Voyeurism

“These are not the sort of observations my editor is interested in.”Page 17

“In her emails she assures me that such articles are always topical, and it’s all people are wanting to read about given the state of the world, and could I tweak this and that before she publishes it”Page 17

“She asks if I wear the hijab—as though that signifies something—and whether all my : family made it out and how bad the fighting is. It feels like a test, as though the answers to such questions enhance my credibility, as though they might confirm that I am what I am and not some leftist, liberal populist in a mask. I don’t answer such queries, or I answer them selectively, the way I’m selective with what observations do and don’t go into the pieces I send her.” p18

"“Everybody here wants a story: doctors looking over bruises and scrapes and boils that don’t heal; officers asking to see papers, proof that you are authorized to be here; strangers on the street who think . they recognize something in your face from home. “p18

“How easy was it to process your papers? Do you know someone at the office they could speak to about their cousin or aunt? They want to hear about the hardship and the struggles and the people who died along the way. Josie wants it all. She doesn’t come out and say it, but I know she means the harsher, the better. “p18

""“She wants a nice little packet of memories she can serialize for her readers. Even better would be memories tied up with those observations she’s so fond of. “"p19

""“The human need for stories is itself an obstacle to memory. Like our dreams, we are not content with images or scenes or fragments of sensory stimuli… We try to construct narratives…. We try to place these elements within a structure that makes sense, wading back through fragments, trying to stitch it all together into a coherent pattern—a beginning, a middle, and an end. Something to cleave to, something to reassure us that everything is okay in that head of ours and that the monsters and ghouls and jinn that visit us in the night ARE NOT REAL.”" p19

""“She encourages me to write more, to be fearless—a directive I can’t help but snort at. She’s asked me to expound on thoughts of religion, to re-tool entire articles so they : come from that angle: Did the war make you hate religion? Has all that death and destruction and pain made you abandon God? Do you have an uneasy relationship with all religions, or is it only Islam? » p28

“Back home, religious differences run so deep and go so far back that no one bothers to talk about it any more. People think the war is about religious freedom, about black flags and opposition to a secular government, but it’s not. The media seized on this idea, putting up side banners and trying to explain to viewers the difference between Sunni and Shiite, Kurds and Arabs, pie charts showing how a country has divided itself up. I get it. Religious conflict is sexy. It’s easy to sell, the way it fits into the simple, dichotomous way people prefer to view the world. It’s easy for news producers and politicians to frame it in terms of a cosmic war being waged in a land far, far away." p28

"But it isn’t real. This isn’t a religious conflict— or if it is now, it certainly didn’t start out that way. Initially, in those private salons all across Damascus, with that Statement of 99, that intellectual fount of all Springs, it was about freedom. It was about the right to live with dignity, the right to think without fear, the right to exist outside of a state of emergency. It was about rising unemployment rates among a restless youth and free-market policies that benefited the few rather than the many. It was about the rains that never came, the migration and the cities straining under the weight of all the people they held but could do nothing with.” p28

“The news is full of refugee pieces. They’re on every channel and all sorts of websites—video diaries, insights brought to you by pseudo-celebs, in-depth interviews. It’s as though the more fresh-faced, young women they can find with hoodies raised up as they gaze across borders back at their homeland or logged on to wifi while huddled in a tent at the Greece-Macedonia border, the more likely they are to convince the public there’s nothing to fear here, that a refugee will not kill you. There is no horde of barbarians at the gates. In point of fact, these people are escaping the barbarians." p72

"It lacks the coherence and direction of your previous pieces. Why don't you give us some of your memories instead? Im particularly interested in your experiences in making your way here or even what things were like back home before you left. Could you focus on that? Try to draw those memories out rather than focusing on purely rational analysis of the state the world finds itself in, viz. media and facts. There are more than enough talking heads going on about that. I think your personal narrative would make for highly readable pieces. Sit on this for a few days and get back to me? » p74

"« Are memories ever true in their entirety? Josie asks me for them," p75

“Why dont you give us some of your memories instead? She asks it so easily, as though it were as simple as No-Lights-Man pulling his box out from under the bed, as though it were not in fact a matter of pulling corpses from the ground, their foetid breath washing over you as they speak of all the things they've seen. She wants me to flay myself, to dig deep, to mine all that I have swallowed. Perhaps even drag Little Ahmed up, muddy water dripping from pale brow... No. »"p75

"" | suppose that’s the point of me, the point of what I’m doing. They—and by “they,” | mean my editor and the people at the magazine you’re currently reading and some of you who have left comments in the empty spaces below—want me to reveal myself as some microcosm of refugee society. They want to see, in me, all the hopes and ills and frustrations and struggles and singular stories of some five million plus people. They want me to speak for the chaos of the world, to weave the abstracts of cultural convulsions and scapegoats and simple apathy into my story, so that by seeing “me,” by knowing “me,” you might know them all, and | suppose—by extension—might feel some degree of empathy for them all. Humanize. That’s what they say, when they’re fawning over certain books and documentaries and films. A word uttered easily and without too much thought. A well-intentioned word that nevertheless concedes the argument that some people are not people and so require some art form to render them human. It’s the game of fiction, this duping of the public into caring about things and Others they might not otherwise care about. But | suppose it is a sound enough strategy; fiction does make migrants of us after all. The Voiceless, The New Press, 14 June 2017 »p140

“She still asks for memories… She wants stories about home, about family, about the journey and the camps. The whys and hows of it all. And yet, here I am, swallowing the personal in favor of the political. Again. Why? Is it easier? Safer? After all, if no one knows your personal story, they can’t use it against you. »p154

“She wants me to write of borders, simple pieces with titles like, My Border Memories, My Memories of Borders, All the Borders I’ve Gone Through. »p154

“Josie wants memories, so I’ll give her memories. I will give her all of them, whether they are completely chronologically factual or — not… I'll write about Queiq in that spring when Mama gave up on life and Baba finally resigned himself to the fact that we couldn't stay there,.. I’ll write about the cousins and aunts and uncles and brothers and neighbors and best friends who were tortured or killed or scattered to the wind like doves that would never again find a place to nest… Pll tell her about the crossing of Europe and how I walked a continent. About the weighted-down raft and the people who drowned ° and the bigger boat and all the camps where people immediately tried to impose some order and structure on their lives..(page 165) I’ll write about being locked in freezing lorries and being chased and shot at and beaten by border guards and smugglers who fleece you and use you because they know your only other option is death.I write two, three, four articles that I fire off throughout the day and night and another day until she has a fucking timeline of how I got here.”p164

“She asked if I could tone down the descriptions of the weather, saying it matched up too well with the emotional undertones of the memory, that the reader didn’t need the symbolism of the weather. »p180

“She wanted me to alter the memory, so as to show a contrast, some symbolism over reality. »p180

“Do I tell Josie about that pride? Do I include Khalid in the things I share with her and the world? Must I give them everything? My own voice, my own story, stutters and falters in its way. All this time I’ve spent shifting and shaping myself into an entity that can function here, and now my memories too need to be molded into something easy to digest? »p187

“I don’t know what such a story would even look like, what shape it would take. The structure of narrative has collapsed; imprecise in my own mind, with jagged pieces it takes so much to screw together. What could a story like that accomplish? Do I risk turning us—me, Khalid, Amer and Ossama, Mama and Baba and the others and the little ones—into nothing more than characters, to be followed and felt for but ultimately supplanted with newer, fresher takes? What do all these stories do? I wonder if Khalid would want this, or if he would see it as just another kind of treason.”p187

"" They tell their stories to writers who have no concept of the sort of reality they’re being exposed to, writers who are then charged with taking that raw story and transforming it into a tale for the public. These well-meaning writers invariably make an inward turn, where they take bottomof-the-pyramid needs of shelter and a stable food source and warm clothing and streets that lie outside the path of bombs (page 190) and turn it all into a soliloquy on how time is what ultimately kills you or the hypocrisy of Western ideals of justice and democracy or how the limbo of the asylum seeker is worse than what they left behind. Barrel bombs kill you." p190

“First Josie wanted memories. All the memories, for weeks it’s all she asked about, but now she says they are too much to be believed, and I wonder if she’s playing with me. She’s read the other pieces I sent, where I talked about the hot and overcrowded bus through Turkey and the camps in Greece and the little toe that became so infected I thought it would fall off like a rotten piece of fruit. I wrote about guns to my head in front of the open backs of freezing trucks and that afternoon when we swallowed tear gas and dodged rubber bullets on the Macedonian border. I still have not, cannot, will not, tell her about Syria. The bombs pulverized our home and that door has caved in, perhaps forever. »p191

“Only its a bit overwhelming, she says. I thought that the first article was enough, in how it detailed your journey from home to here. Those were not details, Josie. It was not even the beginning of “detailing.” People will have a hard time believing it all happened to you…J believe you, but others will suspect.”p191

“Not satisfied with sterile facts, she wants a story, a narrative arc and maybe some character development. She wants a tearjerker, emotive and affecting, something to rev the idle engine of empathy. It’s not how we've been trained to speak of what we've been through. At borders and centers and clinics all they wanted was the information—dates, names, places, frequency. Don’t get too emotional. They need to believe you. It’s journalists and authors and poets who have the luxury, the enormous well of credibility, to then take those facts and spin them into something moving. »p192

“A part of me is terrified that a story will diminish the real, that it will cheapen the experience beyond what I can bear. »p192

“I do want to publish these. Don't get me wrong. But maybe we could lighten them a bit, or just focus on one episode and unpack it for the readers. »p192

.” I feel like fiction is such a liberating medium for you. You can say what you like and embellish as much as you want without fear of reprisal."p210

."Do I stop writing for the magazine? Focus more on fiction, where, according to her, you can bring all the drama you need, no matter how unlikely? Is there any point to what I write? Or are we all just screaming into the void? »p228

« I can't go back to that place. To those tests and the pills and injections that make everything even fuzzier and the white walls and small, small rooms | and all the things they want me to remember, the things they want me to put on display for them. I can’t. »p250