{"id":97578,"date":"2016-05-02T10:30:03","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T14:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97578"},"modified":"2016-05-02T12:56:32","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T16:56:32","slug":"the-art-of-war-reporting-an-interview-with-janine-di-giovanni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/02\/the-art-of-war-reporting-an-interview-with-janine-di-giovanni\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of War Reporting: An Interview with Janine di Giovanni"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Rannjan Joawn<\/p><\/div>\n

I met the war reporter Janine di Giovanni more than a decade ago, when I was a new expatriate in Paris. Her bohemian apartment, half a block from the Tuilerie Gardens, was filled with journalists, writers, newspaper editors, and members of NGOs from places I had only read about. On the table were large bowls of pasta drenched in butter and truffles\u2014she\u2019s from a large Italian American family from New Jersey\u2014and an inviting assortment of open bottles of red wine. Our children, both a year old, became best friends in the way only children can, and remain so to this day. Janine remains the only person I know who\u2019s canceled a playdate with the excuse that she had \u201cto go to Syria on Thursday.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Known for her wrenching and immediate dispatches from Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and Syria for the <\/em>London Times, <\/em>Janine took an unusual road to war reporting. She went to the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop for fiction and completed a master\u2019s degrees in comparative literature at the University of London. Her conversion to war reporting came, she says, when she saw a photograph of an Israeli soldier burying a Palestinian teen alive with a bulldozer full of sand. \u201cIt disturbed me horribly\u2014so I went. I met a human-rights lawyer who took me to the refugee camps and said, If you have the ability to write about people who have no voice, then you have an obligation. And that was that.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Giovanni is currently the Middle East editor of<\/em> Newsweek. Her books include <\/em>Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love; <\/em>The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge;<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Against the Stranger, about the effect of occupations during the first intifada on both Palestinians and Israelis; and\u00a0<\/em>The Quick and The Dead, about the siege of Sarajevo. Her latest, <\/em>The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria<\/a>, is out this week.<\/em> I spoke with her reporter-style by Skype\u2014I reached her in Paris, where she still lives.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stories you tell are steeped in tragedy\u2014the death of a child, the violent torture of a prisoner of war. How do you conceive of your reader, who is, after all, not a war reporter and isn\u2019t used to this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My attitude is, I hope readers are upset by this. That\u2019s what I want to do, shock them out of their complacency. But I\u2019m not doing it deliberately. Some reviews of my latest book would say, There\u2019s no holds barred, she tells these bitter stories incredibly graphically. But I just told my readers what my reporting had told me. I didn\u2019t exaggerate, I didn\u2019t add to anything. I didn\u2019t have to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So you feel you\u2019re just reporting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m reporting, I feel like I\u2019m a vessel. Of course a lot goes into that\u2014having to find these specific people and gain their trust, which takes an awfully long time. It might look like I just showed up to the torture center and found this guy, but no, there were layers and layers and\u00a0layers of searching for people and finding them and then gaining their trust and making sure that while you\u2019re telling their story they\u2019re not going to have a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

Do you feel the enormous burden of doing right by them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes the people I\u2019m writing about are too weak, too frightened, too vulnerable, or too traumatized to stand up to their aggressors\u2014their bullies, essentially. So this is my chance to be David against Goliath. But there\u2019s a price to pay. In 1999, in Kosovo, I was doing a very long, in-depth story about systematic rape. I needed a translator who could go with me and talk to these women, who were denying that they had been raped. I needed to spend a month with them, get them to open up. The translator they offered was this young, beautiful woman. She was about twenty-four at the time, and we spent the next month together. She had been in a terrible attack in Pristina the day the war started. She was sitting in a caf\u00e9 with her best friend and the Serb paramilitaries came and blasted the whole place with machine guns. She was the only survivor. She came to me essentially covered in shrapnel. So I said to her, Are you okay to do this? When you write about torture or rape, you need the detail, unfortunately, the minute detail. She said, Yes, I\u2019m fine. A month passes and she\u2019s getting stranger and stranger, and one night she has a total psychotic break. I get her to the doctor and it turns out that when she crossed to border to Albania, she was picked up by a truckload of farmers and gang-raped, she kept this all to herself. I worked for the Times of London<\/em> at the time, and we got her to a psychiatric hospital in London, but she never recovered. To this day I\u2019m in touch with her, and she\u2019s still totally blacked out. When you do push people to their limit by asking them to tell their stories, is it good for them? Are we meant to strip away the layers of people\u2019s vulnerability to get to the really raw bleeding part of it? Is that what\u2019s most important? If someone doesn\u2019t want to talk, I never push it. That\u2019s why when you say I report, I don\u2019t report. I\u2019ve never been able to go up to a mother who lost her kid and ask, How does it feel? I wait for them to come to me when they\u2019re ready to talk. It\u2019s almost like being a shrink, in a way, because I don\u2019t say a lot, I just listen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How do you cope with the stress? I mean\u2014are you broken?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. How could\u00a0I not be? Whenever I have to go give talks, people say to me, How do you stay sane? I tell them, Well, I\u2019m a writer\u2014that makes it so much easier than being a photographer or a cameraman, and we know it\u2019s tougher for them because they don\u2019t have the ability to kind of vomit it out afterward. I feel that sometimes it makes a big difference, the writing. It has influence on policy makers, it has power, it gives a voice to people who don\u2019t often have one. It gives some justice to people who are utterly deprived of any kind of justice. I think that\u2019s why people like Hassan, who had his intestines removed, want to talk to me. What happened to them is so horrendous that no one could believe it.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re writing about such atrocities, how do you find the right words?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I sit down and it just pours out. It was always like that, even when I was back at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, writing fiction. I was just very disciplined about sitting down at the typewriter. Once I have an opening line, the words themselves flow out almost like I\u2019m in a trance. For me, structure is more of a problem.<\/p>\n

What do you mean by structure?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much to say. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve never been a good reporter, a newspaper reporter\u2014putting all you have to say in two thousand words is bloody difficult. News people hate me for this, but I do think my best stuff has been in Granta<\/em> because they give you eight thousand words. The best story I wrote, I think, is called \u201cThe Book of the Dead.<\/em>\u201d It was about a guy I knew during the war in Sarajevo, who was in the morgue and kept the list and the book of the dead. I went back to find him and he told me his story of the war, down to the fact that he discovered his own son on the slab.<\/p>\n

Do you suffer from some sort of PTSD? What are the things that come up in your everyday life? I know you said you always want to have toilet paper \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the longest time I didn\u2019t feel safe. I just came back from Egypt, and I spent the whole week paranoid. It\u2019s the kind of paranoia I\u2019m totally used to, and I assume everyone else lives like this, but you don\u2019t. You don\u2019t think the secret police are going to come and bang down your door and drag you to jail.<\/p>\n

But evil things happen everywhere. People are abused, emotionally abused, women are beaten up by successful wealthy husbands\u2014a friend of mine had her nose broken by her husband\u2014or people lose their jobs, people are gay and they\u2019re trapped in marriages. All kind of shit happens to people and it\u2019s not necessarily nice. I think there are all kinds of war zones, that\u2019s what I mean. Do I feel safe right now, sitting in my flat? This is why I create nests. Wherever I am in the world, I make a nest. Even in my shitty little tent in Kosovo. I spread out my sleeping bag, I lay my little things neatly around. I bring something that\u2019s not pretty, but it smells good, or something I can keep in my hand. I\u2019ve always done that. As a result, my \u201creal life\u201d in my Paris flat feels safe.<\/p>\n

Have you ever had a situation that\u2019s too awful to describe?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. I\u2019ve heard stories of mothers forced to watch their daughters being raped and brothers forced to watch their sisters being raped. The way I tell it, in terms of technique, is just to tell it. Stories like that are so awful, sometimes it\u2019s like a drumroll, the way I tell it. Because I think the words and the story itself are so powerful that they don\u2019t need any kind of technique from me.<\/p>\n

Once in Sierra Leone, during the fall of Freetown, child soldiers were cutting off people\u2019s hands and arms and they would ask you, Short sleeves or long sleeves? If you said short sleeves, they would cut off your hand. If you said long sleeves they would cut off your arm at your elbow. I met a girl\u2014they all had noms de guerre, the child soldiers\u2014<\/em>and she was called Queen Cut Hands, because she had cut more people than anyone. She\u2019d amputated six-month-old babies, innocent teachers. It was all civilians they amputated, it was a way of saying, You will be a grotesque symbol of what we can do. It\u2019s all about installing fear, which is what rape is, too, by the way. When you rape entire villages, it\u2019s a way of making the rest of the population terrified. When I was sitting talking to her, the hair at the back of my neck was standing up because I knew I was in the presence of evil. I met her in a camp that these Jesuit priests had set up to rehabilitate kids, child soldiers. They said to me before, I don\u2019t think we can get through to her, ever. And when she was telling me how she did it, in detail, she was full of glee. It\u2019s like she was getting excited by it. I just sat there and I thought, I hate her, but at this moment I\u2019m going to reserve any kind of judgment and I\u2019m going to write exactly what she\u2019s telling me. I don\u2019t have to pass judgment on her while I\u2019m writing because what she\u2019s saying is so evil and so graphic and so grotesque that readers themselves will get that.<\/p>\n

How does your reporting from war zones translate into your book-length projects?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I said, I was always a writer, never a reporter. I came out of Iowa thinking I was going to write fiction for the rest of my life. At twenty-four, I wanted to write like Flannery O\u2019Connor, about these freakish, grotesque sides of life. I used newspapers as a way of getting there, but that was never my thing. Whenever I would go, I would have a commission from Granta<\/em> and I\u2019d have a book deal. So I would gather the notebooks. In Bosnia it took four years, in this case it took five years. I write down everything, and when I can\u2019t write down stuff\u2014I never record\u2014because it\u2019s too delicate or it would break down the rapport that we have together, I go home at night and I lie in my bed and I write pretty extended notes. I do my best writing in bed. Writing a book is a bit like being pregnant\u2014it\u2019s a long process and you don\u2019t get to deliver until the very end. A newspaper piece of six or seven hundred words is actually harder for\u00a0me. Luckily my newspaper experience was with the British press, which had a very different take on writing. They were at the forefront of narrative nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Which war reporters have influenced you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d say Martha Gellhorn, as much as I wouldn\u2019t like to admit it, because she wasn\u2019t a really nice person. But she had this amazing eye for detail, and she focused on the human side of war, but she managed to pull in the whole big picture. She very much wrote like a novelist. James Fenton wrote a piece called \u201cThe Fall of Saigon,\u201d which had a huge influence on me. Michael Herr\u2019s Dispatches<\/em>, definitely.\u00a0It\u2019s very dated now\u2014it\u2019s that late sixties-style writing. But you get a great sense that he\u2019s there on the ground with these guys, going with them, alongside them. You also have a sense of the writer\u2019s voice, the writer\u2019s presence. I always get annoyed when people write about themselves endlessly, because I\u2019m like, it\u2019s not about you, it\u2019s about them! But I like knowing that the writer\u2019s there with me. The greatest war stories in a sense come from Homer\u2014The Iliad<\/em> and The Odyssey, <\/em>the yearning to get home, the separation, the nostalgia for peacetime, the bloodiness of war. And the classics, like Euripides\u2019s The Trojan Women<\/em>, Herodotus\u2019s The History\u2014<\/em>in a sense I think that\u2019s what great reportage is. You have to tell the whole story. Rebecca West wrote Black Lamb and Grey Falcon<\/em> during peacetime, and it\u2019s a journey through Yugoslavia between two wars. It wasn\u2019t war reporting but it had a huge influence on me. She had a great brain. She pulled in so many aspects of sociology, ethnology, culture, anthropology, literature, language, and put it together in an enormous, beautifully written package. More recently, I read The Sorrow of War<\/em> by the Vietnamese writer B\u1ea3o Ninh. <\/em>It\u2019s actually a novel, but it\u2019s about his experience as part of a child brigade on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. They were called the glorious twelve, and it ends with almost all of them dead. When I went to Hanoi I met him, years later, and he was such a broken man. I met him in his apartment at ten in the morning and he was already drunk, talking about the war as if it were in the present. He was unable to escape the past. I think if you were a child soldier you wouldn\u2019t be able to\u2014that kind of yearning for the dead, the phantoms and the ghosts that haunted him.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the main distinction between war reporting and other kinds of reporting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s freedom in it, in being able to go to all these places. I\u2019m not a lawyer, I\u2019m not a police officer, I don\u2019t work for the UN, I\u2019m not an official, so I can talk to people. I can do whatever I want. No one is going to say to me, You can\u2019t go there, you can\u2019t do that, you can\u2019t do this. But all that freedom means a lot of insecurity. But what I like the most, as corny as it sounds, is the ability to give people a voice. Their loneliness and isolation during wartime is so huge, they think the world has forgotten them. I\u2019m saying, You\u2019re not forgotten, I\u2019m here. The other day I was talking online to these guys inside Darra, a besieged city in Syria, and they were writing to me, The power is going down. Or, Right now they\u2019re shelling. And I wrote, Courage, you are not alone. I think these four words, you are not alone, are the most powerful in the human language. I think they basically transcend everything. That\u2019s what I write most about, is being able to say, You are not alone.<\/p>\n

Susannah Hunnewell is publisher of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met the war reporter Janine di Giovanni more than a decade ago, when I was a new expatriate in Paris. Her bohemian apartment, half a block from the Tuilerie Gardens, was filled with journalists, writers, newspaper editors, and members of NGOs from places I had only read about. On the table were large bowls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":614,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[21151,2682,1132,7518,22156,22160,178,6008,22159,11833,22158,22157],"class_list":["post-97578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-bosnia","tag-homer","tag-interviews","tag-james-fenton","tag-janine-di-giovanni","tag-martha-gellhorn","tag-ptsd","tag-rebecca-west","tag-sarajevo","tag-syria","tag-the-morning-they-came-for-us","tag-war-reporting"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJanine di Giovanni: The Art of War Reporting<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Susannah Hunnewell interviews Janine di Giovanni.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/02\/the-art-of-war-reporting-an-interview-with-janine-di-giovanni\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Art of War Reporting: An Interview with Janine di Giovanni by Susannah Hunnewell\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 2, 2016 \u2013 I met the war reporter Janine di Giovanni more than a decade ago, when I was a new expatriate in Paris. 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