I have always been a bit daunted by the prospect of the profile. How do you capture a whole human being in one piece and serve them up to the world to read? It is less a fear of offending the individual in question, or failing to accurately represent them, which is no different from any kind of reporting we do. But there is something about conveying the life of an individual human that feels very delicate. I also struggle with relevance — when you’re dealing with a person, or event, rather than a widespread phenomenon, how do you get your readers to care about your subject like someone they know? Novelists do it all the time, but it feels harder in journalism, where there’s no room for making things up.
In both Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” and Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” though, people and places were fully alive and relevant and interesting at all times. Part of the advantage of writing for a Western audience about elements of Egyptian culture and Syrian nightlife is that everything is novel, so simple sensory descriptions go a long way. The first for grafs of “Dancing for Their Lives” are almost purely descriptive, entirely devoid of quotes. This is often a journalism no-no, but here it really works for both introducing Um Nour as a character and the nightclub as a space. For an unfamiliar audience, the story is merely that such a person and such a place exist, and we want to understand it.
Hessler employs a similar strategy. To understand the informal economy of the zabalen, for someone who hasn’t directly experienced it, is to be transported into a new world with unfamiliar practices and rules. The story stays interesting through physical description and the introduction of a central character. Both Deb and Hessler see many different sides of Um Nour and Sayyid, respectively. Both journalists are introduced to a new system — the system of prostitution in Syrian nightclubs, and the system of garbage pickup in Cairo — through these central characters. In some ways, they are the tour guides to their own profiles, and we only see of their lives what they show us.
The journalist’s role then becomes to reflect on these lives in all their richness and activity, draw out significant themes (as the two Nieman and WSJ advice pieces advised), and organize them. In “Dancing for Our Lives,” the image of the women “lingering together in this comfortable female place, homesick, preparing to live off their bodies,” accomplishes this particularly well. This is the thesis in a nutshell: the women in the piece are dancing, literally, for their lives. Any outside could understand that. But only the insider, who has entered the changing room with these women and watched them prepare, could get a sense of the comfort in the shared female space, or accurately convey the homesickness of these women. Similarly, in “What the garbage man knows,” Hessler gives us insight only he, as a journalist who has truly immersed, could provide. He has gone to Sayyid’s house, gone to court with him. There was something unsatisfying in being unable to piece together what happened with Sayyid and Wahiba’s marriage. But Hessler gets us the closest a person can get. Reading these pieces helped me work through the role of a profile. There are so many people in the world the average person never gets to be close with, from politicians to celebrities sex workers to the local garbage collector — and a profile’s job is to get us the closest we can get.
