Roundtable

Seeking Asylum, Getting the Story

An interview with journalist Mattathias Schwartz.

By Elias Altman

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Migrants arrive on the Italian island of Lampedusa, 2007. Photograph by Sara Prestianni for the Noborder Network.

On October 3, 2013, a boat carrying asylum seekers from Libya to Italy sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. The Italian coast guard managed to save some one hundred and fifty people while more than three hundred drowned. In April 2014, The New Yorker published “The Anchor,” by Mattathias Schwartz, an article about the tragedy, its repercussions, and the heroic efforts of an Eritrean priest named Mussie Zerai. An excerpt of “The Anchor” appears in the Spring issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “Foreigners.” Schwartz has written for, among other publications, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times MagazineElias Altman recently sat down with Mattathias Schwartz at the LQ offices to talk about foreigners, immigration, and journalism.

LQ: Can you give us a little backstory about what the ship was doing, who was on board, and why it sank?

Mattathias Schwartz: For the last twenty years, tens of thousands of people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. These migrants or refugees pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars to two or three thousand for crossing on small, clandestine boats. Some of the boats are quite old. Some are just junk. It’s a systemic problem.

LQ: Has the number of refugees trying to make that voyage increased since the Arab Spring?

MS: Yes, there’s been a tremendous spike. Especially people coming from Eritrea, where the political situation has been bad for a long time and it’s only getting worse. By the time these Eritrean refugees have crossed Sudan and Libya, many have been starved, sexually abused, or even murdered along the way.

LQ: Over the past year around 120,000 migrants aboard ships similar to the ship you wrote about have been picked up by the Italian coast guard, which has created a search-and-rescue operation. It’s very expensive to maintain. What’s the role of the EU in addressing this sort of refugee crisis?

MS: With European unification in the 1990s, the EU passed something called the Schengen Agreement, which made it easier for people to pass between countries within Europe without border checks. Once you’re in Europe it’s easy to cross into other European countries. Although more recently, the government of Spain has begun using the Paris attacks as a pretext or excuse to say that the subject of open borders needs to be raised again. There are a lot of laws about terrorism, and they often wind of screwing over people who have no ties to terrorism. For example, when most refugees arrive in Lampedusa, the first thing they want is a SIM card. They want to buy phones to call home, and to call friends in Europe to come meet them. But an Italian antiterrorism law stops them—you need a passport or an official ID to get a SIM card. So these laws that were designed to protect Italy from a small percentage of people who might be plotting to do the country harm wind up hurting a much larger population that is really just trying to survive.

LQ: Do you speak Italian?

MS: No, not really. Just some fake Italian from the Spanish I barely speak.

LQ: So when you went to report the story in Lampedusa…

MS: I thought about getting a translator and I looked into a couple of people, but there are upsides and downsides to working with a translator. Father Zerai speaks some English, and later on, after I got back, I hired an Italian research assistant who asked him background questions. In Lampedusa, most of the time I just watched and didn’t understand a lot of what was being said. There was prominent Eritrean-Swedish activist and journalist named Meron Estefanos who was with us and helped me a great deal. She speaks English and Tigrinya, which is the main language of Eritrea. I taped a lot and got it translated later.

LQ: How many hours of recordings did you have?

MS: I don’t know. Probably twenty hours. But when I met Zerai for the first time, I did a six-hour interview, and this was long before the ship-sinking incident.

LQ: What inspired you to meet with him prior to the accident?

MS: I attended a lecture in New York given by Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan about what they call forensic aesthetics. It was there that I heard about the Forensic Architecture Project, a collaboration between Weizman and a Brooklyn architecture firm called SITU Studio. They conducted a series of investigations into controversial human-rights incidents based on architectural analysis of the settings in which they took place. I heard about a project they’d done on a different boat connected to Zerai, called the Lost Boat. I wanted to write about that case for The New Yorker. The magazine thought Zerai himself sounded more interesting. This was good advice but I ignored it for a year and a half until I was in Europe and it was only a short flight to Switzerland. So I decided I might as well go meet Zerai.

LQ: This was how many months before October 3, 2013?

MS: I met with him in August 2013. So two or three months before.

LQ: Well, then the events in October…

MS: Journalists should have a word for those times when circumstances put them close enough to write about some terrible event. At some point, I would like to write a story in which no one dies.

LQ: Speaking more generally about being a journalist, how do you get people to talk to you?

MS: You explain who you are and why you are there. Usually that’s the first thing; sometimes it may come a little bit later. You don’t want it to come too late, or people will get pissed off. I generally assume everyone is smart and I don’t try to fool anyone. I have a lot of deep disagreements with things that Janet Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer. I’m not sure that even she believes what she says—which is basically that journalists are out there to trick people. I don’t think that’s true. If you go with that mindset you are limiting the people who are going to be willing to talk to you. You will probably wind up just confirming whatever you believed going in. Also, it’s important to make it clear to whomever you’re talking to that not talking to you is a valid option.

Everyone likes to beat up on objectivity, too, but to whatever extent you can be objective, that’s the extent to which you’re going to get educated on all sides of whatever it is you’re looking at. One thing I’ve found—this may not be true in all cases—but if I’m talking to someone and I personally disagree with what they are saying, it’s important for me to make them aware of that disagreement at a certain point. It’s not good to smile and nod at someone who is saying stuff you personally find false or offensive: You need to interrupt them and say, “I think you are full of shit, and here’s why.” Or a more polite version of that. If you can find a way to negotiate the disagreement, your relationship with that person will be much stronger for it.

LQ: Joan Didion said something similar to Malcolm in the 1960s—that writers are always selling somebody out.

MS: I think you are collaborating with everyone you meet, engaging in an exchange with them. You could go so far to say as you are forming temporary conspiracies. The more people you talk to and the more of these implied agreements or understandings you have with each person, the more they are all going to come into conflict. Then it gets harder for you to mediate all the conflicts. And that’s good—dealing with all that is part of the work. Didion has a point: a journalist’s job isn’t to cause his or her subjects the minimum amount of discomfort. But, again, I think she’s being a bit dramatic. If you focus on any profession with such neurotic intensity, you’re going to discover unpleasant things about it. You are going to learn that lawyers are not always truthful and that doctors don’t always know how to save lives.

LQ: If you would compare being a journalist to another profession, what would it be? Being an editor is sometimes like being a psychoanalyst—trying to get a narrative out of someone who’s searching to tell his or her story. On your end, as a writer—a detective?

MS: Yes, you are kind of like a police officer or an investigator. But you have to be smarter about it because you don’t have as much power. You can’t arrest people or put them under oath or engage in dirty tricks—some British newspapers notwithstanding. I love reading John Le Carré’s books and I push them into people’s hands. I have learned a lot about interviewing and synthesizing information from John Le Carré—the way that Smiley does interviews in the Smiley trilogy, the way he puts his questions in order, spaces them out.

LQ: You mentioned wanting to report a story in which no one died. I let that slide earlier. Were you joking? Surely you’ve written pieces not predicated on death.

MS: I don’t know, not a long story, not for a while. I did some for Harper’s, but that was a few years ago.

LQ: What would you say—obviously death, destruction, and mayhem are compelling subjects, but what type of stories are you drawn to?

MS: Ambiguity is interesting to me—I recently wrote a story about the NSA for The New Yorker. And it was fascinating: people on both sides of the privacy-security issue are so passionate. Both sides are full of hardcore idealists. So you have a rich clash of ideas. These exchanges are about what America is and how it goes about protecting itself, involving fundamental tradeoffs. It’s fun to watch people mix it up on issues like that. I’m drawn to people driven by some sort of idealism as well as people outside the state, those who the state then attempts to integrate or conquer in a kind of counter play. That happens often around borders. I think Zerai is an example of that. He’s operating like a quasi-state actor outside the state, a bridge for people trying to make this migration.

LQ: When you’re working with an editor or you’re going through a manuscript and you find there’s a character or scene you really like but doesn’t quite fit, do you struggle with killing your darlings?

MS: If something has to go out eventually for whatever reason, you can’t resist that or you’ll slow down the process. But I do think artistic gestures are important. I read something about fiction once: someone was saying that even the best authors are really only on about ten percent of the time. That’s kind of true. If you can’t make mistakes, then you can’t experiment. Ideally, you just don’t want to make mistakes that are too big in front of too large a group of people. And part of the editor’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

LQ: Speaking of successful experimentation, you began “The Anchor” in an unconventional way. You wrote it in the first-person plural, as the voice of refugees. What was the genesis of that artistic decision?

MS: I’m not sure I would call it an artistic decision, but thank you. I was just reading all these different accounts and it was an insane amount of material, all these first-person statements from different people involved in the shipwreck. They were all fragmentary; so I just had an “aha” moment. I saw I could work them all together and have the people, as a group—since they had trekked overland and by boat so far—speak as one. As soon as I saw that as an option, it made the writing a lot easier.

LQ: Did you feel weird inhabiting the minds of these people?

MS: Yes. I thought people would criticize me: You are not Eritrean; you weren’t in a shipwreck; you are just some reporter calling yourself a part of “we” without quotation marks. I was kind of surprised no one got mad. It’s worth debating. I tend to think that if you’re doing something totally unimpeachable it’s probably not going to be interesting. The interesting aspect and the risky aspect are often the same.

LQ: In an article you wrote for Harper’s in 2008, you said, “For as long as men have chalked certain occurrences up to chance, and so set them beyond human intervention, other, more ambitious men have sought to bring these events under control.” That seems to be a recurring interest in your work.

MS: That was supposed to be sort of a dry statement. I was gearing up to make fun of these men who try to keep chance under control. How do you see it as a recurring theme?

LQ: The issue of control—people try to set up control over other people, whether the NSA or immigration laws. So much of life is chance and of course we all try to mitigate circumstances so that we are not constantly dashed upon the rocks. The battle of life is between people who control things and people who are more subject to chance.

MS: Or the people who are more controlled. Yes, that’s true. I’m interested in how man tries to exert an insane level of control over himself and his environment. I wrote an essay vaguely about this—from an idea I had when I was around twenty-one. I thought there were two fundamental forces in society. There was Teen Sex Energy and Land Money Power—TSE and LMP.

LQ: That’s quite a dichotomy.

MS: It’s important not to forget about TSE, because at a certain point you realize LMP is so vast that it threatens to become your whole universe. Zerai, on the other hand, is not in either of these worlds. He leads a God-oriented existence. I don’t think I ever quite witnessed firsthand a good person doing as much good as he could for others all day long until he couldn’t stand up anymore, over and over again, for no apparent gain. It changed me.

LQ: Okay, so, I’ll bring you into the home stretch here. The Spring issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is titled “Swindle & Fraud”...

MS: I love The Big Con by David Maurer—a classic.

LQ: We have an excerpt from that, his glossary of grifter terminology, and then we also have the opening scene from The Sting. Maurer sued the film’s studio, Universal Pictures, because of how much the film relied on his book as source material.

MS: Really? They didn’t cite him?

LQ: No.

MS: I had no idea. I hope he won the lawsuit.

LQ: They settled out of court.

MS: That was a big movie: Paul Newman, Robert Redford.

LQ: Totally. The studio paid through the nose, in part, because David S. Ward, the screenwriter, won an Oscar in 1974 for best original screenplay.

MS: I guess it wasn’t really so original.

LQ: My final question is about the journalistic process. Do you get more pleasure from writing a piece or researching it—if you can cleave the process into parts like that?

MS: I fantasize about doing more reporting, because the raw experience is exciting. One great thing about reporting is that you have moments when you say to yourself: “Wow, there’s no way I’ll be able to use this at all.” But you’re there anyway, so you experience it, as opposed to recording it. There’s this worry when the record is unfolding in front of you that you are going to miss something important—you worry if you are the only one there and you worry even more if there are more people there. Once that worry is gone, it can become more fun. It’s a form of spiritual hooky when you are on the clock and know you’re involved in something that won’t go into the piece because then you can really pay attention to it. At Lampedusa, I went out to dinner with Zerai and some of the October 3 survivors, along with Meron Estefanos. They were talking in Tigrinya for an hour or two and having a nice dinner. I kind of had this revelation: I realized that, first of all, I had no idea what was going on or what anyone was saying. Second of all, I didn’t want to put a tape recorder on the table. Third, Meron was there, but she’s talking to them too—and this is really important—I didn’t want to ask her to explain everything to me as it was happening because that would ruin her night. I realized I just needed to be there and experience it, and that I didn’t have to get everything down. The less I focused on getting down everything happening around me, the more interesting things became, because I wasn’t so much of a burden. The thing is, I made that trip to get a story and I had a limited period of time. So there’s a tendency to be very focused on getting something good. But on this trip I understood that as a journalist, you’re going to be in a lot of places where your story will be happening to some extent, but it may not be the most important thing happening. There may be other things happening that have nothing to do with your story or where the connection to your story does not become clear until later. You have to let things happen and be willing to not understand them.