Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "journalism"

A foreign correspondent builds memories out of blood and corpses. Often they turn to nightmares.

While working on my second Palestinian crime novel, A Grave in Gaza, I sometimes wept as I wrote. I used to think that meant I was a damned good writer. Now I know it was my trauma, collected over a decade of monthly visits to Gaza, seeping onto the page.

I hope that makes it a better novel. I know it saved me from the creeping depression and sudden fear that sometimes gripped me when my mind would return to memories of burned bodies, scattered body parts, angry people who wanted to hurt me, the sound of bullets nearby from an unseen gun. It helped me understand what kind of man I really was.

Journalism can’t do that. It plunges you into other people’s traumas and, through the constant repetition of 24-hour cable news, seems to make those horrors part of our own lives. It pushes us to blame someone, to rage against them. To lash out, like traumatized people. To feel depressed.

I know. I’ve been a journalist based in Jerusalem for 13 years.

As the latest violence unfolded in Gaza, I wondered what keeps me here. When I largely quit journalism to write my novels three years ago, I could’ve gone to Tuscany, as I had always thought I would to do. I no longer needed the journalist’s daily proximity to the conflict. Even though for a decade previously I’d been as committed as any other journalist to learning every nuance of the conflict, I’ve since been weeks at a time without turning on the local news.

That’s why I’m still here.

News blots out real life. It makes Israelis and Palestinians seem like incomprehensible, bloodthirsty lunatics, ripping each other apart without cease. Living amongst them makes it clear that it’s the news that’s unreal, fashioned to quicken the pulse and shoot you up with adrenaline. By staying here, living a happy life among normal Palestinians and Israelis, I’ve beaten the bad dreams and the sudden rages. They exist only in a decade of dog-eared notebooks on my bottom shelf.

I’ve developed relationships over the years with people who’ve opened up their cultures to me, shown me a perspective on Gaza that’s beyond what you’d ever see in the newspaper.

Take my friend Zakaria, who lives in the northern Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, a major battleground in the current fighting. Zakaria was for decades Arafat’s top intelligence man. I’ve seen him during hard times when he expected his home to be stormed by rival Palestinian factions; when he sent armed men to bring me to meet him in secret; when Israeli tanks took up positions at the edge of his olive grove. Times worthy of headlines.

But my deepest impression of him came when he jovially served me giant scoops of hummus laced with ground meat and cubes of lamb fat at breakfast. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve downed some rough meals (Bedouins once milked a goat’s udder directly into a glass and handed me the warm fluid to drink), but try raw lamb fat at 9 a.m. and see how you like it.

For Zakaria, the dish was a tremendous delicacy and a demonstration of his hospitality. The writer in me found the mannerisms with which he served me and his insistence that I eat a second plate just as revealing as his tension during moments of conflict.

Fiction is able to put across the true characteristics of my Palestinian friends--like Zakaria’s courtly hospitality--in a way that’s largely beyond journalism, with its headline focus on the literally explosive. I’ve filled my novels with those characteristics, because they remind me that the times when I felt threatened by violence were unnatural. They belong only to nightmares and they aren’t real any more.

I want to give my readers the true emotional experience of being among people who live in extreme situations, with all its traumas, but mostly its pleasures. For entertainment--sure, these are novels, not non-fiction tomes to be crammed down like cod-liver oil because they’re good for you. But also because if there’s a point to knowing about the world beyond our borders, it’s to see into the minds of other men and thus to better understand ourselves. Sometimes it might even save us from ourselves.

Matt Beynon Rees is the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. The latest novel, The Samaritan’s Secret, was published in February (Soho Press).

The New York Times features me in an article published this weekend about Global Post, the new foreign news website. As the Times explains, Global Post is intended to replace all the foreign news that's no longer produced by US newspapers, magazines and tv channels -- because those media "cut costs" and fired everyone. I've been writing for Global Post, which is run by a chum of mine who worked in the Middle East for The Boston Globe, and enjoying the freedom from starchy journalistic constraints it gives me. Here's what I wrote about my jaunt in Hillary Clinton's Ramallah motorcade earlier this month. Read it. Definitely not starchy.

Israel’s hippest, most tolerant city celebrates its centenary
By Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post

TEL AVIV—Purple fireworks sprayed off the roof of Tel Aviv’s City Hall last week to open festivities marking a century since Zionist pioneers began construction of the “first Hebrew city.” Watching among the crowd in Rabin Square, Marko Martin wept.

A German journalist, Martin travels the world to write cultural articles for Die Welt, filing from Myanmar to El Salvador. But he returns again and again to this Mediterranean metropolis, where his Israeli friends call him “Mister Tel Aviv.”

“No other place on earth makes me feel so much at home as this hot and shabby town, built by immigrants from all over the world,” says Martin, whose book “Tel Aviv—A Lifestyle” will be published in Germany this summer. “I was born in Communist East Germany, so I know how to appreciate an island of tolerance in an ocean of bloody fanaticism.”

At its centenary, Tel Avivians have many complaints about their city, from lack of parking to smog to the plain ugliness of most of its architecture. But they all agree with Martin that they’ve built a city that seems almost out of place in the Middle East. Where the rest of the region (including Israel’s capital, Jerusalem) is bigoted and hardline, Tel Aviv mirrors edgy European centers of social liberality like Martin’s native Berlin, even down to a flamboyant Gay Parade and a throbbing nightclub scene that brought you some of the most annoying “trance” music ever recorded.

In 1909, the area that’s now Tel Aviv was “a wilderness of sands,” according to the Zionist mythology. It had been a Canaanite settlement in the third century BC. When Napoleon besieged nearby Jaffa over two hundred years ago, he camped here. The early Zionists who decided to move the short way up the coast from Jaffa wanted to found a “Hebrew city,” unburdened by the biblical past.

They clashed with the Zionist establishment, which favored socialist collective farms and agricultural labor. Tel Aviv was home to tradesmen and shopkeepers. They called their new city “Spring Hill,” which sounds exactly like the bourgeois suburb it originally was. When the British army came through during World War I, it had a population of 2,000, compared to 50,000 in Jaffa.

But the Zionist dream was built around construction as much as agriculture. One of Israel’s national poets, Natan Alterman, immigrated from Warsaw to Tel Aviv in 1925. In his “Song to the Homeland,” he wrote: “We will clothe you in a robe of concrete and cement.”

Alterman might have specified that the robe would be a muumuu, because for a relatively young city Tel Aviv has the girth of a sumo champ.

These days Jaffa, where the Biblical Jonah took ship on his date with the whale, is the minor partner of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, an Arab slum with a smattering of gentrifying yuppies. Tel Aviv is a town of 390,000, and its greater metropolitan district has swelled to a population of 1.3 million. Not huge, but pretty good going for a city that was an outpost in a British colony until 60 years ago.

Tel Aviv has its detractors. Jerusalem has a more religious, conservative population and is inclined to see the city 40 miles away on the coast as a modern Sodom. (The ancient city which gave us the word “Sodom” is, of course, south of Jerusalem near the Dead Sea.) Certainly the gay community is very much accepted in Tel Aviv and also provides a refuge for Palestinian gays who flee their own intolerant towns. By contrast, Jerusalem grudgingly allows a Gay Parade. But over the last few years Jerusalem’s religious zealots have attacked marchers, including one gay man who was stabbed.

Tel Aviv isn’t the loveliest place to look at, either. “It is shabby, like a neglected old woman,” wrote Yossi Klein in an Israeli magazine earlier this month. (An aside: the same magazine included an interesting article on Israeli sexism.)

Personally, having grown up in a mountainous country, I’m constantly lost in the featureless landscape of Tel Aviv. I’ve been there every couple of weeks for 13 years, but it’s always as though I’m visiting for the first time, clinging to a couple of identically sycamore-lined, grubby streets which I believe will get me to the highway and back up the hill to Jerusalem in the end.

The city has been through a number of attempts to pin a name on its unique character. In the 1990s, the municipality came up with “The City that Never Stops,” which gets a cheer when visiting rock stars parrot it at concerts, but is mainly used tongue in cheek by locals. (They know it’s a third-rate reworking of “The City that Never Sleeps.”)

More recently the central district--built by Bauhaus architects fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s--has been somewhat spruced up and Tel Aviv dubbed itself “The White City”. In 2003, UNESCO made it a world heritage site.

It’s undoubtedly among the ugliest of the 878 world heritage sites (If you don’t believe me, check out the list). But one would be churlish to say that this cosmopolitan oasis in a desert of hate didn’t deserve some recognition.

I’m starting a new feature on my blog today—a series of interviews with authors about what it’s like to be a writer. I’ll be asking them the questions readers often ask me, and I’m intrigued to know how they’ll answer them. Be sure to follow this blog so you’ll see what these fascinating writers have to say in the coming months.

It’s a great pleasure to begin this series with my friend Matt McAllester. A Scot, he’s been one of the most intelligent and adventurous foreign correspondents in the world over the last decade. That earned him an uncomfortable stay in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, but it also brought him numerous journalism prizes (including a Pulitzer) and the material for his first two books (on Kosovo and on Iraq). Matt’s new book, out this week, is a stunning departure. “Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen” is a highly personal account of his relationship with his troubled mother—and the way his memories of her cooking helped him recover the loving, happy times before he lost her to mental illness.


How long did it take you to get published?
I’ve written three books. The proposal for the first one was rejected by every major publishing house. Finally, the wonderful New York University Press bought my proposal, which was about the war in Kosovo. I remember the moment. It was worth waiting for. Even though I’d have made more working at McDonald’s for a couple of months than I did writing that book.

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I’d mainly recommend reading brilliantly written books and then seeing if you can ever do anything that even gets close. But Orwell is the best, I think, on the process. It’s worth reading his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. “One needs rules when instinct fails,” he writes, and begins a short list of rules with the following, which I think is probably all any writer really needs to know: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

What’s a typical writing day?
I wish I had one. But it depends on what I’m writing – a book, an article or just trying to come up with an idea for either. A good writing day produces about 1,500 words. About three of which will be tolerable.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
It’s called Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen, and it’s a memoir of my mother, who died over three years ago. She had been mentally ill for much of her life so I was surprised by the awful power of her death. I scrabbled around for a way to make sense of it, to re-connect with her, and I ended up trying to teach myself to cook using her cookbooks. Along the way I learned a lot, I think. I hope the book is full of hope and laughs and moments of beauty and love, as well as the sadness that comes with illness and death.


What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
“It was amazing champagne.” The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. And borrowed, if I remember correctly, by Geoff Dyer in his excellent Paris, Trance. I suppose I could have fallen in love with a sentence of great profundity. But instead I’m mad about these four frivolous, air-light words of joyousness and rarity.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
There are two snatches in Brideshead Revisited that never leave me. Waugh writes of the “cloistral hush” of Oxford and then this, full of melancholy beauty, with a rhythm that any writer would dream of capturing just once: “Do you remember,” said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening, “do you remember the storm?”

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
Philip Roth, because he is almost without style these days, which I think is an act of will and humility, and suggests that he doesn’t want anything flash to get in the way of what he has to say before he dies. Which, it seems, he feels will be at any moment. Even if it’s not.

How much research is involved in each of your books?
A lot. With my Kosovo and Iraq books, I found it almost impossible to get writing until the research was nearly done. My current book was different. The book became part of the process, really, the writing and discovering and the cooking blending into each other in a way that was new to me.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
She gave birth to me. I thought she was pretty interesting from that moment on.

What’s your experience with being translated?
It’s only happened once, in French, and was jolly nice but I was a bit surprised when my book, which was written in the past tense, appeared in the present tense in French.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
I was in San Francisco having a bagel for breakfast. Room service had brought it up. My teeth crunched down on a large chunk of metal. I was pretty annoyed. I took it down to the front desk and held it out in my palm and began to complain that I’d found it in my bagel. At which point my tongue flicked across a huge gaping hole in an uppar molar. British dentistry is, I’m afraid, lampooned in the US for a reason. I rushed off to a proper dentist between radio interviews and slurred my way through the afternoon.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
A manifesto about how we should all live and work outside. I write this while sitting in Manhattan, one of the least exterior corners of the planet, and it doesn’t really seem such a weird idea.

Next up in THE WRITING LIFE: Bangkok nightlife and the dark side of Thailand with Christopher G. Moore.

I wrote a guest post for A Book Blogger's Diary this week. The post, headlined "Fiction more real than journalism," explains why I turned from journalism about the Middle East to fiction, as a better way of explaining the profound things I had learned in more than a decade here in Jerusalem.

The Wanderlust and Words blog has a post about how my writing, in particular my second novel A Grave in Gaza, has channeled my traumatic experiences as a war correspondent and placed them on the page in the form of shocking moments for my characters.

Murder by the Book Mystery Bookstore blogs about my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which it calls "a thought-provoking, very different look at a community in crisis."

I've started writing for Tina Brown's ground-breaking news website The Daily Beast. The first of my pieces runs today. Here's the headline:
ISRAEL'S PRIVATE SHAME
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the worst place to be a survivor might be Israel.
To read the article, click here.

My irreverent take on the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI to the Holy Land features prominently on The Daily Beast today. Maybe people always say their take is "irreverent," but in the case of a story about the Pope I feel justified in using it...

War correspondent Matt McAllester fled into the fields of battle to escape an alcoholic, mentally ill mother. In his memoir, Bittersweet, he tries to make amends with her, in the kitchen. Read my interview with McAllester on The Daily Beast.

Obama presses Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop building in West Bank settlements. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost May 26, 2009

JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.

A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.

This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...

What’s happiness? A large income, Jane Austen said. Absolute ignorance, according to the delightfully morbid Grahame Greene. Or John Lennon’s less delightfully morbid warm gun. Whatever else it is, happiness is done to death. But where it is? That’s something new. The genius of Eric Weiner’s New York Times bestseller “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” is to change the way of searching for happiness. Instead of looking for ways to make himself happy (the typically American individualistic approach to joy), he went out to find places where other people were happy. That way the former NPR correspondent (I got to know him when he was Mideast bureau chief, but he was based in India, too, for a time) was able to identify broader characteristics of a society that create happiness. He found, of course, that being Swiss helps (they trust everyone around them and therefore don’t have to worry and watch their backs). Being Moldovan on the other hand definitely doesn’t help -- everyone cheats, nothing's fair = miserable place. On his journey Eric also ditched email. But he broke that rule for the sake of my blog, and I’m glad he did.

How long did it take you to get published?

It took me three weeks to find an agent and publisher. It took twelve years for me to settle on an idea that I was passionate about.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

No. I think the best way to learn to write is to write. Reading (everything and anything) helps, too. So does coffee.

What’s a typical writing day?

I wake up bright and early, and by 8:00 a.m. settle into my office. Then I check my e-mail. Then I check Facebook. Then I check a few of my favorite blogs. Then I break for lunch. Usuallly, after lunch, I will do some actual writing before calling it a day.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?


You're asking a writer to plug his own work? Okay, if you insist. My book, The Geography of Bliss, is brilliant because it takes a fairly tried subject, happiness, and gives it a new twist. Most happiness books focus on the what of happiness; I was interested in the where. Which are the world's happiest countries and what can we learn from them? And--did I mention?--the writing is brilliant! Funny and serious at the same time. I would highly recommend it. Really.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

Mainly b), I think, with a smattering of c). My genre, broadly speaking, is travelogue. It is an odd, self-loathing genre. Many of the great travel writers don't like to be called travel writers. I think that's because travel writing sounds fluffy and inconsequential. At least bad travel writing is like that. Good travel writing is simply good writing that happens to use place as its main construct. In my work, I try to fashion a slightly new genre, the travelogue of ideas. In that sense, my book isn't really travel book at all. It's a book about the nature of happiness that uses geography as a way to get at this mystery.

Where is your favorite place to write?

I like coffee shops. The background din, oddly, helps me focus. After a while, though, I get antsy and feel the need to move. I might write in two or three different places in a single day. After all, I am a travel writer. Place matters.

Who is your favorite travel writer?

Jan Morris. She can get to the heart of a place in a few sentences. She is opinionated, but not obnoxiously so. She puts herself in her writing but never gets in the way of a good story. And she can be funny in all the right places.

What do you do if you are stuck?

I drink more coffee. If that doesn't work, (and it usually doesn't) I go for a walk. If that doesn't work (and it usually doesn't) I read what I have written aloud. I tend to write for the ear, and reading aloud can help me regain my rhythm. Also, I recently discovered a wine called "Writer's Block." It's a very nice Zinfandel.

What do you read for pleasure?

I like big fat books that tackle big fat topics. I'm currently reading Peter Watson's Ideas; A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud. It's easily 800 pages. I'm still in the fire bit.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

An awful lot. For The Geography of Bliss, I read everything I could get my hands on about happiness, from Aristotle to Marty Seligmen, the poo-bah of the "science of happiness." I camped out at a university library for weeks on end. For a while, I was concerned that I was over-researching, but now I dont' think there is such a thing. Many morsels from my research made their way into the final manuscript.

What’s your experience with being translated?

My book has been translated into 13 languages, The publishers send me copies, which is nice. I can't understand a word of them,. for all I know they did a terrible job of translating. But they look nice on my bookshelf. Especially the Korean edition. Very colorful.

Do you live entirely off your writing?

I do make a living off my writing. I consider myself very fortunate.

How many books did you write before you were published?

This is my first one. Non-fiction, though, is a lot easier to get published than fiction.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

I had just completed an interview with a radio station in Portland, Oregon, when the interviewer said, "That was really great, Do you want to smoke some weed?" It's true. I might have taken him up on it, but I had a book reading in a couple of hours, so I politely declined.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I'd like to write a travel book about time travel. I would go back in time to an age when there still were undiscovered places to explore and write about them. I'd also buy some choice real estate in Manhattan. Then I'd travel back to the present and live large.