COMM 150: Another Irish foreign correspondent's raison d'etre, 'to be there, to see, and to record'

Irish Times Washington Correspondent Lara Marlowe has a new book out. And this weekend's editions carry an excerpt from the book that echoes some of the themes in BBC correspondent Fergal Keane's first-person piece "Letter to Daniel." I've been reading Marlowe's coverage, off and on, since the Kosovo war more than 10 years ago. She has been in most of the world's more vicious trouble spots. Lebanon, Algeria, Africa, civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, American wars in what she calls (quoting Mort Rosenblum*, another journalist) "Vietraqistan." Marlowe says here:

Suffering is the lot of mankind; if my reporting sometimes strikes a chord in readers, I believe it is because I feel tied to the people whose pain I describe. As T S Eliot wrote: “I am moved by . . . The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing.” Some, like the parents of children who died violently in Ireland and France, became friends. Most have been swallowed up by distance and time. But I do not forget them.

That rings true, for what it's worth, to me. I've been told if a reporter stops waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the people he writes about, it's time to get out of the business. Lose sight of that common humanity, and you're done. Cooked.

And Marlow says this:

At the Féile an Phobail [community festival] in west Belfast in the summer of 2010, I was asked if I despaired of what the American poet e.e. cummings called “manunkind”. I didn’t want to sound negative, and strained to find examples of heroism. On occasion, I have encountered humour, generosity, altruism, even beauty. But for the most part, I have found the world to be as Matthew Arnold described it: without joy, love, light, certitude, peace, or help for pain. The instruments of suffering are usually remote: fighter bombers at altitudes of tens of thousands of feet; the secret minutes of politicians’ meetings. Only occasionally does one glimpse the face of cruelty: in a Serb prison-camp commander or, more recently, in an Arizona sheriff who glories in chain gangs of hungry prisoners and the deportation of Mexican migrants.

Despite the sadness and anger, I remain endlessly fascinated by the human condition. I still want to know what will happen. Looking back at this juncture, this mezzo camino [midpoint in a journey, lit. road], I have found something approaching a meaning and a purpose: to be there, to see, and to record.

__________
* After heading Associated Press bureaus in bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires, and Paris, as well as a 10-year stint as editor of the International Herald-Tribune based in Paris, Rosenblum now teaches journalism at the University of Arizona. His latest book, and I am not making this up, is on chocolate!