncle sent him to India to study IT, and when he came back, he worked for a cable company, and he had his own store….” Darlene pauses for a moment. “His plan is to finish up here … and then go to Kobani to fight. I asked him, ‘How long are you staying?’ And he just said, ‘Until I die.’ It was like … ‘Until I finish this cup of tea …’” Darlene shakes her head. “It probably won’t hit me fully until I go back to Denmark.”

Since she arrived, Darlene has been helping with wiring electricity in the camps. She also works with a Kurdish theater group from Istanbul that gives refugee children here a creative outlet to express themselves through improvisation and roleplaying.

Today, Darlene has been invited to join a daf workshop in a camp at the edge of the city. (A daf is a large frame drum, popular throughout the Middle East.) I tag along.

A group of children, mostly young teenage and preteen girls, fill one of the tents. The walls are decorated with pictures of Kurdish musicians, drawings of animals, and the word “Kobani” drawn neatly in pastel colors.

One of the youngest girls can say a few words of English. When we answer her questions, the other children’s eyes grow wide. They prod her to ask us more.

Initially camera shy, the children slowly get used to our presence. One of the two boys is a master daf player and models for my camera. Before long, some of the younger girls are posing too and taking pictures of each other.

Daf Workshop — A *daf* drum workshop at a refugee camp in Suruç.

Later, I will read that there are 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey—half of them children.

Later that night, Iris and I are walking the dark and dusty streets of Suruç when we hear the murmurs of a thumping rhythm carried on the wind. Iris knows exactly what it is—”A wedding!”

We follow the beat, which soon becomes a cacophony of drums and whoops. We turn a corner and find a hundred people dancing in a winding circle across the street. Young boys dash between legs. A man fires a shotgun repeatedly into the air, while another holds fireworks in his bare hands and shoots them into the sky. A small circle within the larger circle of dancers carries a man aloft on a chair. It is the groom. His shirt is in disarray, his face smeared with paint. He wears an exhausted grin—Kurdish weddings last three days and nights.

We stand and watch the spectacle until we are noticed. A man who speaks English brings two chairs and sits down to chat with us. A woman serves us tea. Some of the young girls shyly sneak glances at the two foreigners.

I tell Darlene about our adventure later that night. She smiles. “They love seeing people from other countries here—I can really feel that. In the camps, they invite you in for dinner, and they say to you in the shops, ‘You know, if you don’t have a bed to sleep in tonight, you can stay here with us.’ There’s always somebody handing you food, there’s always someone handing you a cup of tea. At nighttime, if you’re cold, they’re always pulling blankets up over you. They really try and look after you.”

It’s our final night in Suruç. My husband and I lie in our tent in a small garden behind the cultural center. It’s the weekend, and dozens of new volunteers have arrived. Both of the center’s visitor rooms and the two heated tents behind us are full, and a group of young Kurdish men are sleeping in the main room.

The ground shakes every so often throughout the night, as the US-led coalition forces drop bombs on Islamic State targets in Kobani. The blasts are not so loud from here, and they would be indistinguishable from the growl of truck motors on the road outside were it not for the quaking earth.

A rumor, reportedly from one of the YPG fighters, says Kobani will be freed in the next two or three days. The prediction turns out to be wrong—about the date, that is. A few weeks later, a man I met in the distribution center sends me pictures of the liberation of Kobani. They show a Kurdish red, green, and yellow flag being raised over a hill overlooking the city, replacing the black Islamic State flag that previously flew there.

Today, the residents of Kobani are slowly beginning to return to their homes. Much of the city remains uninhabitable after months of fighting and destruction. The long rebuilding process is now underway.

Meanwhile, Kurdish forces continue to fight in neighboring areas. Many other communities across Syria and Iraq are still occupied by ISIS.

But Kobani is free. When I saw the photos of its liberation, I imagined the celebrations in the cultural center, and the wild all-night dancing around fires in Mahser. I wish I could have stayed to see it, and I wonder what the future will bring.

Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com

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Tiedoli, Italy

Commentary

A Half-Sentence

A note inscribed in the margin of an ancient book connected me, across an ocean and a century, to a fateful decision.

Peter M. Nardi
April 25, 2015

Small stone church with two spires — The Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Tiedoli.

The musty aroma of mushrooms was everywhere. It was the Fiera del Fungo, a festival of porcini mushrooms held every year in the northern mountain town of Borgo Val di Taro, Italy, and I was here sightseeing with two colleagues of mine. What had lured us was the mushrooms, creatively incorporated into dishes of all kinds—from soup to gelato. But what that smell evoked in me was memories from an ocean away, of my childhood in the Bronx and the times when my grandparents, immigrants from Italy, would excitedly open a package of funghi from the “old country.”

That was my real reason for visiting Italy. I wanted to see the part of the country where my grandparents used to live. The college where I teach happens to have a study-abroad program in the nearby city of Parma, and in 2005, I flew out there and met up with two of the program’s directors. One morning, we drove out to the festival in Borgo Val di Taro, taking a few hours to indulge in the town’s more famous dishes. Then we decided to head into Tiedoli.

My grandfather Pietro had grown up there. A small village nestled on the edge of the Apennines mountains, Tiedoli was not even on our Google map. We drove up a winding road until we came across a tiny, barely legible sign that reassured us we were headed in the right direction. As we drove into Tiedoli, I could make out the double steeples of a church—by far the largest building among the village’s smattering of houses and farms.

I wondered if the church had any records of my grandfather. We walked over to the building, an imposing stone structure topped by a statue of John the Baptist. A priest emerged from the front doors just as we arrived. I asked him if there were documents dating back to the 1880s. He laughed. Their records went back to the 1700s, he said.

The priest quickly found a book with baptismal notices from 1886, the year my grandfather was born. He slowly turned the pages, folio-sized sheets filled with handwritten paragraphs of names, dates, and family information. All of a sudden my grandfather’s name jumped out. There it was, in a baptismal announcement in Latin.

The priest confessed he could not read Latin—“O tempora! O mores!” I wanted to exclaim—but I assured him that between his Italian and my four years of high school Latin, we could probably stumble through the paragraph.

Although we have different middle names, my grandfather, my father, and I share the first name Peter, or Pietro. The name, which means “rock,” goes back to the founding of the Roman church. My grandfather would sometimes remind me that June 29 was our name day—the feast of St. Peter.

Author in front of house door and sign — Standing in front of a house in Tiedoli and a sign with the village’s name.

I have always admired my grandfather. He left Tiedoli to join the carabinieri at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when members of the national police force looked not unlike the figure stamped on the old Galliano liqueur bottle. He was stationed in Rome, and there he learned about the cosmopolitan world outside the farm country where he had grown up.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Pietro left Italy to seek a new life in America. Many decades later, he told me stories from those early years. After passing through Ellis Island, he looked for work in New York. Signs in store windows told Italians not to bother applying for jobs. But my grandfather would not be discouraged. His first gig was sweeping up in a burlesque house, where the pay amounted to whatever coins had been tossed at the dancing girls and left on the floor. Eventually, he worked his way up to becoming the chief room-service waiter at the prestigious Hotel St. Regis, where he served Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, and the silent film star Nita Naldi.

Pietro met my grandmother Celestina in New York’s ethnic neighborhood for northern Italians—what is now the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. As it turned out, she had grown up in a small hill town just twenty miles from Tiedoli. They were married for fifty-two years before she died. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, remaining to the end a smart, self-educated man who loved to read the newspapers.

When my grandfather died in 1975, I was in my late twenties. I realized then how fortunate I’d been to be able to ask him some of the questions I wished I had brought up with my other grandparents before they died.

Baptismal notice in ancient Italian book — My grandfather’s baptismal notice.

According to my grandfather’s August 10 entry in the church’s baptismal records, he had been born the day before, on August 9. The names of his parents—my great-grandparents—were also listed. The entry noted that his father was an orphan with no parents identified. (Back then, these words could have meant that the parents had died, or that the child had been abandoned for being illegitimate.) My grandfather had once told me that it would be difficult to trace our family tree because of his father’s unknown lineage. He often joked about being a possible descendant of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born about fifty miles away, near Busseto, around the same time as my great-grandfather was.

As we were about to close the folio, I noticed a note in the margin next to my grandfather’s entry. The words were written in a different handwriting and ink, and in Italian, not Latin. Went to America 1913, it read.

That’s when the operatic tears started to flow. In those four words lay a major decision in my grandfather’s life. The path he had chosen had taken me, almost a century later, down the road to this village, this church, and this baptismal notice. It had taken my family to another country and another way of life.

In that overwhelming moment, a half-sentence note in the margin connected me to something much larger than myself.

Peter Nardi is a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College. He previously wrote a column for Pacific Standard on critical thinking and has written numerous academic publications on the role of friendship in men’s lives. Site

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Commentary

Fresh and Fetid: Remembrance of Lunches Past

The cool kids had Lunchables and Mondos. I had a neon cooler ripe with the aroma of kimchi.

Sandra Hong
February 21, 2015

Eddie Huang and his mom in front of the supermarket — **In search of Lunchables.** Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) and his mom Jessica (Constance Wu) journey to the supermarket.

“Ugh, what is that? Gross!”

About seven minutes into the pilot episode of ABC’s new comedy series Fresh Off the Boat, eleven-year-old Eddie, the new kid in school, is invited to sit at the cool kids’ table during lunchtime. He’s conscious of making friends, especially the right kind who will ease his entrance into the local social structure. But Eddie quickly blows his first impression when he pulls out a Tupperware container of homemade noodles.

“It’s Chinese food. My mom makes it,” Eddie explains.

“Get it out of here!” the table’s alpha boy yells. “Oh my god, Ying Ming is eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!”

Fresh Off the Boat adapts the memoir of Eddie Huang, chef and owner of Baohaus, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York. Though his recollections were turned into “a cornstarch sitcom,” as Huang claims in an angry Vulture op-ed about his own show, Fresh still highlights an experience that hasn’t been visited on network television in decades: life as an Asian American. Huang spoke with comedian Margaret Cho—whose All-American Girl twenty years ago was the last sitcom to depict an Asian American family—about his doubts whether Hollywood would do justice to his story. “I believe in you,” she told him, “and to be honest, we need this.”

Indeed we do. But I hadn’t realized how much “we” needed this cathartic mainstream exposure until I started watching the show. The scene brought back surprisingly vivid memories of elementary school, its lunchroom hierarchy, and my mom’s cooking. I had accepted these memories as amusing anecdotes, dinner-party fodder. But Huang’s show elevated to comedy an important experience all-too-familiar to many Asian American (and other) kids: the search for a seat in the cafeteria.

My own search began as a fifth-grader in suburban Maryland. As in many school cafeterias, the cool kids sat together. They always seemed to bring brown paper bags with ham or turkey sandwiches on thin, crustless Wonder Bread. They drank out of juice boxes. They snacked on Doritos, Fritos, or treats like Gushers or Fruit by the Foot. The most envied kids had boxes of Lunchables and Mondos (artificially flavored drinks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup), the ultimate beverage of choice.

I found my place lower down the totem pole with a more marginalized and diverse crowd. My best friend Julia, a Jewish girl, had in her packed lunch healthy items like fruit, Yoplait yogurt, pita, hummus, and Ziploc bags of carrot or celery sticks. Rachel usually either brought a lunch in a recycled paper bag or bought from the cafeteria a tray of chocolate milk, soggy canned green beans, tater tots, and chicken nuggets. Another Jewish girl, Aviva, ate latkes and other foods unrecognizable to me. And Shobi’s mom made her incredible pocket sandwiches stuffed with a deliciously aromatic mixture of soft spiced potatoes, onions, and peas. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, these were gently fried with a nice brown crust. I would later learn they were samosas.

One day, my mom packed a doshirak (Korean for a compartmentalized lunchbox) of rice, bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) in an insulated cooler with a mottled neon green-and-orange pattern. The aroma of the kimchi assaulted the noses of my dining companions as soon as I unzipped my lunchbox.

“Ugh, what is that?!”

“It’s Korean food,” I said apologetically.

Mortified, I confronted my mother as soon as I arrived home after school.

“Why did you pack kimchi in my lunch, Mom?” I cried.

“Because I was out of other banchan,” she replied nonchalantly, as though the lack of other Korean side dishes served with every meal was sufficient explanation for her egregious error.

“Why can’t you pack me a normal lunch like the other kids’?”

I was angry with my mother’s lack of understanding. All I wanted was one of those brown paper bags or a box of Lunchables. Not a cooler box of pungent foreign food.

And I wanted better clothes. As in the opening scene of Fresh, my mother also rejected my sartorial choices. Her final judgment: too expensive. I went to school every day in no-brand T-shirts and ill-fitting Mom Jeans, while the most popular girls—Kristen, Ashleigh, and Julie —had closets filled with Limited Too, the preferred retailer of ten-year-old girls. What I would have given to sit with the cool kids in a new Limited Too outfit and laugh while flicking my shiny ponytail.

In retrospect, I wanted to be popular as much as I wanted to belong.

The day after his humiliation in the cafeteria, Eddie dumps his homemade lunch in the trash. When his mother finds out she is upset and baffled. “But you love my food!”

Eddie attempts to articulate the gravity of the situation in a monologue far more effective than my childhood protests. “I need white people lunch!” he tells his mom. “That gets me a seat at the table. And then, you get to change the rules. Represent. Like Nas says . . . I got big plans. First, get a seat at the table. Second, meet Shaq. Third, change the game. Possibly with the help of Shaq.”

In its inaugural episode, Fresh hit the nail on the end: Eddie does love his mother’s food. That is a part of who he is, his heritage. But he is also mindful of where he is going and who he is expected to be. Despite the difference in details, I related to Eddie’s balancing act and his constant negotiation between how much of his culture to bring to his evolving identity and how much to leave behind.

When I was ten, I didn’t realize that this experience would add to the richness of two of the many ways I identify myself—Asian and American. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to experience the cultural complexity of American society, laid out on the table every lunchtime in our virtual ethnic-food fair, where I tasted my first samosa thanks to Shobi’s mom. And I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have eaten fresh homemade meals without artificial, processed ingredients.

My mom’s love came packed every day, in a brightly colored cooler.

Sandra Hong Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

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Interviews / Photo Essays

Photographer without Borders

Best of In The Fray 2014. Through photography, journalism, and social media, Onnik Krikorian is chipping away at the cross-border hatreds that once escalated into a vicious war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—one that has never really ended. Over the years he has seen little progress toward peace at the highest levels of government, but at the grassroots and among the young, he says, there is hope for change.

Jo Magpie
Photos by Onnik Krikorian
October 15, 2014

When the Soviet Union began to crumble a quarter-century ago, more than a dozen of its former republics gained their independence. But in the South Caucasus—that much troubled limb of land that, depending on your perspective, either connects or divides the Eurasian continent—the withering of Soviet rule meant the escalation of war. In the early nineties, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inhabited mainly by ethnic Armenians but recognized by the United Nations as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict left as many as 25,000 dead and a million displaced from their homes.

Since then, attempts to broker a lasting peace between the two countries have failed. Ethnic hatreds go far back, entangled as they are with Armenian hostility toward Turkic people and anti-Armenian sentiment that fuelled the Armenian genocide conducted a century ago in the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire. Although Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire in 1994, dozens continue to die each year in frontline skirmishes. And the situation has worsened in the past few months, with the fighting intensifying and the threat of a large-scale conflict becoming more palpable. “We expect war every day,” said the commander of Karabakh’s defense forces, Movses Hakobyan, in a recent interview. “And the goal of our army is to stand ready for it.”

Onnik Krikorian is a British-born journalist, photographer, and media consultant who has worked for years to promote peace between the two countries. His independent-media platform Conflict Voices brings together grassroots activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists from around the region, who use social media to challenge stereotypes and encourage dialogue between ordinary citizens of both countries.

erebuni 0008a — “There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, ‘No, no, no!’ And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still.”

Normally, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have very limited contact. Armenia is an oligarchy, rife with electoral fraud and poverty; Azerbaijan is a dictatorship. Each country routinely demonizes the other in the media. Krikorian, whose ethnic surname comes from his Greek Armenian father, emphasizes the need for an alternative view of the conflict, one not swayed by the propaganda on either side. Through his work with Conflict Voices, his role as a consultant and trainer, and his own writing and photography, Krikorian has sought to build that “third narrative” piece by piece, documenting life in communities where ethnic Azeris and Armenians still live and work together peacefully.

Nowadays Krikorian is based in Georgia—a country he describes as something of a neutral ground between its two warring neighbors. He has reported extensively on his city of Tbilisi, including recent pieces on the lives of its street kids and an environmental protest camp in Vake Park devoted to stopping the construction of a hotel. Yet his work as a journalist has also taken him to the farthest corners of the region. His photography tells the stories of the forgotten people of the South Caucasus: those living in remote villages, foraging landfills, or dwelling in institutions.

In The Fray spoke with Krikorian about his days toiling on Web 1.0 websites, his first awkward but breakthrough meeting with young Azerbaijani bloggers, his hopeful pragmatism about the ongoing conflict, and why he thinks photojournalism is, at its heart, about empathy.

How did you first get into photography, and what was the process that led you to the South Caucasus, doing the kind of work that you do?

When I was in my early teens I saw the work of Don McCullin, a British war photographer, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed poverty in the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s. It just blew me away. These images for me represented what the power of photography was. They weren’t just of foreign wars, they were also of poverty in the United Kingdom, for example, and it had a major effect on me. That was what really pushed me into photography.

I started at the Bristol Evening Post doing paste-up and sub-editing. Eventually I decided to move to London. I got a job at the Independent newspaper, but again on the production side of things. It was then that I got to the South Caucasus. The ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh had just been signed, so I went to the picture editor and said, “Listen, there’s a humanitarian-aid flight going to Nagorno-Karabakh. Let me go.” And the guy said, “Sure, okay.”

When I came back, Mosaic—the web browser that popularized the Internet—had been released. I took a look at this web browser and thought, Wow, I understand where this is heading, and I need to do this. So in 1994, I set up my first Internet site, on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I also became involved with the Kurdish Human Rights Project, following a chance meeting with some Kurdish activists in London.

In 1998 they asked if I’d like to go to Armenia to research the human rights situation of the Yezidis, the largest minority in Armenia [a Kurdish religious group now in the news because of their persecution in ISIS-dominated Iraq —ed.], and while there it was obvious that there was very little reliable information coming out of the country. I was struck by the poverty, the corruption, and other issues that no one was really reporting on. So that’s when I decided to write. Because ultimately, I felt that these issues need to get out there. I was offered a job with the United Nations Development Programme and moved to Armenia in 1998. That’s when the sort of work I do now started.

What languages do you speak?

I speak English and some Armenian. I learned Armenian when I was in Armenia. While my dad is ethnic Armenian from Greece, my mum is English. My parents divorced when I was about a year old, so I was never brought up by Armenians, and I never had any contact with Armenians until I was about twenty-one, when I got in touch with my father again. I don’t know what that really says. Maybe I have a different view of how identity works.

This concept of ethnicity in the South Caucasus is a concerning thing. People relate to each other here based on their ethnic group, rather than, you know, “You’ve got the same biological makeup as me.”

Stepanakert children in a van — Children pose in an abandoned van in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, soon after the ceasefire was signed in 1994.

How did Conflict Voices come into being?

In 2007 I was Caucasus regional editor for an organization in the United States called Global Voices. I would put together posts about issues that were underrepresented in the regional and international media from the South Caucasus—for example, about gay rights, women’s rights, or the flawed process of elections in the region. But in 2008, Facebook started to emerge in the region, and then things really got interesting. You could basically form relationships across borders online.

I was still based in Yerevan, Armenia. As the regional editor for Global Voices, how could I do anything referring to Azerbaijan without knowing what was really happening there, or without even being in contact with any Azerbaijanis? It’s just not professional, and it’s definitely not possible to have a clear view of the region if you don’t speak to people from the other countries. So I ventured up to Tbilisi and made contact with some Azerbaijani bloggers at a BarCamp. It was very interesting. You had the Armenian contingent, who would be standing about twenty meters away from the Azerbaijani contingent. They were just totally separate. I thought, Well, this is bloody stupid! So I decided to approach the Azerbaijanis. I had my camera on me. They thought, This looks like a photographer, let’s give him our cameras and ask him to take pictures of us together.

I handed them their cameras, and they said, “Thanks very much, where are you from?” I said. “I’m from England.” They said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Onnik Krikorian.” Deathly silence. But people are people, and there’s always that initial thing when you have stereotypes and whatever. You don’t know how to react in such a situation. After ten seconds, they say, “Thanks, stay in touch. Could you send some of the images you took with your camera?” So I found them on Facebook and made contact with them. Suddenly, a world in Azerbaijan through young Azerbaijanis was opened up to me. And not surprisingly, they weren’t very different from Armenian youth.

They’re not totally preoccupied with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and they have the same interests as any young person does—mainly posting about music, films, university, or whatever. I saw the potential of social media to break down stereotypes and thought, if only a young Armenian in Armenia could see what a young Azerbaijani is doing. They would see that actually each side is not a monster, each side is not perpetually thinking about armed conflict. In that sense, social media was incredibly revolutionary.

I had a foot in the door of Azerbaijani social networks. And as a journalist, the more they saw my work, the more I think they understood that I wasn’t a threat. Trust and relationships were built, and my material was shared. I thought, okay, something really has to be done now, something proper, because this is a very wonderful, personal tool for connecting people.

Has this affected your view of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?

Yes, it’s changed my view of the conflict. Don’t get me wrong—it’s also a really depressing situation, with no solution anywhere in sight. In 1994, when I returned to London from Nagorno-Karabakh, analysts were telling me, “In twenty years, the conflict will be solved.” Well, it’s now twenty years since then, and the conflict is nowhere even close to being solved. I’m not even sure it’ll be close to being resolved in another twenty years.

So do you just envision a continuing standoff, or do you think something else is going to happen?

I think the standoff continuing is, unfortunately, a safe bet. What some are concerned about, however, is whether hostilities will resume. I think the consensus is that no side will start a new war, but that there’s a danger of an accidental war when a skirmish on the border spirals out of control. But despite how depressing the situation looks, I can at least see in the interactions I have with Azerbaijanis and Armenians, that there is a—albeit small—group of progressive, open-minded people on both sides.

They communicate with each other, and some meet face-to-face. In Georgia, of course, you have ethnic Armenians and Azeris who have absolutely no problem with each other at all.

You have now been based in Georgia for two years. Was this a tactical decision?

Georgia is very different from Armenia. There’s a more liberal and freer environment here. I’d been visiting since 1999, and even then—when it was a failed state, when it was criminal, when there were problems with electricity—there was something about Tbilisi that I really loved. Yes, I knew all the problems, and it was inconceivable that the Rose Revolution would happen and things would start going in the right direction. There was something I liked about the place, and I always knew I’d probably end up here. My Armenia-Azerbaijan work is another reason. This is the center of the South Caucasus, the place where everyone can intermingle.

It’s difficult for Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan to get into Armenia, and it’s even harder for Armenians to go to Azerbaijan. It’s a horrible conflict and people don’t mix. People-to-people contact is an incredibly important—if not the most important—component of reconciling differences and finding a peaceful solution. And it’s the one thing that the citizens of both countries are prevented from doing—except in Georgia. There are Armenians from Armenia and Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan mixing here. Not thousands, but it does happen.

I think this is the strength of Georgia. It’s always been the heart and soul of the South Caucasus.

Tsopi villagers — Ethnic Armenians in the Georgian village of Tsopi. Situated close to the country’s border with Armenia and Azerbaijan, the village is 70 percent ethnic Azeri. The rest of the villagers are ethnic Armenian. Integrated villages like Tsopi challenge the notion that the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is merely an ethnic one.

I remember reading your articles about Tsopi, the Georgian village co-inhabited by ethnic Azeris and Armenians, and about the Azeri-Armenian teahouse in Tbilisi.

You know, you have this in Georgia. But when you have really intense nationalism and propaganda in Armenia and Azerbaijan, both sides cannot see eye to eye or find any common ground. Some would argue this is by design. Both governments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because it allows them to cling onto power. They’ve come to power on the back of the Karabakh conflict, and presidents have lost power on the back of it, too. These are the things that have defined the leadership in both countries. But there are alternative voices emerging, and that’s the most important thing for me. Ten years ago these alternative voices didn’t have a space, online or off, but now you have alternative media outlets in both countries. I would even argue that despite there being more anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan than anti-Azeri sentiment in Armenia, there’s an even larger group of alternative young Azeris who are more open-minded than their counterparts in Armenia.

There could be very many reasons for this. It could be because there’s a more oppressive regime there. But the youth movements, the alternative voices in Azerbaijan are incredibly impressive—and they face the greatest risks in the entire South Caucasus for what they’re doing.

You’ve covered a lot of different stories around Armenians and Azeris living together, but also around social movements in Georgia—like the Vake Park protests—as well as street kids in Tbilisi, and institutions and asylums. How do you decide which stories you’re going to cover?

I stumble upon something and see there’s something wrong and that no one is covering it. Actually, the problem of vulnerable children in residential care started in Armenia, as part of a big project I did on poverty in Armenia. There’s a lot of poverty. I saw this and I was very shocked by it. I worked with organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], and that took me into the issue of the institutionalization of children. In 2007 I came to Georgia to look at the situation here. They had the process of de-institutionalization, so it was an interesting contrast.

Vake Park was an impressive display of a non-politically partisan social movement that managed to attract the involvement of everyone. I’m used to movements in Armenia being politicized, and for me that’s not the way you achieve social change. Maybe it’s a part of it, but you need grassroots nonpoliticized movements. Vake Park is still going on, the hotel has not been constructed, and they’ve still got their camp. It was a pleasure to document something like that, as well as an interesting story.

The street kids project is ongoing. There’s a lot of kids on the streets of Tbilisi. These kids are not necessarily sleeping on the streets. The majority do have homes, but are from poor families. They’ve got no choice but to beg on the street from early morning until late at night. The street is not a safe place for a kid. Under UNICEF’s definition, they are still street kids. They’re great kids. I really enjoy hanging out with them.

It seemed that you had a strong rapport with those kids—and, in other stories, with the people who live by salvaging from landfill sites, or who live in small villages like Tsopi and Sissian. How do you create a level of trust that allows you to take such intimate portraits?

You don’t necessarily try to gain their trust. You either have empathy with them, or you don’t. A lot of photojournalism is about empathy with a subject. Unless, of course, it’s a battle raging around you, or police beating protesters—then you don’t really have empathy with the policeman—but for those sorts of social issues, you need empathy. You can tell if someone’s being open with you or not. Also, it takes a lot of work. In some cases you have to spend days for them to get to know you. There were times documenting poverty in Armenia and especially at the landfill sites that I wouldn’t take any photographs, because they didn’t want pictures taken. Why would someone who’s taking rubbish off a landfill want their picture taken? Why would someone who’s living in extreme poverty want their picture taken? Of course they don’t want their picture taken. There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, “No, no, no!” And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still. Maybe that picture works because it shows that. I can’t go into someone’s home and intervene in their lives, then just walk out. I would also go back many times, to see if their lives had improved.

Have there been any improvements?

Erebuni Hostel — A family living in a run-down hostel in the Erebuni district of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. The little girl, Isabella, sits on her mother’s lap. She died a week later, after falling seven floors in an unsafe stairwell.

The poor people, no. There is the building of the homeless shelter, but that’s not really a major success story, because the government, being the Armenian government, decided to build the homeless shelter right on the outskirts of the city, where no homeless person can actually get to. Homeless people stay around markets, and there’s a reason for this, and that’s because homeless people go through the bins later looking for discarded stuff. And buses won’t take homeless people. And taxis, even if they could pay, don’t take homeless people. So it seemed like a success, but in reality it didn’t really do much to achieve a solution.

I guess the main success story for me is the number of Armenians and Azerbaijanis that I’ve managed to connect who would never have done so without me acting as a bridge. You need someone to break the ice and to bridge that divide. I think that’s the most successful thing I’ve managed to do. Of course, the conflict is nowhere near resolution, and however many people I manage to connect, it’s still not a critical mass. I was recently at a closed meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh, and a very bright guy from Azerbaijan simply noted, “There’s no peace movement. There’s no demand for peace. And NGOs, it’s time for you to stop sitting around, patting yourselves on the back, talking about the projects that you’ve done, because they’re really not changing much. There really is no genuine grassroots peace movement in the South Caucasus, and especially Armenia and Azerbaijan, and now you guys need to work on creating one.”

Maybe that’s what I hope I can contribute to. To try and make this bigger. Obviously I can’t do it on my own, but maybe as part of a bigger process that can finally sort out the mess that is the Nagorno- Karabakh conflict. It’s a major obstacle to the development of both countries. The conflict will be over one day. It cannot last forever, and so I’d like to think that my work can be part of the process that brings that day sooner. Of course, whether I’ll see it in my lifetime is still unclear.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com

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Athens, Greece

News

Digging in the Dustbins of History

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki left the faltering Eastern Bloc and came to Greece in pursuit of a happier life. But as the energy and promise of Greece’s once-fiery economy has dwindled away, immigrants like them have experienced homelessness and hostility—as well as a peculiar yearning for the old communist ways.

Stav Dimitrοpoulos
September 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Homeless Polish immigrant sitting on the sidewalk next to a moped — After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yannis Lubovicki left Poland and came to Athens in search of work. He lost his job during the Greek economic crisis and now lives on the streets.

In the Athenian neighborhood of Skouze Hill, a pair of shabbily dressed men, Polish immigrants, sit on a doorstep across the street from a supermarket, wearily asking passersby for change as they wait for store employees to throw away the day’s unsold food. Once the food has been tossed into the supermarkets’ dustbins, they will compete with the area’s other dumpster divers—ethnic Roma—for the stale bread and leftover vegetables.

When he illegally immigrated to Greece two decades ago, Yannis Lubovicki, forty-three, dreamed of a better life than what Poland—then struggling to adjust to a post-Berlin Wall world—could offer. Instead, he and his companion Christos Gabriel, fifty-three, found poverty. Now they spend their days panhandling and their nights sleeping on park benches. They survive on food from church soup kitchens and trash cans and the water from park fountains. Once a week they walk downtown to Koumoundourou Square and use the public baths there, well frequented by the homeless.

“Don’t give them any money,” says a well-dressed middle-aged woman heading into the supermarket. “They’ll spend it on wine in a split second.” If harsh, her words are perhaps true: their breath smells of alcohol, their eyes are bloodshot, and Lubovicki—the woman points to him emphatically—is timidly taking a corkscrew out of his bag.

An estimated one person in twenty is an undocumented immigrant in Greece, a country of eleven million. Many of them, like Lubovicki and Gabriel, are transplants from the former Eastern bloc. Having moved to Greece in search of the economic opportunities that an integrated, prosperous Europe once offered, they have instead struggled to survive, one of the groups hardest hit by financial crisis in Greece—itself one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession that struck in 2007. At the same time, they have been scapegoats for the country’s ongoing malaise, with high unemployment and political turmoil—along with a humiliating dose of international ridicule for the former continental success story turned basket case—feeding a brutal, anti-immigrant backlash within Greek society, just as they have in other immigrant magnets such as Italy, Malta, and Spain.

Yet in few corners of Europe have ultranationalism and xenophobia gained as much traction as they have in Greece. Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, has seen tremendous growth since the economic crisis hit. In 1996, it received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections; in 2012, it won 7 percent. Halting immigration is the party’s chief goal. Its leaders declare that “illegal alien-invaders” amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity. The party’s extreme rhetoric has, in turn, fed violence, from the murder of a Greek antifascist rapper by a party member, to the stunning attack that Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris unleashed on two leftist members of parliament during the live taping of a morning talk show. (After their argument grew heated, Kasidiaris—who has called Greece’s undocumented immigrants “human garbage”—punched Communist MP Liana Kanelli and threw a glass of water in the face of SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou.) Golden Dawn members have frequently harassed immigrants, going so far as to pose as police in order to intimidate street vendors.

Even in Athens, Greece’s cosmopolitan capital, Golden Dawn has substantial support. It won 16 percent of the vote in last May’s mayoral elections, a huge jump from its share of just 5 percent in 2010. “We have been swarming with Albanians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Eastern Europeans,” says the middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who did not give her name. “Now we have the Gypsy gangs, too.” Her once-affluent neighborhood used to be populated by high-ranking military officers and their families, but in recent years the poorer immigrant enclaves in the bordering downtown areas have spilled over here as well.

“That’s why they wanted us in Europe, “she adds—referring to wealthy northern European nations like France and Germany—“to keep the Third Worlders away from them so they can continue their petty little lives.”

Two Greek illegal immigrants — Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki, undocumented Polish immigrants, survive by panhandling and scrounging in dustbins for food.

Gangling and gray-haired, Gabriel walks with a limp and speaks with a thick accent. In his halting Greek, he notes happily that he recently discovered a new hideout, a tiny covered alley alongside a newly built apartment building, where he lies down on the pavement at night to sleep. He and Lubovicki have spent the last five years living in close proximity to the supermarket and its surplus food. Until a few months ago, they had been squatting in a nearby abandoned house, but then the landlord drove them out.

Gabriel has been in the country for twelve years. Back in Poland, he lived through the early years of his homeland’s transition from communism. Post-Soviet Poland quickly reformed its economy to woo investors, privatizing its coal and steel industries and knocking down regulatory hurdles. Thanks to vigorous economic growth and rising standards of living, Polish households were optimistic and exuberant, and credit flowed easily. Gabriel, then a coal miner, decided to take out a loan to buy a two-story house in the southern Polish city of Katowice for himself, his wife, and four children.

The Polish “miracle,” however, failed to curb the country’s high levels of unemployment. Laid off and unable to find a new job, Gabriel struggled to pay his 50,000-euro mortgage. Desperate, he immigrated to Greece in 2002, joining a wave of illegal immigrants drawn by the global image of pre-crisis Greece as flourishing and full of promise. (Today, there are about 50,000 Polish immigrants in the country.) Gabriel has not seen his children since he left.

But today’s moribund Greek economy—now in its seventh year of recession—now offers little in the way of hope for Gabriel and immigrants like him. In Athens, about 5,000 undocumented immigrants live in derelict buildings unfit for human habitation. When they can find work, conditions are often extreme: migrant strawberry pickers, for example, earn $26 to $33 a day for about ten hours’ work, living in makeshift huts with no access to toilets. Meanwhile, government officials warn of a “public-health time bomb,” with large numbers of new immigrants not inoculated for tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other communicable diseases.

Until the 1990s, Greece was an extremely homogenous society. The wave of Eastern European immigrants that flooded Greece after the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by another wave of immigrants from Africa and Asia in subsequent years, gradually ratcheting up anti-immigrant sentiment among the broader population. Today, as unresolved economic and immigration problems worsen an already festering resentment; Greece continues to vie for the title of Europe’s “most racist” nation.

In recent years, the government has had some success in stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, which it credits in part to an eight-mile barbed-wire fence it erected along its border with Turkey, completed two years ago. The number of illegal immigrants that the government detained fell from 77,000 in 2012 to 43,000 in 2013.

These days, Gabriel stays on constant alert for police raids—not for fear of deportation (European countries, Poland and Greece included, signed the 2007 Schengen agreement that allows citizens of each country to move and work freely throughout the union), but for fear that he may be arrested for failing to pay his bank loan back in Poland. For the most part, thought, the police tend to ignore him and other homeless immigrants.

Golden Dawn wishes it were otherwise. These foreigners must be deported, the party argues, in order to save the culture and community of the “pure” Greeks. (Ironically, in spite of his slogan of “work for Greeks only,” Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, happens to own a hotel in an immigrant Athens neighborhood staffed by low-wage foreign workers.) Beyond its anti-immigration platform, Golden Dawn has argued for building closer ties with Russia at the expense of the US (particularly in regards to energy resources), erasing the “illegal” Greek debt and voiding the terms of the country’s internationally funded bailout, purging the public sector, and walling the Greek economy off from global trade.

In recent months the party’s brazen militancy seems to have backfired to some extent, with two of its leaders now in jail awaiting trial—Michaloliakos for forming a “criminal organization” and a spokesperson for gun charges. Nevertheless,Nikos Kyriakidis, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from Athens, insists that Golden Dawn is the only party that will fight against Zionism, imposed multiculturalism, and the growing erosion of Greek culture. Economic anxieties also seem to be at the root of Kyriakidis’s anger. He rails against the “scumbags” of PASOK and New Democracy—the major political parties that have long run the country—that he says destroyed the Greek economy. Although he has a quarter-century worth of work experience, right now Kyriakidis is unable to support his family. They just moved to avoid living in a part of the city that has recently seen an influx of immigrants. Kyriakidis doesn’t want his children to grow up in such a rundown neighborhood, he says.

In Greece, Eastern European immigrants tend to fare better than other immigrants in one area: racist attacks. Three weeks ago Gabriel and Lubovicki witnessed a gang of thirty young men dressed in black beating Asian immigrants. “They shouldn’t have hit them, it’s not right,” says Lubovicki, a stubby and gregarious man who fills in the silences of his tall and taciturn companion. The beating took place out in the open, in a public square with numerous passersby. Four police officers were nearby but did nothing, Lubovicki claims. Fortunately, the gang did not bother the two Poles. “It is the dark ones they are after,” he notes—that is, the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Somalis, and Eritreans who have built up the country’s largest Asian and African immigrant enclaves.

“The men were huge—real giants,” Lubovicki adds. “If one of them punched me in the face, my head would fall off.”

Homeless Polish immigrants sitting on curb — Lubovicki and Gabriel sit on a street corner in the Skouze Hill neighborhood of Athens.

A group of young men walk down the street, stopping when they notice Lubovicki and Gabriel—half-drunk and reeking of alcohol—sitting on the doorstep. “I’ll give you ten bottles of wine if you kick this car door,” says one of the men. He is short and fair-haired, in his early twenties.

“Ten more bottles if you sing,” says another, a hulking man with a humpback.

Lubovicki bursts into laughter and says he can’t do it. Gabriel cracks a smile.

The young men seem to know the Poles. They, too, are immigrants—second-generation Albanian Greeks. Many of their parents immigrated to Greece after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Today, those of the country’s unauthorized immigrants who hail from the former Eastern Bloc are chiefly from Albania: in 2013 they were almost a third of all illegal immigrants arrested that year, and Albanians also comprise a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population.)

Lubovicki has a daughter of his own, now seventeen years old. (Her name is Despoina, a Greek Orthodox name; Lubovicki converted to the Greek Orthodox faith after arriving in the country.) His marriage ended after his wife, who had moved out to Greece with him, found out about an affair. “We had a brawl,” he says. “My wife left Greece in the middle of the night with my daughter.”

Things really got bad when Lubovicki lost his job during the crisis. “I haven’t worked in five years … I was a construction worker,” he says. (The construction sector—which used to employ both men, and whose workforce is a third foreign-born—has shrunk by half since 2009.) “I’ve been a vagabond all these years, sleeping on the benches of the parks.” He smirks as he admits it.

Their descent into poverty has soured their attitudes toward the free market and made the two Polish immigrants nostalgic for Poland’s communist era—however repressive it was. They would never have left Poland if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, they point out. Back then, life was good, and they lacked nothing. Thanks to the government, Lubovicki adds, he attended a trade school.

These are views shared by a significant number of older Eastern Europeans, according to a 2009 Pew survey. While those under the age of forty tend to favor the economic and political reforms their countries have gone through over the past two decades, the older generations are more skeptical. Clearly, many have painful memories of the USSR: not just the absence of freedom and dissent, but also the frequent shortages of food and toilet paper, the constant lecturing about Marxist-Leninist creeds, the degrading monotony of Soviet life. But like Lubovicki and Gabriel, some of those who grew up under communism point out that unemployment and homelessness were virtually unknown back then. Their salaries were nowhere near American ones, but the cost of living was negligible. The Soviet educational system was excellent, ranking among the best in the world.

In recent years, Poland has, like Greece before it, seen rapid economic growth. While many Poles continue to go abroad in search of the higher wages to be found out west, living standards have improved back in their home country. Lubovicki points out that his mother, a professional chef, enjoys a pension and a cozy house of her own. Meanwhile, he lives on the streets.

Lubovicki misses his hometown, a village outside Warsaw. He misses his daughter, who speaks to him by phone every other week. He misses his mother’s cooking. But he does not believe he will go back to the old country anytime soon. “My mother calls me up all the time asking me to return to Poland, but I can’t because I can’t afford it. I need eighty-five euros to renew my passport and about 200 euros for travel expenses.”

It’s not just about the money, Lubovicki adds. Born “Yannus,” he has lived as “Yannis” since he came to Greece—now half his life. “If I go to Poland, I won’t know a thing. I’ll be unable to adjust there …. I have been living in Greece ever since I came of age, how am I supposed to start all over again?” Gabriel—who used to go by the name “Yaroslav”—nods in approval.

“Have I told you I am also a mechanic for all kinds of machines and can do some plumber work?” Lubovicki says, moving on to another, more hopeful, topic. “I may find a gig like this in the future. I know the tools of the trade.”

Then his eyes light up. The sliding doors of the supermarket have opened. Employees bearing huge trash bags head for the dustbins. Lubovicki walks over to find his next meal.

Correction, September 27: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man in the first photo. It is Yannis Lubovicki, not Christos Gabriel.

Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Separatist fighters survey the steppe after recapturing Saur-Mogila from Ukrainian forces. Sergei Kopylov, via joyful-life.ru

Saur-Mogila, Ukraine

Commentary

Unearthing Another War

Best of In The Fray 2014. Last year I visited Saur-Mogila, a burial mound in eastern Ukraine that commemorates the Soviet soldiers who died driving back the Nazis during World War II. Today it is a battleground for a new war, as separatists fight for independence and Russia moves its troops into the lands it once liberated.

Michael Long
Photos by Sergei Kopylov
September 19, 2014

In the frigid autumn sunlight I climbed the stone steps of Saur-Mogila. The burial mound, located atop a bluff encircled by the bronzed steppe, covers the bones of Soviet soldiers killed during the Second World War. More than 23,000 died fighting the Germans for this hilltop along the eastern edge of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The panoramic view from the summit is coveted for reasons both aesthetic and strategic, and I could easily see why. At 277 meters, Saur-Mogila is the highest point in the region.

Continue reading Unearthing Another War →

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Caracas, Venezuela

News

Street Fighters

Dozens died in mass demonstrations earlier this year against the Venezuelan government. While the violence has subsided, the conflict continues to spill out onto the sidewalks and storefronts of urban Caracas, where opponents and supporters of the government engage in an art of war over the symbolism of the protests and the memory of the dead.

Story and photos by J. J. Gallagher
August 24, 2014

Man walking past graffiti-marked wall in Caracas — A neighborhood in central Caracas bears the marks of dueling political groups.

Armored vehicles roll down the street, ringed by dozens of police in riot gear. Further down on the palm tree-lined Avenida Francisco Miranda, one of Caracas’s main arteries, small groups of protesters clad in bicycle helmets and gas masks arm themselves with stones and hastily construct roadblocks with whatever they can find: sign posts, bits of concrete, a steel cable taken from a nearby construction site. Bags of garbage burn nearby, spewing black smoke into the air. Though it’s early on a weekday afternoon, the storefronts that line the normally busy street have already been shuttered, antigovernment graffiti scrawled on their windows and walls. A crowd of several hundred people—a mixture of peaceful demonstrators and onlookers from nearby businesses—clank guardrails amid shouts of “Resistencia!” and “Libertad!”

Protesters sitting alongside candles and photos of the dead — People gather to remember the dead in Altamira Square, the epicenter of many of Venezuela’s fiercest protests.

Slowly at first, the police lob tear gas canisters into the crowd. Protesters quickly pick them up and cast them away. Then the canisters start raining down, scattering nearly everyone. Crates full of rocks and bottles and containers filled with gasoline appear suddenly among the demonstrators. Someone hurls a firebomb, which explodes underneath a contingent of about six officers, who, seemingly unscathed, continue advancing. Marching in rows through the choking fog, the police start aiming their tear-gas guns directly at the protesters still gathered on the street. A group of teenage boys break into a furious sprint as police on motorcycles hurtle down the sidewalks after them. One of the boys, shaking with fear, frantically jabs at apartment buzzers as a group of workers nearby shout, “Let him in! Let him in!” He slips inside the apartment building’s steel gate, just out of an officer’s reach.

The April 1 demonstration in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas—a protest march that swiftly descended into an armed brawl with security forces sent out to clear the streets—is one of dozens that have taken place this year, fueling a major popular uprising against the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since February, forty-two people have died, though the violence has tapered off in recent months. The fatalities have included both opponents and supporters of the government: José Guillén Araque, a thirty-four-year-old National Guard captain and father of two teenage daughters; twenty-two-year-old beauty queen Génesis Carmona; Adriana Urquiola, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant; and many others, drawn from all parts of Venezuelan society.

Protesters wearing gas masks on the streets of Caracas — A protester hurls a tear-gas canister back at advancing riot police.

As in many of the popular uprisings that have broken out in places like Syria and the Ukraine in recent years, repressive tactics intended to quash the protests have only served to inflame them. And as they have elsewhere, Venezuela’s artists have been a driving force within the opposition movement, crafting a compelling narrative to motivate resistance.

Since the killings began, street artists have memorialized the dead in spray paint, tagging walls and sidewalks throughout the city with their faces and names. “[The government] has all the power. They do whatever they want, and they are extremely violent,” says Marina, a twenty-seven-year-old English teacher and a member of anti-Maduro student artist collective called Stencil Resistencia. (Because of fear of government reprisals, the protesters I spoke to asked me to withhold their last names.) “That’s the idea of painting the faces of the dead, to remind everyone of who we are dealing with. They are the violent ones.”

The demonstrations began in February, over local issues. College students in the western city of San Cristóbal turned out to protest a sexual assault that had occurred on campus. The resistance quickly snowballed into a national movement. Angered and aggrieved, thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets since then to decry the government’s failure to deal with a raft of problems.

Tire blockade with the word "Resiste" — A protest barricade, one of the opposition’s favored tactics, completely blocks a major artery in southern Caracas.

Despite having the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela has struggled economically, and in the past two years its fiscal woes have reached crisis levels. During his fourteen years of increasingly unrestrained rule, the late president Hugo Chavez succeeded in rearranging the country’s power structure and lowering the poverty rate, mainly by allocating more of the country’s oil wealth to programs for the poor. But he also left the legacy of an isolated and sputtering economy, as well as a byzantine currency-control system under which, critics say, tens of billions of dollars in public funds have gone missing.

Today, the country consistently ranks near the bottom of global measures of freedom of the press and the ease of doing business. It boasts one of the highest inflation rates in the world—more than 60 percent annually—as well as an increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Basic necessities like toilet paper, cooking oil, and flour, nearly all of which are imported, have become scarce. Alarmingly, the number of murders has also surged over the past decade: according to the United Nations, Venezuela now has the second-highest murder rate in the world.

Meanwhile, government repression of dissent has been at times brutal. The first protester fatality occurred on February 12. Bassil Alejandro Dacosta Frías, a twenty-three-year-old carpenter, left his home in the nearby city of Guatire to join two of his cousins in a protest march in Caracas. An estimated 10,000 people took to the streets that day. In a scene that would become familiar, the demonstration ended in chaos. Once the police came out in force, most of the protesters filtered out into nearby streets, but small groups stayed behind or were diverted by the security forces.

In the confusion that ensued, at least one member of the security forces opened fire into the crowd, using live ammunition. The protesters fled. A video released later showed Dacosta running and then falling to the sidewalk, struck from behind by a bullet to the head. (A forty-two-year old member of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency is now in jail awaiting trial for firing the fatal shot.) The night before he was killed, Dacosta announced on Facebook that he was going to “go out and march tomorrow without fear of anything, with the hope of finding a better future.”

Protester spray-painting a stencil of a dead protester's face on a wall — Members of a group of street artists calling themselves Stencil Resistencia adorn a wall with the faces of people killed in the protests.

In the weeks that followed, the country’s fractured politics continued to play out bloodily on its city streets, with dozens more dying in the violence. Remembering the dead became an act of resistance that united the opposition. In the outpouring of emotion following Dacosta’s death, his face became ubiquitous, popping up on T-shirts and placards, painted onto walls and sidewalks.

The activists I interviewed have helped blanket the city with his likeness, along with those of the unrest’s many other victims. “These people who died gave their lives for the country. We must not forget them,” says Alejandro, a twenty-five-year-old economics student who has dedicated much of his free time since the protests began to the opposition movement. Using digital photos published in local media and shared on social networks, he and other artists create images in Photoshop that are then cut into stencils and spray-painted onto surfaces.

Antigovernment street art carries with it some irony in Venezuela. Chavez popularized graffiti and murals as political statements, and the government still hires artist collectives to work on public projects, which often carry strong anticapitalist and anti-American messages. Chavez often mocked the highbrow sensibilities of Venezuela’s elite and sought to empower the country’s poor by celebrating their culture. But now the government-sponsored street art has become an institution as well as a propaganda tool. After his death, Chavez’s image has become omnipresent, with his face, his recognizable signature, and even his eyes occupying the sides of buildings and billboards. In Caracas, the writing on the wall is usually a good indicator of whether you are walking through an opposition or government stronghold.

Police wearing protective gear and firing tear gas — Police begin firing a barrage of tear gas at the protesters who remain on the street.

The government has also organized marches of its own and rallied an army of pro-government musicians and street artists to its side. They depict a world dominated by Yankee imperialists, allied with Venezuela’s wealthy elites, who threaten to subjugate the poor. With America’ record of meddling in the affairs of Latin American countries, Venezuela’s history of entrenched inequality, and the country’s persistent political instability—punctuated by upheaval and coups—this message resonates with the government’s supporters, who have vowed to continue the populist political agenda championed by Chavez, who died in 2013 after a prolonged fight with cancer.

Since he took office, Maduro—Chavez’s handpicked successor and the leader of the country’s ruling socialist party—has drawn heavily from his predecessor’s playbook. He has claimed to be the target of frequent coup attempts and made vague accusations of interference from US-backed militants. Amid the recent wave of protests, the president, his supporters, and the state-run media have sought to portray the opposition as bent on conflict and destruction. (Maduro has even taken to calling the protesters “Chuckies,” in reference to the ginger-haired, knife-wielding doll of 1980s horror-movie fame.)

Protesters holding a flag and flagging passing cars — Demonstrators vie for the attention of passersby at one of the many peaceful protests that took place in Caracas.

Government forces have come under gunfire in several of the confrontations, and the protesters have on numerous occasions tussled with them and set fire to buildings and vehicles. Because of the international media’s focus on the street battles that have led to deaths like Dacosta’s, masked young men have come to symbolize Venezuela’s protest movement to the outside world, even though their groups generally number in the dozens, compared to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators who turn up at major opposition marches and rallies. The protesters—many of them in their teens and early twenties—complain, in turn, about the police’s heavy-handed tactics, which they say are employed even when the demonstrations are nonviolent. (A number of protesters claim the police often incite the violence and viciously beat them even when they do not resist arrest.) Images purporting to show the bloodied and bruised bodies of demonstrators circulate widely on Twitter and other social media networks, fueling the outrage.

The government has deftly used the street skirmishes to justify its crackdown. Maduro recently vowed to bring to justice “criminals who seek to fill our country with chaos and violence.” In May, his forces raided a protest camp outside of the UN office in Caracas, even as the government engaged in internationally mediated peace talks with the opposition.

More than 3,000 people were detained in connection with the protests earlier this year, according to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal Venezolano; seventy-five remain jailed today. The group also says it has documented instances of beatings and torture. Beyond its violent crackdowns on demonstrations, the government has hounded opposition politicians and media outlets that it accuses of fomenting the hostilities. In June, images of Leopoldo Lopez, the former mayor of the Chacao district in central Caracas and the government’s most famous prisoner, were leaked, showing him bearded and gaunt after spending more than a hundred days in detention under charges of instigating violence and damaging property. (With his pugnacious rhetoric and overt support of the fighting in the streets, Lopez played a critical role in sparking the protest movement.) Lopez’s trial finally began in late July. His lawyers say he could face up to ten years in prison if convicted.

The April 1 protest in Caracas was set in motion by Maria Corina Machado, another vehement critic of the Maduro government, who urged her supporters to come out for a political rally and march. Machado had just been accused of treason and ousted from her seat in Venezuela’s parliament after denouncing, at a Washington meeting of the Organization for American States, human rights abuses allegedly committed by the regime. (In Venezuela Machado is a controversial figure, whose political organizations have in the past received financing from the US government. The government has long called her a puppet of the Americans, and in late May she, the US ambassador, and several other opposition politicians were publicly accused of organizing an assassination plot against President Maduro.) Thousands turned up to hear her speak at a plaza in downtown Caracas, but when it came time for the symbolic walk to the steps of the National Assembly, many of the demonstrators found themselves face-to-face with police and National Guard troops, who shut down metro stations and blocked major avenues.

Police standing on a rock-strewn street — A view of police gathering in the distance, from the protesters’ vantage point.

While they don’t agree with using violence, the protesters I spoke to see the street demonstrations as a necessary and effective tactic. Instead of addressing the country’s problems, they say, the government has marginalized legitimate political dissent and attempted to silence criticism. Beyond their hostility to the government, however, the protestors have little in the way of a unified agenda. Their demands range widely—from moderate policy reforms to regime change.

Like many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans, the activists I interviewed complain that their day-to-day lives have rapidly deteriorated over the past few years, as crime has grown and the economy worsened. “The situation is as bad as it’s been in the past fifteen years,” said Alejandro, the economics student. “The [government] officials can’t go on denying the weakest currency in the world, the lowest minimum wage in the world. We are demanding a change—not necessarily in the government, but in the policies that they are carrying out.”

With the potent symbolism of their street graffiti, artists like Alejandro have helped the dead protesters achieve a near-mythic status in Venezuela. Sympathizers often refer to them as “los caídos,” or the fallen ones. Even as tensions in the street have calmed in recent months, with no new deaths being reported, the activists say their acts of remembrance will go on. “We have to continue struggling,” says Marina. “If we go back to our daily lives, they will have died in vain.”

J. J. Gallagher is a freelance writer based in New York. Twitter: @jayjgal

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Red Cloud (seated, second from left) and other Sioux chiefs.

Reviews

Last Stand: A Review of The Heart of Everything That Is

The Heart of Everything That Is tells the little-known story of Red Cloud, a ruthless Lakota chief who brought together the warring tribes of the Great Plains to fight the US government and halt its relentless westward expansion.

Amy O'Loughlin
June 18, 2014

For nearly three hundred years, white settlers and American Indians engaged in mutually destructive warfare. The bloodshed followed the path of white Western migration—from the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, where colonists coming ashore in 1607 were met with a volley of the Powhatan’s arrows, to far Western lands like the Montana territory, where General Custer and his soldiers made their last stand in 1876, overrun by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.

Their stunning victory in the Battle of the Little Bighorn immortalized the names of great Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. But in The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”

Continue reading →

Amy O'Loughlin Amy O’Loughlin is a freelance writer and book reviewer whose work has appeared in American History, World War II, ForeWord Reviews, USARiseUp, and other publications. She blogs at Off the Bookshelf.

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Mumbai, India

News

The White Death, Revived

Best of In The Fray 2014. Once thought cured by modern medicine, tuberculosis is making a global comeback. Rampant misuse of antibiotics and broken health-care systems have spawned deadly, drug-resistant strains that are now present in virtually every country.

By Octavio Raygoza
May 23, 2014

Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Bacteria, the cause of TB — *Mycobacterium tuberculosis*, the pathogen that causes TB. *NIAID*

She looks like a child: a baby face and large, round eyes, long and thin arms that make her seem gawky. When she sees me, her eyes brighten, and she struggles to sit up in her hospital bed. The blanket covering her drops, revealing a frail and gaunt body—a nineteen-year-old’s body. Five feet, four inches, she weighs only eighty pounds.

Sonam Yambhare is dying, and there is little modern medicine can do for her. Two years ago, she contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in her lungs. The bacteria that cause the disease have destroyed her macrophages, the body’s first defenders against foreign invasion. Constant nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting—symptoms of the disease—have emaciated her. All medications have been infective. In her weakened state, another serious infection will likely kill her.

Ward Number Eight of the Sewri Tuberculosis Hospital is a silent room with gray concrete walls. It is a world away from the chaotic streets of Mumbai. And it is a world away from the rest of Indian society. With nowhere else to go, neglected and stigmatized TB patients like Yambhare come here—even from towns and villages hundreds of miles away—to wait out the last stages of the disease, sometimes alone.

“Everyone is depressed here,” says Chandge Mokshada, a young doctor on her rounds. In the crumbling ward, dozens of women lay quietly on their beds. There is little chance they will recover, Mokshada says. “We mostly lose our patients.”

One of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases is making a comeback. Two centuries ago, tuberculosis was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in parts of Europe and the US. Known as the “white plague” or “white death” due to the way it blanched the skin, the disease left a deep imprint on the culture. Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about it. Emily Brontë and Henry David Thoreau died from it.

After the development of effective antibiotics in the 1940s, deaths from tuberculosis plummeted. But TB remains a formidable killer in many parts of the world. And in recent years, it has evolved in frightening ways. Its virulent new strains now defy many or all known antibiotics. And while they have ravaged Asian countries in particular, these deadlier forms of the disease are spreading everywhere.

Last month, the World Health Organization released a report about the surge in infectious diseases that are fast becoming untreatable. “A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century,“ the report read. The WHO singled out drug-resistant tuberculosis as one of the greatest dangers. In 2012, it accounted for 450,000 new cases and 170,000 deaths—that is, less than 4 percent of those newly infected with TB, but 13 percent of those the disease killed. The total number of confirmed cases has grown sevenfold over seven years, with India, China, and Russia accounting for more than half of new infections. (The official statistics also understate the size of the problem, since many of the hardest-hit countries report bogus numbers.)

New strains of TB arise when the old ones are not properly treated. Not taking a full course of antibiotics, for example, can merely weaken, rather than eradicate, the bacteria that cause the disease. The remaining bacteria evolve to adapt to the drug, turning a treatable strain of TB into a resistant one.

The problem has gotten progressively worse. At one point, health officials believed TB could be eliminated. But in the 1980s, tuberculosis strains emerged that resisted the most common and safe anti-TB drugs. In the past decade, even second-line treatments have become ineffective against certain tough strains that fall under the category of “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis” (about 10 percent of drug-resistant TB cases). To deal with them, doctors will put patients on more than one of these toxic drugs. Their side effects, however, can be severe, ranging from acne, weight loss, and skin discoloration to hepatitis, depression, and hallucinations.

For the hardest-to-treat strains, doctors are now forced to use so-called third-line drugs, an even more toxic regimen whose effects have yet to be fully tested.

Today, resistant strains can be found virtually everywhere, including the United States and Europe. But perhaps nowhere is the crisis more real than in India. The world’s second most populous country has a quarter of its TB cases—and now, many of the hardest ones to treat. While the number of Indians suffering from the disease has actually gone down in recent years, thanks in part to widespread vaccination, the WHO estimates that in 2012 the country had 21,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB of the lungs—an exponential increase from the few dozen cases the government had been reporting just six years earlier.

India also has the dubious distinction of being one of three countries—Iran and Italy being the others—where certain strains of TB have resisted every drug used against them. Four years ago, Zarir Udwadia, a noted pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, identified twelve patients suffering from untreatable TB infections. (Three of the twelve have since died; the others have been taken into isolation by the government.) Udwadia and other researchers have described these kinds of cases as “totally drug-resistant.”

The Indian government disputes the categorization, arguing that these strains have not been tested against all of the experimental third-line drugs. Another term, “extremely drug-resistant TB,” gets around the worry of some experts that classifying such a common disease as untreatable may cause panic.

Regardless of what they are called, these hardy strains have the power to push societies back to a time before antibiotics, when the “white plague” was all but unstoppable. “If not contained,” says infectious disease specialist Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, “it poses a big problem to the world.”

In India, those infected with TB tend to be the most vulnerable people in society. Yambhare was born into a low caste. She lived in a cramped apartment, where she shared a room with her mother and two sisters. Every day she took overcrowded trains from her home in the countryside to Mumbai, where she helped her mother clean houses. In other words, her poverty made it far more likely that she would be exposed to TB, which often (though not always) settles in the lungs and can be transmitted through the air.

Two years ago, Yambhare developed a persistent cough. She visited one of the private medical clinics that line the teeming streets of the western suburb of Bandra. There, a doctor diagnosed her with tuberculosis, and Yambhare began taking antibiotics. When her family saw no improvement over two years, they switched doctors. The new doctor prescribed more drugs.

No one bothered to give her a drug-sensitivity test. The test would have revealed what strain of TB she had, and a competent doctor could have then prescribed the correct drug. Instead, the incomplete and inept treatment that Yambhare received gave the bacteria the chance to adapt and become stronger. It soon developed a resistance to all four of the first-line drugs used to treat TB.

In Yambhare’s case and thousands of others, a broken health-care system has made the problem of drug-resistant TB much worse. Hospitals are overcrowded, and the services provided are minimal. So Indians—rich and poor—flock to private doctors. But the slapdash treatment they tend to provide, with laxly administered drugs and inadequate follow-up care, has allowed drug-resistant TB to spread wildly.

Udwadia, the Mumbai pulmonologist, says that many of these doctors are unscrupulous, and most are uninformed. In 2010, he conducted a study in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, one of Asia’s largest and the origin of many of the city’s most severe TB cases. He asked more than a hundred doctors in the area to “write a prescription for a common TB patient.” Only six were able to do it correctly. Half of the doctors he surveyed were practitioners of alternative therapies with no grounding in modern science.

Udwadia argues that India needs a law that will let only designated specialists treat drug-resistant tuberculosis patients. But at the moment the government does not bother keeping detailed records on the many private doctors now operating, much less ensuring they provide adequate care.

“The government has no control over private practitioners,” says an official in the health ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to talk to the media. “They require only once-in-a-lifetime registration, and there is no chance for them to lose their license.”

Calls for regulation by experts like Udwadia, the official says, are silenced, ridiculed, or ignored. Meanwhile, the government has been accused of underreporting the number of new cases of drug-resistant TB every year. In 2011 the official count was 4,200 cases; the next year, the government began adjusting its figures to resemble the WHO’s estimates, and the number of reported cases quadrupled. (Indian health ministry officials did not respond to emails asking for comment.)

In terms of its anti-TB spending, however, the government has been devoting more resources. In 2013 it budgeted $182 million to fight the epidemic.

Some of this money will go toward upgrading the 103-year-old Sewri hospital, which could use it. In its ward for drug-resistant patients, there is no medical equipment in sight; records are kept in rusted metal cabinets. The most pernicious forms of TB are hitting a health-care infrastructure poorly equipped to deal with them.

Every year, more than eight million people fall ill with tuberculosis. More than a million die from it, placing TB just a notch below AIDS in its globe-spanning lethality. And a whopping one-third of the world’s population has what is called “latent TB”: they are infected by the bacteria, and a tenth of them will go on to develop the disease at some point in their lifetimes. Drug-resistant TB, in other words, is just one part of a global health emergency.

Meanwhile, the problem goes ignored in rich countries. Antibiotic treatments for TB have been so successful there that most people’s experience with the disease today is limited to works of literature: novels and poems with archaic references to “consumption” and TB sanatoriums. But that may change someday soon. In the United States, a hundred new cases of drug-resistant TB are diagnosed every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases of extensively drug-resistant TB have already been reported.

Paul Nunn, the WHO’s TB coordinator, says that these deadly strains have cropped up in certain European countries, too, though the reports have yet to be published. “If the health system of the world fails, the highly resistant strains will replace the old,” he adds. “We’ll see a worsening of the situation if nothing is done.” On the other hand, it may be only when the resistant strains become a major problem in rich countries that the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry will take notice and pour real money into the development of potent new treatments.

Without effective drugs to combat the most resistant strains, doctors may have to revert to remedies from an earlier era. Udwadia recalls his first patient with untreatable TB. Twenty-six years old, she had spent the last five years trying a variety of anti-TB drugs, all of which had failed. As a last resort, she underwent a pneumonectomy, a high-risk medical procedure to remove a lung. The woman later died of complications from the surgery. The procedure had not been used on tuberculosis patients since the introduction of antibiotic treatments six decades ago.

Even though so many people are infected, TB still carries a terrible stigma in Indian culture. “People treat you with disgust,” Yambhare says. As she grew sicker, she became more isolated. Her sisters were told to stay away. Her friends stopped visiting. Finding a partner or even a job was impossible. She sunk into a depression.

Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay for her treatment. Their monthly household income was just $100—not uncommon in a country where one in three people lives on less than $1.25 a day. But the expensive second-line drugs cost $80 a month. And once she began taking them, the side effects kicked in. Her skin became discolored. Her muscles atrophied. Her weight dropped.

Eventually, Yambhare’s family could no longer care for her. They sent her to the Sewri hospital.

When I visit her in the ward, orderlies are carrying out the infected mattresses of previous patients. In a nearby courtyard, they set the mattresses afire.

Yambhare watches the smoke curl past the window near her bed. Below her, in the courtyard, stray dogs fight over bones.

Yambhare turns to me, an eerie shine in her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says through her mask. “I want to go home and help mother.”

Octavio Raygoza is a video journalist who covers sports, news, and culture. Twitter: @olraygoza

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Jerusalem

Commentary

A Stranger in Jerusalem

I had come to Jerusalem to remember my grandmother’s life and mourn my marriage’s demise. As I made my way to the Wailing Wall, a shopkeeper stopped me with a question.

Sasha Vasilyuk
Photos by Kyle Trafas
April 27, 2014

Men standing in front of the Wailing Wall — Visitors to the Wailing Wall take part in the centuries-old Jewish tradition of placing slips of paper with prayers into the cracks of the wall’s broken stones.

The hot white wind whistled quietly as I walked through the rows of Jerusalem’s labyrinthine cemetery, built on a mountainside.

I would have never found my grandmother’s grave here if it weren’t for Inna, her lifelong friend. They had met in college back in the Soviet Union, where we all had once lived. I had called Inna as soon as I landed in Israel, the last stop on my solo journey around the world.

Inna led me past a wall of tombs until we arrived at one bearing the black granite letters of my grandmother’s name.

The last time I had seen my grandmother was more than two decades earlier, before she bought a one-way ticket to Israel in hopes of curing her Alzheimer’s. It was a tumultuous time. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and many were heading abroad. My grandmother, a literature professor, had started to notice early symptoms of her condition. Rumor had it that in Israel they knew a cure. My grandmother decided to leave everything behind and make the move, joining Inna in Jerusalem.

There was no one else in this section of the cemetery, and in the morning stillness I felt my grandmother beside me. The warmth of her skin. Her round, tanned face. Reddish curls that bounced when she moved. A laugh that rang like wind chimes.

I didn’t want to leave her, but the taxi was waiting.

As our car weaved through the cemetery and back toward the city, Inna said, “I’m really glad you came to visit your grandmother. I see a lot of similarities in you.”

I felt the same way. My grandmother and I had shared a sense of independence that had propelled us to leave one life in search of another. Twenty years after my grandmother made her life-changing decision, I also bought a one-way ticket, leaving behind family, friends, and a marriage that no longer worked.

Now, on the final lap of a journey meant to help me put myself back together, I wished I could ask my grandmother about her life and gain a little wisdom to live my own. But she was gone. I wanted to ask her friend more about her, but there was no time. Inna had to rush home for the Jewish holidays, and I had to meet my brother at the Wailing Wall.

When I entered Jerusalem’s Old City through the ancient Jaffa Gate, the scene was dizzying. A boiling river of tourists flowed down the alleys of the street market. I was running late, so I hurried past the shopkeepers doggedly hawking their wares. Red carpets. Wooden crosses. Miniature chess sets. Green carpets. Gooey baklava. Silver jewelry. Evil-eye charms. More carpets.

Looking down the covered walkway of a bustling street market — A street market in Jerusalem.

“Can I ask you a question, miss? Excuse me, miss! I just wanted to ask you …”

I flew by them, weaving my way through the tourists haggling over souvenirs, ducking under giant trays of fresh sesame-seed bread carried by deft young men.

Then, something stopped me.

I was in front of a shop selling unpolished silver antiques—oil lamps, samovars, menorahs. But what caught my attention wasn’t the merchandise. It was the old shopkeeper.

His eyes matched the deep blue of his simple work shirt. They exuded the calm of someone who belonged under the shade of an oak tree in a peaceful meadow, not in the madness of an urban bazaar.

There was something entrancing about this Middle Eastern Buddha who smiled at me and said, “Come, take five minutes inside.”

“But I’m in a hurry, someone is waiting for me,” I said skittishly, without moving.

“Our whole life passes as we hurry,” he replied. “When we are kids, we hurry to grow up. Then, we grow up and hurry to …”

“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, remembering the hectic life I had left behind. “Everyone always hurries. But actually, I’ve been traveling and haven’t felt hurried this whole year.”

“And? Did you find yourself?” he asked, as if he knew exactly what had sent me away from home and brought me to his doorstep.

“I think so,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, anyway.”

He considered me quietly. “You keep a guard, but you shouldn’t. You’re beautiful, intelligent, sensitive, and a little stubborn. Come,” he gestured toward the depths of his silver cave. “I want to talk to you.”

I could have said no and left for the Wailing Wall, where my brother was probably already waiting. Instead, I walked to the back of his store and sat on a soft cushion. He sat in front of me, his small figure framed by rows of ivory bracelets. An antique clock slept above his head.

“Are you in love with yourself?” he asked.

Wait, what?

I considered his strange question. It seemed that I’d been able to leave my marriage precisely because I loved myself enough to save what remained of me. And yet the experience of the divorce had made me feel like a failure.

The most truthful answer I could give was, “Sometimes.”

“Why sometimes?”

I paused again, my eyes focused on the bracelets hanging in front of me. “Can you love yourself even though you feel that no one else loves you?”

The skyline of Jerusalem's Old City, with the Wailing Wall in the foreground and the Dome of the Rock in the background — The Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock in the distance.

To my embarrassment, I felt a tear roll down my cheek as I said the words. I despise self-pity, so I turned away and pretended to look around the store. Trying to find something else to talk about, I made a comment about an old samovar on one of his shelves. But the shopkeeper made no reply. When I finally turned to face him again, he was looking at me with curiosity, not pity.

“To love yourself doesn’t mean to be selfish,” he said. “To love yourself means to be at peace with your body, your soul, with who you are. I see that you’re hiding yourself because you feel ashamed of your tears, but even with tears you are beautiful.”

My tears now started streaming down my face.

“Love is simple,” he said, pressing his hand to his heart. “I know I haven’t known you for very long, but … I love you.”

He said it so naturally. Looking into his serene eyes, I believed him.

Who said that love is the lifelong emotion that wives feel toward their husbands and mothers toward their children? Why can’t love be a sudden burst of sunshine in a dusty shop in Old Jerusalem?

The two of us sat there. I could hear the clamor of the market, just steps away.

Three women walked into the store, and the moment passed. I looked at my watch. I was now an hour late.

Wiping away my tears, I rejoined the crowds in the street, making my way to the Wailing Wall.

Sasha Vasilyuk Sasha Vasilyuk is a writer based in New York City. She was born during a cold Russian winter and grew up in the golden hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays and articles on art, culture, business, travel, and love have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Russian Newsweek, Oakland Tribune, and Flower magazine. She received the 2013 North American Travel Journalists Association silver medal for her Los Angeles Times cover photo "Barra De Valizas." She is currently working on a collection of essays about her year-long solo journey around the world.

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Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru

Commentary

Power Play

Russia's actions in Ukraine show that for Vladimir Putin, the Cold War never ended. Now the US and its allies must prepare for another lengthy power struggle. But no international coalition can be effective while Russian energy reserves supply a quarter of Europe's natural gas. A long-term US energy strategy is the best way to counter Russian power.

Victor Epstein
March 18, 2014

Russian president Vladimir Putin before the Russian flag — Russian president Vladimir Putin. *Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru*

This week, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine. Flouting international censure, Russia has just annexed the breakaway region. The US and its European allies have responded to the crisis so far with sanctions, but Russia has scoffed at these rebukes, stating they would have “no effect” on Russian policy.

US president Barack Obama has stated that America does not see Ukraine as a piece on “some Cold War chessboard.” But Russian president Vladimir Putin clearly does see the world this way. And he is winning. He has captured Crimea like a pawn and is now likely looking toward other parts of eastern Ukraine, planning his next move. It’s America’s turn, and it is letting the clock run out.

The US and other NATO countries need to stop fooling themselves that they can intervene in Ukraine (here is a very interesting dissection of why). In fact, they should stop pretending that they have any real influence over Russia’s actions. Until Europe no longer depends on Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom for a quarter of its natural gas, there will be no real way to crack down on Russia. The US and its allies need to start developing a long-term strategy to counter Russia’s global influence and aggression, and the key to this will be a comprehensive energy policy: giving Eastern European countries like Ukraine an energy alternative to Russia’s natural-gas monopoly.

At this point, I should admit a personal bias. I was born in the former Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. My family comes from Vinnytsia, a city of about 350,000 located roughly halfway between Odessa and the capital city of Kiev. My parents were political dissidents, whose marriage ceremony took place in a prison camp for those who opposed—or just disagreed with—the USSR. While attending Moscow State University, my mother spent her spare evenings bent over a typewriter, manually copying banned manuscripts for underground distribution: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and other authors I took for granted, reading them in the security of a New England high school years later. My uncle was persecuted by the KGB for his poetry, and ultimately expelled from the country. So, I have no sympathy for Russia’s slow return to totalitarianism over the past decade.

I also recognize the warning signs. Russia’s systemic persecution of minorities, such as recently enacted laws against the gay community. The country’s ever-bolder moves to beat down dissent, such as a literal public flogging of the political punk band Pussy Riot. The moves to silence free speech and the press. Bullying of smaller neighbors to spread Russia’s influence and agenda. Most worrisome, the cult of personality being built around a leader who presents himself as all-powerful and paternal. Russia is marching down a familiar path. And speaking as someone whose family remembers the horrors of Russian pogroms and Soviet purges, I know where the path leads.

America spent forty years and trillions of dollars in the last Cold War with Russia. And now it needs to prepare to do so again. It needs to play Russia’s Cold War-era power game—and win. If left unchecked, Putin will turn the clock back to the Soviet era, recreating the authoritarian police state the retired KGB colonel probably misses and stamping out democratic movements throughout Russia’s sphere of influence.

Russia now effectively controls the southern peninsula of Crimea, the strategic location of the port city of Sevastopol. Now that Putin has annexed the region, he will need to negotiate with Kiev’s new leaders (Crimea relies on mainland Ukraine for most of its utilities). Meanwhile, clashing political protests have turned deadly in several eastern Ukrainian cities that, like Crimea, have ethnic Russian majorities. According to Ukraine’s new government, Russia is inciting the unrest. It may use the violence to justify more military interventions, following the same pattern it used in Crimea—and before that, in South Ossetia, a region it helped separatists to wrest from Georgia in 2008. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to civil war. However, it is more likely that Putin will simply use the threat of military action as another bargaining chip, to force Ukraine to agree to considerable political concessions. He doesn’t want to destroy the country, but to cement his control over it.

Even if Russia invades other areas of eastern Ukraine, there will be no meaningful military response. After more than a decade of costly and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has no stomach for further armed conflict. And without America’s army, no country will be willing to support Ukraine in a bloody conflict with a former superpower. Ukraine’s new leaders know this. Though they have mobilized their army, they have no real plans to fight Russia. Their troops are merely an attempt to draw a line in the sand, a show of strength to discourage further aggression.

Nor can Ukraine count on Russia bowing to international pressure. The US and its European allies did announce sanctions against Russia this week, restricting the travel and freezing the international assets of a short list of Russian and Ukrainian officials. However, these amount to little more than a wag of the finger—and Russia interpreted them as such. Europe’s dependence on its gas means that few will sign onto the kind of serious economic sanctions that could actually hurt Russia. So instead, we get harshly worded threats—Obama’s warning that Russia will face “greater political and economic isolation”—and other largely symbolic rebukes, such as the push to evict Russia from the G8 club of nations.

Reviving the aborted US plan to set up a missile-defense system in Poland might deter Russia. And stripping it of the honor of hosting the 2018 World Cup would certainly bruise Putin’s pride. But even if Europe and the US retaliated in these harsher ways, they would be unlikely to change Russia’s bellicose foreign policy. The fact that Russia invaded Crimea right after spending years of effort and many tens of billions of dollars trying to improve its reputation with the lavish Sochi Olympics proves how little international opinion matters to it. Putin is willing for his country to be the world’s black sheep, as long as it is one of the most powerful ones in the flock. Domestically, his aggressive stance in Ukraine has actually caused his popularity to skyrocket, making it even less likely that he will back down.

In all honesty, Kiev’s only viable option is to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with Russia to end the crisis—one that will likely be more of an appeasement than an agreement. In the short term, there is little that the international community can do to help.

However, short-term thinking is part of the problem. So far, the international media have largely focused on Russia’s belligerent actions on the ground. Yet Russia’s chief geopolitical weapon is not its troops, but its energy resources. Russia has 47.8 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, almost five times as much as the US. And Russia is not afraid to use Gazprom as a weapon to punish recalcitrant nations, as it proved when it shut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Now it is threatening to call in Ukraine’s $1.5 billion gas debt, which may collapse the country’s already unstable economy. It may cut off gas to Ukraine once again. (Luckily it is now March—the last time Russia withheld gas was in the middle of a brutal winter.)

If America hopes to put an end to Russia’s growing antagonism and totalitarianism, it needs to fight fire with fire. The US has newly tapped reserves of natural gas, thanks to the recent boom in shale-gas production. In a few short years, it will go from being a major importer of natural gas to being an exporter. Expanding existing hydraulic fracturing operations in the Marcellus, Bakken, and Eagle Ford shale plays will expedite the production of this strategic energy resource. More importantly, the US can enact policies to promote the export of natural gas to Europe. In this way, the US can weaken Russia’s sway over the continent and make sure its allies’ energy dependence no longer hobbles any international efforts to keep Russia in check.

In countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, nuclear power is another means of shielding these countries from Russian influence. Ukraine, for example, has fifteen nuclear power plants. Most of the logistical support and fuel for its nuclear infrastructure comes from Russia. Imagine if this assistance came from the US instead. Beyond technical assistance and partnerships, the US can also intervene more directly in the energy market. For instance, when price disputes in 2009 prompted Russia to retaliate by turning off Ukraine’s natural-gas supply, the US could have subsidized nuclear-energy prices, neutralizing the Kremlin’s strong-arm tactics.

If the US invests in nuclear reactors in Eastern European countries, it would also counterbalance Russian power in the region in more subtle ways. The natural partners in these co-ventures would be the billionaire oligarchs who already control most of the infrastructure in these countries. These men wield great, almost feudal, power. Lucrative energy agreements with them would allow the US to buy their influence—and counter that of Russia.

Ukraine is currently trying a similar strategy, appointing oligarchs to governorships in the eastern part of the country. The gamble is that by tapping these men for leadership posts, Kiev’s leaders can indirectly win support and prevent these regions from seceding. The risky strategy seems to be paying off. In the eastern city of Donetsk, the billionaire Serhiy Taruta was appointed regional governor; soon after, the city’s police force evicted pro-Russian protesters from the parliament building they had occupied and arrested Pavel Gubarev, an organizer of mass demonstrations pushing for Donetsk to separate from Ukraine. While partnering with shady oligarchs can be a politically unsavory course of action, it could prove effective.

Fracking and nuclear power have serious environmental risks. But it is important to remember that Russia’s former satellites are already heavy users of these two sources of energy—about half of Ukraine’s electricity is produced from its nuclear reactors. And there is no reason that the US can’t help these nations build an infrastructure of solar panels, wind turbines, and other alternative sources of energy, too. Along with natural gas and nuclear energy, investing in green technologies would not just help America kick its addiction to Middle East oil, but would also enhance its ability to defend Ukraine and other fragile democracies around the world.

In the twentieth century, our Cold War conflict in Russia was waged just as much in the laboratory—to win the Space Race and the nuclear-arms race—as on any battlefield. Now, America and its allies are engaged in an energy race—and are woefully behind. The US can’t just respond to each new crisis manufactured by Putin with ineffective sanctions and stern words. It needs to take the long view. For once, it needs to think about its endgame.

Editor’s Update, March 27: President Obama stated yesterday that Europe needs to “diversify and accelerate energy independence,” and America could play a role in this: “The United States as a source of energy is one possibility, but we’re also making choices and taking on some of the difficulties and challenges of energy development, and Europe is going to have to go through some of those same conversations as well.”

Correction, March 22: An earlier version of the article mistakenly listed Ray Bradbury, rather than George Orwell, as the author of a banned manuscript.

Victor Epstein

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Interviews

The Gateway Author: A Conversation with Novelist Sherman Alexie

Best of In The Fray 2014. A novelist, poet, and peerless observer of American Indian life, Sherman Alexie has produced an acclaimed body of work that deals with the estrangement, poverty, and tragedy of life on the reservation. Two decades into his career, what really makes him happy, he says, is the way that a new generation of kids are picking up his books for their first real taste of literature.

Susan M. Lee
March 3, 2014

Head shot of Sherman Alexie — Author Sherman Alexie. *Photo by Chase Jarvis*

When his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, came out two decades ago, the New York Times Book Review hailed Sherman Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Since his debut, the American Indian novelist, poet, and filmmaker has written two dozen books and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State — an experience that became the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Alexie has also delved into film, writing the critically praised screenplay for Smoke Signals. His latest work is What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, a collection of poems and short prose published last November by Hanging Loose Press.

Sherman Alexie spoke to In The Fray about what it’s like being an “ambiguously ethnic person,” how the first immigrant he met inspired him, and why writing groups make him flinch.

You’re often asked about growing up on a reservation. I recall reading your short story, “Indian Education,” for the first time and being blown away by it. How did your experiences growing up shape what you write about?

Oh, that early stuff is barely fiction. Yeah, “Indian Education” … I called it fiction to give myself those moments where I could actually tell a more interesting version of what happened. I mean, there’s no doubt. I remember reading my first book after many years and laughing because I could have easily called it autobiography. So certainly early on, that’s what I was doing, as many young writers do.

One of the things I’ve been realizing lately — and having the words for it, I guess — is that I generally write about unhappiness and poverty and oppression, and all that difficult stuff, growing up on the res. But what I’ve realized is that a lot of my unhappiness has to do with the fact that I was a natural liberal. And an Indian reservation is an essentially conservative place. So, yeah, I was really fleeing conservatism of the Indian variety.

I can kind of relate to that. I come from a Korean American background, which can be conservative in many ways.

It’s fascinating because — I don’t know about your family — but because Democrats are usually the ones who are more pro-Indian, the worldview of Indians tends to be more Democratic. But at the same time, their tribalism is incredibly right-wing. The religious stuff is incredibly right-wing.

What did you surround yourself with, then, when you were on the reservation?

Books, books, books, books. And what I didn’t know then, and I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary or experience to know, is that I was really reading the work of about a dozen generations of white American liberals.

What were you reading?

Jane Austen, who is not actually American. [laughs] You know, The Great Gatsby. I should say, not white American liberals. White liberals. Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman. Stephen King. Even travel books, encyclopedias.

Do you visit the reservation often?

Not since my dad died. He died ten years ago, and I have a hard time being home. I mean, my mom and my siblings still live there, but I meet them in Spokane. I have a lot of pain associated with the reservation. I am completely public and out about the fact that Indians should be fleeing reservations. We’ve completely forgotten that reservations were created by the United States government as an act of war. I think they still serve that purpose. It’s Stockholm syndrome.

You have said that leaving the reservation was a pivotal moment in your life. In an interview with Bill Moyers you said that you felt like an “indigenous immigrant” and a “spy in the house of ethnicity.” I love that. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Everybody thinks I’m half of what they are. I get treated in every way imaginable, from positive to negative. People will say things to me and react to me in every way possible.

Like the question of “What are you?”

What are you? Where do you come from originally? [laughs]

What do people think you are?

Asian, Central American, South American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Cuban, Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Siberian, Russian, Slavic. It used to really bug me. It used to really anger me to not be seen as Indian. I realized that came out of this sort of insecurity — my identity was so based on immediately being perceived as being Indian. But the thing is, in order to immediately be perceived as Indian, you have to talk, act [“Indian”]. You have to wear all these cloaks. You have to conduct yourself on such a surface “Indianness” level that you become a cartoon character.

Did you feel that way when you first went off to college and left the reservation?

I felt like a minority. I mean in eastern Washington, I am completely identifiable as Indian. I guess the question as an ambiguously ethnic person is, how to protect yourself. You know, you’re driving into a region and you think, “Okay, how likely am I to be confused for a member of the race that’s most hated in this region?” I think it’s the shit that white people don’t even consider. Often they don’t even think that it’s real. And it’s often the thing that makes brown people so enraged and irrational, too. So it has this double effect, you know — white people deny it, and brown people base their entire lives on it. It’s so damaging in all sorts of ways …

Also, there’s a certain kind of magic in [race]. It’s often about people trying to connect. It’s like that brown-people head nod in the airport — when you see somebody, you make eye contact with somebody who is something, and you’re something, and you may be the same something, so you do that little head nod at each other. Like, “Yeah, I acknowledge the fact that we may be of the same brown-skinned race, or maybe not, but I’m gonna nod my head just in case.”

A lot of your work is about despair, but I feel you never get a sense that your writing is didactic. You talk about these subject matters but kind of interspersed with moments of real comedy and hilarity. What is that like for you as you’re writing?

I don’t worry about it. I don’t preplan or preconsider whether something is going to feel didactic or not. And I think I have been didactic, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I have a specifically political and social ambition in my work. I’m happy when anybody reads my book, but I especially love that my career has become multigenerational, and really happy that all sorts of brown boys are into my books now. I get “This is the first book I finished” or “This is the first book I ever loved.” I hope I am the gateway book.

I don’t think there’s a typical writing process for you, is there?

Oh God, no.

Do you have any rituals or habits?

Nothing. I think ritual prevents you from writing. If you don’t have everything in place, I think that ends up being an excuse. The more complicated your writing ritual the more likely you are not to write. So no, I am promiscuous.

How about deciding between poetry and prose? Do you ever start out with a poem and later decide that it would be much better as a short story — or the other way around?

It used to be more clear-cut that way. It really came down to the mechanics of the thing I used [to write]. I started out writing on a typewriter. If the poem went past one page, it turned into a story. When I pulled that sheet out of the typewriter, it really made the distinction between poetry and prose clear to me. But now that you don’t do that, you keep writing. I think it’s far more blurred and unpredictable.

Do you read your work aloud?

Oh, constantly. All the time. I am not a formalist, a typical formalist, but I use a lot of rhyme — all of traditional forms — and repetition. So certainly the music of it is something I am very interested in.

Do you have readers or friends you show your work to?

Most of my work, I don’t. I have a few friends that see my early stuff, but by in large, no. I am pretty isolated that way. I don’t hang around, you know, a writing group. That makes me flinch. Or hanging around writers talking about writing. That makes me flinch. If I were a plumber, I wouldn’t want to be talking about plumbing all night. My friendships revolve around my other interests.

This is a broad question, but who would you say has been a big influence on your life and work?

Always teachers. And not even necessarily English or writing teachers. One of the reasons why I’m good at public speaking is my experience with the Future Farmers of America in high school. I did debate. I did parliamentary-procedure contests and debate within Future Farmers of America. It was performance. You would get a randomly chosen topic and a specific set of motions that you had to display. It was sort of theater, in a way. And you would be debating and discussing these issues as well at a mock meeting — bureaucratic theater, essentially. I’ve always been in the school plays, too. On the res, I was always the narrator and the lead role.

When you went to college that’s when you got into poetry. And you credit one of your professors at Washington State University.

Yeah, Alex Kuo. He’s a poet. He’s incredibly brilliant and extremely liberal and politically minded. He was born in China and grew up in the US, in Boston. It was my first experience — I haven’t ever put it this way before — it was my first experience with an immigrant. I’m just realizing that.

What was that like?

Well, he was the first Chinese person I knew. The first Chinese American I knew, the first poet I knew. He was this perfect combination of all those liberal things I was reading about on the res, in the form of a second-generation Chinese American.

The first class [of Kuo’s course] he assigned the work, and a week later we met. Before the second class he read five pages of my poems, and they were the first five poems I had ever wrote. He came in and he took me in the hallway. He asked me what I was doing with the rest of my life, and I said, I don’t know. And he goes, “Well, you should be a writer.”

Are there any topics or themes that you don’t want to face, or stay away from?

I stay away from specific tribal and religious ceremonies. I have characters who participate in that stuff, but I never go inside the sweat lodge, so to speak. I think it would be playing a character. And number two, Native religion is so economically exploited that I have no interest in being a part of that, either. And it’s a cliché by now, Native spirituality. It’s all that. And it’s just bad writing.

When did you start Tweeting?

Maybe it’s been a year and a half. It’s entertaining. It’s a monologue. It’s so funny. Some people get so mad that I don’t have conversations with them. They get all Twitter fundamentalist: “There are these rules!” It’s another forum for me to put ideas that people can agree with or not, but I have no illusions about whether I am going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

I saw that your book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was banned recently in a school in West Virginia. Do these actions ever surprise you or piss you off?

I support all the people who fight these bans, but on the individual level, all they do is benefit me. It’s a lot of free publicity. The philosophy, you know, is dangerous. The people who try to ban one book, they’re not trying to ban a book. They’re trying to ban imagination.

When do you know that you’re absolutely done with pieces of your work?

When my publisher tells me that they have to have to be turned in. It’s really deadlines. I abandon things. I turn them in because I have to.

Is there anything else that you want to accomplish still as a writer?

Hopefully to get better. I want to write a book that surprises me. And in doing so, surprises everybody else. Something I never thought I was going to write about, or was capable of doing. I don’t even know what that is. Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.

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personal stories. global issues.