Arundhati Roy once said, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Talking to Sama Dizayee, there is a very real sense in which her project as a journalist is to empower the disempowered, hear the supposedly ‘voiceless’, and write about the unwritten.
Born in Baghdad, she has lived through three wars in Iraq and watched her country being torn apart by ethnic division and foreign intervention. But she has been a ‘witness’ in more ways than one. From a young age, she felt an insuppressible urge to document not only acts of bloodshed, turmoil, and corruption, but also the often omitted acts of community, reconciliation, and charity.
She recounts the defining moment when she knew she wanted to be a journalist. At the age of 15, there was an explosion 50 metres down her street. Against her mother’s instructions, she couldn’t resist going outside to see what had happened. “I was always adventurous,” she smiles. “When I went outside, I just thought, I want to grab my camera and film this because I want to share what happened. I want to share the torture that is happening to these people, how many people are dying. And I want to show how others are helping each other, are risking their lives, to put the wounded in cars and take them to hospital.”
She expresses frustration that the media “never talked about the community that risked their lives. They never mentioned that. It was like the news was trying to divide people rather than report what actually happened.”
Following the incident, she started to write a diary documenting her experiences. “That was the moment I realised I just want to keep writing, and I want the world to see what I write.”
She tells me, “The media is biased. We all know that. They ignore some stories like, you know, what’s happening in Nigeria.” And while Dizayee stands with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, she compares the 12 victims there with the 2,000 killed by Boko Haram, saying, “It’s a massacre… and you don’t see it in the headlines.”
“And I am sad to see the news like that… Because our job as journalists is to cover everything – to tell the world everything about what’s going on in the world. For instance, since the US soldiers left Iraq, you barely see Iraq in the news – it became something people didn’t want to talk about.” Under the Saddam Hussein regime, the Western media focused on foreign policy issues like WMDs, rather than human rights violations. “They really weren’t talking about the people…”
There seems to be a definite sense in which white lives matter more in Western media. When I ask whether she thinks that the Middle East is ‘othered’ or ‘orientalised’ in the media, she says it is dismissed as a “conflicted” area. “Like for example everywhere in the news you hear them talking about Lebanon as a conflicted country. But also, I go to Beirut on a really regular basis and we party like no place else! I swear to you!” It seems that ethnic conflict in Lebanon has even had a kind of cathartic effect, ultimately unifying communities. “Trust me, they live like it’s the last day of their life. They’ve got to a point where they’re like, ‘OK, we might be living today and tomorrow we might die. So what do we want to do? Do we want to sit at home and wait for it? No! We want to keep going with our lives.’ And you know, they really do!”
A central theme for Dizayee seems to be the balance between the positive and the negative. In being a witness to her country’s conflict, she is also determined to be a witness to its reconciliation. “I will keep writing until I see my country unified. And that is possible, if we come together, with other people around the world. You have to inform people: keep writing, keep trying.”
I’m intrigued to find out whether she feels being a woman impacts upon her career. With a wry smile, she says, “Definitely. Because we’re women, and when you start writing something, people say, ‘well that’s because she’s a woman’.” She reflects on how women are not expected to be able to cope with risky or dangerous situations. “Even my family right now doesn’t want me to go back to Iraq. But if it was my brother and
he was a journalist, they would have let him go, because he’s a man – he can survive these situations.”
Dizayee rejects these assumptions, saying, “Journalists are journalists to tell stories – to show the real images to the people, not to be scared. Because if you are supposed to be a journalist, and especially if you choose to be in a conflict zone, or you choose to be a war correspondent, then you know what you’re getting into. I think you should fight for it. You should fight for your stories.”
Words are like oxygen to Dizayee. “This pen,” she gestures metaphorically, “has been my friend for 12 years.” Her eyes shine as she talks about writing. “I love it, – because that’s how I feel alive.”
Is the pen really mightier than the sword? It might not seem so to those who are victims of bloodshed and oppression across the world. But as Dizayee symbolically throws hers into the audience at the end of her speech, we can only hope that a new surge of ink will blot the Western narrative of a blood-stained, orientalised Middle East into obscurity.
