Interrogating the NY Times' Anthony Shadid
The two-time Pulitzer winner on sneaking into Syria, being kidnapped in Libya, and the high cost of getting the story in a war zone.
—By Aaron Ross
Thu Jan. 26, 2012 3:00 AM PST
Anthony Shadid may have a hard time topping his last year's adventures. The New York Times' Beirut bureau chief and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting spent 2011 tracing the path of the Arab Spring. He traveled west from Egypt, where he covered the 18-day uprising that toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak, to Libya, where demonstrations against dictator Moammar Qaddafi morphed into armed rebellion. During a battle last March in the eastern city of Ajdabiya, Shadid and three Times colleagues were captured by Libyan government forces. Over the course of a harrowing week, they were blindfolded, beaten, and threatened with execution before finally being released. Returning to Lebanon in August to report on the Assad regime's intensifying crackdown on Syria's protest movement, Shadid audaciously snuck across the Syrian border sans visa. For days he shuttled on motorcycle from one safe house to the next alongside some of the country's most wanted dissidents, emerging with a rare firsthand glimpse of a nation cascading toward civil war.
Despite his renown for daredevil reporting—in 2002, Shadid was wounded by sniper fire in Ramallah—it's his knack for penetrating the surface of rough-and-tumble conflict zones that makes him one of his generation's preeminent foreign correspondents. In his more than six years covering the Iraq War, he routinely unearthed the conflict's human faces with a lyricism that seemed to belie his prolificacy.
Shadid's third book, House of Stone, due out in late March, demonstrates his uncanny ability to reclaim humanity from wreckage. It recounts Shadid's return to his ancestral village in southern Lebanon from 2007 to 2008 to rebuild his great-grandfather's abandoned home—and perhaps piece back together his own wayward life in the process. In an account infused with introspection, the Oklahoma-raised Shadid narrates a rich personal odyssey for community amid a war-torn region's struggle to reclaim a modicum of its former identity. I spoke to Shadid about the Arab Spring, the perils of his profession, and the path forward in Syria.
Mother Jones: What was it like growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City?
Anthony Shadid: I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't. There's always a sense of community, of belonging to the Lebanese community, in Oklahoma. It's remarkable, when I talk to other Arab-Americans, how closed and tight-knit the community was, everything from the church that everyone shared—they all came from the same town in Lebanon—to the food that was served on every holiday and almost every day. There was a sense of coming from someplace else and having to make it in the place they ended up, and there was a lot of pride in that. The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.
in full: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/anthony-shadid-libya-syria-house-of-stone
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