The Idea of Home

by Geraldine Brooks

  I moved to Cairo in 1987. It did not feel anything like home. From my window, I looked across the Nile at the dusty ochre city. Cairo resembled a beehive, so densely was it packed with humanity. On rare clear days, I could see all the way to the Mokattam Hills, where the garbage pickers lived and worked, recycling the city’s rubbish in the most confronting manner imaginable. The reporter in me was delighted. Surely I had arrived just in time for a big story. Surely this combination of population, poverty and political repression was unsustainable. Clearly, Egypt was on the brink of revolutionary eruption. Well, it turned out to be a very wide brink. I was off by two and a half decades. I could see Tahrir Square from my apartment window. When the Arab Spring finally reached there, early in 2011, I was not surprised it happened. Only that it took so long.

  My Cairo apartment never did become a home. It was a way station. I did not spend much time there, because in the late 1980s the big stories were breaking elsewhere. I’d barely unpacked when the first Palestinian intifada erupted in Gaza. Khomeini’s Iran was at war with Saddam’s Iraq. In the Persian Gulf, oil tankers were under attack, moving only when protected by US warships. Lebanon reeled under sectarian warfare. Kurdish separatists were fighting in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. I covered all of these conflicts, as well as war in Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Bosnia. My first military battlefield was Majnoon (aptly, the word, in Arabic, means ‘crazy’) in the desert of Iraq. Poison gas had been used there, the Iraqis had defeated the Iranians, and were in the process of reconfiguring earthworks, with heavy bulldozers rolling over the unburied dead, mashing flesh into the sands.

  I reeled from assignment to assignment, thumbing frantically through briefing books as I struggled to understand the history and politics behind each conflict. My foreign editor, sensing my panic, tried to reassure me with a caustic observation: ‘You’ll never be closer to your readers than you are right now, when you don’t know anything.’

  Maybe. But some things I had to get to know, quickly. I had to learn an entirely different way of reporting in societies that disapproved of women in public spaces. I had to learn that an M16 was a rifle and an M1 was a tank, that Hezbollah was Shiite and Islamic Jihad Sunni. I had to learn that, if you are covering a firefight, you need to be with one side or the other, not caught in no-man’s-land, as I was the first time I blundered into a hot conflict. And I had to figure out how to tell stories of faraway fighting in a manner that would grab the attention of Wall Street Journal subscribers. I had to learn how to keep them reading words that didn’t have an immediate impact on the question: stock market, up or down?

  In desperation, I turned to the writings of women who had done this before me. ‘War is men’s business, not ladies’,’ wrote Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind. And for a great many years, this was considered true for those who covered wars as well as for those who fought them. But by the time I became a war reporter, many notable women correspondents had gone before me. Women such as Margaret Bourke White, the Life photographer, and the New York Times’s Gloria Emerson, as well as many less-celebrated freelancers. Women had challenged gender barriers in conflicts from World War II to Vietnam. In most situations, therefore, I was as free to pursue the news of carnage as my male colleagues.

  That my level of access matched theirs, however, does not mean that I covered war in the same way. I believe that gender matters in the way that one writes about war. And while I would not make quite the bald generalisation Gloria Emerson did, when she said that it was important to have women correspondents because ‘men were boys at heart who got dazzled by guns and uniforms’, I do think that her own work epitomised a difference of approach. Emerson’s colleague, Craig R. Whitney, pointed out in her obituary in 2004, ‘War as she wrote about it was not ennobling but debasing, a misery that inflicted physical suffering and psychic damage on civilians, children and soldiers on both sides.’ Whitney quoted Emerson on her reasons for requesting assignment to Vietnam, where she had briefly freelanced in 1956. She wanted, she said, ‘to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story’.

  In 1991, when Saddam Hussein was brutally suppressing the Kurdish uprising, I was on the flat roof of a house on the outskirts of the Kurdish city of Kirkuk. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, sunny after several days of soaking rain. Someone in the house had taken advantage of the weather: the family’s laundry was strung across the roof. There were cloth nappies and children’s clothes. There were hens up there, too, scratching around for scattered grain.

  In the street below, there was a tank, and soldiers armed with rocket-propelled grenades. I was on the roof with three male colleagues: photographers from Time and Newsweek and a radio journalist for CBS. All of them were very interested in the hardware: what kind of tank, what size shells? I was interested in the hands that had washed the nappies and fed the hens. My male colleagues wanted to go to the front lines with the Kurdish Pesh Merga who were trying to defend Kirkuk from Saddam’s army. I wanted to go inside, where the women were trying to calm their kids.

  How do you learn to cover a war? By doing it, certainly. But throughout my career I have leaned most heavily on one writer as the role model for how I thought my job should be done: Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn was a pioneering woman war correspondent. She once noted rather memorably that she had two enemies during World War II: the Germans and the US Military Press Office. At that time, the US military refused to give credentials to women reporters to cover front-line fighting. Female correspondents, she said, were seen as ‘lepers’.

  Gellhorn was twenty-eight years old when she filed her first war dispatch. She was covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly Magazine. The article was headlined ‘Only the Shells Whine’. The year was 1937. The episode she described occurred just weeks before the bombing of Guernica, which would redefine the civilian cost of war. This is what she wrote:

  An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home; you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes. A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat.

  Gellhorn’s eyes are usually on the civilians, not the soldiers. The editors did not always appreciate her focus on the ordinary human costs of war. ‘Not bad for tear jerker sort of stuff,’ is scrawled across one of her pieces on the suffering of refugees from the Spanish war.

  It was in Spain that she began a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in 1940. Apparently jealous of his wife’s reporting abilities, he became her competitor at Collier’s. It was Hemingway, therefore, who was given US military credentials to travel with the troops to the D-day invasion. Gellhorn did it the hard way. She talked her way on board a hospital ship docked in England on the pretext of doing a human-interest piece on the nurses. Once aboard, she went straight to the bathroom and locked herself in until the ship was under way. It was the third hospital ship to attempt the crossing; the first two had hit mines. The report she filed was a remarkable piece of journalism. It focused on the cost of the invasion, full of vivid accounts of the wounded. Though she actually went on the beach as a stretcher-bearer, she barely mentions herself in the piece.

  Hemingway’s dispatch is very different. Collier’s ran it as its cover story. The six-page spread begins with a half-page photo of Hemingway with the troops. He never went ashore, although you wouldn’t know that from his dispatch, which is a self-aggrandising account of how he virtually directed the landing and saved the day. He finds the right beach for the bewildered young officer, who has lost his map overboard. Luckily, Hemi
ngway tells us, he has memorised the complete geography of the Normandy coast.

  Gellhorn’s story gets just one page, buried in the back of the magazine behind a story on how to swallow a sword. The short piece, headlined ‘Over and Back’, gives no sense that she left Britain, much less went ashore under fire. It was six weeks before Collier’s finally printed the longer account of her experiences. I wondered if Collier’s had considered a hairy-chested account of boys in battle more gripping than Gellhorn’s humanistic account of suffering. Or whether the editors had been worried about upstaging Hemingway. Or if they feared angering the US military, which had arrested Gellhorn when her ship docked back in Britain. They ordered her confined to a nurses’ barracks. (She rolled out under the barbed wire, headed for a nearby airfield, hitched a ride to the Italian front and carried on reporting the war.) But the reason her story was published so late turned out to be none of the above. It was discovered only in recent years by Sandra Whipple Spanier, an academic researcher from Penn State University. She ferreted out the original cables sent by Gellhorn and Hemingway. Hemingway’s piece and Gellhorn’s short article were cabled from London, and stamped received on 13 June. Gellhorn’s longer, substantive piece, ‘The Wounded Come Home’, was not cabled, but mailed back to Collier’s. When Spanier asked an ageing Gellhorn about this, Gellhorn was astonished. She recalled giving the cable to Hemingway to send and had always assumed he wired it. The marriage did not survive the war.

  That Gellhorn’s piece is much anthologised today points to the value of her focus on the human cost of war. And yet I must confess to some ambivalence about the current place of women, as equals with their male colleagues in the right to cover war. As ‘embeds’ in military units, reporters are cut off from the ability to cover civilian suffering, and all too often become stenographers for the military point of view. So I would like to reconsider a proposition that I, as a feminist, have for so long found self-evident: that if a barrier to women’s participation in any field of endeavour exists, the breaking of that barrier should be cause for unalloyed rejoicing. My experience as a woman correspondent covering war has caused me to question this assumption.

  The wars I covered were mostly in countries not noted for gender equality. So it was surprising to realise that the first right a woman generally is granted, in a society that affords her very few, is the right to fight and die as a soldier. This is true in conservative Arabian Gulf countries and in many places in Africa. I covered these stories, because they were interesting. A diffident tribal girl in Eritrea becomes a respected military commander. A veiled woman of the United Arab Emirates is admitted to Sandhurst. Covering the latter story, I met Janis Karpinski, who was the US army officer in charge of training the Emirates’ first class of women military recruits. A decade later, the Eritrean soldier has been betrayed by her movement, which, like the Algerians and many liberation movements before them, neglected gender equality once the war ended. The women of the United Arab Emirates still struggle for the most basic rights. And Janis Karpinski, demoted and disgraced, has become the only senior scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Generals Miller and Sanchez, her male superiors, who were far more deeply implicated, continued to prosper in their careers.

  Since then, reports have emerged of US servicewomen’s role in the interrogation of Muslim prisoners, where they have been required to violate the prisoners’ sense of sexual propriety and religious taboo by engaging in lewd behaviours, such as straddling them suggestively or smearing them with fake menstrual blood. These are not aberrant behaviours by a few out-of-control sadists on a night shift: these are sanctioned tactics, reviewed at the highest level. The US military has sunk to pimping its female personnel.

  In war, women may have won the right to be in the firing line, but I believe it is a right that women should approach with a pair of tongs and a Hazmat suit. If the point is courage, or proving love of country, or providing useful service, I believe it can be done in many other places, the barricades of domestic protest not the least of them. Most wars end at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. Yet the tedious work of negotiation is not aggrandised, nor are diplomats lionised like military heroes. And some of the bravest people in the war zones I covered as a journalist were the unarmed, underpaid aid workers. Stuart Cameron, a Brisbane man of forty-five years, was one of them. Mr Cameron was a regional manager for Care and was implementing a winter survival plan designed to deliver heating fuel and food rations to destitute Kurds in the aftermath of the first Gulf war. In 1993, an ambush left him dead with seventeen bullet wounds. It was part of a terror campaign aiming to drive foreign aid groups out of Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq. Mr Cameron had been loved and respected by the people he helped. When the car carrying his body pulled out of the hospital on the first leg of its long journey home, thousands of Kurds lined the footpaths and rooftops. Some had brought their weapons, and shouldered them in a military salute. Others just stood in silent farewell. On a few walls, hastily lettered posters in fractured English struggled to express their feelings. The one I remember best read simply: Kurds Will Not Forget Stuart.

  In almost every conflict I covered as a reporter, I ran into Australians, many of them women, working to make things a bit better for the suffering civilians. They were irreverent, unsanctimonious, unself-aggrandising and largely unsung. But their competence and dedication has won Australia many friends in the tattered corners of the world. Like journalists, aid workers travel on the tides of disaster. We come and we go, unsure if we leave any permanent trace behind us. Near the end of her life, Martha Gellhorn reflected on this as she addressed a gathering of young journalists:

  All my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and I have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t need to worry about that. My responsibility is the effort. I belong to a global fellowship of men and women who are concerned with the planet and its least protected inhabitants.

  Some of us — Greg Shackleton, my Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl — will die making that effort. The least we can do is pay attention. It is too easy, for most of us, to ignore injustices in far away countries, to push them to the back shelves of our conscience like unread books. But in this interconnected world, that behaviour becomes increasingly perilous. Because the membrane that divides the prosperous and peaceful world from the poor and war-ravaged one is weakening. We see it in the woes of the global economy, which have spread like a blastoma, penetrating into even the healthiest tissues and causing dysfunction.

  What’s coming environmentally will be much worse. And no flags, no borders, can protect us.

  When my father died, an Australian flag draped the coffin at his funeral. My immigrant father loved that flag. As for me, I prefer to imagine the possibility of a future when we won’t require national flags at all. I glimpsed it for a moment, that night at the Sydney Olympics: that moment when we only needed one flag, bedecked with doves of light.

  FOUR

  A HOME IN FICTION

  A few years ago, on a crisp autumn day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I attended a lecture entitled ‘Singularities in Algebraic Plane Curves’. For reasons that I will not go into, it was necessary that I attend. I slumped into the room, armed with a doodle pad. My plan was to sit politely and let the talk sail over my head. I would use the hour for meditative reverie; perhaps, if I positioned myself wisely, a discreet little nap might be possible.

  On the pad I carried that day, I have a few fragments of the sentences the mathematician used:

  A formal power series about the origin is an infinite sum

  Homomorphism is an isomorphism if and only if the matrix is inevitable

  This is like poetry, I thought, and I leaned forward to hear more. The mathematician was eloquent. She was passionate. And when I set aside my firm belief that I could not comprehend her, something strange happened. It wasn’t that I understood her work, but I understood her vision. I realised I had
lived, until that moment, in an airlock, and that she was prising open the heavy door, just a crack. In the sudden brief shaft of light, I glimpsed a sliver of the world beyond, the world in which she lived. When she looked at the old maple beyond the lecture room window, at the great swoop of bough arcing out from massive trunk, her consciousness overlaid a pattern on that branch that was elegant and sensual. I could imagine, for a moment, what it was to see with her eyes, to feel with her heart, to inhabit a space in which the language was not particular and national, but infinite and universal, a world in which every object sang to her with its own particular music, chiming out in delicate arpeggios and thundering chords.

  I know now that it is a beautiful world, but I also know that I can’t live there. If she has lungs, I have gills. I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. I am sure though that our work, the mathematician’s and mine, is essentially the same. In her exploration of the singularity in every plane curve, she seeks a way to more perfectly describe that arcing branch, or a soaring bridge, the squiggle in the iron lace of a terrace house, the quivering S bend of a squirrel’s upraised tail. She pushes her way deeper and deeper into the full truth of the world. This, also, is what I must do.