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Best of In The Fray 2015. As they head into what should be their golden years, many older immigrants still work low-wage jobs and remain undocumented. Unable to save up or receive benefits for the elderly, they can do little but hope they stay healthy and employable. Part two of a two-part series.
“Nursing homes are sad places. People are abandoned there,” says Gloria Murray, sixty-six, a Jamaican immigrant who worked for more than two decades as a health aide at a nursing home. Over the course of her career, Murray became close to many of her clients. It was important to her that they be shown kindness and respect. In Jamaica, she says, “we take care of our old.”
Yet as Murray grew old herself, she quickly learned that no one was going to take care of her. In 2010, a fire destroyed her home in New York. Homeless for two years, she struggled to navigate the city’s shelter system. Life there was unbearable, she says: “It was drugs, pimps, the whole lot. I never knew it would come to this.”
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2015. Embracing the last stage of life is a challenge for all, but especially so for those growing old outside their homeland. Part one of a two-part series.
Tucked away in Staten Island’s Clifton neighborhood is a fourth-floor apartment painted in drowsy greens and browns. A blend of savory aromas—fish gravies, okra, fufu, stewed bitterballs—fills the air as brightly dressed women chat over bowls of chicken stew with rice.
Monah Smith, a small, wizened woman with a quiet smile, has been cooking for them. Smith sells home-cooked meals from her apartment in Park Hill, a low-income housing complex. The place never seems to be empty. Staten Island is home to the largest Liberian community outside of Africa, and many of Smith’s fellow immigrants drop by—at almost any hour of day—for the traditional, slow-cooked dishes she makes.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2015. In his first book, Philip Connors went to the woods to learn what it had to teach. In his latest work, he delves into the dark memories of his family’s past, rooting out the meaning of a tragedy.
Susan Dunlap
Earlier this year, forest-fire lookout and nonfiction writer Philip Connors came out with his second book, All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found. It’s a beautifully wrought memoir about his brother’s suicide, which happened when Connors was only twenty-three. In the Fray’s Susan Dunlap talked with Connors over email in the spring about the way his brother Dan’s death shaped the trajectory of his own life, the approach he took to writing about a taboo subject, and the comforts of solitude.
You started out as a journalist and avoided getting an MFA degree. Were you daunted when you first set out as a creative nonfiction writer?
I first started writing nonfiction because I tried and failed to write quality fiction. A good deal of my apprenticeship—aside from working for newspapers—involved writing terrible short stories that no one has ever read, nor ever will. I just couldn’t write a good one. I couldn’t seem to finish a story without getting bored with it. And I never had the desire to subject myself to the torture of the MFA workshop, which Louis Menand memorably described as “a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy.” At some point, having failed for years to write any decent fiction, I thought, “Why not try to write a true story? The thing happened; I know how the story begins, I know how it ends.” And my first attempt was decent enough to be published in a little magazine, the Georgia Review, which was, of course, encouraging. I haven’t written a word of fiction since.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found By Philip Connors
W. W. Norton & Company. 256 pages.
All the Wrong Places is a very personal book about a dark chapter in your family’s life. You say that you felt inspired to write about your brother Dan because your mother shared her diary with you. Was it hard for your family to see the entire story when it went to print?
Parts of it were very difficult for my parents to read, as they would have to be: I’m writing about their only other son, who chose to end his life with a bullet from an assault rifle. But they’ve been remarkably supportive of the book. My sister told me she loved it. That meant a lot. My mother told me she couldn’t put it down, even as she cried through the whole second half.
As you mentioned, it was her brave act of connection and sharing that originally unlocked the book for me. She’d been keeping a diary of her thoughts about Dan, and in one of our rare moments of conversation about him, she had the impulse to share what she’d written. I found it very moving that she would offer up something so intimate. By then I had come to understand how difficult it is to talk about suicide—so difficult that it’s among our last taboos. It was not something we talked about much in our family, even though it sat there like the elephant in the room. And after my mother shared what she’d written with me, I thought maybe I could also write something that chipped away at the taboo.
It feels like you are saying in the book that your brother’s suicide shaped your adult life, both in the mistakes you made but also in the fact that you became a nonfiction writer.
It happened when I was still in the process of crafting an adult self, so I think it’s only natural that it affected everything that came afterward in my life. And I do think it’s a major part of what made me the sort of writer I became. Because the subject of suicide is so taboo, I found that the only place I could talk about it was in my own private notebooks. For years and years I had a running conversation with myself about it; if I didn’t, I feared the fact of Dan’s death would eat me alive. In some perverse way, the fact of his death ordained my becoming a writer. In order to live, I had to write—and so I did.
The sense of lost connections, or a failure to connect, gives the book a sense of poignancy, without it ever becoming maudlin.
Yes, that was a trap I wanted to avoid. I didn’t feel a need to accentuate the tragic nature of suicide. The reader is going to get it. What I wanted to do was write a quest story—a quest for how to be in the world after something like that has happened in your family.
The suicide of a family member is like a bomb going off, and it leaves everyone left behind with a lot of shrapnel and a lot of questions. How could my brother have believed that a bullet in the brain was the answer to what troubled him? And what was the thing that troubled him? For years, I didn’t know. It took some searching to unearth a plausible story, and in the meantime the fact of his death was close to unbearable. I thought about it every day for years, and it made me what I suppose a doctor would call clinically depressed.
But finding a way to live with the unbearable can result in comedy, at least in retrospect. Making the unbearable bearable is a real-life run at improvisational burlesque, and often a massive exercise in self-deception. I made counterintuitive choices. My life became deeply weird, sometimes even farcical. I managed to work myself into the wrong situation—the wrong neighborhood, the wrong job—over and over again.
The details of that impulse allowed me to laugh at some of what I had made of my life in those years, and that was crucial in writing a readable book, one that didn’t take the reader by the scruff of the neck and rub her nose in endless misery. I like to think that parts of it are pretty funny, perhaps unexpectedly so.
Part of the book is also about clandestine phone sex, which adds a touch of ribald humor but also is closely tied to the theme of an inability to connect. Was it hard to write about something so personal?
Not really. Those parts of the book were among the first I wrote, and they came pretty easily, because the experience was so strange and vivid, and so rich in narrative potential. If you’re going to write a memoir, you’ve got to be willing to confess. Having grown up Catholic, I know a thing or two about confession.
I was especially riveted by the story of your friend who developed a phone relationship with a dying man. I think that could fall under the “you can’t make this stuff up” category of nonfiction. Yet with this book you managed to do what I think good fiction generally tries to do—capture an emotional truth through telling a story.
Life is almost always stranger than fiction. How to capture some of that strangeness in a true story—and how to impose a certain shapeliness and beauty on the chaos of lived experience—is a motivating challenge for me. In both of my first two books, I wanted to write nonfiction that had a depth of feeling and an emotional impact similar to the best fiction.
Was there another memoir writer you’ve met or read who inspired you to think about your own book the way you did?
[The semi-autobiographical novel] A River Runs Through It always spoke to me because it mingled the comic and the tragic so beautifully, and deftly managed big jumps in time. But as a memoirist I was dealing with the raw material of my own life, so the challenge was to sift through my experience to discover what about it had the shape of a story. I wanted the book to have a kind of relentless narrative drive. The goal was to create that unlikely thing: a page-turner about a suicide. Mostly that involved writing and rewriting, again and again, and stripping away anything extraneous so that all that was left was essential.
Your first book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, could be called a modern-day Thoreauvian account of a solitary life in the wilderness. Solitariness is also a theme in All the Wrong Places. Do you think solitude is a necessary condition for you as a writer?
I’m not sure solitude is a necessary condition, but it is without question helpful. Back when I lived and worked in New York, I wrote in the mornings before setting off on my commute. I think what I’ve written since then is better, deeper, and more thoughtful for the time I’ve been given as a Forest Service fire lookout, living and working in solitude, with plenty of mental elbow room for thinking or not thinking, being creative, allowing things to bubble up unexpectedly. Part of writing, for me, is sitting and doing nothing. In order to write for an hour, I often find I have to sit doing nothing for three. Then a phrase comes, and I’m off.
What’s next for you?
Check back in six months and perhaps I’ll have an answer. This book left me feeling that I’d scraped from the bottom of the well. Now I need to allow the well to fill again. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.
You’re about to head back into the Gila National Forest to work as a fire lookout for another season. Are you looking forward to a respite from the pressures involved in being a public person?
Absolutely. I’m far more comfortable sitting alone in a lookout tower than I am speaking in front of strangers in bookstores. I’m very much looking forward to sitting quietly, communing with the birds, studying cloud shapes. It’s what I do best.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Susan Dunlap is the natural-resources reporter for the Montana Standard.
Correction, August 10: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story mistakenly said All the Wrong Places is Connors’ third book; it is the second he has written, though he edited and contributed an essay to a third book. The story also said the suicide of Connors’ brother occurred when he working as a reporter; he was actually a college student at the time. We regret the errors.
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Best of In The Fray 2015. The Troubles are gone, but the anger and suspicion remain in Northern Ireland—especially in working-class Protestant communities left behind by the peace process.
Chris Schumerth
Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr
A few years ago, I found myself in a very Protestant part of Belfast trying to convince neighborhood kids that they should be nice to Catholics. I was working for a nonprofit, driving all over Northern Ireland to direct sports programs that bussed groups of children back and forth between Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Americans would probably describe the work we did as “peace-building,” but locals in Belfast called it “community relations.”
My colleague Joanne, a Catholic, had come with me to east Belfast to talk to kids who were part of a soccer program there. Programs like this are often funded by foundation grants that mandate a community-relations component. The danger is that the participants sometimes felt duped. They were there to play soccer but found out they had to listen to our spiel first. Challenging the convictions they’d grown up with invited resentment, too, especially when the hosting adults didn’t really buy in. And that’s the exact scenario Joanne and I ran into.
A sixtyish man named John (a pseudonym) greeted us. The conversation started out friendly enough, but then he informed us that our allotted time had been cut in half. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “The boys really just want to play football.”
To cut our time was a breach of contract, but I wasn’t about to bring that up. John wasn’t done talking, anyway. He had another request: could we please refrain from mentioning Gaelic football tonight? (In Northern Ireland, Protestants play rugby and Catholics play Gaelic football, but we made a point of talking to our kids about both sports.) Gaelic football is a sectarian game, John insisted. He doesn’t want to be friends with any of those Catholics anyway. Buncha terrorists. Besides, he knows some of them, and they wouldn’t go near a rugby pitch. And don’t even get him started on those Lithuanians who keep coming in and stealing his people’s jobs.
Neither Joanne nor I really knew what to say. To be honest, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were other adults from the soccer club around, and they seemed embarrassed. They awkwardly pulled us away and led us to a room with window views of the pitch. For the rest of the evening, teenagers circulated through the room to participate in our activities. We talked about Gaelic football. We said that anybody should be able to play sports because they’re fun and a good way to bring people from different backgrounds together.
One boy was not so sure. “I know one person around here who would disagree with all that,” he said.
The boys sat up straight when John entered the room and sat ominously at the end of the table. I let Joanne do as much of the talking as possible, and she handled it like a pro. She’d been working in community relations for years. To my surprise, John stayed quiet, and I wondered if someone had told him to ease up on us for the rest of the evening.
Northern Ireland may have originated as a legal entity in 1921, when the British Parliament split Ireland in two, but its history of nationalist conflict stretches back to when King Henry II of England first landed in 1171 and took control of the island. Much later, from 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army fought British forces in a war for Ireland’s independence. It was during those years of conflict that the infamous episode known as “Bloody Sunday” occurred. On November 21, 1920, the IRA assassinated fourteen British operatives in Dublin. Later that day, an occupational police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary retaliated at a football match, killing fourteen civilians.
After Ireland was partitioned, the southern part of the island became independent. A sizable Irish Catholic community lived in Northern Ireland as well, and the Irish nationalists, or republicans, wanted to join the new nation. But Northern Ireland’s population was mostly unionists, or loyalists, who wanted to stay a part of Great Britain. The tensions between the two sides culminated in the Troubles, a conflict from 1968 to 1998 that led to more than 3,600 deaths. As many as 50,000 were injured, sometimes from gruesome practices like kneecapping.
When I arrived in Belfast for my job, I barely knew the distinction between Northern Ireland and its tourist-friendly neighbor to the south. Back in the United States, my father’s family are practicing Catholics, and my mother comes from a family of Protestants. I thought this background would help me understand Northern Ireland, but I was completely wrong. To call the dispute there a religious conflict is almost a misnomer. Sure, there are Protestant and Catholic churches that subscribe—with differing levels of rigidity—to conflicting beliefs about God. But the most salient identities in Northern Ireland nowadays seem to have little to do with disagreements about, say, transubstantiation. Instead, they have to do with culture—and also, to some degree, class.
Furthermore, the conflict today is played out in often hidden ways. As my coworkers warned me, questions about which school you attended or what part of the city you live in or what sport you play are often subtle attempts to peg allegiances. They are about figuring out what side you are on—what flag you fly in a war over national pride and cultural dignity that has never really ended.
A few weeks after my encounter with John, I was near the city center, driving home from work. I stopped at a red light. Before the light changed, a mob of people holding British flags rushed into the intersection. They planted themselves there, chanting. I tried to slide over to the right lane to make a turn. Several protesters anticipated my move and ran over to block the way. I wanted to keep driving, but I didn’t need any legal troubles, especially as a foreigner. So I stopped and waited. The demonstration backed up more and more traffic behind me, but the crowd was in no hurry.
This was my first experience with the demonstrations that were happening all over the city, every night for weeks, in response to a Belfast city council decision that the Union Jack would only be flown at city hall on specific holidays rather than every day. On a few occasions, Protestant disgust with the decision had turned violent, with young men burning cars and throwing bricks and petrol bombs at police officers, and explosive devices winding up in cars and in the mail.
My coworkers and friends in Belfast—many of them educated, liberal, and middle-class—were impatient with the protesters. “It’s just a flag,” they would say. Or, “It’s just a few crazies. I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant.”
As I sat in my car waiting for the protesters to disperse, it was easy to sympathize with that attitude. But the more time I spent in Northern Ireland, the more that I realized that things were complicated. For instance, there was a socioeconomic component that hardly anyone mentioned. Many of the protesters came from the neighborhoods where I worked. I knew what the housing looked like there, what the children wore. They were working class. The most embittered among them seemed to be men with few prospects, whose best option to make money was either applying for welfare or joining the military. I could understand the appeal of simply drinking one’s life away in a pub with other rowdy and angry men, instead of dealing with a hopeless future. On top of all the pressures these working-class men and women faced in their day-to-day lives, now politicians were stripping away their very identity: first their political power, and now their national dignity.
Through work, I met Will Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who had worked extensively with low-income Protestants in Belfast. He was well-connected and had even gotten to know a few men with paramilitary backgrounds, guys with terrifying pasts. “Most unionist parties didn’t come from the working class,” he told me. “They were considered parties of the State. So some Protestants in Northern Ireland have a history of underrepresentation.”
After I got trapped in that street demonstration, I wanted to learn more about what Protestants thought about the flag. I attended a panel discussion with representatives from all of the country’s major political parties save Sinn Féin (the highly nationalistic Irish Catholic party). As an American, it was interesting to watch a real multiparty debate. In addition to the Protestant/Catholic split, there were varying conservative and liberal perspectives under those two broad religious banners. I trusted one panelist in particular: Trevor Ringland, a former rugby star with a Protestant background. Sometime after his playing days ended, he had transitioned into politics. He seemed to genuinely want what was good for all sides.
Northern Ireland, Ringland said, had moved from violent conflict to a cold war—and now, to a “cold peace.” The next step, he argued, had to be a “constructive peace,” which would require more from the Northern Irish than living in separate neighborhoods and attending separate schools. It would require integration. It would require feeling, seeing, and healing old wounds.
I was moved by his speech, but I also could not help but notice that Ringland’s political moderation came from a privileged perspective. Yes, he had lived through the Troubles, but he had also been a professional athlete—and not just any rugby player, but the player on Ireland’s team who had scored the “Try of the Century” against the Scots to win them the Five Nations Championship in 1985. He was a local hero who had lived a good life, and so it was possible for him to believe in a good life.
Not everyone in the room had that luxury. Although the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace accord brokered by US president Bill Clinton, had aimed to bring about a more equal and just society in Northern Ireland, one Protestant panelist called the peace process “incomplete.” Among those left behind were certain Protestant communities—specifically, the least educated, least employed ones.
The conversation got tense during the audience Q&A. Someone asked why, if the nationalist community was really interested in a “shared future,” did a park in Newry get named after a “terrorist”? Others accused loyalist protests of hurting the Northern Irish economy and its international reputation. Tempers flared, audience members interrupted speakers, and tears flowed.
I went home thinking about how the Northern Irish weren’t really that different from Americans. They chose segregation not because it’s better, but because it’s easier.
I had been hearing about the Twelfth of July ever since I arrived in Northern Ireland. The holiday commemorates the Battle of the Boyne. In that decisive encounter in 1690, Protestant forces led by King William defeated King James’s Catholics near the Boyne River, some thirty miles from Dublin. Many Protestants practically live for the day, while some Catholics hate it so much they leave town. The Twelfth has become so fraught with emotion that there is a government agency—the Parades Commission—charged with keeping the celebration safe. That year, a controversial ruling by the commission prohibited marchers from taking a return route through Ardoyne, a feisty Catholic area in north Belfast.
I was determined to experience at least part of the holiday, so I headed downtown to the celebrations. After parking my car, I walked in the direction of piping flutes and banging drums. A crowd of thousands stood on each side of the street, watching band after band march through. I saw blue football jerseys for the Glasgow Rangers in every direction, and the Union Jack used in all sorts of creative ways: as a shirt, skirt, even a hat.
Before, a friend had told me that what is so disturbing about the Twelfth is that its uniting force—what is actually celebrated—is hatred of a particular demographic. Watching the parade, I detected a certain triumphalism in the way some people were celebrating. But it seemed to be only part of the story. I mostly saw smiles. There were angry men there, but there were also old ladies, mothers, and children. People shared their food. Musicians played their tunes. Marchers tossed their poles. I felt myself getting in step with the martial beat of the drums, just like I’d done years ago as a cadet in military school.
My own best guess is that any real shared future in Northern Ireland will find a place for the Twelfth of July commemoration. I don’t think working-class Protestants—or any of us, for that matter—can entirely shed such a potent part of their identity, even in pursuit of peace. By the same token, extinguishing the hatreds and distrust that give that celebration a bad name will require taking seriously the sometimes inconvenient voices of this sizable group.
The more disconcerting part of the Twelfth of July celebration took place the night before. Protestants all over the city gathered around bonfires after dark. A few of my friends took me around to see them, though my friend Paddy warned me—or maybe “begged” is more accurate—not to call out his name. When I heard “bonfires,” I thought of quaint little gatherings: roasting marshmallows, singing Kumbaya. Not so. In Protestant neighborhoods the partygoers lit pallets stacked with wood, their flames reaching as high as three stories. The heat was so intense that we had to stand hundreds of feet away. I was surprised the practice was legal.
Children ran around, while parents danced to blaring music. The beer flowed, and some people were clearly drunk. The police presence seemed minimal and indifferent.
Just off Shankill Road in north Belfast, I spotted a tent where a woman was selling cheap beer out of a cooler. I walked over and ordered a drink. A man behind me heard my American accent.
“Where ya from?” he asked.
“I’m from the States,” I said, uneasily. Other people were turning to listen to us. “I’ve been here for almost a year.”
“What are you here for?” he asked.
“My job,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask what my job was.
“What part of town do you live in?”
“Lower Ormeau Road,” I said, thankful that I lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly Catholic.
“Who are they?” he asked, pointing at my friends.
Maybe I was paranoid, but by then, I was almost certain this man was really only interested in one thing: Was I Catholic?Did I have Catholic sympathies? Was this all a big joke to me, peeking in on the Protestants?
I doubted that continuing the conversation would lead to anything good. It was time to end this little dance. “It was nice to meet you,” I said, excusing myself.
I chugged my beer and tossed the bottle in a trashcan. Then my friends and I got back in our car and drove away.
Chris Schumerth is a writer who lives in Indianapolis. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in Salon, the Miami Herald, Relevant Magazine, and Punchnel’s, among other publications. Twitter: @ChrisSchumerth | Blog: chrisschumerth.com
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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.
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.
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!”
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.
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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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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
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
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.
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
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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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.
When his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, came out two decades ago, the New York Times Book Reviewhailed 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 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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, came out two decades ago, the 
, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Alexie has also delved into film, writing the critically praised screenplay for 
. His latest work is 
, a collection of poems and short prose published last November by Hanging Loose Press.