People Like Us (4 page)

Again, it was entirely logical, and for a while I thought about throwing in the towel—all that trouble calling and faxing, all that effort, to get to this stage play with its predictable dialogue. But interviews like this meant “scoring” on the home front; nobody there knew about the PR department, let alone the lingerie shop—they thought it was incredibly dangerous to interview an ogre like Nasrullah. And interviews like this might offer minor revelations if you read between the lines. It wasn’t what was said, but the way it was said. In Sudan, I’d interviewed Hassan Turabi, the ideologist of the fundamentalist regime. I’d read some of his horrible speeches, but in person he turned out to be a giggly man with diplomas from the Paris Sorbonne on his wall, who seemed to like nothing better than pointing out a paradox or contradiction in Western politics: “That doesn’t make sense, hee hee hee!”

Something like that happened with Nasrallah, too. His mentor was the Ayatollah Khomeini, who’d laid down the foundations of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Khomeini never looked Western interviewers in the face, but dictated his answers with his eyes fixed on the interpreter. Nasrallah did the same, only we didn’t need an interpreter. I’d prepared my
questions in Arabic and had gone through them with Nabulsi, who’d seemed to find this a fun exercise. I asked my questions directly, and Nasrallah answered without making eye contact. It worked until he noticed that my tape recorder was jamming. “Is it still working?” he asked Nabulsi. “One side is full; it will go over to the other side automatically,” I said. “It’s a new system.” And before he’d realized it, Nasrallah had given me a nod of understanding.

 

 

T
hat was the job, different from what I’d expected, but no less exciting. The paper or radio would call: “We’ve seen something on the BBC about a factory in Beirut where they’re making dolls of Western leaders in order to burn them. We’ve got to have it!” Or I’d read something myself and think,
That’s a story I’m going after,
and I’d travel to that city or country at my employer’s expense. I haggled over a bazooka in a market in Yemen, attended the king’s funeral in Morocco, and for the Christmas issue of the paper I trekked through the Sinai desert, following in the footsteps of the Israelites. One time in Beirut there were shootings on the Lebanon-Israel border. I would race there, collect great quotes until half past nine at night, rustle up a piece on a notepad in less than an hour, and ring it through to the Netherlands—knowing that the next morning more than two hundred thousand people would find it lying on their doormats. Or it was ten degrees in the Netherlands, but there I was in baking-hot Tehran, standing next to an election box and listening to the producer in Hilversum say, “Five seconds now,” and then I could tell a few hundred thousand countrymen about Iran.

Of course, I made beginner’s errors, and I still blush when
I remember the time I casually asked the
New York Times
correspondent if I could have the phone number of the man he’d written about last week. He looked me up and down, presumably to see whether I might ever be able to return the favor, mumbled that he might feel a bit uncomfortable about it, and walked off.

This was part of the job, too, but a reaction like that was the exception; most of my fellow journalists were helpful, perhaps because I was the only full-time correspondent from the Netherlands, and I wasn’t fishing in anyone else’s pond. There was just one list that everybody kept to themselves: The names and numbers of people with dodgy connections who could get you a visa for a dodgy country within a few hours, for a high price, if you got wind of breaking news.

Over the months, my list of talking heads and ex-pats grew: Tour guides, business people, diplomats, scholars, development workers, Jesuits, and missionaries. For background and analysis, I used CNN, the
New York Times
, Al-Jazeera, and the other big boys. From these sources I pieced together a picture, combined it with websites and magazines, and then put it to my network: Does this match your impression? Am I missing anything?

I found a better apartment in Cairo where the landlord had a human look in his eyes, not just dollar signs, and I can still remember looking around in a press conference some six months after that first trip to Sudan and happily thinking,
Yes, I’ve finally arrived.

At the same time, I couldn’t escape a growing feeling of unease.

It’s normal for people to take on the colors of the organization they are working for without realizing it, and that’s what happened to me. I was working so hard to fulfill the demands and expectations of my employers that I had no time to reflect on them. When my article “Islamic Front threatens U.S. with new attacks” led the front page, I glowed with pride. It was only a summary of agency press releases and local news and, thanks to the Internet, I could just have easily have written it in Amsterdam. But I’d scored the headline. And my colleagues were congratulating me! Successes like this gave me a good feeling for the first six months. After that, it became so routine that I had time to reflect on what I was doing, and where that feeling of unease was coming from.

Earlier, as a student, I’d spent quite some time in the Arab world. My first encounter had been in the mid-1990s, as an unworldly twenty-something traveling through Syria. Mass tourism didn’t exist in Syria back then, and I’d been frightened. Despite the political correctness I’d grown up with, I saw Arabs as irrational men who set fire to flags or effigies, and shouted horrible things about the West. In any case, I thought they were exotic—perhaps not inferior, but certainly different.

But once in Syria, I didn’t see any burning flags, I didn’t hear a single anti-Western slogan, and if I began to talk about politics I saw repressed panic rather than hatred on people’s faces. My confusion continued to grow because nobody had told me that Arabs, and therefore Syrians, too, can do some things better than Westerners. Syria might be thirty times poorer than the Netherlands, but I saw scarcely any vandalism, beggars, aggressive drunks, or homeless people. There was almost no petty crime; I could leave my luggage at a bus stop or archaeological site and pick it up later. People invited me to stay with them, and the pleasant, easy-going atmosphere on the streets was like nothing I’d ever experienced in the Netherlands or elsewhere in the West.

And then there were areas where the Syrians weren’t the slightest bit different from Westerners. I was amazed to hear them cracking jokes. Of course, I pulled myself together immediately, but where would I ever have seen Arabs telling jokes? My image of the Arab world came from Hollywood films, history books, and the news; the Arabs featured in those were almost always terrorists, oversexed oil sheiks, chanting masses, or anonymous victims—not the kind of people who’d laugh. But everywhere I went in Syria, people discreetly tried to make me, and each other, laugh.

For instance: A Russian, an American, and a Syrian secret agent are having a rabbit-catching contest. First, the Russian runs into the woods, and eighteen minutes later he comes out with a rabbit. Then it’s the American’s turn; he does it in sixteen minutes. Finally, the Syrian goes off. Fifteen minutes go by, half an hour, an hour ... Finally, the Russian and the American find the Syrian under a tree, where he’s torturing a hare: “Admit it, you’re a rabbit!”

A year after traveling through Syria, I did a research project at Cairo University among Egyptian students, many of whom had never spoken to a Westerner before. I had the opportunity to study them at length and, even more than in Syria, I was struck how much, despite their differences, they seemed like Westerners—and Westerners seemed like them. The most common topics of conversation amongst Egyptian students were sports, careers, and sex, not politics or the news. Egypt, too, had gossip magazines, talk shows, and a widespread obsession with celebrities and show business. And people made jokes.

As in, one evening, Osama Al-Baz, the president’s advisor, walks past the most famous bridge over the Nile. On the other side of the bridge, two giant bronze lionesses are parading. Just imagine Al-Baz’s surprise when one of the lionesses suddenly says to him, “Bring me a lion and I’ll tell you the secret of Egypt.” Al-Baz rushes to Mubarak and says, “Mr. President, hurry! I’ve witnessed a miracle, a talking bronze lioness!” So Mubarak accompanies Al-Baz to the bridge. “No, you moron,” the lioness shouts to Al-Baz when she catches sight of the two of them. “I said a lion, not an ass.”

My fellow Egyptian students were rather less exotic than I’d imagined, and at the same time certain things really
were different from the Netherlands—just not in the way I’d expected. I knew that 9 million of the 22 million inhabitants of Cairo had to get by on just one euro a day, but I’d never have expected poverty to cause an increase in self-respect. But the poorest of my friends were also the proudest.

 

 

A
s a student in Syria and Egypt, I saw the gulf between representation and reality in the Middle East for the first time, and at the time often asked myself how it was possible that I’d been following both countries in the news for years and yet still encountered totally different places than I’d expected. Back in the Netherlands, this amazement subsided, and my first months as a correspondent were so hectic that I still didn’t really think about it then either.

But then I managed to hook up with one of my old university friends, Imad. We hadn’t managed it before for various reasons: One time, he hadn’t shown up; another time, I’d had to leave suddenly; after that, we couldn’t get hold of each other for a while because he didn’t have a mobile, and that’s how it went.
Issabr gamil
, the Egyptians say, patience is a virtue, and finally we got to shake each other’s hands again. I felt guilty and rather recklessly said, “Come! Let’s not go to a coffee house—let’s go to a real restaurant on a Nile barge. I’m earning now, so it’ll be my treat.” We chatted, I remembered why I liked him and why I thought him an ass, and then the bill arrived. Before I’d realized it, Imad had grabbed it, opened it, and stiffened. There was no point arguing, and so there I sat as Imad, as discreetly as possible, conjured small-denomination banknotes from every one of his pockets. He made it,
Allahu akbar,
and the evening was saved. But we both knew he’d spend the
next month staying in because half of his salary had gone on those glasses of fruit juice.

As I walked home, I remembered what an impression the poverty had made on me as a student in Cairo. I would never have imagined anything like it until I saw it with my own eyes and understood that you had to experience it yourself. Take a child you really care about—a son or daughter, nephew, little sister, neighbor’s daughter—and try to remember an instance when that child really suffered. Take the helpless feeling you had then, and multiply it: She’s in terrible pain, the illness is terminal, and she’s withering away in her bed, screaming because she doesn’t understand what’s happening. Imagine now that there’s a hospital five hundred meters away, where she could be saved—only you can’t afford it.

That’s poverty. When I saw it close up in Imad and others, I wracked my brains over why such a defining phenomenon doesn’t get more attention in the press. How could you understand anything about the Egyptians without an idea of how incredibly vulnerable these people were? Imagine if you had no right to social security, a state pension, student loans, child benefits, fixed rent ... And yet you still bought drinks for a loaded Westerner. As a faithful newspaper reader and news watcher, why hadn’t I had a clue about poverty or the way that these people coped with it?

 

 

I
mad and his sense of pride reminded me of other things that had happened during my student times, and I began to suspect the cause of my growing unease. In my work as a correspondent, I was propagating that same image of the Arab world that had wrong-footed me as a student. At any rate, after six months I hadn’t written a single story on poverty, let alone
on the pride felt by the poor. At the same time, my personal archive contained stories with headlines like these:

The fact was that I was only covering summit meetings, attacks, bombings, or diplomatic stratagems. “Egyptians proud despite poverty,” “Lower crime rates and less alcoholism in Arabic countries,” and “Arabs less afflicted by stress than Westerners” ... these things weren’t news. They were seldom-written background stories or features, and they had no impact on people’s ideas of the region; but without them you couldn’t understand the headlines or the news stories.

Not only did my positive experience of the Arab world remain hidden in my articles, but I was also contributing to the image of Arabs as exotic, bad, and dangerous. The ways the news worked meant that while I did write about “angry men” burning flags and chanting slogans, I didn’t have the space to tell readers what was happening out of shot. On television or in photographs, it might look like there was a crowd; but on the spot you saw that there were just a few angry men who only held up their lighters when the cameras were turning, and that they all went home for tea afterwards. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, children were going to school, trams were making their circuits, and tomatoes were on special offer at the market.

In a descriptive piece about Damascus, I quoted the gigantic slogan on Martyrs’ Square: “Dear Assad, The Syrian people support you with Blood and Soul.” I had to leave out how, after writing down the slogan in my notebook, I’d sunk my teeth into a döner kebab and spent a pleasant quarter of an hour chatting with a passerby. I wrote about Hezbollah’s “acts of violence,” and quoted catchphrases such as “America is absolute evil,” but I didn’t tell readers about the people I’d met in the famous Nuriddin bathhouse in Damascus, where I’d sat panting and steaming after a hard day’s work. I looked around the bathhouse, as you do, and raised a hand in greeting to a man with an enormous beard. The profusely sweating man nodded back and we introduced ourselves. He turned out to be in Hezbollah, and was responsible for the children orphaned by Israeli bombardments. I sat down and proudly told him that I’d interviewed his leader. The man nodded, barely interested, but then he said, “You’re from
Hulanda
?!” His face lit up. “Aha! At last someone who can tell me why a country with so many good footballers has never been world champion!”