Geraldine Brooks is a female war correspondent from Australia who works in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Today, when the world is deeply divided, we relive her journalistic career and see how she discovered the tenacity and human dignity of women in those war-torn times and scenes. Geraldine said, "It's too easy for most people to ignore the injustices that happen in distant lands." These things are like books that you don't like to read, pushed to the innermost part of the bookshelf. And in this interconnected world, such behavior will become increasingly dangerous, and the barrier between peace and prosperity and poverty and war is dissolving. The problems of the world economy can be like cancer cells, invading the healthiest organs and causing them to necrosis. And environmental problems are only going to get worse. There is no flag, or borders, that can protect us. ”
This article is included in Single Reading 14: The Sailors of the World.
Single Reading 14: The Sailors of the World
Republic of China 丨 Taiwan Strait Publishing House Publishing House
Wu Qi, editor-in-chief
2017-6
(Click on the cover to purchase this book)
In homes all over the world
Written by Geraldine Brooks
Translator: Dong Shuai
Honour Greg Shackleton, Daniel Pearl and Gad Gross
In 2000, I competed in the Sydney Olympics. I'll never forget the feeling of walking into the cheering Australian Stadium, where the crackling flashes of light were like thousands of fireflies illuminating the night sky.
I wish I could say I'm an athlete, one of those "faster, taller, stronger" young talents. But I couldn't run fast at all, and even if I had to start a night earlier, I wouldn't have won any race. As for "strong", I was so weak that I couldn't even pinch the pudding. Coupled with the fact that I officially turned forty-five the day before the Sydney Olympics, the title of "youth" has become a distant memory.
Sydney Olympics opening ceremony
I'm like a pixel, a little dot in the gorgeous color puzzle that makes up the opening ceremony. My task was to form a moving grid with the others to lead the athletes in and make sure the 10,500 athletes stayed excited on the pleasant playing field. It's a bit like a shepherd, but it's the kind that's been rehearsed beforehand. Athletes enter in alphabetical order of country names, and we dressed up Carbys (a type of dog in Australia) cleverly take them where they should be.
The athletes' entrance ceremony is one of the must-do events for the opening ceremony of every Olympic Games, along with the lighting of the torch, the raising of the Olympic flag and the release of peace doves. In the past, real pigeons were usually used, until that year, when the pigeons of the Seoul Olympic Games were released, they thought that the torch stand was a good stop, and it turned out to be a group of dead pigeons. Therefore, the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee has other plans on the matter of pigeons. After the athletes returned to each other, something unexpected happened. A huge white flag flew overhead, covering the entire playground. I, along with athletes from 199 countries (the largest number of participating countries in history at this Olympics), was stamped under this huge banner. Suddenly, we were in a very intimate and unusually bright space. The flag that rolled above us, projecting a dove pattern, was white and bright, symbolizing peace.
Under that flag, I looked at the faces of the young athletes around me, who looked up, full of surprise and curiosity. I'm standing next to the country with the initialS I, next to athletes from Iraq, next to Iranian athletes. The last time I saw young people of this age from both countries, most of them were dead. During the brutal war between the two sides during the eight-year standoff, they turned into swollen, foul-smelling corpses scattered in the sand of the Fao Peninsula on the border between the two countries. And now, they stand side by side next to me, alive and joyful. Not far away, athletes from the Eritrean state are next to the Ethiopian team. A few years ago, these countries were engaged in a thirty-five-year civil war. I've been to a massacre site there where the remains of the victims are only sunburned skulls and piled up as towers of victory.
That night, I took a deep breath of the early spring air and said to myself, this is really a new era, the world is really at peace. At the very least, it seems that way in that moment, and maybe we really don't have to face war anymore. It was a sweet moment, but so short. Just before the closing ceremony, the Media Center received news that something had happened to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Associated Press reporter immediately packed up the table, left the arena, and flew to report on the sudden violence. Within a few days, the second conflict erupted on a large scale, and the air was filled with smoke from human bombs and tear gas. The world changed, and just a year later, in September, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed, reducing to rubble and soot. We return to that familiar world, endless enemies, endless wars.
This time we are going to talk about the concept of home and its different interpretations. If one of the definitions of the word "home" is "goal," I would say that becoming a war correspondent was never my goal or intention. I didn't even want to be a foreign correspondent. In the late 1970s, as an intern at the Sydney Morning Herald, I was in awe of Margaret Jones. She had just returned from Beijing and was the first Western journalist to be allowed to go to China after the Cultural Revolution. I know that this kind of deed can easily make people aspire to become people like her. But for me, just being in that office, my world has been stretched infinitely.
I grew up in a corner of Sydney, had been to Melbourne and Hobart during school holidays, and I didn't know anything about Australian cities. Becoming a journalist is like giving myself a license to familiarize myself with the unknown, and to look at my hometown from a broader perspective. By doing the reporting, I can learn about the lives of a wide variety of Sydneysiders – rich, poor – and not just my neighbours. I love discovering the city's colourful back alleys, as well as its beautiful groves and babbling gorges. I often volunteered to accept rural themes that would take me to Australia, which was originally only rumored to exist. I used to take the convenience of the city for granted, and the experience of living away from the city really opened my eyes and thinking. The work of inspecting wool, harvesting wheat, and herding cattle during the dry season is so different from the environment I am familiar with. I slowly understood what kept people in that land and in those remote towns: the connection with nature and the seasons, the humor and wisdom. Soon after, my yearning for the woods sparked my interest in reporting on environmental issues. To my own surprise, I realized that we didn't need wide walking trails when hiking in the jungle, and that we didn't need to take a cable car to ski on Mount Kosciuszko. I learned to carry backpacks that weighed half my weight, camp in the snow, and lie under the night sky looking at the vast constellations of stars I had never imagined.
It's a very satisfying job that I should have been doing all the time. But David Bowman, then editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, told me about a scholarship opportunity for a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University. The scholarship is in honor of Greg Schockleyton, who died honorably in reporting on the events of East Timor in 1999. Shackleton has always had a dream to go to Columbia University. His widow, Shirley Shackleton, set up this scholarship for young journalists in honor of her husband.
East Timor's decision to independence following a referendum in 1999 followed by the 1999 East Timor Crisis. After the referendum, some anti-independence militants and east Timorese pro-Indonesian militia forces backed by the Indonesian army began attacking civilians. The atrocities soon developed into a nationwide riot centered in the capital, Dili. Approximately 1,400 people are believed to have died in the incident.
After receiving this scholarship, I flew to Melbourne to attend the award ceremony. Shirley was also there, along with many of Greg's former colleagues on Channel 7 News. So, five years later, when the Wall Street Journal asked me if I wanted to be their correspondent in the Middle East, I accepted the job without hesitation. I also happened to catch up with the craze for female journalists to be sent abroad. In 1992, about one-third of foreign correspondents were women, and in 1970, that number was only six percent.
In any way, I was unprepared for the job. In college, I didn't know much about the area. I knew Arabic only to the temporary cradle of Buddha's feet four weeks before I left Sydney, when I found an Egyptian teacher to teach me some basic vocabulary. But think about it another way, being an Australian of our generation is actually a kind of preparation in a sense. On the world stage, we have two identities, historically biased toward Europe and geographically biased toward Asia, which means that we ourselves face the door of the world. Our curiosity about the world is greater than our inquiry into ourselves, and we accept literature, music, movies, and food from all over the world. We pay attention to international news – dynamics in any place affect our economy, trade, security, because our actions in the international situation are always closely linked to the movement of the United States. In my personal experience, I have countless neighbours from the turbulent countries of Russia, Turkey, the Balkans, Greece and Lebanon, which has taught me that not every place is as safe and secure as the suburbs of Sydney.
In 1987, I moved to Cairo. It wasn't like home at all. Through the window, behind the Nile, a dusty ochre city can be seen. Cairo is like a hive, packed with people. On the occasional sunny day, I could see directly the Mucatam Hills, where scavengers lived and worked there, sorting the city's garbage in the most unbearable way. As a journalist, I'm happy because I'm sure I can catch up on big events. This demographic, impoverished economic and political situation will certainly not last long. It is clear that Egypt is on the verge of a revolution. However, it turns out that this "edge" is really wider. I have been sent there for more than twenty-five years. I could see The Tallier Square from the apartment window.
My apartment in Cairo never turned into a "home". It's just a stop. I didn't spend much time there because in the late 80s, the big news happened elsewhere. When the first Palestinian conflict broke out in the Gaza Strip, I barely had time to get home to open my luggage. Khomeini's Iran is at war with Saddam's Iraq. Tankers in the Persian Gulf are being attacked and can only be diverted under the escort of American warships. Lebanon is caught in the vortex of sectarian war. Kurdish forces are fighting in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. I have covered these conflicts, as well as the wars in Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Bosnia. The first time I experienced the battlefield was in the Iraqi desert of Maginnon (coincidentally, the word means "crazy" in Arabic). That war used poison gas, and the Iraqis defeated the Iranians. Iraqis were clearing the battlefield, bulldozers running over bodies that were still exposed, crushing flesh and blood into the sand.
I kept moving from one mission to another, frantically flipping through briefings along the way, trying to understand the history and politics behind each battle. My editor felt my anxiety and tried to reassure me with his harsh observations: "When you don't know anything, you're the closest to your readers." ”
Maybe, but more often than not, I have to get a quick overview of the situation. I need to find ways to report where women are not welcome. I need to know that the M16 is a rifle and the M1 is a tank. I need to understand that if you're reporting on a firefight, you need to stand on this side or the other, and don't stray into the "three no matter" zone between the two sides. I also wanted to figure out how to get this story about the distant war to catch the eye of Wall Street Journal subscribers. I need to learn to entice them to read a text that has nothing to do with the rise and fall of the stock market.
In desperation, I went to read articles by the women's predecessors. "War is a man's business, not a woman's." Margaret Mitchell wrote in Gone With the Wind. For a long time, both the reporters of the war and the participants in the war thought it was the truth. But by the time I became a war correspondent, there were already a lot of famous female war correspondents before me. For example, Margaret Bourke White, a photographer for Life magazine, Gloria Emerson for the New York Times, and many lesser-known freelance journalists. From World War II to the Vietnam War, women have continued to challenge the gender barriers in the industry. So, in the vast majority of cases, I was able to do the same things as my male colleagues in reporting about the Holocaust.
Just because I have the same reporting conditions as them doesn't mean I'll write in the same way as them. I believe that gender differences also lead to reporting on different ways of war. Of course, I would not say in a general way, as Gloria Emerson did, that the reason why female war correspondents are so important is that "men are still obsessed with guns and uniforms from the bottom of their hearts." Her work does highlight a different perspective of reporting. In Emerson's obituary in 2004, Craig R. Whitney wrote: "She always demeans rather than exalts war, and in her writings, citizens, children, and soldiers on both sides of the war share the physical and mental pain of war." Whiteney, who described why she voluntarily applied to be a freelance journalist on the battlefields of Vietnam in 1956, also quoted Emerson, saying, "I want to write about the people of Vietnam and about this painful upheaval that took place in their lives, not about the military stories that were widely reported by the media giants."
In 1991, when Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed the Kurds, I was on the roof of a house on the outskirts of The Kurdish city of Kirkuk. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, and the rainy sky had finally cleared on that day. The residents of the house quickly seized the opportunity to dry their clothes on the roof. I was surrounded by children's clothes and diapers. There was also a flock of hens on the roof, pecking at the grain.
On the street, there was a tank parked and soldiers carrying bazookas. I stood on the roof with three male colleagues: a photographer for Time and Newsweek, and a CBS broadcast reporter. Their attention was focused on the armament: what type of tank it was, what caliber of gun barrel. And I was keeping an eye on the hands that washed diapers and fed the chickens. My male colleagues wanted to go to the front with the Kurds and see how they could fend off Saddam's army. All around me, women are comforting their children, and that's where I want to go deeper.
How do you learn to report on a war? The answer must be, by reporting on a war. But throughout my career, I've always been modeled by one person — Martha Gellhorn, a pioneer of female war correspondents. She once remarkably that during World War II, she had two enemies, the German and U.S. Military Press Offices. In those days, the U.S. military refused to allow female journalists to cover frontline stories. Female journalists are treated as "leprosy" and avoided.
Gailhorn went to war for the first time at the age of twenty-eight, writing about the Spanish Civil War for Colliers Weekly. The title of that article was "Only Shells Whimpering.". The year was 1937. The scene she described took place in the weeks leading up to the Guernica bombing. She wrote: "An old woman, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a trembling boy in her arms, is running briskly toward the square. You understand what she's thinking. She was thinking, I have to get the baby home quickly. You'll always feel safer at home, surrounded by familiar scenes. You don't imagine yourself dying in your own living room, you never think that way. While she was in the middle of the square, another shell fell. A tiny sheet of steel, scalding hot and sharp, had just peeled off the shell and cut the boy's throat. ”
Gailhorn's eyes always fell on the citizens, not the soldiers. Editors don't always appreciate her attention to the price that ordinary people pay in war. In an editor's note for one of her articles about refugees from the Spanish war, there was a line that read, "It's okay to look like that kind of tear-jerking story."
Martha Gellhorn (November 8, 1908 – February 15, 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who was described by the London Daily Telegraph as one of America's greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Over the course of a six-decade career, Gailhorn worked as a war correspondent for fifty years. She has covered eight of the world's most famous wars, including the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish War, World War II, the Chinese War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and the Vietnam War. She is the third wife of the famous American writer Hemingway.
While in Spain, she began a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, and the two married in 1940. Apparently, probably out of jealousy of his wife's excellent reporting prowess, Hemingway became her competitor in Collier's Weekly. The U.S. military gave Hemingway special permission to accompany him to report on the Normandy landings. In contrast, Gellhorn is much harder. She negotiated with a medical ship moored in England and said she wanted to do a story about nurses. As soon as she got on the boat, she rushed straight to the toilet and locked herself inside until the boat lifted anchor. It was the third medical ship to attempt to cross the strait, and the first two were struck by mines. The coverage she brought back was outstanding, focusing on the cost of the attack and a nuanced depiction of the wounded. Although she also went ashore to assist in carrying the wounded, she barely mentioned herself in the text.
Hemingway's report was different from hers. Collier Weekly featured Hemingway's article as a cover story. The six-page report begins with a half-page photograph of Hemingway standing with soldiers. He hadn't actually been ashore, but you couldn't tell from his words, you could only see a self-inflated man there pointing out the country and telling how he had directed the landing and led the war to victory. He found the right landing point for an officer who had lost his map and lost his map. Hemingway meant that he remembered all the geographical details of the entire Normandy coastline.
Gailhorn's report was lined up on just one page, at the bottom of the magazine, behind an article that taught you how to swallow a sword. The short article, titled "Over and Back," shows no sign that she left Britain, much less that she landed on the other side of the war. It was six weeks before Collier Weekly published her full report. I suspect that Collier's weekly writings about men with lush chest hair in the midst of war are more eye-catching than Gellhorn's humanitarian reports? Or didn't the editor want Hemingway to be compared to her? Or are they afraid of provoking the U.S. military? After Gailhorn returned to England by boat, the U.S. military arrested her and ordered her to be imprisoned in a nurses' camp. But she climbed over the barbed wire fence, found a nearby airport, and flew to the Italian front to continue reporting on the war. Later, people found out that the reason why her article was delayed was not any of the above. Until recently, Sandra Whipple Spanier, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania, discovered the contents of the telegram that Gellhorn and Hemingway had sent back that year. Hemingway's long essay and Gailhorn's short story were both telegraphed from London, while Gellhorn's long story,"The Wounded Come Home," was not telegraphed back, but was sent by flat mail to the editorial board of Collier Weekly, with the june 13 postmark. When Sbanier asked the elderly Gellhorn about this, Gellhorn was shocked. She remembers asking Hemingway to help her telegraph both of her articles back to the newsroom at the same time, and she always thought he had sent them. Their marriage did not last until the end of the war.
Now, Gailhorn's works during the war have been collected and published, which has extremely high humanistic value. I must admit that my psychology is now ambivalent about the equality of women and men in reporting on war. From the military's point of view, journalists are generally not allowed to report on the suffering of the people, but they are required to speak for the military from the perspective of military pros and cons. As a feminist, I used to take it for granted that if there were barriers to women's participation in any field, it would be a great joy to break that barrier. However, my experience as a female war correspondent has led me to question this view.
The wars I report on usually take place in countries where gender is not yet equal. I was surprised to realize that in such countries that give women very little power, the first right to be given to women is to give them the "right" to go to war. This is true in the Persian Gulf countries and in many parts of Africa. I covered these stories because they have a deep meaning. In Eritrea, a shy maiden of the tribe was appointed commander. A veiled woman from the UAE was admitted to Sandhurst (Royal Army Officer School). In interviewing the latter, I met Janis Karpinski, an American military officer who trained the emirate's first female officers. Ten years later, as with the Algerian national liberation and many movements, gender equality was forgotten as soon as the war was over. Women in the UAE are once again struggling for the most basic rights. Janis Kabinsky, on the other hand, was demoted, degraded, and became the only high-ranking scapegoat for the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her two male superiors, Admiral Miller and Admiral Sanchez, were deeply implicated in the incident, but their careers flourished.
Since then, there have been reports of interrogations of Muslim prisoners by U.S. army women soldiers who have been asked to commit a series of acts that violate their sexual orientation and religious taboos, such as making them pose in sexually suggestive poses or applying false menstrual blood to them. These are not the things that a few abnormal sadists sneak around in the night shift, but are known and approved by the highest levels. The U.S. military has degenerated to the point of pimping female soldiers.
Perhaps in the war, women gained the right to go to the front. But I think that if that's the case, women should also have the right to safety. If it is to prove one's courage, or patriotism, to serve the country, then I think it can be achieved in many places, and putting up the necessary barriers to the protests at home is one of the most important things. Most wars end at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. But this is not exaggerating the merits of the negotiating table or touting politicians as war heroes. As a journalist, the bravest people I've ever covered on the battlefield are aid workers who don't have weapons and are low-paid. One of them is Stuart Cameron, a forty-five-year-old from Brisbane who is a humanitarian regional chief who runs the winter subsistence programme and provides coal and food to the impoverished Kurds who have just experienced the first Gulf War. In 1993, he was ambushed and shot seventeen times. The aim of the terrorist attack was to expel foreign aid workers from Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq. Mr. Cameron has always been loved and respected by his aides, and when the car carrying his coffin pulled out of the hospital and began his first long journey home, thousands of Kurdish residents stood on both sides of the road and on rooftops waiting. Some of them brought weapons and saluted the hearse, while others silently watched the car leave. On the walls on both sides of the road, there are many hastily written cards on which their feelings are written in broken English. I remember one of them saying: Kurds don't forget Stewart.
As a journalist, I've met Australians on almost every battlefield I've been to, many of them women. They are doing work over there that can improve the livelihood of the local people. They are often direct, not obstinating, not self-aggrandizing, and not being praised. But their hard work and dedication have left seeds of friendship in all corners of the world. Like journalists, in the face of disasters, rescue workers will rush to the front line of disasters. We have come and gone, and we are not sure if we have left any eternal marks. At the end of her life, Martha Gelhorn once told a group of young journalists: "My journalistic career has been to throw small stones into a big pond, and I don't know which stone can make even the smallest ripples. I don't need to worry about that. My responsibility is to throw out these stones. If there is a group of people who care about the earth and the most vulnerable part of its inhabitants, then I am one of them. ”
The best of us, Greg Shackleton, my colleague daniel Parr at the Wall Street Journal, will surely fight her life like she did. And the least we can do is stay tuned. It's too easy for most people to ignore the injustices that happen in distant lands. These things are like books that you don't like to read, pushed to the innermost part of the bookshelf. And in this interconnected world, such behavior will become increasingly dangerous, and the barrier between peace and prosperity and poverty and war is dissolving. The problems of the world economy can be like cancer cells, invading the healthiest organs and causing them to necrosis. And environmental problems are only going to get worse. There is no flag, or borders, that can protect us.
When my father died, his coffin was stamped with an Australian flag. My father was an immigrant, and he loved the flag. For me, I prefer to imagine that in the future we will no longer need the flag. That night, at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, I saw a glimmer of possibility at that moment: in that moment, we only needed a flag, and the flag that was full of projections of peace doves.
——
Excerpts from the author's speech at the Boyer Lecture hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in The Idea of Home, published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Press.
Geraldine Brooks grew up in Sydney's western suburbs, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Sydney and later worked as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. After receiving a journalism scholarship from Columbia University, Brooks completed his master's degree there. She then spent a decade as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, based in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.
After two nonfiction writing jobs, she turned to the field of historical fiction and achieved great success. Her novels range from 1666 in England to the American Civil War and cover a wide variety of topics, from book protection to slavery. In 2006, the book March won the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his novels, "Calebs Crossing" and "People of the Book," were included on the New York Times bestseller list. The Year of Wonders has been translated into more than 25 languages, including Chinese, and is popular around the world.
She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2010 and the Australian Medal in 2016.
Currently, Brooks holds positions as a Woodrow Fellow and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She lives with her family and various animals, lives in Marsard Vineyard, Massachusetts, and often returns to Australia to live and work.
Her works "March", "Year of Miracles", and "Book Man" have been published in China.
In 2020, Single Reading is looking for subscribers, members, and honorary publishers, and it's ongoing!
Single Reading 23 · Broken House is already available
It was unexpectedly timed again