Except from creative writing.
Foreword
As a journalist, we take an oath for impartiality and the courage to tell the truth. However almost 12 years after I made such an oath, I have decided to classify my stories as a writer under fiction as to do otherwise at this time, will further endanger my life and the ones who I write about.
There are thousands of journalists who die or are imprisoned every year around the world. Most of them, their names and faces will remain anonymous. I choose to live to bear witness and bring you the stories.
Here is my first story under my real name, you can call me a coward afterwards…
With peace as always, Siv
COWARDS
By Sivana Vythilingum
Deep down a corridor of an unremarked hotel in downtown Toronto, I enter a room now turned into a temporary headquarter for four American hackers. Unsure if they were the four horsemen of the apocalypse or just a bunch of over-sugared and under-sexed adults, I pushed forward despite the risks. Eleven years ago, as a new journalism graduate, I had struggled with being brave. I had assessed the risks of getting killed as a high probability, given I was wide open with vulnerability. There were no personal boundaries in investigative journalism, no such thing if you want to uncover the truth, and perhaps save the world as I once had naively announced to a group of strangers before starting university.
A few days before the Canadian federal election of 2008, while being the fly on the wall intern inside the producers’ room at CBC The National, I witnessed the somber announcement that one of our own foreign correspondents had been kidnapped.
The curly-haired executive described in short sentences that she might be injured and her location was unknown deep in the Afghani mountains. Later at the end of this decade, she would recount that she had been stabbed, raped and shoved in a hole by a group of disillusioned bandits who intended to sell her to the Taliban. This was the job that I had been training for since I was a student tv anchor in highschool or perhaps since I was 9 years old, watching “Envoyé Special,” the French investigative documentary program that aired every Friday night on my parent’s fuzzy antenna-powered TV in our living room in South East Africa. The only people who knew of her kidnapping was in this room and Canadian Intelligence.
Two weeks from now, I was to stand on the podium at my applied arts college to receive my diploma in broadcast journalism, fast-tracking my communications degree after dropping out of university two years prior. To understand the world, it is a trade and therefore lessons are learned on the grounds. The preparations are not made in a university classroom but to understand the real truths about the world, you need to be a soldier in the streets.
Instead of focusing on my corporate job in finance on the 15th floor of a blue-tint skyscraper, I devoured countless books on journalism in my photo-lined cubicle, probably more prepared for war, psychological torture, and news deadlines instead of winning battles in office politics. But now flashes of the memoir of the widowed NYT journalist, Daniel Pearl jump in my head. My Italian-Canadian boyfriend’s grim words that he had uttered months earlier seemed not as an “if” but a “when.” He had vowed that he will not be the husband to tell my kids that their mom was dead and so, I should rethink my career in journalism. My parents had agreed too that there was no sense to put myself in that kind of danger. And so just like I broke up with this over-protective Calabrese man, I let go of my dreams of being a foreign correspondent.
A slurped noise from a large coffee cup brings me back to the room filled with laptops, cellphones and moved furniture, and I felt relieved that this was the better compromise that I had made over a decade ago. This was better than being locked in by immense mountain ranges, better than being far away in a country where despite the colour of my skin or even if I could speak Arabic or Farsi, I would still be an outsider and worst an educated woman as they had warned me. And now, better than it had been for Melissa Fung or Marie Colvin. Better, and definitely, less violent. This time however, I will stay brave.
The leader of the group, a Greek-American man in his forties whom you can overlook his condescending cadence for his striking blue eyes shows me a video that he had just edited. A strong male voiceover echoes from his laptop speakers, “Hack The Revolution” they say. Hack it against corrupt police, politicians and corporate power.” Quickly the conversations went from normal sexual banter, to not your everyday meet up at the local brewery, and to paranoia.
The shortest one picks up a set of binoculars and quickly scans the illuminated Toronto skyline.
“We think that Israeli intelligence might be surveilling us.”
To those who had been keeping track of mass citizen surveillance by global intelligence agencies, this was perfectly plausible. I was one of them. Someone who had applauded when a joint effort by a quiet and unknown group of journalists from around the world, including a female documentary filmmaker had helped bring light what a former CIA officer had hidden in a rubrics cube. It had been a massive undertaking that took years and a large part of the work was not only done by this American hero to some, but again by a large network of underground journalists who had evaded imprisonment, surveillance, and for some death, in the face of freedom of information. We also radicalize people in telling the truths, and to become whistle blowers. Later you will understand who is “we.”
Just a few days before Melissa Fung was kidnapped, I had experience the censorship that journalists face while producing a segment on our prime minister for the election. Even what seems like a sea of loud voices, public broadcast journalists are still silenced. Silenced by executives, silenced by governments, and silenced by citizens who benefit from a censored democracy, many who are part of large corporations that are backed by states who want to battle for supremacy around the world.
As I listen to these men who naturally assume that I was a clueless pretty girl who should just either go home or give them a massage for their overworked shoulders that ached from hours of coding, I felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. After years of proving I had brains and booty, shrinking was now my greatest armour with men on this once foreign land.
I had met one of the men serendipitously a late summer evening in Soho four years prior. Sipping on a warm cappuccino while writing notes from my day in my red moleskin notebook, a young muslim man had approached my table.
“Are you a writer” he says and I had reply “Yes, a journalist.”
A surprise cheer escapes his body. This was a welcome surprise. A season had passed since I left the second long relationship of my twenties with a Polish-Canadian who had scolded me with no explanation during the early years of our courtship with “No woman of mine will be a journalist.” It was a jealous, insecure and disillusioned madness that I could never understand.
After all, it was the work of journalists that helped bring down the berlin wall and helped free his people I had thought.
What had disgusted my ex who was a hacker turned tech consultant was making this guy weirdly excited. As I continuously learn, journalists are hated as much as lawyers, police officers and influential entertainers. He sees my large smile as an invite to exchange ideas on journalism. He wants to be a writer but at the moment, he proudly announces that he is a data scientist for the social networking website company, now turned into an Orwellian spyware service for corporations and governments.
This man likes female journalist. Again, different from the man that I would learn that they helped get into power south of the border who will later get impeach, not for how he got into office but for corrupting world leaders to spy on his opponents.
After our New York city meeting, he awkwardly sends me a picture of colourful mukhwas and share Ayesha Omer’s Coke-Studio love song. I never confirmed but I imagine, he also like my ex could hack in my computer and spy on me. Ethical hackers were very few as I learned over this past decade.
Now as I sit next to him on the pull-out couch while his friends, each on the other couches in the room were calling it a night after their ruthless teasing for his rejection to having casual sex, I feel sad.
I suggest we lie next to each other. I want to tell him that it’s ok to wait and this is what I tried to practice this summer but instead numbed out after the public shaming I received about my first sexual teenaged experience.
We press our hands into each other and I feel the soft hair of his chest touch the bottom of my palm. Not sure where this will lead, I sit up to leave and tell him that I could meet with him again to discuss plans of collaborating on future projects perhaps. He had just released an article with WIRED about the hypocrisy of politicians using Facebook to gather information on potential voters while at the same time criticizing the tech giant. I wanted to tell him about my research but it would have to wait. I would need to understand who these men were first and if they were ethical or part of the problem. As much as I stood for freedom of information, I also wanted to protect our security, our land, our democracy and order.
What I found was even more perplexing. What had been a fight about freedom of information was turning into revealing the battle for power and supremacy that the United States had been engaging with us and the rest of the world. A silent war of intelligence where we are all agents.
………………………….
Later after I would pass the note to the officer at my door, writing “I have been silenced by the mob* but I have been brave for these past few months,” I knew now I was truly on my own, an outsider and worst an educated woman who was once again undermined, left to carry on, not in the middle of mountain-locked cities filled with insurgents but on the democratic land that I’ve had a love affair for the past two decades. Finally, I was the foreign correspondent that I had wanted to be, and this time my country will stop me.
…………………………...
*Mob: Not what comes to your mind, but in the real world that I know, it is much more complicated than that.
