A Different Angle to Women Reporting on Conflict:Beyond Lara Logan

I must start this piece with a disclaimer (Usual readers: you'll see why this is necessary): At no point do I support or condone sexual violence towards or harassment of Lara Logan or any other journalist or indeed professional trying to do her job.  This piece is NOT about the sexual harassment/violence that women journalists face but rather of the "whitewashing" of the issue in the debate following the much publicized attack on Logan.

As a kid in India, I had family and friends who were/are journalists. Some of these are women. They covered riots, wars, crime, the Union Carbide gas tragedy. They were true heroines and my inspiration.  Growing up in India, writing fiction was not a viable career choice and I always thought that journalism was a respectable, even noble, second option.  Not surprisingly, after finishing my BA, I took up journalism. I worked as a reporter, editor and free-lancer off and on for fifteen years in all sorts of places in Africa, Latin America, India, on stories that ranged from culture to business to human rights abuses.  And I used those skills for a range of media driven organisations: state-owned, private corporation and advocacy groups.

What I learned in those years of reporting convinced me that just as the feminist theories of universal sisterhood had meant the silencing of non-white female experience, the same holds true for the practice of journalism.  Outside India, many of my colleagues were drawn from an internationally motley group, primarily made of Europeans and north Americans.  Most were male. Like many women reporters, I had to work twice as hard to get the "tough" assignments, to prove myself as capable as the men.

But I had a second disadvantage: I also had to prove myself better than the white female reporters. You see, despite self-avowedly "liberal" milieu of the typical international newsroom, an implicit hierarchy still exists. The liberalism of my editors and colleagues meant they pretended to be blind to my race while continuing to assign stories that demonstrated their racist assumptions. And no, I will not go over instances of the prejudice simply because this post is not a whine or a rant!

The colour-blindness played out more oddly at the level of colleagues.  My white male colleagues, for most part, would deal with me without the sexual charge that often informed their interaction with white female reporters. So in a way, my skin colour gave me the added benefit of being sexually invisible as well with the result that I could drink and "hang" with the boys and swap tips without any of the "baggage" that marked similar interactions for my white female colleagues.  This had its good and bad: I developed a great network, felt less sexual pressure, and felt no need to "out-tough" the guys. The bad side was that I felt invisible, was treated by many white female colleagues as the male "runt" of the press club litter and often dealt with visible contempt.  Crossing of race and gender ensured that I was always the outsider.

Yet the same qualities gave me a strange edge while in the field. Even as most Latin Americans recognised me as a foreigner, my dark skin provided a strange protection: identified clearly as not linked to the social, economic, political and military power structures (ie EU/UK/US), and people spoke to me with greater ease.  In Africa and parts of Asia, my Indian-ness was and still is recognised and generally greeted with great affection, something for which I have to thank Nehru's foreign policy and Bollywood films.

Time and time again, locals have stepped in to assist, protect and inform me in ways that were not available to my white colleagues, regardless of gender.  Moreover, my skin colour ensured that I could blend into the crowds in a way white colleagues could not; and sometimes that tiny fig leaf is greater protection than any one can hope for.

There is a more complex aspect to this. Another sort of sexual invisibility protected me in crowds: People often forget that sexual harassment and violence is mostly about power not desire.  Whiteness is an indicator of historic power disparities in many parts of the world (read Fanon, Said, Shohat for the complex arguments of these issues) even though many of us choose to deny or ignore this.  White women thus become symbols of a larger historic imbalance of power than their individual selves, a factor in many of the cases of sexual harassment that not only women reporters but also average travellers face.  In contrast, my colour gives me an unexpected advantage: harassing me provides little redress for historic grievances.  Not surprisingly, I meet camaraderie and respect in places where my white female friends and colleagues only find aggression and harassment. It is an advantage that I have been always been grateful for, though I have done little to win it.

Finally, perhaps there is also a cultural education angle to this. Unlike most of my European and American women friends and colleagues, I have grown up with an acute awareness of power imbalances between genders. There is also greater awareness of cultural codes with clear sense of covering one's body and/or head if necessary without major ideological agenda.  This translates to clothing, body language, even reporting techniques. Even at my most aggressive, I am/was aware of potentially transgressing cultural norms and made subtle adjustments as needed.

This too is a gift - however ambivalent - of growing up in India where we adapt and adjust as needed.  It may also be a result of a postcolonial heritage which has never granted me the privilege of cultural, racial even gendered arrogance/naivete that I often see amongst many European and Americans.  For example, unlike Sabrina Tevernise, I would never assume that walking into an empty hotel and encountering a man would be anything less than risky, regardless of the part of the world. That too is a complex negotiation of culture, race, gender and history!

As a nonwhite women journalist, I recognise that I occupied a strange space when covering international stories. Without ever being told so explicitly by my employers, I knew that my "value" was lower than that of my white female colleagues. And while things have changed in the past decade with increasing number of nonwhite women reporters working for mainstream media, many of the experiences and issues I mention here have not drastically changed as long as one works for a western media outlet.  In frankest of terms, this means that I always recognised that I made less of a story than my American or European colleagues would (For those who question it, compare the media inches granted to Logan vs the temporary detentions of Sonia Verma the Indo-Canadian reporter or Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in Egypt).  This knowledge informed the risks I took as well as the professional decisions I made.

At the same time, I and other nonwhite reporters can access people and places that many "western" journalists can not, regardless of gender. And that is an advantage that few media outlets can ignore, especially as the power balance shifts away from the traditionally western centres of power. 

Perhaps, to reference Toni Morrison, it is the privilege of whiteness (or lack thereof).  I confess that I have used it to my advantage, as have many other women journalists from Latin America, Africa, Asia.  I also have to admit that it has worked to my disadvantage, although more at institutional rather than human/individual levels. 

As Kim Barker astutely noted: "Without female correspondents in war ones, the experience of women there may only be a rumour."  That is indeed true. But to whitewash the ways in which race and culture inform not only women reporters' functioning but also the response they receive is to be equally ingenuous as maintaining a silence on the issues of sexual harassment and violence.  

I hope these thoughts capture some of my own reactions to the debate triggered by the Lara Logan incident. I write in hope of giving voice to a set of women (and very able professional reporters) who are again being whitewashed from a narrative historically dominated by white middle-class women who position their own experience as universal; in making such a whitewashed case, and with greater access to mainstream western media, they also once again silence many of us who share their gender but not their race.

Update: Eyewitness accounts from Tahrir contradict the CBS statement on Lara Logan incident making my impression of Orientalist narrative that evolved around her even stronger. 

Missing Edward Said: Some Thoughts on Egypt's Youth Uprising

Like most people, I too have been caught off-guard with the events in Egypt since January 25, 2011. For years, I have been following global events, analysing and at times writing about them. For example, I made a case for the shift of power to the east nearly fifteen years ago, when India was still stumbling unsteadily into globalisation. It has been gratifying to note that I was right!

But despite following events for the past two decades, I have to confess, I got Middle East wrong! I believed that once the power of US and Europe had shifted to the east, and the pernicious postcolonialist influences exercised directly or indirectly by Europe and US diminished, Middle East would find its feet. Mistakenly, and perhaps with a dose of cultural arrogance of my own, I believed that the region would find its historical sense of self once China and India regained their postcolonial importance.

My analysis based itself on one primary factor: culture and cultural production of a society, and its ability to control and shape its own narrative. I believed that as literature, art, music, film were so tightly controlled, that as mass scale cultural production was not happening at a large enough scale, in a free enough environment, the Middle East would not be able to shake off its postcolonial burden of an identity thrust upon them, of the Orientalist narratives of political apathy, autocracy, religious fanaticism, poverty, fecklessness.

A disclaimer: I know there will be political and economic analysts who will write more knowledgeably than me on those factors, but I am more interested in longer historical cycles, in ways in which deep-rooted cultural identities are reformed, reshaped, and revived constantly, consistently and repeatedly. Perhaps that is why I have been thinking of the great scholar Edward Said, and wishing repeatedly that he were alive to see the way his region has risen up to definitively shatter the narrative of Orientalism.

And yet the signs that perhaps a different cultural production was going on in the region were there to see. By this, I do not only mean the various Arab language TV channels, including of course Al Jazeera. I mean a larger, almost invisible, popular culture in which the region's population has been participating: the digital one.

I do not want to over-emphasise the role of social media here, as implicit in some of the lauding of that has been a covert desire for western commentrators to take credit for Egypt's (and Tunisia's) changes, as if Mark Zuckerberg were - in some fashion - a Lawrence of Arabia for the 21st century.  The phenomenon goes beyond simply the availability of digital technology and social media.

First of all, some basic points which are specific to Egypt but can, with slight modifications, be applied to many states in the region:

A large segment of Egypt's population is under twenty five. While this point has been noted in economic and political terms, lets just place it in its historical context. This means that most of Egypt's youth - and the bulk of those in Tahrir Square - are truly postcolonial.

What does this mean beyond a short hand?

The literacy rate at the point of decolonization in most countries around the world in the middle of the twentieth century was abysmally low. The educated sections of the population formed a colonised elite - so amply explained by Franz Fanon - who were removed from their own cultural roots, dislocated from their own history, often collaborators with the colonial regimes that not only showered them with largesse during the empire but repeatedly jockeyed to position them as leaders for the decolonization. The strategy then was not too different from the one now: replace the regime but replace it with one that would be sympathetic.

Poverty stricken, illiterate, battered, the decolonizing masses around the globe relied on leaders - who were not only often corrupt and autocratic, but also propped up by the Cold War order - and were repeatedly disappointed.

However, this has been steadily changing over the past decades. Even the most backward decolonized nations show  distinct improvement when compared to the days of the empire(s). Which is why, the protesters in Tahrir Square are no Fanonian elite. Born not only in a decolonized country, but also after Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, they demonstrate a sense of identity that does not rely on "othering" or indeed on difference. For the first time in the region, there have been few anti-Israel or anti-US slogans raised, and done so only for their complicity with their own hated regime. What we're seeing today is a revival of an older identity, recovered, revived, re-formed in Egypt which relies on itself. This is not to argue for some "essentialist" ideal, but rather a decolonization of the mind! And it is happening right across the postcolonial world.

And this brings us to the issue of popular culture. While Arab and Persian language television has much to contribute, there has also been a revolution in popular culture in the region thanks to the internet. In the (almost) decade since 9/11, more young people in the region have joined online communications with extraordinary results.

Although this process began - in a limited way - with Iraq, the first major shift that I had noted was in 2006 as Israel's began its punishing war on Lebanon. While most global mainstream media continued reporting through the typically Orientalist lens (Israel = civilized, democratic, right; Lebanon = barbaric, fanatic, wrong), there were other, newer narratives being shaped, not only on television, but also online. Bloggers posted photographs and eye-witness accounts. Suddenly those who have so long been classified by western media and governments as "collateral damage" not only had voices, but faces, homes, families, stories. Not surprisingly, since so few western reporters were actually on the ground (that is another tale, for another day), the narrative that emerged from within Lebanon was primarily shaped by the Lebanese with accounts and photographs of not only the dead and wounded, but of parties held amongst the rubble; of young people cleaning and rebuilding, of returning to their normal lives.

That story was repeated in 2008 with Israel's bombing of Gaza. Once again, photographs and accounts turned up on blogs and social media websites. In this case, Palestinian and foreign citizen journalists took on the burden as mainstream media went missing.  Again and again, average citizens uploaded their pictures and accounts using precious diesel for generators.

There are many who have pointed to Tunisia as the event that started Egypt's uprising. I don't agree! Tunisia may have provided the spark, even been the first domino to fall. But the process began earlier. More importantly, the foundations of this change and its engine are not economic or political, although they are undoubtedly huge factors.  The foundation of Egypt's uprising as well as many others bubbling around the Middle East are cultural. The key to this uprising is the not only the change in narrative, but also the newly found power to shape it. And that is also the reason that the political failure or success of these protests is immaterial in the longer term (although obviously hopefully they will succeed; failure will mean brutal oppression of these brave young people).

This is also the reason the dominos won't fall in the line predicted by many analysts. After all events of the past week demonstrate that access to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other sites is not enough. As Egypt rose to reclaim its position as a pre-eminent civilization through its "Twitter/Facebook revolution" the same websites were amply being used by Pakistan's youth to show their outrage at granting even minimal protection to minorities. There are lessons in the histories of both nations - you just have to look closely at each land in order to solve the mystery.

But for the moment, closely watching Egypt and the larger Levant reshape the Orientalist narrative of oppression, I can't help wishing Edward Said were alive to watch this extraordinary moment of history!

Curious Lessons for an Aspiring Writer: Looking Back at a Decade of Publishing

I just realised that not only are we approaching the end of a year but also the end of the very first decade of this century. Or should that have been last year already?  Regardless, this year, 2010, also marks my very first decade as a published writer. And what a difference ten years make!

Well, actually make that ten years, three countries, three books, a PhD and well over half a million published words.  Phew!  Not sure how I packed all that in, but it has been a fun ride so far.  And yet, today is a good moment to look back at that younger me, at that naive, wide-eyed writer with a bagful of a dreams, no idea of publishing, zero contacts,  and an ambitious manuscript.

There are times I laugh at that younger self, amazed at her absolute sense of belief in her own work (some have, and probably rightly so, called her arrogant).  In my mind, I watch my younger self sending off her chapters to agents who suggest that she make the manuscript more "marketable;" to publishers who respond with a stock letter of rejection that she still does not know means they haven't even opened her precious work; to literary "mentors" who she does not know trade more in sexual favours and big egos than in well crafted words and ideas. And I am amazed that she walks away each time, a little bit stronger, a little bit more convinced that those purveyors of literature are wrong, that her writing will eventually find the sympathetic reader - if only she looks hard enough.

But I also wish I could protect that young writer: from discovering that some of the "big" names in the literary field have feet of clay, that they wouldn't know good writing if it came and hit them on the nose; from realising that many reviewers are driven by their own thwarted literary ambitions and ideology rather than any knowledge or love of stories; from that slow and sickening horror when her very first review in a national newspaper pans her novel based on its chapter headings rather than content, demonstrating clearly that the reviewer could not be bothered to read the book; from the knowledge that much of publishing, like many other industries, is more about who one knows rather than any focus on literary quality.

Yet - now ten years since my first novel was published - I would not change a thing for that young writer.  Those years of fruitlessly pounding the pavement gave me immense strength and the crucial insight that no-one knows my writing better; that there are friends and support in the unlikeliest of places; that the most important quality for a writer is not talent or sensitivity or empathy, but rather absolute grit and obsessive self-belief. Without that messiah-like fervour, few of us can survive the cruel knocks meted out by the coterie of editors, publishers, reviewers (and no, the knocks don't stop with a publishing contract; that is just the first round of the punishing cycle).

But more than anything else, I would remind that young writer of the old Hindi proverb: अंधी गाय का धर्मं रखवाला (Dharma protects the blind cow), that the cosmic law protects the innocent.  How else could I send off dozens of emails to literary agents and yet end up signing up with the only one who believes with missionary zeal in absolute literary merit of my work?  How else would an Indophile reader in Barcelona pass on my first novel to a friend who also happens to be one of the most courageous editors in the country? How else would a naive kid like me, from a nondescript small Indian town, end up with an extraordinary international group of editors, publishers, literary agent, reviewers, readers and academics who champion my work in big and small ways? That in itself is a little miracle!

But most importantly I would tell that young writer-self of mine that she would find champions in other unlikely places: in chance encounters with other writers; in brief meetings and snatched conversations with unusual and unexpected literary mentors.  And perhaps there is no other way but to remind myself of two brief literary encounters with more experienced writers who generously shared their insight and kindness in that first year of my publishing trajectory.

The first would be a series of brief meetings with Ruskin Bond, that gentle chronicler of the Himalayas, in Delhi as well as in Landour, when he repeatedly advised me to focus on my craft and try to block out the distractions of the "publishing circus."  At an early meeting, he pointed out that it was better for a writer to not get early success as it gave them a chance to develop their own craft and ideas.

On one memorable occasion, we escaped a glamorous book event in a five-star Delhi hotel - to get chaat in the Bengali Market. The excitement he generated amongst the school kids when we walked in was the clearest reminder that a writer lives not in the inane chatter of the apparent literati but in the minds and hearts of his/her readers.  Through out that meal, Ruskin got wide smiles and gasps of recognition, shy, affectionate and utterly non-intrusive greetings, and a little kid's loud triumphant announcement: "he does love chaat, he does! Just like in his book!"  No amount of literary praise or prizes can replace that incredible warmth and affection that I noticed amongst Ruskin's many readers that night.  For me, it was an early lesson that good writing is not about royalties or prizes or reviews, but about the abiding affection a reader can hold for a writer.  I have since followed Ruskin's advice, staying true only to my craft, and have been ever grateful for his  gentle guidance.

The second lesson was even shorter and more unusual, with a single brief meeting - again at a book event - with the novelist, Shashi Deshpande.  That she knew me at all surprised and flattered me but the fact that she had not only read but liked my book came as the biggest shock.  I veered madly between pride and embarrassment through the evening, feeling giddy and slightly sick.  We spoke briefly, and later my brother and I gave her a lift back to her hotel in our dilapidated, dog-drooled, student-y Maruti 800 (she graciously ignored the dog toys and crumbs of dog biscuit on the seat, and was unfailingly courteous and lovely).  As we said goodbye, she said a strange thing to me: "Get away from this city; it will stop your writing. Go somewhere where you can continue writing."

For a young writer loving the glamour and excitement of book launches, and literary talks, press interviews and society chitchat, the advice seemed a bit odd. But in the months that followed, and I found myself unable to concentrate on my writing, I realised its importance.  Keeping her words in mind, I began drawing away from the literary circles, refocussing on my own work rather than the "networking." Soon after I moved, first to Barcelona, then to London, and to this day, continue inhabiting the fringes of the literary communities in both cities.

That decision to withdraw has come at a price: for example, only one national publication in India chose to review my last novel despite my editor's very valiant and concentrated efforts. And yet instead of that novel sinking without a trace, given how studiously it was ignored by the press, Indian readers continue to find it, read it and love it.  More interesting is its trajectory overseas where it continues to spark debate and attract readers. (An aside: its Serbian translation also brought back a long lost friend, who found the novel in a Belgrade bookshop and emailed, after over two decades of no contact).  I am now in a strange situation: even though much of my writing is about India, and often for Indians, now European and American critics engage and discuss my work more often and more thoroughly than those in my own country.  I often wonder what Ruskin and Shashi would make of this weird contradiction?

So what next for this writer?

The past decade has taught me many things, but one is more important than all else: my job is to write good stories, to consider ideas, to create debate and provoke thought. And to do all that to the best of my capacity!  The rest is neither my area of expertise nor my remit.  My agent, editors, publishers continue to work very hard to get my writing out into the world, and for that I am very grateful.  They are the ones who take risks, persuade and cajole, believe and hope, and most of all passionately champion my cause.  And they do so while fully conscious that my writing shall neither be the next bestseller, and without advising me to be more "marketable." Those are the true heroes of this journey!

But then, most of all, there are my readers who take choose to spend hours of their time and energy with my books, and short stories, and essays.  And they take the trouble of finding me and emailing me with their responses: indeed, not a week goes past without receiving an email from a reader somewhere (and often in very unexpected places).  And that keeps me focussed on what I need to do: think more, dream more, live more. And most of all, write more.

Happy 2011! And a very happy new decade!