Good journalism should shake people out of their indifference to human cruelty and suffering, said award winning journalist, Lara Marlowe as she prepared to head to the Blackwater valley to reflect on 40 years of working as a reporter in some of the world’s most dangerous and damaged places.
Paris-based Ms Marlowe, who will speak at the Lismore Immrama Festival of Travel Writing this weekend, said she believed WH Auden’s poem ‘The Musee des Beaux Arts” encapsulates much of what journalism should seek to do when Auden reflects on how suffering often lies in plain sight.
“Using a painting by Breughel, Auden described the way that suffering “takes place/when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”, while “dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
Very often in the modern world, indignation or even just care are exceptional emotions, said Ms Marlowe, adding that anger can be a powerful motivation for a journalist, fuelling their determination to tell someone’s story of suffering to ensure it gets the audience that it merits.
The author of “Love in a Time of War – My Years with Robert Fisk”, Ms Marlowe said that her former husband was “the finest journalist” she had ever known and when she was in Ukraine for The Irish Times for five weeks last year, she wondered what Fisk would have made of it.
“But for me, Ukraine is different. I hope Robert would have made an exception in the case of Vladimir Putin’s rape of Ukraine, but I cannot be certain.”
But while journalists can be motivated by anger, it is not a journalist’s job to write about their own emotions and she recalled Fisk saying the reader doesn’t care about the journalist’s feelings and the journalist’s aim should instead be to make the reader care about the people in their story.
But notwithstanding that idea that the journalist’s job is to avoid writing about their own emotions, Ms Marlowe revealed she wept four times in her career, each time moved to tears by scenes that confronted her as she worked all over the world, reporting on wars, natural disasters and poverty.
The first time, she recalled, was in 1983 after she spent a couple of hours walking around the Cité Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince in Haiti with two American missionary ladies and she was shocked by the appalling scenes of poverty and deprivation that she saw.
“My missionary hosts rushed to comfort me and make me a cup of tea. I could tell that they were secretly pleased at my reaction.”
The second occasion was six years later when working in Lebanon and she went to a house in Beirut to meet and interview with a magazine editor called Ghassan Matar whose teenage daughter, also called Lara, had been killed by car bomb on her birthday.
“Lara’s birthday cake was on the kitchen counter, in preparation for that evening’s celebration. Ghassan wept as he told me about her, and I wept too.
Ms Marlowe told how when she returned to Haiti in 2010 to report on the devastation caused by an earthquake, she watched as Cuban doctors operated on earthquake victims without anaesthesia and saw them amputate the badly injured arm of a little girl.
“A five-year-old girl called Faimi Lamy was having her arm sawed off. The child was delirious and screamed, ‘Give me a knife. Give me a knife so I can kill the devil.’ I was writing down Faimi’s words on a notebook as an interpreter whispered them into my ear.
“At some point, I noticed drops of water on my notebook. I looked up to see if it was raining, but the sky was blue. I realised that tears were streaming down my cheeks. I glanced at the interpreter and driver and saw that they too were crying.”
Ms Marlowe revealed the fourth and last time she wept at an interview was when she spoke to the Oksana and Sophia, the widow and daughter of Ukrainian journalist, Viktor Dudar at his graveside in Lviv in March 2022 after he was killed while fighting in the Donbas following the Russian invasion.
“Oksana told me how hard it was to let Viktor leave for the front. “My heart told me not to let him go but I knew I could not change his mind. I told him it is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward. He was very proud of me for saying that.”
“The other most powerful interview I did in Ukraine last year was with Viktoria Osypenko, a gynaecologist whom I met in Kyiv at the end of July. She had cared for one month for a 12-year-old girl who was gang-raped by Russian soldiers in Bucha,” said Ms Marlowe.
“The child’s parents and the family dog were shot dead in front of her. Osypenko did reconstructive surgery on the child’s ruptured genital organs. ‘I hope they did not make it out of Bucha alive,’ Osypenko said of the soldiers who committed these atrocities. ‘I hope they rot in hell’.”
Ms Marlowe will speak at this year’s Immrama Festival in Lismore and tickets are still available for her talk on Sunday morning.
For full details on the programme of events, click here.