Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 15)

Donald Trump will be the 47th President of the United States. He won the election on a campaign to crack down on migration. His running mate, JD Vance, has suggested the deportation operation could remove more than a million people a year. NYC has an estimated population of 560,000 undocumented migrants, and Philadelphia has an undocumented population of 170,000. Trump has also promised to end temporary protected status.

How are undocumented migrants and the organizations and advocates that support them in NYC and Philadelphia preparing for the coming Trump presidency?

How will immigration enforcement differ under Trump’s second presidency from immigration enforcement under his first presidency?

I plan to include scenes from the Welcoming Center and The Good Shepherd Church. I might also be able to go and visit New York again. I want to weave in perspectives from people who worked in organizations during the last Trump presidency and then get a sense of what could happen this time. I want to make sure I have a strong legal explanation for what the current situation is and what might change. I also want to include a sufficient account of the anxiety and stress that comes from just worrying about what might happen.

I know I need a more specific angle, but I’m not sure what that should be yet.

Interviews that I have already done / people I have quotes from:

Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz

Colombian couple who didn’t give me their name at the Lutheran church

Welcoming Center director of community (I lost their name but will find it again)

Welcoming Center woman who is leaving (I lost their name but will find it again)

Migrant at the welcoming center

Giulia at the welcoming center

People I need to contact/am waiting to hear back from:

Julia Preston

Anuj Gupta

Someone from the Legal Aid Society

Someone from The Door

Someone from the New York Immigration Coalition

Vitaliy Bolgar is a regular at the military evacuation hospital, the first stop for Ukrainian soldiers when retreating from the warzone. This sanctuary stands 20 miles out from Donestk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, where armed forces soldiers stand—a line of bodies—defending against Russian troops. “These guys come off the front lines and they’re watching their friends get destroyed. Their eyes are empty like glass, nothing behind them,” says Bolgar.

To the soldiers, Bolgar is a healer. He has become a popular visitor, with many men specifically requesting his treatment. “You could see a kind of life being breathed back into the soldiers,” says Bolgar describing the effects of his care. What Bolgar possesses is not a secret medical antidote: he arrives with a guitar, his voice, and traditional Ukrainian folk songs.

Three years out from the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bolgar’s musicmaking has been a form of lifesaving therapy to process the trauma and grief of the war, not only for the soldiers and victims of military attacks, but also for himself. Bolgar’s musical choices reflect a broader trend of the Ukrainian folk tradition’s postwar revival. Ukrainian folk music has become a uniting cultural marker for Ukrainian identity. Refugees as well as those who stayed unanimously returned to an old and largely forgotten culture, embracing the same songs across national lines.

Since Russia’s attack of Kyiv in February 2022, Bolgar has remained in western Ukraine. Bolgar worked tirelessly with relatives to find a way to transport his wife, Ludmila and son, Julien out of Ukraine to safety, eventually linking up with a Christian Romanian group in May. “In the back of your mind, you think about the huge amounts of human trafficking that takes place of women from Ukraine and from Russia,” Bolgar said. While his family reached refugee settlement camps in Germany, Bolgar was unable to flee and spent over a year alone in Kyiv.

In his solitude, the persistent accompaniment to Bolgar’s life was blaring air raid sirens. His body settled into a state of physical unrest, unable to sleep and constantly on edge for an impending attack. “I used to love putting music on to get moving and to lift myself up. Now, the music that I want to listen to is quiet, it brings peace to your soul,” said Bolgar.

This newfound need for meditative music shaped what he chose to sing to the front-line soldiers at the military hospital. Bolgar was singing traditional Ukrainian folk tunes: patriotic yet spiritual songs that have been rising from the ashes of a shared cultural fabric.

“Since the beginning of the war, people have returned to patriotic music, to traditional Ukrainian folk songs that haven’t been sung for many, many years,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “You’re seeing the return to the idea: what does it mean to be a Ukrainian?”

In the folk song tradition, Ukrainians and the diaspora are recognizing the duty to preserve a culture that is threatened by extinction says Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies the Soviet Union and Russia.

“Now that there’s this monstrous force that’s seeking to erase them as a people, Ukrainians are finding within songs of lament,” Morrison said. “These songs are communal expressions of grief, a wealth of material that people associated with these traumatic events that have occurred over and over again.”

Today, this notion of the Ukrainian identity is also being revived linguistically. Bolgar was raised in the small Russian-speaking village of Bograd, but switched to speaking Ukrainian since the start of the war. His choice reflects trends amongst Ukrainians towards reclaiming the Ukrainian identity and its modern expression, but still being rooted in the traditions of old Ukraine according to Benham.

Now, the Ukrainian language and music are the two main cultural identifiers for Ukrainians who have left. “All of a sudden, they want to sing Ukrainian folk songs, even if they never spoke a word of Ukrainian in their life. That is a big deal for people to say, ‘We’re not Russia,’” Benham said.

However, there has been an increasingly bitter discourse around Ukrainians who fled since the start of the war. A negative sentiment has risen around Ukrainians leaving, labeling them as abandoning those who chose to remain, says ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

“For musicians, it’s an ambiguous question: what do you do in the moment of a crisis like this one? Some of course joined the military. Many, especially pop musicians who use commodified platforms, understood that they would have better luck in Western Europe,” said Sonevytsky.

As Ukrainian musicians search for a new audience of listeners outside their country, the sudden burst of international attention towards Ukrainian artists since the start of the war has also brought a sense of global solidarity for these musicians.

“It feels very powerful that Ukrainian music is even in the U.S., that everybody knows about Ukraine now,” said Sonya Zhukova, a Ukrainian singer-songwriter who is a refugee in Poland, about a performance at her music camp in Los Angeles. “In that moment, I just closed my eyes and I thought about the war. I felt this support from my team: that they loved Ukraine, they support us, and everything is okay.”

Bolgar’s current musical project is creating a Ukrainian psalm book with guitar backing tracks, specifically for soldiers based on his performances at the military hospital. The book contains a mix of traditional Ukrainian folk songs as well as spiritual songs aiming to spread peace, calm, and hope during the war.

“Sometimes one of the guys will be a musician and have a guitar in the in the trench with them. Other times, they just don’t have anything,” Bolgar said.

He hopes to meet his fundraising goal of $3,500 to make recording backing tracks a reality, so that soldiers can have the music to listen and sing to while they are in battle.

“Ukraine is not just our territory, but it’s our culture as well. We want Ukrainians to remember who they are when they leave the country. We want there to be a Ukrainian culture that remains, and music is a really important part of it all,” said Bolgar.

“In the midst of this horrible war, music is not only our therapy, but it also lifts us up to go into battle together, so that we know we are fighting for our freedom.”

Both Peter Hessler’s  “What the Garbage Man Knows” and Deborah Amos’s “Dancing for Their Lives” pulled me and other readers into the lives of people doing whatever it takes to survive in tough situations. I was drawn to the author’s ability to pull me into the daily life of the subjects as well as give me an indepth description of who they are without merely listing of features or information but by situating themselves and us into their world.  Hessler follows Sayyid, a garbage collector in Cairo who understands people deeply by sorting through their trash. Meanwhile, Amos explores the lives of Iraqi women in Syria who, as refugees, sometimes have to turn to prostitution to support their families. Both writers dive into worlds far removed from their own, gaining the trust of the people they write about, while also dealing with tough questions about how much they should share and how best to show respect. With issues as big as divorce and traficking, I wonder where the line of journalism is? Are they always okay with the way their life is portrayed? Since Sayyid is illiterate, what are the methods of ensuring that as a reporter you are presenting information correctly? 

Hessler starts with Sayyid’s daily life rather than his personal backstory, letting readers understand him through what he does and what he notices. This approach helped me and  readers see Sayyid as a person with skills and knowledge, rather than just someone who’s “uneducated” or “poor.” For example, even though Sayyid can’t read, he’s learned to pick up on small clues, like how women throw out empty pill packs with days marked on them. This allows for us to know how he views the world rather than merely getting a description of who he is. But Hessler also shows us the challenges Sayyid faces. He doesn’t get paid much, he had to serve longer in the military because he couldn’t read, and there are strict gender roles in his community. By not jumping in with personal facts, Hessler lets us get to know Sayyid through his actions, which builds trust. But this makes you wonder: How can journalists like Hessler build this trust with people who may be hesitant to open up? This piece was written over a long time but what steps and procedures did the author follow to ensure that the relationship had been properly built? How do they gain respect without crossing boundaries?

In Amos’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” she brings us into the world of Iraqi refugee women who sometimes feel they have no other option but to sell their bodies to survive. There was a description of these two young girls about 12 years of age watching the other women dance which showcases how desperation passes from one generation to the next. The idea of dancing is a means of survival that is not only present in the now but in the generations to follow and this description does an amazing job at capturing that.  How does she observe and record without standing out too much or putting herself in danger? And how do reporters handle the tension between wanting to show the real story and respecting the dignity of those involved?Both pieces make us think hard about what journalists should and shouldn’t do when reporting on sensitive issues. How do they respect people’s struggles without making them look like just victims? And when they immerse themselves in these communities, how do they avoid making things worse for the people involved?.

I was particularly interested in your article, Professor Amos. First, I was interested in the temporality of the reporting. You had built a relationship with Um Nour from reporting trips in 2008, but much of the article takes place in one night. My first question is what does building and maintaining a relationship with a source over several years involve and look like? In terms of the night itself, how do you pitch the project to your source? Much like in the Hassler article, your focus on prostitutes is interesting for the way that although the migrant prostitutes are on the margins of society, a deep focus on them actually reveals a lot about the wider society on whose margins they live. For example, by following Ahmed around, Hassler is able to momentarily explain Cairo’s tipping culture, which more vividly elucidates the broader nature of society for a non-Egyptian reader. This technique reminds me of a profile of an RUC police detective in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing. Radden Keefe explains and demonstrates in his own choice of interviewee that the RUC would target people in menial roles who were connected to the IRA, for example, Gerry Adams’ driver, rather than trying to get Adams himself. My next question is how you come to make judgments like the following: “One last look? Enough eyeliner? Another pat of powder? Anxiety also filled the room, because of the deals that would have to be concluded later in the evening.” This quotation describes the bathroom in which the women are doing their makeup. Particularly when there is a language barrier, is this the kind of thing you just have to trust your judgment on or was this made more apparent to you in conversation about the scene with Um Noor?

With regard to the Ben Taub piece, I read it when it first came out in 2021. I remember being blown away at the time by the level of detail. There are many questions the article raises for me. First, how does one decide to set off investigating this kind of thing and then how does one actually go and do it? Did the story come to him or would he have had an inkling doing other reporting? I’m also curious how he would have built trust with people who inhabit a very murky world.

Finally, I was interested in the Goudeau chapter. It’s striking that the US immigration system used to be so explicitly based on race. As Goudeau points out, there were millions of people from around the world in majority non-white countries who could have benefited from coming to the US, but the US was only interested in European immigrants. I was struck by the US sympathy for the student rebels in Hungary and thought the example raised a number of parallels with today. The US is interested in refugees that “deserve” settlement because of some kind of alignment with US foreign policy interests. For example, in recent years both Ukrainians and Afghans have received special access to the US, whereas Syrians have not.

Question:

How are Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainians abroad finding meaning/processing grief using music today?

Differences between those who stayed and left?
Rebranding and sudden attention to Ukrainian artists?

There has been a revival of traditional folk Ukrainian music since the start of the war. This has been a source of healing and processing of grief in a strange turn of events; there is a return of a linguistic and musical tradition that has largely been forgotten before the war.

Or has it? I have conflicting sources. Some people believe that this war truly reignited a tradition that has brought unprecedented attention and linked Ukrainian refugees and those who have stayed. Another that I talked to believes that the folk tradition has been coming back into the light for decades now, and that this revival has been dramatized.

I am still trying to find my angle and would like to root it more to the idea of migration and the refugee experience. This is an approach I hope to take by talking to more Ukrainian refugee organizations.

JRN 449 Final Project Source List

* = musician/performer

People I have interviewed:

Vitaliy Bolgar* – Ukrainian director Music in World Cultures (MIWC), Singer & Guitarist
Stephen Benham – Professor of Music Education at Duquesne University, President of Music in World Cultures (MIWC)
Sonya Zhukova* – Singer-Songwriter, Musika Musika Communications (REACH OUT)
Simon Morrison – Professor of Music at Princeton University, Focus: the musical, cultural, and political histories of the Soviet Union, Russia, the United States
Solomiya Ivakhiv* – Violinist
Maria Sonevytsky – Associate Professor of Anthropology & Music at Bard College

To reach out to:

Jana Strukova, PhD’ 07 Princeton Theological Seminary (leads program at church that welcomes Ukranian refugees)
Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Committee
Princeton For Ukraine (I connected with the Facebook Page)
Ukrainian Institute of America
Nadia Shpachenko, piano (concert at Ukrainian Institute of America on Nov 17 that I was invited to, they said I could speak to her)

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.

Frank Langfitt’s article illustrates very well the value of flexibility in journalism: he started out wanting to write a story about Chinese Communist Party dissidents, and ended up uncovering an internationally renowned con man in the process. I was particularly struck by the approach the reporters took to changing course when their suspicions about the stories they were being told began to surface. The turning point was the email Gao allegedly received from the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service. I was impressed by the authors’ clear-sightedness in recognizing that something was wrong, and their insight into undertaking their own research to verify the stories they were being fed, especially given how much the story had already been picked up by other outlets without being verified. I appreciate similar illustrations of the role that journalists can play in seeking the truth and not simply reporting what has been said. The authors of this article used their critical thinking and pursued their vocation of objectivity and integrity to investigate, ultimately producing a story that might have gone against their subjective interests, namely, to scrutinize the Chinese government.

This anecdote about how the media picked up the story of the bomb threats when they had not been verified echoes what we read last week when we talked about the value of open source investigations. Time and time again, we have seen how the media can fall victim to its own biases. In our collective consciousness on this side of the world, China is constructed as a country controlled by a very complex, deeply organized, and deeply intrusive state that orchestrates complex operations to suppress dissidents and target the United States. While some of the events that underlie this characterization may have merit, if this is the assumption with which we approach stories as journalists, errors like the one above can easily proliferate. We seek out stories that confirm our biases and are not motivated to investigate further stories that seem to confirm our preconceptions. Repeated over and over again, this lack of rigor can be counterproductive because it erodes trust in the journalism profession as a whole and we run the risk of falling into a post-truth society where we no longer know who to trust. Biases are humane, thus why it is important to design a rigorous system that allows us to maintain objectivity regardless of the subject matter.

I believe this distance is necessary for effective journalism. It is one of the greatest benefits of embedded journalism, because it gives a journalist the time and space to follow a story long enough to identify potential inconsistencies and investigate them thoroughly. This creates a lag that helps create a helpful contrast with the fast-paced environment of traditional journalism, which ends up being more vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation due to the expectations placed on journalists to cover the news quickly and to shock.

Finally, I enjoyed reading Goudeau’s article because she showed us the role of public perception and opinion in shaping the political landscape of refugee resettlement in the United States. The power of public relations campaigns cannot be underestimated, as it defines which groups receive assistance and which have a hard time making their demands heard.

It’s no secret that I am interested in disinformation about migrants. I’ve spent the semester (and my thesis) working on political disinformation about migrants, writing pieces about how disinformation spread by politicians have hurt migrant and non-migrant communities in Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. I’ve interviewed disinformation experts and people with firsthand experience, all to answer the questions: why does disinformation about migrants spread, and how does it affect them and their communities?

When interviewing them about “disinformation targeting migrants,” the subjects sometimes asked for a clarification: do I mean political disinformation spread by people like MAGA for political gain, or do I mean “for-profit” disinformation spread by scammers to trick migrants into paying them. I always clarified I meant the former, but those questions made me curious… what is the world of migrant scammers like? Who are these scammers? What do the scams look like? How are they spread? Why aren’t the scammers being held accountable?

In my few conversations about these scams, what I’ve heard is extremely disheartening. People posing to be much-needed pro-bono asylum lawyers ask for money upfront after “taking their case,” and disappear never to be heard from the migrants again. And the migrants don’t have the means to hold these so-called lawyers accountable because they either don’t have the money, don’t understand the legal system, are afraid of getting in trouble with the immigration system, or a combination of these factors. And so, many times these scammers get away with it.

There hasn’t been much news coverage about this. CBS News New York covered it in a brief article when DA Alvin Bragg discussed it after indicted one scammer back in January. More scams have been investigated in other states like Colorado. But from my few conversations about this, the problem is much more widespread.

Ideally, I would speak to migrants who were scammed about their experience with scammers. I would also speak to advocates like Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz and CARECEN in D.C. who help migrants navigate their arrival and avoid scams. But most of all, I would love to actually meet the scammers – to see them in action. Perhaps the dream scenario for me (as someone who is not Hispanic and doesn’t speak Spanish) is to have a migrant secretly record meeting a scammer to hear their tactics. New York is a one-party consent state – I assume this would be legal? I’d love to interview one (maybe some actually convicted), but I don’t know how possible that is. Perhaps I can take a page out of Taub’s book and use transcripts from indictments involving scammers?

Scams targeting migrants is an important issue, a story of people taking advantage of those with little to no power to fight back. And if they can’t turn to authorities to take care of this, then it is up to journalists to help them fight back – to correct this injustice and address the corruption.

Alternatively, another story idea I have is to answer why more Hispanic voters voted for Trump in 2024 than they ever have. But that question was somewhat easily answered by various people we talked to in New York, so maybe not the best story idea.

The articles chosen for this week were tremendous – each one demonstrated what journalism has the capacity to be. Powerful and affecting, these were great examples of embedding. I’m struck by the quality and quantity of reporting that went into these, not just in terms of how they got the support to engage in such long projects, but also in the organization of information. Taub had papers sprawled out on his floor… how do you go from that to a tight article? Topically, I felt like these stories all showed underrepresented voices. In yours, Deb, I was most impressed by the final detail that Um Nour was facilitating sex-work; to survive means to take advantage of your social position at every rung of the ladder. Victims of economic violence perpetrate violence against others, unfortunately usually those lower in the ladder than them. This is a side of migration, and of everyday living, that normally is overlooked. Each story felt like it unraveled dominant narratives to show underlying ones: from fake chinese threats to the relationship between the BVT and Halabi, the real events are always shrouded in other narrative constructions. Particularly after this election, I think we need to key into the narratives that are created by institutions of power. The American voters were against Biden’s migration policy and “his” economy because they were led to feel that way. Narrative journalism can be weaponized by the state (Austria), or by individuals (Wang). Regardless, there seems to be an obligation to criticize and question the things we hear. We interact with narratives all day, and live our lives accordingly; knowing which ones to look into is difficult, and sniffing out those fake narratives feels essential to good journalistic work. 

Now, methods-talk again. I’m really attracted to embed-style journalism because of the wealth of details that comes out: that Sayyid takes away his empties because he’d be the one picking them up later, that one of the women on stage cried while dragging on her cigarette, that Pircher is called “rumpelstiltskin” behind his back, these details are what make a story great, and they show me that the reporter has done their due diligence. At the same time, I’m abundantly aware of the challenges embedding creates. Langfitt’s work is amazing, but I don’t think it could be done anymore. I talked about Langfitt with a friend who laments the impossibility of foreign-correspondance in China, and he joked that if you tried the “free Taxi,” bit now, your second or third passenger would be a CCP officer. Embedding is reliant on access. Taub bypasses this by using documents and investigates by moving around the subject, but even here he somehow has access (which to be clear, I don’t understand… how does he get all these internal documents!? How does he get top-secret BVT memos?). Embedding is a great tool, but there needs to be an open door to go through – how do you open that door? This “access,” question creates further challenges – Hessler is a foreigner, and so why Sayyid trusts him is slightly unclear… at a certain point, it’s to get something. Embedded reporting straddles a line wherein subjects become friends or collaborators. There’s some mutual exchange. As shown in the Langfitt article, this can have serious consequences. How do you make sure the information you’re getting is positive, reliable, etc? Hessler’s interaction with Wahiba shows another big problem in embedded journalism or immersive journalism. A lot depends on the social standing of the journalist themselves, or their identity! A foreign man could never see Wahbia and talk to her for a story, but there’s probably a good story to her life and to her. Without her perspective, a lot is lost in my opinion. Someone else could write a story with access to her. Just not Hessler. And to navel-gaze for a moment, I couldn’t write it either! Given my position and identity, more doors for immersive reporting are open to me than most. I’m abundantly aware of that privilege there. But at the same time, thinking specifically about trying to talk with Afghan women for my final paper, my position will create challenges. These articles also present an alternate to our norm, wherein the reporter is themselves the migrant, rather than the other way around. There is the challenge of possible misunderstandings – I guess the solution is to immerse so deeply that you don’t feel like an outsider any more, but getting that far feels difficult. Lots of words, lots of thoughts. Each of these articles was a novella unto themselves, so I feel like I could (and should) say more, but generally just impressed and motivated by these readings.

What I love most about long-form pieces is they often have the best details. Maybe it’s the space that long-form provides, or maybe it’s the people that write long-form vs. short-form. But they make the stories so much better. It really shows the importance of the journalist being there, immersed in the story – that just makes it better.

In the Dancing for their Lives piece, there are so many great details. The scene with the women getting ready in the bathroom is great – familiar to anyone who has seen any teen movie (and, I presume, many women have experienced this image themselves). And, when detailing the dance floor, calling the women “merchandise” in the eyes of men is very poignant – it exacts a particular image. And the images of the women on the dance floor were also very illustrative, especially the woman with the cigarette:

“She appeared to be listening to music from some distant time inside her head; eyes closed, she mouthed the lyrics of traditional laments of loss. With each refrain, her eyes moistened and she took the cigarette she was holding and brought the burning tip close to the exposed skin above her breasts. Over and over she brought the smoldering tobacco near her naked skin, about to inflict pain, but stopping short of contact.”

This is such a beautiful description; I can close my eyes and see her in the red dress with her cigarette. I can watch her movements because they are described with such detail. Though I wonder how much of her emotional description is real or interpretation… gee I wish I could ask the author.

I thought the article on Halabi was really well written, but I am curious about some of the choices. For example, the choice to not include the fact that Halabi never spoke to Taub and that most of his quotes are from the interview with the asylum officer until mid-way through the article was interesting. I noted that he kept saying “Halabi said later” which was interesting, specific phrasing, and then he revealed later why he phrased it that way. Also interesting is starting out with Brunner – it is perhaps a little disorienting, but I did appreciate Taub making the parallels between Brunner and Halabi clearer throughout the piece (especially ending with the comparison). But I do like building Halabi’s life, movements, and mysteries by piecing together the puzzle: talking to people like Tayara or reviewing the asylum interview transcripts or going over the CIJA investigation.

I also found the article about Sayyid the garbageman fascinating.  It is really cool to read about people we wouldn’t normally hear from, and hearing how the system works in a foreign country like Egypt. As Hessler alluded, the reader does learn a lot from following Sayyid around the streets and fire escapes of Cairo. The pills example was particularly striking (though perhaps it’s because it comes up again later in the article). The fight between Sayyid and his wife, too, was illustrative – with the different “weapons” (money and words).

I do wonder about the first-person nature of these articles. I’ve been trained as a journalist to keep myself out of the story – I am not the story, the characters (or subjects) are – but both the dance club and Sayyid had the author at least a secondary part of a larger story.  It was almost as if they are a character themselves. The audience was keenly aware they were looking through the writer’s eyes. What is the reasoning for this?