| First-Person Narratives in Radio
Document Historic Memory
Nieman Reports
Fall 2001
A publication of The
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University
Some stories are so good you just want to get out of
their way. Or so it seemed with The Lemon Tree, a documentary
that captured, with two deeply personal stories, a slice
of the last 50 years of Middle East history.
In July 1948, at the height of the Arab-Israeli War,
Bashir Al-Khayri, six years old, fled with his family
from their stone home in old Palestine.
The family made its way on foot from Ramle to the tent-covered
hills of Ramallah in the West Bank. They were among
the 700,000 Palestinian refugees in a growing Middle
East Diaspora; they lived in shelters and crowded into
relatives' living rooms, determined one day soon to
return to the family's home.
Three months later, Dalia Ashkenazi, six months old,
embarked on a journey to the new state of Israel.
The family, Bulgarian Jews who'd escaped the Holocaust,
arrived in Ramle, now an Israeli city. Dalia would later
be told that she was the only one on the boat who didn't
get sick. Israeli resettlement authorities gave the
family a stone home in the center of town.
For 19 years, Bashir's family lived as refugees in
the West Bank, always dreaming of the future, when they'd
return. Dalia's went about forging a new society, always
haunted by the past, which they'd barely survived.
In the summer of 1967, just after the Six Day War,
Bashir decided to try to visit his house—for which
his father, now blind, still had the key and the deed.
Bashir made his way to Ramle and to the front step of
the family's home.
Bashir rang the bell.
Dalia answered.
Thus begins The Lemon Tree, a 43-minute radio documentary
broadcast on Fresh Air for the 50th anniversary of Israel's
birth and the 1948 war. The story chronicles a slice
of Middle East history through a difficult friendship,
which began when Dalia invited Bashir in with the words,
"This is your home."
This was precisely the kind of story my Homelands Productions
colleagues and I were
seeking when we embarked
on World Views, a
series of first-person
documentary narratives
for public radio.
Frustrated with the rise of corporate infotainment,
my colleagues and I were looking for a way to cut through
the stream of information and dehumanizing images absent
of meaning, understanding or deeper context. Most absent,
it seemed—and what radio was best at providing—was
voice: stories told by ordinary people from the depths
of their experience.
We started thinking about a series of stories to be
told directly by the people in the midst of the news.
These would be perspective-based narratives getting
beneath the surface of daily events, telling the story
from a deeper place than conventional reporting could.
At this point (1993) there were a few examples of this
emerging in public radio— Jay Allison's Life Stories
series, Dave Isay's Ghetto Life 101, along with public
television's P.O.V. and the BBC's Video Diaries—but
our idea was to get reports from the ground, throughout
the world, as stories unfolded and historical events
were recalled.
We imagined, for example, a Cuban narrating her story
from a raft bound for the United States.
Or an African American traveling to the old slave house
on Senegal's Goree Island, reversing the journey of
his ancestors.
Or a Moscow investigative reporter, one of the first
to write publicly about the KGB, telling a personal
history of the dissident movement in the former Soviet
Union.
Or a Ukrainian nuclear physicist recording an audio
journal of day-to-day life in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
Or a New Delhi poet and an "untouchable"
rickshaw driver describing their chance encounter across
vast barriers of caste, culture and life experience.
(Some of these ideas were inspired by experiences of
my 1993 Nieman colleagues.)
But what we didn't anticipate was how much the series—indeed
the entire genre of first-person narrative—would
present significant challenges not to be found in the
standard news documentary.
In the traditional form, the reporter (and/or producer)
interviews, records sound, writes and narrates, balancing
the story with competing perspectives. From Edward R.
Murrow forward, this has been the style of choice for
many an aspiring radio journalist.
The style itself need not be dry, especially when accompanied
by compelling interviews, vivid writing, a strong sense
of place (Morrow's London rooftops come to mind), and
evocative use of sound. Our Homelands documentaries
had taken this more standard approach, be it with street
kids in Rio, an Amazon chief in Bolivia, farmers in
India, or while "interviewing" penguins in
Antarctica.
With a first-person story, especially controversial
ones or those narrated by someone with a strong point
of view, issues of balance, representation and context
emerge.
What about the other side of the story? What is being
left out that would ordinarily be filled in by a reporter/narrator,
and how can we put that context back into the piece?
What happens when someone wants input, or even editorial
control, in the telling of his own story? (For example,
in adapting a writer's work for broadcast.) And how,
ultimately, do you find a story that is both particular
and metaphorical of a larger reality?
For The Lemon Tree, balance was not an issue.
In their own ways, Dalia and Bashir represented the
fears and aspirations of their peoples. Far more complicated—for
an assignment to identify a story that was somehow representative
of the 50-year struggle between Israelis and Palestinians—was
in determining this was the story among many to tell.
For the first two weeks, on the ground in Israel, the
West Bank and East Jerusalem, I did no recording. Instead,
I read and listened to history, including Israeli military
accounts, Palestinian oral histories, Israel's "new"
historians (who challenge the traditional Zionist accounts),
the heroes of what the Israelis call their War of Independence
and the sons and daughters of what the Palestinians
call their Naqba, or catastrophe. Soon I began recording
similar accounts, considering the chasm between them
that had scarcely narrowed in the last 50 years.
But still I searched for the story and characters that
would connect the narratives and tell the larger truth.
I felt as much like a casting director as a journalist.
Earlier my wife, Lamis Andoni, a Palestinian journalist
who covered the Gulf War for The Christian Science Monitor
and the Financial Times (and was a 1993 Nieman Fellow),
had described the outlines of Dalia and Bashir's story.
In 1987, at the beginning of the Intifada, Dalia had
written an open letter to Bashir in the Jerusalem Post
on the eve of his deportation from Ramallah. (Bashir
was suspected of being an organizer of the Intifada
and deported to Lebanon.)
Dalia had urged the Israelis not to uproot Bashir a
second time, while also urging Bashir to moderate his
political views. From exile, Bashir had written a response,
published in Arabic and eventually in Hebrew. Lamis
knew Bashir and thought he'd be willing to talk to me.
One night, over dinner in Jerusalem, an Israeli filmmaker
told me the story again. It was a powerful story, she
agreed, but she didn't think Dalia would agree to talk.
Dalia, she said, felt used by people trying to frame
her history to suit their political purposes.
The next day Lamis and I ran into Bashir on the street.
Sure, he said, he'd be happy to sit for some interviews.
And though he hadn't seen Dalia in years, he thought
she would be, too.
Bashir was right, and over the course of the next three
weeks I shuttled from Ramallah to Jerusalem and back,
recording five sessions with each, perhaps 15 hours
of tape in all.
I envisioned simply intercutting the stories: Bashir's
invitation to Dalia to visit his family in Ramallah
(nearly unprecedented in 1967); Bashir's father's subsequent
visit to the house in Ramle and the tears streaming
down the blind man's face as he touched the family's
old lemon tree; Dalia's shock at Bashir's imprisonment
in Israel on charges he had helped plan a supermarket
bombing in Jerusalem; Bashir's revelation that his own
fingers had been blown off as a child, picking up a
booby-trapped mine in a field in Gaza. (Bashir had managed
to hide this from Dalia for years, his left hand always
in his pocket.)
In the end we decided that these stories, powerful
as they were, could not be sustained for 43 minutes.
I obtained archival tape (early radio accounts from
the 1948 war; a CBC broadcast in the wake of the supermarket
bombing) and approached a pianist to compose music to
use at key moments. This gave breathing space between
the words, varying the aural images and allowing time
for the words to sink in.
To add historical context and move the piece through
time, and at the urging of Danny Miller, executive producer
of Fresh Air, I added snippets of narration at several
points in the story.
But what made the narrative work were the voices that
mined the history. Dalia's, in evocative English, and
Bashir's, read by a native Arabic speaker, Walid Haddad,
so as not, literally, to lose anything in translation.
These voices speak to the potential of first-person
narratives for radio.
Though they can be fraught with complication, and the
producers must often struggle with issues of balance,
historical context, and the ethics of who gets to tell
the story, first-person narratives can cut through the
sludge of endless information to the truth as it's felt
on the ground. In this way they hold promise to be a
democratizing force in media.
Of course it also helps when you have a narrative vehicle
as powerfully simple as the one I encountered in The
Lemon Tree—a stone home of shared memory. This
is the house that Dalia, after the death of her parents,
declared should be dedicated to the common history of
the Ashkenazis and the Al-Khayris.
Today the place is called Open House. During the day,
it's a kindergarten for Arab children in Israel. In
the evenings, it serves as a house of encounter for
Arab and Jew, a place to discuss history and to look
for a way forward. |
Oil
in Equador's Amazon