Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  Cameras are banned at this fashion week. We’ve smuggled our cameras in beneath the abayas, and in one large backpack, thanks to the Italian charm of the blue-eyed photographer. Blue eyes go a long, long way where we’re from. Toni said it all in 1969, and there’s not much to add.

  My sister gifts me a bracelet engraved by hand with a line from Beloved, but I cannot wear it and I never wear it, and I make no secret of it. “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother,” it reads, which is what I always tell her, but I’m old, not grown, and not a mother. I cannot bear the sight of the beautiful silver words. So I leave it on the nightstand at my mother’s house for her to wear, except she doesn’t because my sister had it made especially for me. So it just sits there, looking at me every time I spend the night in my childhood bed, acutely aware that I’m nowhere near motherhood.

  “Did you check your phone?” The photographer’s blue eyes look up from the lens, red with anger. Grief. I’ve seen that look. I check my phone. Abdullah al-Qadry is dead. Our stringer. Husband, son, father of a baby. Nearly decapitated in Yemen. Thankfully, someone later says, not on assignment for us. Thankfully.

  In Philly, years earlier, my cousin calls me one January afternoon and asks if I’ve checked my Facebook. I never want to check my Facebook. “Did you at least read the Times today?” But I stopped reading the English news the minute I stepped away from the field. Exasperated, she tells me Leila is dead, Leila Alaoui, an al-Qaeda bullet in Burkina Faso. Two weeks after I last saw her in Beirut.

  * * *

  —

  I left the field once, for almost five years, because I didn’t understand anything anymore, and because at heart I have always suspected I’m not really a journalist. I can’t remember most of the five years. The fog hasn’t really ever lifted. I try to explain to my therapist that it’s not trauma, or post-trauma, or post-traumatic stress, although it’s probably a disorder, that the mind can actually bear this world. Maybe we are always a little bit depressed. Maybe sometimes it’s not just war. It’s the rest of the world that leaves you traumatized.

  And maybe there is no possible way to tell the stories we should. To pretend they are something other than stories. I am waiting to go to Yemen, but you don’t have to go anywhere anymore to be covering your beat. Plenty of great work gets done from a distance, my boss reminds me, and we need that distance. Because we’re not far enough away.

  * * *

  —

  Ali Abdullah Saleh is killed and Sana’a collapses, again. Our stringers are trapped. Again.

  I call a contact, a dear friend, to make sure she is okay. For the first time in a year, she loses it. She saw a child scoop water up from the side of the road and drink it because people can’t afford to buy water. A camp for the internally displaced—who, if their ports weren’t under blockade, would have boarded boats and turned into refugees, but for now they are IDPs, internally displaced persons—is bombed. A boat of Ethiopian and Somali refugees is spotted by the Yemeni coast guard, so the smugglers throw people into the water, and probably stomp on their heads to keep them down. Another boat capsizes. She loses it. The next month, when we meet in person, she thanks me for my dedication, which took the form of using my phone, paid for by my company, from an air-conditioned flat in a high-rise in Dubai. She thanks me for my stories.

  I don’t know where little Ali and Beydaa’ are now, but Mazhar is dead and Abdullah is dead and Leila is dead and Baraa is dead. My cousin Joe is dead, and Ramzi is also my cousin and he is also dead. Mohammed has no eyes or left arm anymore, and the other Mohammed is in jail.

  I am in Dubai now, and my business card says I cover Yemen. I am in Dubai now, being thanked for caring, and six years after little Ali put on his little red T-shirt that morning, the room starts its lilting, comforting spin again.

  Bint el-Balad

  Nour Malas

  At first, they were just black shadows cast across the desert expanse. As they drew nearer, they came into focus as a trudging mass of humanity.

  Syrians.

  Women in loose robes dragged toddlers, babies propped up on their hips. Men carrying parents and grandparents on their shoulders stepped ahead, calling back for assurances as women collapsed in the heat. Flimsy plastic bags, crammed with clothes and other belongings, dangled off shoulders and wrists. In the midday glaze, as light shimmered off the desert like water droplets, the scene at the Syrian-Iraqi border seemed almost biblical. My Iraqi colleague Ali, who had already tasted the wrath of displacement from his own country, squatted in the shade of our car and cried.

  I, too, had watched this scene many times already, in Syria and on its borders. Recently, at another crossing into Iraq, thousands of Syrians had trampled over a bridge that all but collapsed into a river, capturing the media’s waning attention of the then three-year-old refugee crisis. From Iraq, I went to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, aiming to report on the refugee crisis from every border of Syria that I could. I was determined to see every dimension of this war so that I could better understand it. But not just for my reporting. This was a deeply personal assignment for me, and yet one that never quite felt personal enough.

  Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. I would untangle the many shades of this identity at the very moment the country was coming undone. Through my reporting, I would learn more about the people of Syria—Syrians, like me—from cities I knew, towns I had never heard of, and faraway villages I wouldn’t think to visit if it weren’t for my job.

  My parents are from Damascus, Syria, but my siblings and I were raised in other countries in the Middle East and in the United States. Home was a place we created for ourselves over and over in places that never felt as though they were indisputably our own. Still, growing up, we always knew where we were from—Syria—even if we didn’t live there.

  In Saudi Arabia, for example, where my father built a career in the construction industry, we weren’t quite as foreign as the Western expats, but we weren’t Saudi either. Life felt temporary, even after many years. In Lebanon, one of our latest adopted homes, it took only a couple of words for new neighbors and friends to identify our Syrian accents.

  We spent summers in Damascus, at the apartment my parents bought specifically to keep roots in Syria. And though it seemed fickle to declare this was the place I was from based on yearly visits, nothing else came as close to making as much sense. After ten years in Lebanon, my Lebanese friends would jokingly ask, “But how do you still sound so Syrian?” I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived?

  I would grapple with that question subtly, slowly, over my formative years—and then sharply, suddenly, in my job.

  MIN WEIN? (WHERE ARE YOU FROM?)

  I particularly never identified with the straddle that comes with being a hyphenated American: Syrian American, in my case. But because I worked for a U.S. newspaper, I found that not only was that duality an accurate and apt description of me throughout my reporting in the Middle East, it was also a helpful one that I could use to my advantage in certain situations. Still, it was always a little awkward explaining I had never lived in Syria. Sometimes this conveyed a social class barrier—of someone with the means to live abroad—or else a woman so Westernized that I might as well have not been of Syrian origin at all.

  But remembrances of Syria over many cups of tea, and even a meal or two scraped together from meager ingredients, eventually diluted the differences. After all, it wasn’t just that I spoke Arabic but my specifically Syrian accent that eased me into the small, intimate quarters of refugees and helped me get reporting done, for the most part, with ease and trust.

  I learned to navigate the corners of my family identity and history, and use my experiences as a native reporter in the region, to see and
access deep or difficult parts of the story. Instead of dreading the question “Min wein, anseh?” (Where are you from, miss?), which I was asked in every conversation and interview, I came to cherish the mutual exploration that would follow. What bound us was always more obvious, in the moment, than what made us different.

  At least for the first few years of the war, this was true.

  I never anticipated that I would cover this kind of war in my homeland. I told family and friends often how lucky I considered myself to have this job, this assignment, at this very moment. It was like an elevator pitch I perfected: It wasn’t just that it was a huge story, I would say, a skill-building and name-making experience. It was a privilege to get to know my country, whatever the circumstances.

  Privately, I felt guilty that it took the Arab Spring and a nightmarish descent into war to accidentally spark this personal journey. As a college student in Lebanon, where I also first started to work as a journalist, I learned more about that country than my own. This felt like a betrayal, however inextricably linked the two nations’ histories were. Soon I had more Lebanese friends than Syrian. Beirut, with its beachside bars and an American university we liked to call “Harvard of the Middle East,” was a cooler place for twentysomethings than Damascus, where a semisocialist economy made the city feel like it lagged a decade or two behind.

  When the early rumbles of the Arab Spring started, and my editor at the Wall Street Journal asked me to look into what was happening in Syria, I was mortified. Sure, I was Syrian, but I didn’t know the country nearly as well as he might have assumed. And I predicted—mostly correctly—that few people I personally knew would be willing to talk to me in my capacity as a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper.

  But as with any assignment, I worked away until I had contacts and sources I trusted and who trusted me, people offering snippets of life in a country fragmenting faster than we could document. Eventually, I even began to excel at the part of the job I found the most difficult: pressing traumatized and vulnerable people to recall experiences and details they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, in order to explain the suffering of Syrians in our stories. In moments of great synergy, it felt like I was drawing on a special power that helped me glide into people’s lives, even at times of horror or tragedy.

  TASHREED (DISPLACEMENT)

  For a while, my job was a welcome safety net. It gave me an excuse to dissect and report a convoluted war with the aimed precision of a lab investigator, or a fact-finding mission, while dueling narratives swirled all around. My focus on deadlines and news cycles left no room for personal reflection or outrage, or the debates and conspiracy theories consuming the Arab world. I thought it was better that way, as week after week, and then year after year, the war killed, injured, depressed, or polarized everyone around me. Everyone knew someone who stopped talking to a brother or aunt on the opposite side. Relatives trickled out of Syria, packing up homes they doubted they would ever return to. My mother wept every time she watched the news.

  Whether they’re taking shelter from barrel bombs in the caves of Idlib or Aleppo or in the relative safety of Beirut or Berlin, Syrians everywhere will talk about tashreed—literally, displacement. “Tsharadna, ikhtee” (We’ve been displaced, sister), people would say to me over and over. The word meant so much more than simple physical displacement. Tsharadna meant we were ripped apart, made dispossessed—evicted, even. Over time, it began to reflect the complete shattering of the nation and the people it had encompassed.

  Throughout the war, I downplayed my own feelings. What an inappropriate indulgence it felt like to recognize that somehow I had a small connection to this mass tragedy, beyond my job. I felt unentitled to this pain. I was, after all, a longtime expat—not a born-and-bred Syrian. I was experiencing this primarily as a journalist. My family was safe. Colleagues and friends praised my reporting as brave, but what was momentary courage driven by professional purpose when millions of people—my people—had no choice but to face violence every day? I pushed those thoughts aside and planned the next story, the next trip.

  Still, my accent, my name, and ultimately my feelings always betrayed me. To myself and others, I was undeniably Syrian. And as the war got more violent, “Min wein?”—Where are you from?—became a more pointed question, demanding an answer with significant specificity: Which neighborhood, what sect? Here, too, I used my reporter’s role as a veneer to protect myself from the type of probing often faced by journalists related to the places they are covering. “I’m just a reporter” was an easy, and honest, answer to “What side are you on?”

  By the time the conflict had been raging for a few years, Syrians had perfected the coy game of finding out strangers’ political views without asking. Only a straight-up rebel supporter, some would say, would still refer to the conflict as a “revolution.” Regime backers tended to call it “the war,” while those in the hazy area between the regime and its opponents reverted to the conspicuously broad term “the events.”

  I watched people do this verbal dance often, only to realize later that I was walking a similar tightrope in my own reporting and writing. I was so aware—even paranoid—of my personal connection to the story that I strained to project unreasonable neutrality, sometimes to the point of pretending I had no sympathy for any tragedy, on any side. I compartmentalized the suffering and made it my job to cut through it, to write clearly and straightforwardly. Interviewing a former prisoner, I asked minute details—and asked again and again, for accuracy of order and verification—about a torture tactic called “the chair.” It felt cruel, but necessary. With every mass killing, I seemed to raise the bar for what I thought constituted enough information to piece together an account. In short, I nearly stopped believing anyone. I would probe all sides for answers, unflinching when fathers described rolling their dead babies into tiny shrouds and nodding mechanically as families talked about eating soil to stave off starvation.

  I made it clear to Syrian officials in Damascus that I was on no side, even though they constantly invoked my being Syrian, and gave trite explanations about the job of journalists—a funny thing to explain in a state without independent media. When I traveled around the country with rebels, I didn’t comment on the regime’s actions or praise the rebel movement: I wanted it known I was there as a reporter, not as a sympathizer or an activist.

  TA’TEER (DESTITUTION)

  As a reporter, I tried to explore Damascus as I would have on summer vacations or visits to aunts, uncles, and cousins in the past. I was curious, and apprehensive, to see how the beloved hometown of my parents and grandparents was coping with the war. I felt this was my prerogative as a native, even though I was there as an American journalist. I wanted to steal any moment that would revive the Damascus in my memory with a determination to prove, to perhaps nobody but myself, that this was Syria: breezy balconies wrapped in jasmine vines, walks to the neighborhood cassette store for the latest mixtape, and crowded family dinners—not the divided nation showing its new faces in my notebooks.

  Most of my close relatives had left the city by then. A few had stayed on, living stalled lives with little or no work, refusing to leave home unless violence came to the doorstep. One invited me for a home-cooked meal. She seemed enthusiastic to reconnect and offer familiarity and care in an otherwise electrified environment. The neighbors and some other relatives would join, too, she said. I couldn’t wait to sit with people I knew and trusted, to take a breath and shed some of the paranoia I carried around with me in wartime Syria. Maybe we would even smile and laugh.

  When I arrived, the table was set for six, but my relative and I were the only two there. The others had realized I was a journalist on assignment and, assuming my every movement would be tracked by the government, got cold feet.

  “I wasn’t going to talk about work or anything about politics!” I fumed, embarrassed to have ruined the dinner, but also feeling frustrated that a simple meal w
ith family had become an undertaking of risks and calculations.

  “I know,” my relative said bashfully. “But this is Syria.” She promised to gather us all another time.

  * * *

  —

  Syria. The more I reported on it, the farther away it began to seem, like a receding goal that had become so distant that none of us—Syrians as a whole—could remember what it was originally about.

  The war contorted and dragged on, and my own ability to contort my Syrian-ness in ways that served my reporting—my special power—began to fade, becoming instead an unshakable burden. I struggled to use the fly-on-the-wall perch I sometimes secured, feeling like it could breach the trust of the people allowing me into their lives, even though they always knew I was a journalist.

  At a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert one late summer day, that struggle smacked me straight in the face.

  Abu Nawras, a retired Syrian army intelligence officer, was said to be the first refugee to have registered at the camp. He was impatient. There I was, trying to get him to revive the details of his earliest moments at the refugee camp, when two days earlier, a fresh disaster had struck his—our—country: the first large-scale chemical-weapons attack outside Damascus. I covered the aftermath of the attacks remotely from my reporting trip in Jordan. A small television screen in his trailer looped images of gagging children and lifeless bodies. The former American president Barack Obama had called the action a “red line.” Syrians, within the country and across the Middle East, were holding a collective breath to see what would happen next.