I’m 
... on I was excited to read a the book that set a “new standard by which all correspondents might approach other forgotten wars.”
Bryan Mealer’s All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo was all at once more than I expected and more of the same.
He begins:
There were journalists, aid workers, diplomats, diamond dealers, assorted opportunists, and third world peacekeepers…when we arrived, there was always the same war. Many came simply to test themselves against the brutal country, and I’ve learned there is nothing wrong with that. What mattered was the kind of prints you left behind in the red dirt. Five centuries of those bootprints now packed the soil and snaked into the trees, so many they bled into one enormous trail that hid below the camouflage and slowly choked the land.But get down close and you can see.
One of those trails was mine.
When I first read this book about a month ago, I was enthralled with the story Mealer told. I finished the book in a couple of days, cherising chameos by colleagues whose paths crossed with Mealer’s, and reading it with awe, envy and an eye towards understanding.
There are a few great books about Congo that I know of: King Leopold’s Ghost and In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz at the forefront. The first here takes care of colonial eras, then next of Mobutu’s reign.
Mealer picks up where they left off, but in a differnet genre. The title promises war and deliverance, but I felt there was a lot more war than deliverance. Ultimately, I think that’s as much about Congo as it is about Mealer.
In the first half, he writes about his original forays in Congo, convering news in Ituri and then later in Kinshasa. In the second half, he seems tired. Tired of Congo, tired of traveling, tired of noise and bugs and heat and bad food and bad nights. The writing, which shines in the first half, falters in the second. It’s tired. The book becomes less about Congo and more about Mealer in Congo.
I thought of Michela Wrong’s words in an essay I linked to just a few days ago, about young male journalists writing about Africa:
You deliver a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do.
And then I thought of a comment on my blog post about the contruction accident on Tuesday. And I thought of one of the comments:
From the tone of the post, I felt the journalism/photography took precedence over the tragedy, which to me is even sadder.
I wrote, in reply:
@bsk – I fear you may be right about the tone, but I think on my side I was trying to comment on how journalism handles tragedy. As a photographer covering this kind of thing, I don’t have the ability to spend time investigating the construction company practices or speak to people at length about their losses. I have to get in, get photos, get out, file photos, as quickly as humanly possible. AP hires me because they know I can accomplish this task.In this post, my goal was not to make my work more important than the tragedy, but to account an experience and maybe shed some light on tragedy and the media. I’m sorry this made you even sadder than the deaths of seven people, but I really hope that’s an exaggeration.
At some point, there has to be balance between the author and the subject. Without the author’s presence, some readers who are disconnected from the subject will only be futher alienated. With too much of it, a reader who didn’t purchase a memoir wants his money back.
I’m not sure where the line is, but I think for the most part, Mealer does a good job tightrope walking.
Mealer stayed in Congo on and off for several years. While that’s not as long as Michela Wrong, it’s long enough to see fresh faces come and go, a journalist from New York who has a business card that is a metal dog tag, and violence junkies who have been to every hot spot on the planet.
It’s also long enough to form a real and meaningful relationship with his translator and fixer Lionel, who he tries to convince that Fela Kuti is way better than Phil Collins, with only marginal success. It’s long enough to reach remote places and transform them from dots on a map to places with details and description.
And he kept going back, even when there was more war than deliverance.
A friend who did some work in Congo (and incidentally reviewed Mealer’s book) blogged recently, from New York,
I finally understand that thing I’ve read about in books, where hardened correspondents talk about the desperation they feel to return to the completely screwed places they’ve covered when things take a turn for the worse. It means something different when you know how that place looks in real life, and something gnaws at your gut, beckoning you back.
But for now, I’m here. I’m here, wishing to be there. Which is something those 100,000 people would probably think the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard.
In a way, I’m glad she’s not there. Things aren’t good. And when things are the way they are right now, stories like her piece on cattle theft or chikudus are less pressing to publish, and less possible to report since movement is heavily restricted.
On an accident scene and in a war zone, the possibilities for the kinds of stories you can tell are restricted by concerns about safety for yourself and the people who answer your questions and the immediacy of what’s happening around you.
I think Mealer is a great writer and a great journalist. And I hope he goes back to Congo – again – at a time when he can tell another kind of story.
