Transcription of Sara Corbett for the show Cultural Divide #130
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’ show number 130, ‘Cultural Divide’, airing for the first time on Sunday, March ninth, 2014. Today’s guest includes Sara Corbett, author of ‘A House in the Sky’, and Eleanor Morse, author of ‘White Dog Fell from the Sky’.
How do we understand those who are different from ourselves, particularly when these are people we may have never met? Maine authors of both fiction and non-fiction can help us bridge cultural divides. Today, we speak with journalist and Telling Room cofounder, Sara Corbett who writes the true story of Amanda Lindhout, another journalist who was held in captivity for more than a year by Somali extremists in the book, ‘A House in the Sky’.
We also spend time with Eleanor Morse who explores her own experience with South African apartheid in the novel, ‘White Dog Fell from the Sky’. Thank you for joining us.
As listeners of the program now, I very much enjoy having authors, writers in the studio to talk about the books that I have read because I love reading. It’s one of my favorite activities maybe in the world, at least favorite solo activities I guess. The individual that’s come in today is this a long time and coming, I read her book last fall. I was very excited to speak with her husband, Mike Paterniti who’s also an author. This is Sara Corbett. She’s a contributing writer to ‘The New York Times Magazine’. Her work has appeared in ‘National Geographic’, ‘Elle’, ‘Outside’, ‘O, The Oprah Magazine’, ‘Esquire’ and ‘Mother Jones’.
She and her husband, Mike Peterniti settled in Portland after living in a number of places around the states, and she most recently co-wrote ‘A House in the Sky’, a memoire with Amanda Lindhout who lived out her dreams to travel the world but was tragically abducted in Somalia. The story is about her struggles as she converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives life lessons from one of her captors and risks a daring escape. Thanks so much for coming in, Sara.
Sara: Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Now, you’ve written for a lot of different magazines, but this book was somehow different for you I think.
Sara: It was. I made a choice. I went to meet Amanda Lindhout in 2010. She had been released from captivity in Somalia only a few months earlier, and a colleague of mine at ‘The New York Times’ had suggested that the two of us meet. He had a connection to her. I went to meet her thinking that I would do what I always do as a journalist which is get her to tell me her story so I could then contextualize the story, I could organize it and interpret it for people. I recognized that she had a great story to tell and it would be a book. I thought it could be a book, but I wanted to write the book.
After spending a few days with Amanda, and again, just even the sight of her, she’s a very striking looking young woman but she had lost teeth while she was held captive, she was malnourished. Even in the comfort of her home in Canada, the effects of captivity on her were evident. Once I heard her story and realized how much she had lost in terms of her freedom, her dignity, her ability to voice herself, she had even lost her name in captivity, her Somali captors had renamed her, ‘Amina’.
Once I realized how much she had lost, I realized that my job as a journalist had to shift, and that really the greatest service I could give, not just her but to her experience was to let her tell the story and to usher that into the world using my skills as a writer, but not owning it, not putting my name up top, not trying to put my voice in the book, but really just humble myself to her voice. That was the choice we made.
Dr. Lisa: There was for Amanda it seems almost a cling to self. In the beginning of the book, there’s I guess a reproduction of notes that she took while she was being held captive in very, very small writing, but this effort to normalize or somehow just hold on to who she was as a person.
Sara: Right. She was held hostage for 460 days. For much of it, she had nothing. I mean really, she had nothing. Her story is an exercise in the power of the mind, really trying to figure out how to not go insane. For example, how to transcend your circumstances, how to hold on to hope, how to view the people who are harming you, do you hate them, do you try to find some compassion for them …? I think she had a mix of both.
Toward the end, she was given … As you mentioned, she had converted to Islam as a survival tactic, and they gave her a Koran and a small notebook where she was supposed to keep notes on her studies. What she did instead was write a letter to her mother that went on for pages and pages and pages. We have reproduced it at the beginning of the book because to me, it’s this incredible document. It’s this cramped, cramped handwriting.
When I first saw it, I thought it reminded me of … I had seen an art exhibit years ago that was asylum writing, stuff that had come out of asylums in the 1920s. It looks mad. What you realize is there’s this ferocious and I think deeply human need to give testimony to one’s experience.
When I was researching the book, I read a lot of holocaust literature. I think survival narratives are part of something that extends way back in time, and that people who endure something really have an impulse to record it, for whatever reason that might be, whether it’s just to dignify what happened, whether it’s just sort of assert that very primal thing. I made it. I live to tell, and also I think to document what the capacity for human cruelty looks like, and on the flipside, what the capacity for human strength and resilience looks like.
Dr. Lisa: There is something that happens also between people who are held captive and the people who are holding them captive. There’s actually a shift that happens in the mind. There have been … I think it’s called the ‘Stockholm effect’ in which there is a cross identification that happens. That gets to be very confusing for people. I think that this did happen with Amanda.
Sara: I think so. I mean, if she were here, she would say, “Stockholm syndrome is what it’s called. It is not a psychological diagnosis. It is not in the DSM. It is not recognized by this psychological profession.” It really isn’t. It’s something that has been lumped on to survivors.
However, I do think you’re right. I think that when people are put into an extreme environment and forced to live together as often prisoners and their captors are, you can’t help but see them as human beings. I think Amanda’s story is an interesting dance between her captors who were a group of mostly teenage boys who had never been in close proximity with a woman who is not in their family before, who were intrigued, scared of her, and also had power over her.
On the flipside, she’s looking at them and she had to be dependent on them for food, for kindness which wasn’t a given every day. Yes, at some point, I think she made a choice which was we write about it in the book. She could either swim inside of real hatred or she could try to understand who these people were. One of the things that she realized was the world that they came from. Somalia hasn’t had peace in 30 years. It hasn’t had a stable government. The schools don’t function. Families are torn apart. People are displaced. Neighborhoods are torn apart.
When she was able to communicate with these young men, she heard really devastating stories. Many of them had seen their parents shot and killed in front of them. It doesn’t for one second forgive the way they went on to treat her. She suffered all sorts of horrific abuses at their hands, but it did I think allow her not to lose faith in humanity in a really utter way and a deep way that she might have taken her own life I think, but I think in seeing them and their circumstances, she was able to hold on to her worldview that made her want to get through.
Dr. Lisa: You have children yourself. You have two boys and a girl. Your oldest is 14. That really is right around the age of some of the captors. As you’re writing this, how did this make you feel as a parent?
Sara: It’s a good question. I have to say that I think that the young men in the book, their circumstances and their backgrounds are so vastly different than my three fairly privileged kids growing up in Portland, Maine are that I didn’t … I don’t think I was making those connections. However, I think anybody and I hear this a lot from people who read ‘A House in the Sky’, a lot of people watch Amanda’s trajectory because the book begins with her childhood and follows her through her teens and into her 20s, and she was raised in a very poor family, she never went to college, she is very intelligent and also has always been very ambitious. That ambition led her to start saving her money. She was working as a waitress, and go often see the world, so she would waitress for six months and then she would go off and travel for three months. She was fearless in that travelling.
I think for me, that parental wire gets tripped and it’s a really interesting thing. She was backpacking by herself around the world, she crossed Sudan, she crossed Syria, she went in to Pakistan, she went to Afghanistan as a tourist. She was making decisions that I think a lot of people would question. For me as a parent, I think about that a lot because I think it’s actually what drew me to Amanda’s story because I really admire risk takers, I want to raise children who question authority, who aren’t … they don’t live in fear.
Amanda’s story, it takes place during the George Bush years, the decade post 9/11. I remember so acutely, I was a younger woman then, and I have because of my job travelled quite a bit and I travel mostly by myself when I’m on assignment, and I hated how the U.S. was hunched down in fear during that time. I look at Amanda’s freedom in her travels with some envy for sure with some hope like, “I hope someday my kids are out and they see the world and they meet people in these environments and they take them on their own terms.”
There’s a big but because every time something went well for her, it drove her deeper into the world, and eventually she tried to become a journalist, she had mixed success as a journalist, and she landed in Somalia. As a parent, you can’t read what happened to her and think you would ever encourage your child or anybody you love anywhere near that situation.
It’s complicated and I think it’s provocative. I think that that is a really great piece of the story because she’s not trying to say what she did was right, but she’s trying to help people see how it happened. For me as both as a parent who wants to raise exuberant free children and as a journalist who really has appreciated and learned a lot from world travel, I can see how one gets there.
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It’s not an uncommon thing. When I hit those situations, I do my best to help both people understand that neither is a hundred percent right or wrong, that they simply have to take a step back and look at their own financial life in a new light. It is also true in politics and economics. What we need to do is see money as a living thing that can be used to grow our lives together without disagreement or so called ‘Boarder issues’. It’s a great feeling for me. It’s like I’m helping people negotiate peace treaties with their money.
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Dr. Lisa: It is interesting because you have two boys and a girl, 14, 11, nine. I’m wondering how … I mean, I have a boy and two girls. I know that the way that I see my children even though I make an effort not to see things based on gender. I can’t really help but do that.
My older child went to Guatemala and worked in Guatemala City for a year at just the age of 18. My now 18-year old daughter, I worry more about her. I think there was some gender … there were some gender issues that came in when it came to Amanda as well.
Sara: Yes. It’s interesting. She says in the book that people would say to her “It must be so hard to travel alone as a woman.” Her answer always was, “It’s actually not. I think it might even be easier,” because she felt like if she was open to the world, people went out of their way to help her. Really, I mean, the thing to keep in mind is she had many years of really great experiences as a traveler.
Again, when I put on my mom hat, I know exactly what you’re talking about and yes. I think it’s something we need to strive for is to not worry more about our daughters than we do our sons because truly, the world’s dangers are the world’s dangers and yes, women are more at risk for physical assault. I just don’t think it should stop. I don’t think we should keep our girls home. I don’t think we should keep ourselves home. I think it’s an unfortunate thing. I also feel like the more women who are out travelling, the more possibilities for understanding culturally come about, and maybe someday that will help. Maybe that will change some of the attitudes.
Mike and I were reading last night an item in the newspaper about the violence against women in India. I’ve travelled by myself to India a few times, and I love it there. Had I read the horror stories? I might have stayed home and I’m so glad I didn’t. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. I totally know what you’re voicing and I think it’s a reality and I don’t think there’s an easy answer to it.
Dr. Lisa: That is part of what you and I had talked about before which is that the further you get into this, the fewer easy answers you find, and this ongoing back and forth and sense that maybe there isn’t a right …
Sara: Right.
Dr. Lisa: … and even having to live within that yourself and having to live within that and subsequently raise children who are still looking still at this age need easier answers, at least initially.
Sara: Yes. I think the world is a really complex place. I think that one interesting vein of Amanda’s story for me was her exposure to radical Islam which is inarguably one of the giant forces shaping our world today for better or worse, mostly for worse. She had a front row seat on fundamentalism. To me, I think what she learned from that is really instructive. She was able to see in these young men gradually over the year or plus she was held hostage.
The first couple of months, they wanted to ask her questions about where she came from and where she had travelled, and they wanted to practice English and they talked about wanting to study abroad. What had happened was this was a cell. It was basically a criminal cell, and so they had been isolated from their families, if they have any jobs or hope of jobs of schooling, they disappeared as this kidnapping ordeal dragged on. What they were being fed was this really steady diet interestingly enough, largely through cell phones of fundamentalist teachings.
As time went by, instead of family, instead of community, instead of peace or warmth, they were told that heaven came in the form of the afterlife, and that their devotion now, their devotion to Jihad would all pay off someday, and she got to watch them embrace this. Again, there’s no moral to the story, but I think that I really appreciate people who are out in the world who are bearing witness to this and bring it back and relay it because there is something helpful and instructive in that. I feel like I understand the world a little bit more. Does that make the world any less complicated, scary or mystifying? No. It doesn’t, but I’m really glad to know what I know because of it.
Dr. Lisa: That brings up another word which is ‘Translator’. This is you’ve been a journalist for many years now in many different places covering many different stories. The common theme for you is translation.
Sara: Yes. I love my job. I’ll start by saying that. It never gets old. I have worked for ‘The New York Times’ for 13, 14 years now. I work for the magazine so I do long form stories. They take always months, sometimes I’ve spent a couple of years working on several stories, but sometimes it takes a long time for them to come to fruition. I never meet somebody once, I always meet somebody several times. I try not to do phone interviews if I can help it. I’m very lucky to work for an organization that will put me in a plane and send me places to meet people, and I really try to listen.
I listen and I listen and I listen, and I go in to every story having done my homework but without judgment. I think that that’s something that I’ve learned over the years because when you’re a journalist, your job is to translate. It really is. If you go in with your opinions and your worldview, you’re not going to do a good job that way. The best thing you can do is try to understand where people are coming from, why they say the things they say, why they do the things they do, and what context they’re operating in. It doesn’t always work, but when it works, it’s a really great feeling.
Dr. Lisa: You and Mike were part of a group of people who founded ‘The Telling Room’ here in Portland, which is of course all about stories. We’ve talked about ‘The Telling Room’ before on the show, and it remained something that you both are very interested in is the story at a very fundamental level.
Sara: We are. Again, getting back to being a journalist, my job is to listen to people’s stories. Somebody asked me recently. They said, “Have you ever not liked anybody when you go out and you write about them?” I really did think about it. I was like, “I don’t think so.” I think like every … Again, I don’t think I would have done my job if I just flat out didn’t like somebody because I feel like everybody has something of real value to say and it can take a long time to get it out of them, it can be a confusing message or something that maybe I hadn’t thought about or maybe wouldn’t be inclined to agree with.
Here in Portland, when we started ‘The Telling Room’ 10 years ago, where this is we’re so excited. This is our 10th … We’re about to celebrate the 10th anniversary, we turned that framework on to the kids in the community and this idea that if we can empower them and their voices, we adults, we people in Maine can learn a whole lot from the kids here.
One of our first projects was we worked with immigrant and refugee children in Maine and they told they’re coming to America’s stories and we published the anthology containing the stories, and it became a teaching tool around the State of Maine. One of the most wonderful days was this group of kids went to Yarmouth High School and did a reading. Yarmouth students asked these Portland students all sorts of questions and they dignified them as authors, I think everybody learned a lot, and it was just this wonderful day of seeing kids hearing each other and responding to each other in a really genuine, rich way.
I think as adults, any time we can mediate that without getting in the way, but creating those opportunities, it’s just really fun and it’s really humbling. Any time I go into ‘The Telling Room’, there’s some little experience that makes me walk out an inch taller like, “Look what they’re doing. It has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with there’s a space where these kids can tell stories.”
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s the type of thing that it’s so important to hold on to because one of the things that struck me the most in ‘A House in the Sky’ was when Amanda was trying to get out of captivity, everybody had given up. The governments have given up and it was essentially her family and the family of the man that was also captured with her that were negotiating with these guys on their cell phones. It just struck me. It’s so lonely, and to be out there and be like, “Who cares about me?”
Sara: Yes. Yes.
Dr. Lisa: On the other side, foster the sense of community and story and that ‘The Telling Room’ brings up, that must be very important to you to be able to have those counterbalances.
Sara: I think that personally, I get a lot out of community. That’s why I love Maine. I love living in Portland because it’s a small city and we all know this every … I’m sure all of your listeners know this. There is this intimacy that is really special here, really, really special. Then there’s this creativity here that’s also special. Much of the time with my job, I have to go away to do it. I go away to do my reporting, and there’s nothing that makes me happier when I’m here and I’m writing which can be very isolating and lonely to be out in the community whether it’s through working with ‘The Telling Room’, whether it’s being in the playground where my kids go to school or walking the dog, or walking up exchange street.
Whatever it is, there is this … or [Hunefer 00:28:34], my God. There is this sociability and community connection that I think is incredibly sustaining regardless of what you do for a living. I think it’s really, really special in Maine.
Dr. Lisa: What’s next for you?
Sara: I’m back at work at ‘The New York Times Magazine’. I’m leaving next week. I’m doing a story now about surveillance. I’m about to spend a week in the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Russian code breakers. That’s my next adventure. It’s starting … This is what I love. It’s a blank slate every time, and I’m about to dive into something that I know absolutely nothing about and hopefully will come out the other side having learned.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out about the work that may be coming up in the future, the work that you’ve done in the past and ‘A House in the Sky’?
Sara: Most of my work is listed on a website called ‘Byliner.com’ which aggregates long form writers work. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook.
Dr. Lisa: Sara, we’ve really appreciated your coming in and talking to us today. I can’t recommend more highly the book, ‘A House in the Sky’ that you co-wrote with Amanda Lindhout. I also encourage our listeners to go out and spend some time looking at some of the other things that you’ve written about. Thanks for coming in.
Sara: Thanks so much, Lisa.