Afghan family's story trampled by mean-spirited journalism (smug journalist sued)

The Toronto Star ^ | 17 November 2003 | ROSIE DIMANNO

[Stultis]

Afghan family's story trampled by mean-spirited journalism

ROSIE DIMANNO

Journalists can be such creeps. I am one and know this to be true.

They (we) will steal into your life and steal your life. Insinuating ourselves, ingratiating ourselves, making false declarations of trustworthiness — all with a sense of reportorial entitlement that implicitly excuses deceit and duplicity and betrayal.

The story's the thing, the scoop's the thing, the bestseller true-crime novel's the thing.

That's why I do not fuss much about journalistic ethics, a subject best left to navel-gazing J-school academics and media scrutineers. I have no ethics, but I've never claimed otherwise. The best one can strive for, I think, is journalistic integrity.

Integrity, by my reckoning, comes from within; ethics is imposed from without. Integrity means not lying to ourselves — and the public —about what we're doing, which is oftentimes quite inexcusable and morally indefensible by any normal standard of measurement.

A reporter is a moral grifter.

I am reminded of the observation made by New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm some 15 years ago. She was writing about Joe McGinnis — author of Fatal Vision — but her comments were applicable to Everyman Reporter: "He is a kind of confidence man, playing on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Fatal Vision was the insider story of Jeffrey MacDonald, the American soldier-doctor convicted of murdering his wife and daughters. McGinnis had convinced MacDonald he believed in his innocence and thus gained intimate access to the defendant's narrative. But the book was the opposite — an indictment. The doctor (now serving a life sentence) sued McGinnis, arguing he thought the author would portray him favourably. The case was settled out of court, reportedly for $325,000.

(Malcolm, it should be noted, was later found guilty herself of fabricating quotes. People who live in glass houses ...)

Anyhow, this is all by way of background to a journalistic controversy currently brewing over an international best-seller called The Bookseller of Kabul, by Norwegian reporter Asne Seierstad. One of the best-selling Norwegian non-fiction books of all time, it was launched in North America last month, with Seierstad, 33, promoting it on major U.S. news shows.

Probably to her surprise, Seierstad is not exactly being feted for her efforts. Indeed, she's been slammed by various commentators.

I shall slam her also.

The Bookseller of Kabul recalls the three months Seierstad spent living with an Afghan family in the spring of 2001, after the fall of the Taliban. The journalist — a war correspondent and not without bravery — says she was inspired by the story of a bookseller she met in Kabul, an urbane, middle-aged man who defied censors and book-burners in his besieged country for two decades. Repeatedly imprisoned, the bookseller (real name Shah Mohammed Rais) continued to buy, sell and hide his books over the years, somehow keeping his shops open through the tyrannical era of Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban fundamentalism, when it became a criminal offence to so much as depict human representations in books or artwork.

Rais was (and is) a book lover, keenly appreciative of Afghan history and literature, an intellectual liberal. But, it would seem, a patriarchal bully within his own family, cruel to his children, vain and avaricious, shaming his long-time spouse by taking a teenage second wife, and monstrously feudal towards all females in the family.

Seierstad asked the middle-class and English-speaking Rais if she could live with his family for a time, making clear she intended to write a book on the experience. In typically hospitable Afghan fashion, Rais immediately said, "You are welcome."

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The Khans are real people who opened their home to Seierstad and got sucker-punched

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But Seierstad almost immediately lost interest in Rais-as-hero. While inspired by his book devotion at first, she became increasingly distressed by the dynamics of a family to which she had been granted intimate access, and most particularly by the mean treatment of Rais' female relatives. That is, essentially, the story she told — the appalling subjugation of Afghan women, their cultural invisibility, the hardship of their lives.

In the foreword, Seierstad explains how she was so deeply provoked by Rais (whom she calls Sultan Khan, to provide him anonymity) and the other Khan males. "We shared many good times, but I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family, and I have rarely quarreled so much as I did there. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there."

Instead, Seierstad slugged Rais/Khan in her book.

It's not a bad book. It's actually sparely written and quite readable. But it's a betrayal of the Khan family all the same. It is written from the perspective of a white female European who cannot abide the society in which she has deliberately — and, I would argue, deceitfully — placed herself. Seierstad does not put herself in the story, but she is nevertheless palpably present on every page, stealing anecdotes of the characters' lives and processing all she sees through a prism of cultural and moral superiority. She is appallingly judgmental and applies standards of Western conduct alien to Afghan culture. She violates confidences and reconstructs internal conversations she could not possibly know.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, trying desperately to retain some sense of social order in the muck of war. For Rais, however wrongly (by our Western perspective), that order — and the future of Afghanistan as a functioning, rehabilitated nation — rests in the strength of patriarchal rigidity and family obedience.

Seierstad, who claims to be telling their story, shames and diminishes them instead.

Perhaps she believed the truth, or the truth as she saw it, was worth betraying the Khans. Perhaps, as stated, she believes she's given voice to these muzzled Afghan women and their lives of quiet submission. I suspect she merely thought she could get away with it — write the book, expose the Khans, pat herself on the back for depicting the horrible reality of women's lives, and move on. After all, they're just Afghans. What were they going to do about it?

But here's the thing: Rais is fighting back. Quite unexpectedly, almost unthinkably, Rais has denounced the book and flown to Oslo to prepare a lawsuit against author and publisher. An outraged Rais insists the book is full of lies, distortions and dangerous indiscretions.

The man may, in fact, be a bully within his family. But bully for him, I say.

He's been betrayed.

The Khans are not just story-fodder for a gallivanting Western journalist. They're real people who opened their home to Seierstad and got sucker-punched. They've been shamed. And for all the time she spent in Afghanistan, Seierstad seems not to understand anything about Afghan pride or the social ruination of dishonour.

For purposes of full disclosure, I should point out here that I know Seierstad, slightly. But to know her slightly is to dislike her a great deal.

We met last March in Amman, where both of us were trying to get into Iraq. She had come up with a scheme to enter on tourist visas, as part of a religious-sites bus package. In the end, I decided this was a bad idea. For one thing, we wouldn't have been able to file stories, couldn't take in a satellite phone or computer.

And I had no wish to be arrested as a spy (as happened to others who tried this gambit.) I obtained (for $1,800 U.S.) a precious Iraqi journalist visa and travelled to Baghdad with a British colleague.

More to the point, I had a visceral reaction to Seierstad. She was one of the most pompous, patronizing, smug reporters I'd ever met, and I recoiled from her. To paraphrase her foreword remarks, I've never before "had the urge to hit anyone" as much as I did with Seierstad.

I cringe at libel chill. But I hope Mr. Rais wins his lawsuit. There are too many slick creeps in this business.

Additional articles by Rosie DiManno

[Brandon]

Where's the barf alert on this one? I have never heard of the author of the article or the author of the book, but if the following paragraph is true, the book author would have been no better than CNN was in pre-war Iraq if she had engaged in a cover-up. Methinks the author of the article is the smug, sanctimonious one:

Rais was (and is) a book lover, keenly appreciative of Afghan history and literature, an intellectual liberal. But, it would seem, a patriarchal bully within his own family, cruel to his children, vain and avaricious, shaming his long-time spouse by taking a teenage second wife, and monstrously feudal towards all females in the family.