These articles have the acute skill of taking astute, specific observations about small quirks or details about a person and drawing it the broader narrative and social phenomena relevant to the story they’re trying to tell. This presents as a literary approach to writing, one where form fits content in the sense that these are deep immersions into personal being. However, upon this personal being the reporters are ultimately seeking to draw attention to the external forces that led this person to their current state of being.

 

In this case of Tales For Trash by Hessler, there’s an extension to the idea of Egypt’s epidemic of illiteracy. Quite literally, Hessler connects the individual man to a national phenomenon: “For the leaders of the revolution, who are mostly middle and upper class, the experience of a citizen like Sayyid is a perfect example of why radical change is necessary.”

 

In Dancing For their Lives, Um Nour’s ripe enthusiasm is stretched to this crisis of women in the freelance prostitution market, and an Iraqi political history of corruption: “I could see why this was Um Nour’s favorite club. The system of cost and rewards favored women who wanted some control over their work. It was a freelance market.”

 

I found this to be a very useful tool in writing and I enjoy pondering about this concept of using the personal to peel back into the larger political issues that may seem more distant to the average reader.

 

In that vain, in these pieces I noticed an interested theme that was the idea of inserting the author into the world of the individual being profiled. Notably, in Taub’s How a Syrian War Criminal and Double Agent Disappeared in Europe, I found it interesting how there is quite a revealing statement about how deeply this story has infiltrated his mind and his work. The Taub piece on Khaled al-Halabi presented the profile in a form that felt more traditionally “news story”-esque to me, in tone and content at the start, but that changes as you progress thorugh the story.

 

“Directly above the Austrian woman’s apartment, a man who looked like Khaled al-Halabi sat on his balcony, shielded from the late-morning sun. But I was unable to confirm that it was him.”

 

This closing paragraph almost feels romantic as he describes the sun falling upon the balcony, reminiscent and deeply reflective of the experience that has been stepping into Halabi’s shoes and committing to his story and life for years.

 

You can also quite easily hear a distinct tone and humor in the profiles that isn’t present in some of the more fact-based pieces that we’ve covered this semester, which lean into acknowledging the positionality of the reporter themselves. There is an ethnographic perspective that peers through these articles, really painting the scene and the characters so that the reader understands the scene as well as how the journalist fits into it.

 

I thought that the authors used speech as the foundation to their painting of a person, like using their unusual and fascinating syntax, mannerisms in speech as brushstrokes to really capturing how a person talks and exists.